• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, December 17, 2013

According to a recent Trapit survey of U.S. marketers, 58% of respondents believe effective content marketing requires 10 or more pieces of content every day to boost engagement. The number refers to everything from tweets to videos and blog posts. When it comes to blog posts, writing one or more every day can seem impossible if the content team is just one person, says the report.

Nearly half of the marketers in the survey said they’re not meeting their content goals. Marketers don’t think they’re spending enough time creating and maintaining content strategies. Participants said that they spend 28% of their time on content marketing, but, in a world without limitations, they would prefer to double that investment, says the report.

Aside from writing blog posts and creating other pieces of long-form content, most respondents are maintaining social channels throughout the day. So many marketers feel obligated to just get something out there that there’s no real guarantee of quality or originality. This is the consequence of the time constraints on the average marketer, says the report. On average, participants in the survey are planning to increase time spent on content to 33% of the day over the coming months.

• 63% currently dedicate 30% or less of their time on content marketing
• 47% expect to dedicate 30% or more in the next year
• 50% would dedicate 50% or more if they could

Poor-quality content means less engagement from consumers who have gotten tired of hearing the same stories over and over. 31% of participants also said that personalization is going to be the future of content marketing. Marketing automation platforms are making it easier to deliver different types of content to different personas, but that’s only if marketers have enough time to create the content that goes into those personalized experiences.

The survey revealed that many marketers think mobile habits are going to have a definitive impact on strategy, with 49% of participants saying that mobile search is going to replace traditional discovery routes. With mobile such a dominant channel, content has followed by going visual. In the survey, 82% of marketers agreed that content was more likely to be consumed if it was visually appealing. Going into the New Year, brands are going to need to find a way to efficiently and reliably curate not just blog posts and articles, but videos and photos, too, says the report:

• 82% say content is more likely to be consumer if it is visual
• 49% think mobile content consumption habits will displace traditional search
• 42% say marketers wiil be spending more on content/inbound marketing
• 31% feel that content must be “hyper-personalized” to be effective
• 31% say content marketing will take significantly from traditional marketing budget
• 31% feel that content marketing is saturated with too much content

Producing ten or more pieces of original content a day takes too much time and defeats the purpose of social media, says the report Content marketing is supposed to build thought leadership and brand awareness, in part by sharing things from third-party sources. 74% of marketers say that content curation is an important part of their content strategies. However, 60% of respondents said that it was difficult to find content that isn’t also being shared by peers and competitors, and 57% said that finding the right content in the first place is proving to be a challenge:

• Content curation important part of strategy   74% of respondents
• Valuable part of marketing mix   73%
• Hard to distinguish curation from peers/competitors   60%
• Need effective curations to stay afloat   58%
• Finding right kind of content to curate is difficult   57%
• Current curation content less  effective because of saturation   53%
• More curation vs. less original content more effective   36%

The report concludes by noting that there’s a clear need for a better way to curate content that simplifies and refines the process for more engagement, and less of a burden for marketers. Automation will have to meet personalization and automate social channels with dynamic, real-time content that learns from user’s choices, to create fully branded experiences offering prospects and customers highly relevant blog posts, articles, videos, photos and more.

For more information from Adotas, and access to the PDF file of the study, please visit here.