It’s hard out there for content leaders. As the media landscape fragments, audiences scatter. A new focus on privacy has caused signal loss across channels. Seemingly overnight, artificial intelligence has turned the world upside down and inside out.
With so much changing all at once, it’s increasingly difficult to know where your audiences are going and what content they’re likely to engage with. Relying on analytics — the go-to tool in a content marketer’s toolbox — takes you only so far because performance metrics look backward. Layering audience research adds valuable context but only deepens your understanding of past performance.
To anticipate what comes next, step outside your standard toolbox and consider expertise from a range of disciplines. I asked behavioral science, anthropology, journalism, and speculative fiction experts to share their advice for unlocking the future.
Behavioral science: The art of anticipating emotional reactions
It’s unclear who first said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Some believe Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dennis Gabor coined the phrase; Peter Drucker often gets the credit in business circles.
Regardless of its origin, the sentiment explains the merits of integrating behavioral science techniques into content marketing operations.
“From a marketing perspective, the beauty of behavioral science is that it allows you to increase the likelihood that your audience will do what you hope,” says Nancy Harhut, chief creative officer at HBT Marketing and author of Using Behavioral Science in Marketing: Drive Customer Action and Loyalty by Prompting Instinctive Responses.
Use psychology-based methods to anticipate and activate
Nancy says grounding your content in psychology can help you better anticipate what your audience wants. Even better, it can compel them to take the actions you desire: “Science has proven that humans often rely on decision-making shortcuts — hardwired, automatic, intuitive actions developed over the ages. When marketers trigger those behaviors, we have a better chance of prompting the actions we seek.”
Consider social proof, a decision-making shortcut that means people are more likely to imitate people who are like them and who they like.
Content marketers put social dynamic proof into play when they work with influencers. As authentic audience representatives, the influencers aren’t preaching to the choir; they are the choir. Consequently, content that relies on social proof is more likely to resonate and activate audiences.
Along similar lines, when marketers create content that taps into humans’ innate curiosity, their need to feel in control (autonomy bias), or the tension they feel when a task is interrupted (Zeigarnik effect), they aren’t just pursuing a metric on an analytics report, they’re working toward an expected result.
But it is not as simple as waving a magic wand. Deploying behavioral science within the context of content marketing requires testing and learning how to activate the right triggers: “At its heart, it’s the study of human behavior — of why people do what they do,” Nancy says. “If you’re in marketing, this knowledge is vital.”
Emotional understanding isn’t just a B2C benefit
Nancy explains that people make decisions for emotional reasons and justify those decisions with rational reasons. B2C marketers often think of their customers in emotional terms. However, B2B marketers sometimes overlook emotion because they see the lengthier, more complex buyer’s journey as purely rational. It isn’t.
“Emotion plays a role in marketing products meant for consumers and business buyers,” Nancy says. “At the end of the day, you’re dealing with a person. One of my B2B clients tested an emotional message against a straightforward problem-solution message and saw a 13% increase in purchase intent with the emotional approach. It works.”
Cultural anthropology: Understanding human connections
If behavioral science zooms in to understand why people do what they do, cultural anthropology zooms out to get a holistic view of how humans unite through culture.
To most, culture may be an amorphous concept that varies by context. In business, the term is often shorthand for what it’s like to work somewhere. In the broader society, culture is referenced as both a synonym for art (high and low) and a stand-in for social issues, such as the current political discourse on a “culture war.”
But sociocultural anthropologist Autumn D. McDonald, owner of ADM Insights & Strategy and faculty member at Howard University, defines culture as the “holistic system of meanings, knowledge, traditions, and practices that are formed in a community, handed down from one generation to the next and embodied in that community’s values, customs, skills, and behaviors.”
View actions through the lens of why
Anthropology helps content marketers see the market landscape, audiences, products, and content as a system. It makes a good framework for deepening the understanding of why a message resonates.
The better you understand the why, the more information you bring into anticipating what comes next. Those insights are helpful for content marketers navigating rapid cultural shifts and vital to understanding and appealing to diverse constituents.
“Culture underpins everything we think, feel, say, and do,” Autumn says. “I have yet to encounter a business question that would not in some way benefit from applying an anthropological lens.”
Overcome misperceptions and misapplied techniques
Sound reasons exist to incorporate anthropological methods into your audience research. Yet, Autumn notes, some common stumbling blocks prevent marketers from achieving their benefits. For example, she says leaders may discount the utility of anthropology-driven insights or feel additional inquiries will disrupt their team’s workflow.
However, the biggest obstacle she sees to using anthropology in content marketing is a lack of familiarity with the field.
“Many business leaders don’t realize that commonly used approaches in marketing such as ethnography and in-context observation have their roots in anthropology,” Autumn says. “[But] the way that [today’s marketers] apply these techniques deviates from the robust design, theory, and analysis grounded in anthropology. As a result, the soundness of the resulting research is all too frequently diluted in marketing and market research.”
The solution? When conducting audience research, consult or partner with a trained anthropologist instead of someone who says they’re familiar with anthropological tools and methods.
Journalism: Community investigations and conversations
As an advertising futurist and deputy managing director at the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, Tameka Kee thinks a lot about what comes next. But to confirm her theories and ideas, she draws on the investigative skills she learned in her prior career as a journalist.
“A lot of trendspotting is really about understanding what’s going on in niche communities,” Tameka says. “Content marketers who respectfully engage niche communities embody the people they’re trying to reach. As they build fluency, they learn much more about the content likely to resonate in the future.”
For B2B content marketers, niche community conversations typically happen on LinkedIn. But Tameka says industry events also offer predictive advantages. For example, the selection of sessions on the agenda reveals a lot about what people think will be important in the coming year. Likewise, sponsorships are a good proxy for where the money is headed in their space.
There’s also the wisdom of crowds. Listening to and joining the conversations among participants can expand your view of upcoming trends and issues of importance. “If you’re able to attend events and network, you’re going to learn a lot about what’s coming down the pipe,” Tameka says.
It’s a similar story on the B2C side, though the priority conversation platforms differ. B2C content marketers should gather intel from niche conversation platforms like Reddit and relevant topic-specific sites. Tameka points to AllTrails, a popular app for hikers, as a good example.
“If you’re a content marketer for a brand that makes hiking gear, sunblock, trail mix, or reusable water bottles, your audience is hanging out on apps like AllTrails,” Tameka says.
Speculative fiction: Manifesting future possibilities
If you worry about ads following you around the internet, you might have a beef with Philip K. Dick, the author of Minority Report, or Steven Spielberg, who adapted the story into a movie starring Tom Cruise.
The film was released in 2002, a formative period in digital media between the dot-com bubble and Web 2.0. The plot had little to do with advertising, yet it introduced moviegoers to a world where personalized wall-to-wall ads exist.
The concept was all anyone [in marketing] could talk about for years, according to Brad Berens, a writer, futurist, researcher with the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg, and author of a free weekly newsletter, where he writes about new trends in media and technology. “It’s a good example of how marketing can become completely obsessed with science fiction because it extends the realm of the possible,” Brad says.
Create narratives to retcon future success
For Brad, using speculative fiction — a category encompassing sci-fi, fantasy, and related genres — to help content marketers expand their audience perception is a little like a product team doing a pre-mortem before a campaign launch.
It’s an exercise in which you assume that the launch was a disaster, then examine what went wrong so you can “retcon” success. “When you change [your] thinking from not wanting to believe anything will go wrong to presuming that things have already gone wrong, all of a sudden, [you can] start filling in gaps,” Brad says.
Constructing a narrative — even a short story — becomes a mechanism that pushes you to confront a particular question. According to Brad, narrative exercises are a great way to focus on how people use a product instead of the product’s attributes.
For example, think about a Starbucks Frappuccino. If you wrote a story about it for morning commuters, you wouldn’t discuss its similarities to milkshakes. However, you might frame it as “a sweet breakfast alternative that’s easily consumed while driving.”
Look back to see ahead
Marketers don’t have to write fictional stories to learn from them. Reading older science fiction, or what Brad refers to as “retro futures,” is also useful for thinking about what comes next. He says, “With retro futures, you’re asking what assumptions [the authors] were making about the future? What did they get right? What did they get wrong?”
Looker, a Michael Crichton movie, is a good example. The film follows a series of mysterious deaths plaguing cosmetic surgery patients. Ostensibly, it’s a story about the role media, advertising, and television play in creating artificial beauty standards. But the film, which came out in 1981, also predicted a top storyline of 2024.
“Looker hit upon deep fakes before deep fakes were a thing,” Brad says. “What it got wrong was that it imagined deep fakes as a technology that could only be used by a powerful corporation. Today, of course, we’re seeing that one of the biggest challenges with deep fakes is that anyone can do them.”
The movie’s goal wasn’t to predict deep fakes or anything else. The objective was simple: Tell a good story. Still, it likely began with a seminal question: “What if?”
“It’s the process of working through the ‘what if’ that makes the future focus narrative such a powerful tool for marketers,” Brad says. “The what if doesn’t necessarily have to be central to the plot, but the more you stick with it, the more you’ll discover.”
Keep asking questions
While Brad, Tameka, Autumn, and Nancy use different perspectives for trendspotting, the frameworks all have at least one thing in common: curiosity. If you aren’t curious, it’s easy to stay in your comfort zone and stick with what worked. That’s a recipe for a future marked by stale, outdated content. Rather than playing it safe, ask provocative questions. The answers may not be what you want to hear, but harnessing curiosity will help you better understand the road ahead.
