The State of Content Marketing in 2010

By the middle of 2010, a handful of real, concrete shifts had reshaped what “content marketing” meant in practice, well beyond the individual blog posts and newsletters businesses had been experimenting with for years.

The discipline got a name and an institute

Joe Pulizzi had been evangelizing branded content since his Junta42 blog launched in 2007, but 2010 is when that work formalized into the Content Marketing Institute. For the first time, businesses running blogs and newsletters had a dedicated body of research and a shared vocabulary for what they were doing, rather than borrowing terms from advertising or PR.

The iPad changed how people read

Apple’s iPad launched in April 2010, and it mattered for content marketing in a specific way: it made longer-form reading comfortable on a screen for the first time. Whitepapers and in-depth guides that had been written primarily for print or desktop skimming suddenly had an audience willing to read them on a couch. Businesses that had been trimming everything down to skimmable blog posts started reconsidering longer, more substantial content as a legitimate format again.

Visual bookmarking started, quietly

Pinterest entered closed beta in March 2010, and almost nobody outside a small circle of early testers had access yet. It’s easy to overstate its influence this early, but it signaled a direction: content built primarily around images, not text, was becoming its own category worth watching, well ahead of most businesses’ blogging strategies.

Measurement stayed crude, but it stayed honest

Google Analytics adoption kept growing through 2010, but multi-touch attribution didn’t exist yet for most small businesses. Tracking meant simple, direct signals: traffic to a post, time spent on the page and, most usefully, whether a new inquiry mentioned reading something on the site. Crude as it was, that honesty kept businesses from fooling themselves with vanity numbers.

Budgets kept shifting away from pure advertising

The 2008 recession’s effect on ad spending hadn’t reversed by 2010. Businesses that had cut display and print budgets two years earlier had, in many cases, gotten comfortable with the cheaper alternative and had no intention of going back. Content wasn’t winning on its own merits alone in every boardroom; it was also the budget line that had survived the cuts, and case after case of blogs and newsletters producing measurable leads at a fraction of ad costs kept it there.

What this meant if you ran a business that year

None of these developments required a business to change its actual approach overnight. What they signaled was legitimacy: content marketing was no longer an improvised workaround for a smaller budget, it was becoming a recognized discipline with its own research, its own emerging visual channels and a growing body of evidence that it worked. Businesses that had been treating their blog as a minor side project had good reason, by mid-2010, to start treating it as a real part of the marketing plan.