The Best Digital Marketing Stats of 2019 — Part 2

By Lynette Sawyer

June 11, 2019

Content Intelligence, content maketing, Content Strategy, Digital Marketing, social media, Social Media Marketing, Statistics, Statistics Tool, Stats

Nom, nom, nom! Who’s ready for another helping of stats?
In our last post, we highlighted the rapid pace of change with digital marketing, and the demands placed on marketers and business owners to keep up with the latest industry trends. We reviewed the best digital marketing stats we have seen thus far in 2019 for mobile, search engine marketing, and email marketing. For the second installment of our two-part series, we look at the best marketing stats for social media, content marketing, and content optimization.

Did you know that 76% of people think marketing has changed more in the past two years than over the previous fifty? This stat alone sums up the pace of change right now.

Social Media Stats

In my opinion, social media and their various platforms have had a significant impact on our lives—how we court and date people, interact with loved ones, and how we share a glimpse into our life with family and friends. From a business perspective, we use social media to find new places, source recommendations, even build brands and communities. Social media is virtually everywhere; unavoidable and maybe even addicting to some. Since 2004, social media has been growing exponentially, and it hasn’t yet reached its peak of popularity. There is no denying that social media is now the primary source of news and information sharing and provides platforms that are unique in the way they interact with customers. Needless to say, it is a powerful medium, and it is here to stay. Still wondering if you should invest in social media marketing? Let’s delve into some stats!

Demographics and Behavior

• Close to half of the world’s population (3.03 billion people) are on some type of social media.

• Facebook remains the most widely used social media platform with roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) now reporting that they are Facebook users.

• 90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Generation X, and 48.2% of Baby Boomers are active social media users.

• Of the 2.1 billion total accounts on Facebook, an estimated 270 million profiles are fake.

• 59% of adults between the ages of 18 through 29 are using Instagram.

• An average of two hours and twenty-two minutes are spent per day, per person on social networks and messaging.

• 1.57 billion YouTube users watch about 5 billion videos on average every single day.

• While 68% of 16–24 year-olds follow a celebrity on social media, 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers say they trust online influencers more than celebs.

• 60% of smartphone users between the ages of 13–34 are using SnapChat.

Business and eCommerce

• 80% of millennial Pinterest users say that the platform will help them decide what to buy.

• Only 43% of online stores see significant traffic from their social media pages.

• 54% of social browsers use social media to research products.

• 49% of consumers claim that they depend on influencer recommendations on social media to inform their purchasing decision.

Brand and Marketing

• 77% of Twitter users appreciate a brand more when their tweet receives a response.

• It takes about ten hours, on average, for businesses to respond to a tweet, even though customers want a response within four hours.

• About two-thirds of companies with 100 or more employees use Twitter as part of their marketing. 86% of people going on Twitter are primarily searching for news.

• 55% of the 178 million people on SnapChat follow some type of brand or company.

• 96% of people talking about companies and brands on social media aren’t actively following those brands online.

• Infographics are ‘liked’ and ‘shared’ on social media three-times more than other any other type of content

• Social media has become the most popular content marketing tactic reported by 90% of B2C businesses. The next most used content marketing tactics are illustrations and photos (87%), eNewsletters (83%), videos (82%), and website articles (81%).

• 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as part of their content strategy. Other popular platforms include Twitter (87%), Facebook (84%), YouTube (74%), and Google+ (62%).

Content Marketing Stats

Content. It is one of the most vital tactics in marketing today. The strategy? Market it. Content marketing is the way for your business to create and share audience-targeted written, downloadable, and visual media so consumers can learn about you as a brand or organization, and understand your products, services, and expertise. Stats can help businesses and marketers of today learn about what platforms and tactics others are using to fulfill their consumers wants and needs, as well as a way to meet their business goals. Let’s look at content marketing stats that can help structure your marketing plan:

• 91% of B2B brands use content marketing as compared with 86% of B2C brands, and the brands that don’t use it plan to start soon

• 62% of ‘most successful’ B2B marketers and 59% of ‘most successful’ B2C marketers have a content strategy in place.

• 87% of visionaries and 81% of leaders keep content at the core of their marketing efforts.

• Content marketing generates three-times the leads per dollar spent over paid search marketing.

• Bloggers that post 'big' articles—an average of 1142 words—are more likely to get ‘strong results’.

• Companies publishing 16 or more blog posts per month report three-and-a-half-times more organic traffic over companies that publish four posts or less.

• Historical optimization on blogs can increase a company’s organic traffic by 106%.

• Audience relevance is number one when it comes to content effectiveness at 58%, but compelling storytelling takes a strong second place at 57%.

• 97% of marketers are using prescriptive content, meaning they’re laying out a foundation of rules and strategies to follow when it comes to creation.

• B2B marketers are convinced blogging is their most important type of content (43%) while B2C marketers are convinced visual content is more important (45%).

• 45% of marketers rate their interactive content as either extremely or very effective. Interactive content includes assessments, calculators, quizzes, or contests.

Content Optimization Stats

With content marketing being the strategy, content optimization is the process. Content optimization is a method to ensure that the content created is written in a way to reach the largest possible target audience—including search engines. Content optimization can be broken into four key formats: text, image, video, and news. Some tactics include well-crafted search headlines, using keywords strategically, adding in robust SEO metadata, and image tags.

• Marketers will get the best results by crafting interesting titles that are between six and thirteen words long. 80% of blogs will send out email newsletters as a way of reinforcing their content.

• 0.8% is the average conversion rate for websites using video, compared to 2.9% for those who don’t.

• 72% of marketers worldwide said relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic.

• Updating an old blog with new information can increase the effectiveness of your search results by 74%, yet, only 55% of marketers will use this strategy.

• About one-in-ten posts are compounding, meaning that their traffic increases over time. These compounding posts will generate up to 38% of all blog traffic.

Speaking of content optimization, our new, eight-part weekly series, Optimization Prime, will soon be getting underway with our first entry focusing on—and elaborating more about—content optimization. You can catch part one on Monday, June 17^th, 2019!
 

Lynette Sawyer

Lynette Sawyer is a Web Project Manager for Falcon-Software, a digital web agency founded in 1994. For the last 13-years Lynette has been in various digital capacities and her expertise goes beyond Project Management. Lynette brings experience and knowledge in graphic design, marketing communications, project management, product management and engagement.