Top 10 Facts About Content Marketing
As we move towards the end of the year—it’s hard to believe it’s nearly Christmas as the sun is still shining down on Peppermint Spain and few of us have graduated to putting a duvet back on the bed — it is time for marketing agencies and numerous experts to start reviewing what has been going on during 2014. What is new in graphic design, which style of website is trending and what’s going on with social media?
One of the first annual reviews to appear in Peppermint’s mailbox is Newscred’s 56 Reasons Why Content Marketing Works. We have looked at a few aspects of content marketing during the year, including an Expert’s Guide to Hiring a Content Creator and Your Business Needs a Blog! to mention just two of them and now we’d like to share with you some of Newscred’s findings about why ‘old school’ marketing strategies are redundant and the effects of the meteoric rise of content.
To start with, the research showed that three key things are currently vitally important:
- • Content marketing builds a business efficiently
- • Acquiring customers requires simultaneous tactics
- • Blogs, email marketing and social media drive brand engagement
1.Banner ads are a problem – content is the answer
Consumers reject banner ads at a rate of 99%.
78% of senior marketing staff believes customised content is the future of marketing for Business to Consumer.
2.Invest in a content marketing team
Content teams are typically small with less than six people (81%).
Blogs take 9% of a full time staff member’s time and cost 7% of marketing budget.
3.Blogging helps customer acquisition
82% of marketers’ blogging daily acquired a new customer via the blog compared with 57% of businesses blogging monthly.
Brands that post 15 blog posts a month average 1,200 new leads monthly.
4.Social media helps customer acquisition
77% of buyers said they were more likely to buy a bran dif the CEO uses social media.
Customers spend more money when they find a product via Pinterest than any other social media channel.
5.Visual content boosts brand engagement
The brain absorbs visual information 60,000 times faster than when reading text.
Video at 87% is the top content marketing technique, closely followed by web articles at 86%.
6.Facebook customer engagement
Retail brands posting between 1 and 4 times per week creates 71% more engagement.
Facebook posts with questions get 100% more comments.
7.Twitter customer engagement
Tweets that ask followers to retweet get 12x higher retweet rate than brands that don’t ask.
78% of customers engage with a brand on Twitter by retweeting.
8.LinkedIn and brand engagement
64% of social referrals to corporate pages are via LinkedIn.
60% of LinkedIn users are interested in reading research reports and industry insights.
9.Instagram and the hashtag
Instagram posts with three hashtags get 110% increase in post likes.
Instagram posts with five hashtags get 180% more post likes.
10.The value of YouTube
90% of users claim that watching a YouTube video helps them to make a decision to buy.
Visitors to your website are 64% more likely to buy your product if they watch a video about it.
Peppermint Spain sees three key points in here:
- • Use video and powerful graphic information whenever possible.
- • Post on social media and blog as frequently as possible.
- • Only publish customised content.
Keep an eye out for more of Peppermint’s end-of-year reviews of marketing trends and make sure you’re ready to hit 2015 with a strong strategy in place.