If you’ve been searching for marketing ideas, you likely know about content marketing. It’s one of the best ways to attract new customers to your business. You can combine it with pay-per-click ads, and it might even be offered by the company that handles your website maintenance. In the realm of digital marketing strategies, it ranks among the top. But how can you ensure it will really work?
Every day, millions of people go online to find information. Hundreds of thousands of them are searching for details about products and services. If your website provides that information, you are much more likely to draw visitors than if it does not. So, are you ready to begin content marketing? Here are some key statistics about content marketing that you should be aware of.
1.More than 65% of marketers rely on document content strategies, something that only 11% of failing marketers use. What does this statistic tell us? It tell us that people who want effective content marketing use a strategy. The majority of marketers whose content is effective use a strategy, while the minority of ineffective content marketers use a strategy.
2.Effective content marketers distribute their content on an average of seven social medias. You might not think that social media is an important platform for a small business, but not only does a social media page give you one more interne presence that your customers can find, it also provides you a place where you can share your content, so that even more people will find it and read it.
3.Marketers with successful content campaigns spend 39% of their budget on this strategy. On the other hand, those with unsuccessful (or not as successful) campaigns, spend only about 16% of their marketing budget on content. Content marketing should get a large portion of your entire marketing budget. It should not be an afterthought, but instead, a central focus of all marketing for your business.
4.What content marketing tactics should you use for your business? Start with social media.
a.Social media is the number one tactic, with more than 85% of companies using it.
b.Articles on your website is the next most popular at 81%, followed closely by emailed newsletters, at 80%.
c.Then comes blogs, with 76%.
d.Other tactics in the 70% to 80% range include videos, case studies, and in-person events.
e.Infographics come in at 51%.
f.Ebooks are used by a whopping 34%.
g.Mobile apps come in at 28%.
h.And print newsletters at only 22%.
5.Yes, social media is popular, but what social media should you be using? For your small business, there are a few social media that are better for the type of content marketing you are going to be doing, over the kind of marketing that other industries do.
a.81% of business to business marketers use Facebook to disseminate their content marketing. T
b.YouTube may also be an effective place for your content marketing, if you are willing to make videos about procedures or your business. Video is an engaging medium and a great way to send out information to your potential customers.
c.Twitter is a good way to send out updates, especially reminders for your customers to make an appointment, or if your business is doing a special offer like a free consultation.
6.But does content marketing really work? The success for content marketing when it comes to drawing new web traffic is 63%. The quality of those leads is 54%. Improvement in SEO ranking is 44%. Inbound links, growth of subscriber list, and sales all grow with a content marketing strategy. It even helps to save on costs by 6%, and this percentage is higher if you switch your marketing efforts from ineffective channels into content marketing.
7.Where does content marketing come from? About 64% of marketers outsource the writing of their content. Finding a writer to outsource to is rarely a problem. Again, the company that builds and maintains your website may have a writer on staff or may have a freelancer that they regularly work with, who can produce valuable content for your webpage.
Outsourcing is a great way to lift the burden of creating content, which can be a serious time suck if you are not used to writing or do not know what kind of information will be interesting to consumers. Out of anything in your business that can be outsources, content writing is one of the easiest and one of the most beneficial. Finding a great writer who can consistently provide you with new, fresh content is a great way to stay on top of your campaign.
8.What challenges to content marketers have? The biggest challenge of content marketing is a lack of time. 69% of marketers report that they do not have enough time to create content. 55% say that they have difficult creating enough content to keep their campaign regularly updated. 47% say that have a difficult time finding topics that will engage their readers. Lack of budget, inability to produce varied content, or a lack of knowledge about content marketing are also cited among the most debilitating challenges.
What does all this mean for your content marketing strategy? It means that content marketing is an effective way to find new customers for your business, but only if you allocate the budget towards it and have enough time and ideas to implement it effectively. If you have the budget, but not the time and kill, outsourcing is always an option.