Aussie and Kiwi businesses are planning to invest more time and resources to content marketing in the next financial year, report says
Video investment is on the rise and social media is in focus as A/NZ marketers ramp up their content strategies in the next financial year.
The latest Australia and New Zealand Content Marketing Survey released by Castleford revealed 97 per cent of respondents plan to maintain or increase the time and resources they commit to content marketing in the next financial year. Crucially, 64 per cent said they would be spending more, up from 47 per cent last year.
While paid promotion of content was the most popular emerging trend for 2015/16, social media topped the survey as the most popular marketing tactic, with 81 per cent of respondents using it. This was followed by press releases (64 per cent), video (61 per cent), blogging (59 per cent) and AdWords (59 per cent).
Guest blogging continued to decline with just 6 per cent using it compared to 11 per cent last year. Almost half of respondents said they were using five or more different online marketing channels as part of their overall strategy.
“A big change from last year was the number of respondents investing in video as part of their marketing activity,” Castleford’s commercial director, Kate Davidson, said. “Almost two-thirds are using video up from less than half a year ago. We’re certainly seeing more demand for video and it was one of the popular predictions for growth in our 2014 survey.”
The most significant hurdles to doing more content marketing remain time (45 per cent) and budget (29 per cent), which was broadly in line with last year's survey. This was followed by production expertise, understanding and success of other channels.
In contrast, only 3 per cent said lack of c-level buy in was the biggest barrier to content marketing, while overall c-level support for content marketing remained solid, with 76 per cent of respondents taking either a "quite positive" or "very positive" view on it.
"In my experience, content marketing is claiming an increasingly large share of overall marketing budgets, which is going to mean more pressure to show how it's benefiting the bottom line," Castleford director, Rob Cleave, said.
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The report also showed a significant drop in the number of businesses failing to properly measure their return on content marketing investment.
"I was particularly pleased to see a big drop in the proportion of respondents who said they didn't measure their return from content marketing. That's a clear signal that content marketing has moved off the periphery and into the mainstream," Cleave concluded.
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