Is your company or organization engaging in content marketing? If so, do you wonder how your efforts compare with others? Here are some content marketing benchmarks for you to measure against.
Oracle Eloqua recently published an infographic on their blog graphically summarizing data from their report entitled, “The State of Content Marketing 2014.” The report seeks to determine content marketing benchmarks for activities and policies, how content is being mapped to the buyer journey, and what metrics content marketers are using.
The infographic (shown in full below) illustrates specific data points from the report, including trends in blogging, content production, social sharing, and measurement strategies.
An overall takeaway is that most companies and organizations have a lot of room to improve their content marketing efforts.
Scroll down for full infographic
We found a number of points especially interesting and relevant:
Creating Content
- Lack of production: Only 29% of marketers are producing more than one piece of content a week.
This is a really low number and indicates companies and organizations could use some help in ongoing production of quality content. - Failure to Blog: One-third are blogging only two to five times per month, with 17% not blogging at all. Blogging should be an essential foundation of all content marketing activities of all companies and organizations.
- Reuse: Nearly 60% are actively re-purposing their content assets. This is actually very good news. Re-purposing and reworking content assets to take advantage of multiple distribution channels is working smart. Breaking large content assets into smaller, more digestible chunks — “snackable content” — is also an excellent practice.
Measurement
- Strategy work is needed: Only 12% reported that they know how to align their content to their buyer’s journey and how to measure the results effectively. This isn’t surprising. So much emphasis is put on creating content. But without a content strategy, it’s very hard to create “appropriate” content, and even harder to know whether the content you’re producing is getting you where you want to go.
- Lack of measurement depth: Only 37% are sophisticated enough in measuring that they go beyond the basics — such as number of visitors — to actually analyze engagement measures, such as shares or time spent with content. There are so many metrics available that it can be overwhelming. So, the straightforward and “easy” measurements become the default. However, taking the time to learn how to work with and interpret the “harder” metrics is key to actually determining the ROI of content marketing efforts.
Full Infographic
This infographic comes from data gathered in the Oracle Eloqua Community report on “The State of Content Marketing 2014.”
If you want to see the full report, you can get it here with a simple registration: Eloqua Community: The State of Content Marketing 2014 Survey Report
So, how do your content marketing efforts compare?
We look forward to hearing from you, either in “Comments,” or you can contact us directly.
