HubSpot’s Not Another State of Marketing Report (2020) was created by 60 people and was the result of a survey of about 3400 marketing leaders from 16 countries across the globe. And if this article is already starting to make you crave a yawn, then you’ll appreciate this super-quick summary for the attention-deprived below. It's great information for marketers who like information.
Content Marketing:
- 70% of marketers are investing in content marketing
- 60% of them consider it very or extremely important.
Most common content formats (in order):
- Video (Promotional Videos and Brand Storytelling are the most common types)Blogs
- eBooks
- Infographics
- Case Studies
* Other formats included white papers, checklists, and interviews.
Most common channels for content (in order):
- Facebook (showing the biggest ROI)
- Company Website
- YouTube (low ROI)
- Linkedin (low ROI)
Most common forms of content on social media
- Photo
- Video
- Text-based
- Influencer
- User Generated
- Partnership
Marketers see results from content marketing in:
- Sales
- Web Traffic
- Lead Gen
- SEO
Favorite performance metrics for content (in order)
- Site traffic
- Social media engagement
- Engagement Time (bounce rate)
- Email Engagement
- Email Subscribers
- Search Rankings
Paid Advertising:
- 68% also listed paid advertising as an important or very important part of their strategy.
- 33% of those use paid advertising to increase brand awareness.
- Facebook and Google Search provide the best ROI
Website Redesigns:
- 63% of marketers are investing in a website upgrade in 2020.
Email Marketing:
- Email marketing is third behind “website” and “social media” as a preferred channel for marketing.
- Roughly 80% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the past 12 months
- 35% of marketers are sending 3-5 emails to their customers every week.
Most popular email strategies (in order)
- Promotional offers
- Account sign-ups
- Editorial
- Behavioral
Best ways to improve email engagement (in order)
- Audience segmentation
- Improve the copy
- Personalization
- Improve the Design
- Frequency
SEO:
- Almost 64% of marketers invest in SEO
- About 55% of marketers consider search engine optimization either “very important” or “extremely important” to their overall marketing strategy
- Page speed optimization is the most popular tactic used to improve SEO
Bots:
- 45% of marketers are using chatbots on their websites
Other Notable Findings:
- Most are creating content for 3+ audience segments.
- 72% plan to invest in market research this year (surveys and interviews mostly)
- The most common customer marketing tactic is ‘creating exclusive content for customers.’
- 91% of marketers are ‘somewhat confident’ or ‘very confident’ that they’re investing in programs that influence revenue, and 75% of them track that metric closely.
My guess is that this was created prior to the coronavirus outbreak, so take everything with a few sacks of salt. That said, I do think it's useful to see where people's heads were just before the world changed forever.
