• by Tanya Gazdik , December 18, 2012

There is still opportunity for companies to improve their content marketing strategies to drive deeper engagement with customers, according to a multi-industry survey undertaken by IMN.

The survey revealed that while content marketing is important to businesses across industries (including automotive, direct selling, franchise, financial services and insurance), companies still have inroads to make.

Regardless of industry, finding and sourcing relevant content and internal resource constraints were the top two roadblocks to successful content marketing programs.

The credit union (33%) and direct selling (31%) sectors had the highest number of respondents replying that their organizations have a formal content marketing strategy in place.

The financial services (75%), insurance (50%) and software (50%) industries are the most advanced when it comes to having separate content marketing strategies for each channel. The automotive (14%) and banking sectors (14%) were the least likely to have separate strategies in place.

Financial services (50%), insurance (50%), software (50%) and banking (43%) industries had the highest percentages responding that they do have content marketing editorial calendars in place.

The insurance (50%), credit union (33%), financial services (33%), banking (29%) and automotive (19%) sectors are concerned about the regulatory compliance of the content they distribute.

According to the results, 78% of respondents indicated that content marketing was either a medium or a high priority, while 52% did not have a separate content marketing strategy in place for each channel it distributes content through. A full 32% of respondents had a content marketing calendar in place to track the topics that would be covered, when and by whom.

Across industries, Web sites, newsletters and social media consistently ranked as the most effective content marketing vehicles, except for the financial services and software sectors, which did not list social media at all (email campaigns completed each of their top three).  Also, respondents from the insurance industry ranked video higher than social media.

Open-rate metrics for email blasts is the most popular form of content marketing program measurement for the automotive, banking, financial services and insurance industries. For franchises, software firms and direct selling organizations, the number of incoming leads was most popular. Revenue increases were the most frequent type of measurement used by credit unions.