May 28, 2021
Part of the answer can be found in the Content Marketing Trend Study 2021 recently published by Statista, which brings together the responses of more than 1,600 participants from B2B and B2C companies interviewed between January and February of this year. Here are the highlights.
Let us start with the state of play. According to the survey, content marketing is used as a back-up strategy by most companies. For most of them, this does not represent more than 15% of their budget (almost 7 out of 10 B2C companies). However, the advantage of this practice is that it does not necessarily require large resources.
Nevertheless, after a pandemic year, more than 60% of B2B companies and 40% of B2C companies plan to increase their budget in this area this year.
Several content per week on average
Almost half of B2C companies surveyed (46%) publish multiple content each week (39% for B2B), which seems to be the norm in the industry. Even a quarter (24%) publish them every day.
The reasons given for this content publishing strategy include:
- Brand strengthening and external image (85% for B2B, 81% for B2C),
- Customer acquisition (82% for B2B, 77% for B2C),
- Consumer loyalty (62% for B2B, 73% for B2C),
- And, much further behind, strengthening the employer brand image for recruitment (21% for B2B, 13% for B2C).
Content marketing can sometimes be associated with a catch-all strategy given the diversity of broadcast channels that may or may not be considered. The study shows that, globally, social media is the lion’s share ahead of corporate websites or even their blog.
Inevitably, the question that arises in the wake is… which social media? The opportunity to see strong disparities according to the sector of activity.
Of course, LinkedIn is the preferred network for B2B companies (91%) ahead of Facebook (72%) and Youtube (58%).
On the B2C side, Facebook came first (91%) ahead of the group’s other flagship app, Instagram (83%). Surprisingly, Pinterest (20%), TikTok (13%) or Snapchat (7%) are far behind.
In addition, B2B companies focus on text format, video, images, infographics, webinars and whitepapers. While B2C companies use video format first, then images, text formats, infographics, gifs and finally webinars.
Measuring success, a major issue in content marketing
This is one of the big questions for content marketing specialists: indicators of success! Unlike advertising, it is difficult to measure performance. In fact, only a third of companies have determined a specific approach to analyze success.
The indicators looked at? Nothing very surprising:
- Tracking website traffic (for 70% of B2B companies and 63% of B2C companies),
- Analysis of statistics from social networks (65% for B2B and 67% for B2C),
- The engagement rate from the website (57% for B2B and 49% for B2C).
Finally, it should be noted that the reported success rate of content marketing strategies is rather high, with 68% of B2B companies considering the action plans implemented as “somewhat successful” (67% in B2C), and 10% reporting “very successful” strategies. (11% in B2C).
Among the main investments planned for this year 2021:
- Content creation and production (69% of B2B and 60% of B2C),
- Website improvement (65% vs. 58%),
- Creating a community on social networks (47% vs. 64%),
- Customer experience (49% vs. 50%),
- Organic content distribution (40% vs. 41%),
