Infographics: The Top UK Content Marketing Trends Of 2017

The latest content marketing research report revealed at the keynote address by the Content Marketing Institute highlighted the future trends content marketers in the UK will be utilising. Five main sections where highlighted in the report and the handy infographic produced by the team at Marketing Signals showcases each of these five key areas.

But what do the findings of the Content Marketing Institute’s latest report tell us about the UK’s content marketing trends for 2017? To find out let’s take a closer look at each key area.

Content Marketing Tool Usage

Any content manager or marketer will tell you there’s a range of tools available to monitor how effective content marketing is. But with such an abundance of tools available now finding the best way to monitor your marketing performance and find out how and who you should market you content to isn’t as simple as it might seem.

Unsurprisingly the marketers best friend analytics proved to be the most popular tool with 84% of UK marketers surveyed favouring analytic tools to market their content, with a dedicated email platform coming in second place with 73%. However while website traffic and social media sharing were found to be two of the most popular metrics for measuring marketing success, with 70 and 63% respectively only 49% of UK marketers surveyed utilised social media calendars.

Digital Assessment Management (DAM) systems also proved to be one of the least popular marketing tools with only 5% of UK marketers utilising them. Showing that despite the rising digital landscape and technological evolution of the past decade UK marketers still favour more traditional marketing tools like editorial calendars and brand style guides.

Techniques Used to Learn About Target Audience

Learning about your target audience is at the core of marketing but there’s many ways to learn about your audience so you can better market your content and rework your marketing strategy. The report shows that key word analysis, website analysis and social listening are the more popular techniques showing a strong preference for the more digital orientated methods.

Considering as we earlier mentioned that the majority of marketers consider website traffic to be one of the most important metrics to measure success this isn’t overly surprising. However more social techniques like customer feedback and employee feedback still proved to be popular with 41% and 39% respectively.

However expert advisory boards are one of the least used techniques with only 12% of today’s marketers using the technique. Showing that today’s marketer places a higher importance on the customer’s opinion rather the experts.

Infographics: The Top UK Content Marketing Trends Of 2017

Content Marketing Tactics

Digitally orientated content marketing techniques proved to be overwhelming popular and future trends show a big push towards such techniques across UK marketing. Blogs scored a huge 93% while social media content scored 80%. The popularity of more digital content marketing tactics is an interesting contrast when we consider that more traditional marketing tools where favoured over digital alternatives.

Online presentations were also found to be more popular than in-person events although both still scored well, with 64% and 55% respectively. But while certain digital tactics did prove to be popular this wasn’t universal. Virtual conferences and mobile apps for example where utilized by less than 10% of the marketers surveyed.

Channels Used to Distribute Content 

Social media sites come in many forms nowadays but certain sites are certainly more popular than others when it comes to disturbing content. The research shows that UK marketers prefer LinkedIn and Twitter (which both scored above 80%) to sites like Facebook and YouTube. This is interesting when we consider that Facebook and YouTube both have a bigger user base.

Showing that the number of active users isn’t the only metric to consider when distributing your content. Instagram for example only scored 20% despite having around 600 million active users and being one of the most popular social media sites for advertisers.

While email despite being one of the older digital distribution methods still maintained the top spot despite the rise in social media as well. So while social media is certainly important it isn’t the only distribution method you should focus on.

Paid Methods Used to Promote Content

The research revealed some interesting trends in how UK marketers utilize paid methods to promote their content. Social media focused methods such as social promotion was overwhelming the most popular method scoring 76%. While older digital methods proved to be less popular with only 33% of UK marketers using traditional banner ads to promote their content.

In contrast more traditional print methods where still found to have an audience with 50% of marketers surveyed saying they utilised print or other off line methods. Another interesting finding was that 21% of marketers surveyed didn’t use any kind of paid promotion in their content marketing at all.

What Does This Tell Us?

So what do these trends tell us? What do today’s entrepreneurs need to know to successfully market their content? The key trends show that digital methods and social media interaction are very important but they aren’t the only methods you should consider. More traditional or older fashioned techniques are still perfectly viable as well. So entrepreneurs need to be well versed in all areas of content marketing in order to ensure they create the best content they can and ensure it reaches their target audience.