It’s refreshing to see a move toward great content in online marketing, but why wasn’t it always this way?
For those of us in the fields of writing, communications and journalism, we have one big question to ask about this sudden dramatic shift: why wasn’t it always this way? After all, if you visit places on the Internet that are not marketing-related (websites for organizations dedicated to science, health care and education, for example) the emphasis on long-form, high-quality content has always been there, just as it had been there for them before the Internet came along.
Supposedly, now “companies will pay more attention to customer experience and curate content in a more emphatic, client-oriented way.” I guess this means that the uber-love of gadgets and pushing buttons to make digital magic has finally given way a bit to allow for real, thoughtful and provocative insight … the stuff we used to call ‘writing.’
Go down to number 4 and you’ll see that there will be more videos than ever used for marketing purposes. One can only hope that the content on these videos is actually constructed by a real and well-paid writer. Great videography alone isn’t enough. If you can’t string a few cohesive words together, your videography falls desperately flat.
I look at number 5 and I’m dumbfounded that there’s a ‘trend’ toward more personalized content. Does this mean that marketers have long been ignoring actual living, breathing people in favour of churning out their trumped-up marketing jumble?
I’m heartened by what I see in # 6. It’s nice to know that there will actually be marketing ‘noise’ that we can use. That means a greater appreciation (from marketers) of long form content that offers information and insight. Good on Google for ensuring that “length and value of the content will be more essential than ever for effective SEO” – and for labelling content of less than 200 words as “Thin Content” and putting into operation new algorithms that will find the low quality content and penalize it, by driving down its search rankings.
The fact that high quality, long form content hasn’t always ruled the online marketing front is, plainly, a shame. Now there’s no turning back.
There’s one problem that remains: paying writers what they’re actually worth to come up with all this fabulous new content. This means paying them as much as the marketers.