In B2B marketing, benchmarking is used to paint a picture of the environment where you want to operate. It provides the necessary context to define new strategic approaches, or to perform industry analysis of your business and competitors. By contextualising the industry (whether you are entering a new one, evaluating your strategy, or launching a new project), benchmarking can provide the starting point for your new business adventure.
So, how do you benchmark content marketing? One way to approach it is to base it on the goals that content marketing is often created for:
- Lead generation
- Brand awareness and loyalty
- Sales support
- Engagement
Looking at what other people are doing, industry trends, and audience preferences against the four pillars above is a good place to start. But content marketing is too broad a concept to benchmark, so you will need to break it up to get accurate insights – e.g. per channel (focus only on blogs, then on social media, then on landing pages, and so on).
Being a B2B content marketing agency means we are writing blogs left, right, and centre. Plus, with 80% of bloggers reporting that their blog delivers results to varying degrees, it only made sense to put together the top blog benchmarks you should know this year. If you were looking for 2022 blogging benchmarks, here are 20 to help you design, execute, and deliver your B2B blog strategy.
The stats speak for themselves
1. B2B marketers that use blogs gain 67% more leads than their competition that don’t blog
(Source: Optinmonster.com)
2. Marketers who prioritise blogging are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI
(Source: KeyScouts)
3. 94% of blog readers are willing to share blog posts if they think the information in the posts can be useful and valuable to their peers, friends, and other connections
(Source: Riverbed Marketing)
Who reads blogs, anyway?
4. Approximately 60% of internet users regularly read blogs
(Source: Express Writers)
5. Roughly 409 million internet users read about 20 billion blog pages monthly
(Source: Neal Schaffer)
6. 63% of marketers reported keeping up with relevant content by going directly to a company’s website, including blogs
(Source: Isoline tech b2b buyers survey)
7. 54% of decision makers say they spend more than one hour per week reading and reviewing thought-leadership content
(Source: Hubspot)
8. 71% of B2B buyers stated they reviewed a blog while on their buying journey
(Source: Demand Gen)
What makes a good blog?
9. 43.7% of the top-ranking pages on the internet use links that also refer back to their site
(Source: Thrivemyway)
10. Websites that incorporate a blog have on average 435% more indexed pages and 97% more backlinks
(Source: Stratabeat)
11. Having a headline with six to eight words can increase your click-through rate by 21%
(Source: Express Writers)
12. Listicles receive 80% more page views than other forms of blogging content
(Source: Creative Click Media)
13. Long-form content gets an average of 77.2% more links than short articles
(Source: Backlinko)
14. The average blog post is now 1,416 words, up from 808 words in 2014 – equivalent to a 75% increase in wordcount in only seven years
(Source: MarketingProfs)
(Source: Orbit Media)
To remember when creating and sharing blogs
15. Most websites get between 1,000 – 4,000 monthly visitors in the year 2022
(Source: Hubspot)
16. The majority of blog ideas are generated through internal sources, with 82% of marketers generating content ideas from employees, 57% from sales, and 19% from the customer support team
(Source: Upland Software)
17. Most blogs include average reading time. On average, a person reads between 200 and 250 words per minute. To calculate your reading time, you can therefore divide the total number of words in your article by either 200 or 250
(Source: Tempest Media)
18. 97% of bloggers promote their blog posts on social media*
(Source: Startupbonsai.com)
*Content distribution is key to pulling in traffic, and social media channels like LinkedIn can be especially effective for bulk sharing – check out our LinkedIn InMail templates to help you get started.
19. Top-performing B2B blog entries generate an average of 100 social media shares and 50 organic search views every month
(Source: Demand sage)
20. Measuring results has never been more important (we have a great ROI blog to help you with this!) 79% of C-suite execs agree that not measuring ROI makes it hard to justify investment in content marketing
(Source: Earnest Agency)
Essentially, blogging is more alive than ever in 2022. More and more people are creating blog content, so it’s important to differentiate yourself from the competition and cut through the noise. Creating a benchmark to understand the industry trends is a great place to start, and will allow you to track your businesses progress against the competitive environment in the long run.
If you’re looking to add value to your business with blogs and other content forms, please get in touch with us at hello@isolinecomms.com and we’ll help you put together great content that delivers.
