Marketing continues to shift from a ‘one fits all’ unidirectional approach to offering beautiful, relevant content and a unified brand experience across channels. More and more companies are realizing the need to transform and adjust their approach to keep up the competitive pace. This is where content marketing comes to play: for creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

We analyzed this year’s latest content marketing study on the pain points, challenges and decision-making process of content marketers within UK companies that are aware of the power of relevant, engaging content. They are as valid on our market as well, especially that we are more and more taking our products abroad and erasing physical borders.

Less than 10% of respondents were definitely sure how to implement content marketing

Among all the things on their daily lists, companies simply don’t have the resources or the inside expertise to craft their content strategy, plan and instruments or to put the effort into consistent content creation and distribution. While most companies believe content marketing is effective, only a small percent knows how exactly to implement it.

 

How is Content Marketing Measured? Where Can We See the Strongest Impact?

Content marketing’s effects are most visible in increased brand awareness, customer engagement, search engine visibility and lead generation. All the other reasons are not at all to neglect, but the results depend on the amount of effort and consistency you put into it.

 

The Most Effective and Dynamic Distribution Platforms

Not very much surprise here and good news for B2B marketers: YouTube and LinkedIn remain their valuable allies. I would bet more on the creative use of SlideShare as it can offer a good place for sharing useful and more detailed knowledge than in a social post or video.

 

Budget Percentage Allocated to Content Marketing from the Total Marketing Budget Increases Every Year

While in 2015 a modest 10% up to a more courageous 20% was allocated to content marketing from the total marketing budget, last year the average percent got closer to a quarter of the overall budget. This is more encouraging and shows that companies become increasingly aware of its importance and effects. In fact, 70% of marketers say they will definitely increase their content marketing budgets. I believe that this increase will be dedicated to dynamic, visual content marketing instruments.

 

Common Challenges that Companies Are Facing

Surprisingly or not, the top 3 challenges are internal and they link to the lack of time or skilled resources to produce content regularly. These can be solved by outsourcing the content creation and distribution to a specialized content marketing company, while companies only need to provide the basic information.

 

What’s next?

Content marketing works best when it accompanies impeccable service and product delivery and continuous evolution in offering better products, friendlier services, and a great overall customer experience.

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Drop us a line to help you create your own bright story in content marketing.

Source of the content marketing study 2017: https://www.zazzlemedia.co.uk/the-state-of-content-marketing-survey