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Marketing Stats that Blew Our Minds in 2022
Marketing Trends

Marketing Stats that Blew Our Minds in 2022

It’s the end of the year and you know what that means: time to look back at a few marketing statistics that blew our minds this past year! (What, don’t we all do that in December?) Here are a few of the fun facts, stats, and observations that made us pause our on-demand webinars and dash off an excited Slack message to the team.

Decision-makers DO read
Good news, copywriters and content creators! Decision makers — you know, the folks the marketing strategy team painstakingly identified as your target audiences and developed marketing personas for — are reading and spending a decent amount of time with the thought-leadership content you create.

54% of decision-makers spend 1+ hours per week reading thought-leadership content. (Edelman/LinkedIn 2021 via Hubspot)

According to one study, a strong 54% of them reported spending an hour or more each week reading things like whitepapers, guides, and other content pieces. That means there is value for brands in putting effort and budget into developing longer-form content as part of an overall content marketing strategy.

At CID we’ve seen this firsthand. We’ve worked with clients to develop pieces like annual branded industry reports or longer, quarterly newsletters that offer deep dives into topics relevant to their buyers. Thanks to trackable data, we know people are downloading, opening, and spending time with longer, more meaningful content.

LinkedIn: Where B2B advertises
Ok, so LinkedIn being an effective channel for B2B advertisers isn’t a mind-blowing stat. But, LinkedIn being the largest display advertiser for B2B? That one took us aback a little.

eMarketer (via Hubspot) shared that LinkedIn amounts to 32.3% of B2B display advertising. It makes sense. Digital strategists at CID often recommend LinkedIn ads as part of our B2B clients’ plans precisely because capturing these audiences through Google or Bing can sometimes be more challenging.

One caution: LinkedIn makes it easy to see who clicked on your ads, but since most people have a personal email address tied to their LinkedIn accounts, it might not be the most useful lead capture information to gather. We recommend using your LinkedIn display ads primarily for awareness advertising vs. lead gen tactics. (Unless you want to nurture that lead with some amazing content in their personal inboxes, but that’s a topic for another blog post!) You can still prioritize a lead capture form on the landing page your awareness ads link to, however.

SEO is the real MVP for B2B
Having a balanced marketing plan that includes paid and organic tactics is important, but according to this Brightedge Channel Report paying special attention to your SEO strategy is well worth your time. In general, SEO drives more traffic than social media, but get this: “B2B companies generate 2X more revenue from organic search than any other channel.”

“B2B companies generate 2X more revenue from organic search than any other channel” - Brightedge Channel Report

This stat is precisely why CID’s Marketing and Strategy team will always recommend optimizing our clients’ website content for SEO and developing a robust content marketing plan. It’s a great way to build trust with their audiences by answering the questions they are searching for and increasing the odds that the site will show up on the first page of Google’s results for that search.

The stat that made one of us actually swear out loud
We saved the most mind-blowing stat for last. This one came from Kate Bradley Chernis during 2022’s Content Marketing World Conference, and it might hit you right in the budget. Ready?

“Companies spend $3.1B each year on remedial writing training.” — Kate Bradley Chernis, CEO of Lately.ai

$3.1 billion. Training their people — C-suite, management, a whole swath of people — on basic writing skills. It’s a tremendously huge amount of money, and the fact that it’s a stat that points to “each year” tells us whatever training they’re paying for isn’t sticking.

Beefing up your team’s writing skills is important and to be clear, we’re here for it. But we’ll also add that in some cases, spending some of your budget on professional marketing copywriters trained in how to write effective, persuasive content for a variety of media types might be a better, or at least more efficient, use of those dollars.

(It was one of our copywriters who did the swearing out loud if you haven’t figured it out by now.)

Whoa to all those stats, right?! (We geek out about marketing, clearly). Even if you aren’t quite as geeky as us about it, hopefully this info and our thoughts about it got you thinking about ways to have more impact with your marketing plan in 2023.

Here’s one more stat: People who click this “CONTACT CID” link to talk about their marketing programs are 100% likely to hear from CID within 48 hours (on business days).

CI Digital Strategy Team

CI Digital Strategy Team

Our Marketing & Strategy team works on everything from SEO and digital advertising strategies to developing and executing content marketing strategies.

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