Well, it depends what you mean. It’s harder than ever to get cut through. It’s getting more costly. But the volumes just seem to be increasing.
So is it worth pursuing?
According to the Online Marketing Institute and Microsoft and Google it takes multiple touch points with a brand to convert a prospect into a customer. Google estimates the financial investment customer will engage with brand content online 8-9 times before making an investment decision. For the OMI, touches 1-5 are simply about building basic brand awareness. Conversion isn’t likely to happen until somewhere between touch 7 and 13. (And yet 89% of sales people give up on the opportunity around touch 4 – run out of outreach ideas perhaps?).
Profitwell’s research shows that content marketing as a customer acquisition channel is fast accelerating in cost and volume of output, even as engagement drops. Profitwell sees this as an indication of the maturity of content marketing. An analysis borne out by the Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 study into B2B content marketing. The CMI found that overall success with content marketing is similar to that reported for the last 3 years.
But even if customers are more difficult to reach, and the proliferation of content makes getting cut-through harder, content marketing is still driving business. Of respondents to the CMI 2020 study:
– 86% said content marketing creates brand awareness
– 70% found it generates demand
– 68% found it nurtures leads, and
– 53% found it generates sales
Which Content Types Are the Highest Performing at Each Funnel Stage?
Marketing teams now have a good understanding of creating content for different parts of the consumer purchasing journey. A recent Semrush study shed some light on the favourite content types in each stage:
- At the top of the funnel, ‘how-to-guides’ and ‘landing pages’ proved to be the best for generating traffic.
- Middle of the funnel content which works before for brining in leads are ‘how-to-guides’ and ‘product overviews’.
- Bottom of the funnel content which working best for driving payments are ‘product overviews’ and ‘customer reviews’.
So, one could form a hypothesis that ‘how-to guides’ are a proxy for ‘content marketing’. The next question is how is the demand for ‘how-to guides’ fairing. We ran a simple Google Trends analysis for ‘how to guides’ over the last five years (Google Trends does not permit punctuation in its search function) which revealed the following result:
To ascertain a trend, we used a 6 Degree (Order) Polynomial Trendline. The result is far from clear – it could be that we are now at a second peak of interest with the following few years heralding an era of disenchantment with content marketing and its favourite asset – the how to guide.
But can we say it is definitely in in decline? Well, no. It might be an ongoing and costly endeavour but it’s clear that content remains the fuel that drives the marketing engine. The tough message is, we just need to work harder at creating work that delivers.
