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This is a compilation of two posts that originally appeared on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Blog for both B2B and B2C marketers.
Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs recently released the fifth annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America and the third annual B2C Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America reports. These reports are full of statistics and trends in content marketing, but here are some key takeaways for content marketers when it comes to building a cohesive customer journey. I've broken out the key takeaways by B2B and B2C.
Only 35% of content marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. 60% of those who have a documented strategy, though, say their content marketing is highly effective. Only 32% of those with a verbal content marketing strategy would say their content is highly effective. Take a look at other differences between companies with a well-documented content marketing strategy and those without.
The amount of content being created is growing immensely. 70% of marketers are creating more content than last year.
With this growth, it is more important than ever to create content that breaks through the clutter and stands out. Look for new ways to engage your audience with your content.
42% of content marketers say they publish new content daily or multiple times per week. 31% of "effective marketers," though, publish new content multiple times per week and 32% of marketers with a documented content marketing strategy publish new content multiple times per week.
While effective content marketers are obviously producing a large amount of new content, something can still be said for producing high-quality content. You can't just be a content factory. Creating quality, engaging content with a clear objective should still take precedence over creating just another e-book.
63% of marketers rated LinkedIn as effective or very effective. Twitter and YouTube came in second and third at 55% and 48% respectively.
84% of marketers say "brand awareness" is the most important goal, and lead generation came in second at 83%.
CMI noted, though, that "customer evangelism" was new this year to the list of goals. This goes right along with Jay Baer's Youtility concept and using your content to create customer evangelists. Customer loyalty ranked sixth with 69% of marketers deeming it important.
Over 60% of marketers cite website traffic as their most important content marketing metric. Sales lead quality was second at 49%.
This is really interesting when you compare it to the chart above—organizational goals for content marketing. Organizational goals do not align very well with the top metrics content marketers are using to assess their success. Metrics that help assess brand awareness like "benchmark life of company awareness," "benchmark lift of product/service awareness," and customer renewal were all cited by fewer than 25% of B2B marketers as a metric they use to assess success. This may be one of the explanations to #7 below.
This means the majority of content marketers are not successfully tracking ROI. Only 35% of marketers with a documented content marketing strategy are even successful at tracking ROI.
I believe this solution comes with greater alignment between organizational goals and metrics used to track success. Marketers first need to be tracking the right things. Take a deeper look at your core key performance indicators and how you measure them. Implement a process to measure actionable metrics that can demonstrate cause and effect relationships.
50% have a content marketing strategy, but it is not documented. 43% of those who have a documented strategy, though, say they are successful at tracking ROI (compared to 23% of the total population surveyed). If you want to be more effective at content marketing and tracking your success, document your strategy. Take a look at other differences between companies with a well-documented content marketing strategy and those without. It's clear to see the advantage of having a documented content marketing strategy.
93% of B2C marketers use social media and 80% use eNewsletters. Marketers used 11 tactics on average for their content marketing. The biggest increase in utilization over last year was branded content tools, which grew from 37% to 47%.
What is interesting is that CMI found that B2C marketers rated all of these tactics as less effective than they did last year. B2C marketers who ranked their overall content marketing as highly effective, though, found themselves slightly more effective at each of these channels than the sample as a whole. The most effective B2C marketers found social media content to be the most effective tactic at 80%.
The average number of social media platforms used by B2C marketers is seven, compared to six last year. The biggest mover this year was Instagram, which grew by 17%.
The social channels used least often by B2C marketers were Tumblr (29%), Foursquare (28%), Vimeo (27%), Flickr (26%), Vine (21%), SlideShare (20%), StumbleUpon (20%), and SnapChat (15%).
YouTube was rated the third most effective social platform with 49% of B2C marketers rating it as effective. LinkedIn (36%) actually saw the largest decrease in effectiveness with a drop in six percentage points. This differed dramatically with the B2B marketers as LinkedIn was the most used social platform and the most effective social platform for B2B marketers.
Social ads, promoted posts, and traditional online banner ads were also all used by over 50% of B2C marketers. The average number of paid advertising channels used was four. Overall, B2C marketers used more paid methods than B2B marketers.
71% of B2C marketers use "print or other offline promotion," but only 46% of them rate is as being an effective method.
See the full list of organizational goals B2C marketers ranked below.
Just as with B2B marketers, B2C marketers' content marketing metrics rely heavily on web traffic. Sales, though, rose to the top as the second most popular metric. It is interesting to me, though, that most of the top metrics used by B2C marketers are not correlated to their top organizational goals. I think the most effective content marketers will be those that either realign objectives and metrics or start to measure metrics that lead to meeting your organizational goals.
Only 6% of B2C marketers would rate their organizations at being "very successful." I think this is a major epidemic for content marketers and marketers running content marketing programs. 43% of B2C marketers with a documented content marketing strategy, though, rate themselves as successful at tracking their ROI.
Only 36% of B2C marketers said measuring content effectiveness was a challenge last year. Finding trained content marketing professionals also saw a large jump over last year from 10% to 32% this year.
Be sure to check out the complete study from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs for all the B2C content marketing benchmarks. If you're interested to see more of the specific differences between B2C and B2B content marketing benchmarks check out the chart below.
Want to learn about best practices for SMB social media marketing? Visit salesforce.com or download the free e-book.
