content marketing statistics – Curata Blog

Content Marketing Statistics: The Ultimate List

Mitchell Hall — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 15:00:53 +0000

As a marketer, you always want to ensure your opinions, strategic insights, and tactical activities are well supported by data. With this in mind, we’d like to share with you the content marketing related research and data points that Curata looks to on a regular basis, including our own annual content marketing staffing and tactics study with 1,000+ marketers. It’s the content marketing statistics post to end all content marketing statistics posts!

We keep this post updated regularly, so do send us a note if you come across some great research that should be in here. Feel free to share these stats with your Twitter followers. Last updated July 17, 2017.

Start by clicking on a category below, or scroll down to begin the learning!

Content Marketing Definitions:

Curata: Content marketing is the process of developing, executing, and delivering the content and related assets needed to create, nurture, and grow a company’s customer base. Stages of the content marketing process include: strategy; content development; asset development; and channel leverage across outbound marketing, inbound marketing, and sales enablement.

IDC: Content marketing is any marketing technique whereby media and published information (content) is used to influence buyer behavior and stimulate action leading to commercial relationships. Optimally executed content marketing delivers useful, relevant information assets that buyers consider a beneficial service rather than an interruption or a “pitch.”

Altimeter: Eight primary content marketing use cases:
- Feed the Beast: Creation; Curation and Aggregation
- Refine: Optimization; Analytics; Audience and Targeting; Distribution
- Govern: Workflow; Legal and Compliance

Content Marketing Institute: Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience–with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Forrester: Content Marketing is a strategy where brands create interest, relevance, and relationships with customers by producing, curating, and sharing content that addresses specific customer needs and delivers visible value.

Gartner: Content marketing is the process and practice of creating, curating, and cultivating text, video, images, graphics, eBooks, white papers and other content assets. These are distributed through content management systems, media platforms, and the social graph.

Content Marketing Strategy

70 percent of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy. (Altimeter)
CMOs at the largest technology companies report that building out content marketing as an organizational competency is the second most important initiative, only behind measuring ROI. (IDC)
29 percent of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose content. (Curata)
Ninety-two percent of marketers said their organization views content as a business asset. (Content Marketing Institute)

Strategy Documentation:

Forty six percent of marketers said their organization has a documented strategy for managing content as a business asset; 44 percent said they don’t, and ten percent weren’t sure. (Content Marketing Institute/Intelligent Content Conference)
Seventy two percent of marketers have a content strategy in place. Thirty percent have a documented strategy; 42 a non-documented strategy. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
The top three things that make content effective: audience relevance (58 percent); engaging and compelling storytelling (57 percent); triggers a response/action (54 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Content Segmentation:

Content segmentation by product/service category (53 percent); buyer persona (40 percent); vertical (35 percent); stage in buying cycle (32 percent); pain point (28 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Forty eight percent of marketers support three to five buying stages with dedicated content. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Fifty two percent of marketers support two to four roles and buyer personas with dedicated content. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Sixty three percent of marketers create content by buyer persona; 38 percent by vertical; 30 percent by geography; and 30 percent by account or customer. (Curata)

Buyer Insight:

Prescriptive content that lays out a formula for success was the most popular type of content among B2B buyers in 2017, with 97 percent citing it. (DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey)

Eighty seven percent of B2B buyers give more credence to industry influencer content. Buyers also indicated they give more credence to peer reviews, third-party publications and user-generated feedback. More than two thirds (68 percent) of buyers said they frequently give credence to peer reviews and user-generated feedback. Sixty percent give credence to content authored by a third-party publication or analyst. (DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey)

Case studies are the top content type for buyers, with 78 percent accessing this format type
when researching purchases in the past 12 months (vs. 72 percent in 2016). (DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey)

Forty seven percent of B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content prior to engaging with a salesperson. (DemandGen Report – 2016 Content Preferences Survey)

Buyers prefer LinkedIn as the top social network for sharing business related content, with 84 sharing business content on LinkedIn. But email remains the channel most buyers employ to share content, with 94 percent saying email was their number one channel for sharing. (DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey)

Buyers are most willing to register for and share information about themselves in exchange for white papers (76 percent said they will share information), eBooks (63 percent), webinars (79 percent), case studies (57 percent) and third-party/analyst reports (66 percent). They’re less willing to register for podcasts (19 percent), video (19 percent), and infographics (24 percent). (DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey) (Ultimate White Paper Template)

Budget:

Eighty eight percent of B2B marketers in North America use content marketing. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Seventy five percent of marketers are increasing investment in content marketing. (Curata)

B2B marketers allocate 28 percent of their total marketing budget, on average, to content marketing. The most effective allocate 42 percent, and the most sophisticated/mature allocate 46 percent. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Fifty one percent of B2B marketers indicate they will increase their content marketing spending in the next 12 months. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Sixty four percent of companies with a documented content strategy have a dedicated content marketing budget. Meanwhile 14 percent of companies without a documented content strategy have a dedicated content marketing budget. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Eighteen percent of companies allocate 10 percent of their budget (excluding headcount) to content marketing (majority of responses from 0 to 30 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Fifty three percent of marketers allocate between 1 and 30 percent of marketing budget to marketing technology (25 percent allocate between 1 and 10 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Size of Content Marketing Market:

The marketing software market is expected to grow to more than $32.3 billion in 2018. It will be one of the fastest-growing areas in high tech, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4 percent. (IDC)

Content Marketing Growth:

42.5% of companies are increasing their content marketing staff levels in 2016. (Curata)

Content Marketing Priorities and Challenges

Top three content marketing objectives: Drive sales and/or leads; engage customers/buyers/influencers; boost brand awareness. (Curata)
Top five B2B content marketing challenges: Producing engaging content (60 percent). Measuring content effectiveness (57 percent). Producing Content Consistently (57 percent). Measuring the ROI of content marketing program (52 percent). Lack of Budget (35 percent). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)
Top five content marketing challenges: Lack of time/bandwidth to create content (51 percent). Producing enough content variety/volume (50 percent). Producing truly engaging content (42 percent). Measuring content effectiveness (38 percent). Developing consistent content strategy (34 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Top three goals of content marketing: Lead Generation (59 percent). Thought leadership/market education (43 percent); brand awareness (40 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Business bloggers’ greatest priority is creating a strategy, followed by the need to measure impact of the blog on their organization’s success. (Curata)

Marketers’ top needs from a content marketing perspective: Audience identification and targeting (67 percent). Analytics (67 percent). Creation (60 percent). Distribution (53 percent). Curation and Aggregation (48%). (Altimeter)

Thirty percent of marketers say their organization is effective at content marketing (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Organizational Structure (“People”)

Forty two percent of companies have an executive in their organization directly responsible for an overall content marketing strategy. (Curata)

Top four areas responsible for setting content strategy: Corporate marketing (54 percent); Product marketing (25 percent); CEO/president/owner (21 percent); PR/communications (19 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Top five skill-sets missing from today’s content marketing teams: content creation; content marketing leadership/strategy; promotion; performance management/metrics orientation; subject matter expertise. (Curata)

Top five areas responsible for creating content: Corporate marketing (53 percent); product marketing (39 percent); subject matter experts (36 percent); PR/communications (32 percent); external agency/consultant (30 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Seventy one percent of business bloggers have some type of center of excellence team. This is a team that provides a blogging code of conduct, audience engagement guidelines, best practices and guidance to help internal teams execute their own blogging activities. (Curata)

Seventy two percent of B2B marketers surveyed by Forrester say less than half of their marketing staff plays a primary role in content marketing today. (Forrester)

Content Marketing Tactics

Type of Content:

The target content marketing mix by superstar content marketers is 65 percent created, 25 percent curated and ~10 percent syndicated content. (Curata)

Top five B2B content marketing tactics: Social media content (92 percent); eNewsletters (83 percent); articles on your website (81 percent); blogs (80 percent); in-person events (77 percent). (IMN Inc.)

Top three content marketing tactics: Blogging (65 percent); social media (64 percent); case studies (64 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Top five B2B content marketing tactics: social media content (93 percent); case studies (82 percent); blogs (81 percent); eNewsletter (81 percent); in-person events (81 percent). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Fifty three percent of content marketers use interactive content. (Content Marketing Institute)

Top five types of interactive content used by marketers: assessments, calculators, contests, quizzes, interactive infographics. (Content Marketing Institute)

Publishing Frequency of Content:

Thirty eight percent of marketers publish content weekly or more often. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Ninety one percent of the best business bloggers publish weekly or more often. Only 70 percent of all other bloggers post at this frequency. (Curata)

Content Creation (Including Outsourcing and Curation)

Target content mix: 65 percent created (created by dedicated, internal staff, crowd-sourced internally, or outsourced); 25 percent curated; and 10 percent syndicated. (Curata)

On average, 18 percent of companies’ blog posts are 750 words or more. (Curata)

Long-form blog posts generate more than nine times more leads than short-form blog posts. (Curata)

Types of content used in social media marketing include visual assets (85 percent), up from 74 percent in 2016. In second place was blogging (66 percent). Live video (such as Facebook Live and Periscope) is used by 28 percent of marketers (up from 14 percent in 2016). Podcasting is only used by 8 percent of marketers and represents an opportunity. (Social Media Examiner)
B2B marketers are much more likely to use blogging (75 percent) when compared to B2C marketers (61 percent). B2C marketers are more likely to use live video (30 percent) compared to B2B marketers (24 percent). (Social Media Examiner)

The most important content for marketers is (only one choice allowed): visual images (41 percent) up from 37 percent in 2016, surpassing blogging for the first time. Blogging dropped from 38 percent in 2016 to 32 percent in 2017. (Social Media Examiner)
Blogging is more important for B2B marketers (43 percent say it’s the most important) than B2C marketers, 26 percent of whom claim it’s most important. B2C marketers place more importance on visual content (45 percent say it’s the most important) than B2B marketers (32 percent). (Social Media Examiner)

Content Curation

Eighty two percent of marketers curate content. (IMN Inc.)

Sixteen percent of marketers curate for their audience every day. Meanwhile 48 percent curate from third party sources at least once a week. (Curata)

Eighty three percent of marketers curate/share content with their customers and/or prospects from third party sources such as blogs, social media, industry publications or news sites. (Curata)

Over 50 percent of marketers that curate content say it has increased their brand visibility, thought leadership, SEO, web traffic and buyer engagement. (Curata)

Forty one percent of marketers that curate content indicate it has increased the number and/or quality of their sales-ready leads. (Curata)

Outsourcing

Marketers outsource 18 percent of their content, with the remaining content being created in-house, curated, or syndicated. (Curata)

Twenty five percent of marketers don’t outsource any content creation. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

About two thirds of marketers outsource less than one third of their content creation (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

The top two most outsourced content marketing activities are writing (44 percent) and design (41 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Business bloggers outsource 14 percent of their blog posts. The best practitioners outsource 24 percent. (Curata)

Fifty seven percent of business bloggers’ outsourced blog posts originate from non-paid contributed or guest posts. (Curata)

Content Promotion

B2B content marketing social media platform usage: LinkedIn (94 percent); Twitter (87 percent); Facebook (84 percent); YouTube (74 percent); Google+ (62 percent); SlideShare (37 percent). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

The top five most effective social media platforms to deliver content and engage audiences: LinkedIn (82 percent effective); Twitter (66 percent effective); YouTube (64 percent effective); Facebook (41 percent effective); SlideShare (38 percent effective). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Top three paid advertising methods used by B2B marketers to promote/distribute content: Search Engine Marketing (66 percent); print or other offline promotion (57 percent); traditional online banner ads (55 percent). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Twenty one percent of all business bloggers send posts through a newsletter to their subscriber base at least weekly; 39 percent of best practitioners do this weekly. (Curata)

Have marketers integrated their social media and traditional marketing activities? Strongly Agree (27%); Agree (54%); Uncertain (10%); Disagree (7%); Strongly Disagree (2%). (Social Media Examiner)

Weekly time commitment for social media marketing in hours: 0 (3 percent); 1 to 5 (33 percent); 6 to 10 (23 percent); 11 to 15 (11 percent); 16 to 20 (10 percent); 21+ (20 percent). (Social Media Examiner)

Over 81 percent of marketers found that increased traffic occurred with as little as six hours per week invested in social media marketing. (Social Media Examiner)

Which form of paid social media are marketers regularly using? Facebook Ads (84 percent); Google Ads (41 percent); LinkedIn Ads (18 percent); Twitter Ads (17 percent); YouTube Ads (12 percent); Promoted Blog Posts (7 percent). (Social Media Examiner)

LinkedIn generates more leads for B2B companies than Facebook, Twitter or blogs individually. (Inside View)

Have marketers integrated their social media and traditional marketing activities? Strongly agree (24 percent); agree (60 percent); uncertain (9 percent); disagree (6 percent); strongly disagree (2 percent). (Social Media Examiner)

Top five social media platforms most used by B2B : LinkedIn (94 percent); Twitter (87 percent); YouTube (74 percent); Google+ (62 percent); SlideShare (37 percent) (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Content Marketing Impact

Seventy four percent of companies indicate that content marketing is increasing their marketing teams’ lead quality and quantity. (Curata)

Thirty six percent of companies with a documented content strategy indicate their content marketing is “very effective” or “extremely effective.” (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Seventy seven percent of all companies rate their social media marketing as successful at achieving the most important objectives set for it to some extent. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

The greatest impact today’s business bloggers have on their organization are: thought leadership, SEO, and brand visibility and buzz. (Curata)

Fifty five percent of business bloggers are getting five percent or more of their corporate web site’s traffic from their blog. (Curata)

Eighty seven percent of B2B marketers surveyed by Forrester say they struggle to produce content that truly engages their buyers. (Forrester)

Content Marketing Metrics

Content Marketing Measurement Success

Only eight percent of marketers consider themselves “very successful” or “extremely successful” at tracking content marketing ROI. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Forty five percent of content marketers rate interactive content as “extremely effective” or “very effective”. (Content Marketing Institute)

Content Marketing Technology

Fifty six percent of marketers use content marketing-specific software to manage their content workflow and distribution. (Curata)

Seventy percent of content marketing leaders are increasing investment in marketing technology. (Curata)

Sixty nine percent of companies use an editorial calendar for content marketing. (Curata)

Over 100 content marketing vendors have been placed in 15+ categories in this Content Marketing Tools Map.

Top five areas of technology investment by marketers: social marketing, digital commerce, marketing analytics, customer experience and advertising operations. (Gartner)

Thirty three percent of marketing budgets go to technology, with 28 percent of that spent on infrastructure. (Gartner)

Forty percent of companies have either “moderately” or “fully” integrated their marketing and sales automation systems. (Curata)

Vertical-Specific Data

Automotive Industry

Forty six percent of auto marketers have a formal content marketing program in place, compared to 33 percent of overall respondents. (IMN Inc.)

Almost 70 percent allot less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets to content marketing efforts, versus 38 percent overall. Twenty five percent acknowledge they don’t set aside enough budget to those efforts. (IMN Inc.)

Banking and Financial Services

Forty five percent report content marketing efforts are done on an ad-hoc basis, compared with 30 percent of overall respondents. (IMN Inc.)

Fifty percent of banking and financial services marketers have not even thought about using content across channels, versus seven percent of overall respondents. (IMN Inc.)

Fifty five percent of banking and financial services marketers allocate less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets to content marketing efforts. However, 45 percent say they would increase budgets if funds were available. (IMN Inc.)

Ninety one percent of banking and financial services marketers curate content, compared to 82 percent overall. (IMN Inc.)

More than half of banking and financial services marketers worry about trademark, copyright and citation issues. (IMN Inc.)

Had Your Fill of Content Marketing Statistics Yet?

For an in-depth look at more useful content marketing numbers, download Curata’s Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics and Metrics.

Content Marketing Strategy: Welcome to The Jungle

Michael Gerard — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 18:08:10 +0000

The great news is that content marketing works! The best marketers know this, and are increasing their investment in content to drive leads and revenue. 75% of companies will make this increased investment in the coming year, and the most cunning and clever teams are driving the greatest return from their investment in content marketing strategy. We call these marketers the FOXES.

In this post I analyze the results of Curata’s recent survey of 1,000+ marketers to hone in on what these foxes are doing from a strategy, staffing and tactics perspective to kick ass with content. I share many of the staffing, process and technology benchmarks gleaned from the research, as well as what some of these foxes have to say about their own strategies. For a more in-depth presentation of the benchmark data and related guidance, download the entire eBook here: Content Marketing Staffing & Tactics Barometer.

Overview: Top 5 Content Marketing Strategy Areas to Focus On

We’re entering a new phase of content marketing. The marketers leading this pack are no longer focused on pure content volume or trying to hit the lottery with that one piece of content. These marketers—the foxes, are building the foundational elements of a practice that taps into the power of content to move an entire organization, versus simply a handful of people in a small corner of the marketing team.

More specifically, the foxes are focused on:

Strengthening the content marketing team (e.g., 42% of companies have an executive responsible for content marketing).
Creating a content marketing strategy (check out The Content Marketing Pyramid to see how we do this at Curata).
Building out content marketing processes (i.e., production, distribution, analytics).
Investing in content marketing technology (75% of foxes are increasing marketing technology investment).

SCOTT ABEL
Founder, CEO, and chief strategist at The Content Wrangler, Inc. @ContentWrangler
“The single best practice that will set content marketers apart from the crowd is to focus on adopting intelligent content production efficiencies. The big challenge today is producing relevant content efficiently. It’s about scale, automation, and creating content the way factories create products: In a united, consistent, optimized way that provides the most bang for your content production buck.”

Survey Demographics

1,030 marketers participated in this survey. They were made up of:

Participant Titles:
- CMOs and VPs of marketing made up 8.7% of respondents
- Marketing directors, managers and specialists were 45.9%
- Marketing consultants and agencies were 16.7%
- Marketing technology directors, managers and specialists were 9.1% of respondents
Revenue:
- 54.4% of companies were <$10M by revenue
- 26.4% were $10M to >$100M
- 12.6% were $100M to <$1B
- 6.5% were $1B+

Content Marketing Works!

The new content marketing movement has had a significant impact on business, with 74% of companies increasing lead quality & quantity from their content. Marketing leadership is recognizing content’s positive impact, with 75% of companies increasing content marketing investment, and 43% increasing staff levels. However, the real work is just beginning.

Content marketing hype is coming to an end, indicating the beginning of its maturity across more organizations that will:

Expand the strategic impact of content marketing efforts
Fill skill-set gaps across teams
Better leverage existing resources
Get more rigorous on measuring content impact deep into the pipeline.

Content marketing is positively impacting the entire marketing & sales pipeline. Content continues to build awareness for organizations, and the best marketers are tapping into the power of content to more deeply engage leads, better influence sales opportunities and influence revenue growth.

CHRIS GAEBLER
Chief Marketing Officer, Arbor Works @Chris_Gaebler
“Good content makes a point. Great content tells a story. Stories have tension and consider the humans involved. Start with the person, think about their struggles, and write.”

However, although content marketing has been growing significantly over the past three to five years, companies are only just starting to ramp up their efforts to take full advantage of the opportunities presented. As one example of the early stage content marketing is in, the average content marketing team consists of only three staff members.

Content Marketing is Still in the Infancy of Its Maturity

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs’ 2016 content marketing study identified 32% of companies as being sophisticated or mature. This is similar to the 29% of companies considering themselves leaders in Curata’s study (i.e., the foxes).

Although roughly a third of companies are leading the pack, all companies have significant opportunity remaining by improving their content marketing practices. This covers many areas across people, process and technology.

Investment Continues to Grow

75% of companies are increasing content marketing investment, with 43% increasing staff levels. The 42% of companies with an executive responsible for content marketing will increase to 51% by 2017. Skill-sets being beefed up include writing (i.e., journalists), design professionals, and others.

This growth in staff is exciting and sorely needed as we enter a new phase of content marketing maturity. No longer are content marketing teams solely focused on trying to create one ‘home-run’ piece of content that garners thousands of shares and page views. This become too much of a lottery play. Now we’re focused on:

Building a content marketing strategy that yields high quality content on a consistent basis
Paying more attention to customers’ needs along the entire buying cycle
Increasing relevancy by developing content focused on specific verticals, company sizes, and even specific accounts (e.g., supporting account-based marketing)
Tapping into the reach of sales teams through sales enablement
Learning what does and doesn’t work to get better and demonstrate impact

ROBIN GOOD
Writer, speaker, change-agent, & publisher of MasterNewMedia.org @RobinGood
“What do I believe is the single best practice that will set apart the top content marketers from the rest of the field this year? The ability to move away from the classical article metaphor to create content that is not only useful, rich in resources, and well documented, but which also provides real information benefits to the reader, either in the form of a learning experience, of a starting point for new discoveries, or as a problem-solving resource. Doing this is not easy, nor is it going to save anyone time—quite the opposite. But those who invest time and resources to create such content will stand out for contributing something of such real value or inspiration to many that it will last to promote their brand for a very long time.”

What’s Your Content Marketing Spirit Animal?

When thinking about your own organization and its current efforts to thrive in the content marketing environment, do you think of your business as:

The Fox
Cunning, strategic, quick-thinking, adaptable, clever, and passionate, with the ability to use your resources for survival and growth.

The Wildebeest
Follows the pack, afraid of being left behind.

The Elephant
Strong, stable, and patient. Slow to shift to changing situations.

The T-Rex
Formerly powerful but rapidly on the way to extinction.

There are many different animals in the jungle, and some are better suited for survival than others.

MONICA NORTON
Senior Director of Content Marketing at Zendesk @monicalnorton
“The content marketers that stand out from the crowd are risk-takers. They experiment. They never get too comfortable. If they don’t fail once in a while, they’re playing it too safe.”

So at a high level, what are the foxes up to?

Content Marketing Strategy in 2016

The majority of marketers (75%), plan to “increase” or “significantly increase” their content marketing budget in 2016. Accountability for this investment will increase in the next six to eighteen months as more rigor is applied to content’s pipeline impact.

The ability to respond in real-time—and not only newsjacking—is becoming more and more important. However, good planning provides the foundation from which you can respond most effectively, which is why having a great editorial calendar remains crucial. You can find the best in the Ultimate List of Content Marketing Editorial Calendar Templates.

DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT
Marketing strategist & bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, and Newsjacking @dmscott
“Gone are the days when you could plan out your entire content marketing programs well in advance and release them on your timetable. It’s a real-time world now, and if you’re not engaged, then you’re on your way to marketplace irrelevance.”

The Fox’s Content Marketing Strategy & Tactics: People

Leading marketers are focused on:

Hiring a content marketing lead who will drive strategy and orchestrate the content marketing strategy across many marketing disciplines.
Build out the team, focusing on the greatest skill-set gaps as detailed below.
Improve staff alignment across the organization.

42% of Companies Have an Executive Responsible for Content Marketing Strategy

Do you currently have an executive in your organization directly responsible for an overall content marketing strategy? (e.g., Chief Content Officer, VP or Director of Content)

Expectations for growth of this senior role were high in 2015, with 49% of companies expecting to have a lead for this role by the end of 2015. Growth has been slower than expected however. That said, this role exists at 42% of companies today with this expected to increase into 2017.

Of the foxes, 53% have this role in place today, versus 32% for the elephants and T-rex. Small companies with less than $10M in revenue, and large companies with $1 billion+ in revenue should see a 30% increase in staffing for the lead role in 2017.

Two thirds (68%) of these senior content marketing executives have global authority—a good sign given how important collaboration across an organization is for content creation and input, content reuse, and content distribution.

“Chief Content Officer” Not a Common Title for Content Marketing Executives

What is the exact title of the executive in your organization directly responsible for overall content marketing strategy?

The most common title for content marketing executives is Content (Marketing) Director or Manager—not Chief Content Officer. Most folks titled Chief Content Officer are in agencies or publishing organizations. 68% of companies have up to three people on their content marketing team, and 42.5% of companies are increasing content marketing staff levels this year.

29% of $1 billion+ companies are struggling to align content marketing strategy across their teams, while small companies are leading the pack in content marketing alignment.

What’s the Greatest Skill-Set Missing From Today’s Content Marketing Team?

JAY BAER
Marketing consultant, speaker, author of New York Times bestseller Youtility @jaybaer
“The best content marketers will think video first in every element of content marketing. Because if you have video, you have audio. And if you have audio, you have text (via transcription + editing). Video is now the seed corn for all great content marketing.”

Alignment Also Key Success Factor for Content Marketing Impact

Please indicate how aligned your content marketing strategy and tactics are across internal teams (e.g., campaign management; social media; marketing operations; product marketing; regional/field marketing).

The Fox’s Content Marketing Strategy & Tactics: Process

Leading marketers are focused on:

Creating a content marketing strategy (step-by-step provided in this webinar)
Completing a content audit.
Focusing content creation on segments and accounts. (e.g., account-based marketing)
Reusing content. (e.g., using the Content Marketing Pyramid as a framework)
Creating and curating content.
Measuring content’s impact.

A common theme among foxes is stretching the dollar.

They’re asking themselves:

What content do I already have?
How can I reuse and repurpose content?
How can I collaborate and curate?

Do You Know Which Content Exists Across Your Company, and Where It Is?

How often does your organization complete an audit of your company’s content?

37% of content marketers never complete a content audit!

Reasons to Perform an Audit:

Know what content you have and don’t have
Focus content creation and curation efforts on gaps in content inventory
Prevent investing in duplicate content
Identify and then replace or remove outdated content
Determine which content can be reused and repurposed
Improve quality of existing content

Content Marketing Leaders Create Content for Individuals (Account-Based Marketing)

BETH KANTER
Author, trainer & nonprofit innovator in networks, learning, and social media @kanter
“The top content marketers understand their audience and why they want to consume content, and create and curate high quality content that helps them reach their goals.”

29% of Leading Marketers Systematically Reuse and Repurpose Content

The Content Marketing Pyramid

Use the Content Marketing Pyramid to execute a content campaign, assuring optimal content consumption, reuse and reach. For the full framework for developing and executing your content marketing strategy, download The Content Marketing Pyramid eBook.

JASON MILLER
Bestselling author, global content marketing leader at Linkedin @JasonMillerCA
“The one single best practice that will set apart the top content marketers from the rest of the field in 2016 is… doing more with less by extracting every last bit of value from your existing content while striking a balance between data, creativity and your own personality for content creation moving forward.”

The Best Marketers Create AND Curate Content

Almost two-thirds of foxes (leaders) are curating content, with a similar percentage outsourcing content creation. Companies not taking advantage of these strategies are missing a HUGE opportunity to better leverage resources and more deeply engage with users. The recommended content mix is: 65% created, 25% curated and 10% syndicated content. Target one-third of your created content to be outsourced.

What percentage of companies are curating content or outsourcing created content?

Additional reasons to outsource or curate content? To better leverage resources, improve the ideation process, better engage buyers through higher value content, and engage with your ecosystem.

What Exactly is Content Curation?

Content curation is when an individual (or team) consistently finds, organizes, annotates and shares the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market.

Have you ever published a “best of” post, commented on and shared a link on Twitter, or posted a link to Facebook with your commentary? Then you’ve curated!

To be clear, content curation done right is not pirating. Follow these 6 tips to curate content ethically:

If you are reposting an excerpt from an original article, make sure your excerpt only represents a small portion of the original article.
Always identify the original source and drive visitors to the original publication. 3. Retitle all content you curate.
Don’t use no-follows on your links to an original publisher’s content.
Inject some creativity and your own voice into your curation efforts. E.g. provide context for the material you use, add your own insight and/or guidance for your audience.
Make your commentary longer than the excerpt you’re reposting.

To really curate like a rockstar, download The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation eBook.

Analytics

“Half the money I spend on ~~advertising~~ content marketing is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” – (with apologies to) John Wanamaker

The foxes are laser-focused on measuring the impact of content; to justify its impact on the organization as well as to drive continuous improvement. These leaders also get that content impacts the top, middle and bottom of the funnel if done right.

Content marketing leaders excel at performance measurement

JIM LENSKOLD
Marketing expert, international speaker, president of Lenskold Group and author of Marketing ROI: The Path to Campaign, Customer and Corporate Profitability @JimLenskold
“Marketers with ROI-based measures will gain advantages as they maximize their financial performance. Content measures must go beyond engagement and leads to show contribution to both incremental sales and increased customer value.”

Seeing the Impact of Content

Estimate the impact of your company’s content marketing investment on the following areas during the past 12 months.

Content marketing has had the greatest impact on the top of the funnel (TOFU) so far. However, the foxes are seeing significant impact on MOFU & BOFU as well. They are looking at metrics across the funnel, from leads generated and influenced at the marketing-owned stages, to sales opportunities generated and influenced.

Time to Raise the Performance Measurement Bar

Data-driven content marketing is possible, and can yield significant results. For example, Curata used its own content marketing platform, integrated with Marketo and SF.com, to demonstrate that long form blog posts generate 9 times more leads than short form blog posts. (full blog post here) Investing in marketing technology makes this process possible.

The Fox’s Content Marketing Strategy & Tactics: Technology

There’s no doubt that the number of technology solutions continues to grow, as evident by the below Content Marketing Tools Universe figure below. 75% of foxes are increasing marketing technology investment in 2016 to take advantage of these new solutions. However, a key step in getting the greatest benefit out of this investment is integrating new software into your existing tech stack. 40% of companies have either “moderately” or “fully” integrated their marketing and sales force automation systems, compared with one third in 2015. 59% of foxes are dedicating effort to MAP and SFA integration.

Summary:

Content marketing is impacting ALL stages of the pipeline. The foxes get this, and as a result content marketing is entering a new phase of maturity. Don’t miss the boat!

Build your content team: both internal and external. Take a Center of Excellence approach.
Identify opportunities to stretch your content marketing budget (e.g., repurpose and reuse content, tap into content curation).
Raise the performance measurement bar to go beyond measuring page views and social media. Dive deep into marketing pipeline impact and sales pipeline impact (examples here).
Tap into the power of content marketing technology: Establish a closed-loop content supply chain, and integrate with marketing and sales automation (e.g., the content marketing platform is complementing marketing salesforce automation). And above all, don’t forget to have fun with it!

Your Content Marketing Education: 57 Remarkable Content Facts

Meg Sutton — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 21:28:36 +0000

We hear all the time that content marketing has come a long way in the past few years and that this strategy will continue to be a growing trend in the future.

But where’s the proof?

I’ve pulled together 51 of some of the most compelling content insights on the web to help marketers plan and adjust for this $44 billion dollar industry. The information compiled below consists of content marketing tactics, use cases across various channels and actionable information to better prepare your organization for content management and production.

Here’s a curated list of a few of the most interesting statistics out there from some of the most knowledgeable content marketing information sources. I highly encourage you to dig deeper into the reports provided below for more detailed information on topic-specific studies.

Content Marketing

93% of B2B marketers use content marketing (Content Marketing Institute)

Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads, per dollar spent, as traditional marketing tactics (Demand Metric)

$135 billion will be spent on creating new digital marketing collateral in 2014 (WebDAM Solutions)

Proving bottom-line results of inbound strategies is a concern for 25% of marketers (HubSpot)

43% of organizations have a dedicated content marketing executive (Curata)

1.2 billion users access the Internet from their mobile devices (Epik Consulting)

7 out of 10 readers would prefer to learn about a company through their content, rather than an ad (Custom Content Council)

61% of B2B organizations believe webinars are an effective content marketing tactic (CMI & Marketing Profs)

47% of users ignore mobile ads in apps and 43% think ads disrupt UX (Forrester)

33% of marketers don’t know which channel generates the most revenue for them (MediaBistro)

Content marketing makes 70% of consumers feel closer to a company (Demand Metric)

56% of marketers use a form of content-specific technology (Curata)

67% of B2B content marketers believe event marketing is the most effective strategy (MediaBistro)

A majority of the audience you’re marketing to, 65%, are visual learners (WebDAM Solutions)

Online audiences spend 20% of their time reading content (Demand Metric)

60-70% of content created by B2B organizations goes unused (Sirius Decisions)

10-20% of website content drives 90% of it’s web traffic; 0.5% of that content drives over 50% of traffic (Inbound Writer)

Content published by influencers is 74% editorial (Technorati Media)

82% of consumers trust a company more when the CEO/leadership team are active social media users (TopRank)

33% of content marketers are unable to measure the effectiveness of their strategy (Polaris)

Digital marketing spend will surpass 50% of total program spend by 2016 (IDC)

71% of organizations plan on increasing spend on content marketing in 2014; 39% plan to increase spend on curation (Curata)

65% of content marketers tailor content to industry trends (CMI & Marketing Profs)

40% of marketers use some sort of CRM technology (Act-On)

76% of content marketers used newsletters to reach consumers in 2013 (eMarketer)

Reaching the right audience and converting leads are the top marketing priorities for 23% of marketers (HubSpot)

Multichannel campaign management is a top priority for 27% of content marketers (Adobe)

77% of business buyers prefer different content at various stages of the product research process (Pardot/Salesforce)

Social Media

Social Media is used by 87% of B2B marketers to distribute content (Demand Metric)

LinkedIn’s conversion rate is 3 times higher than Twitter and Facebook (Quick Sprout)

Images result in a 98% higher comment rate on LinkedIn (Quick Sprout)

33% of consumers discover new brands, products or services by reading messages on social networks (eMarketer)

There are over 420K c-level executives on Twitter (Social Strand Media)

70% of organizations have a presence on Google+ (Jeff Bullas)

Increased exposure is the top benefit of social media marketing for 89% of marketers (Social Media Examiner)

Content marketing is a top strategy for 57% of marketers (Altimeter)

34% of marketers have generated leads through Twitter (Jeff Bullas)

Google+ has 300 million active monthly users (USAToday)

71% of tweets are ignored, only 23% generate replies (Search Engine Journal)

43% of content marketers say social media is a top contributor to marketing success (Gartner)

29% of organizations are producing content assets each week (Eloqua)

YouTube attracts 1 billion unique users each month (YouTube)

50% of consumers are more likely to purchase from organizations they follow on Twitter (TopRank)

Search

92% of marketers find content marketing an effective driver for SEO (Sekari)

41% of traffic to content sites is from search (TopRank)

2000 words is the average length of posts that rank on the first page of Google (Optimind Technology)

40% of B2B website traffic is from organic search (MediaPost)

Blogs

23% of a user’s time online is spent on social media and blogs (CMI)

Blogs give websites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links (Content+)

77% of your online audience reads blogs (Ignite Spot)

57% of marketers have acquired a new customer from their blog posts (Sekari)

Over 27 million pieces of content are shared every day (AOL & Nielson)

75% of marketers are increasing their focus on marketing automation; 63% are increasing focus on blogging (eMarketer)

B2B companies that blog create 67% more leads than organizations that don’t (WebDAM Solutions)

Email

Online services most likely to influence purchases include brand sites, 34%, and blogs, 31.1% (Technorati Media)

75% of readers are likely to delete emails that can’t be read on their phones (Marketo)

76% of CMOs say email marketing generates brand awareness (iContact)

The most trusted online services are news sites at 51% and blogs are trusted by 29% of readers (Technorati Media)

Hope this list got you up to speed on the latest in the world of content marketing! Know of any other intriguing content marketing statistics? Let us know in a comment below & check out our Content Marketing Tactics Planner for more information on what tactics over 500 organizations are putting in motion this year.

Also, if you’re ready to learn how content curation can help complement your created content and better engage your audience, then reach out to us for a brief demo of Curata’s solution.