Soooo … Google has changed the rules of the game again. Driving the content mantra.
Where does this leave you, Mr/Mrs/Ms Marketeer? Perhaps you're trying to make sense of the information that as much as 31% of marketing budgets are being spent on content marketing. Sure that's mad, Ted. Isn't it?
As yet, we don't have figures for spend on content marketing in Ireland (more of which later), but while it's reasonable to think that it trails the UK figure cited above (Source: CMI, DMA UK), there is no doubting that it's also growing fast in Ireland.
But perhaps the real question that you are grappling with is this. What is the content marketing return on investment? How do I convince the powers that be in the company that this is a route worth investigating? You may even be thinking 'If I introduce this and it's a success, then I could be a star, rise to the top of the company and have a big orange piggy bank of my own full of money', you sneaky thing!
Well, let's hope there's space at the Boardroom table for one more.
The Aberdeen Group is a Boston-based research house that has undertaken an important piece of analysis on content marketing. They studied data collected from 96 marketing practitioners, including 81 companies that use content marketing. They further identified the top 35% in terms of results, termed them Leaders and the remainder Followers, and defined what it was that Leaders did to give them the best results (you can download the research here).
62% of these companies prioritised lead generation or customer acquisition as their primary objective – so this is the metric that we are principally concerned with.
So what was their finding on this key metric?
And there you have it. Companies using content marketing generate almost eight times as many marketing qualified leads as those that don't. You can apply your own cost of conversion rate from MQL to Sale based on your company's experience.
However, Aberdeen went on to examine the differing results achieved by Leaders versus Followers. And what is very clear is that companies that do content marketing well do a whole lot better out of it than those that just do content marketing.
The website traffic required by Leaders to create a sale was just over half that required of Followers and their per customer acquisition cost was just 66%. It's clear that there is a significant execution gap between Leaders and Followers.
Well, bowl me over with a piggy bank! I'd say it's worth doing well, wouldn't you?
Measure what matters – track conversion rates associated with content. Measure the incremental lift that specific content types or specific content provide.
So given the success of content marketing, what's the next step? If you have the expertise and resources you can do it yourself. Or if you not quite doing content marketing as good as you should/could, you can always just contact us.
Ah Go On, Go On, Go On.