In early 2019, we reached out to thousands of marketing decision makers, to gather their opinions and understand their experiences of and challenges with content marketing, for our third annual State of Content Marketing survey. Here are those findings – they make for interesting reading...
Before we dive straight into the detail it’s worth reminding ourselves of last year’s major takeaways – one of the biggest was execution.
Many knew they should be doing content marketing but were not seeing the results they expected from it, which was understandably frustrating for everyone involved. This roadblock created a bit of a standstill for many of the marketers we surveyed.
But in 2019, 96% of our marketing decision makers say content marketing is effective for their brand.
This has risen by a third in the last 12 months, which is huge! There has obviously been a lot of learning in the past year to see such an increase in effective execution.
In the 2018 results, we found that marketers needed ‘confidence in content’ – many people were unsure about how to correctly execute and measure their campaigns. The 2019 effectiveness stat, below, shows that confidence is growing.
It appears that integration has improved too – 89% of our marketers agreed their marketing was linked to other parts of the business, compared to only 45% in 2018. This growing awareness that marketing activity needs to be tied to wider business goals is positive in many ways – it leads to better knowledge from decision makers, purse string holders and those executing the plans. It is clear a more integrated campaign can lead to stronger results and proven ROI.
Just like effectiveness, and integration, marketing knowledge is consistently growing year on year – with a third of surveyed marketers telling us they are ‘definitely clear’ on the best way to run a content marketing campaign.
This has improved by 10% on 2018’s results, showing a rapid level of education within the industry, although there is clearly still some way to go to complete understanding of the practice.
Increased knowledge on execution will reap better results. And with this comes bigger investment...
We asked what percentage of the marketing budget is solely focused on content marketing – and a monumental 78% increase on last year’s average of 23%, means now 41% is spent on content marketing! Almost half!
And almost two thirds (61%) of our marketers expect this to rise next year too. This higher awareness of content marketing is causing more money to be spent, therefore more reason to learn and execute in the ‘best way’ with those all important purse-holders needing justification on spend.
