Brands have been moving from the usual “brand blog” to “brand as media company,” over the past few years, according to Contently. This in turn notes just how much content marketing has changed, even though it remains more effective than ever.
The company a new report titled Content Marketing 2016: Staffing, Measurement and Effectiveness Across the Industry, which breaks down a number of vital stats in various departments.
There are several takeaways from the report, including the following:
- 73 percent of marketers actually managed to create more content this past year than they did in 2014.
- Lead conversion (32 percent) continues to be the most popular metric for measuring content marketing success, although social shares and likes (19 percent) and page views (15 percent) were close behind.
- 49 percent of marketers feel their content is either somewhat or very effective.
- 67 percent of respondents in the poll devoted less than a quarter of overall marketing budget to content, while 63 percent devoted less than 1/10 of overall marketing budget to content marketing technology.
- 43 percent of companies have two full-time employees (and in some cases, more) handling content marketing, while 64 percent of marketers are creating 90 percent of more of their content in-house.
- Email continues to be the most effective organic distribution channel, although Facebook has done rather well when it comes to paid distribution.
- 30 percent of respondents don’t use any sort of platform or tool in terms of providing data for their content.
- When it comes to turnaround time on getting content approved and created for a brand, most of those polled indicated a quick period of around seven days, while less than one percent said that it can take as long as six months.
The biggest challenge that lies with creating content is time, with 37 percent feeling it’s a large factor in getting it done effectively. This makes sense, considering most companies want something that’s going to work right away, and sometimes it can take time to plan it out.
Other reasons included:
- Strategy (19 percent)
- Distribution (14 percent)
- Internal support (14 percent)
- Budget (13 percent)
When it comes to programs in need of tweaking to make a marketing plan more effective, 33 percent of those polled state they do it on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, 25 percent say they check on this weekly, and nine percent daily. Only three percent of those feel that such campaigns don’t require tweaking.
