OK. Content marketing is popular. Lots of businesses use it, and they’ve used it for hundreds of years.
But is content marketing right for your business?
Just because content marketing worked for early adopters, that doesn’t mean it’s going to work for your modern-day business. And just because massive B2B and B2C businesses use it today also, that doesn’t mean that it’s right for you.
To find out, let’s take a look at some recent and relevant content marketing data.
In the end, we’ll try to answer the question two questions: Is content marketing right for you? And should you invest bandwidth and budget into it?
Let’s start with the fact that the top priority for B2C content creators is to create more engaging content. Next in line is a desire to understand what kind of content is effective and what isn’t.
We must now ask ourselves why those are the top priorities.
Why do people want to create more engaging content, and why do they want to understand what kind of content is effective?
Most likely, it’s because these companies aren’t totally satisfied with their current content marketing efforts.
They probably feel that they are doing OK, but they also feel that they could do better.
And our suspicions are confirmed when you find out that 70% of B2B content marketers struggle to keep up with content quality and quantity.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that content marketing is wrong for your business.
In fact, it probably just points to the fact that content marketing is incredibly competitive today.
People are trying to create more and more content every year because great, mediocre, and terrible blog posts, videos, and infographics are increasingly cluttering the online environment.
You could use that clutter as an excuse to not create content for your business.
Or, you could take it as a sign that content marketing is well worth your time. You’ll just have to invest more energy into it to stand apart from the crowd.
So the answer is still unclear.
But remember this: Even though a lot of businesses are struggling with their content creation, many also understand the current power of their strategies.
After all, just because those businesses are dissatisfied, it doesn’t mean that their content marketing efforts are falling dead.
It might just mean that those businesses have extraordinarily high standards for success.
In truth, paid advertising — sort of the antithesis of content marketing — is the most overrated tactic in the marketing world while blogging, SEO, and even social media are far less overrated.
And to further prove that content marketing is working for many businesses, consider that SEO and blog creation are the top two inbound marketing priorities for marketers.
Yes, the content marketing world is more competitive than it has ever been before. Every time you Google something, millions and millions of results present themselves.
And yet, you only see the top ten.
That means that searches are only seeing a few people for that keyword.
You, of course, get to decide if content marketing is a fit for your business.
But I hope you’ll see here that it’s a fit for almost every business.
Whether you’re a tractor company, a coffee house, or a blender manufacturer, there’s a content marketing strategy that can benefit your ROI.
But how can you stand above all of the online noise?
That’s what we’re going to talk about next.