Marketers are using blogs more and more as a channel to acquire new customers, increase brand awareness and earn a variety of other marketing returns. Yet, according to a recent Social Media Marketing Report, sixty-two percent of marketers want to know more about blogging and at the same time sixty-six percent plan on increasing blogging activities. In fact, blogging was the top channel that respondents in the social media marketing report want to know more about. This overlap of inexperience and increase in focus means that marketers need to get up to speed on blogging fast.
Blogging Important to B2B & B2C
While blogging is more important to B2B marketers, it remains the second most important social media marketing channel for B2C marketers. Eleven percent of B2C marketing focus is spent on blogging, which is more than even Twitter, Youtube and Google Plus.
With longer and more in-depth sales cycles on average, it is no surprise that more effort is spent on blogging in B2B marketing. While blogging ranks third in social media marketing channel focus in the B2B, almost twice as much focus (19%) is spent on B2B blogging efforts compared to B2C blogging. This is still more focus than is spent on popular social networks such as Twitter and Google Plus.
Blogging Increases with Marketing Experience
There was a clear difference in blogging efforts between different levels of marketing experience. Marketers with over five years of social media experience blogged at a rate sixty-six percent higher than marketers with less than one year of experience. Of all marketing channels, blogging showed the highest upward mobility with marketing experience.
Most Blogs are Not Mobile-Friendly
Companies that blog have no excuse to ignore mobile, considering how much online traffic comes from mobile devices. Yet only twenty-eight percent of the respondents have blogs that are optimized for mobile devices. What’s possibly more scary is that almost forty percent of the respondents were unsure how to answer that question! Clearly social media marketers have a long way to go when optimizing for mobile. Perhaps this is because mobile has mostly been taken for granted since social network content is naturally optimized for mobile.
Marketers are Outsourcing Content Creation
Many marketers are outsourcing blog content as content creation is the second most outsourced task among the survey respondents. Marketing leaders must make sure that vendors understand the business, do the right research and work with consistency & dependability when developing blog content.
Blogging has clearly become an integral part of the digital marketing mix, so expect to see more blogging efforts arise as marketers become more experienced in the social media field.