Each year, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) publishes the results of a benchmark study of small business content marketing. The 2015 study shows how writing things down makes content marketing efforts far more effective.
While 86% of the businesses surveyed say they have a content strategy, only 39% say that strategy is documented. To understand the value of following certain best practices, CMI asked those responding to rate the effectiveness of their content marketing.
The report shows that best practices among the most effective small-business content marketers include:
- Creating a content marketing group (69% of those surveyed)
- Using content strategy to guide content marketing efforts (64%)
- Documenting that content strategy (58%)
For these three best practices, the gap between the most and least effective small-business content marketers was consistently 46 percentage points. Failing to document a content strategy appears to undermine a company’s ability to deploy it effectively in day-to-day marketing efforts.
Early in its report, CMI notes:
The 39% of B2B small business marketers who have a documented content marketing strategy are more effective in nearly all aspects of content marketing than their peers who either have a verbal-only strategy or no strategy at all.
Not every small business can afford to create a content marketing group, but every small business can develop a content marketing strategy and then write it down. The act of documenting your strategy pays off in better implementation and superior results.
