Content Marketing in English: 5 Important Figures to Help Startups

Content marketing is an effective method of promoting a startup abroad. There are ways to attract hundreds and thousands of users, even with a budget of just $ 200 . However, you need to approach the creation of corporate content wisely.

I selected 5 important statistical indicators that should be considered when creating a content strategy and its implementation in the English language.

36% of readers prefer list headings

Despite the fact that the so-called listicles, that is, posts in the form of lists, are considered a low genre of content marketing, they are really effective. The most common figure on this subject is 36% of readers who prefer headings with numbers (“10 Ways,” “5 Reasons,” etc.).

One can argue with this figure, yet it has surfaced in the network of the year since 2014, but the fact remains - English-speaking readers really love such headlines. It is easy to understand why so - such headings immediately answer many questions:

• What the article will be about ("10 Ways to Write a Popular Blog Post").
• What exactly will be in it (tips for creating content);
• Estimated duration (10 ways this is a lot, it would be five, could be read faster).

Note : the lists are great for your own company blogs, but if you want to write serious texts, for example, to be placed in the media, practice creating content in a different format. I did not say for nothing that listicles are considered a low genre - many not-so-popular startup resources will not take such texts.

Well, in any case, in addition to 36% of those who love lists, there are still 64% of the remaining readers, which should not be forgotten.

16 posts per month give 3.5 more traffic than 4 posts

Content marketing stands on two pillars - this is regularity and quantity. The more quality content you publish regularly, the better your blog results over time.

According to HubSpot, companies that publish 16 or more blog posts per month receive 3.5 times more traffic than companies that publish 0-4 material. The conclusion is simple - you need to try to publish by post daily.

To grow search traffic, you need articles no shorter than 2000 words

As Neil Patel, one of the leading American marketers, writes on his blog, the average length of pages in Google’s position in the top 10 results is 2000 words. The higher the page is in the search results, the more content is on it: on average, the first result in the search results has 2400+ words, and the tenth result is about 2030 words.

Thus, in order to increase search traffic, you need to publish at least 2000 words in length on your blog.

At the same time, if your goal is not to get search traffic, but to publish some materials in the media, then different logic works here. It is important to build on the style of the publication - it is often customary to publish shorter content on some resource, and it is more familiar to readers. For example, according toResearch, visitors to the popular technology site TechCrunch prefer articles of medium length - from 5 to 10 thousand characters. For example, 6000 characters is about 1100 English words, that is, such content will in any case be less than 2000 words.

Publications with images viewed 94% more often

The statistics of the PRDaily resource confirms the popular thesis that it is easier for people to perceive visual content. Even in the case of texts, relevant pictures allow you to dilute his canvas and add meaning.

Illustrations allow you to visualize the theses presented in the text. As a result, on average, materials with such visual content are viewed much more often.

Ideal time for publication: after 11 am on weekdays and after 9 on Saturday

According to research, blog posts published after 11am get the most coverage. At the same time, readers leave the largest number of comments on materials published on Saturday after 9 am - this can be explained by the fact that on weekends the amount of published content sags significantly, and many people have nothing to read. At the same time, on Sunday everyone is already engaged in family affairs and less surf the Internet. The largest number of external links is received by articles that were published on Monday or Thursday after 7 a.m.

There is also evidence that materials published on Tuesday receive the most “shares” on social networks and, as a result, the most views. However, LinkedIn and Pinterest users, on the contrary, prefer to share links to blog posts on Monday.

Conclusion: what does all this mean for business

Content marketing in the English language is not an easy task, which requires considerable effort, resources and time. In order to achieve long-term success, companies need:

• Experiment with publication formats - do lists, how-tos, guides, and other types of posts to understand what works best for their audience;
• publish content regularly and often - one article per week will not save anyone and is unlikely to give a good result;
• Articles should be worked out - business needs to either work through texts and make them longer to increase search traffic, or try to find sites where shorter formats work;
• you need to pay attention to illustrations - to prepare them, to ensure that pictures make reading easier and add information load;
• Try different approaches to the time of publication, including experimenting with weekend posts.

As you can see, this is all really difficult, so there is nothing surprising in the fact that, according to statistics , almost 60% of business blogs use the work of outsourcing specialists - otherwise it is almost impossible to fulfill all the conditions described above.