Among the marketers we’ve surveyed across three continents, those based in the United Kingdom rate themselves highest in terms of content marketing effectiveness.
That’s one of the key findings included in Content Marketing in the UK: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends. This is our second annual UK report, produced in partnership with the UK Direct Marketing Association (DMA).
NEW VERSION OF THIS RESEARCH NOW AVAILABLE: Content Marketing in UK 2015: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends
For this report, we compared for-profit — both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) — marketers in the UK with their North American and Australian counterparts. Here are some of the key findings.
UK marketers are confident, but many lack a documented strategy
While UK marketers are, for the most part, confident in their abilities (with 48 percent rating themselves highly in terms of effectiveness, compared with 41 percent in North America and 33 percent in Australia), many lack a documented content marketing strategy (click to tweet); or if they have one, they are unaware of it. At first look, it would appear that fewer UK marketers have a strategy when compared with North American (43 percent) and Australian (52 percent) marketers; however the 10 percent of UK marketers who said they are “unsure” is the highest rate of uncertainty we saw around this question when we looked at the responses across all three continents.
UK marketers use more tactics, more frequently
UK marketers use an average of 14 content marketing tactics, compared with 13 for North American and Australian marketers. In addition, they use nearly all tactics shown in the chart below more frequently than North American and Australian marketers do. The three tactics UK marketers use most often are social media content (87 percent), blogs (86 percent), and articles on their websites (85 percent) (click to tweet). However, like their North American counterparts, UK marketers rate in-person events as the most effective tactic.
(If you are looking to get some ideas on how to be more effective with the tactics you use, check out CMI’s recently updated Content Marketing Playbook.)
Twitter is the social media platform they use most often
UK and North American marketers both use an average of six social media platforms to distribute content, compared with five for Australian marketers. Eighty-nine percent of UK marketers use Twitter most often, whereas 87 percent of North American marketers and 86 percent of Australian marketers use LinkedIn most often. However, like their North American and Australian counterparts, UK marketers rate LinkedIn highest in terms of effectiveness (click to tweet).
UK marketers allocate a higher percentage of their budget to content marketing
On average, UK marketers allocate 31 percent of their total marketing budget to content marketing, which is more than what North American (29 percent) and Australian (27 percent) marketers allocate (click to tweet). On the other hand, 69 percent of Australian marketers and 58 percent of North American marketers plan to increase content marketing spend over the next 12 months, compared with 56 percent of UK marketers.
UK marketers are fairly challenged in terms of producing enough content (46 percent) and producing engaging content (44 percent); however, they are less challenged with producing a variety of content when compared with their North American and Australian counterparts.
View the full report today to learn more about those challenges, as well as:
How much content UK marketers are producing now, compared with one year ago
What metrics they use to measure content marketing success
How they tailor content, and more
What are your thoughts or experiences with content marketing in the UK? Let us know in the comments below.
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