Actionable Content Marketing Benchmarks

ACTIONABLE
Content Marketing
Benchmarks
Is your content A+ Material?
VENNGAGE
Create Infographics at venngage.com

How are you doing compared to
your competitors?
How far away are you compared to
the best of the best in the industry?
How fast should your content
marketing be growing to be
comparable to industry leaders?
Ask yourself
these
Questions
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Create Infographics at venngage.comContent Marketing Benchmarks: Is Your Content A+ Material?

We picked the top 115 marketing
tech companies from Inbound.org’s
Top MarTech list
We used Buzzsumo to look at all blog
posts of the top MarTech companies
What we are Benchmarking
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We are benchmarking content
from from March 1, 2015 to
October 30, 2015. We did not
want to look at any posts less than
six months old to make sure there
was enough lag time.
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The Best in
the Industry
These are the companies we are benchmarking.
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Compared to
Your
Content
The Best in
the Industry
We wanted a benchmark that compared our content
to the best in the industry, not to the average
(remember, we want to be the best!).
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Top Performers
(Top 10%)
Average Performers Lower Performers
The performance of content follows the power law rule: it
disportionately rewards the bests performers in the group.
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Benchmark
Metrics
Blog Post Total Shares and Shares by
Platform (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+)
Blog Post Shares by Followers (Shares
normalized by the number of followers for that
company. Normalized post shares level the
playing ﬁeld among companies who have a lot
of followers and those who do not. This allows
companies with smaller followings to compare
their social shares with larger companies.)
Post Total Shares by Type
Total Shares and Shares by Platform per
month (for a company)
Top Companies
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This study will help you
measure the performance of
the content you publish.
We’re using a percentile
/grading system.
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if you’re in the 90th percentile, that
means you’re better than 90% of the
other sites (or you’re in the top 10%)
and you’re an “A” grade performer.
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This allows you to be ambitious and target
higher percentiles as you get better.
Let’s say you start out in the 50th percentile (or “C”
grade range), you can target to improve to the 75th
percentile (or “B” grade range). When you get to B,
you want to move up to the top 10% (A grade).
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This benchmark measures the total shares a single blog post. The Total Shares of
a post is the sum of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and G+ shares.
As you can see, an A grade post has 939 total shares or more, a B post, 357
shares, a C (which is the median) has at least 131 shares.
Blog Post Total Shares
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Top Performers
(Top 10%)
Average Performers
Lower Performers
How do you benchmark your own posts’ total
share performance?
Look at the blog posts you have published from the previous
month, and get the number of total shares for those posts.
Use a social sharing plugin
like the tool, Buzzsumo.
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For each post, compare the
total share number with the
benchmark and assign a grade.
Click here to download the excel workbook
we created and plug in your own content!
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This benchmark measures the Facebook shares of a single blog post. Use this
benchmark if you’re targeting Facebook as one of your main channels for sharing
your content.
In general, Facebook hasn’t been used as much by B2B marketers (as shown by
the relatively low number of Facebook shares below, compared to the total
shares), though that is quickly changing.
Blog Post Facebook Shares
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Click here to download the excel workbook
we created and plug in your own content.
As you can see, an “A” grade post has
144 Facebook shares or more, a B
grade post, 43 shares, a C grade (which
is average) has at least 12 shares.
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We use the normalized the shares of larger companies to level the
playing ﬁeld among companies who have a lot of Facebook followers
and those who do not.
Normalized Shares
Your
Content
The Best in
the Industry
This allows companies with smaller
followings to compare their social
shares with larger companies.
VENNGAGE

This metric is usually expressed as a percentage, as it can be used as a proxy for the
percentage of Facebook followers who shared that post. This is similar to a common
measurement for engagement, as in how engaged your Facebook followers are.
As you can see, when normalized, Facebook shares are very small in general. Even the top
performing articles get very little Facebook shares when expressed as a percentage of the
number of Facebook followers they have.
Blog Post Facebook Shares
Per Follower (Normalized)
Use the Excel worksheet to put in the number of Facebook followers and
it will calculate the normalized shares and grades for you.
VENNGAGE

To help you calculate
this number, download
the Excel worksheet
Put in the number of Facebook
followers you have and we’ll calculate
the Normalized Facebook Share
numbers.
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This measures the Twitter shares of a single blog post. In general, blog posts get
more Twitter shares than Facebook shares. The top performing articles get more
than double the amount of Twitter shares compared to Facebook shares.
Blog Post Twitter Shares
VENNGAGE

As you can see, we really suck on Twitter. In February, even
our original research content scored a D and C. To be fair,
we’ve never focused our marketing efforts on Twitter, nor
have we done anything special to promote our content there.
Download the Excel
worksheet and plug in
your own content.
VENNGAGE

This measures the Twitter shares of a single blog post divided by the
number of Twitter followers.
The Normalized Twitter Share levels the playing ﬁeld among companies
who have diﬀerent amount of Twitter followers. It allows companies with
smaller followings to compare their Twitter shares with companies who
have larger followings. This metric is expressed as a percentage.
Blog Post Twitter Shares
Use the Excel worksheet to put in the number of Twitter followers and it
will calculate the normalized shares and grades for you.
VENNGAGE

This measures the LinkedIn shares of a single blog post.
MarTech blog posts get almost as many LinkedIn shares as
Twitter shares in terms of absolute numbers.
Blog Post LinkedIn Shares
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We were equally as bad on LinkedIn as as we were on
Twitter. LinkedIn is actually a channel we value and one that
we want to put more effort in. So hopefully our grades here
will improve in the coming months as we focus our content
and efforts on engaging more of our LinkedIn followers.
Download the Excel
worksheet and plug in
your own content.
VENNGAGE

Blog Post LinkedIn Shares
This measures the LinkedIn shares of a single blog post divided by the number of LinkedIn
followers for the company that produced the post.
When compared to other social platforms, the Normalized LinkedIn Shares are the highest
for all platforms, and by quite a large magnitude. For example, the top 90th percentile is
2.77% shares (compared to a measly 0.46% on Twitter and 0.35% on Facebook).
Use the Excel worksheet to put in the number of LinkedIn followers and
it will calculate the normalized shares and grades for you.
VENNGAGE

This measures the G+ shares of a single blog post. To be honest, we
don’t actively use G+ as a marketing channel but we added this
metric because it is part of the Total Shares metric.
Blog Post Google+ Shares
As you can see, G+ does not get that many shares at all.
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We wanted to know which type of blog post produces more shares,
and we also wanted deeper granularity into our content mix. The
following benchmark uses Buzzsumo’s post categories: Infographic,
Video, Guest Post, Article, Interview.
Blog Post Benchmarks by Type
How do diﬀerent types of blog content impact shares?
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Blog Post Benchmarks by Type
Infographics have the highest number of shares among all content types
We were surprised at how much better
infographics did compared to other content
forms. Infographic is the hands-down the most
effective content form for MarTech companies
If you’d like to learn more about how to use infographics in your content
marketing eﬀorts, sign up for free at Venngage.com. VENNGAGE

Monthly Shares Per Company
In the following table, we aggregated all the blog posts by each company over the same
six-month period and calculated the average monthly shares (total and for each platform)
into the same benchmark grading system.
This means the top 90th percentile group gets almost 15k total shares per month, the
75th percentile, about 5k shares per month, and the 50th percentile, 1.6k total shares per
month. Why would you want to look at this benchmark? The rationale for looking at
monthly shares per company is to measure the monthly performance of your content
management eﬀorts as a whole.
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Monthly Shares Per Company
At Venngage, we do not produce many original posts per month. Our publishing rate is
low–only one or two original pieces and a few guest posts a month (we decided as an
editorial and strategic decision to focus on quality over quantity).
Use the worksheet in the Excel workbook to add your own post and total shares number
and the sheet will aggregate and grade your monthly posts automatically for you.
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Here are all 115 companies sorted by their total shares from the six month sample period
(not all companies are labelled in the X-axis due to space constraints).
Which are the top MarTech companies
when it comes to content marketing?
You’ll notice that even among the top
MarTech companies, the distribution of
total shares per company follows the
power law rule. In our sample, the top 20
companies account for 80% of all shares.
The clear gorilla in this
space, HubSpot, represents
25% of all the shares!
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Here are the Top 20 Companies and their
Average Monthly Total Shares
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Download
eBook &
Worksheet
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Content Marketing Benchmarks: Is Your Content A+ Material?

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Actionable Content Marketing Benchmarks