A recent survey conducted on LinkedIn answers some burning questions regarding content marketing. Over the duration of three weeks, 740 respondents answered the survey, majority of whom were experienced marketing professionals.
The survey reveals the latest trends in content marketing, such as what are the expectations from content marketing, the best content marketing platforms and more. The most positive message from the survey is that content marketing is seeing a tremendous growth. 84% of marketers have reported that there will be a massive increase in content production in the near future.
Top- five Trends
The first trend – there is a huge growth in content marketing and close to 85% of the respondents have said that they are focusing on increasing content production. Over 50% have rated their marketing tactics as ‘effective’ and have reported using 10 or more content marketing tactics and formats. Most of the participants have also reported that they have distributed the task of content creation over six separate functional roles.
Second – B2B (business-to-business) marketers have stated that effective content is at the core of their business goals- lead generation, brand awareness and market education. Surprisingly, most respondents have picked lead generation over sales as one of their content marketing goals.
Third – Infographics as a content format has seen a huge growth. Its use has increased by 1.5 times compared to last year.
Fourth – the survey has also highlighted the problems B2B marketers are currently facing. Survey participants have stated that their biggest challenge is creating a large volume of quality content on a small budget and within a restricted time frame, as 94% or B2B marketers create original content instead of rewriting existing material. Companies are also increasingly outsourcing work to external content writing services to produce large and important pieces of content.
Lastly, B2B marketers are trying to create more effective content and are using metrics like web traffic, number of leads and their quality, number of downloads and visitors, etc. to gauge content engagement.
Expectations from Content Marketing
This survey also gives us a clear idea of the goals marketers are trying to achieve from content marketing. Most marketers want their content to generate more leads than sales. 68% of participants have rated lead generation as their top goal. B2B marketers want more and better leads generated from their content marketing strategies.
Half the respondents want their content to educate their customers and to influence their behavior. Close to 40% of the participants have rated brand awareness as their top content marketing goal. Along with this, participants have also rated sales, customer acquisition and lead nurturing among the top goals.
Effective Content and Social Media Platforms
Along with content marketing techniques and formats, respondents have also rated the type of content that they think can successfully advertise their company. Over 80% of marketers have said that engaging writing is one of the elements of successful content. 52% chose originality, followed by customized content (50%) and 39% of the participants picked professional writing as the elements of successful content.
When it came to the social networks that marketers chose to deliver their content on, LinkedIn came on top with 85% of respondents picking it as their major social media platform. Twitter ranked second with 70% of the picks, followed by Facebook (54%) and YouTube (53%). Slideshare (25%) wrapped up the top 5 social media platforms.