The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is affecting all aspects of our lives. Private and professional. It is also changing our working world, marketing and sales in the long term. We took this as an opportunity to conduct a large-scale survey among marketers from a wide range of sectors.
{{divider}}
Information on the groups surveyed
More than 240 marketing managers from in-house marketing teams, freelance marketers and marketing agency employees took part.
Larger teams of up to 10 employees made up 18% of our respondents. More than half of all participants work in marketing management, with different specializations. Around 14% were marketers in a managerial role and 14% were self-employed.
The vast majority (40%) work in small teams with a maximum of 3 colleagues. Almost the same number (approx. 20%) are either solely responsible for marketing or work together with up to five employees.
{{divider}}
The challenge of the century - How is Covid-19 affecting content marketing?
We asked them all what impact Covid-19 has had on their work in digital marketing.
While around 64% of all respondents stated that there was an increased or even greatly increased need for digital content marketing measures due to coronavirus, only 4.5% stated that this had decreased.
Even in direct comparison with other internal marketing measures, an overwhelming majority (almost 83%) rated their content marketing activities as at least equally important (42.9%), if not more important (25.6%) or significantly more important (14.3%).
The participants are mainly inspired by the big names: brands such as Red Bull, Coca Cola and Hubspot were mentioned remarkably frequently in connection with successful content marketing.
{{divider}}
Objectives and challenges in content marketing
While almost two thirds of marketing managers have identified an increased need for digital measures as a result of coronavirus, the goals and challenges vary more significantly.
More leads, sales and traffic? - Challenges in detail
Just over a third of respondents (35.3%) stated that they use content marketing with the aim of generating leads and improving sales.
Around a quarter (25.3%) would primarily like to increase the traffic rate and 21.2% stated that they wanted to improve their standing with the target group with digital marketing.
You would think that with monthly budgets of between EUR 1,000 and EUR 25,000, over 50 percent of respondents would be able to achieve these goals.
However, coronavirus is not only presenting marketing departments in the DACH region with financial challenges.
For example, participants in our survey stated that the current, constantly changing situation makes it difficult to make forecasts. Others are confronted with the difficulty of bringing variety into coronavirus-heavy communication.
"We have practically the same problems as before the pandemic"
In a large number of marketing departments, fundamental problems seem to have intensified. A large proportion of the responses give the impression that it seems to have become even more difficult to communicate the purpose and goal of content marketing, to break up entrenched corporate structures and to encourage bosses and clients to be more courageous and creative in digital marketing due to and during coronavirus.
The answers were similar when we asked about possible solutions to help overcome these challenges.
It was almost unanimously agreed that cross-departmental cooperation, communication and transparency would be one of the keys to success.
The desire for more budget-oriented solutions, such as the expansion of the team or more funds and resources to be able to use software for process optimization and automation, also ranked highly.
According to over 50% of respondents, the reason why this is not possible is that too few resources are provided or available for content production. According to almost 50% of marketers, most of the time and the majority of the budget is spent on creating content.
Almost 29%, on the other hand, lack opportunities, and more than 25% find it the most difficult to prove ROI. This is also reflected in the satisfaction with the ROI generated to date: only 56% answered the question at all and only 23.5% were really satisfied with the values achieved.
Other challenges faced by the marketers in our study are building reach (20.6%) and regularity (18.5%).
For 35.7%, the biggest problem with content marketing still lies in the phases before creation. For example, brainstorming, editorial planning and process and content optimization.
{{divider}}
Planning and the future of digital marketing
Nevertheless, 40% of our respondents feel they are very well equipped to meet the challenges of content marketing and are already planning their next steps. For 64.4% of marketers, these mainly consist of setting up improved processes. A third (33.9%) will in future focus primarily on their own expertise in order to better understand content marketing. Only 1.7% stated that they would outsource their content marketing. This is despite the fact that almost half of all respondents (46%) stated that it was difficult or very difficult to find qualified new employees in the field of content marketing.
The prioritized formats that respondents would like to focus on more in the future include video content in particular. 56.2% stated that they particularly want to push this content format in 2021. However, a quarter of respondents want to develop and expand text content and only 3.4% will focus on audio content.
{{divider}}
Status quo of content marketing measures
60.1% of all participants say they attach great importance to search engine optimization. Given that for almost 67%, their website or blog (57.1%) is one of the main distribution channels for their content, this emphasis on SEO is only logical.
Only just under 38% of our respondents use software for content operations. The most important thing for them was that the software covers all phases of the marketing process and is designed to be as intuitive, simple and clear as possible. SEMrush and Hubspot were among the most frequently mentioned tools.
