Content Marketing in 2018 – How to Get an Edge

Updated January 7, 2023

Everybody’s Writing

Generally in marketing when everybody is doing one thing, you should be doing something else. But in the case of content marketing, you don’t really have a choice of opting in or opting out. So let’s take a look at the content marketing trends in 2018 and see what opportunities are being missed.

Content Marketing Trends

Let’s take a look at where content marketing is headed by looking at some statistics:

• 91% of B2B marketers are now using content marketing and 86% of B2C marketers

But less than 40% of marketers have a content marketing strategy. This shows that plenty of content marketing efforts are misguided. Put simply, all marketers know they need to be creating content, but they don’t have a clear plan of what they want to achieve with that content. Without a plan, you can’t measure success, which explains why marketers, despite all claiming to create content regularly, are not very committed to content marketing and would consider stopping.

• 74% of B2B marketers find email marketing to be the most successful aspect of their content marketing

This shouldn’t be a huge surprise because email marketing is the part of content marketing that closest resembles traditional marketing techniques. From direct mail to early email marketing tactics (spamming), marketers have been writing copy for communications like email for generations.

• 46% of marketers in B2B and B2C say that their content marketing budget is going to remain the same in 2018 and 2017

Stagnation is the word that comes to mind. With marketers running out of new ideas when it comes to content creation, budgets will also falter. If you can’t think of anything exciting to show your bosses, it’s difficult to ask for more budget. Again, this presents an opportunity, because if your competition isn’t spending money on content marketing (with many considering to outsource it totally) there is a space opening up for quality, high value, content production.

• Over 40% of marketers are not measuring return on investment (ROI) for their content marketing

Again, this statistic tallies with the others. Budgets are understandably static if marketers aren’t even trying to measure the success of their content marketing. For a sensible marketer, this sets the bar pretty low. If you want to outperform your competition, simply looking at the statistics of which posts are getting the most traffic could be enough to get the edge.

Content Conclusions

So, in 2018 content marketing is almost universally used as a marketing tactic. But until more marketers decide to measure ROI and invest more into finding out how to make it work it doesn’t seem it will be a universally successful one. If you want to get one over on the neighbors you need to make sure you’re measuring what is working and then putting more money into it.