NEW YORK: As consumers, marketers rely heavily on unbranded content to make purchase decisions, but at work they continue to allocate almost half their budgets to traditional advertising.
Newscred, a supplier of content marketing software, surveyed marketing leaders from Fortune 1000 brands who were attending its recent #ThinkContent Summit and obtained responses from 463 of the more-than 1,200 present.
And it uncovered what it described as "an interesting dichotomy" as it noted a major disconnect between what marketers spend their time, budget, and resources creating and what they themselves actually want as a consumer.
Specifically, the overwhelming majority (97%) of Fortune 1000 marketers spent over an hour researching and consuming content before making a purchase decision; half (51%) claimed to spend more than four hours on this activity.
Just 17% said they headed to a brand's website, while a mere 10% looked at social media.
But two thirds (64%) indicated that they relied on non-biased, unbranded information before making a purchase. And 70% said user reviews resonated the most when they were making a purchase decision, far ahead of product demos (13%) and user review websites (7%).
Despite their own behaviour patterns, only around one quarter (27%) of respondents were allocating budgets to content marketing.
And around half (45%) admitted they still spend most of their marketing budgets on traditional advertising – even though a mere 5% said that these channels delivered the most ROI.
"We, as marketers, know what works to connect with our audience and grow our brands – and we know what resonates for ourselves as consumers as well," said Alicianne Rand, VP/Marketing at NewsCred.
"It's time to reconcile the two so that we can further allocate resources to channels that our audiences care about, and that will continue to drive real business results," she added.
Newscred, a supplier of content marketing software, surveyed marketing leaders from Fortune 1000 brands who were attending its recent #ThinkContent Summit and obtained responses from 463 of the more-than 1,200 present.
And it uncovered what it described as "an interesting dichotomy" as it noted a major disconnect between what marketers spend their time, budget, and resources creating and what they themselves actually want as a consumer.
Specifically, the overwhelming majority (97%) of Fortune 1000 marketers spent over an hour researching and consuming content before making a purchase decision; half (51%) claimed to spend more than four hours on this activity.
Just 17% said they headed to a brand's website, while a mere 10% looked at social media.
But two thirds (64%) indicated that they relied on non-biased, unbranded information before making a purchase. And 70% said user reviews resonated the most when they were making a purchase decision, far ahead of product demos (13%) and user review websites (7%).
Despite their own behaviour patterns, only around one quarter (27%) of respondents were allocating budgets to content marketing.
And around half (45%) admitted they still spend most of their marketing budgets on traditional advertising – even though a mere 5% said that these channels delivered the most ROI.
"We, as marketers, know what works to connect with our audience and grow our brands – and we know what resonates for ourselves as consumers as well," said Alicianne Rand, VP/Marketing at NewsCred.
"It's time to reconcile the two so that we can further allocate resources to channels that our audiences care about, and that will continue to drive real business results," she added.
Data sourced from Newscred; additional content by Warc staff
