by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, April 4, 2017

As U.S. companies prepare to post the strongest quarterly earnings in years during the first financial season of 2017, advertisers are building up and repositioning content marketing teams to prepare for stronger growth.

The report — The Anatomy of the Modern Content Marketing Team — released Tuesday by Conductor examines the makeup of today’s content marketing teams and its challenges and position within marketing organizations.

The concept of a content team within an organization is relatively new. Although nearly three-quarters of content teams have executive buy-in as a business strategy, only about 40% have been in existence for between 2 and 4 years. About 21% have been in existence between 5 and 9 years.

About 45% of content teams have between two and four employees, followed by about 20% that have between five and 9 people. Nearly 4% do not have an in-house content team and only 12.8% have a team of one.

Those within the department report to many disparate places within the organization, and one-third of content teams have changed where they report at least once in the last five years. About 33% of content marketers say they have reported to multiple departments in the last five years.

It may seem chaotic, but 33.1% of marketers have reported to multiple departments within the past five years as companies try to determine where this type of marketing team belongs within the organization.

The study also looked at where content teams should report into versus where they do report.

About 38% of survey respondents say content teams should report into the head of marketing, compared with 45% saying that they do. Some 12.2% say they should report into corporate marketing, whereas 13.4% say they do. Some 12.2% say content marketing teams should remain independent, whereas only 1.8% say they do. The disruption could come from disparate teams. Some 2.4% of respondents say that each department has its own content marketing team.

Search engine optimization and content specialists sometimes team up. More than one-third of respondents — 35% — indicated SEO professional are on the same team as them. Some 45.7% said they work closely with the SEO team, and 21% identify themselves as both a content and SEO professional.

Organic search traffic is the No. 1 metric that marketers use to measure content marketing success, followed by leads, social engagement, all traffic, time on site, revenue and transactions.

Most companies — especially large ones — struggle to attribute revenue to content. Only 5.3% of respondents from companies with more than 10,000 employees say they can clearly attribute revenue to content, compared with 30% of content marketers from companies with less than 100 employees.

Most respondents, regardless of the size of their organization, listed organic traffic as their No. 1 metric for measuring content success, according to the study.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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