We were delighted to receive our copy of HubSpot’s state of marketing report 2020, which surveyed over 3,400 global marketers, and were excited to delve in for an in-depth look at the latest decisions marketers are making, and the trends we should be seeing this year.
Read on for some great stats and insights into the marketing landscape.
Content Marketing
A content marketing strategy allows you to engage your buyer personas, tailor content for each stage of the funnel, as well as boost brand awareness. So we were surprised to learn that only 24% of marketers planned on increasing their investment in content marketing for 2020.
The report also revealed that video is the number one form of media used in a content strategy, with promotional videos and brand storytelling the most common video type created by marketers. As seen in the chart below, both blogs and infographics are surprisingly quite far behind video in popularity.
Digital Advertising Strategy
As organic channels continue to become more crowded, we’ve seen many of our clients turn to the paid advertising approach as an effective way to get content in front of the right people.
With 68% of marketers stating that paid advertising is ‘very important’ or ‘extremely important’, it’s great to see that more marketers are understanding the benefits of a paid advertising approach. The stats also show a promising future of the right goals being put into place to achieve success, as 33% of marketers revealed they were using paid advertising to increase brand awareness, whilst 24% use advertising to impact direct sales.
Websites and SEO
Websites have become increasingly important in communicating with your audience, and the goal should be to create a concise and effective user experience; so it was great to learn that 68% of marketers would be investing in a website upgrade in 2020.
The report also provided insight into the tactics marketers have found to be the most beneficial in improving site performance and ranking, with optimizing mobile performance coming out on top. Other key stats also revealed an encouraging future for SEO, stating that:
- 55% of marketers consider SEO either ‘very important’ or ‘extremely important’ to their overall marketing strategy
- Over 52% of marketers are investing in technical SEO updates to their website
- Roughly 50% of marketers consider their SEO tactics to be ‘very effective’ in helping them achieve marketing goals
Email Marketing
Email is still alive and well, and marketers are continuing to see some great results when implementing email marketing in their strategy, with a staggering 80% of marketers seeing an increase in email engagement over the past 12 months.
Interestingly, promotional emails are the most common email type that marketers are investing in, and message personalization is seen as the number one tactic to improve email performance, followed closely by mobile-friendly emails and email automation campaigns.
Additional Findings
The report also uncovered some interesting findings on different areas in marketing, revealing that the top priority for marketers in 2020 is “generating leads”, as 61% confirmed that their company is currently using ABM.
68% of marketers say their business uses automation in some way, but of those who are automating marketing, only a shocking 23% are automating their content delivery.
Although the report has revealed no major surprises, it’s encouraging to learn that our thinking of the future of marketing aligns with the data. The use of video has continued to become more effective, and both ABM and marketing automation is on the rise with progress still need to be made in automating content. It’s also great to see SEO being viewed as such an important tactic to assist with growth.
To read the full report, you can download your copy by clicking here.
