10 Content Marketing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know in 2021 [Infographic]

You’ve got your ecommerce store all set up and you’re ready to launch. Once it goes live, the key lies in getting consumers to visit your store. 

The fundamental question here is: How? 

To quote Bill Gates, “Content is king.”

One of the most effective ways to increase website traffic is with content marketing. Doing it right requires, first and foremost, understanding aspects of it like what sort of goals to set, what metrics to look at when measuring content marketing’s effectiveness, and more.

In this article, we’ll dive into ten content marketing statistics that will show you not only the importance of content marketing but also some of its best practices so you know just how to craft the content marketing strategy that best suits your business.

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1. Content Marketing Effectiveness

The first content marketing statistic we have for you will aim to answer the basic question, “Why is content marketing important?” 

The best way to explain the importance of content marketing is to look at its success rate. As many as 96 percent of all marketing decision-makers today say content marketing has been effective for their brand (Zazzle Media, 2019). That’s an increase of 37 percentage points increase from the 70 percent who said so in 2017. 

In fact, nearly one in five of them describes content marketing as “extremely effective.” 

This is so much so that content marketing is increasingly being integrated into brands’ overall business goals, with 89 percent of marketers saying that it now forms part of their company’s wider objectives. 

When it comes to the types of content marketing that are commonly used, written content is still by far marketers’ favorite. A whopping 98 percent of marketers use written content as part of their content marketing strategy. This is followed by email marketing with 82 percent and organic social with 78 percent.

2. Measuring Content Marketing

Though the above statistic proves that content marketing is effective, it doesn’t mean you should start churning out content after content with no overview of its results. There needs to be a strategy in place, and a big part of that is success measurement.

The latest content marketing statistics show that three in four marketers (76 percent) use organic traffic to measure their content’s success (SEMrush, 2020). This refers to users arriving at a website through non-paid means after having come across content by conducting an online search. 

This is the most popular way of measuring content marketing success, followed by leads, with 62 percent of marketers listing it as a metric to measure how well their content has performed.

Sessions and pageviews, conversion rate, and time on page make up the five most popular metrics with 60 percent, 47 percent, and 39 percent respectively.

3. Most Achieved Content Marketing Goal

No content marketing strategy is complete without setting goals and objectives. 

According to a recent survey, in 2019, 86 percent of marketers said they were able to successfully reach their brand awareness-related goals with content marketing (Content Marketing Institute, 2019). 

Not only does that make it the most achieved goal through content marketing, but its attainment rate is also on the rise as this marks a five percentage point year-over-year increase.

Other goals marketers have reached with the use of content marketing include the ability to educate their audiences, with 79 percent of marketers having achieved it, followed by building brand credibility and trust (75 percent), and generate demand and leads (70 percent).

With the increasing number of marketers reporting successful goal attainments for these metrics, it’s clear that content marketing is an essential strategy to grow your dropshipping business. 

4. Active Investment in Content Marketing

With such a high rate of success with goal attainment through content marketing, it should come as no surprise that as many as 70 percent of marketers are investing in content marketing actively (HubSpot, 2020).

But not all types of content marketing are made equally, and costs can vary across the different methods. Video marketing, for instance, can be particularly expensive, especially if it is done with proper professional equipment and quality footage and editing. 

The costs of influencer marketing can also fluctuate quite a bit depending on the industry or niche you’re in and the type of influencers you’re going for—whether it’s a high-profile influencer or a micro-influencer.

The amount of time, energy, and resources that you can spend on investing in content marketing will ultimately come down to your content marketing budget, which brings me to my next point.

5. Content Marketing Budget

Yes, content marketing is effective. But just how and in which areas do we see the biggest results?

According to the latest content marketing statistics, more than seven out of ten marketers (72 percent) say content marketing helps to boost engagement (OptinMonster, 2020). 

This refers to interactions users have with the content and can be anything from sharing, liking, and commenting on a social media post to clicking on a call-to-action embedded on a landing page. 

As many marketers (72 percent) also say that content marketing is effective in increasing the number of leads. 

To quantify content marketing’s effectiveness, we need to understand its return on investment (ROI), which determines whether or not a particular action generates enough positive returns to justify its investment. The higher the ROI, the more worthwhile it is to continue producing the content. 

But this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Increasing ROI requires a solid content strategy, which brings us to our next statistic.

6. Content Marketing Strategy

Investing in content marketing is one thing, having a proper strategy for it to ensure business goals are met is another.

As we’ve seen from the previous content marketing stats, brands are dedicating resources to achieving their business goals through content marketing. However, not all of them have a strategy to guide them.

The latest figures show that just over three-quarters (77 percent) of companies say they have a content marketing strategy in place (SEMrush, 2020). 

Of them, a majority, or 52 percent of them, consider their strategy to be “good” or “excellent,” while 38 percent say it’s just average. The remaining ten percent rated their strategies as either “fair” or “poor.”

Crafting a successful content marketing strategy that works and meets objectives isn’t a straightforward process. It involves constant evaluation and fine-tuning to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the market,  your audience, and your business goals.

7. Consumers Expect Brands to Provide Content

Interestingly, 90 percent of consumers expect brands to provide content (Meaningful Brands, 2019). But while the demand is clearly there, getting your content to really resonate with consumers may prove challenging because more than half (58 percent) of online content is not considered to be meaningful.

Content marketing is certainly a competitive field. In order to get your content to stand out, you need to differentiate it from the content published by other brands and more importantly, your competitors. 

This is done by what expert Rand Fishkin calls “10x content”. Factors that need to be considered in crafting such content include whether it generates an emotional response, is unique, and includes exceptional information. 

As a matter of fact, a lot of what this essentially boils down to is the angle of your content and your ability to provide readers with a content experience that’s different from everything else that’s already been published.

8. User-Generated Content Is Important

One type of content that comes across as meaningful and valuable is user-generated content. It is one of the most effective forms of content marketing, with as many as 79 percent of people saying that it highly impacts their purchasing decisions (Stackla, 2019). 

In contrast, just 13 percent of them say branded content affects their decisions in the same manner, and the figure falls further to eight percent for content created by influencers. 

It can be argued that much of this comes down to the difference in perception of how authentic these types of content are. 

Compared to branded content, consumers are 2.4 times more likely to view user-generated content as authentic. In fact, this is a stark contrast with marketers’ own perspectives, who are two times more likely to view branded content as the more authentic one. 

9. Content Marketing Strategy: Paid Distribution Channels

When it comes to non-organic content marketing, social media advertising is by far the most popular paid strategy by B2B content marketers. As many as 84 percent of them have invested money in promoting and distributing their content on social media (Content Marketing Institute, 2020).

Of all the different social media sites, LinkedIn is the most popular paid social media platform, with 76 percent of marketers reported to have used it in the past 12 months. Facebook, the king of social media, comes in second with 66 percent. 

These two platforms are the clear leaders in paid social media by a big stretch. Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube were used by just 29 percent, 17 percent, and 11 percent of marketers respectively. 

The next most used paid distribution channels after social media advertising is sponsorships such as branding, booths, and workshops at 66 percent and Search Engine Marking (SEM) at 61 percent.

10. Outsourcing Content Marketing

A lot of time, energy, and effort go into doing content marketing well. Not only does that rely on the team itself and its available resources, but it’s also about how well integrated it is into the company. 

According to the latest content marketing statistics, more than half (52 percent) of organizations say they are served by a small content marketing team, which sometimes consists of just one person. A quarter of them have a team that works across departments, while six percent of them say they have a dedicated team for each brand, product, or department.

If your business is just starting out, you’re going to be pretty busy managing its different aspects and you may not have the resources to hire a full-time content marketer. One way around this is to outsource the work. 

Many companies certainly are. More than half of them have at least one content marketing task outsourced (Content Marketing Institute, 2020). The best part about outsourcing content marketing is that from creation to strategy and measurement to distribution, there are just so many different tasks that can be outsourced. 

That said, content creation is the activity that’s outsourced the most, with 84 percent of organizations saying they’ve hired external help for it. This is followed by content distribution with 31 percent, content technology with 22 percent, and content strategy and measurement at 13 percent each.

Conclusion

We hope these content marketing statistics have provided you with a clearer idea of the importance of content marketing and how it can help your ecommerce business. 

If you need more help with growing your business, head on over to our blog where we have plenty more insightful and articles about everything related to dropshipping. 

For those of you who already have a content marketing strategy in place, do share with us what’s worked and what hasn’t in the comments section. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Summary: Content Marketing Statistics

Here’s a summary of the Content Marketing statistics you need to know in 2021:

1. 96 percent of marketing decision makers say content marketing has been effective for their brand.
2. Three-quarters of marketers use organic traffic to measure content marketing success, the topic metric used.
3. 86 percent of marketers have successfully reached their brand awareness goals through content marketing.
4. Seven out of ten marketers are investing in content marketing actively.
5. On average, brands are spending 41 percent of their overall marketing budget on content.
6. Just over three-quarters of companies have a content marketing strategy in place.
7. Nine out of ten consumers expect brands to provide content.
8. Approximately 80 percent of consumers say user-generated content highly impacts their purchasing decisions.
9. 84 percent of content marketers engage in paid methods for content distribution. 
10. More than half of marketers outsource at least one content marketing activity, the most common being content creation.

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Is there anything else you’d like to know about content marketing statistics and wish was included in this article? Let us know in the comments below!