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50 Crucial Content Facts to Make Your Content Make a Difference Now
A collection of revealing content statistics and quotes to shape your content approach.
Content Consumption
The internet is now doubling in size every two years, resulting in 50-fold growth of content and data from 2011 to 2020. — The Content Advantage
Source: The Content Advantage
69% of adults in the U.S. use Facebook, 37% use Instagram, 28% use Pinterest, 27% use LinkedIn, and 22% use Twitter. — Pew Research Center
81% of American adults now own a smartphone of some kind, up from 35% in the spring of 2011. […] Roughly one in five adults are “smartphone-only” internet users, meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have traditional home broadband service. — Pew Research Center
Source: Mobile Fact Sheet
Forrester predicts marketing message volume will increase by 40% in 2021 as brands continue to compete to be top-of-mind to consumers amid a slow recovery from the pandemic. — Forrester
Source: Content Marketing Fact Sheet
Email open rates increased during the pandemic. In both March and April 2020, email opens were up 20% year-over-year. — Campaign Monitor
U.S. adults who use social networks have spent more time on these platforms in 2020, but eMarketer predicts this “pandemic boost” will start to fade in 2021. — eMarketer
Source: Social Media Fact Sheet
The majority of online video is now watched on a smartphone, and mobile is forecast to account for 72% of the growth in spending on online video advertising. — Forrester
Source: Mobile Fact Sheet
Nearly two in three American adults (64%) say fabricated news stories cause a lot of confusion when it comes to the basic facts of current news and events. — Pew Research Center
Source: Credibility + Trust Fact Sheet
75% of Americans age 12+ (approximately 212 million people) are now familiar with podcasting, up from 70% in 2019. And, 37% (104 million) listen monthly, up from 32% in 2019. — Edison Research
Source: Content Omniverse Fact Sheet
Around 4 million blogs get published every day. The average blog post is 1,269 words, up 57% since 2014 — Worldometer and Orbit Media Studios
Source: Content Marketing Fact Sheet
Content Operations
“If a company does not elevate content to a cohesive core competency, then the company is likely to suffer problems that make content ineffective and that make its operations inefficient at scale.” — Colleen Jones, Founder of Content Science
Source: The Content Advantage
44 percent of digital leaders collect and analyze customer data at least weekly to identify new ways of winning over buyers, compared with just 16 percent of laggards, which, on average, dig into customer data only monthly. — McKinsey
Source: The Content Future
Leaders who communicate a clear vision for content are 5 times more likely to report success than those who do not. — Content Operations + Leadership Benchmark Study
There are five levels of Content Operations:
1. Chaotic, 2. Piloting, 3. Scaling, 4. Sustaining, and 5. Thriving.
Content professionals are most likely to say their company is at level 3, Scaling—expanding formal content operations across business functions.
Only 5% indicated their content operations were Thriving—innovating and seeing true ROI.
— Content Science
“To scale operations for your content marketing program use data to optimize your content planning and production.” — Colleen Jones, Founder of Content Science
Source: Introduction to Content Marketing Course, LinkedIn Learning
Just 11% of marketing/content teams plan content campaigns based on organizational objectives and prioritize by those that fill strategic gaps. — Upland Kapost
Source: Content Marketing Fact Sheet
“The companies that are doing content strategy well are…interviewing the people who use the content. How are they consuming the content? Where are they consuming it? What things are most helpful? We pair that qualitative approach with a more quantitative approach of what’s getting the most traffic, those types of things.” – Eli Woolery, InVision Director of Design Stories
Source: Creating Content Designers Crave: Q&A with InVision’s Director of Design Stories
“Our content operations research has repeatedly found that content leaders and their teams face no shortage of challenges. A content playbook helps overcome most of the top challenges by bridging strategy and execution.” — Content Science Review
Source: What Is A Content Playbook?
“We expect that 2021 will bring with it a new customer experience leader on the executive team. This leader will be responsible for the voice of the company across all channels. The most successful companies will be the ones that can communicate with their consumers in a single voice across all channels.” — Christopher Willis, Chief Marketing Officer, Acrolinx
Source: Source: Content Predictions and Plans for 2021
Content Intelligence + Effectiveness
Only 32% of content teams regularly evaluate content effectiveness or impact. The most frequent reason why is vague goals. — Content Science
Source: Content Science, Content Operations + Leadership Study
“We find that when there isn’t a lot of thought to strategy…about 20% of content is having 80% of the results.” — Colleen Jones, Interview with MarketMuse
Not knowing whether your content is working for your customers or users brings real costs and risks to your business, including wasting money on content efforts because decisions are not guided by evidence. — Content Science
Source: Evaluating Content Effectiveness
Only 10 percent [of brands] are personalizing experiences using uniquely mobile data or features. — Forrester
Source: Mobile Fact Sheet
71.7% of people who said that content [in a digital experience] was not relevant indicated the content was too general. — ContentWRX
Source: The Content Advantage
“Channel analytics can give you more specific details than web analytics about who your [content] audience is. For example, Facebook Audience Manager and Twitter Audience Insights can tell you demographics, interests and more.” — Colleen Jones, Founder of Content Science
Source: Introduction to Content Marketing Course, LinkedIn Learning
Content professionals who reported the ability to evaluate content’s impact and the freedom to experiment with content options were significantly more likely to report content success. — Content Science
Source: Content Science, Content Operations + Leadership Benchmark Study
People who reported that content was easy to find were significantly more likely to report that it was accurate, relevant, and useful than were people who experienced difficulty (but eventually found the content they needed)—86.2% versus 39.4%. — ContentWRX
Source: The Content Advantage
Content Channels
45% of journalists believe that the way most companies share information with the media is still outdated. Lack of personalization is the top reason journalists say they reject otherwise relevant pitches. — Muck Rack
Source: The State of Journalism 2020
333,635,013,935 emails were sent by Mailchimp users in 2020. — Mailchimp
The global conversion rate—people who visit websites to convert (buy a product, for example)—still hovers around 2 to 4 percent. That rate range has not changed since 2003. — Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly Index
Source: The Content Advantage
Marketers who send fewer than three emails receive a reply rate of just nine percent. But if a marketer sends between four and seven emails, their reply rate jumps to 27 percent. — Woodpecker
51% of consumers are willing to use artificial/virtual reality (A/VR) technology to assess products. — Nielsen
Source: Content Technology Fact Sheet
By 2022, the influencer marketing industry could be worth up to $15 billion, up from as much as $8 billion in 2019. But, the Federal Trade Commission is concerned that “fake accounts, fake likes, fake followers, and fake reviews are now polluting the digital economy, making it difficult for families and small businesses looking for truthful information.” — Federal Trade Commission
Source: Credibility + Trust Fact Sheet
Mobile conversions increased from 39% in 2018 to 49% in 2019. But desktop users are still more likely to convert—desktop visitors convert 60% more than mobile visitors, and conversions from a desktop device are worth 93% more than mobile conversions. — AccuraCast
Seven out of 10 U.S. agency and marketing professionals advertise in influencer videos, and 43% expect to spend more on the format in 2019. — eMarketer
Multiple studies find digital, dynamic signage captures customer attention significantly more than static signage. And in one study, digital signage industry experts said they are most excited about video walls, interactive signage, and LED developments. — Samsung
Content Automation + Personalization
“AI is the only way we’re going to be able to deal with the fact that the demand for content is increasing exponentially. We’re going to have to automate the production of certain aspects of content.” — Noel McDonagh, Dell EMC
Source: The Content Advantage
Companies fully invested in online personalization will outsell companies that have not by more than 30%. — Gartner
Source: The Content Future
Creating personalized messages and experiences requires intimate knowledge of customer journeys, relevant content that drives action, and technology that helps deliver and measure experiences. Brands need to be extremely thoughtful in how they personalize their content today…focus on showing customers you can help them first. – Gartner, Rethinking Personalization for Maximum Impact
Source: The Content Future
Half of respondents in a 2020 McKinsey study say their organizations have adopted AI in at least one function. — McKinsey
73% of executives say their organizations have embarked on a path to intelligent automation, up 58% from 2019. Those organizations range from piloting, with 1 to 10 automations (37%), to scaling, with 51 or more automations (13%). — Deloitte
“When we engineered and architected GovHub, we kept content fluidity as a goal. Even though websites are our primary way of delivering information, we need to be future-ready. Now you don’t need a special Alexa skill to read georgia.gov content because Alexa or Google Home automatically reads information from georgia.gov or GovHub hosted websites. The way we changed and modified our content made it machine visible and readable.” — Nikhil Deshpande, Georgia’s Chief Digital Officer
Source: How Georgia’s Digital Office Overhauled Its Approach To Content Management
“Advanced personalization technology can enable you to offer content based on your customers’ behavior, their roles, their preferences, or a combination.” — Colleen Jones, Founder of Content Science
Source: Introduction to Content Marketing Course, LinkedIn Learning
Executives are most likely to say process fragmentation and a lack of IT readiness are the top barriers to scaling intelligent automation. — Deloitte
“Since launching [personalized content in the Weather Channel’s mobile app], we increased performance in double digits across all priority metrics, including visits per user, sponsorship traffic, total impressions, and retention.” — Lindsey Howard, The Weather Channel
Source: Forecasting What Mobile Users Want: A “Sunny Day” Strategy for any Type of Weather
54% of marketers report seeing a lift of more than 10% from their personalization efforts. 13% see a lift of more than 30%. — Evergage
“Marketing AI can take you a long way, but it’s up to humans to do the work of making the content, promoting it well, and connecting with an audience.” — Brandon Andersen, Ceralytics
Source: AI Is Not The Silver Bullet to Defeat Your Marketing Monsters
Most respondents at high performers say their organizations have increased investment in AI in each major business function in response to the pandemic, while less than 30 percent of other respondents say the same. — McKinsey
“I have no doubt technology will be able to do much more for content in the future. No matter what those [technology] capabilities are, companies that view content as a system will be better able to accommodate the machine capabilities and shift the roles of people to make the most of those capabilities.” — Colleen Jones, Founder of Content Science
Source: The Content Advantage
“Automation will in some ways make the lives of content professionals easier (push-button omnichannel content publication) but it could very well go wrong too (creepy chatbots replacing talented writers). Content professionals will need to focus where their true value is—as an article by McKinsey states, we need to ‘take the robot out of the human’, and work to be tech-savvy enough to make automation work for us, humans.” — Marie Girard, IBM cloud AI software
Get these facts on presentation-ready slides over at Content Science Review
