With all the shifts in content marketing this year, from the larger macroeconomic picture to the continued buzz on AI, and Google updates, it can feel like there is this global slowdown for content creators and marketers.

Are we headed toward a content recession, or what?

Well, for some of us, yes, but don’t lose hope just yet.

It’s not all bad news.

This week, I came across Bynder’s State of Content report and there’s some good news for us scrappy content people!

The BLUF of it all:

Despite the tough economic climate, brands are continuing to invest in content; most are increasing their content marketing effort spend.

This is good, but what does this really look like for us?

Brands are taking a much more strategic and cautious approach to content spend and how they are creating content, and who is delivering that content is continuing to look much different.

According to the report and from what I’ve seen:

RIP to the traditional content marketing agency. Companies are moving content creation in-house, moving away from expensive agencies, and investing in their own in-house capabilities to create content.

We’ve seen the writing on the wall for quite some time when it comes to content marketing agencies, especially those who charge super high premiums for ho-hum, average content.

What do I think content marketing companies need to do?

• Expand their offerings to include other forms of content (other than selling words or just building sites) such as video, social posts, and content experiences.

• Be transparent if using AI tools in any part of content creation and share those cost savings with clients.

• Invest in real-deal experts to create the content and build a moat that is not easily done (it takes time to find experts and is a much more involved content workflow to maintain and grow)

• Offer other content marketing services such as optimization and repurposing strategies

• Make the distribution of content part of the offerings. With Google updates, social platform changes, anything can happen. Agencies that can help get brands in front of customers in publications that live outside of Google, Facebook and Twitter will have a clear edge.

Brands are looking for ways to save money creating and distributing content by updating technology and consolidating their technical solutions.

Content creation is getting costlier, so I do think a lot of brands are going to look for technology that can help reduce the costs of creating and distributing content, but I don’t see a ton of companies investing more into their own CMS systems. That can be a costly investment as well.

Leveraging the right technology is going to be key as we move forward, and I predict that companies will look to better technological solutions they can bring in-house that already work within the established ecosystems, such as WordPress. This week, Vox Media dropped its own CMS and is going back into the WordPress ecosystem, which tells me that others are going to follow.

Streamlining content creation teams + better content distribution technology is the name of the game for 2023 — I see a lot of opportunities for content operations people here to come in and help create these systems. I also see a big opportunity for tech solutions that improve WordPress and make content creation and distribution for smaller content teams a breeze!

Companies are focusing on improving existing content instead of funding new content creation.

The chatter this past month in my content creators group has been all about content optimizations.

As the search landscape changes, It’s getting harder to maintain the rankings and traffic that we already have.

Content marketing is never a set-it-and-forget-it exercise, and brands are realizing this. There are so many reasons why content optimization makes sense today, but here are a few of my thoughts:

• The search landscape is a more dynamic environment today. Content refreshes give you a look into what’s going on in the SERPs today vs when you first created that content.

• When optimizing and improving existing content, a smart strategist sees trends and signals that can be improved site-wide as well. These kinds of improvement insights can help make new content better as well.

• Content optimization and improvements are generally less costly overall than producing new content.

• You’ll quickly discover new competitors and see where your content currently stands up and when it doesn’t; again, this can be helpful to improve new content creation as well.

• Looking at previously published content in an effort to make it better helps us see the shifts in user intent and can often lead to finding new topics to write about as well.

While the findings of the Bynder study intentionally lead us to want to learn more about Bynder’s Digital Asset platform (the proposed solution to these content marketing goals) — they are indeed some of the trends I’ve seen globally across the board for quite some time.

So, are we headed for a content recession?

I don’t think so, but where we invest our content budgets is shifting. I’ll keep watching all the trends and sharing what I see here.

There’s a lot happening in content right now, so this week, I thought I’d expand my things to read and ponder section — there’s just so much going on.

Things to Read, Watch and Ponder This Week in Content

Here is a resource that I believe every SEO and content person needs to read, and re-read. According to Dr. Marie Haynes, this article is the culmination of 8 months of researching machine learning systems and Google’s documentation on their ranking systems, alongside looking at hundreds of examples of content that was either rewarded or punished by this system.

I recently watched a talk on 2023 trends that I think we all should check out!

Watching Mordy Oberstein break down EEAT and how Google can actually tell if the content is demonstrating valuable experience (or not) is worth a listen here.

Starting around the 29-minute mark, Mordy walks us through the things content needs to have in order to rank and what EEAT really looks like with some real-life content examples. Worth a watch for sure!

Cyrus Sheppard became a Quality Search rater for Google and shares some of the learnings here. The good news is, you don’t have to become a Quality Search rater to get these insights, but it’s always good to evaluate your content with these quality rating guidelines in mind.

There have been some heated discussions going on lately, publishers vs. Google, and I’m bringing my popcorn and watching it all unfold. Can we ever see a world where we get more transparency from Google (probably not), and what would SEO look like if we did find a way to work together? There are no easy answers, but in the meantime, I like that we’re talking about this.

If you haven’t heard, Google and Meta are set to remove Canadian news publishers from Google, Facebook, and Instagram — looks like they’ve already started removing access for some Canadian publishers’ Instagram.

Again, I think this kind of big move tells me that publishers need to own their distribution strategies outside of the typical platforms. There’s always platform risk, but this can be a huge blow to a lot of smaller Canadian publishers who rely on Google, Facebook and Instagram traffic. I’m watching this closely; we’ll see if it all shakes down as predicted.

If you want to brush up on your editing skills (yes please!) check out Erica Schneider’s FREE editing database:

We’re not done talking about AI. Looks like a lot of content creators are embracing AI technology in some way. Check out these survey results from Descript:

I’m removing my favorite Tweets of the week section here, just rolling some Tweets and insights into the Things to Read, Watch and Ponder section instead.

With all the changes to Twitter this week, including a strange re-brand to X, I think makes sense to do this. I still think Twitter is a valuable platform, but it’s definitely not the ONLY platform worth spending some time on these days.

I can’t believe we’re in our final week of July — summer days here go really fast. I’ve been out trying to squeeze in every summer moment I can, but I’ve also been really digging and thinking about search intent this month.

While we hire only subject matter expert writers at Venture 4th Media, sometimes I see that there is still some confusion about the specific ‘search intent’ and delivering content that the reader really expects. Search intent is much more nuanced than people realize, but really ‘getting’ this principle is key to making your content better.

I’ve even been doing some fun experiments with Chat-GPT to see if AI can help us discover the intended search intent of a topic. It’s been a fun experiment, and I’m still doing a lot of ruminating on this topic.

I’ll share some of my findings and thoughts re: search intent and what that means to us as content creators (it’s super important and a foundational thing IMO) in the next newsletter.

Keep subscribing and reading if you want to know more…

Cheers! Amy

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