I’m always interested to see how the field of web marketing is changing over time and what skills, tactics, and practices are receiving particular attention. One of the ways I track this is to look at results from several sites on a semi-annual basis, including:
- LinkedIn’s bio searches
- SimplyHired’s Job Trends
- Indeed’s Job Trends
- Google’s Keyword Trends
- Craigslist Keyword Search
This process is by no means scientific or precise (and unfortunately, I’ve not been detailed or diligent enough about it to have great trend data yet), but it often does illustrate trends that match with common sense, and therefore get some, perhaps false, confidence. When many of these data sources match up, I’m likely to feel like a pattern has emerged, and it can be compelling evidence for investors or execs, too.
Recently, I re-made a graphic that I’ve used a few times in board and investor pitch decks, based on LinkedIn data, that I wanted to share:
The image below uses LinkedIn bio search results for the US only.
Numbers collected on June 16, 2013 | Venn overlaps/sizing are approximate, not precise
As you can see, there’s been some pretty serious growth in these practices and in the broad field of web marketing over the last 14 months. Some of the most interesting ones for me were:
- The incredible growth in blog/blogging/blogger appearing in folks’ profiles. I would have guessed that blogging was a more mature field and that we wouldn’t see 3X growth between early 2012 and today.
- Content marketing is huge, and already has more mentions in bios than blogging/blog/blogger, which shocks me.
- Nearly 1mm US profiles are using “social media marketing,” which is stunning. That’s actually more than use any single one of “web marketing,” “internet marketing,” “interactive marketing,” etc.
- SEO’s growth has been impressive, too, although it seems to be at a lower percentage rate than many of the others.
- That “Google Analytics” actually appears in more profiles than “web analytics” shows their absolute dominance of the industry. They haven’t just become synonmous with the practice, their product has become bigger than the field itself.
I plan to keep monitoring these numbers over time, and thus I thought I’d record a lot of the data I gathered recently in this blog post for posterity. I’ll use only single phrases/terms to track across all the sites as accurately as possible.
“Social Media Marketing”
- LinkedIn US: 938,951
- LinkedIn World: 1,782,232
“Content Marketing”
- LinkedIn US: 30,145
- LinkedIn World: 54,100
“Content Strategy”
- LinkedIn US: 74,839
- LinkedIn World: 127,132
“Inbound Marketing”
- LinkedIn US: 14,852
- LinkedIn World: 27,762
“Web Analytics”
- LinkedIn US: 109,511
- LinkedIn World: 262,011
“Google Analytics”
- LinkedIn US: 112,734
- LinkedIn World: 287,251
Blogging
- LinkedIn US: 472,413
- LinkedIn World: 820,679
Blogger
- LinkedIn US: 91,015
- LinkedIn World: 175,740
SEO
- LinkedIn US: 364,119
- LinkedIn World: 952,253
“Conversion Rate Optimization”
- LinkedIn US: 1,132
- LinkedIn World: 2,248
“Landing Page Optimization”
- LinkedIn US: 9,360
- LinkedIn World: 22,512
“A/B Testing”
- LinkedIn US: 10,558
- LinkedIn World: 17,111
I think it will be fascinating to compare this data in the future, and I hope to revisit these numbers every 6 to 12 months. If you have suggestions about the process or want to do a more in-depth project on this, please let me know in the comments!