Content Marketing Statistics

Content Marketing Statistics, Facts and Trends

So you decided to start an online business? That’s good. What you need now is traffic.

What is the best way to grow website traffic you ask?

Producing quality and useful content, of course.

In this post, we’ll walk you through important and interesting content marketing statistics, facts and trends. Read on to learn why content marketing is important for every type of business.


General Content Marketing Statistics

  • According to CMI, 91% of B2B and 86% of B2C marketers have already adopted content marketing.
  • How important is content marketing for marketers? 60% of marketers in a HubSpot 2020 survey said is “very” or “extremely” important” to their overall marketing strategy.
Content Marketing Importance

Source: Hubspot

  • 96% of marketers said that content marketing has been effective for their brand.
  • In another study, 72% of marketers said that it increases engagement.

Content Marketing ROI Statistics

  • At ROI of $40 per $1 spent email marketing is the most effective way of content promotion.
Email Marketing ROI

Source: Smart Insights


Leads and Conversion Statistics

  • Content marketing produces 3x more leads per $, according to Kapost.
  • According to the same research, brands that published 15 posts/month averaged 1,200 new leads during that time.
  • Inbound marketing generates 54% more leads than outbound marketing.
  • Content marketing generates 3X more leads than paid ads. It also costs 62% less than the old forms of advertising. 
  • Companies that use content marketing see a 6x increase in overall conversion rate compared to those that rely on traditional marketing.
  • Companies that offer customer persona-driven content and use inbound marketing platforms saw a 45% rise in the volume of Sales Accepted Leads.
  • B2B marketers that blog get 67% more leads per month than those who don’t.
B2B that blog generate 67 more leads

Source: Antevenio

  • According to HubSpot, organic search leads have a 14.6% close rate.
  • The most popular signup form, pop-ups, have the 2nd-lowest conversion rate (4%), while the least popular signup form, landing pages, have the highest conversion rate (24%).
  • Organic traffic was the number one key metric used by marketers to measure their content success (83%), followed by page views and sessions (70%) and leads (66%), according to SEMrush.
Content marketing key metrics

Source: Semrush


B2B Content Marketing Statistics

  • Most B2B marketers consider their content marketing success “somewhat more successful” (51%) than a year ago. 18% consider it “much more successful”, while only 2% think it’s “somewhat less successful”.
How B2B rate content marketing success

Source: CMI

  • 60% of B2B marketers upload at least one piece of content per day. According to a 2011 AOL & Nilsen study, 27 million pieces of content were shared daily.
  • Unfortunately, not all content is being used. Between 60 and 70% of content created by B2B marketers ends up unused.
  • B2B buyers do an average of 12 searches online before visiting a supplier’s website. 
  • 84 percent of companies reported that hiring for content marketing is a major challenge. 44.9% of B2B companies planned to hire for content.
  • The average content marketing budget in a 2019 B2B company was $185,000. At the same time, 36% reported below $100,000 budget and 18% said they had no content marketing budget.
  • Content outsourcing is largely split 50/50 in B2B organizations, according to CMI. Large (1,000+ employees) companies are much more likely to outsource (71%). Small (1-99 employees) companies are less likely (63%) to outsource.
Content outsourcing statistics
  • 56% of B2B marketers didn’t have a documented marketing strategy in 2014. In 2020, 69% of the most successful and only 16% of the least successful B2B marketers had a documented content marketing strategy.
Percentage of B2B with documented content marketing strategy

Source: CMI


Customers and Engagement Statistics

  • People want to learn about your company through content and not ads. According to Content Marketing Institute, over 70% of consumers say they rather learn about a product or service via content than ads.
  • However, consumers don’t want you to give them any old content. If you want consumers to buy from you, you need to have updated original content.
  • 78% of marketers believe that custom content is the future of content marketing. Only 19% believed this in 2006. 
  • One study showed that 61% of consumers are more likely to buy if a company produces custom content. 
Why companies need content marketing

Source: Mashable

  • At the same time, creating a customer persona can improve content effectiveness by as much as 60%.
  • 55% of business professionals said that storytelling helps them focus on and engage with content.
Story engagement

Source: Prezi

  • Marketers and consumers disagree on what is the most authentic form of content. Consumers are 2.4x more likely to say that user-generated content (UGC) is more authentic. Marketers are 2.1x more likely to say that brand-created content is more authentic. 
  • Nearly 80% of consumers said that UGC highly influences their buying decisions. 
  • Consumers overwhelmingly expect brands to provide content. 9 out of 10 according to Meaningful Brands 2019 report. 58% of consumers trusted editorial content, according to AOL & Nielsen 2012 report.
  • 81% of consumers will research the company or their products online before reaching out to sales. In 2018 buyers went through about 57% of the purchasing process before ever talking to sales.
  • ⅔ of consumers (66%) prefer short videos as a way to learn about a product or service.

Content Marketing & Social Media Statistics

  • How to make your website unique enough to keep the readers on it as more and more content is being shared daily? When compared to content of less than 1,000 words, content of 1,000-2,000 words gets 56.1% more social shares on average.
Longform vs shortform content marketing statistics

Source: Backlinko

  • 96% of B2B marketers use Linkedin for organic content distribution

Video, Blogging & Infographic Statistics

  • Video is now the #1 media format above blogs, ebooks and infographics. 
Primary forms of media used in content strategy

Source: Hubspot

Related: Video Marketing Statistics

  • Users are no longer satisfied with text-only content. 74% of marketers included visuals in their content in 2019. That is a 10.5% increase from 63.5% in 2018.
Visuals use increase content marketing statistics

Source: Venngage

  • The use of infographics in marketing has become more popular among B2B marketers over the last few years. Content Marketing Institute’s research shows that about 57% of B2B marketers created infographics/charts in 2021.
  • More than 38% of Internet users between 18 and 29 said they had read a blog post in the last four weeks, according to Statista. This proves that blogging remains relevant as a marketing tactic.
  • Every second, 17 new blog posts are published on WordPress.org

Backlink Statistics

  • What’s the secret to getting backlinks? Being active. Websites with active blogs tend to generate 97% more backlinks than those that aren’t active as much. Or, no posts = no backlinks.
  • Only 3% of content on B2B websites get links from more than one website.
  • 93% of content gets no links from outside, according to Backlinko’s analysis.

Other Content Marketing Statistics

  • Content marketing doesn’t need a huge and expensive team. 78% of companies only have one to three people in charge of content.
  • For B2C companies, the average content budget was $230,000.
  • 31% reported under $100,000 and 23% no budget at all for content marketing.
  • A joint Gleanster-Kapost report said that 67% of respondents indicated they think there is room to improve their current content creation process.
  • Unique website traffic growth, YOY, is almost 8X higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers.
  • Global attention span has markedly decreased in recent years. The reader’s average attention span has dropped to 8 seconds in 2015, compared to 12 seconds in 2000.
  • In addition, more than 50% of visitors will abandon a mobile site if its pages take 3+ seconds to load.
  • Only 20% of visitors who read your headline will continue to read the copy.

Conclusion

Bill Gates said in 1996 that “content is king”.

That’s true in 2022 as well and we hope that content marketing statistics, facts, and trends provided in this article were able to demonstrate you why.


Further reading:


Sources
  • Kapost
  • Statista
  • Content Marketing Institute
  • AOL & Nielsen
  • HubSpot
  • SEMrush
  • SocialMediaToday
  • Demand Metric
  • OptinMonster
  • https://www.zazzlemedia.co.uk/resources/content-marketing-survey-2019/#gref
  • https://prezi.com/resources/2018-state-of-attention-report/
  • https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.mediapost.com/uploads/MeaningfulBrands2019.pdf
  • https://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-marketing-roi-remains-strong-whilst-spam-rate-falls-10-year-low-chartoftheday/
  • https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-154/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/need-mobile-speed-how-mobile-latency-impacts-publisher-revenue/
  • https://www.business2community.com/blogging/10-unbelievable-statistics-sell-boss-business-blogging-0903221
  • https://copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/
  • https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-statistics/
  • https://www.linkedin.com/business/sales/blog/b2b-sales/how-sales-can-win-before-57–of-the-buyers-journey-is-over
  • https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-stupid-simple-ways-scale-your-content-creation-james-carbary
  • https://go.forrester.com/blogs/its-not-content–its-a-lack-of-buyer-insights-thats-the-problem/
  • https://themanifest.com/digital-marketing/how-businesses-use-content-marketing
  • https://stackla.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Data-Report-2019-FINAL-FINAL.pdf
  • https://venngage.com/blog/visual-content-marketing-statistics/
  • https://www.wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics/#section4
  • https://mashable.com/2014/08/11/content-marketing-roi-data/
  • https://www.slideshare.net/NewsCred/50-best-stats-presentation
  • https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2016/10/11/the-ups-and-downs-of-b2b-content-marketing/?sh=6122c5ec6023
  • https://www.cision.com/2018/01/declining-attention-killing-content-marketing-strategy/
  • https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-marketing-statistics/
  • https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/B2B_2022_Research.pdf

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Nadia

Nadia is a content writer with a B.A. in English and Spanish from Northwestern University. She crafts content for a variety of industries, including tech and business.

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