B2B Marketing Research: content marketing goes mainstream

If you needed any more evidence that content marketing has gone mainstream, just put ‘Content Marketing’ into Google Insights for Search (beta) and compare it with the general Advertising and Marketing category search volumes. It’s not the most rigorous B2B marketing research but, hey, I’m not the most rigorous guy.

Here’s the chart, showing the search interest since 2004:

It’s exciting to see — and if we add ‘social media marketing’ to the chart, you really start seeing the vital signs of an industry in transition.

Of course, traditional advertising still dwarfs these search volumes, but it’s trending down, down, down:

Just out of interest, let’s see how the search interest trends for Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing compare:

A curious scrap of B2B marketing research: it looks like ‘inbound marketing’ came from nowhere to rival ‘content marketing’ but now both terms are trending up at about the same rate. That’s interesting — usually markets like to settle on one name for something so big. But it feels like both terms are equally viable so far…