Newly released research from WordPress VIP provides an insightful overview on the state of content marketing, based on a survey of more than 1,500 marketers, journalists, developers, and executives across the globe in both B2B and B2C industries.
With online attention being harder than ever to catch—and retain—creating content that connects with audiences is the key to success. That means content marketing isn’t just a part of big-picture marketing strategy anymore—all marketing is content marketing, according to the firm’s Content Matters 2023 Report.
Over the past two years, there’s been an unprecedented surge in demand for more content at a faster pace
The inaugural Content Matters report last year found that 66 percent of marketers and content creators wanted to produce more content to keep up with already-high demand.
“Content marketing leaders, writers, and editorial teams crave credible information on delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time, in the most effective way, and then quantify results,” said Nick Gernert, WordPress VIP CEO, in a news release.
“Unfortunately, many lack easy-to-use tools and platforms; e.g., content analytics, to truly understand how their content is performing,” said Gernert. “That’s one of the biggest takeaways from our survey, again this year.”
High-level takeaways by category from the report:
- Resources: Teams and budgets are still growing despite economic uncertainty. In fact, 58 percent expect their content budgets to grow in 2023.
- Strategy: 61 percent are still creating more content, but focus is shifting to quality over quantity.
- Analytics: Measuring performance is key to proving the value of content, yet only 46 percent actually use data to make strategic decisions.
- Planning: The future of content is bright, but data is the spark.
“The most interesting part of this research to me is that more content is being produced overall, and yet the percentage of organizations creating more content dropped slightly,” said Robert Rose of The Content Marketing Institute, in the release. “When you couple this with the (still) low number of companies (46 percent) that use data for making decisions about content, you see that most companies are frustrated, trying to find purpose to the larger strategy. Content is important but is still not treated as a strategic operation.”
Download the full report here.
