Lisa Chang, Interactive Marketing Specialist

When thinking of content marketing, here's where I see some of the focus going in 2011.

International Communities

China's social network is larger than Facebook and their consumer spending is on the rise.  They, meaning China, India, Brazil and others, still favour Western brands over local ones so a little bit of local or cultural customization and a brand can start to develop a market abroad.

This MADE FOR CHINA (IF NOT BRIC) trend is part of the economic and consumption power shift to emerging markets.

Here are some of the stats:

1. China's retail sales rose 18.7% year on year to USD 183 billion in May 2010, following a 15.2% rise the previous year. (Source: Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, June 2010)
   
   
2. China’s retail sales may outstrip those of the US by reaching USD 5 trillion in 2016. (Source: Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, September 2010)
   
   
3. Affluent Chinese consumers prefer foreign brands: 52% of consumers whose annual income exceeds RMB 250,000 (USD 36,765) trust foreign brands more than Chinese ones while just 37% said they prefer the latter. (Source: McKinsey, September 2010)

Smartphone Dominance

With the global smartphone marketplace predicted to reach 804.42 million by the year 2015 and some of the key ways of communicating being via our social networks and texting, the application of an online media / content marketing strategy will become key to many B2C as well as B2B marketplaces.

Online media, social media marketing and more will be essential to reaching people where they receive their information.  For much younger consumers, the trend will be towards Planned Spontaneity will move to willingly opt-in to passively and continuously share their location in return for good suggestions on fun, exciting and spontaneous things to do.   

*According to Jeff Jonas at IBM, mobile devices in the US are creating approximately 600 billion geo-spatially tagged 'transactions' a day (that's every call and text, not just web connected smartphones!) - see Planned Spontaneity

Online Marketing Spending is on the Increase

Already, we are seeing huge declines in traditional newspapers favouring online news sites.  Advertising budgets will favour reaching the market online where people are looking for their news and where online marketing provides are more far reaching delivery vehicle. 

In fact, in a recent survey, B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends by MarketingProfs and Junta42 in association with American Business Media, Business Marketing Association and the Content Marketing Institute, there were 1,100 North American B2B marketers surveyed and these were the budget and production findings:

• On average, B2B marketers allocate approximately 26% of their total budgets to content marketing initiatives. The smaller the company, in terms of employees, the larger the percentage they spend on content marketing.
  
  
• Most marketers (51%) report they plan to spend more money on content marketing in 2011.
  
  
• Outsourcing for content marketing is employed by over half of B2B marketers (55%).

Urbanomics

“Today, half the world’s population – 3 billion people – lives in urban areas. Close to 180,000 people move into cities daily, adding roughly 60 million new urban dwellers each year.” (Source: Intuit, October 2010)

In fact, just the top 100 cities account for 30% of the world economy and almost all the innovation.  To understand this, NYC's economy is larger than 46 sub-Saharan Africa's economies combined.  Hong Kong receives more visitors per year than all of India.  And, emerging market cities of Shanghai, Sao Paulo and Istanbul are eagerly looking to join the ranks of this marketplace as well.

Cater to the city-citizens who are more daring, more liberal, more tolerant and more prone to trying new products and services.

Women Power

Women still spend more time socializing and being online has made it even easier in a lot of cases.  The highest growth in gamers come from the grandma marketplace keeping up with grand kids both from a conversational as well as an activities oriented approach.

Urbanization and access to education will help women enter the workplace while shaping the world economy.

"Over the next decade, women around the world will enter the workforce at an unprecedented rate. Close to 1 billion women, many of whom have either never worked or worked at a subsistence level, will be contributors in the world economy."

- An excerpt from the Intuit 2020 Report

An article from earlier this year, Women are Shaping the Internet, show ComScore findings that the fastest growing marketplace is still women 55 years or older.  Women will shape the internet both as consumers as well as contributors to the world economy.

Generosity - Random Acts of Kindness

Content marketing is on the rise in the social media realm, as the marketplace has matured.  See Review of 2010 - Social Networking, Search & Email Marketing and the indicators of the maturation of this marketplace. 

And, the winning spaces will be those locations providing touching consumers in an ongoing and engaging way.  Consumers are seeking "realness" and a human touch in this highly technical platform of social media. 

Brands which adopt Random Acts of Kindness will demonstrate charisma and compassion instead of the unwieldy and difficult to reach corporate images of years past.

Here are some examples of how this has been implemented in social media:

• Flower delivery service Interflora has launched a social media campaign in the UK designed to brighten up the lives of Twitter users by sending them flowers. As part of the campaign, Interflora monitors Twitter looking for users that it believes might need cheering up. Once found, the users are contacted by tweet, and sent a bouquet of flowers as a surprise.
• Dutch airline KLM’s ‘How Happiness Spreads’ Foursquare-based campaign employed a ‘Surprise Team’ to give passengers tailored, unexpected gifts at the airport. Throughout November 2010, as soon as someone checked-in at a KLM Foursquare location within its network of airports, the Surprise Team went online to find more background information about the person, decided upon a suitable gift and gave it them before they flew. For instance, one traveler tweeted he would miss a PSV Eindhoven football game while he was in New York. The Surprise Team, accordingly, gave him a Lonely Planet guide book of NYC with all the football bars highlighted in blue.

Source:  Random Acts of Kindness 2010

How can you take your organization to the next level with some of these trends? 

Join the newsletter or follow on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn to find out more during the coming year. 

I'll talk more in my next blog about how to make sure your online marketing campaign will stand out amongst the crowd now that social media is mature and it isn't about just being involved in the social networking scene but much, much more.