Only Twenty-Three Percent of B2C Marketers Are Successful at Tracking Content Marketing ROI

A new study from the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProf called B2C Content Marketing 2015: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America, sponsored by EnVeritas Group, shows that only 23% of B2C marketers are successful at tracking the ROI of their content marketing efforts.

What Are Successful Marketers Tracking?

The survey showed that the top metric that B2C marketers use to measure the ROI of their content marketing efforts is website traffic. Regardless of company size or effectiveness and whether or not the company has a documented strategy or not, measuring content’s ROI by tracking traffic proves most successful.

Fewer than 30% of B2C marketers said that they use the following metrics to measure ROI: Customer Renewal Rates (26%), Inbound Links (23%), Benchmark Lift of Company Awareness (23%), Benchmark Lift of Product/Service Awareness (21%), Sales Lead Quality (16%), Cost Savings(15%), and Sales Lead Quantity (15%).

What Percentage of Marketers Have a Content Marketing Strategy?

While study after study shows that marketers will invest more money in content marketing in 2015, only 27% of B2C marketers have written their strategy down, meaning that the majority of marketers do not document their strategies (as illustrated in the bar graph below).

The 50% of B2C marketers who say that their agreement regarding their content marketing strategy is expressed verbally are less likely to track ROI successfully than those B2C marketers who process and document their strategies. Of the B2C marketers with a documented content marketing strategy, 43% say they are successful at tracking ROI (compared with the 23% cited for the total sample).

How Is Content Distributed?

Despite all the negative press in 2014 about the decrease in organic reach on Facebook, Facebook remains the primary channel for content distribution by B2C marketers.

B2C marketers are now using an average of seven social media platforms to distribute content as opposed to last year when the average was six. All social media platforms have experienced some level of increase this year (except for LinkedIn, which has stayed the same). The biggest increase this year has been with Instagram (up 17 points) followed by Google+ (up 13 percentage points).

Conclusion

In conclusion, the data regarding B2C Marketers and their content marketing strategies demonstrate that successful B2C Marketers:

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Only Twenty-Three Percent of B2C Marketers Are Successful at Tracking Content Marketing ROI