Parse.ly have released their findings in the 2022 Content Matters report.
The tech company, which provides analysis and content optimisation for online publishers, surveyed more than 800 online marketers and found a number of key areas to help better engage with customers and drive business outcomes from investments in content creation.
The report found that in 52% of companies creating more content than ever before, however, they are not producing as much as they would like to because of a lack of people who can produce the content.
It noted that such organisations are set to maintain or increase their budgets in the coming years to reflect the increase of the importance in marketing.
“The spending gap between people and technology is striking and speaks to the relative maturity of content marketing in comparison to other marketing disciplines. Clearly, to be effective, organisations must balance people, process, and technology,” the report said.
In another point, the report found content markets drive top-of-funnel activities and that brands and businesses are concerned with the initial connection with customers across an array of distribution channels.
While most favour channels they own such as websites and blogs, paid channels are still in the mix for more than half of those surveyed.
The report also discovered that top content marketers want to use video more because of the higher audience engagement that comes with the medium, but noted that they lacked the resources.
As the video quality and editing capabilities of smartphones and handheld devices continue to improve, the Parse.ly report noted content teams could create DIY marketing approach to video shoots and production.
It also noted that 49% of content marketers don’t know how their content is performing and risk wasting time for both the customer and creator with no reliable feedback – in contrast to 51% who track metrics and know their content performance.
The report found that “vanity metrics”, page views and email clicks, did not offer much analysis of content performance and don’t tell a customer’s lifecycle journey.
“Clearly, legacy analytics tools haven’t caught up with the modern content marketing approaches companies now favor… It’s time to move beyond content strategy decisions arrived at by holding a finger to the wind,” the report said.
Finally, the Parse.ly report noted that tracking revenue back to content is difficult. While there is analytics, marketers rely on guesswork and gut feel as content marketing has not reach the same maturity as tradition forms.
“Most organisations don’t have specific revenue goals tied to content. Not only are many content marketing teams struggling to measure the results of their content, they aren’t planning with results in mind either. While many organisations haven’t tied their content to revenue, for those that do, the need to use content to drive revenue is ever increasing,” the report said.