• by Ray Schultz , May 2, 2019

Email marketing plays a major role in content delivery. But it ranks as a distant third in mindset, at least in the UK this year, according to the State of Content Marketing, a study by Zazzle Media.

Of the businesses surveyed, 45% plan to focus on email marketing in 2019, compared to 77% that will concentrate on written content/blogs and 45% on SEO.

However, email marketing is “definitely growing in the front of marketers' minds as they have to be hyper-aware of what they are sending and distributing via email channels, because of GDPR,” the study states. 

Indeed, email is utilized by 82%, second only to written content, which is cited by 98%. In addition, 78% use organic social, while 72% use video and 59% use paid social.

In general, 66% say content marketing is extremely or very effective. And 31% claim it is somewhat effective.

Eighty-nine percent now claim their content marketing is integrated with other parts of the business, compared with 45% last year. Furthermore, brands are devoting an average 41% of their marketing spend to content, up from 23% in 2018.

The primary objectives of content marketing are raising brand awareness (47%), targeting new audiences (25%), product promotion (15%) and list building (8%). 

Only 31% generate measurable sales directly from social media, while 49% use it but say it doesn’t build sales. 

Here are the measures they use to judge content marketing success:

• Increased website traffic — 89% 
• Improved SEO rankings — 65%
• Subscriber growth — 62%
• Increased sales —51%
• Higher conversion rate — 50%
• Better sales lead quality — 48%
• Brand lift — 34%