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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 vision and strategy.
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
Mobile accounts for more than 50% of all opens, and mobile users check email 3x more often than desktop users. — Campaign Monitor
Source: Mobile Fact Sheet
The average person receives over 140 emails per day—one every three and a half minutes. — The Radicati Group
74% of U.S. adults who use Facebook say they visit it at least once a day. — Pew Research Center
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
U.S. consumers now spend more time with their mobile devices than they do watching TV. The average adult spends three hours on a smartphone each day. — eMarketer
Source: Mobile Fact Sheet
51% of Americans 12+ have ever listened to a podcast, with 32% reporting listening in the past month, and 22% in the past week. Podcasting’s “Share of Ear” has more than doubled in five years, increasing 122% since 2014. All key demographics grew, but much of the increase in podcasting has come from Americans age 12-24. — Edison Research
Data-driven content builds your brand credibility and drives more web traffic and social shares than other types of content. — Buzzsumo
Source: The 7 Key Skills You Need to Build a Powerhouse Content Marketing Team
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: McKinsey Quarterly, The drumbeat of digital: How winning teams play
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
The most common places an association content strategy practice starts is in the marketing (27%), education or professional development (18%), or communications (14%) department. — Association Content Strategies for a Changing World
Source: How to Improve Your Content Strategy Maturity, Part 1
“As design teams grow and begin creating, launching, and re-creating, they need documentation to guide everyone along to make consistent experiences. Design systems or pattern libraries are often the answer. But research shows that only about 30% of design systems include guidelines for content such as voice and tone.” – Michael Haggerty-Villa, Intuit Principal Content Designer and Strategist
“Effective content starts not with strategy but with a vision that is clear, ambitious, and unique.” – Colleen Jones, Founder of Content Science
Source: The Content Advantage
Global leadership advisory and search firm Russell Reynolds Associates has identified more than 60 content executives within leading non-media organizations; about 50% of them were hired in just the past two years. — Russell Reynolds Associates
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
Only 35% of content teams say they have evaluated the ROI of their content. — Content Science
Source: The Content Advantage
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 EFFECTIVENES
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
“Last year [2018] Google added a Topic Layer to its Knowledge Graph.
Topic is the new keyword.” – Jeff Coyle, MarketMuse
The average email open rate across all industries is 21.33%. — Mailchimp
Source: Email Marketing Benchmarks, 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
“Content marketing as an industry is growing at lightning speed, and it’s creating lots of opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors. Just look at the rise of companies like Kapost (content operations workflow management), BuzzSumo (content curation and analytics), and ClearVoice (a content creation and marketing platform).” – Colleen Jones, Founder of Content Science
Source: What Is Content Marketing?
The platforms many marketers use to build their messaging campaigns haven’t evolved to meet the standards of the new multiple-channel world. 57 percent of enterprise marketers have to build each channel in its own UI and 74 percent said their cross-channel teams are all or mostly siloed. — MessageGears
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
Just 18 percent of marketers are currently using AI in their martech stack. — Demandbase
Over 80 percent of CEOs consider artificial intelligence and machine learning either “very important” or “extremely important” to the future of the company—a huge increase from 54 percent in 2016. — Colleen Jones, Founder of Content Science
Source: The Content Advantage
“The use of analytics to inform the creation of a personalized or bespoke experience is something myself and my design teams have pursued in the past—now, because of GDPR, CCPA and other regulations, I have to be mindful about how I use data and for what purpose.” – Joe Dickerson, UX Leader with Microsoft, Deluxe Corporation, Fiserv
Source: The Future of Content Experience
“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
34 percent of enterprise marketers have moderate to significant difficulties personalizing messages across email, push, and SMS. — MessageGears
“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
“‘Hyperautomation’ combines machine learning (ML), packaged software, and automation tools to deliver work. For UX teams, hyperautomation means more opportunities to leverage cross-platform solutions such as cloud computing and localized hardware to envision and design ‘end-to-end’ automated experiences.” – Joe Dickerson, UX Leader with Microsoft, Deluxe Corporation, Fiserv
Source: The Future of Content Experience
“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
