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Part
01
Beauty and Fashion Company Blogs
Although the number of recent, publicly available statistics and data related to company/business blogs is quite limited (especially when looking specifically at the U.K.), there is enough information available that can collectively help to illustrate the effectiveness of company blogs when it comes to customer engagement and sales, as well as to make an educated guess whether company blogs in the beauty/cosmetics/fashion industry in the U.K. is growing or declining.
Overall, marketers believe that company blogs are a key priority when it comes to content marketing, as they are known to significantly increase ROI, generate leads, and attract more website visitors. In the U.K., the number of beauty and fashion blogs overall has been decreasing quite significantly over the past 2-3 years, and the number of people who blog on a company blog has also been decreasing since 2016 (although not nearly as drastic of a decline).
These findings could suggest that the number of company blogs in the beauty/fashion industry may be on the decline, or at the very least, growth is stagnant. One possible reason for the decline is that there is a shift in beauty and fashion content being focused more on visual platforms such as Instagram, which is noted as being easier than running a blog while still accomplishing a similar goal.
STATISTICS: EFFECTIVENESS OF COMPANY BLOGS AT INCREASING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AND REVENUE
- According to a 2018 report by HubSpot, "55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority."
- According to a 2019 report by HubSpot, "Marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI."
- A 2017 report on the Social Marketing Industry found that "43% of B2B marketers say blogging is their most important type of content."
- A 2017 survey conducted by Hubspot of over 1,531 companies (some that had blogs and some that didn't) found that company blogs attract 55% more website visitors.
- According to a 2018 report, 47% of customers "viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep."
GROWTH OF COMPANY BLOGS IN THE U.K. (BEAUTY/COSMETICS/FASHION)
- A 2019 survey of the blogging industry in the U.K. found that 8% of blogs are in the fashion and beauty category, which was a decrease from 22% in 2016. One suggested reason for the decline is that beauty content is moving to visual platforms like Instagram, which are more convenient to run than a blog.
- A 2019 survey of the blogging industry in the U.K. found that 2% of respondents blogged on behalf of their company in 2018, while this figure was 1% in 2017 and 3% in 2016.
- According to a 2018 report, the U.K. has a 6.75% share of the blogging industry. There are currently more than 1.5 billion blogs in the world.
RESEARCH STRATEGY
To conduct this research, we first began by looking for insights that show the effectiveness of company blogs with regard to customer engagement and sales. Interestingly, while a wealth of data was available on this topic, much of it was out-dated and the vast majority of this data was focused on the general market, rather than being specific to the U.K. As such, we focused on digging up the most recent statistics we could find that helped to answer this part of the request. In doing so, we noted that a number of other recent statistics which discuss this topic were locked behind paywalls, which is likely why most resources were still reporting the older data. This was noted in an effort to find reports, surveys, and studies that provided statistics about blogging and company blogging, of which the majority are paywalled and any insights that are publicly available were those that were republished by third-party sites. In alignment with this, we found that the majority of resources that had this data publicly available were all reporting the same/similar sets of data (most of which that was out-of-date).
In looking at the growth of company blogs in the U.K. specific to the beauty and fashion industry, we again ran into the same problem. While we were able to find some general insights showing the growth of B2B company blogs specifically, these insights were not specific to the U.K. nor specific to the beauty/fashion niche. On the positive side, we were eventually able to locate a recently published survey about the blogging industry in the U.K. This survey provided some useful information which we were able to used to make some assumptions regarding whether the number of company blogs in the beauty, cosmetics and fashion industry in the UK is likely growing or declining.