According to the sixth annual Content Marketing in Australia: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, content marketing in Australia is on the rise.
The report, which was compiled by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) in collaboration with the Association for Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising (ADMA), has revealed that the amount of Australian content marketers focusing on building an audience through content is up 16 per cent on last year.
With 85 per cent of Australian organisations now using content marketing strategies to increase their brand awareness and drive ROI, it’s not surprising that the latest content marketing report has found that more and more businesses are experiencing successful content marketing outcomes.
Of the organisations surveyed, those who were the most committed to their content marketing strategies, whether handled in-house or outsourced, experienced the highest levels of success.
Results also found that less Australian content marketers are in the ‘first steps’ phase of their strategies (32 per cent), while more businesses felt they had progressed to the ‘adolescent’ content marketing phase (38 per cent). These results have shown improvement year on year.
It’s also worth noting that three out of five respondents (59 per cent) outsource at least one content marketing activity, while 41 per cent keep everything in-house.
Content creation (written content, design work, video production) is the most commonly outsourced activity (55 per cent), with content promotion and distribution coming in second at 28 per cent.
Of the companies surveyed, 66 per cent of them feel that their overall content marketing efforts have risen over the last 12 months, and 43 per cent described their efforts as extremely or very committed.
As a result, the bulk of Australian organisations are achieving success with their content marketing strategies.
Respondents attributed their increased levels of success to higher quality and more efficient content creation (75 per cent), strategy development (72 per cent), and making content marketing a higher priority (55 per cent). These areas are closely followed by content distribution and organisational changes, such as new content marketing roles or new management staff.
Email marketing, LinkedIn, and other forms of social media were the most successful content marketing platforms for respondents. A staggering 90 per cent of respondents were focusing their efforts on these areas, with research reports and interactive tools being the least popular forms of content marketing.
However, from concept through to the completion stage of any content marketing activities, there is still room for improvement, as more organisations rated this on the good to poor scale than they did on the very good to excellent scale.
To make the most of any content marketing strategy, it seems social media and email marketing are two of the biggest target areas for organisations, both of which are achieving the desired results.
* Data and images have been sourced from ‘Content Marketing in Australia: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends’.
