Content continues to reign supreme year after year. However, there’s much more to content marketing than publishing loads of content pieces for your business. Effective content marketing is not centered on running a content mill, but rather on deliberate, high-quality content that helps convert your content pieces into lead-generating assets that educate your audience and keeps them coming back for more.

Knowing why your content works will help you continue to create the best quality content for your business by replicating success and giving you visibility into what’s not working. From blog posts to videos and podcasts and everything in between, content marketers evolve year over year, creating the types of content consumers are looking for. Data is key to adapting and adjusting your content marketing strategy for success.

To get you started, we’ve compiled the top content marketing statistics of 2022.

How do you compare? Read on for a good benchmark of your content marketing efforts.

The State of Content Marketing

Content marketing effectiveness relies on adapting content strategies to meet the industry’s and consumers’ changing needs.

Here’s what the current landscape looks like:

  • 82% of marketers have a content marketing strategy (Hubspot)
  • 22% of businesses want to create original content  (The Manifest)
  • When it comes to content marketing usage, the majority of your audience is online with 85% of adults going online on a daily basis (Pew Research)
  • Content with more than 3000 words gets more reads than shorter content (SEMrush)
  • Well-written how-to guides can generate a click-through rate of 20 -30%  (Good Firms)
  • 60% of marketers say that content marketing helps generate leads (Content Marketing Institute)
  • 51% of companies that have invested in content marketing publish content daily (The Manifest)
  • The top goals in content marketing are to boost sales, increase brand awareness and build customer relationships (eMarketer)
  • 85% of consumers watch videos without sound and marketers should focus on creating interactive, live, and immersive videos, and providing captions to reach those viewers (DigiDay)
  • 69% of marketers invest in SEO (Hubspot)
  • Large businesses publish more frequently than small businesses (The Manifest)
  • 60% of companies use data in their content marketing strategy  (The Manifest)
  • 31.01% favor lists for high click-through rates (Good Firms)
  • 60% of searches came from mobile devices (Rellify)
  • 95% of marketers stated that key performance indicators (KPIs) should be tied to business goals to matter (Rock Content)
  • 92% of marketers have embraced account-based marketing (ABM) (Kentico)
  • 88% of marketers have generated brand awareness through content marketing  (Content Marketing Institute)
  • Augmented reality  (AR) is on the radar of marketers (Outgrow)

Top Content Marketing Challenges

The height of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation across all industries. Companies are still reeling from the effects, resulting in some of the top challenges we’ve seen this year:

  • Breaking through the clutter of digital marketing (Forbes)
  • Consistent, high-quality content is a key challenge  (Wordstream)
  • For 60% of marketers, generating content consistently is a top challenge (FT Longitude)
  • The shift toward paid promotion is changing the content landscape  (Digital Agency Network)
  • 58% of marketers don’t ask directly about their customer’s needs  (FT Longitude)
  • Content that does not drive conversions (Parse.ly)
  • 44% of marketers are struggling to measure return on investment (ROI) (Kentico)
  • Just 8% of marketers are able to attribute ROI to their content plan (Kentico)
  • A lack of time is a major barrier to content marketing (Wordstream)
  • Maintaining brand voice  (Marketing Insider Group)
  • Aligning content with customer personas and journeys (Digital Agency Network)
  • 49% of marketers don’t know how their content is actually performing (Parse.ly)
  • Alignment in digital strategy across various platforms  (Marketing Insider Group)
  • Promoting content effectively is a challenge for marketers (Forbes)
  • Measure the ROI of content marketing initiatives  (Digital Agency Network)
  • Not knowing the best channel to promote content  (Parse.ly)
  • Scaling content is a challenge because it involves hiring more people (Evolving Digital)
  • Proving authority and credibility (Marketing Insider Group)

Blog Content Statistics

Blogging continues to be a key strategy in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) content marketing. The top content marketing data pertaining to blogging that we’re seeing in 2022 include:

  • 48% of businesses with a content marketing strategy incorporate blogging as part of this strategy (Hubspot)
  • 80% of bloggers report that blogging delivers results(Orbit Media Studios)
  • Out of the 1.9 billion websites in the world, there are 600 million blog posts (Web Tribunal)
  • Bloggers are writing longer articles but are publishing less often  (Orbit Media Studios)
  • Long-form content averages 77.2% more links than short content (Backlinko)
  • Every day, more than 6 million blog posts go live  (Web Tribunal)
  • Those who use 10 or more images in each blog post reported strong results (Orbit Media Studios)
  • 56% of marketers consider blogging to be effective (Hubspot)
  • 97% of bloggers promote their content using social media (Statistica)
  • The global content marketing industry is expected to grow by $417.85 billion through 2025 (Report Linker)
  • 71% of bloggers update old content (Orbit Media Studios)
  • Titles with a word count between 6 and 13 words get the most traffic (Hubspot)
  • It takes bloggers an average of 4 hours and 10 minutes to write a post(Orbit Media)
  • The more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google (Ahrefs)
  • 73% of readers skim through blog posts (Hubspot)
  • 34.48% report an average click rate of 1 – 1.9% (Good Firms)
  • 68% of the online journey begins with a search engine (BrightEdge)
  • 69% of businesses publish blog posts (The Manifest)
  • The average blog post length is 1142 words (Orbit Media Studios)
  • 10% of marketers consider blogging to generate their largest return on investment  (Hubspot)

Podcast Content Statistics

Podcasts provide a new way of connecting with audiences and continue to be an important aspect of a leading content marketing strategy.

The popularity of podcasting continues to grow year over year:

  • Podcasts remain strong in content marketing with those in the United States tuning in to 15 billion hours of podcasts (Outgrow)
  • There are 383.7 million listeners worldwide (Demand Sage)
  • By the end of 2022, there will be 424 million podcast listeners  (Demand Sage)
  • Podcasting will be a $4 billion industry by 2024 (The Verge)
  • 162 million citizens in the United States have listened to podcasts and 41% listen every month (Demand Sage)
  • 8 podcasts are listened to on average each week (Influencer Marketing Hub)
  • The largest increase in podcast listeners is in the 12-34 age group (Edison Research)
  • 82% of marketers plan to invest the same or more in podcasts or other audio content types (Hubspot)
  • There are more podcast listeners in the United States than Netflix account holders (Edison Research)
  • The peak listening hours for podcasts are between 8:15 and 8:30 am, followed by 11:00 to 11:15 am and 5:30 pm (Influencer Marketing Hub)
  • 18% of US-based companies intend to incorporate podcasts into their marketing strategies (Hubspot)
  • Monthly podcast listeners grew to 125 million listeners, an increase of 6.1% (eMarketer)
  • 80% of consumers listen to all or most of each podcast episode (Podcast Insights)
  • 79% of podcast listeners tune in on their mobile phones(Influencer Marketing Hub)
  • Podcast ad spend is estimated to reach $1.74 billion this year (Statistica)

Video Content Statistics

People consume content in different ways. Some prefer to read a blog post while others may favor videos. To reach a larger audience, companies must provide content that appeals to these preferences.

Videos continue to be an effective content marketing asset:

  • 93% of marketers agree that video content converts better or the same as other types of content (Vidyard)
  • 70% of viewers purchased from a brand after viewing it on YouTube (Google)
  • 62% of video marketers say success is measured by the engagement (likes, comments and shares) of their videos(Wyzowl)
  • Business websites and social media channels are the most popular places to publish video content  (Vidyard)
  • 51% of B2B marketers state that webinars have delivered the most optimal results for them (Content Marketing Institute)
  • 92% of marketers consider video to be an important component of their content marketing plan (Wyzowl)
  • 72% of businesses publish video content (The Manifest)
  • 86% of marketers consider video to help generate leads  (Wyzowl)
  • 72% of consumers would prefer to watch a video than read a post (Rock Content)
  • 94% consider video to have increased understanding in service or product  (Wyzowl)
  • Articles that include video get 83% more traffic (SEMrush)
  • 55% of marketers create their own videos in-house (Wyzowl)
  • When it comes to organic traffic, YouTube is the second most visited website in the United States (Ahrefs)
  • 32% of video marketers use a combination of outsourced and in-house videos (Wyzowl)

Social Media Content Statistics

Social media continues to be one of the leading marketing channels, making it the ideal platform for promoting content. However, there are some tactics to keep in mind when creating social posts:

  • Headlines that ask a question receive 23.2% more shares on social media (Backlinko)
  •  When’s the best day to post on social? It doesn’t matter. Research shows that social shares are evenly distributed evenly regardless of which day it was posted (Backlinko)
  • By 2023 users aged 65 and over will outnumber the 18-24 age group (Insider Intelligence)
  • The best length for maximizing your social shares is 1,000 to 2,000 words (Backlinko)
  • 62% of companies use social listening as a social media marketing tactic (Hubspot)
  • The average consumer bounces between 7 different social media platforms each month (Sprout Social)
  • Facebook is the platform used most by marketers worldwide (Statistica)
  • TikTok and Reddit are the two social platforms that are growing the most. TikTok users will reach 78.7 million and Reddit will reach 43.3 million (Insider Intelligence)
  • Facebook Messenger is expected to reach 3 billion users (Statistica)
  • Instagram dominates engagement in social streaming services with 81% engagement versus Facebook’s at 8% (Sprout Social)

Key Content Marketing Takeaways

The format in which content marketers promote content continues to play an important role and has evolved. Video use is growing and where we use to see large quantities of content, it’s now more about the quality.

Content marketers can incorporate these ideas into their strategy as we head into 2023 and continue to nurture their content marketing efforts. Success in content marketing will demand marketers to evolve and create a multifaceted strategy, consisting of long-form content, video, and the use of the most effective social media channels to promote these efforts.

Need help with your content marketing strategy? Learn how ClearVoice can help you create a powerful content plan.