New study finds a major gap in content marketing understanding as budgets soar

UK marketers are struggling to understand how to best spend their growing content marketing budgets and can’t find skilled people to deliver an effective plan.

The finding come from The State of Content Marketing survey launched, exclusively to senior marketers earlier this year, by digital marketing agency Zazzle Media.
The aim of the survey was to gain a true reflection of the spend, activity and challenges faced in content marketing in 2017.
Whilst 79% of decision makers rated content marketing as ‘effective’ or ‘very effective’, a surprising 62% were unsure of how to measure the ROI of content-led campaigns, with only 6% ‘definitely clear’ on how to best run this activity day-to-day.
So, how do marketers currently judge the success of content marketing campaigns?
– 85% of marketers said the most important factor of success was increased traffic.
– SEO ranking was the second most popular measure, with 45% of marketers using it as a goal.
– But surprisingly, an increase in sales was only a key measure for 38% of marketers.
Managing director of Zazzle Media, Simon Penson, commented on the statistics…
“It appears a large percentage of marketers are choosing content marketing as their weapon of choice, before thinking about what they want this activity to achieve. Whether it’s traffic, keyword ranking or sales, content marketing has the ability to assist these goals, but it’s important to have this objective in mind from the start.”
“As content marketing experts, it’s important we continue to share performance measurement tools, educational guides and best practice eBooks with marketers, so they have the tools to bridge the gap in knowledge and confidence we have seen in our survey.”
The results of The State of Content Marketing survey have been turned into an eBook which is available to view here.