Looking into the crystal ball of the future to see what the future of advertising and marketing is can be a rather imprecise science, but an important practice to carry out if you want to stay ahead of the curve and valid with your marketing strategies.
Content strategy, for example, is hard. With so many audiences and a bazillion competitors, how can you know you’re fiding the right guys? How can you know that you’re always finding the right guys? Well, there is something out there that can help, and it is called programmatic delivery. If you’ve never heard of it before, neither have 99% of other marketers – but this could be the future, so listen up.
Essentially, it refers to algorithms and other mysterious computing elements that take the unreliable human element out the equation, helping your content reach the right people at the right time. In practice, it works via a kind of ad exchange, where advertisers queue up with their content that they hope to share, and the supplier side, where websites and media owners announce what they want. In the middle is an an ad exchange, hooking the two sides up almost instantaneously in a real-bidding process.
Sounds like Outbrain and/or Taboola, right? It almost is, except it fills “holes in the internet” and could come to search engines and more soon, with laser-targeted content that sees what you’ve been looking for previously and presents content not just similar to it, but collating it to deliver articles that combine what you’ve been looking at of a similar nature. So, if you’ve been price comparing 3 cars, you might get an article that compares those 3 cars’ pros and cons.
There’s a lot more to it of course – but the possibilities are amazing, and just knowing where the future of content marketing could go is a great place to start writing content so you’re stacked up and ready for it.