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%