Content marketing is still one of the best ways to ensure effective top-of-the-funnel marketing.
Some brands even use it as their primary marketing channel, especially B2B brands.
For that reason, I’ve analyzed and collected some of the most important content marketing trends you’ll need to follow this year.
Let’s get started.
The State of Content Marketing
In my experience, brands often have a tumultuous experience with their content marketing investments. But I chalk that off to impatience from decision-makers.
Regardless, 82% of marketers still actively invest in content marketing.
1. AI will continue to act in a supporting capacity.
After the release of ChatGPT (and other AI tools), many marketers started to experiment with it for their content marketing needs.
Many websites that relied on low-quality content could suddenly get what they wanted for a fraction of the price.
However, content marketers always understood that there’s a stark difference between AI-written content and content developed by a writer/marketer.
Despite that, in the last two years, I’ve seen many companies cut down their content marketing budgets, lay off employees, and shift their focus toward AI content completely.
It’s safe to say such companies realized their blunder. That being said, cutting costs wherever possible is always the goal so organizations settled for smaller content teams that used AI as a supporting tool.
That’s exactly what you can expect this year – marketers using AI for research, ideas, and inspiration, plus automation where it’s necessary.
In my opinion, 2023 was a hype year for AI, but 2024 will be about making AI-powered marketing methodologies.
Statista estimates that the market value of AI in marketing will be $36 billion in 2024. That’s three times as much as it was in 2020.
Even between 2018 and 2020, there was a 55% increase in marketers’ AI usage from 29% in 2018 to 84% in 2020.
This tells us that while the number of marketers using AI hasn’t increased much in the last few years (since it’s already a good majority), the amount spent on AI tools has increased significantly.
2. Search practices are evolving – 51% of Gen Z women use TikTok for search, not Google.
Google has long been the go-to search engine for most people, followed by others like Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo, among others.
I usually track the dominance of a brand by how it replaces verbs in a language. Like instead of “search for it online” we simply say “Google it” now.
At that point, brands become (almost) unstoppable – a legacy. But, that doesn’t mean progress can’t change it.
We’re currently witnessing a shift in how search works. A decent majority of the younger generation is now using social media as their search engine.
It may be to find out what’s in fashion, directions, or even to simply learn more about a topic.
Considering that TikTok alone has 34 million videos posted every single day, it’s safe to say that it can work as a search engine.
Let me provide some perspective – Wikipedia currently has almost 6.8 million English articles, and you seem to find information on most things on the site.
Sure, TikTok has a lot of content that’s not informational; it’s a social media app after all. But even if 1% of the videos posted are informational, that’s 340,000 videos per day.
With shortening attention spans, it’s no wonder newer generations are resorting to using TikTok as a search engine.
What does this mean for content marketers? Well, content strategies need some adjustments, accounting for social media content, especially if your product’s target audience includes younger generations.
3. 54% of businesses plan on increasing their content marketing budgets in 2024.
Only 3% of organizations decreased their content marketing budgets in 2023. (Source)
For the past few years, I’ve seen that businesses, especially SMBs, generally have plans to increase content marketing budgets.
However, it’s also important to note that last year, 69% of businesses increased their content marketing budgets.
It may seem like fewer businesses want to increase budgets this year. However, I like to look at things holistically.
For example, how many businesses increased their overall marketing budgets in the past three years?
How many of these businesses had a content marketing budget under $1,000? Because Semrush found that in 2022, 27% of businesses had a content marketing budget below $1,000.
Only 16% had a budget over $10,000.
At the same time, it’s possible that a lot of organizations didn’t get the results they wanted from their content marketing efforts.
Regardless, more than half of all businesses still want to increase their budgets. That’s enough evidence to show how important a healthy content marketing strategy is to the wider marketing efforts of a company.
4. 36% of content marketers incorporate interactives in their content strategies.
54% of marketers believe interactive emails are the most effective form of interactives. (Source)
Interactives include any asset that allows users to tangibly interact with it. That includes interactive infographics, custom calculators, assessments, quizzes, image sliders, polls, flipbooks, and interactive videos.
Whenever I mention interactives, there’s one thing I always mention – this excellent article on the workings of a mechanical watch by Bartosz Ciechanowski.
Not only does it systematically explain the inner workings of a mechanical watch, but it also utilizes multi-layered interactive GIFs that do wonders in helping understand the process.
Another great example is the Scale of the Universe interactive by Cary Huang. It allows you to see the scale of objects throughout the universe from the tiniest atom to the largest clusters in space, all coming together in the backdrop of a serenading melody.
Kurzgesagt, a German YouTube channel that makes long-form 2D animated explainers on a variety of topics also made a version of it here (Apple version).
Such interactives do more than just make your content entertaining. It creates an impact.
I remember watching the Scale of the Universe for the first time and immediately looking for the creator whose name I actively remember to this day.
Similarly, organizations that put this sort of effort into their content notice the same level of impact, provided their outreach is efficient.
5. 45% of marketers believe attracting quality leads is the biggest challenge in content marketing in 2024.
Only 19% of marketers consider finding good content marketing talent as a challenge. (Source)
Leads over traffic has been the content marketing mantra for a while now. If content marketing efforts don’t bring in quality leads, what’s the point of having high traffic to your content?
Despite that, 45% of content marketers still consider it their top challenge. The answer may be in the second top challenge – 38% of content marketers consider creating content faster as their top challenge.
Many organizations go down this rabbit hole where creating more content seems like the answer to getting more leads.
However, this often becomes a case of iatrogenics – where intervention leads to more harm than benefit.
My recommendation? Broaden your horizons when it comes to content types. Test different forms of content to see what resonates with your audience then make it a necessary step in your strategy.
B2B Content Marketing Trends
While the general strategy and rule book remain the same for both B2B and B2C content marketing, there’s a difference in the approach, method, and developed assets.
One thing’s for sure, you’re more likely to notice the use of passive AI in B2B content marketing; here’s how.
6. 72% of B2B content marketers are using generative AI tools.
5% of B2B marketers use generative AI to create videos and audio. (Source)
B2B content marketers are doing their best to use generative AI only to make the content process more efficient.
However, there’s an issue there. They first need to establish a baseline; something to compare AI-assisted work with.
I think that marketers who skip that step and claim that AI boosted their performances are no different than marketers who use vanity metrics to display their performance.
At any rate, the study found that 51% of B2B marketers use generative AI to brainstorm new ideas.
Meanwhile, 45% use it to research keywords & headlines and write first drafts. Furthermore, 91% of these B2B content marketers don’t pay for AI tools.
They use either the free tools or the free versions of the AI tools. Meanwhile, 38% of markets have embedded AI tools in their content management systems.
27% have subscriptions to tools like Jasper. It may be troubling to find that almost half of all B2B marketers use AI to create first drafts.
But the study doesn’t ask in what capacity. In my experience, the AI’s first draft is only used as a skeleton.
No actual content is used from it. Instead, marketers use it to determine the flow of information.
And that’s important because more often than not, content marketers only figure out major flaws after they complete their actual first draft.
So, it’s a great way to rectify that common problem; you can already see what you would’ve done and start your work accordingly.
7. 75.6% of employees consider themselves to be their company’s ambassador.
Before the internet, being a company ambassador meant using their products, praising them in public settings, networking with potential audiences, etc.
Today, there’s a different take on the employee ambassador. If you peruse LinkedIn as much as I do, you must have noticed how many employees use it for more than just sharing their professional achievements and accomplishments.
Generally, individuals are able to create a more engaging following on LinkedIn, compared to company accounts.
That’s why sharing content on company pages doesn’t get much traction.
To counter that, content marketers have started using their ‘personal brands’ to market company assets and products.
That’s the modern version of an employee ambassador.
And considering that 3 out of 4 employees consider themselves company ambassadors, we’ll see a lot more of such content on LinkedIn and other similar sites as part of a B2B content strategy.
8. OpenAI released their latest AI engine Sora, allowing anyone to create videos from text.
As a B2B content marketer, you know selling a video to your boss is hard. It’s expensive, takes a lot of time to make, and repurposing it is limited to an extent.
And, up until now, text-to-video AI prompts were hardly convincing. However, with OpenAI’s latest release, Sora, this is about to change.
Sora lets you create absolutely realistic scenes that can be indistinguishable from the real thing with the right prompts and angles.
That means B2B content marketers now have a super cheap way to create videos to complement their strategies.
Now, Sora is far from perfect.
There are subtle things that the human eye can detect like inconsistent walking patterns, specific color palettes, and in some cases, recognizable assets.
However, marketers can still make use of it in its current state by generating animated videos.
I bet six months from now, Sora will be fully capable of replicating real humans in videos (even background ones).
9. 94% of B2B content marketers use articles in their content strategy.
84% of B2B content marketers use videos in their content strategy. (Source)
New year, and new strategies, but blog posts and articles remain the number one content type of B2B marketers all around.
However, what I find interesting is how many marketers are now using video.
That’s already due to the multiple AI-based tools that allow B2B content marketers to create videos faster, cheaper, and more efficiently.
What I find weird is that live-streaming content is used by 25% of B2B marketers. If you LinkedIn, you’ll see that many B2B marketers with decent followings have livestream sessions and podcasts.
Yet it is a high-effort low-reward type of content in my opinion. I think the number of marketers with livestream content will reduce drastically this year; it already has on LinkedIn at least.
10. 95% of companies plan on reusing content in 2024.
86% of companies operating both as B2C and B2B plan to reuse content. (Source)
The idea behind reusing existing content is to reduce spend and increase efficiency.
However, the word reuse implies a lot of things; a better word is repurposing content.
That’s because you don’t pick up the same content and post it again in slightly different words; this isn’t LinkedIn.
Repurposing content means distributing the same content in different mediums and types.
The idea here is that the content remains relevant for a longer period of time. If you develop the same content in five different mediums and release them at once, it’s a waste.
One thing that’s not talked about enough in the content marketing industry is pacing. It’s the key to a good content strategy and a good repurposing and distribution strategy.
It’s the key to reaching a large part of your target audience and it’s the key to maximizing quality leads.
Expert Insights on Content Marketing Trends
This won’t be that big of a spoiler or revelation but most experts today are talking about the involvement of AI in content marketing.
Generative AI can’t handle content without help. If brands want to generate quality leads and connect with consumers, you have to tell a story. That’s something AI can help you with but can’t do it all alone.
Meanwhile, some marketers believe that the presence of AI has finally allowed content marketers to show what they can do.
The future of content marketing is bright. Because as AI-driven content floods the interweb, it sets a precedent for expert-driven content, allowing it to shine.
Chima Mmeje, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Moz
Providing first-hand knowledge and information will always trump mass-produced regurgitations of existing content.
And it seems like that is the consensus with most experienced marketers.
Messing with generative AI won’t lead to any sort of innovation. Without innovation, there is no competition, only a rat race.
Moving on, another thing marketers talk about is personalization. But most marketers forget about personalization when it comes to their work.
Switching to newer tech stacks has helped them drive loyalty. Changing tech stacks, adopting new strategies, and experimentation are important if you want to offer personalized experiences to customers.
Interactivity is the key to engagement. Interactive content like polls, quizzes, and fun interactives not only helps engage customers but also determines what your target audience wants.
Most content marketing trends revolve around AI this year, generative AI to be exact. The general consensus among content marketers is that we need not rely on AI but rather use it as a catalyst for our own thoughts.
Other than that, there is a shift in how people are using search, especially younger generations.
Adapting to this shift early on is the best way to control how this turns out, to an extent at least.
I’ll say this, new AI technologies like Sora may seem to be gunning for your jobs but they can never replace human ingenuity and creativity.
Laziness, unoriginality, and the pull of the sunk cost fallacy will be gunning for your jobs, not AI.
Mughees is an agile and detail-oriented content marketer and strategist with 3+ years of experience in strategy and management, and 9+ years of experience writing content that converts.
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