Why Invest in Content Marketing?

Why Invest in Content Marketing?

1. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing. (source: Leaders West )
2. 60% of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it. (source: Leaders West )
3. 78% of consumers believe that companies providing content are interested in building good relationships. (source: All Twitter )
4. Blogs give websites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links. (source: PRNews )
5. 68% of people spend time reading about brands that interest them. (source: Leaders West )
6. 61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that delivers custom content, and they are also more likely to buy from the company. (source: All Twitter )
7. B2B buyers say that 70% of the content they read and study before making a purchase decision is actually found on their own through research. (source: Forrester )
8. Organic search leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound marketing leads have a 1.7% close rate. (source: PRNews )
9. Per dollar spent, content marketing generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing. (source: Leaders West )

What Content Marketing Strategies Work?

1. Marketers use an average of 12 content marketing tactics. (source: Content Marketing Institute )
2. 37% visit content marketing websites at least once a month. (source: The CMA )
3. Marketers use an average of 4 social media sites to distribute content, whereas B2B marketers use an average of 5. (source: Content Marketing Institute )
4. 84% of Marketers are relying on social media to drive their content marketing. (source: Social Media Today )

What’s the Typical Budget for Content Marketing?

1. Companies with fewer than 10 employees typically allocate 42% of their marketing budget to content. (source: Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs )
2. Companies with over 1,000 employees typically allocate 24% of their marketing budget to content. (source: Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs )
3. The average, annual spend on branded content outsourcing was $371,364, and $987,417 for companies that exclusively outsource. (source: Custom Content Council )
4. Businesses that spend more than 50% of their lead generation budget on inbound marketing report a significantly lower cost-per-lead. (source: Hubspot )
5. Nearly 50% of marketers plan to increase their inbound budgets for 2013. (source: Hubspot )

Measuring the Success of Content Marketing

1. Content marketers use unique visitors (88%), pageviews per visitor (76%) and total pageviews (71%) as their main metrics. (source: Econsultancy and Outbrain )
2. 52% of content marketers rely on content marketing to engage new customers and prospects. (source: Social Media Today )
3. 60% of marketers use web traffic to measure effectiveness of content marketing. (source: Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs )
4. 88% of marketers are measuring unique visitors as their main metric to understand how their audience is consuming and sharing their content. (source: Bit Rebels )

10 reasons companies are investing more in content marketing this year

1. Google demands content
2. Consumers avoid ads, but actively seek content.
3. Engages consumers at every stage of the buying process
4. Reduces relying on publishers. You are the publisher.
5. It is tried, tested and true
6. Makes a real difference to customer loyalty
7. Increases the lifetime value of customers
8. Is great for staff morale
9. Positions your brand as a market leader
10. Delivers a strong ROI

Source  contentmarketinginstitute