In this guest post, B&T regular, Storyation’s head of content, Lauren Quaintance (pictured below), predicts the demise of the very industry in which she works – content marketing! However, as you’ll discover here, it ain’t all bad news…

A few months ago IT consulting firm Gartner published a seminal report on content marketing platforms which made this startling statement: by 2021, the term “content marketing” will be defunct. 

Now as a founder of a specialist content marketing agency I could have been forgiven for feeling a bit faint when I read that. Except that the report articulated something I’ve been thinking for a while. 

At Storyation we’ve always talked about how, right now in Australia, content is a broad church. 

So much of what marketers describe as content – whether it’s product descriptions, a press release or a retail ad – is really “marketing content”.

Content marketing on the other hand is producing something useful or entertaining that engages or nurtures your prospects and customers. 

When Gartner predicts that content marketing will become defunct what they mean is that in a few years all marketing content will in effect be elevated to become content marketing that has utility at its heart.

That will mean that content marketing is no longer siloed in marketing team structures and we’ll all be thinking holistically about how customers engage with a brand across their purchase journey.

When I spoke at a marketing conference last month, my co-presenter Bupa’s global head of content strategy Matt Allison talked about how the future of content marketing is integration.

“We need to stop looking at content as a vertical and start looking at it as the lynchpin of a broader customer engagement strategy.”

Gartner analyst Kirsten Newbold Knipp had this advice for marketers keen to prepare themselves for what’s next: “Take a cue from the best content marketers to understand how their persona and customer journey orientation coupled with a journalistic approach helps them deliver value.”

Only three years until Nirvana. I, for one, can’t wait.