Whether you’re blogging to promote your own brand, the products sold by a business partner or affiliate offers, you’ll want to ensure that the work you do is effective at helping you reach your goals. One way of doing so is taking a look at data from recent statistics. Content marketing, just like any other digital marketing channel, changes rapidly.
10 Content marketing stats to make things easier on you
Techniques that you were using just a few months ago may no longer be effective. On the other hand, there could be some very valuable opportunities open to you if only you knew about them. Here are some of the latest content marketing stats and trends any blogger should know about.
Read: Developing a Content Marketing Strategy for Your Blog
1. 52% of marketers believe that blogging is their most important content marketing method
(source: Content marketing institute).
There are many reasons why blogging has been one of the most popular content marketing strategies for several years. It provides a platform to capture the attention of prospective buyers and educate them about a product or service you’re promoting. It also allows you to build valuable links and gain authority in the eyes of search engines.
The general layout and format of blogs makes them a perfect platform for anyone who wants to create educational material. A blog can also help a business make a closer connection to its audience by providing a way to collect email opt-ins and encouraging visitors to follow them on social media.
Read: How to start a blog (step by step)
2. Long-form blog posts are able to generate nine times more leads than short ones
(source: Curata).
As long-form content goes more in-depth on a topic, it’s better at keeping a reader’s attention. It also delivers a lot of value by offering useful educational content on a certain topic.
Visitors who find a blog’s content useful are more likely to keep exploring it, following links to the company’s main website and making an inquiry about their products or services.
3. The average length of blog posts has gone up to 1,142 words
(source: Orbitmedia).
This is an increase of 41% since 2014. When blogging first appeared on the Internet, a post of just over 500 words was more than enough to help you rank for a keyword. But the world of SEO has changed significantly since then. Getting on the first page of Google search results for any keyword is now a lot more difficult.
Search engines like Google and Bing now see a post’s word count as one of the most important indicators of quality.
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Longer posts receive more backlinks, partly due to their higher amounts of social engagement, like shares on social media and comments. In today’s highly competitive SEO environment, the best ranking blog posts are around 2,400 words in average length.
4. Less than 55% of old blog posts receive updates, even if they’re 74% more likely to get good results
(source: Orbitmedia).
If you publish posts that are getting you good results, such as opt-ins and leads, don’t hesitate to go back to them and add content updates or expand on them with new information whenever possible.
Search engines see new content as more useful and relevant than posts made several years ago. From a SEO standpoint, updating an old post can sometimes bring you the same results as creating a completely new one.
5. On average, each reader will spend only 37 seconds on a blog post
(source: Newscred).
With so much content out there, online attention spans have gotten shorter than ever before. This requires blog publishers to structure their content in a way that is easy to read and keeps the visitor focused.
There are various ways to achieve this, such as bolding subheaders, as well as placing the most important themes in bullet points to make them stand out from the rest of the text.
Read: 7 Tips to Speed up Your WordPress Blog
6. 30% of bloggers are now putting more than one image in their posts
(source: Orbitmedia).
A growing number of bloggers are using multiple images in their posts. Blogging has moved from being primarily a text-based communication method to the one that incorporates various multimedia elements, like images, animations and videos.
Multimedia content is particularly valuable when it comes to SEO. Bloggers including audio, mainly podcasts, in their posts, are more likely to see growth in their search engine rankings. Research conducted by Marketing Land also shows that having posts containing videos can increase a blog’s organic search traffic levels by 157%.
7. Blog posts are now taking an average of 3 hours and 20 minutes to create
(source: Orbitmedia).
Research by Orbit Media shows that the amount of time bloggers spent on each post has been growing steadily in the last couple of years. In 2014, the average blog posts took two and a half hours to put together. Their study also indicates that nearly 50 percent of bloggers who spent over six hours creating each article they publish report receiving “strong results” from them.
The increase in time spent on each post can be explained by the fact that blog posts are getting longer on average and that search engines are placing a greater emphasis on quality. This encourages bloggers to spend more time creating content that is genuinely valuable to their readers.
8. Individual bloggers are publishing just several posts per month now. In 2015, the average was 2 to 6 posts per week
(source: Orbitmedia).
A recent Orbit Media survey found that individual bloggers aren’t publishing articles as often as before. This doesn’t mean that blogging is losing steam. Simply put, they are creating longer posts and spending more time working on the content.
9. Businesses who make over 16 blog posts each month get 3.5 times more traffic compared to those who publish zero to four posts
(source: Hubspot Blog).
Businesses that publish quality content frequently on their blogs get the most benefits out of it in terms of website traffic and leads. While quality has gotten a lot more important lately, quantity still plays a role in the SEO benefits that a blog will bring.
For this reason, smaller and mid-sized businesses that can’t always afford a full team of in-house content creators are increasingly hiring freelancers to create articles for their blogs.
10. Social media is the most popular content promotion channel, being used by 95.9% of bloggers
(source: Orbitmedia).
SEO comes in second, at 64.1 percent, followed by email marketing, which is used by just over 58.2 percent of blog owners. Having quality content on a blog is important, but so is ensuring that it gets seen by as many people as possible.
There are now many ways for you to amplify the reach of your posts. Some digital marketing firms offer influencer promotion services, which get your posts promoted by people with a large following in your niche. This is a highly effective technique, as nearly half of bloggers who worked with influencers reported getting “strong” results.
Overall, bloggers are also satisfied with paid promotional channels, no matter what these are. Just three percent of bloggers who paid to have their blogs promoted reported being disappointed in the results.
If you’re using content marketing, especially blogging, it’s important that you stay on top of the latest trends and developments in the industry. This will help you save time and money by optimizing your blogging strategies so that they’re more likely to give you the results you wanted. You can use the data from the trends mentioned above to make more informed content marketing decisions.
