Four content marketing trends that will shape your strategy in 2016

Creating a marketing plan for next year can be difficult due to the fact that trends change so much from year to year. Once heralded strategies such as link building are now generally frowned upon. As 2015 comes to a close, what should you focus on in the year ahead?

Here are four content marketing trends we expect to take off in 2016 that you should keep in mind when developing your online marketing strategies:

• Valuable content will become more effective: This might seem more of the same from the past year, but simply creating content isn’t enough. It’s got to be great content, and it must focus on your customers’ needs rather than your company’s services. And understanding how this content will be presented on different mediums (e.g. desktop, mobile, tablet, etc.) will be increasingly more important in the year ahead.  
• Social media will provide even more marketing opportunities: Facebook continues expanding its Instant Article tool, which will allow marketers to publish articles and native ads directly on their social channel, significantly decreasing load times. And then there's Twitter, which is experimenting with introducing the ability to publish longer form content. These two features could be big news for marketers next year.
• Video content will become more popular: Experts predict that video will end up accounting for 69 percent of all online consumer traffic by 2017. Videos tend to drive more engagement as well – research tells us that people are more willing to share and comment on videos than other type of content. This means that a part of your budget should be reserved for video production, whether you decide to do it in-house or outsource it.
• Mobile marketing will become even more important: There are 3.65 billion unique mobile users worldwide, which means that not only do you have to optimize your site for mobile use through the use of responsive design and embedded videos, but you need to implement a mobile marketing strategy.

Depending on your outlook, these trends are either terrifying or exhilarating (we think it’s the latter). Marketing and communications continues evolving – seemingly at light speed, but with that evolution comes some great tools that better allow us and our clients to better connect with customers.