This video by the Mention media monitoring company from July 2016 looks ahead to the current year and asks content marketing experts what they predict for content marketing in 2017.

Seeing as how we’re now two months into this year, now is a good time to check in and see if what the experts predicted appears to be coming true. The experts featured in this video include:

• Rand Fishkin with Moz
• Sam Mallikarjunan with HubSpot
• Benji Hyam with Grow and Convert
• Larry Kim with WordStream
• Sujan Patel with Web Profits

Presentation

Before we get into the meat of what these experts are saying, let’s talk about presentation for just a minute. There is a stark contrast in this video between the first presenter, Rand Fishkin of Moz, and most of the other presenters (including the hostess). Rand is obviously using a professional setup to record his part of the video and he obviously rehearsed what he said and probably did multiple takes and that all shows in his portion of the clip.

Compare that to the rest of the video, which is basically people sitting in front of a webcam and jumping around on screen ever-so-slightly from poor editing jobs and you can easily see why it pays to put even just a little effort into your videos.

You come off looking so much better than when you just wing it and try to edit it later to look better.

What they say

The two main themes of this video are:

1. Content marketing is going to become way more competitive this year and therefore content marketers will need to create more unique content for increasingly niche audiences, and
2. Video will continue to become increasingly important in content marketing.  

Niche

Virtually all of these content marketing experts agree that competition for the general public’s attention is only going to increase and this will drive content marketers to become more and more niche.

This is hardly a surprise considering that you can watch a couple of hours of video on a site like Digital Marketer or many one-person operations on YouTube and become a “certified content marketing pro” or some such nonsense.

We’re not sure how many people go through these certification classes each week, but they’re all learning the same thing and then immediately putting what they’ve learned into action, so there’s no doubt competition is ramping up in the content marketing sphere.

And we’ve already seen companies that offer a general product or service becoming more niche with who they target (we even do it here at WizMotions). Even if a company offers a more general business service, more often than not nowadays it will zero in on a couple of different industries and specifically market to them more than others.

Once you get a toehold in these niches, it becomes easier to retarget this audience that you’ve already got the attention of.

Kim actually recommends buying some Facebook and Twitter ads to give your content an extra boost in the crowded content advertising market.

But, considering how easy it is to ignore these ads, whether or not that strategy will work is debatable.  

Video

Perhaps the easiest prediction ever (and one that we love love love) is that video is going to keep increasing in importance in content marketing.

Interestingly, Patel says he believes short-form content will gain in popularity and long-form content will start to slow down, as people get tired of being bombarded with long articles and long videos.

This seems like something that is bound to happen with the uptick in importance of video content on social media platforms like Facebook. Those sped-up recipe videos on Facebook are a good indication of what can be done with video in just 20 or 30 seconds.

We’re surprised that Vine was scrapped when it was, because people were doing some good stuff with those six seconds, but perhaps something similar will come along.

More competition is never a bad thing, as it will push marketers to be more unique and offer more value to the audiences they’re trying to target. And, you know we love the increase in video content that’s expected.

Speaking of unique content and video, you know what kind of video content really stands out?

Animation.
Click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much your animated video will cost. (You don’t even need to talk to anyone!)