Since early 2011, when Google first began to differentiate between high- and low-quality sites, content marketing has been one of the main channels of online marketing and search engine optimization. By developing and curating content, businesses can attract readers, inform them about their products and services, and turn these readers into customers and patients. Four years later, how successful has content marketing been at doing what it intends? Ascend2, a market research firm, has answered this question by asking those who know best: you, the small business owner.
The results: an overwhelming 89 percent of small business owners say that content marketing has successfully helped them meet their business objectives.
What Does the Data Show?
In their most recent edition of the Content Marketing Trends Survey Summary Report, Ascend2 conducted an online survey from a sample of over 50,000 business professionals. Of these, 78 percent represented companies with less than 500 employees and 57 percent represented businesses with fewer than 50 employees:
Respondents were given an opportunity to explain what goals they were trying to achieve. 52 percent cited improved customer engagement and increased lead generation. 38 percent stated that the most important objective was increased sales revenue and 44 percent responded with increased brand awareness.
How successful was content marketing at achieving these goals? 89 percent of those surveyed responded that content marketing had been successful in helping them meeting their objectives.
Content marketing comes in many types, however. Your website might have a combination of product or service pages, which educate the customer or patient on what your business offers, and blog posts, which help acquire and engage current and future traffic. Other forms of content include infographics, educational videos, and newsletters. How do these different forms of content stack up against each other in terms of effectiveness? According to the survey results:
In response to this success, 48 percent of respondents said that they were increasing their content marketing budget and 44 percent answered that their budget was remaining the same. Only eight percent of those surveyed reported a falling budget. In other words, over nine in ten business professionals found that the rate of return justified their investment.
Breaking Down Content Marketing Barriers
The Ascend2 survey also asked business owners and other professionals about the major challenges to their content marketing strategy. 53 percent of those who responded cited a “lack of content creation resources” and 42 percent pointed to the “lack of an effective strategy.” The exact breakdown is as follows:
It’s no surprise, then, that 85 percent of business professionals surveyed outsource all or some of their content creation. By taking advantage of the resources of a specialist, like Now Media Group, your business can enjoy the full benefit of a comprehensive content marketing strategy with proven success.
How can a specialist help you overcome the barriers to content marketing? At Now Media Group:
- Our tested, successful Infosite™ campaigns are able to target local patients for the treatments you want to promote. An infosite is a one-stop educational resource on a specific treatment, with comprehensive coverage of the questions and concerns a patient might have. This is exactly the type of resource that is successful on search engines, because it’s genuinely intended to educate and inform patients, attracting readers in your neighborhood, your city, and ultimately turning these readers into leads for your business.
- Our blogging campaigns, we can attract new customers or patients and make sure existing ones return your website. Informed by data — rate of traffic, bounce rate, and other measures of user behavior —, our blogging is dynamic, able to adapt to the changing demands of the reader.
- We use a number of tools to measure your content’s success. These include tracking your website’s performance on Google and other search engines, analyzing your readers’ behavior with Google Analytics, and call tracking to get a direct measure of the number of readers your content is converting into leads. These reports aren’t for our eyes only; we can send these reports to you, so that you can more accurately gauge the success of your investment.
By having already hurdled all the obstacles, we put the power of content marketing at your fingertips. Have questions or concerns? Leave us a comment below! If you would like to learn more about how content marketing can help your business or if you would like an assessment of your current content marketing strategy, contact Now Media Group to speak to your consultant: 858-333-8950.