As a marketer and an engineer, I always want to ensure that my opinions, strategic insights and tactical activities are well supported by data. With this in mind, I’d like to share with you the content marketing related research and data points that we at Curata look to on a regular basis.

We’ll keep this post updated regularly, so do send me a note if you come across some great research that should be in here. Feel free to share these stats with your twitter followers by clicking the tweet button to the left of the stat.

Start by clicking on a category below or scroll down to begin the learning!

Definition of Content Marketing:

• Curata: Content marketing is the process for developing, executing and delivering the content and related assets that are needed to create, nurture and grow a company’s customer base. Stages of the content marketing process include: strategy; content development; asset development; and channel leverage across outbound marketing, inbound marketing and sales enablement.
• IDC: Content marketing is any marketing technique whereby media and published information (content) are used to influence buyer behavior and stimulate action leading to commercial relationships. Optimally executed content marketing delivers useful, relevant information assets that buyers consider a beneficial service rather than an interruption or a “pitch.”
• Altimeter- Eight primary content marketing use cases:
  • Feed the Beast: Creation; Curation and Aggregation
  • Refine: Optimization; Analytics; Audience & Targeting; Distribution
  • Govern: Workflow; Legal and Compliance
• Content Marketing Institute: Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
• Forrester: Content Marketing is a marketing strategy where brands create interest, relevance and relationships with customers by producing, curating and sharing content that addresses specific customer needs and delivers visible value.

Content Marketing Strategy

70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy. (Altimeter)

CMOs at the largest technology companies report that building out content marketing as an organizational competency is the 2nd most important initiative, only behind measuring ROI. (IDC)

Strategy Documentation:

83% of B2B marketers have a content marketing strategy. (35% documented, 48% not documented) (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)



72% of marketers have a content strategy in place (30% documented; 42% non-documented) (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



Top 3 things that make content effective: Audience Relevance (58%); Engaging and Compelling Storytelling (57%); Triggers a Response/Action (54%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Content Segmentation:

Content segmentation: By Product/Service Category (53%); By Buyer Persona (40%); By Vertical (35%); By Stage in Buying Cycle (32%); By Pain Point (28%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



48% of marketers support 3 to 5 buying stages with dedicated content. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



52% of marketers support 2 to 4 roles and buyer personas with dedicated content. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



The top 3 drivers of blog content strategy include: personas, audience demographics and buying stage. (Curata)

Buyer Insight:

75% of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchasing decisions than they did a year ago. (DemandGen Report)



Type of content used in the past 12 months to research B2B purchasing decisions: White Papers (78%); Case Studies (73%); Webinars (67%); eBooks (58%); Videos (58%); Blog Posts (56%); Infographics (52%). (DemandGen Report)



Where do you go to begin the process of researching a B2B purchasing decision? (in order by rank) (#1) General Web Research; (#2) Directly on vendor web sites. (DemandGen Report)



Business buyers share the following content types with colleagues: (results for a response of “frequently”) Blog Posts (40%); Infographics (39%); Videos (37%); White Papers (34%); Case Studies (29%); eBooks (29%); Webinars (27%); (DemandGen Report)



56% of B2B buyers “frequently” use mobile phones to access business-related content. (DemandGen Report)



2/3rds of B2B buyers (66%) strongly agree that B2B vendors should stop overloading content with copy/small print to improve the quality of their content. (DemandGen Report)



68% of B2B buyers strongly agree that B2B vendors should curb the sales messages to improve the quality of their content. (DemandGen Report)

Budget:

86% of B2B marketers in North America use content marketing. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)



71% of marketers are increasing investment in content marketing. (Curata)



Percent of B2B marketing budget (not including staff) spent on content marketing: Unsure (23% of respondents); 0% (3%); 1-9% (25%); 10-24% (19%); 25-49% (14%) Average = 28%. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)



Over 2/3rds of companies report that their video content budget is increasing. (53% “slightly” and 16% “significantly”). (DemandMetric)



55% of B2B marketers indicate that they will increase their content marketing spending in the next 12 months. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)



64% of companies with a documented content strategy have a dedicated content marketing budget (vs. 14% of companies without a documented content strategy have a dedicated content marketing budget). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



18% of companies allocate 10% of their budget (excluding headcount) to content marketing (majority of responses from 0 to 30%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



53% of marketers allocate between 1 and 30% of marketing budget to marketing technology (25% between 1 and 10%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



Marketers’ top investment areas across the content marketing space: Curation & Aggregation (38%); Creation (34%); Workflow (29%). (Altimeter)



By what percent will marketers increase their future use of content activities?: Original Written Content (81%); Original Videos (73%); Original Visual Assets (70%); Curation of Other People’s Content (46%); Original Audio Content (33%). (Social Media Examiner)

Size of Content Marketing Market:

The marketing software market is expected to grow to more than $32.3 billion in 2018. It will be one of the fastest-growing areas in high tech, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4%. (IDC)

Content Marketing Growth:

77% of marketers will increase content production in the next 12 months (end of 2014 into 2015). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



56% of leading business bloggers are hiring additional resources in the next 12 months. (Curata)

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Content Marketing Priorities and Challenges

Top 3 content marketing objectives: Drive Sales and/or Leads; Engage Customers/Buyers/Influencers; Boost Brand Awareness. (Curata)

Top 5 B2B content marketing challenges: Producing Engaging Content (54%); Producing Content Consistently (50%); Measuring Content Effectiveness (49%); Producing a Variety of Content (42%); Lack of Budget (41%). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Top 5 content marketing challenges: Lack of Time/Bandwidth to Create Content (51%); Producing Enough Content Variety/Volume (50%); Producing Truly Engaging Content (42%); Measuring Content Effectiveness (38%); Developing Consistent Content Strategy (34%), (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Top 3 goals of content marketing: Lead Generation (59%); Thought Leadership/Market Education (43%); Brand Awareness (40%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

The top 5 most challenging obstacles to social media marketing success: Lack of In-House Resources/Skills (43%); Inability to Measure ROI (42%); Lack of an Effective Strategy (39%); Lack of Compelling Content (34%); Lack of Integration Across Marketing (31%) (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Business bloggers’ greatest priority is creating a strategy, followed by the need to measure impact of the blog on their organization’s success. (Curata)

Marketers’ top needs from a content marketing perspective: Audience Identification & Targeting .(67%); Analytics (67%); Creation (60%); Distribution (53%); Curation & Aggregation (48%) (Altimeter)

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Organizational Structure (“People”)

43% of companies have an executive in their organization who is directly responsible for an overall content marketing strategy. (Curata)

Top 4 areas responsible for setting content strategy: Corporate Marketing (54%); Product Marketing (25%); CEO/President/Owner (21%); PR/Communications (19%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Resource used to perform social media marketing: In-House Resources only (47%); Outsourced and In-House Resources (44%); Outsourced to an Agency or Specialist (9%). (Oracle/LookBookHQ)

Top 5 areas responsible for creating content: Corporate Marketing (53%); Product Marketing (39%); Subject Matter Experts (36%); PR/Communications (32%); External Agency/Consultant (30%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

47% of marketers have a dedicated content marketing group. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Which area in your organization is accountable for content marketing? Owner/C-Level (23%); Product Marketing (19%); Demand Gen Marketing (18%); PR/Corporate Communications (15%). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

71% of business bloggers have some type of center of excellence team. (i.e., a team that provides a blogging code of conduct, audience engagement guidelines, best practices and guidance to help internal teams execute their own blogging activities). (Curata)

72% of B2B marketers surveyed by Forrester say less than half of their marketing staff plays a primary role in content marketing today. (Forrester)

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Content Marketing Tactics

Type of Content:

The target content marketing mix by superstar content marketers is 65% created, 25% curated and <10% syndicated content. (Curata)



Top 5 B2B content marketing tactics: Social Media Content (92%); eNewletters (83%); Articles on your Web Site (81%); Blogs (80%); In-Person Events (77%). (IMN Inc.)



36% of large companies ($500M+ revenue) are producing more than 100 marketing videos annually, versus 5% for medium companies ($25M to $500M revenue) and 4% for small companies (<=$25M revenue) that are producing videos at this same pace. (DemandMetric)



95% of companies report that video is becoming “somewhat” or “far more” important as a form of marketing and sales content. (DemandMetric)



Top 3 content marketing tactics: Blogging (65%); Social Media (64%); Case Studies (64%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Publishing Frequency of Content:

B2B marketers publish new content: Daily (16%); Multiple Times per Week (26%); Weekly (17%); Multiple Times per Month (19%). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)



38% of marketers publish content weekly or more often. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



42% of Eloqua Community marketers produce at least one piece of content per week. (not including blog posts). (Oracle/LookBookHQ)



91% of the best business bloggers publish weekly or more often, while only 70% of all other bloggers post at this frequency. (Curata)



54% of all bloggers are publishing at least weekly. (Orbit Media)

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Content Creation (including outsourcing and curation)

Current mix of created content by content marketers: 58.4% of content is created by dedicated, internal staff; 24.3% of content is crowd-sourced internally; 17.2% of content is created by outsourced staff. (Curata)

70% of B2B marketers are creating more content this year versus last year. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

27.1% of bloggers use someone in addition to themselves to review their work – i.e., another person or a formal editing process. (Orbit Media)

On average, 18% of companies’ blog posts are 750 words or more. (Curata)

44.5% of bloggers typically use more than one image in their posts.(Orbit Media)

What types of content do marketers use in their social media marketing? Original Written Content (94%); Curation of Other People’s Content (73%); Original Visual Assets (60%); Original Videos (60%). (Social Media Examiner)

The most important content for marketers is (only one choice allowed): Original Written Content (58%); Original Visual Assets (19%); Original Videos (12%); Curation of Other People’s Content (10%); Original Audio Content (2%). (Social Media Examiner)

Content Curation

82% of marketers curate content. (IMN Inc.)



16% of marketers are curating for their audience every day, 48% are curating from third party sources at least once a week. (Curata)



83.3% of marketers curate/share content from 3rd party sources (e.g., blogs, social media, industry publications or news sites) with their customers and/or prospects. (Curata)



Over 50% of marketers that curate content indicate that it has increased their brand visibility, thought leadership, SEO, web traffic and buyer engagement. (Curata)



41% of marketers that curate content indicate that it has increased the number and/or quality of their sales-ready leads. (Curata)

Outsourcing

25% of marketers don’t outsource any content creation. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



About 2/3rds of marketers outsource less than 1/3^rd of their content creation (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



The top 2 most outsourced content marketing activities: Writing (44%); Design (41%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



Business bloggers outsource 14% of their blog posts. The best practitioners outsource 24%. (Curata)



57% of business bloggers’ outsourced blog posts originate from non-paid contributed or guest posts. (Curata)

Content Reuse

59% of Eloqua Community marketers repurpose the average content asset 2 to 5 times. (Oracle/LookBookHQ)

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Content Distribution

B2B content marketing social media platform usage: LinkedIn (94%); Twitter (88%); Facebook (84%); YouTube (72%); Google+ (64%); SlideShare (41%)(Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

The top 5 most effective social media platforms to deliver content and engage audiences: LinkedIn (82% effective); Twitter (66% effective); YouTube (64% effective); Facebook (41% effective); SlideShare (38% effective). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

The #1 most challenging obstacle to data-driven marketing success according to marketers: Lack of Data Quality/Completeness (56%). (Act-On)

Top 3 paid advertising methods used by B2B marketers to promote/distribute content: Search Engine Marketing (58%); Print or Other Offline Promotion (52%); Traditional Online Banner Ads (49%) (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Top 3 marketing budget areas that will increase in 2015: Mobile (76% of participants); Content Marketing (70%); Display Ads (64%). (Act-On)

Top 4 digital marketing technologies that are most useful for data-driven marketing: CRM Software; Marketing Automation Suite; Email Marketing Software; Marketing Analytics Software. [Curata comment: Content marketers, get friendly with your marketing operations team.] (Act-On)

21% of all business bloggers send posts through a newsletter to their subscriber base at least weekly: 39% of best practitioners do this weekly. (Curata)

Top 3 ways that bloggers are driving traffic to their posts: Social Media Marketing (94%); Search Engine Optimization (50.8%); Email Marketing (34.5%). (Orbit Media)

Have marketers integrated their social media and traditional marketing activities? Strongly Agree (27%); Agree (54%); Uncertain (10%); Disagree (7%); Strongly Disagree (2%). (Social Media Examiner)

Weekly time commitment for social media marketing (hours): 0 (2%); 1 to 5 (34%); 6 to 10 (27%); 11 to 15 (11%); 16 to 20 (9%); 20+ (19%). (Social Media Examiner)

84%+ of marketers found that increased traffic occurred with as little as 6 hours per week invested in social media marketing. (Social Media Examiner)

How will marketers change their future social media activities? % of marketers increasing: Blogging (68%); YouTube (67%); Twitter (67%); LinkedIn (64%); Facebook (64%). (Social Media Examiner)

Which form of paid social media are marketers regularly using? Facebook ads (90%); LinkedIn Ads (20%); Twitter Ads (17%); YouTube Ads (11%); Promoted Blog Posts (10%). (Social Media Examiner)

LinkedIn generates more leads for B2B companies than Facebook, Twitter or blogs individually. [Inside View]

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Content Marketing Impact

38% of B2B marketers rate the effectiveness of their organization’s use of content marketing as “effective” or “very effective”. CMI and MarketingProfs define effectiveness as “accomplishing your overall objectives.” (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

36% of companies with a documented content strategy indicate that their content marketing is “very effective” or “extremely effective.” (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

52% of companies indicate that video converts “somewhat better” than other content types, while 19% indicate “much better”. (DemandMetric)

77% of all companies rate their social media marketing successful to some extent at achieving the most important objectives set for it. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

51% of marketers told Forrester their content marketing efforts are only somewhat effective. (Forrester)

The greatest impact that today’s business bloggers have on their organization are: thought leadership, SEO and brand visibility and buzz. (Curata)

55% of business bloggers are getting 5% or more of their corporate web site’s traffic from their blog. (Curata)

87% of B2B marketers surveyed by Forrester say they struggle to produce content that truly engages their buyers. (Forrester)

How effective have B2B marketers’ content marketing efforts been at delivering business value? Very Effectively (14%); Somewhat Effectively (51%); Neutral (27%); Somewhat Ineffectively (6%); Not effectively at all (1%). (Forrester)

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Content Marketing Metrics

Top Content Marketing Metrics

Top 5 content marketing metrics: Web Traffic/Visits (63%); Views/Downloads (59%); Lead Quantity (42%); Lead Quality (39%); Social Media Sharing (36%). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



Metrics for B2B content marketing success: Website Traffic (63%); Sales Lead Quality (49%); High Conversion Rates (48%); Sales (43%); Sales Lead Quality (40%); SEO Ranking (39%); Time Spent on Website (39%) (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)



Content marketing metrics routinely tracking by organizations: Views (55%); Leads (48%); Likes, +1’s, Tweets, Shares (45%); Downloads (41%); Conversion Rate (40%) n=484. (MarketingSherpa)



The top 3 metrics used by business bloggers today include: page views, shares or likes, and time spent on site. The best practitioners are leading the charge to identify their blog’s impact on the sales pipeline. (Curata)

Content Marketing Measurement Success

Only 21% of B2B marketers indicate that they are successful at tracking ROI of their content marketing programs. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)



8% of marketers consider themselves “very successful” or “extremely successful” at tracking content marketing ROI. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)



49% of bloggers do not typically check analytics. (business bloggers, service providers and “hobby” bloggers) (Orbit Media)

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Content Marketing Technology

56% of marketers are using content marketing specific software to manage their content workflow and distribution. (Curata)

100+ content marketing vendors have been placed in 15+ categories in this Content Marketing Tools Map.

How satisfied are you with the variety and quality of tools available for you to measure content marketing? Very Satisfied (5%); Satisfied (18%); Neutral (65%); Dissatisfied (10%); Very Dissatisfied (2%) n=403. (MarketingSherpa)

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Vertical-Specific Data

Automotive Industry

46% of auto marketers have a formal content marketing program in place, compared to 33% of overall respondents. (IMN Inc.)



Almost 70% allot less than 10% of their marketing budgets to content marketing efforts (versus 38% overall). 25% acknowledge that they don’t set aside enough budget to those efforts. (IMN Inc.)

Banking and Financial Services

45% report that content marketing efforts are done on an ad-hoc basis, compared with 30% of overall respondents. (IMN Inc.)



50% of banking and financial services marketers have not even thought about using content across channels, versus 7% of overall respondents. (IMN Inc.)



55% of banking and financial services marketers allocate less than 10% of their marketing budgets to content marketing efforts, but 45% say they would increase budgets if funds were available. (IMN Inc.)



91% of banking and financial services marketers curate content, compared to 82% overall. (IMN Inc.)



More than half of bankign and financial services marketers worry about trademark, copyright and citation issues. (IMN Inc.)

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