However, one may point out that comparisons with the 2012 survey my IMN (the first in the series) is showing that the realisation that content marketing is important is fairly recent, even in the US, “31% of respondents have had a content strategy in place for more than a year, with 18% stating they put one in place within the last year and 33% working on implementing a strategy” … as stated above, all these content marketing programs are still fairly recent and there is still room for improvement, “67% of respondents use a newsletter to distribute content to their customers and prospects”.
This is namely true with regard to Germany Email List newsletters for which a great number of users are sending them once a year therefore showing little or no understanding of how the medium is used, “78% of respondents curate content; 48% having run into permissions / attribution issues during the process” … But 15% of respondents are worried that they could use copyrighted content on their own resources, 44% of respondents cited lead generation as the most important goal of content marketing programs; an increase from 16% last year.
Awareness is widespread now. Content marketers are no longer regarded as zombies… well… I have a few recent counter examples but they are not American. Increasing leads is clearly what makes corporations tick. Yet, my personal experience in that area shows that few are able to go beyond buzz words and stick to their guns. Lead generation is a difficult trade, it requires a lot of fine tuning, and stamina. A trial and error mentality must be adopted; typically something that large companies have trouble coping with long term thinking! image Blogs are still here in that picture but they are not alone and part of an ecosystem.