A recent post on http://searchengineland.com/survey-43-percent-marketers-say-75-percent-content-not-consumed-277626 mentions:
A new survey from BrightEdge on the future of content and search marketing exposes some interesting contradictions between what enterprise marketers think and what they do. Conducted earlier this year, the survey received 252 responses from “digital marketers at Fortune 500 brands that represent a split of B2B and B2C.”
From a content marketing perspective, the top categories these marketers were focused on were:
- Blogging — 69 percent
- Social media — 62 percent
- Video — 45 percent
- Infographics — 30 percent
The metrics being used to determine the success of content marketing efforts were:
- Conversion
- Engagement
- Traffic
Another interesting finding is that roughly 70 percent of respondents said that 50 percent or less of their content was being used or consumed by the intended audience. And 43 percent said that 75 percent of their content was NOT being consumed.
The overall picture that emerges from the survey is one of inefficiency and misalignment between where enterprise marketers think the audiences are going and what they’re doing to reach them. Furthermore, they’re pouring resources into content that they believe is not being seen or read by its intended audience.
My Views On This Survey Results:
I think, more than reflecting the inefficiency the results, reflect the need to pour more resources into content or at least continue with the resources already allocated for content.
Whatever the platform social or search you cannot achieve anything without content. The need to publish content or invest in content marketing as it called is the only way to get correlated to the topics, products, services, etc. for which you want to establish a web presence.
Whether it is the owned, earned or the paid platform we need content. Again, the content can be all formats images, text, videos, podcasts, etc.
As and when you publish content and share it on various platforms the outreach increases in direct proportion to the quality of content. This needs to be done on a continuous basis. If you stop publishing content, then the outreach may remain stable or may decline. This signifies no growth.
If we go by the fact that 75% of content is NOT being consumed:
If we publish 100 posts then only 25 of them are being read. If we get dejected by these results and decrease the no. of posts or stop publishing content, then there is an adverse effect on growth. If instead of 100 posts, we reduce the posts to 50 then we can assume that only 12 to 13 posts are being read.
By reducing the content marketing budget, we are even reducing our engagement, outreach and search presence and thereby traffic.
If we want to increase the content consumption, then we need to invest further in content marketing. Instead if we increase the posts from 100 to 200 and, also improve the quality of content, then we can expect 50 posts to be read. (Keeping the same percentage for consumption – 25% though this can improve marginally if the quality standard is higher)
Though the percentage is the same but this increases the engagement, outreach and the presence. The search engines also give importance to quality content and the correlation to the topics you have published increases thereby improving the search presence. 50 posts read will also increase the shares and likes on social media which further has a positive effect of social signals on search presence.
Hence, please do not get dejected by this survey, this means that to increase and improve the engagement, outreach and search presence raise the quality of the content, also increase the quantity.
When you enter a store, out of 1000s of items in the store you may buy only one and walk out of the store that does not mean the store needs to reduce on the no. of items on display. You have to go on adding content to all the web presence identities your business has online. Some people may just read, some may share, some may comment, some may just move on without any engagement but it is surely to correlate that presence to that context. This in the long run has a positive impact on the search presence and in future you never know how this whole plethora of content will be organized, correlated, archived and used by the social and search companies. Hence, regarding content its always, “More The Merrier” – but of course it is all about quality and quantity.
Once, you establish an online authority presence in your industry then gradually that percentage of consumption will also gradually increase in the long run. The only thing needed is patience and the will to go on improving.
