Every year, HubSpot surveys thousands of the world’s foremost marketers and salespeople to ask them about their most pressing priorities, the challenges they face, and the strategies they plan to add in the year ahead.
All of these insights are then consolidated into a master report: The State of Inbound. Over the last seven years, the report has tracked the practice and adoption of inbound marketing and sales. This year, the State of Inbound looks to the future.
This year’s report focused on what's next in the world of marketing and sales so you can better prepare your business to meet the changing needs of your buyers.
In this post we’ll focus on one of the most standout findings of this installment of The State of Inbound: Marketers aren’t creating the content that people actually want.
Give the People What They Want
HubSpot found that, above all else, “marketers want to convert more of their contacts/leads into customers. To do this, their priority is growing their organic presence and writing blog posts.”
However, these content priorities simply don’t align with what customers want to consume. “People are most likely to skim blog posts and long-form business content. Instead, consumers pay most attention to videos, social posts, and news articles.”
So how can marketers give the people what they want? By diversifying their content.
Top 3 Types of Content
Overall, people want to consume more social media posts, news articles, and videos.
Social Media
It’s not surprising that social media posts were the type of content people wanted to see more of in the future. After all, social content consumption has increased by big margins in the past two years, including 57% on Facebook, 25% on Twitter, and 21% on LinkedIn.
Video
People love watching videos, especially on social media.
- Facebook users watch 8 billion videos a day.
- Snapchat users watch 10 billion videos per day.
- 45% watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week.
- 49% of 18-24 year olds watch at least three hours of video on YouTube a week.
Pay Attention to Where People are Consuming Your Content
Another interesting aspect of the State of Inbound report was that it asked respondents on which type of device they want to see different types of content.
This is incredibly useful information. Marketers (and small businesses who handle their own marketing) now know, for instance, that consumers prefer to watch videos on their mobile devices, and therefore all video content should be optimized for mobile viewing.
Conclusion
As HubSpot concludes in the report, seeing as content consumption is becoming decentralized across the web, “marketers’ content strategy should extend beyond their own blogs and website, and include publishing through external outlets.”
And what should you be publishing on those outlets? Video content, social media posts and news articles about your industry.
