Content marketing goes untracked
Just one-fifth of companies are successfully tracking the return on investment of their content marketing strategy, a major new study has found.
The US-based Content Marketing Institute yesterday released its 2015 Australian Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report, its third annual look at the state of content marketing in the country based on a survey of 251 business-to-business and business-to-consumer groups.
Content marketing creates and distributes content, such as articles and videos, designed to attract and engage with a company's target audience, to create brand awareness and drive sales.
The report showed 33 per cent of marketers thought their companies were effective at content marketing, up from 29 per cent last year.
It showed 86 per cent of companies were using social media (other than blogs), 85 per cent were publishing articles on their website, 83 per cent were using e-newsletters, 72 per cent videos and 68 per cent blogs.
The report found 63 per cent of marketers planned to increase their content market budget next year, despite only 20 per cent understanding how their strategy is converting into sales.
Association for Data-Driven Marketing Australia chief executive Jodie Sangster said marketers needed to be able to demonstrate content marketing's value to management by proving "content's impact on the leads coming through the sales pipeline and the ability to convert to sales".
"Unfortunately, the CMI research shows that the number one metric organisations are using to assess success is website traffic, not impact on the bottom line," she said.
Ms Sangster said some companies were moving towards "sophisticated models that should go some way to addressing the problem".
Half of those surveyed say producing engaging content remains a challenge.
"Australian marketing teams still need to hire more trained content marketing professionals, like ex-journalists, who have the skills to produce compelling content," Ms Sangster said. "Ex-journalists need to learn marketing skills and marketers need to learn journalism skills to do content marketing well."
Head of content strategy at Lush Digital Media, Sarah Mitchell, said it was concerning that only 37 per cent of companies using content marketing actually had a documented strategy. Another 46 per cent had a strategy but had not written it down.
"Having (a written strategy) ensures consistency in your marketing," she said.
"Following the strategy is the only way you can measure effectiveness. If you're not going to measure, you can never be sure of whether your marketing is working or worth the investment."
Australia had moved past the "dip-a-toe-in-the-water" stage and content marketing was becoming "a full-blown discipline" in Australia.
"What's also apparent is we're in a creative phase of experimentation, embracing strategy but floundering on execution," she said.
