36 stats spot signs between content marketing success or failure

 
Content Marketing
Content marketing is now used by 88% of organizations and 76% plan on producing more content this year than last according to the Content Marketing Institute.
With this many companies doing content marketing, there are bound to be winners and losers.
To help you differentiate the two, here are 36 stats that spot signs between content marketing success or failure.
FAILURE
Companies that struggle with content marketing use only a portion of their marketing staff, have trouble development engaging content, lack a consistent strategy, don’t identify their audience and have a measurement plan. As a result, they don’t see the business value in content marketing.

  1. 87% of companies say that developing engaging content is a major challenge. (Forrester)
  2. 85% of B2B marketing leaders fail to connect content activities to business value. (Forrester)
  3. 80-70% of content in most marketing organizations goes mostly unused. (Sirius Decisions)
  4. 72% of surveyed marketers say less than half of their marketing staff plays a primary role in content marketing today — leaving content to quickly degrade to talk of products, features, and what the company has to offer, rather than cleverly packaged bits of the interesting insights buyers crave. (Forrester)
  5. 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy. (Altimeter)
  6. 60% of corporate marketers say they have no to very little understanding of what the best practices are for buyer persona development. (Tony Zambito)
  7. 56% say lack of data quality and completeness is most challenging obstacle to content marketing success. (Act-On)
  8. 32% of B2B marketers are challenged with finding trained content marketing professionals versus 10% last year. (Content Marketing Institute)
  9. 31% of Fortune 500 enterprises now maintain an official blog, down from 34% in 2013. (Sword and the Script)
  10. Top 5 Content Marketing Challenges: Lack of Time/Bandwidth to Create Content (51%); Producing Enough Content Variety/Volume (50%); Producing Truly Engaging Content (42%); Measuring Content Effectiveness (38%); Developing Consistent Content Strategy (34%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

SUCCESS
Companies that succeed with content marketing have identified business goals, know their buyer personas, make content marketing a company competency, use a variety of content forms, curate and re-purpose content and have metrics to measure success, often throughout the entire buying cycle. They also cite trust as an important benefit to content marketing.

  1. Top 3 factors that make content effective: Audience Relevance (58%); Engaging and Compelling Storytelling (57%); Triggers a Response/Action (54%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
  2. CMOs at the largest technology companies report that building out content marketing as an organizational competency is the 2nd most important initiative, only behind measuring ROI. (IDC)
  3. 86% of B2B buyers “frequently” use mobile phones to access business-related content. (DemandGen Report)
  4. 85% of corporate marketers are using buyer personas for content marketing and messaging. But only 15% say their buyer personas are very to significantly effective. (Tony Zambito)
  5. 82% of marketers curate content. (IMN Inc.)
  6. 71% of business bloggers have some type of center of excellence team. (i.e., 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)
  7. Most effective B2B content marketing tactics are in-person events (cited by 69% of marketers), webinars/webcasts (64%), video (60%), and blogs (60%). (eMarketer)
  8. 67% of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchasing decisions than they did a year ago. (DemandGen Report)
  9. 54% of corporate marketers say that quality content is among the most effective SEO tactics their company uses, while 50% also cite (closely related) frequent website updates. (MediaPost)
  10. 52% of marketers support 2 to 4 roles and buyer personas with dedicated content. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
  11. Top 3 drivers of blog content strategy include: personas, audience demographics and buying stage. (Curata)
  12. 48% of marketers support 3 to 5 buying stages with dedicated content. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
  13. 52% of consumers say watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions. (Ber|Art)
  14. 46% of people say they’d be more likely to seek out information about a product or service after seeing it in an online video. (41 Stories)
  15. Over 2/3rds of companies report that their video content budget is increasing. (53% “slightly” and 16% “significantly”). (DemandMetric)
  16. 41% of marketers say driving sales is the No. 1 goal for their content marketing strategies; 94% put sales in their top five content marketing goals. Brand awareness was the second-most-popular goal with 88% adding it to their top five, while 21% ranked lead generation as their No. 1 goal. (MediaPost)
  17. Most-trusted types of online promotional content include peer reviews, natural search results, and brand Web sites, while display advertising and push text messages are the least trusted. (MediaPost)
  18. Over 50% of marketers that curate content indicate that it has increased their brand visibility, thought leadership, SEO, web traffic and buyer engagement. (Curata)
  19. 41% of marketers that curate content indicate that it has increased the number and/or quality of their sales-ready leads. (Curata)
  20. Most useful forms of content when making online B2B purchases are technical brochures / specification sheets (cited by 61% of buyers), followed by instruction manuals / how-to documents (46%), videos (38%) and case studies (31%). Less than a third said webinars, while a quarter value infographics and social media activity. (V3B Blog)
  21. 29% of leading marketers systematically reuse and re-purpose content. (Curata)
  22. Brands that use shortened URLs with a “vanity domain” experience an average increased click volume of 25% compared to long URLs or generic URL shorteners. (Social Media Today)
  23. Content shared on Thursdays has the longest “link lifespan” (people still clicking on those links several days later). (Social Media Today)
  24. Marketers’ top investment areas across the content marketing space: Curation & Aggregation (38%); Creation (34%); Workflow (29%). (Altimeter)
  25. Top 5 content marketing metrics: Web Traffic/Visits (63%); Views/Downloads (59%); Lead Quantity (42%); Lead Quality (39%); Social Media Sharing (36%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
  26. Metrics for B2B content marketing success: Sales Lead Quality (87%); Sales (84%); High Conversion Rates (82%); Sales Lead Quantity (71%); Website Traffic (71%); Brand Lift (69%); SEO Ranking (87%) (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Do these statistics help you spot the signs of success or failure to content marketing for your company? Do you need help getting on the right track with your organization’s content marketing?

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