As a content marketer, you’re likely seeking reputable research reports and white papers to inform several of your processes, such as:

Planning your upcoming strategies

Validating the directions you’re taking

Making the business case for content in your organization

At CMI, we’re pretty passionate about research, too. In fact, we conduct original research every year to help set budgets and benchmarks for your effective content marketing efforts. But, we also like to keep tabs on what others are saying about content marketing, so we can make sure we are keeping up with the latest trends.

As you know, one stat on its own may be valuable, and even tweet-worthy, but seeing multiple stats that validate your point of view is definitely more convincing.

That’s why we’ve compiled this list of some of the best content marketing research out there. It’s designed to serve as a go-to resource for the information we think will be most valuable — and we’d love to add your research, as well.

Huge thanks go to Anna Ritchie, who helped us compile this list.



In the research-focused List.ly above, you’ll find:

B2B and B2C benchmarks, budgets and trends for North America, the U.K. and Australia

Research reports broken down by industry

Meaningful insights on the current state of digital marketing — and the specific implications for content marketers

Discussions on the way social media usage impacts content marketing strategy

Ideas for building stronger connections between your content and sales teams

Sharing your own resources with List.ly

We created this list using List.ly, which is a simple way to create and share lists on pretty much anything and everything. Here’s how it works:

Gather relevant research pieces for your list, adding filters so you can easily sort and browse through the studies to find those most relevant to you.

Rank the reports — you can vote each one “up” or “down” in your rankings, as well as add comments wherever you would like.

Pick reports to save or share from your list. You can even share or embed the entire list on your website or within your own social networks.

Through the process, we found that List.ly really helped us minimize the legwork involved, which made it really quick and easy to find the stats we wanted to highlight and share.

The studies we selected contain dozens and dozens of charts, graphs, stats, and commentary gathered from thousands of marketers just like you. But this list is just the beginning. We’ll be curating this data in various ways to make it even more useful. But in the meantime, we would love your help in making this list a more comprehensive resource. What would you add? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

For more resources and research to help guide your effective content marketing strategies, visit CMI’s Original Research page.

Cover image via Bigstock