It’s true, the internet has shortened our attention spans. We’d rather watch a video than have to read 400 words or more. As a digital marketer one of the great challenges is to figure out what your audience wants and then to package that into something that’s measurable and moves the needle.

It’s getting harder.

You’d think that with the advent of all the new data tools and analytics packages on the market, that we would know exactly what the customer wants. We don’t really. We have an idea but as the sophistication of our digital world becomes more personalized so does the demands and expectations of the consumers swimming in it.

What I do know is that the content marketing game is drastically shifting. We get our information from so many sources nowadays. It’s insane. Think about it though, each of those sources “needs” content as well as content creators. That content? It could be hit and miss.  We choose to consume it and marketers “hope” you consume it. The latter is a beast. Why? Because consumers are fickle. They’re bored and they have zero attention spans.

We’ve become dependent on digital to entertain us, inform us and babysit us.

Because our devices are always on. Our demand for content, our blood lust for digital content to consume, is all encompassing. Because of this, the challenge for the digital marketer is apparent. Whether the content is educational or is pushing a product or service, how it is created, packaged and pushed out, now matters more than ever. Marketers can’t rely on the “long form” writtern word anymore.

We don’t have time for it. You don’t have time for it.

I don’t see this changing any time soon.