Study: 49% of Content Marketers Aim to Drive Brand Awareness

According to the “Content Marketing Survey 2016” from Clutch, content marketers are developing content with a number of objectives in mind, but brand awareness leads the way.

Nearly half (49 percent) of content marketers say brand awareness is the main goal of content marketing strategies. Other goals include higher visibility in search engines (30 percent) and lead generation (21 percent).

The study also revealed that research and original data, infographics, and product reviews perform best for the company.

When sharing metrics of success, 32 percent of respondents focus on sales metrics (the number of people who become a customer), 29 percent focus on lead generation metrics (the number of people who provide personal information), and 29 percent focus on consumption metrics (the number of people consuming your content).

According to researchers, “Metrics should tell a story about whether you achieved your goal…before creating content, you need to define what return-on-investment (ROI) means for that specific piece.”

In order to boost success in terms of shares and links, promotion is key. The Clutch survey found content marketers are taking advantage of paid advertisements (71 percent), organic social media (70 percent) and traditional marketing channels (69 percent) to amplify content marketing efforts.

The surveyors note “it’s important to prioritize paid forms of content distribution over organic efforts. In fact, we found that the majority of enterprise content marketers surveyed believe paid advertisements are more effective than organic approaches to content distribution.”

62% of B2B Marketers’ Content Strategies Improved in the Past Year

The Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs benchmark report “B2B Content Marketing 2017: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – North America” discovered 62 percent of B2B marketers believe their current content marketing approach is more successful than one year ago.

This success is attributed to higher-quality and more efficient content creation (85 percent), developing or adjusting strategy (72 percent) and making content a greater priority within the organization (53 percent).

Fifty-two percent of respondents agree that blogs will be critical to content marketing success in 2017, in addition to email newsletters (40 percent) and social media content (40 percent).