Infographic: 7 Content Marketing Trends That’ll Matter Most This Year

The status quo tends to suck.

This is especially true in marketing, where recycling the same playbook over and over makes it easy for your audience to tune you out.

Over the past year, however, marketing has changed out of necessity. The pandemic has forced everyone to rethink how we spend time and dedicate resources. That thinking has led to innovative adjustments that could last for the long haul.

For example, with in-person conferences on hold, brands cooked up virtual events from scratch in 2021. After an expected learning curve early on, marketers seemed to find their groove by adding more production value and experimenting with new formats like game shows and simulive presentations. As a result, event marketing is going to change moving forward. Big conferences will still exist, but according to Bizzabo, 97 percent of marketers believe hybrid events will become a new staple.

It’ll be interesting to track just how much brands adapt their old ways. McKinsey found that 90 percent of executives believe COVID-19 “will fundamentally change the way they do business for the next five years.”

On the content front, there’s a lot more marketers can still do. (We outlined some tactics in our 2021 research report on buyers’ content preferences.) And you can benefit from a few big content trends without taking out a second mortgage to double your content budget. One such opportunity is developing the personal brands of your employees through LinkedIn video, email newsletters, and educational courses.

To learn the content trends that will matter most in 2021 and beyond, take a look at our infographic below (which was designed by the talented Judy Wong). At some point, things might go back to business as usual again, but now that marketers are armed with a new perspective, they’ll be ready to shake up the status quo.