What does the recent report “B2C Content Marketing: 2014 benchmarks, budgets and trends – North America” tell us about U.S. marketing specialists? Here are the most important conclusions:
– 90% of them use content marketing at work (last year the rate was 86%), but less than half of them have a documented operations strategy
– they love using social networking media (platforms other than blogs; 88%), online articles and newsletters. The least popular are games (17%)
– they like social media even more eagerly than last year. They started to use more frequently practically all portals. The most popular one is business-related LinkedIn (a leap from 51% to 71%), but Facebook and Twitter are also on top of the list (both over 80%)
– 60% plan to devote even more of the budget to content marketing than so far in the coming year
– 72% admit they produce more content than last year (the fact most often declared by most effective marketers and those with documented strategy). Outsourcing is the tool that helps them do so. Especially in large companies creating content (most often writing) is commissioned to external agencies
– their major problem is the lack of time. Apparently, they managed to deal with too lower budgets and not enough content provided, which was the greatest challenge last year
– how do they measure the success of their work? They measure website traffic (79%) and shares on social media websites
– what do they use content marketing for? Most often they want to increase awareness of the brand, previously they pointed to customers’ behavior/loyalty. For the most efficient marketers engagement is the most important factor (73%).