Zeentree.com has released findings from its first survey on the importance of content marketing in the Middle East. The survey shows the region’s marketers are rapidly turning towards Content Marketing as a key focus of their digital marketing efforts. The report finds that 69% of marketers interviewed view content marketing as ‘very important’ to their marketing efforts, with 60% expecting to increase their content marketing budgets this year – and 31% reporting it would grow to be up to half of their entire digital budget.
The Content Marketing Survey reveals the views of the industry’s leading marketing talents and was conducted during the Dubai Lynx International Advertising Festival held in Dubai last month. This comprehensive first-time study of Content Marketing in the Middle East region provides a detailed look at many aspects of online marketing including use of digital channels, languages used, outsourcing, budgets available, along with unearthing the challenges it brings. The survey was conducted by Zeentree.com, a new content production service which launched at the Lynx Festival.
Explaining the reason behind the survey, Lee Mancini, Managing Director of Zeentree.com says, “Content Marketing has been responsible for much of the marketing ‘buzz’ for at least two years and now it has finally become a recognized discipline which any savvy marketer needs to adopt into their strategy. However, in this region we are always lacking good quality, reliable data to help us understand the trends and activity in the region. With the launch of Zeentree.com this year, an e-commerce service that overcomes multilingual content creation challenges, we needed to thoroughly understand the importance of Content Marketing in this region. We are confident that marketers across MENA will also find this survey both timely and useful in allowing them to benchmark their trends and practices in Content Marketing, undoubtedly the fastest growing online marketing channel.”
The key finding of the survey are:
•Nearly all respondents, 86%, expect their digital marketing spend to increase for 2015, with 31% expecting Content Marketing to take up to 25-50% of their digital marketing budgets.
•Nearly half of respondents create content in English, with only 38% creating content in Arabic.
•69% cited Content Marketing as being ‘very important’. Only 6% of the sample said it was either unimportant or that they didn’t understand it.
•24% of respondents stated that availability of budget was the biggest obstacle to content creation.
•20% of the sample cited quality assurance as the major challenge to producing multilingual content
•Social media was the most popular type of content created, followed by video.
“Confidence amongst Middle East marketers about the value of Content Marketing is high; the fact that 60% of marketers plan to increase the amount of budget they allocate to content marketing indicates that they can see how Content Marketing will benefit clients, consumers and the bottom line,” said Lee Mancini. “And the Middle East is surpassing the global figures which predicts a 55% increase in Content Marketing budget for 2015. Further more, coming a close second behind social media as the most popular online marketing channel shows exactly how Content Marketing has taken a hold in this region.”
“Whilst marketers in the region see the importance of Content Marketing, they are held back by obstacles such as budget, measuring ROI and inadequate resources; this is especially true for creating multilingual content, where lack of time and issues with quality assurance create the biggest hurdles. Marketers need to bear in mind that the web is a multilingual platform, and rather than facing the uphill struggle to produce content in additional languages, they can call on Zeentree.com. This is a service specifically designed to help brands produce quality content in several languages, with a fast and efficient e-commerce service that transforms any brand into a publisher of multilingual content in just a few steps,” adds Lee Mancini.