Content Marketing Trends Shaping 2008
Why content marketing is still an emerging, loosely defined term in 2008, and the specific developments pushing it toward becoming a recognized discipline.
“Content marketing” isn’t yet the settled category it will likely become. In 2008, the phrase is still stitching together practices, blogging, white papers, case studies, email newsletters, that most companies were already doing under separate names, without a shared framework tying them together. Here’s what’s pushing that consolidation forward this year.
A dedicated organization starts building the category
Joe Pulizzi launched a company called Junta42 in 2007 aimed specifically at matching businesses with content creators and, more importantly, at defining and promoting the idea of content marketing as its own discipline rather than a subset of advertising or PR. That kind of dedicated advocacy matters for a young term: someone has to consistently argue a practice deserves its own name before marketers start using it that way.
”Inbound marketing” is competing for the same territory
A newer company called HubSpot, founded in 2006, has been popularizing a related but distinct term: inbound marketing, the idea of earning attention through useful content and search visibility rather than buying it through ads. The overlap between inbound marketing and content marketing is significant, and in 2008 it’s unclear which framing, or whether some third term, will end up being how the industry talks about this work going forward.
The economic downturn is quietly accelerating adoption
As the year has gone on, the broader economic picture has worsened, and marketing budgets are under real pressure. That’s pushing more companies toward tactics that don’t require large upfront media spend: blog posts, downloadable guides, case studies, things a small team can produce in-house. Nobody is calling this a deliberate strategic pivot toward content marketing, exactly, but the underlying behavior, doing more with owned content and less with paid placement, is happening for straightforwardly financial reasons.
Search is rewarding depth over volume
Marketers who have been blogging or publishing guides since 2005 or 2006 are increasingly noticing that their older, more thorough pieces keep generating steady search traffic long after publication, while thin or promotional pages don’t. That pattern, informal as the evidence still is, is part of what’s convincing skeptical marketers that sustained, useful content is worth the investment even without a name for the category yet.
B2B companies are leading, not consumer brands
The most visible experiments with structured content programs this year are coming from business-to-business companies selling complex products with long sales cycles, the kind of purchase where a prospect wants to read a detailed guide or case study before talking to a salesperson. Consumer brands are still mostly experimenting with video and social content rather than what would later get filed under content marketing specifically.
Where this leaves the term
Nobody should expect “content marketing” to show up in a company’s official marketing plan yet. What’s happening in 2008 is quieter: separate practices that used to live under blogging, PR and lead generation are starting to get discussed as a connected set of tactics, and a small number of advocates are actively pushing for that connection to have a name. Whether it settles on content marketing, inbound marketing or something else entirely is still an open question this year.
