A good way to ensure that you content marketing efforts remain effective and successful is to regularly evaluate your strategy. This will keep it relevant sticking with what is working and what needs to be improved.

In a fast moving world looking at what other businesses are doing can be a good way to keep up-to-date. A useful source is the Content Marketing Institute annual survey (Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends) talking to content marketers across the world about the top trends that have to do with strategy, planning, tools and many other areas that can help you improve or benchmark your own content marketing ideas. This survey is now in its ninth year. You can get a 55 page PDF of the whole report here >>

Content Marketing Strategy Key Findings

  • The two biggest benefits of a documented content marketing strategy are that it aligns teams around common mission/goals (81%) and makes it easier to determine which types of content to develop (81%).
  • 96% of the most successful content marketers (aka “top performers”) agree that their organizations have built credibility and trust with their audience.
  • Well-researched personas can help teams create successful content; however, too few content marketers are actually talking with customers to understand their needs (42%).
  • B2B content marketers primarily use email (87%) and educational content (77%) to nurture their audience,
    and may be missing other opportunities (e.g., only 23% are using community building/audience participation
    to bring new voices to the table).
  • Nearly all of the most successful B2B content marketers (90%) prioritize the audience’s informational needs
    over their sales/promotional message, compared with 56% of the least successful.
  • Content creation is the area of content marketing where there has been the most reported increase in
    spending over the last 12 months (56%).
  • Changes to SEO/search algorithms is the top content marketing issue of importance to organizations (61%),
    followed by changes in social media algorithms (45%), and content marketing as a revenue center (41%).

Overall the survey shows marketers seeing an increased success in their content marketing efforts and an increase in their budget for future content marketing campaigns.