The New Year provides the opportunity to reflect on achievements, and for nearly 8 in 10 B2C content marketers (78%), creating brand awareness is a goal they succeeded with over the past 12 months. However, just 52% succeeded in generating sales and revenue, per the results of a report from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs [PDF].
That being said, views on success as a whole are in most cases upbeat. Some 74% said their content marketing efforts had been more successful than the previous year, with 19% of the total reporting improvements were “much more successful”.
The areas in which at least three-fifths of those surveyed had achieved their goals include building credibility/trust (67%) – an increasingly important area for brands, educating their audience (65%) and building loyalty with existing clients and customers (63%).
Measuring and delivering on a return on investment has been a challenge for content marketing for many years, including those creating B2B content. The report shows that in 2018, 57% of B2C content marketers were measuring the ROI of their efforts.
And while a common appeal of content marketing is its potential for driving organic growth, B2C marketers haven’t shied away from paying to improve performance. Roughly two-thirds (68%) say they have used paid methods to distribute content in the past 12 months.
Despite some missed resolutions and challenges in driving revenue, a healthy proportion of B2C content marketers now have a level of proficiency in using the metrics they’ve selected to monitor their performance, with 32% rating themselves as “extremely/very proficient” and 40% saying they are at least “somewhat proficient”.
Looking at the year ahead, a reassuring comfort is that the vast majority of those working in the field have the support of the organizations they work for. Just 5% said that their employers were not very committed to content marketing, while 64% said they were “extremely” or “very” committed.
The full report is available here.
About the Data: The report was survey of 299 professionals working in organizations (B2C or B2B & B2C) that had used content marketing for at least one year.
