Why content marketing doesnt work for most businesses

Summary

• Content marketing is essential for SEO and social media, driving significant revenue.
• Most businesses struggle with content marketing due to content saturation that makes consumers picky.
• It's crucial to focus on conversions and not just calling content marketing effective.
• Remember, content marketing and SEO offer sustained benefits unlike paid ads, which stop delivering when spending stops.
• Multiple exposures (3 to 23 times) to your brand are often necessary before consumers make a purchase.
• Quality over quantity is crucial; poor content can hurt SEO and social media engagement.
• Align content types with the buyer's journey stage, such as using podcasts for awareness and case studies for decision-making.
• Costs are rising for social media marketing, while ROI declines, hence a diverse strategy is advised.
• Be mindful of overrelying on AI; AI-generated content often lacks human touch and authenticity.
• Refresh old content regularly (aim for at least once a year) to maintain engagement and traffic.
• Focus on blog posts and email marketing for effective long-term digital marketing.
• Choose content formats that match the sales funnel: blogs for SEO, podcasts for niche engagement, webinars for ROI.
• Customizing your content format according to the preferences of different age groups can significantly improve engagement.
• Blogging is a long-term effort; expect to wait 6-9 months for significant results.
• Social media strategy needs consistent, quality posts; one in 22 posts tends to perform exceptionally well.
• Micro and midsize influencers often yield better ROI than celebrity endorsements due to trust factors.
• Short-form videos are gaining traction, not just on social networks, but also indexed by Google.
• Webinars and podcasts foster deep engagement; leverage them within the right channels for direct audience interaction.
• Consider ROI over short-term metrics to measure true content marketing success.
• Use a multi-touch attribution model to understand the impact of your content marketing better.
• Balancing written and visual content can optimize user experience across channels and improve SEO.
• Avoid using years in content URLs to maintain content relevance over time.
• Update content with current information, multimedia elements, and by potentially reformulating content structure.
• Successful content marketing requires integrating customer-centric elements such as responding to their questions and pain points.

Video

How To Take Action

Here are some easy and effective ways to use content marketing to help with your personal or business growth.

I’d suggest starting with quality over quantity. Focus on making fewer but more meaningful posts – think of each piece like a short story that speaks directly to your customer’s needs. Use your content to answer common questions or address pain points your audience faces.

Try using different types of content for different stages of the buyer's journey. For example, blog posts can attract people who are just learning about you. Case studies might help convince someone ready to buy. Make sure you refresh these pieces at least once a year with updated information or new visuals to keep them appealing.

Don’t overlook the power of email marketing and blogging. While social media’s return on investment might be dropping, a well-crafted email can keep customers engaged longer. Additionally, while blogs take a while to gain traction, they’re a long-term investment that pays off as they provide ongoing SEO benefits.

Be careful with relying too heavily on AI-generated content. It can help with ideas or speed up your writing process, but it’s important to add your human touch to keep content genuine and relatable.

Lastly, remember not to worry if things don’t go viral right away. The real magic happens in the connection and trust you build with your audience over time. Stick with it, and consider your broader strategy rather than just the instant returns!

Quotes by Author

"Digital content consumption is at an all-time high"

"Content marketing generates 3x as many leads as traditional marketing"

"Blogging is a long game"

"Going viral doesn't necessarily equate to more revenue"

"More is not always better when it comes to content"

Full Transcript

n [Music] [Applause] [Music] he [Music] hello everyone thank you for joining today uh and today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects content marketing it's one of the cornerstones to doing well with SEO social media it drives a ton a ton of Revenue but for most businesses content marketing doesn't work why though and what can businesses do to fix it so let's Dive Right In we're NP digital we're a global Ad Agency with over a thousand people in 20 countries we have tons of awards including we just got the agency Excellence award uh from Google to wrap up 2024 and the reason I bring this all up is we see a ton of data as you can see we work in a lot of various industries from Automotive to Home Services to cpg to D Toc the list really goes on on B2B SAS so we see how content marketing works for all sectors right consumer-based companies business-based companies and we figured out over the years how to make it work and we want to share that with you but before we dive in my name is Neil Patel I'm the co-founder of NP digital today I have with me Chris and Chad they've been on our teams for a while Chad I think it's either you or Nick is our oldest employee at this point in the company I don't know if it's you or ni that would be that be me awesome so Chris do you want to give a quick introduction on yourself and then Chad you can do the same absolutely um I'm Chris Hill I manage the content team for npxl our small and medium business division yep and hello everyone I'm Chad Gilbert I'm the uh vice president of content marketing at NP digital uh overseeing the US division um and as Neil mentioned I've uh been around for the better part of almost eight years now so really excited to be here and uh share some of the information that we have for you in terms of making your content great and stand out uh from the rest in this saturated competitive market that we're that we're in so happy to be here yep the first thing I want to highlight is digital content consumption is all-time high the average US adult spends nearly eight hours a day engaging with digital content you know you think about television you guys are all consuming digital content content these days it's no longer oh I'm flipping the channel and watching the news or whatnot this is why viewership and a lot of you know localized television channels are down because everyone's turning to Amazon and Netflix and Apple TV and Disney plus right the list goes on and on but we see digital consumption continually rising in the up and cominging years we actually do not see it declining so that begs the question if digital consumption is up why isn't content marketing not working for most people because people are consuming content right and I want to go into stats on some on some of the things you guys need to know so first off let's discuss the state of content Marketing in 2025 at least 90% of organizations use content marketing um and when you think about the overall Market it's expected to reach 1.95 trillion by 2032 and 63% of businesses are planning to increase their content creation budget in 2025 what we end up finding out is the big thing right here is although everyone is using content marketing consumers are also being bombarded at the same time with tons of content options which makes them picky and choosing which ones they want to consume and which ones they don't which is why more than half of all businesses struggle with content marketing 49% of businesses rate their content marketing performance as quote unquote effective right and a lot of those 49% who are saying they're effective they're actually missing a key component which is optimizing for conversions and if they did that they would actually see much better results when you think about content marketing SEO it's among the most profitable strategies of 2024 this is why companies invest so much money in it right you look at paid advertising it's super effective as well but you got to keep spending spending to generate Revenue you stop spending you don't generate Revenue content marketing SEO do need to be maintained you have to keep spending on them but not at the rate of paid advertising the other thing that I want to note here and this is very important for businesses really look at this graph doesn't matter if you're B2B or B toc on average people need to see your brand three to 23 times before they make a purchase and depending on your price point this right here is why content is super important it allows you to Pride those multiple touch points if you don't provide them people may see you they may like what they see but they're less likely to buy and it needs to be the core of your lead generation strategy because it just converts really well content marketing generates 3x as many leads as traditional marketing right whether this is for email optins or whether it's for or B2B leads or even you know B Toc it doesn't matter it is one of the most effective channels because you're creating Goodwill unlike paid advertising where people know it's quote unquote a ad this tends to create Goodwill and it creates more people wanting to engage in of in so we wanted to take a look and see where books are getting it wrong if content marketing is only being viewed as effective which is better than not effective but it's not as good as delivering the expected return where are businesses going wrong we identified six things that we think that that businesses are missing on so I want to talk about those a little bit then I want to take a look at the trends for what we're seeing in terms of content Marketing in 2025 and then I'll turn it over to Chad and he can give you some suggestions on how to really do content marketing well so where are we missing problem number one that we've identified is that businesses have a lack of resources whether they're financial resources or human resources 71% of businesses have a month a monthly content marketing budget of under $1,000 which means they might not be putting enough investment to see the return that they expect but also 77% of creative teams are struggling to create content at the expected speed so not only your business is not necessarily investing enough but they may not be putting their money in the best places to get the the expectations that they have the second problem is that there seems to be a focus on quantity over quality of content a lot of content is great but if that isn't high quality content it's not going to do you any good on Google p with poor content can affect the performance of your entire site so if you're publishing blogs that are weak in content or if your web copy isn't delivering where it should be in terms of your sales funnel then Google's going to identify that as a potential problem and lower all of your SEO rankings on your entire site reducing traffic to everything that you're working on on social media algorithm algor whoa we'll try that word again algorithm penalize you for content with low engagement so if you're pumping out a bunch of content but nobody's engaging with it it's not going to do you any good so the focus should be on and sorry to interrupt here Chris one thing I want all you guys to know if you look at our social media strategy at NPD and even mine on Neil Patel which pretty much is NPD we test most things out on X before we place it anywhere else so we can figure out what's engaging because X isn't penalize on low engage Eng agement so then that way we're not just pumping out a ton of crap excuse my language on all the other social networks and then having to get on their good graces absolutely Quality quality Quality quality not just quantity the next place that we're seeing businesses Miss is a misalignment between the content type that they're creating and where their buyer is in their buyer's Journey where we think that their Prime reader or engager is in their sales funnel we know that podcasts are great for awareness but maybe not so great for the decision stage where case studies are really great for the decision stage of the buyer's Journey but maybe not so great for awareness so you need to know where your audience is in their buyer's journey and you need to make sure that you've aligned your content to that place in the sales funnel the next problem that we're seeing is that an awful lot of businesses are putting way too much stake in social media don't misunderstand social media marketing is really really important and it's really very effective however studies are show are showing that the return on investment declin lines in social media over time the halflife of social media posts can be hours sometimes it can be days even if a post goes viral it will fall away in terms of your return on investment whereas the investment in a blog post as as you can see in the chart on the right can be two years or more for a single blog post especially if you do what we're going to talk about in a little bit and keep that content updated keep an eye on social media it can do you a lot of good but it may not reflect the cost in the chart on the left you can see the costs for social media have gone up and the average engagement for social media have gone down over the last four years so make sure you're putting your money in the right places and that may not only be social media it certainly is social media but a more diverse digital marketing approach can help drive better results problem number five and of course this has been a new problem over the past couple of years is an overreliance on ai ai is great we've talked about it before I've been on I I think two different webinars with Neil already to talk about AI we like AI but AI without human intervention is not going to drive the results that you're looking for what we see the chart on the left is that content creators are using AI more than other marketers and on the on the right we're seeing that in terms of SEO in particular it is simply not driving the results it's fairly close human generated versus AI generated content in the first month after content is posted but by month five both readers and Google have figured out who wrote your content or who created your thing and they're not engaging with it as they were in the beginning this isn't to imply that AI is bad but like we keep saying in webinars and we'll keep screaming from the the rooftops as long as we need to AI without human intervention is not going to drive results problem number six like I out before is a set it and forget it approach that is to say if you create a piece of content and leave it and don't touch it again you will eventually see a drop off in terms of Engagement and in terms of growth in the chart you can see that that organizations that are spending a majority of their time creating new content and less time updating content are seeing a loss of traffic where those that are almost 5050 in terms of creating new stuff and updating their existing stuff are seeing growth and that's true really across that sort of level the closer you get to Middle creating new content updating existing content the more potential you have for growth over time so if we're going to create new content or if we're going to update existing content what are some of the trends that you can pay attention to that you can watch along with us to do this really well again in a little while Chad's going to talk about specifically how to do this really well but what are some of the trends that can drive those decisions in 2025 we think it's really important that you put your content where it matters make sure that you focus on the channel that really align with your strengths and with the preferences of your audience we're finding that website channels that blogs and web copy on your page videos on your website are really effective display ads are perhaps less effective now web copy and and blogs on your site can be difficult to execute but they're not the most difficult to execute or organic search is difficult to execute and of course these go together you'll want th those to all work together but spending your energy on your website can be a really great place to do that spending your energy on email marketing can be a really effective Channel again reasonably difficult to execute but definitely worth the time so make sure that you're hitting your audience where it matters some kinds of content are gaining Traction in 2025 and we suspect that the trend will continue that some types of content are losing traction like I talked about a minute ago AI generated content is definitely growing short firm videos are growing interactive content podcasts and webinars we're seeing flatter rates of growth in other areas and then we're seeing things like white papers and ebooks that aren't necessarily growing at all they're really declining in both usage and in traffic generation keep in mind that different types of content serve different purposes this is always true this has been true certainly throughout 2024 and as we enter further into 2025 we suspect this trend to continue blogs are great for SEO impact they're great for that longterm growth I'll come back to this idea in a moment that blogs are a long-term investment podcasts and live streams are perfect for Niche engagement webinars like this one tend to be really good for return on investment they're really good for engaging with folks and keeping them engaged we hope we hope that you'll stay engaged with us even when this webinar is over email newsletters are excellent for relationship building and live and short form videos are really really good for quick payback but they may not last in terms of longevity different types of content serve different types of purposes you do best if you have a diverse digital marketing strategy you'll also want to match your content format to your audience need and funnel stages maso's pyramid of content suggests that the majority of your content should be essential content like blog posts or social media posts newsletters press releases whereas searching for and targeting those viral and sharable content short form videos memes and tools while they're really important may not be the best place to spend your time and your energy what's really cool about this chart is that if you flip it upside down it's almost the sales funnel your essential content blog posts social media posts that's your top of funnel informational content in the middle youve got your heavy engagement content it's great for those that are really in the investig in the investigative stage of the sales funnel and then in the decision-making stage that conversion driven content like webinars or case studies matches the audience intent so pay attention to what your audience needs and where they are are in the sales funnel and really how we want to get at that particular portion of the audience yeah and when you look at the viral content most of it is a hit or miss so you don't want to spend tons of time and B it doesn't really grow the business in the long term the way most people think so like you you think about that dude I forgot what his name was um he had a tattoo I think on the out of his neck and he was longboarding to work cuz his car wouldn't start and he was drinking cranberry juice from like that big you know bottle of cranberry juice that you can buy from the supermarket and it went viral and then everyone started drinking cranberry juice and longboarding and you know Ocean Spray sales for cranber just went through the roof well at the end of the day he's gone viral what now right going viral and getting tons of views doesn't mean anything or like that girl I was checking out the other day who to that song I'm looking for a man in finance 65 blue eyes trust fund right got tons of engagement on that tons of memes from that that were created but if you look at her content now like on Tik Tok it doesn't get tons of Engagement like the original post and yeah she's created a song with I believe David Gua um didn't generate a lot of Revenue I'm not trying to hate on her you know congrats for her try to trying to monetize it and do the best as possible you know I hope she crushes it Knocking On would cuz I'm a little superstitious but I hope she crushes it in the future but sadly the real reality is going viral doesn't necessarily equate to more revenue and in most cases goinging viral just gets you notoriety but it generates you little to no Revenue absolutely thanks Neil it's also really important and and Neil and I did a webinar about this um a few weeks ago to think about how different age groups are going to engage with content you want to tailor your content format to your audience's preference we know for example the Baby Boomers love the email newsletters and Jen Alpha and gen Z don't seem to care for it very much it's just not a way of connecting with those particular audience segments that is particularly effective whereas if your buyer is Gen Z or gen Alpha long form videos are going to work great short form videos are going to work great in fact long and short form videos it's a little bit of a sneak because it actually works great for all of the different age groups but pay some attention to this chart take a look at who your is who who your buyer is and make sure that you're creating content that is tracking with connecting with that particular portion of the audience oh sorry about that I hinted at this a minute ago but one of the trends that we're really tracking and have been for quite some time is the idea that blogging is a long game blogging is a long-term investment with the right promotion your blogs can see Heavy engagement and heavy traffic right away but then you're going to see that declining for maybe as long is 6 to n months and if you don't know that blogging is a long-term investment a long game you might be frustrated by that decline in engagement and that decline in traffic but statistically wait it out because after that time period in terms of an SEO engagement SEO picks up you'll start getting more traffic you'll start getting more eyes on that piece of content more folks into your sales funnel but if you get frustrated by that 6 to9 month Mark and you stop blogging because it isn't delivering the sort of return on investment that you expect as you can see in the chart you actually miss the majority of traffic Potential from blogging so don't forget this year as always blogging is a long-term investment equally long-term investment is social media social media requires consistency of posting statistically for every 22 posts that you make one will shine and get four times or more of your average views which means if you want that 4X number you'd better post 23 posts and those 23 posts had better be darn good ones because we've got to drive engagement most social media content 92% of social media content doesn't go viral so we're stuck with the last 7.9% to go viral to get that extra level of Engagement of even double or more so social media is about consistency post often post good quality content and post it frequently in order for you to get the return you expect don't be fooled into thinking that influencer Partnerships have to be celebrity endorsements or Nothing what we're seeing in 2024 and what we're predicting throughout 2025 is that your return on investment for influencer marketing is actually going to be better and more profitable if you are engaging with micro influencers or or midsize influencers than if you're engaging with celebrities or macro influencers partially it's because of the cost but also the potential audience reach and Trust from a micro influencer or midsize influencer is simply higher than with a celebrity endorsement influencer Partnerships can be profitable but you're going to do better if you engage with micro influencers or midsize influencers short form videos aren't just reaching your audience on social networks Google is ranking more long form videos than short ones but we're seeing a trend that is Shifting toward shortform video content it's worth your time to create short form videos and not just for your social networks make sure that you're sharing those on your website make sure that you're sharing those in other in other platforms because they are driving engagement and Google is starting to pay more and more attention to short firm videos at the same time webinars and podcasts Foster deep engagement we got you here didn't we webinars are great for connecting with your audience for having conversations we're going to take questions later this sort of format is great for that podcasts are great for deep engagement the best time to run a webinar we think is Monday through Thursday between 9:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. there's a funnel on how to promote a podcast and how to promote a webinar you'll want to promote it you'll want to have your live session a replay of your live session and then a followup and if you do that you can really help drive that deep engagement which again that's what this sort of content is for at the same time white papers and ebooks are as I showed you on the the chart earlier they're sort of losing some ground in terms of of overall engagement and and use but that may be because a lot of businesses are using them only as lead generation tools white papers and ebooks are more than lead gen tools if you pair them with with a unique landing page that landing page can be indexed and optimized for SEO you can drive that you can use that to drive organic traffic not just to your ebook or white paper but to your entire site and help folks decide to enter into your sales funnel at that point and it's important to consider the marketing content costs versus the potential return on investment content types like webinars or case studies live streams email newsletters and podcasts have a really high return on investment potential so as a tip we recommend that you spend 20% of your this is the old 8020 rule we all know the 8020 rule spend 20% of your efforts on content strategies with a quick payback period and 80% on the ones that produce a better longterm firm return on investment so 80% of your time on things like blogs that have a longer life and 20% of your time on things like images or shortterm short form videos that may have a really high engagement right away but may lose that long-term engagement creating content also isn't enough if you're just creating it and doing nothing with it you're losing the opportunity to use that content as smartly as you can to drive engagement in a variety of different ways you need to promote that content social media posts are a great way to drive traffic to a webinar for example speaking of webinars email blast it send a a notification about your upcoming webinar or podcast or blog post to your email list talk about it on YouTube and also with social media posts go live we go live with all our webinars and it it drives a lot of views I don't know percentage wise solo would know better but I don't think he's on this webinar I would conservatively say at least 30% of our views come from going live uh for our webinars absolutely promote it promote it promote it promote it okay that's enough for me Chad awesome yeah thanks so now that Chris has covered off on how some Brands get content marketing wrong and reviewed some of the types of content and formats we should really be focusing on or creating uh the next section is really going to cover off on some tips tricks and insights on how to make that content great and we've already seen a lot of great questions pop up throughout the first part of this and this section will probably answer a handful of those um so if your question is not answered as we mentioned we'll be doing a question answer series at the end but first and foremost more is not always better as Chris alluded to as well when it comes to content in two recent studies that we ran we uncovered the point of diminishing returns for Content length and we discovered that about 1,000 to 3,000 words is that sweet spot then traffic declines um after that 3,000 word point in the studies that we were running that was the uh graph here on the left the the second graph here is that we also uncover the the average word count by industry so there's been some questions around what do you mean by long form and what is competitive in the space well this graph on the right you can use directionally to understand in certain industries the average length of each piece of content that was in this study so this data is really helpful and directional but you're also going to need to do some real-time research of the specific topics that you're looking to create and take a look at Google and other um search engines to understand what ranking there right now for certain terms um using this data plus your uh manual research you can make a decision based on the topic at hand of how long you're ultimately going to make it and with Google search being fractured by the onet of AI and all of the active social channels and online forums that exist you need to leverage insights across multiple platforms inclusive of keyword research tools um we also like to look at social trends and Forum discussions things that are happening on uh quora and Reddit for instance and the sentiment the overall brand sentiment of the conversations that are happening in those areas there's a lot of tools that can help pull sentiment of conversations that are happening to give you a full picture of what's going on in order to make an informed decision about what kind of content you're going to create so you can cross check all of this information in tools like answer the public to help validate your overall search volume and those opportunities specifically so we're actively leaning into social search Trends right now to inform our content strategies um specifically with um the the Enterprise brands that we're working with at MP Digital customer questions and pain points these are two tactics that I've used in my content marketing career for the better part of 15 years now but always take a look at any questions or pain points or complaints that are happening within your industry or within specific topics that you're looking to create create those are great to build topics around and or figuring out how to include those types of pain points or answers to certain questions within the content you're creating uh this graph on this slide here shows the most popular how what and why questions across all major industries um that are popping up right now so you can take a look and again use this directionally and then dive in deeper to each um specific question and understand if this is the type of question you'll be wanting to answer for the cont content you're you're creating and Chris mentioned AI writing tools a little bit in his section um so I'm going to touch on it here as well but they're a really great tool and help for us to really understand how to research and outline specific pieces or chunk out pieces of copy um Uber suggests as a writing assistant and it's the perfect tool to help do those types of activities um it even helps produce full drafts of copy um as as a first draft or a starting point to understand where you want to go to enhance that piece or change it accordingly um rule of thumb here is you never use AI generated copy as is so you always want to review and enhance the writing and make sure that it hits your style tone and voice and any other brand guidelines that you are following in addition to Uber suggests writing assistant uh I personally really enjoy chat GPT Pro and Claude as uh two other writing assistants mixed in with Uber's suggest T um as you know there are hundreds of AI tools out there these days that can do uh one to a hundred things and we like to test and use a mix of them in our strategy AI writing assistants are also a big help when it comes to repurposing content for other channels so um optimizing your content for more than just Google and search engines it is not just the only thing you need to focus on anymore it's more important than ever to optimize everywhere that your audience is going for information so customers they now we all know that they now have Endless Options when it comes to platforms and research and engage those um specific channels before making decisions large language models like chat GPT social media sites app stores marketplaces podcast and forums those are just a few of the platforms that carry more weight along the buyer Journey when a trigger moment happens for a user specifically they have all of these different touch points and areas to go to find information and engage with information or your brand so be sure to be present in those moments that matter and the keyword universe is also changing the graph here on this slide highlights a recent um the results of a recent study we ran on the average search query lengths for the last decade and people are more comfortable with conversational longtail searches today than they were prior to 2013 so this graph just shows the amount of words that are in each search where it used to be one or two 10 20 years ago nowadays it's four five even more words as a conversational the intent and the comfortability of the Searcher is changing and now more than ever Google and users want eat uh in the last few algorithmic updates over the past 12 months a big Focus continued to be on quality content um determined by Google's eat guidelines or the experience frankly does the content creator have the necessary firsthand or real life experience on that topic expertise that really leans into does that content creator have the necessary knowledge or skill for the topic authoritativeness is the content creator or website is it known as the go-to source for a specific topic and finally trust is the content accurate fact checked honest and reliable those four uh guidelines that Google continues to hone in on are more important than ever especially with the onset of AI and um AI scaled content that's happening and in this recent study wean we uncovered specific tactics under each of the eat guidelines and how they impacted rankings and weighted them from a on a scale of from 1 to 10 so the top ranking factors from this study specifically were around detailed content relevant sites ations or links back links um to the content Andor brand mentions so those four tactics were weighted the most important but there was also a handful of other that are important um throughout the the content research that we were doing eat guidelines can also be incorporated into your content refresh strategy um which you can which you should which you should consider at least once a year but depend in on your business or industry once a quarter is typically ideal some of the main ways that we that we refresh content for our brands that we work for are removing time references to make the topic more Evergreen and have a longer shelf life I think there was a specific question around that when updating content um a lot of the times we like to leave that date out so that you can continue to update that content on a quarterly or yearly basis um and leave that Evergreen experience and again uh maintain or continue that shelf life of that piece of content another great way to refresh content is inject various other content formats so video graphic design data visualizations are just a few of those uh injection points that can help make your content stickier or more relevant to promote on social or even with other Publishers if there's a nice data visualization some of the graphs that you've seen throughout this presentation do very well on social um so think of that because if there's a piece of content already created it's really easy to use AI to help repurpose or create some new formats to inject on that piece a few other uh tips for updating content is rework the the main title and H2S throughout making sure that it's aligned and relevant for the SEO uh research and keywords that you're going after and make sure the structure uh format of the content is user friendly as on-site experience for us users and for Google's uh robots to crawl is very important um these days and also helps increase your visibility in ranks and when planning your content strategy for new or refresh content prioritize the types of content and formats that are going to Garner more engagement so the graphs highlight here the content formats on the left and the types of content on the right that performed the best uh in these recent studies so short form videos are leading the way right now with the most engaged content format at about 31% engagement rate on social and how to en lisal type articles fared the best in terms of the types of content so uh 38% for how2 and 32% uh engagement rate for listicle type articles in this particular study now keep in mind in this study the graph on the left right it breaks down the most popular content formats which Chad described but the text based content is in that other bar so then we took right and it's we took that other uh at least the text part of it and we ended up breaking down all right listicles how to and then that way you can end up seeing the types of content that are text based that are doing quite well yes thanks thanks Neil and align your content with search intent which has kind of been an overarch ing theme throughout the last few slides but in addition to the specific keywords you're targeting for Content you also want to be sure that you're aligning content to the specific search intent um informational content typically attracts and educates um at that upper funnel experience navigational content helps users find you and transactional content um will help make will help that User make a decision so just a quick high level of kind of that types of content that you're thinking of throughout the funnel and making sure that you're aligning specifically to each one of those steps if it's a topic you're going after and you want to make sure that you create enough content to uh to suffice that user's Journey so we touched on some ways to produce great content and touched a little on various content types and formats um we're now going to hone in on how to make your content more engaging which is also in in turn going to help it make it perform better first and foremost brevity and Clarity rule when it comes to engaging content so from 2000 to 2015 our attention spans decreased by 25% and adults have about 8.25 seconds of attention so catching their attention needs to happen quick this is one of those reasons why short form video is a top performing PE uh format of content right now uh because it's able to engage within that first eight seconds typically if it's visually appealing and there's a hook that attracts those readers and gets them to stick and in a recent survey we ranked average attention span by content type and how long you have to C and how long you have to capture that attention for that user so webinars led the way with about 4 minute uh and 45 second attention span for the user during that uh experience and newsletters and images were last with about a two and a 1% or 1 second uh uh attention span respectively for those static images and newsletter content and I mentioned a bit but headlines and hooks those are great tactics to grab attention no matter what type of content you are producing and the most effective headlines from this recent study include uh some type of number or percent data it evokes curiosity or it in clear it includes a clear call to action for your users those were some of the tips that were uh bubbled up to the top of this particular study in terms of um catching attention with headlines and a major question that we continuously ask ourselves is is AI our Aly our Ally and while AI is a great tool as I mentioned to support your content marketing and production needs you should still remain skeptical and Vigilant remember that it is a great that this is a great tool and these tools are great for ideation and research it's great for updating and repurposing existing content or something that's already been finalized and drafted by a human and reviewed accordingly and it can support you with tracking and data analyzation um and there's some common pitfalls to look out for AI often generates false claims and facts even if it come even if a response from AI comes to you very clear direct and concise you need to make sure that you're you're factchecking all the facts and stat that AI produces for you because it is notorious for pulling facts that don't align with something that it's answering for you specifically so always fact check AI ai's output it also exhibits an exhibits an algorithmic bias and can learn from inaccurate information similar to providing inaccurate facts large language models can potentially start to learn um some of the misinformation and continue to spit that out for you for other users who are searching or asking similar questions and it is verbose and easily flagged as AI written I think there's been a handful of questions thus far around how Google um and others are are determining whether or not content is drafted by AI or humans and while it's not perfect yet and a lot of AI Checkers that launched early on last year um came out as they those were creating false negatives right these AI tools weren't really great in the beginning to unpack and understand if one piece of content AI or human written um those tools and Google is getting better and better at learning the the commonalities in AI produced copy again verbose it uses a lot of leading sentences it doesn't sound um it doesn't sound human if you will that who's telling if you were reading a story that was written by a human versus an output from an AI the AI is a little more choppy um so those are things that are starting to be honed in on a little more especially with Google's algorithmic updates and with some of these tools that are being refined to fully be able to to flag uh AI written content so humans are still very important in any AI driven process and in a recent study of AI only copy versus AI assisted copy that we ran the AI only copy was mediocre at best and near perfect when looking at um was sorry the AI copy was mediocre at best but then looking over at the human drafted with AI assisted copy it was near perfect when looking at the readability the SEO and tone of voice you can see that on the graph there on the right the originality point is still pulled back a little bit more because uh the piece of copy was drafted by AI first and then the human helped uh copy edit and then enhance a bit but the originality of there if you started with the human aspect of and then utilized AI to support that um the originality might have been a little higher on that point but again when taking a look at this study AI only copy is not going to cut it especially um nowadays with the extremely saturated and competitive landscapes in in any industry um right now on online so now I'm going to pass it over to Neil he's going to cover a little bit about measuring content marketing success and then we'll uh open it up for some questions and answers so let's let's Dive Right In and talk about measuring content marketing success and performance well most content marketers measure quote unquote success or performance by metrics like traffic and social shares and likes and social shares and that's great and a smaller percentage start looking at things like conversions leads or you know even the engagement on a website but the real metric to look at is Roi because at the end of the day if something is generating a direct Roi or indirect Roi you know you're going to be much better off now um we've done some experimentation not really experimentation but tracking uh we did a study with quite a few businesses that stop producing content on social media and we saw their revenue decline their social traffic decline much faster um but it just shows social media has Roi and it may not be direct and easy to track but it definitely has some sort of a Roi even if it's indirect and trying to equate over time what is that indirect or direct Roi is much better than just focusing on things like traffic and shares the biggest challenge we see when it comes to you know tracking and measuring all the performance is really attribution right how do you know if something is helping and you got to end up looking at multi-touch attribution you got to end up looking at all right what are the studies out there in my space what are the results when we added this Channel versus you know removed it you got to end up running some experiments you got to actually talk to your consumers and find out how they heard about you what caus them to convert all this these data points will help you understand what's really driving your Roi and what's not and what I really recommend is when you're thinking about Ro why you got to look at leads your conversions the revenue right um how many people were added let's say to email list from all these channels well okay from the email list how many of them came from your content marketing what is your email list generated in revenue on a monthly basis when you start getting into the nitty-gritty you'll be able to figure out what's working and what's not and this is the biggest reason content marketing doesn't work for most businesses because they're not Roi focused and the way you want to slice and dice it is going to vary business to business but it all really boils down to Roi if you can figure out what's generating your Roi double down on that and the stuff that's not working as much assume your data is accurate you know shift away your focus from some of those efforts if they're focused on branding have a nice balance because branding is important uh I I don't think it's all about performance and direct Roi that should be a key component some things are great for Branding and a lot of consumers make their choices because of a brand you want at a letic shoes a lot of people just think Nike because they've heard about it so many years one electric car a lot of people think just Tesla because it's been out there for so long and it's really known as that electric car right and Brands you know your brand that you end up creating for your business that is your real Mo people can copy your features the technology and all this kind of stuff over time they can copy a lot of your marketing but the brand that you have is your real Mo Chad Chris and I can go create Michael Jordan shoes and they would be just as comfortable and look as good assuming we knocked it off but we won't sell anywhere not even 1% of what Michael Jordan sells because we don't have that logo it's that brand that really sells those shoes it's not the quality I'm not saying the quality is crap I'm just saying it's that logo of that Jumpman that really sells the shoes so if you need help fine-tuning your content strategy and you want to work together scan that QR code with your phone and you can end up just filling out the form and we can jump on a call or you can just go to NPD digital.com and we can help you with content SEO social media whatever it may be that you're struggling with the marketing we can help all right so let's dive into some Q&A what do we got Colin you C the first question is a Q&A question that's weird um so good stuff everyone some of the questions were answered throughout the the presentation so if I ask it again I I apologize it's hard to keep track of everything but Chad and Chris if there's a Q&A section on your website maybe behind tabs or uh a learn more type of Link or like a little plus symbol that's invisible at sort of first glance but if you click on it sort of expands I mean we historically have called this an information drop or an ey drop or things along those lines is that content beneficial for search and SEO yes it is absolutely yes um and it just depends on um you know I've worked with Brands who wanted that to be a little cleaner on a specific type of landing page and cleaner meaning they don't want long form content above or below a fold or any information on a spefic specific page so they've done the accordion style Google can still crawl that I would say from a user experience it is just a bit fractured it's not completely derailed the user experience because obviously you can click through to those question and answers um but again it just depends on what the page is what the goals of those page pages are that you're adding that content to but whether it's in an accordion style or hidden if it's on the site it is still being crawled um by Google and does provide value yes that can also uh you can also augment that SEO value a little bit with a FAQ schema uh if you do a a schema in the back end of your site that tells both Google and um and Bing and and other engines that crawl that that page contains an FAQ then it's more likely that that content may be pulled into um like AI overviews answer or people also ask answer great great addition thank you for that uh Neil I've got a tough one and might be hard to answer this one but I'm gonna ask it anyway any suggestions on how much budget should be dedicated for Content marketing specif and tough one to answer specific for B2B and a SAS business any thoughts given where you come from B2B and SAS content marketing actually drives a ton of your leads and signups over time um it should be a good chunk of your marketing budget I would say more than 30% um less than 50 but it's going to be probably around 30ish percent um to 35 somewhere in that range uh my background is actually BB SAS it's actually not marketing even though we have a marketing agency um I've been in marketing forever but almost all my companies that I created were B2B SAS companies and most my friends own B2B SAS companies you tend to end up hanging around in similar Serv circles but that's a good start and even though I say 30 to 35% you can't start with that from day one it doesn't matter how big you are or small you are you got to focus on producing content for one channel do it effectively and continually expanding it'll eventually get to 30 to 35% easily over time thank you for that Chad Chris you're up next as an agency how do you communicate all of the best practices and everything that we've been talking about today like explain how viewers maybe need to communicate with their their team that's a really good question um for uh for my team um and again I I work with the small and medium business division um so we spend a lot of time being consultative we spend a lot of time um one-on-one with our clients really helping them to understand their needs making sure that we understand and that they understand Their audience and where their sales funnels lie and things like that um so a consultative relationship based approach is always um I think always the best place to start yep and then um one important kind of research tactic or tool that we launch for every brand that we're working with um is a comprehensive content audit and so we call our audit the six RS audit because ultimately we take a look at all content on the site once once we launch to understand if we need to refresh reformat repurpose retire remain meaning just leave it this leave it as is if the page is doing what we need it to do but coming up with this detailed approach to content that exists and what might need to happen based on keyword research intent and mapping that research experience gets packaged up into a presentation so that we are able to formally discuss certain things that need to happen with content that already exist s because as we've talked about this and you know Neil Chris and myself we'll talk about this until we're blue in the face but refreshing existing content on a regular basis is always a really great strategy to continue on more so than creating net new content especially if there is a lot of content on your site already right we like to do that hygiene approach so there's a few different things we put together to then package up and and then we're able to have an informed discussion around what needs to happen and then of course the client has the the right to review approve and and then work with us on on an approach um for those pieces of content there were actually and we've only got a couple of minutes so I'm going to get to these questions there were a lot of people asking about how do you update content um the timing in which you do that I think there was a slide that said a blog post sort of Peaks after nine months like what do you do there but one of the questions that I saw a couple of different times was when updating existing blog blog content let's just say in WordPress do you have a recommendation on how to do that do you republish the same page with you know a note that says originally posted you know updated on such and such a date there were a couple of questions about that and maybe either Chad or Chris or Neil can answer that and then there was another related one like let's say you have a piece of content that speaks to uh best of 2024 or best of 2025 like what's the recommendation there I mean I can tell you through my own experience I mean I think of I think of e-commerce clients Black Friday Cyber Monday like live yeah so what I I would end up doing is if you're best of 2025 best of 2024 do not put the year in the URL so that way you don't have to keep republishing it when you update content you don't have to publish a whole new post you just update that post right then and there um as for the DAT Chad Chris what do we end up doing for the day I know we ended up updating the date but do we end up putting originally written on and then updated you know I think for my understanding don't we usually just put um the current date that was just updated on Chad Chris we generally for SMB clients we generally recommend against dates on their site like a published by date in the first place date we could update that date to the current but if you u in WordPress and then ask Google to reindex it it's going to ident Google will identify it as new oh yeah that's right even on our blog we don't even put the date we just removed it all together it was just easier yeah no yeah it depends and I date as well keeping it Evergreen now there are some client and want to keep dat for various reasons if then yes sting this was updated on republished the reformatted or refreshed piece a lot more that you're changing than just the date all those other changes incl of noting the date are important um or updated piece of content awesome cool and don't put dates in your url you'll do better if you have no dates in your url we've run a lot of experiments with that and if you have dates in your url fix it do a 301 redirect and change your internal links as well but I know we're out of time I appreciate all of you guys taking the time and energy to be here especially on a busy Tuesday um um if any of you guys want to work with us just hit us up at NPD digital.com cheers everyone thanks everybody byebye bye [Applause] [Music] he [Music]