What Will Successful Content Marketing Really Look Like in 2015?

I’ve spent the week immersed in a thousand articles listing and explaining the trends about to change the world of Content Marketing in 2015.

Frankly, there’s a shipload of theories out there. Some predictions are safe, some less so. Some I’ve read are just plain bizarre.

But there is an undercurrent of unspoken agreement between all the commentators who have used their expertise and theorised, cogitated, deliberated, predicted and outright guessed what next year will look like for successful Content Marketeers.

Speed will dictate the shape of the playing field.

If you’re working in marketing or PR, this development may resonate a little louder.

In essence, this fractional amendment to the velocity of our industry, both corporate and personal, could change everything.

In PR, there is a natural pause between the production of great, creative content and the sign-off from the client. That pause, by necessity till this point, has often been 24 hours or more.

The best Content Marketing campaigns simply won’t be able to afford that pause in 2015.

Next year, Content Marketing will need to turbo-charge its response time.

Those brands truly wishing to surf the zeitgeist, to jump successfully on the right now social gravy train and get the best out of their content, will have to be lightning fast.

The brands which win plaudits, shares, acclaim and become legendary for their Content Marketing, will be the ones who react the quickest.

Those brands will emulate people. They’ll not only think and act like everyone else on social networks, they’ll react like them too.

Think about it. When, as an individual, we see some content we like on Facebook or Twitter we react. Immediately. We hit ‘like’ or ‘share’, ‘retweet’ or ‘favourite’ there and then. Individuals don’t wait 24 hours to react.

The brands which do Content Marketing best in 2015 will react in the same way. Instantly. And that means the familiar 24-hour client sign-off has, somehow, to disappear.

To jump on the increasingly fast rollercoaster to a successful Content Marketing happy ending, brands have to learn to sprint. To cut unnecessary dead hours out of their reaction time.

Remember when British Airways sponsored the London Eye and on the day it was due to be raised to dominate the London skyline they had a technical problem – and couldn’t erect it?

They had the world’s press waiting to see it rise like a phoenix into the sky and…well, they simply couldn’t manage it.

Virgin Airways reacted immediately. They had an airship company just outside London scramble a blimp to fly over the wheel bearing the slogan BA Can’t Get It Up!

Content Marketing genius. Shared globally in just a few minutes.

It would never have happened had they been forced to endure that 24-hour pause for sign-off. It worked because they allowed the momentum of events to carry a brilliant content idea to its natural conclusion in record time.

The point here is simple. Virgin did what an individual would have done. They poked fun and laughed publicly. And they did it immediately. It wouldn’t have been as funny (or as shared or as viral) 24 hours later.

The brands which act most like individuals – normal, everyday, social network loving people – in 2015 will be the ones which reap the biggest rewards from their Content Marketing campaigns.

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