Content Audits in Marketing

• Day 1 of the Marketing Communication Level 4 CIM course will look at the features and benefits of various communication channels and media, both digital and offline, and how to apply them.
• Marketing communications is a term for 'media mix' and involves using different customer-facing communications channels to promote brand and product messaging to support marketing strategy goals.
• In 2022, HubSpot surveyed 600+ media planners.

Survey Theme 1: Engagement and Audience Growth

• Key goal: engagement and audience growth.
• In marketing and PR the question of what success will look like is important
• 62% of marketers find content is over-performing
• Marketers are focused on engagement and audience growth (33%), maximizing the ROI of content (30%), tangible results from every activity.

Content Marketing Distribution

• Almost half (49%) of marketing teams spend between 30% and 50% of their budget on content.
• Only 5% spend 71+% of their budget on content, and only 4% spend between 1-10% on content.

Survey Theme 2: Auditing and Optimizing

• 2 in 3 marketers have run content audits, 30% of them run these monthly.
• Auditing content libraries improves UX (36%), visibility of best content (34%), finding content gaps (34%), SEO and SERP ranking (33%), and identifying website issues like broken links and slow load times (31%).
• 81% of media planners say audits have helped them reach business goals.
• 67% say content audits have had a moderate to a significant impact on their media planning strategy.
• It is predicted that 37% will leverage content audits for the first time in 2022
• 15% of media planners will invest more in content audits than any other strategy.

Survey Theme 3: Audience Analysis

• Conducting market research regularly helps to understand the target demographic and effective communication channels.
• Around 40% of Gen Z use TikTok as a search engine.
• 43% of marketers research to find the most effective channels to reach their audience, with 53% planning to leverage this for the first time.
• 70% of media planners who do market research say it's the most effective media planning strategy and 22% invested more than any other strategy in 2022.

Survey Theme 4: Media Mix

• Over 40% of marketers are changing their media mix in 2022.
• For 2022, 45% of those surveyed stuck with their media mix and 41% plan to change it.
• Email marketing, paid and organic social media content, and organic search are the most leveraged media channels, with the highest ROI, set to grow significantly in 2022.

Top 10 Media Channels in 2022

• Email marketing, paid social media content, organic social media content, website pages or site launches, paid search, display adverts, organic search, online blogs, organic video content, virtual events/webinars.

Email Marketing and Paid Ads

• Email marketing can reward you with very high ROI and potential for personalization and reach.
• Powerful marketing automation tools can customize emails by segment, product, or buyer stage.
• As a result email marketing is used by 1 in 2 media planners, and will continue to grow.
• Email marketing has the 3rd highest ROI.
• Paid ads ensure target customers see the strongest social media ads.
• Paid social media content is used by 47% of media planners and it has the highest ROI and highest engagement of any channel.
• It is predicted that 14% of all media planners will invest more in it.

Organic Social and Search

• Understanding where the target audience spends their time online is important.
• Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest are all channels with different user bases.
• Organic social media content is used by 43% of media planners and will continue to grow.
• Organic social has the second-highest ROI to marketers.
• Pinterest's audience is mostly millennials, but with Gen Z, Gen X, and Baby Boomers also represented.
• Organic search builds up a robust, effective content library.
• 36% of media planners leverage organic search, or blogging, content marketing, and SEO optimization, and 45% claim it has the highest ROI of any channel.

Survey Theme 5: Planning Content

• Planning ahead is worth it.
• The most common issues marketers face is determining the most effective media mix (39%), budgetary limitations (36%), lacking time to plan properly (30%), wasted impressions (29%), keeping up to date with digital marketing trends (24%), and lacking time to measure results (24%).
• It was also found that thorough planning fosters an understanding of the most effective platforms (29%), and where their audience spends their time (28%).
• 34% of media planners start planning out their content strategy 1-2 months in advance.
• 27% of media planners start planning out their content strategy 3-4 months in advance.
• 15% of media planners start planning out their content strategy 3-4 weeks in advance.

Survey Theme 6: Templates

• Almost half of media planners say templates are their most effective strategy for hitting goals.
• Marketers shared that templates help manage the drafting, review, editing, and publishing of content.
• The use of social media strategy templates, and social content calendars, helps managers make posts on behalf of their company in a timely way.
• Infographic templates help marketers to customize data, share insights, and promote offers quickly.
• Media planning templates, and 46% of them say it is the most effective strategy they use to reach their business goals.

Survey Theme 7: Agile Marketing

• Agile marketing is effective according to 74% of marketers who pivoted campaigns.
• In 2021, 99% of marketers who pivoted did so with 39% pivoting three times, of which 78% said it was for the best as it gave them an effective strategy.
• The most common reason for action was COVID-19.

Survey Theme 8: Automation

• Automation and media planning tools enable smarter and more personalised marketing campaigns.
• 78% of media planners use automation and media planning tools.
• These are used for connecting various content marketing channels (40%) and behaviorally targeting relevant content to users (37%).
• Automation is also used for sharing content across social platforms (36%), SEO and keyword research (34%), email newsletters (32%), social listening (30%), integrating data (30%) and creating templates (30%).

Media Mix

• A "media mix" is a marketing term for the combination of channels that businesses use to meet their marketing goals, including billboards, email, websites, and social media.
• Media mix types: owned, earned, and paid media.
• A customer journey map is a diagram that depicts the stages customers go through when interacting with a company, from buying products online to customer service on the phone or social media.

Push and Pull Tactics

• Push marketing gets new brands noticed.
• Pull marketing targets and engages customers.
• It's important to identify push and pull tactics to understand content purpose and create effective comms.