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Having an efficient content marketing strategy in place is essential when it comes to raising brand awareness, generating more revenue, and persuading customers to take action.
However, with content trends and tactics changing every so often, keeping up the pace with your competitors and staying on top of these updates can be overwhelming.
But that’s where our research comes in.
Over the past 3 years, we interviewed hundreds of marketers to get answers to some of the most common content marketing pain points, such as:
And so much more…
As a result, we gathered 30 content marketing statistics that will help you establish benchmarks, understand industry trends better, and improve your own content strategy.
For easier navigation, we divided the data into 4 groups:
Let’s dive in.
When devising a content marketing strategy, making that first step tends to be the most difficult.
Here are some of the most important content marketing facts that industry leaders believe could kick-start your journey.
Producing new content ideas is often very frustrating.
But, what can be even more frustrating is when everyone in your company thinks this should be the responsibility of one person.
About 30% of the companies we surveyed think that new content ideas are everyone’s responsibility. Also, more than 50% of those companies come up with new content ideas at least once a week.
PRO TIP: One of the ways to come up with new content ideas is to spot insights and trending topics on social media. But, instead of focusing on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram, check out Reddit. The fastest way to find subreddits is to search for your topic here.
As SEO and content marketing strategies constantly evolve, so do the methods of coming up with new content ideas that will capture your audience’s attention.
According to our survey, the most popular way to find new content ideas is keyword analysis.
Other answers included internal team ideas, customer interviews, and competitive SEO analysis.
To optimize your website’s content for conversion, you probably use Google Analytics 4 to learn how many people are interacting with your site, which pages brought them to the site in the first place, which pages they engage with the most, and more.
You may have to navigate multiple areas and reports within Google Analytics to get the data you want though. Now you can quickly assess your content performance in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:
And more…
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics 4 experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important metrics for measuring your website content marketing performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics 4 account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
The vast majority of the surveyed companies wish that more of their employees were able to or wanted to make content. The biggest obstacle to achieving this is the lack of time.
PRO TIP: Be aware that not everyone in your company is going to feel comfortable creating content. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have something valuable worth sharing. As a content marketer, you can amplify their voices and share their perspective by interviewing them and writing the article yourself. Here’s how our brand and culture manager does it.
Over 60% of companies employ between 1 and 3 content marketers on their content teams.
At the same time, teams of over 10 marketers turned out to be the least common.
PRO TIP: If you have just started building your content team, a critical role to hire for is a managing editor. This person will act as a content team lead and ensure all of the content you produce meets your brand style and quality guidelines.
The most common content-related responsibility that gets outsourced is writing.
The runner-ups were promotion/distribution, SEO, and CRO.
PRO TIP: When hiring writers, look for someone who knows how to tell a good story and covers a topic in depth. Unlike marketing tactics, critical thinking and professional writing skills cannot be taught as easily and in a short time span.
Ironically, when writing content, marketers won’t spend most of their time on the actual writing process.
Instead, most of the writing time is spent on researching. Also, 80% of the surveyed companies stated they write for people (and not for search engines).
PRO TIP: Focus on writing compelling copy that gets your message across clearly. You can always optimize later. If you try to write for SEO first, it’s very difficult to reverse-engineer that into something people would find useful or engaging.
Attracting new visitors is the main reason more than 50% of marketers write content.
Oppositely, 47% of correspondents stated that they write content to nurture and educate leads and prospects.
PRO TIP: When determining the overall success of your content strategy, go a step further and determine which channel generates the most leads. Promote your content through multiple channels (social, email, paid advertising) to discover where it has the highest impact. Track the number of qualified leads generated by having a lead capture form included with your content.
Companies agree that the content brief should include about 4-5 things, with the primary keyword being the most important part of a content brief, followed by the headline, an outline, internal links, and CTAs.
PRO TIP: An underrated component to add to your briefs is a section to describe why does an article need to be written and how will the article be different than those that already rank. Providing answers to these two questions are going to be key in helping the writer shape the narrative, and create a piece of content that will stand out from the crowd, get attention, and consequently outrank existing competitors.
Over the last few years, satisfying search intent has become one of the main ingredients of a successful SEO strategy.
The vast majority of marketers create at least some content around specific search intent and most of them optimize the content for micro-search intent.
A micro-search intent is much more specified than a basic one since it hones a piece of content to the user’s needs on a much more granular level.
By winning micro intent searches, your content will have an easier time building authority and relevance.
PRO TIP: The best way to identify search intent is to look at the top Google results: Are they how-to articles, product reviews, lists of benefits? Check out the ads that appear on the page too, as well as the “People also ask” section at the bottom of the page. Taken together, this information will give you a good idea of what the user is searching for and what piece of content you should create to satisfy it.
Our next set of content marketing data revolves around the best practices regarding content formats and blogging. Let’s check them out.
According to our content marketing facts, the most created type of content is TOFU.
In general, TOFU content does the best job at generating brand awareness and driving customer engagement.
This type of content focuses on high volume of leads, without putting pressure on potential customers.
PRO TIP: To measure the effectiveness of your TOFU content, you can use Google Analytics to track metrics such as sessions, pageviews, and the percentage of new users.
According to our contributors, social posts are the most crucial type of content in the Discovery stage; email content like newsletters works best for the Consideration stage while special offers work for the Purchase stage.
PRO TIP: The goal of the discovery stage is to attract interest from your target audience, so the content that is created and shared must be relevant to each audience’s content consumption behaviors.
According to our contributors, the average time on page for a blog post is between 2 and 5 minutes. Other research, such as Contentsquare’s 2021 Digital Experience Benchmark report, states that the average time per page across all industries is 54 seconds.
However, the same report states that the average time on page is contextual and depends on the type of website you have, the industry you’re in, and the web page you’re tracking. (Interestingly, the highest average time per page belongs to media and B2B).
PRO TIP: Adding a table of contents to your blog posts is a great way to boost engagement and increase average time on page. It gives a quick way for the user to grasp the whole content and navigate to the most relevant section for them.
With video content increasingly growing in popularity, some marketers tend to believe that blogging is dead in 2022.
But actually, blogging is more effective now than it was 2 years ago, at least for 68% of marketers we asked.
PRO TIP: If you’ve been following Databox, then you know that, unlike most companies, we not only write content for our audience, but also with our audience. Among other things, we do roundup posts where we ask experts to answer specific questions. Then, we compile the best answers into one post. More than 800+ people have contributed to our posts in the last year.
Whether it’s for analyzing their competition, finding new content ideas, or something else, marketers also read other blogs: Most companies visit more than 5 blogs a week.
PRO TIP: If you are looking for B2B blog recommendations, go check out ‘Think With Google’ which shares valuable information on the latest Google Ads products developments and success stories from big corporates and SMEs.
According to our survey, the most preferred blogging platform is WordPress.
This content marketing stat doesn’t come as much of a surprise considering that 39.5% of websites on Google are created on WordPress.
PRO TIP: With WordPress, you can upload content and optimize for search more effectively than any of the other platforms. For example, the Yoast SEO plugin tool, provides you with real-time feedback of how well your content is written.
Blog posts that are not updated for longer periods will decline in ranking as time goes by. This leads to less traffic and fewer conversions.
Most companies recognize the importance of blog updates: about 70% of our contributors have a process for blog updating.
PRO TIP: Internal links are the roadmap that guides search engines through your site. By updating older posts with links to newer posts, you’re providing a better map while simultaneously helping improve the SEO for the newer pages.
Okay, so we have gone over the process of finding ideas and talked about some of the most relevant data related to blogging.
Time to move on to the content marketing distribution and promotion stats.
Posting to social is the first thing marketers do to promote new content after publishing it.
And, this doesn’t only involve posting the content on your own profile. You need a rock-solid strategy for the post to receive the necessary traction.
PRO TIP: LinkedIn is a great resource for sharing relevant new content with people in your community, especially videos. Twitter is best for targeting associated keywords.
Facebook Groups have been voted the most-used community for promoting content.
The runner-ups were individual communities, Linkedin groups, Quora, Reddit, niche-specific forums, and lastly, Growth Hackers.
PRO TIP: So, which Facebook Groups can you use for content promotion? Check out The Content Marketing Lounge – a group for freelancers, consultants, and professionals building businesses, brands, and careers in content marketing.
Most surveyed companies ranked email and social media as their number one channel for content distribution.
PRO TIP: After publishing content, include it in your email signature and update it regularly with a tracking link. Since you probably use email every day, this is a great way to potentially bring in additional traffic for free.
Nearly 50% of the social media managers we surveyed prefer to schedule content at least a month in advance.
The least percentage of them schedule it one day ahead.
PRO TIP: Schedule your social media content by topics or themes on specific days. For example, Tuesday is reserved for Product Reviews, so post a review of your product. Thursday’s theme is Tips, so you could share a way that your product can be used.
Repurposing old content is great for enhancing your marketing efforts, without having to spend time coming up with new ideas.
Not only will you save time, but you will also reach more people and squeeze additional value out of your existing content.
In our survey, video and downloadable PDFs are the top best ways to repurpose old content.
PRO TIP: When repurposing blog content into downloadable PDFs, make gated content where users have to submit their details in order to view them. In turn, this will help you create valuable leads for your sales teams to follow up on.
Finally, let’s go over how you can measure your content performance and analyze the most important KPIs and metrics.
About 40% of marketers set new content marketing goals on a monthly basis.
At the same time, 44.6% do it quarterly or weekly, while only 4% never do it.
PRO TIP: The primary goal of a content marketing program is to establish your relevance within the niche and to increase organic traffic over time. One of the ways you can do it is to set a link-building strategy.
CEO sets the content marketing goals for more than 40% of teams.
PRO TIP: When evaluating the success of your content marketing strategy, don’t focus strictly on soft conversion metrics (think page views, sessions, and scroll-depth) but on revenue as well. One metric you can track for your blog articles is RPM – revenue per 1000 impressions. This metric accurately shows what pages generate revenue and which ones don’t.
Most companies monitor the success of their content at least once a week.
PRO TIP: To monitor content marketing success, we recommend using marketing reporting software, like HubSpot and Databox. Through a combination of tracking links built-in HubSpot, and creating content-performance dashboards in Databox, you would be able to give your team a full, real-time visibility of your content performance.
87.6% of companies we surveyed use data to make content decisions most of the time.
PRO TIP: There are many ways you can use data to create or refine your content marketing strategy, some of them being finding content with high-conversion rates, determining your ideal content length, identifying the most popular topics, uncovering your best content formats, and more.
Our respondents selected 28 different KPIs that they each feel is crucial for measuring blog performance.
The full list is: traffic, pageviews, page authority, featured snippets, bounce rate, top posts by views, leads acquired, traffic by source, social shares, keyword rankings, session duration, email signups, conversions, contact form submissions, sessions, organic traffic, average position, average time on page, CTA click-through rates, qualified conversions, lead generation rate, visitors, organic landing page visits, backlinks, returning traffic, number of comments, campaign responses by target accounts, and revenue.
PRO TIP: The most important KPI will always depend on the stage of the content. As a content strategist, you should create content for different purposes, and this must be reflected in your KPIs.
Almost 80% of the experts measure how well a post converts in terms of getting organic traffic. About 63% also measure leads by post and some 58% look at the sales each post brings. 55% track qualified leads by post as well.
PRO TIP: If you’re dealing with multiple campaigns, multiple publishers, or even multiple pieces of content, use Google Analytics to help you calculate content attribution.
To see what your customers like and identify the problematic areas, you should always measure the results of your content marketing activities.
According to our research, goal completions/conversions is the top-ranked metric for measuring a content program’s performance.
PRO TIP: Don’t expect one piece of content to be great across all stages. Good content unites the entire sales cycle, and that means you are going to need different pieces of content for different things. Choose the primary success metric for every piece of content you produce.
The majority of our contributors study exit and bounce rates to match their content with their search intent, adjust formatting, headings, or CTAs.
PRO TIP: Compare bounce rates and exit rates on similar articles through A/B testing to see what customers are reacting to similar content. Since the metrics are so similar, you can manipulate content in small ways to see what’s helping customers stay on your website before leaving.
Our contributors’ top 5 most-recommended content marketing tools are HubSpot, Buzzsumo, Zerys, Ahrefs, and Coschedule.
Content marketing is all about finding ways to create the best content possible in order to generate traffic and boost ROI.
But, with customers constantly changing the way they receive and consume data, your content marketing strategies are far from evergreen.
What separates an average content marketer from a great one is how well they manage to stay on top of trends and overall performance.
While keeping track of your content marketing performance used to be manageable with presentations and manual work, those days are long behind us.
Nowadays, it’s much more efficient to use dashboards. Databox dashboards, that is.
With hundreds of dashboards, thousands of metrics and visualizations, and 100+ integrations available, monitoring the performance of your content marketing efforts has never been easier.
You can check blog analytics, social media metrics, interactions, and conversions all in one spot. And, you can organize the data however way you want.
Best of all, you don’t even need to build a dashboard from scratch. You can download one of the dashboards from our gallery and customize it as you use fit.
The process is so simple that you’ll start to wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.
Simply connect data from a source, drag-and-drop the metrics you need, and then transform them into stunning visuals with a click of a button.
Are you tired of constantly trying to keep up with your content marketing performance? Sign up for a free trial and stay one step ahead of it.
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Marketing Research Analyst at Databox. Being an experienced Strategic and Creative Planner, with more than 15 years of practice, Nevena is passionately dedicated to untying the knots and entanglements of marketing, sales, and human behavior in order to deliver understandable, useful, and actionable insights for businesses.
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