The content rich keep getting richer, while the content poor keep getting poorer. That’s my observation from Eloqua’s report The State of Content Marketing in 2014.
Eloqua conducted an online survey of its marketing community. It had 205 takers and by the looks of the demographics at the end of the report, the sweet spot seems to be mid-level managers in businesses with a couple hundred employees. However, there’s another factor in demographics that makes the findings especially interesting.
Eloqua provides marketing automation, a fairly sophisticated piece of software – that reportedly just 3% of non-tech companies have explored. To me, this means respondents are more likely to be from companies that a) make considerable investments in technology and b) are willing to invest in technology that is still relatively new.
The content poor vs. the content rich
The content poor are those respondents from companies that appear to place less of an emphasis on content than others. Plainly, I can’t understand this, because everything in marketing revolves around content – that was true even before the web.
What’s changed evolved is the means – among which are the ease and cost effectiveness of self-publishing, the ability to connect directly and create a community, and shareability. Simply put, there are far more ways, the creative repurposing of content aside, to share a white paper these days than there were 15 years ago.
So who are the content poor? Consider the following:
- 54% produce “a” content asset every two weeks
- 17% do not blog at all
- 16% have a policy that prohibits the sharing of 3rd party content
Contrast this with the content rich:
- 29% produce multiple content assets per week
- 33% blog between two and five times per month
- 56% share 3rd party content
- 60% will repurpose content
Still a long road to content shock
As a competitive marketer working for a corporation, as opposed to a consultant or agency staffer, I welcome the dearth of competition. For all the noise about content marketing in marketing circles, the concept pales in comparison to the money and attention focused on traditional mechanisms including advertising, email marketing and search marketing.
From where I sit, there’s a whole lot of competition to be 2nd place in marketing — it’s still a long road to content shock.
The complete infographic follows below – and here’s a few links to some of the other studies I’ve reviewed recently:
- 13 Statistics from an Inc. 500 Social Media Study
- 9 Sweeping Lessons from Content Marketing Benchmarking Study
- Digital: The Gap between Importance and Performance
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