Hundreds of digital marketing experts descended on the Gannett & USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va. last week to connect and share best practices in cutting-edge digital marketing strategies.
The conference was Digital Summit DC (formerly “Digital East”). The key focus at this year’s conference was on “content marketing” — the constant production and promotion of branded media content that helps boost awareness and drive sales. With content marketing now well into its tenure as a hot topic, the focus at Digital Summit DC was on lessons learned — and on which companies and brands are doing it successfully, and how.
The statistics presented below speak for themselves, but five key themes running throughout are:
- “Inbound marketing” — attracting leads to come to you, rather than pursuing them through traditional “outbound” marketing — costs less and drives more sales conversions.
- Consistent blogging is the key to organic search rankings in Google, as it indicates fresh content and a larger web footprint.
- Digital marketing is ever-more dominated by visual communications.
- Video is growing in importance, and by 2017 will account for 69% of all consumer Internet traffic.
- Mobile Internet access surpassed desktop access in 2014, meaning all content must be produced on the assumption that your consumer will view it on a smartphone.
The following are some fascinating statistics presented by one of the Digital Summit sponsors, and are provided here as data points that we as digital marketers can use to educate our bosses, clients, and prospects:
Content Marketing
- Inbound marketing costs 60% less than traditional marketing methods.
- Inbound marketing doubles the average website-conversion rate from 6% of unique visits to 12%.
- Online articles with images get 94% more views than those without.
- Blogging increases website traffic by 55% for brands.
- Companies that regularly blog experience 126% more lead generation than those that don’t.
- Inbound marketing has been shown to deliver 54% more leads compared to outbound marketing.
- 56% of marketers are doing content marketing but without a clear strategy.
- Customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for content marketing, say 89% of marketers surveyed.
Websites
- 86% of U.S. small businesses cite their websites as their most important digital marketing tactic.
- Users form an opinion about your website in as little as 50 milliseconds (0.5 second).
- First impressions are 94% design-related.
Social Media
Mobile
- 66% of email opens are on mobile.
- 64% of decision-makers read email via a mobile device.
- 65% of U.S. adults check their smartphones within 15 minutes of rising, and 64% do so within 15 minutes of going to bed.
- 84% of 13-17 year-olds own a mobile phone.
- 88% of Twitter users are on mobile.
- There are 70 million users on Pinterest.
- 80% of Internet users on Pinterest are female.
- 88% of Pinterest users purchase an object that their friends have pinned.
Video