9 Stats That Will Make You Want to Invest in Content Marketing

Pit content marketing against paid search, and content marketing gets three times the leads per dollar spent. These ads are served to consumers whether they want to see them or not. If you’re like The Little Mermaid and want to be where the people are, your brand marketing needs to be online. Content marketing. It’s content marketing. In fact, it has six times the power of traditional marketing for converting people into leads and leads into customers. Populating websites with blog content is how you end up with 434% more search engine-indexed pages than other business sites that don’t publish content. The result of content creation: You have lots of little pathways sprinkled over the internet that lead back to your site. One more time for the people in the back: Content marketing, content creation, and blogging lead to leads. Best of all, it works, as these nine statistics prove beyond a doubt.

Author: Julia McCoy / Source: Content Marketing Institute

Editor’s note: Because proving the value of content marketing continues to be necessary, Julia McCoy updated her 2016 post with some fresh stats and perspective.

Content marketing has been moving at the speed of light in recent years.

Why?

Consumers are fed up with in-your-face advertising and sales tactics that feel cheap, slimy, or underhanded. Instead, they’re attracted to authenticity, transparency, and friendliness in a brand.

The advent of the internet and social media has a lot to do with this. These channels help consumers pick and choose exactly which brands they interact with. If people don’t want to see your ads, they’ll click away – it’s as simple as that.

As such, marketers have discovered that they need to approach the consumer differently. We can’t serve up the same old ads anymore and expect results similar to 30 or 40 years ago. Instead, we must add value to consumers’ lives to make them want to give us the time of day.

Hence, the fundamentals behind content marketing – relationship-building, focusing on the customer versus the brand – were born in response.

This approach – oh boy, does it work.

For some excellent proof, let these nine statistics do the rest of the talking. They really do speak for themselves. Prepare to persuade.

1. Pit content marketing against paid search, and content marketing gets three times the leads per dollar spent.

Paid search has been touted as the be-all, end-all for cost-effectiveness. However, a recent study by Kapost (in collaboration with Eloqua) proves the opposite.

When the two are pitted against each other, content marketing has both lower up-front costs and deeper long-term benefits.

As time goes on, content marketing builds its own momentum – no extra dollars required. Meanwhile, paid search needs a continual cash flow to keep getting results.

2. Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less.

That’s right. Content marketing is not only cheaper than outbound marketing; it also generates more leads.

Outbound marketing is the old way of doing business. Outbound marketing consists mainly of promotional messages that try to tell consumers how great a brand, product, or service is. These ads are served to consumers whether they want to see them or not. These ads are pushy, interruptive, and intrusive.

Turns out, people today generally don’t respond to this type of product-pushing. That’s because there are other ways to engage with brands – better ways (*cough* content marketing *cough*).