Traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute. Advertising is expensive and annoying; many people have blocked it out. Paid search campaigns can add up quickly.
Enter stage left: content marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects. You are helping them solve a problem, attracting them to your brand. For this reason Content Marketing is also referred to as Inbound Marketing versus advertising which is Outbound.
Specifically, there are three key reasons — and benefits — for organizations that use content marketing to move both B2B and B2C prospects through your sales funnel:
Increased sales
Cost savings
Better customers who have more loyalty
Here are 14 fascinating metrics by some pretty smart people that you can use:
1. Consumers prefer content to advertising. In fact, 70 percent of people would rather get information about a company or learn something from an article or blog post rather than from a traditional advertisement. (Demand Metric)
2. Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. (Demand Metric)
3. Per dollar, content marketing produces 3 times more leads. (Kapost/Oracle Eloqua)
4. On average, content marketing costs 41% less than paid search. (Kapost/Eloqua)
Business-to-Business (B2B)
5. 65% of B2B content consumers strongly agree they have higher preferences for credible content from industry influencers. (Demand Gen Report)
6. B2B buyers preferred these content formats: Case studies (79%); Webinars (66%); Video (49%); and Interactive content (36%). (Demand Gen Report)
7. Cisco projected that more than 80% of all Internet traffic will be video by 2021—which means brands definitely need a video content strategy. (Cisco)
Business-to-Consumer (B2C) ... and, one of the hottest trends in B2B marketing today is to adopt techniques borrowed from B2C marketing.
8. 73% of consumers have been impacted by a brand’s social media presence when making a purchase decision. (Animoto)
9. People today have 2X more interactions with brands on mobile than anywhere else. (Think with Google)
10. 87% of consumers want more video from brands. (Hubspot)
11. Instagram is the fastest-growing platform for driving purchases with video. (Animoto)
12. When asked how they’d most like to learn about a new product, over two-thirds (68%) of consumers said a short video would be best, way ahead of text-based articles (15%), infographics (4%) presentations and pitches (4%) ebooks and manuals (3%). (Wyzowl)
13. Knowing your audience and understanding their preferences is essential. For instance, only 22% of millennials want to see email from a brand they support, while 57% of 45 – 54-year-olds do. (HubSpot)
14. Conversely, 52% of millennials want to see video from brands they support while only 25% of those 45-54 years old do. (HubSpot)
Where is your company today with implementing your Content Marketing Strategy? We are here to help you get more out of each marketing dollar. Even in these uncertain times, your connection with your audience pays off.
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