Marketing is the act of attracting an audience. It is the act of promotion, raising awareness, strengthening loyalty to your brand, pushing forward the value of your services, and generally improving your reach. Marketing is about standing out from the crowd, ensuring you are heard amid the noise, and showcasing the brilliant work that you do.
But marketing is a broad term. . It encompasses, depending on usage, the entirety of content, social media, email, websites, and much more. There are so many facets of marketing, so many different directions, and so much evolution. It can be difficult to keep up.
That’s why we have compiled all the essential marketing stats for 2023 in one place. The facts can help you define your marketing direction, get your service or products in front of a growing audience, and generally give your entire organisation a boost.
So check out the facts and stats below, covering everything from social media prioritisation to search engine optimisation, from website creation to email segmentation.
Skip to: General marketing facts and stats
Skip to: Email marketing facts and stats
Skip to: Social media marketing facts and stats
Skip to: Content marketing facts and stats
Skip to: Video marketing facts and stats
Skip to: SEO marketing facts and stats
General marketing facts and stats
Marketing is a broad and all-encompassing term, generally accounting for various areas – even various departments – of any organisation. In this section, we look at some of our favourite marketing stats, which could help you with future decision-making.
According to Demand Gen, 53% of marketers say email has been the most effective channel for early-stage lead generation and 44% of marketers said that return on investment (ROI) has become a top priority. Ad placement and audience targeting are the top ways for marketers to drive more demand, according to HubSpot, and the top priority for marketers in general is generating leads.
Automation is a marketing talking point in 2023, as it is across the wider economy. And many marketers are heeding the call. According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report, more than three-quarters of companies use automation and 47% of marketers use bots. Those numbers will likely increase, as we witness the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI).
Indeed, according to Mar Tech, 48% of marketing leaders say that AI is making the most significant difference in how customers interact with them and more than 80% of marketers include chatbots in their customer experience strategy. And, perhaps more generally, 64% of marketers consider AI to be valuable in marketing strategy – another number that will likely increase in the coming years.
In terms of analytics, over 75% of marketers report on how campaigns generate revenue, which is welcome as that’s been a historical gap in marketing analytics. Just over half of marketers are using attribution reporting, but only 15% measure the success of content programs by lead generation – most likely track easier metrics, such as page views, time spent on page, even click rates. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, Google Analytics remains the key analytics (and SEO) tool for marketers.
Mobile advertising has been rapidly growing over the past few years, according to Statista. The spend for mobile advertising is expected to surpass $395m in 2024. And most organisations, again, are relying on Google for their Ad spend. Display advertising has also seen a boost, but paid advertisements have risen particularly fast, with more than 33% of marketers now using paid ads for brand awareness.
Email marketing facts and stats
Email marketing remains perhaps the most popular way to reach new audiences. That’s no surprise, really. There are more than four billion daily email users, according to HubSpot, and 37% of brands are increasing their email budget, recognising the continuing importance.
In short, email marketing has long been a popular option, perhaps the most popular, and it looks to remain popular long into the future. And it brings in a lot of money. According to Statista, for example, e-mail marketing revenue is estimated to reach $11bn by the end of 2023.
But what are the best ways to practice email marketing? According to Campaign Monitor, Friday is the best day to send emails, with click-through rates of 2.7%. You should focus on email design, as it is essential to improving email engagement, according to lots of marketers.
Copy is also important, according to an AWeber report. Most businesses write their own copy, according to the report, with an average email consisting of just over 430 words. The average email takes 3.3 minutes to read, according to AWeber, and 50% of emails contain less than 300 words.
AWeber also have some helpful advice on email lines, based on marketing stats. Email subject lines contain just over 43 words on average and only 6.9% include emojis. And, interestingly, 34% use title-case capitalisation, Which Looks Like This, and 60% use sentence case capitalisation, Which looks like this. The remaining 6% use all lower-case capitalisation: which looks like this.
Personalised email, as expected, performs much better, with up to six times higher transaction rates, according to Experian, and click-through rates of around 14%, according to Demand Gen. Automated emails actually perform better than standard email newsletters, according to Epsilon Email Institute, and that’s reflected in the take-up across the economy: 51% of organisations use some form of email automation in their marketing processes.
Customers like emails. Who knew? According to Statista, for example, 49% of customers state that they would like to receive weekly promotional emails from their favourite brands. According to MarketingSherpa, 61% email subscribers would like to receive promotional emails at least once per week. And, again according to Statista, the majority of people prefer to be contacted via email.
Email remains a priority for marketers. Indeed, according to Litmus, four-fifths of marketers say they’d rather give up social media than email – and social media is huge, as we’ll cover below. Newsletter emails are cited by 31% of marketers as the best way to nurture leads, according to the Content Marketing Institute. Most marketers use a dedicated email marketing platform, which is hardly surprising, as there are many cheap and bespoke options currently on the market.
Email marketing remains indispensable to most organisations, regardless of their shape and size. For more information, check out our in-depth article on email marketing, or listen to our podcast below:
Social media marketing facts and stats
More than 4.74 billion people across the world use social media, an increase of 4.2% in 2022 alone, according to Hootsuite. And the users of social media are overwhelmingly adults (or near adults) with more than 75% of the world’s social media users being over the age of 13.
People worldwide spend an average of 2 hours and 28 minutes per day on social media. The countries that spend the most time on socials, according to Hootsuite’s Social Media Trends 2023 report, are Nigeria, Brazil, and South Africa, and the countries who spend the least time are South Korea, Japan, and Austria.
The same report found that the average user visits 7.2 social media platforms a month. Women aged 16–24 use social the most, apparently, spending an average of 3 hours and 10 minutes per day. The marketing potential on social media is huge, particularly if you effectively target demographics. Social media, in short, is an area that marketers are not able to ignore.
And very few of them do ignore social media. According to data collected from various organisations, including Statista and Adweek, nearly 95% of businesses use some form of social media. Research reveals that, the bigger the company, the more likely they are to have a social presence.
The non-profit sector is even more prolific on social media – perhaps for good reason, as raising awareness is so often part of their mission. According to Nonprofit Tech for Good, for example, 87% of non-profits across the world are on social media.
And the budget for social media marketing is massive. Statista estimates that organisations will spend more than $247bn (approx. £200 billion) on social advertising in 2023, a projected growth of 4.53% on the previous year. According to Insider Intelligence, marketers take up a great deal of that overall spend, with a grand total of $65 billion (approx. £52.6 billion) in advertisement.
The social media landscape seems to suggest that organisations will use social media more, not less. And that’s likely true. But there are some trends that pose a counter argument. Consider, for example, that overall trust in social media platforms has been declining in recent years.
Consider, too, that platforms such as Twitter have lost advertising money due to perceived instability, a verification process which undermines authenticity, and a general increase in hate speech and fake news. And consider that Twitter continues that trend, with its recent (somewhat peculiar) transformation into X.
So the future remains unwritten. But it is likely that organisations will remain on socials, even if that means pivoting their marketing to focus on a different platform. Threads, for example, has seen a massive rise in its early stages, already boasting more than a fifth of overall Twitter (or X) users.
Social media demands that you keep up to date. For more social media facts, including a breakdown of all the different platforms, check out our article: Social media facts for 2023.
Content marketing facts and stats
Here is a statement that was true five years ago, remains true today, and will likely be true five years from now: people are consuming more content than ever. There are more than five billion internet users worldwide, for example, accounting for more than 60% of the world population.
People in the U.S. spend eight hours per day online, according to HighSpeedInternet.com. The stats for Europe paint a similar picture. According to a poll commissioned by NordVPN, for example, Brits spend roughly 59 hours each week on the internet, which works out at more than eight hours per day.
Content marketing is worth more than $400bn, with projections suggesting it will grow close to $900bn in 2028, according to a report from the Global Content Marketing Report. Content marketing has been cited as an important area of investment by 97% of marketers, according to SEMRush, and 46% of businesses directly plan to increase content creation spend in the next year.
Investment is warranted, according to some studies, as content marketing typically costs less per lead than other popular forms of marketing. Consumers seem to enjoy consuming content, with 82% of customers preferring brands that have an active content presence, according to Demand Metric.
So content is increasing. Content consumption is increasing. But so is disinformation. According to the Pew Research Center, for example, nearly two in three Americans (64%) say fabricated news stories cause a lot of confusion when it comes to basic facts. And 65% of study participants say web content is “hit or miss” or “unreliable’, according to Content Science, Content + Credibility Report.
Much of that stems from so-called fake news. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 57% of adults agree with the following statement, “The media I use are contaminated with untrustworthy information,” while 76% worry about “false information or fake news being used as a weapon”.
Consumers tend to trust traditional channels. A MarketingSherpa survey found, for example, that 82% of consumers trust print the most, followed by TV with 80%. So, in terms of content creation and marketing, opting for the more trusted and traditional channels may help avoid creating distrust.
That is a vital area that organisations need to address, especially because the absence of trust can undermine an organisation’s reputation. According to Reuters, for example, 87% of news consumers agree that advertising on a news site associated with a fake news story damages a brand’s reputation.
During the pandemic, people turned to two comparatively new mediums to escape, to learn, or just for a little light entertainment: podcasts and webinars. And the new mediums have continued to grow in popularity since. Podcasts have become a popular form of content. There are more than 2.5 million podcasts listed in Apple Podcasts, according to Podcast Industry Insights – so it’s a crowded field.
According to Infinite Dial, Edison Research and Triton, people in the U.S. aged 12 and older are most likely to listen to online audio using Spotify (31%), followed by Pandora (18%), and Google Play/YouTube Music (14%). It is likely similar patterns exist in Europe and the U.K.
Podcasts are popular. But they are particularly popular with certain demographics. Young adults are the most likely to listen to podcasts, according to Infinite Dial, Edison Research and Triton. The research found that people aged 12–34 are the most likely to say they listened to a podcast in the past month (50%) and that number declines as we move into higher age ranges.
The above is an essential stat for organisations to consider, especially when thinking of demographics. If you want to appeal to younger demographics, perhaps more investment in podcasts could provide an answer. If you want to grow older audiences, perhaps not. And plenty of other stats can help you make an informed decision.
Consider the following from an infographic produced by Music Oomph:
- Podcast listeners are 68% more likely to have a postgraduate degree
- Podcast listeners are 56% more likely to be undergraduates
- Podcast listeners are 45% more likely to earn more than $250k
- Podcast listeners in the U.S. are more likely to be male
- Around 50% of podcast listening is done at home
- Around 80% of listeners complete the entire episode
So if you’re aiming to reach graduates who earn a lot of money, podcasts might be the right direction. Podcasts are also a great way to raise money, whether through seeking voluntary donations or through subscription models, largely because people are willing to pay for them.
Video has grown too – so much so, in fact, that it warrants its own section. Indeed, the future of content marketing, whether you like it or not, may well rest with video marketing.
For more information, along with very precise stats on different mediums and different demographics, along with information about the make-up of content teams, check out: Content facts 2023.
Or, for people who prefer to listen, check out our podcast on The future of content:
Video marketing facts and stats
Videos have risen in ascendancy in the past decade – and they continue to grow. Below we look at some key trends, exploring how people consume video, the style and length that the audience most enjoys, the most popular platforms for video content consumption, and much more.
More than 3 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each month, according to Fortunelords. In 2021, people spent 100 minutes a day watching online videos, up from 84 minutes a day in 2019 – and that number continues to grow. And that popularity is reflected in marketing trends.
According to HubSpot, 54% of people want to see more video from brands. Smart Insights suggests that 99% of marketers using video will continue to do so, meaning that it obviously yields results from the people who have already started that form of content creation.
That’s supported by stats from Wyzowl, which show that 78% of marketers say video has directly helped increase sales and 86% of marketers say that video has increased their website traffic. And, on top of that, putting video in emails can increase click rates by 300%, according to Biteable.
The emphasis, at least in 2023, seems to be on short-form videos – reflected in the rise of short-form on social media. Most videos are now less than a minute long, according to Wistia. And more than 30% of global marketers are currently investing in short-form video – a number we expect to grow.
So, for content marketing experts, short and snappy videos, usually in a lighter tone, may prove most effective. But the tone and length will always depend on your message, your mission, and your audience. So do your research, plan in advance, and find the approach that works best for you.
For more useful data and information, check out Wyzowl’s Video Marketing Statistics 2023.
SEO marketing facts and stats
SEO (search engine optimisation) is the most important driver of written content – and increasingly defines other forms of content, too, including video content. The SEO industry, according to Forbes, is worth more than $80bn. SEO can drive a conversion rate of nearly 15%, according to Monster Insights, but only if done right, with the right conversion strategy, a seamless user experience, and great user journey. For comparison, traditional strategies like direct mail have a conversion rate of 1.7%.
To understand SEO, consider that 93% of all online experiences start with search engines. Search engines drive ten times the amount of traffic as social media. Nailing SEO depends on occupying the first page, as 75% of users will not scroll past that page, according to Search Engine Watch.
Google remains the most important search engine, with more than 85% of market share, according to Statista. There are more than 7.8 billion searches performed each day in Google. On average, Google receives more than 102,000 search queries every second. And, to reiterate the importance of mobile, as we’ve shown above, 61% of all Google searches are performed using mobile devices.
So it’s obvious that written content can yield rewards for organisations. But they need to ensure the writing is SEO-optimised, especially if you want to reach new audiences. Writing, if it struggles to engage, can take longer than other forms of content, so it’s essential that you manage to get it right.
SEO is increasingly important for marketers. Over 50% of marketers, for example, say that keyword rankings and organic traffic are the top ways they measure the success of their SEO strategies, according to HubSpot. Importantly, 71% of marketers say using strategic keywords was their number one strategy – which tallies well with our experience, as keywords seem most important.
For more information on SEO, check out our astonishingly simple guide to search engine optimisation.
