More than 82% of Australian businesses are using content marketing but only 49% of marketers have a clear idea about what success in the area looks like.
These numbers come from the latest Content Marketing in Australia report by the Content Marketing Institute in partnership with ADMA. Although businesses are piling into content, less than 10% surveyed said they would classify their efforts as sophisticated.
The largest proportion of businesses (28%) put themselves in the 'adolescent' bucket, which indicates their companies had developed a business case for content marketing, was seeing early success, as well as becoming more sophisticated with measurement and scaling. This was closely followed by 27% of businesses that classified their content marketing as either 'young' or 'mature'. Only 8% refereed to their operations as being top notch.
The report defines content marketing as 'a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, and drive action.'
When asked about what the main hindrance to content marketing was, 63% of respondents said not enough time was being dedicated to the practice, with 53% saying that content marketing isn't given a high enough priority.
The report also investigated the budgets that marketers are looking to pump into content in 2017. Despite the challenges, 47% of organisations are looking to increase their content marketing budgets, however, 42% are looking to keep their budget the same. Only 3% of respondents are looking to decrease content budgets next year.
On average, 30% of marketing budgets are spent on content. However, a third of respondents' businesses only spent between 1-9% of their marketing budget.
The study polled 2,562 recipients from around the globe, representing a full range of industries, functional areas and company sizes. For the Australian portion of the report, findings from 119 respondents were used.
Read a copy of the report for yourself here.
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