15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Content Marketing

We've all been to marketing conferences where at least one executive gets on stage and declares, "Content is king." For good reason. The industry is finally at a point where every marketer understands the value of great content.

But while marketers have certainly made strides, their content marketing strategies are nowhere near perfect. There are a few reasons why. First, more than half of companies still don't have an executive leading content--someone setting the strategy and rules for engagement. Additionally, while budgets are on the rise, a shortage of talent and resources for content production is also impeding efforts.

This week's "Mind-Blowing Stats" takes a look at the content marketing landscape. But before you dive in, please take our poll:

1. Less than 40% of all content marketers are effective at content marketing.

2. The most effective B2B marketers spend 39% of their marketing budgets on content.

3. Last year the amount of video from people and brands in Facebook's news feed increased 3.6X year over year.

4. Visual content is a key component in each of the top five most effective B2B marketing tactics.

5. Forty-seven percent of the most effective B2C content marketers have a documented strategy, while only 5% of the least effective do. This trend is mirrored in B2B content marketing, where 54% of the most effective practitioners have a documented strategy, compared with 11% of the least effective.

6. Sixty-seven percent of marketers find measurement to be the single most formidable content marketing challenge.

7. Sixty-nine percent of content marketing lacks quality.

8. Seventy-two percent of marketers think that branded content is more effective than magazine advertisements; 69% say it’s superior to direct mail and PR.

9. The two biggest reasons professionals access content on LinkedIn is to “keep up with industry news” and “discover new ideas within the industry,” at 78% and 73%, respectively.

10. Seventy percent of content marketers are creating more content than they did a year ago.

11. Twenty-one percent of content marketers say they are successful at tracking ROI.

12. Fifty-five percent of marketers plan to increase budgets for content marketing over the next twelve months, including those who say they are least effective at content marketing.

13. There are a wide variety of obstacles to content marketing success. Lack of content creation resources was the biggest challenge, cited by the majority of marketing professionals worldwide. More than four in 10 respondents said lack of an effective strategy—and likely creation and distribution of content as a result—was an issue, and budget constraints were the third-biggest challenge, cited by 40% of marketers.

14. Forty-nine percent of nearly 600 U.S. marketers studied said their firms have an executive who leads content marketing, up from 43% in 2014, and 60% believed this would be the case next year. Having a leader in place will likely drive the creation of a strategy and help better manage resources.

15. Video is becoming the bell of the content marketing ball. Two-thirds of marketers and agency executives believe that original digital video will become as important as original TV programming within the next three years.

CMO/Giselle Abramovich