There are few guarantees in life beyond death and taxes, but one thing’s for certain – some people love to dunk on good ideas.

Case in point, content marketing. Despite being a reliable, proven way to drive traffic to your site and increase leads and sales, some people just can’t help but talk smack about content. It’s too hard, it doesn’t work, there’s no point – all favored arguments of the content marketing naysayer.

Shame they’re all false.

Next time somebody says content marketing is a waste of time, why not pull out one of these 23 content marketing stats and facts to prove them wrong? You might change their mind – but if not, at least you’ll have the satisfaction of putting them in their place, and who doesn’t love that?

1. Content marketing is incredibly cost-effective and offers amazing ROI. Compared to traditional marketing programs, content marketing costs 62% less and generates approximately three times the volume of leads. (DemandMetric)

2. Content drives conversions like gangbusters. On average, conversion rates are six times higher for companies and brands using content marketing than those that aren’t, at 2.9% vs. 0.5%, respectively. (Aberdeen Group)

3. The biggest brands in the world realize that content is the future. Coca-Cola, for example, spends more money on content creation than it does on television advertising. (Contently)

4. Interactive content is big business – and getting bigger. Of content marketers currently using interactive content (like this interactive timeline of the history of Google AdWords), 75% plan to increase their budgets to produce more interactive content in the coming year. (SnapApp)

5. Marketers are shifting toward longer, more in-depth content. The average length of blog posts is getting longer, with the typical word count of a blog post increasing from 808 words in 2014 to 1,054 words in 2016. (Orbit Media Studios.)

6. Competition in content is fierce – but marketers are meeting the challenge head-on. Almost two thirds of marketers – 60% – produce at least one new content asset every single day. (eMarketer)

7. When it comes to content, longer is better. On average, long-form blog posts generate nine times more leads than short-form posts. (Curata)

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8. It’s how decision-makers prefer to learn about you. 80% of executives and business owners prefer to receive information about a company through articles rather than advertisements. (Stratabeat)

9. All the cool kids are doing it. 88% of B2B marketers in North America use content marketing as part of their wider digital strategies. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

10. Buyers trust content. An overwhelming majority of B2B service and product buyers – 95% – consider content as trustworthy when evaluating a company and its offerings. (DemandGen)

11. Content can help prospective customers at every stage of their journey. Almost half – 48% – of marketers support between three and five of their customers’ purchasing stages with specialized content. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

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12. Content compliments traditional sales techniques perfectly. Approximately half of marketers – 49% – are producing content to align closely with various stages of the typical consumer sales cycle to aid sales teams and increase cross-departmental sales enablement. (LookBookHQ)

13. Prospects WANT content – especially white papers. Approximately 78% of buyers relied on white papers to make a purchasing decision within the past year. (Curata)

14. Content is becoming crucial to the purchasing process. Nine out of 10 B2B product or service buyers say that online content has had a moderate to major impact on their purchasing decisions. (Lenati)

15. Content is incredibly valuable to many organizations. More than half of marketers – 58% – said that “original written content” is their most important digital asset, more so than visual assets such as infographics and video content. (Social Media Examiner)

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16. For many marketers, content remains a primary focus. Approximately 81% of marketers say that they plan to use more original written content in their campaigns in the future. (Ibid.)

17. Content can be amazingly versatile and reusable. Almost 60% of marketers reuse and repurpose content between two and five times. (LookBookHQ)

18. Content has become vital to many companies’ lead generation pipelines. Lead generation, sales, and lead nurturing are the top three organizational objectives for content marketing, at 85%, 84%, and 78%, respectively. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

19. Many companies are turning away from traditional advertising in favor of content. Approximately 28% of marketers say they have reduced their digital advertising budgets in order to produce more content assets. (Gartner)

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20. Content offers amazing long-term ROI. One in 10 blog posts are “compounding,” meaning that organic search steadily increases traffic to these posts over time. (HubSpot)

21. Exceptional content delivers exceptional results. Compounding blog posts generate 38% of all blog traffic, and one compounding blog post generates as much traffic as SIX regular posts. (Ibid.)

22. Content aligns perfectly with shifts in media consumption habits. Almost three-quarters of marketers – 72% – believe that branded content is significantly more effective than traditional magazine advertisements. (Custom Content Council)

23. Content has become a digital marketing powerhouse. The median annual spend on content marketing in 2015 was $1.75 million, with roughly one in six enterprise-level organizations spending more than $10 million on content annually. (Content Marketing Institute)

Article Written by  Dan Shewan of Business 2 Community