Measurement is critical to content marketing with dedicated spend set to grow over the next year, according to a new study by the Content Marketing Association.
73% of senior level marketers said measurement is very important to their content marketing strategy, with half of marketers currently spending 6-15% of their content marketing budget on measurement. Nearly half of the respondents (45%) are planning to increase this in the next year, with 56% already automatically offering it as part of their content marketing strategy, demonstrating its importance in the industry.
When it comes to metrics, 50% of marketers believe it is possible to accurately measure content marketing’s ROI, but over half of respondents (52%) are unsure whether a universal metric is achievable.
The results showed that action (44%) and interaction (41%) are seen as the most important short-term measures to gauge the effectiveness of content marketing – interestingly, 45% of respondents cited views as the least important. There is also a real appetite to expand the boundaries of content marketing measurement with 68% of respondents believing marketers should seek to measure emotional engagement.
When looking forward to the future of the industry, the report revealed that content marketers are concerned that budgets will move away from harder to measure channels if measurement is not sorted – nearly a third (29%) of marketers stated this.
Clare Hill, MD, CMA, said: “Measurement is central to the content marketing industry and this research proves how critical it is to senior marketers. It is great to see the industry joining together to address the key challenges, growing budgets to stay at the forefront of measurement and ROI.”
The report also looked closely at the much debated challenges that the industry faces. The top two challenges marketers in measuring content marketing cited as access to data (65%) and no one agreed system (57%), followed by accuracy (46%), Ineffective tools (45%) and time (43%).
The study, titled ‘The Effective Measurement Report’, was conducted with senior level marketers, including the CMA membership of over 40 companies, plus brands such as Sainsbury’s Bank, Barclays UK and British Gas and agencies such as iris, Ogilvy and McCann.