Content marketing statistics are both plentiful and quite vague but a 2021 Semrush survey has shed quite a bit of light on how significant this discipline has become. What is the importance of content marketing, its weight, and its budgets? As I was preparing for a lecture I delivered recently, I asked myself a question: content marketing has been on every marketer’s lips for long — Visionary Marketing has even been around for 26 years — yet how critical is this discipline and what is the weight of this industry? I came across this Semrush 2021 study, which I found particularly interesting, especially in light of what happened during this pandemic. The US SEO company interviewed 1,500 B2B and B2C companies and marketing agencies, mainly in the US but also in the UK, Canada, Australia and India. To a lesser extent, in France and elsewhere. Despite this bias, this study provides some interesting insights, namely with regard to the US where, “no one hires a marketing director anymore unless he is knowledgeable in content marketing” according to Karine Abbou. 
Content marketing by numbers: 2021 Semrush survey statistics
Content marketing by numbers with the Semrush Content marketing 2021 statistics
Among the 1,500 respondents interviewed by Semrush, a vast majority consider that they have a content marketing strategy, 11% of which feel very satisfied and 76% of respondents with teams of less than 3 people. Three people is already significant though, even if this number depends on the size of the respondents. 61% measure the ROI of content marketing (I’d say we should take this number with a pinch of salt though, but fair enough…) Interestingly, 89% of respondents rely on organic search via search engines (as an aside, let me remind you that Semrush is a company dedicated to SEO).
The three hard skills required for content marketing are social media (50%), SEO (44%) and strategy (42%). This result is quite surprising IMHO, despite the continued importance of social media in many areas, as social is now less prominent with regard to the dissemination of content, due to the decline in “organic reach”, i.e. the natural reach of social media, due to algorithms.
Essential soft skills
On the soft skills side, we find leadership, which makes perfect sense because content marketing is all about thought-leadership. “Being able to deliver on time” comes next, this is important because I see a lot of companies yearning to become content marketers, but unfortunately failing to deliver anything decent in an acceptable timeframe.
Either they try to deliver “perfect content” and this endeavour tends to last forever, therefore defeating the object of content marketing, which must be delivered in a timely manner. Alternatively, they tend to deliver results that are not really up to scratch too quickly. You have to find the right balance, and it’s not easy, because it requires a lot of skills and it’s not rocket science.
Finally, “solve problems”: this is also very interesting because indeed, one of the great aims of content marketing is to document pain-points and how they can be solved.
Let’s dig deeper and look at budgets that further demonstrate the significance of content marketing
In the United States today, content marketing is considered to be one of the most important budgets, certainly not the most important one, because as we shall see, allowances are still limited which is, in my opinion, one of the major concerns.
Companies are investing a lot in technology, and it’s a good thing.