The State Of Content Marketing in 2022

Happy New Year! It’s that time of year where we get to see a bunch of awesome marketing surveys and reports that companies such as HubSpot and the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) put out each year to let us get our finger on the pulse of the industry, what businesses did in 2021, and what their outlook is for 2022.

Here are some stats that stood out to me about content marketing:

• 82% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing (HubSpot)
• 81% of marketers view content as a core business strategy (CMI).
• The top three primary goals of creating content are boosting sales, building relationships with customers, and increasing brand awareness (eMarketer).
• Content marketing generates over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less (Demand Metric).
• 60% of marketers report that content marketing generates demand/leads. In addition, 70% of marketers say that content marketing helps to educate the audience, and 60% say that it helps build loyalty with existing clients/customers (CMI).
• Content creation is the most outsourced content marketing activity among B2B and B2C marketers (CMI).
• The top three organic content distribution channels used by B2C marketers are social media, email, and their organization’s blog/website (CMI).
• 51% of the businesses that invest in content marketing publish content every day (The Manifest).

Blogging stats:

• How-to articles are the most popular content formats (77%), followed by news and trends (49%), and guides and ebooks (47%) (Statista).
• Engagement starts to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes (Medium).

• Social media, keyword research, and blog analytics are the top three research methods bloggers use to decide what to write about (GrowthBadger)

Video stats:

• Video is the primary form of marketing media being created in 2021, followed by blogs (used by more than half of marketing teams) (HubSpot).
• 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. 91% of marketers feel the pandemic has made video more important for brands. 96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service. 85% of people want to see more videos from brands in 2021 (Wyzowl).
• 70% of viewers bought from a brand after seeing it on YouTube (Google).
• YouTube is the second-most visited website in the U.S. by organic traffic (Ahrefs).
• YouTube reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds in an average week than all cable TV networks combined (Google).
• Short-form content is the second most effective trend marketers are currently leveraging. 31% of global marketers currently invest in short-form video content, 46% of them consider the strategy effective when it comes to performance and engagement. In 2022, 89% of global marketers plan to continue investing in it or increase their investment (HubSpot).

Podcast stats:

• 57% of Americans listen to podcasts (Edison Research).
• 80% of podcast listeners listen to all or most of each episode (Podcast Insights).
• Weekly podcast listeners tune in to an average of eight podcasts per week (Edison Research).
• Each week in America, there are more podcast listeners than Netflix account holders (Edison Research).

Social media:

• 44% of global marketers plan to increase their investment in permanent (evergreen) social media content, while 8% say it generates the most ROI compared to other marketing strategies they leverage. 25% of respondents called ephemeral content (content that lasts <24 hours) the “least effective” trend they invested in (ie. ‘Stories’), and 37% of marketing professionals plan to decrease their investments in ephemeral social media content in 2022 (HubSpot).

Influencer Marketing:

• Hubspot asked global marketing professionals which trends they planned to invest in for 2022, and 34% said influencer marketing, putting it at the top of the list above other trends such as short-form video marketing. 
• 57% of marketing professionals that currently leverage influencer marketing say it’s effective, 46% of them plan to increase their investments in 2022. 11% say it’s the top ROI-generating trend they’ve tested.
• 56% of marketers who invest in influencer marketing work with micro-influencers (typically only thousands to tens of thousands of followers).

Inbound content marketing

• 27% of marketers say they will leverage Inbound Marketing for the first time in 2022 while 11% of marketers say it will be their biggest investment in the next year.
• Inbound marketing can be a valuable asset to create brand awareness and build trust digitally through refocusing strategy to drive customers to seek out your content.
• The “flywheel” — and a focus on customer service and providing value — have replaced the one-way direction of the funnel and lives at the center of many inbound marketing strategies.