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The History of Content Marketing [Infographic]

Author's avatar By Robert Allen 11 Aug, 2017
Essential Essential topic

How content marketing has evolved over the last decade

Content marketing has gone through a transformation over the past 10 years. As the pace of content marketing has grown exponentially, so too has the number of content marketing pieces being published online. This has led to a shift in the approach to content marketing and a continuous change of best practices. Taking cues from Google’s constantly changing algorithms, content marketers and SEO experts have changed their opinions on keywords, platforms, and the definition of quality. What started as a way to provide useful information to users slowly became a platform for link building and monetization. This has led to oversaturation and a generally lower standard of quality.

The current state of content marketing best practices advises against shallow and valueless content for the sole purpose of having content, opting instead for creating a content strategy which works towards business goals and provides value to end-users. As technological shifts have impacted the type of content that users wants to consume and how they want to consume it, video, mobile, and social media remain important considerations for content creation and distribution.

2017 will see the increased importance in user-generated content and mobile optimization– along with quality– in order to avoid content fatigue.

If you're learning about the growth of content marketing, our video history of content marketing will also be interesting.

Author's avatar

By Robert Allen

Rob Allen is Marketing Manager for Numiko, a digital agency that design and build websites for purpose driven organisations, such as the Science Museum Group, Cancer Research UK, University of London and the Electoral Commission. Rob was blog editor at Smart Insights from 2015-2017. You can follow Rob on LinkedIn.

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