If you like stats and you want to see what they tell you about content marketing, here’s where you can find a ton of them.
As for today, we’re going to focus on three of those statistics, because they tell you a lot about the current relationship between the business community and content marketing:
- 60 percent of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it (source).
- Content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads (source).
- 92 percent of content marketers say their organization views content as a business asset (source).
The first two explain the third pretty well. If more than half the people who read about a product are inspired to seek it out – and it costs less to write about the product than it does to take the traditional marketing route – of course marketing content is an asset.
The question is: Why isn’t every company in America producing and publishing its own content empire?
If you look at the infographic we posted on LinkedIn yesterday, you’ll know that things are actually moving in that direction. The cost/benefit ratio is simply too favorable to prevent content marketing from growing.
But in spite of these trends, I think content marketing is still more of a niche marketing genre as opposed to an established mainstream one. Here’s what has to happen in order to change that in the coming years:
- Corporate CMOs have to recognize that editorial management is achievable with the right strategic partner. No company wants to start a newsletter or a blog and have it turn out to be inconsistent and amateurish. Some may have had that very experience and are reluctant to give it another shot. A professional editorial management team can turn that around.
- More writers need to emerge who understand that effective marketing content is more than formulaic corporate-speak. You may think it’s compelling to say you’re a “leading provider of impactful solutions leading to optimized outcomes,” but someone who understands how to command an audience needs to tell you otherwise.
- Marketers need to understand the difference between marketing content and PR content. You’re not writing to sell a story to an editor. You’re writing directly to the audience you hope will buy your product and tell others to do the same. That is not the same thing at all.
- Corporate executives need to understand something about readers. It’s not true that people don’t like to read because they have short attention spans. They don’t like to read uninteresting copy like the woebegone sentence quoted above. Write well and offer insight that helps people, and they’ll read it.
Content is an excellent marketing asset if you know how to do it right, stay committed to it and have the nerve to really tell your story. That’s why 92 percent of marketers recognize its value.
The only question now is: What will it take to get you doing it?