Content marketing used to be the disruptor. But now its unicorn status is being challenged as new methodologies dominate marketing spend and strategy. These three trends are promising to bring major disruptions to an established line of work that is data-driven, yet based on very different types of outcomes.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NSP is a method of measuring marketing success that moves away from traditional metrics such as conversation rates, marketing qualified leads and ROI to identifying your most enthusiastic customers. The core premise is that this group will contribute to your organic growth more than any other group, including prospects. How can content marketers create content that recognises and rewards your net promoters while moving others up the scale?

Account Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM is one of the biggest trends to watch in B2B marketing at the moment. It means targeting specific groups or even individuals within an organisation with customised, relevant messages and materials to influence their brand awareness, perception and ultimately buying decisions along the discovery and sales funnel. This involves producing and tailoring very specific communications and content assets, including direct mail, websites, microsites, and videos, based on extensive research and account intelligence. Clearly content has an important role to play in this approach, but delivering it at scale with that level of customisation can be a challenge.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation
In the future, our content assets need to be a lot smarter while finding new ways to deliver the message. AI and machine learning have the potential to analyse vast amount of data much faster than any human. Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of PR 20/20, a B2B content marketing agency, maps out the big questions in this thought piece on the Curata blog. While he admits that it’s still early days for AI in content marketing, we are clearly looking at a future where more content marketing tasks can and will be automated, from generating and customising content to managing content delivery and analysis of results.

Bottom line: While content creation and marketing are staying relevant, if not even more in demand, disruptive trends in the way that marketing success is being measured are driving the evolution of industry innovation and best practice.

The focus will be on quality over quantity, with human insights and ingenuity amplified by an increasingly sophisticated set of tools, including AI.