Content marketing is the marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant, and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action.
How important is content marketing to profitably running a business?
The marketing decisions any company on the internet has to make is how to invest between “owned,” (a website, video, CRM system), “earned,” (communications that commented, liked and/or shared) and “paid” (ads – search, display, banner, native) properties. Anything a company can do is going to fit in one of these areas.
What sort of return should your company expect from content marketing investments in these areas? Here are 30 hard facts about the content marketing to drive ROI.
OWNED
- 93% of B2B marketers report to using content marketing in their marketing mix (source: Custom Content Council)
- 90% of consumers find custom content useful and 78% believe that organizations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships with them. (Inbound Writer)
- 86% of B2C marketers include content marketing in their marketing mix (source: Content Marketing Institute)
- 81% create content for social media (source: Custom Content Council)
- 73% of B2B organizations have a person dedicated to overseeing content marketing strategy (source: Content Marketing Institute)
- 61% of consumers say they feel better about, and are more likely to buy from, a company that delivers custom content. (Custom Content Council)
- 58% of B2B marketers are planning to increase their budgets on content marketing in the next 12 months (source: Content Marketing Institute)
- 55% of B2B marketers are planning to increase their budgets on content marketing in the next year (source: Custom Content Marketing Institute)
- 40-40% are expecting to increase their output for web updates, SEO content and social content next year (source: Custom Content Council)
- 30% of B2B budgets are currently allocated to content marketing (source: Custom Content Council)
- 28% of B2C budgets are currently allocated to content marketing (source: Custom Content Council)
- 43.9 billion was spent on custom content spending on production and distribution last year (up 9.2% versus the previous year) (source: Custom Content Council)
EARNED
- 97% of websites with blogs see more indexed pages on search engines (source: Content+)
- 82% of consumers trust a company more when the CEO/leadership team are active social media users (source: TopRank)
- 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI for their inbound marketing (source: HubSpot)
- 70% of people want to learn about product through content rather than traditional advertising (source: Business Intelligence)
- 67% more leads per month on average are generated by B2B companies that blog than non-blogging firms (Social Media B2B)
- 50% of buying decisions are made because of word of mouth (source: Content+)
- Roughly 50% of marketers struggle with producing enough content, and producing content that engages (source: Content Marketing Institute)
- 23% of all time online is spent on social media and blogs (source: Content Marketing Institute)
- 10-20% of website content drives 90% of it’s web traffic; 0.5% of that content drives over 50% of traffic (source: Inbound Writer)
- 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day (AOL)
- Top 3 reasons people follow brands on social media are interesting content (Content+)
- Blogs give websites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links (Content+)
PAID
- 79% of marketers report that their organizations are shifting to branded content (source: Forrester)
- 77% of business buyers prefer different content at various stages of the product research process (source: SalesForce)
- 72% of Marketers think that branded content is more effective than magazine advertisements (source: Content Council)
- 69% say it’s superior to direct mail and PR (source: Content Council)
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads (source: Business Marketing Insider)
- 62% of companies outsource their content marketing. (Mashable)
- three content marketing tactics that deliver the highest ROI are featured articles (cited by 62% of marketers), video (52%) and white papers (46%) (source: eMarketer)
To understand the anatomy of content marketing, below is an infographic from Content+.
Do these facts convince you content marketing could change your ROI?
