Content marketing is all the rage these days, right? It’s the shiny new object everyone thinks is the bomb yet the practice has been around for decades in various different iterations. Well we aren’t going to quibble over the fact most every “new thing” in marketing is simply a re-invention of something else. Nope, we’re just going to hop right on the bandwagon with the rest of the lemmings and hype this thing until the next shiny new object appears.
So content marketing. Demand Metric has put together a fact-filled infographic with information from multiple sources on how content marketing has shaped up over the course of its short life.
Currently 90% of organizations market with content and spend 25% or their marketing budget to do so. Seventy eight percent of CMOs see content marketing as the wave of the future. While 91% of B2B companies and 86% of B2C marketers engage in content marketing, 62% outsource their content marketing to others.
Per dollar spent, content marketing generates about 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing and it costs 62% less.
Does it work? It would seem so. Eighty percent of people say they enjoy learning about a company through custom content, 90% find it useful and 60% seek out a product or brand after having read about it. And, 70% prefer to learn about a company through an article as opposed to an ad.
Done well, content marketing or the more complete approach of inbound marketing can, indeed, produce results. It’s why companies like Pardot, HubSpot and Marketo have experience such dramatic growth.
Of course, not all content marketing is done well. In fact, just today, writing in Digiday, Jack Marshall highlights the many problems facing content marketing including cheesy lead generation schemes, poor content and companies like Taboola Marshall claims distributes content that’s “not necessarily the type of content readers expect to arrive at when they click a link on Time.com that’s titled ‘You might also like,’ and makes no indication that the placement is a paid one.”
But, hey, there’s always bad with the good right? There are always few who will always game the system or automate it in a fashion that ruins its true intent. So it’s incumbent upon marketers to make the right choices when they decide with whom to spend their content marketing dollars. It’s not so easy when there are so many reflections bouncing off the shiny new object but over time marketers’ eyes will adjust (one hopes) and the right decisions will be made.
