Allegra and Ascend2 have published the results of a research study conducted with "marketing, sales, and business professionals" in 194 small and medium-sized businesses. You can get a copy of "Content Marketing Trends from the small and medium-sized business perspective" at http://partner.ascend2.com/allegra-content-marketing-smbs/
The report allows and encourages sharing and commentary on their findings, which I will take advantage of. All charts and statistics presented here come from the Allegra and Ascend2 report. Interpretations and commentary is my own. I am cherry-picking just a few of the reported statistics.
The first chart shows responses to a question about the most important objectives of a content marketing strategy. It's a little frustrating to interpret, as there is no indication of whether participants could select as many as they wanted, one only, or some limited number of choices. But note the wide range of goals that are assigned to content marketing campaigns:
In my mind, Content Marketing should be separate from Lead Generation. They are both examples of overall Demand Generation, and should ultimately result in increased business for your organization. But Lead Generation is a very specific activity with a very specific goal and quantifiable measurement. Content Marketing includes those soft and fuzzy items such as brand awareness, customer retention, search engine placement, goodwill, and much more.
It's not just a question of terminology… If you aren't specific in defining objectives and measurements of success, it is hard to create meaningful content that accomplishes your business goals. You end up with muddled messaging and too many calls to action targeted at different population segments.
I suspect that is the reason for the next chart. When asked what types of content are most effective, webinars were ranked depressingly low:
But wait… It gets worse! Participants were also asked to rate difficulty in creating content. Webinars were again among the most negative rankings:
So webinars are difficult to create and are not effective. What's going on here? let's take a look at two more charts to see where the results came from. First we have a demographic breakdown identifying who took part in the survey:
Mostly from companies of fewer than 50 people and mostly from high level executives. Now let's see what they identified as the biggest obstacles to their Content Marketing efforts:
Hmmm… Small companies lack people with the bandwidth and skills needed to create quality content, they can't throw money at their problems, and they don't have effective Content Marketing strategies. Yes, that is going to create problems! It also helps us understand why the effectiveness rating is so far below similar studies by the Content Marketing Institute that included larger firms:
Larger budgets, larger dedicated marketing groups and content creators, and more established marketing strategies seem to help produce better results from Content Marketing webinars.
Is there any solution for small companies? Should they just give up on webinars as not worth the effort? I think there are ways to improve performance and make webinars a worthwhile and useful part of Content Marketing for these firms. But you'll have to come back tomorrow for that.
