Content Marketing Vital to B2B Marketers
Content marketing is now a well-established, core marketing strategy in the B2B marketplace, with B2B marketers considering content integral to their marketing mix: fully 9 in 10 organizations say they market with content, according to a new study from MarketingProfs and Junta42 titled B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.
B2B marketers are committing time, resources, and budget to the discipline of content marketing, the study finds:
- They employ eight tactics, on average, to achieve their content marketing goals.
- 51% report that they plan to increase their spend on content marketing over the next 12 months.
- They spend, on average, more than a quarter of their marketing budget on content marketing.
"We have known for some time that marketers can no longer get the attention of customers by merely touting the features and benefits of their companies' products and services," says MarketingProfs Chief Content Officer Ann Handley. "Marketers now recognize that to be trusted they must regularly offer educational or entertaining information to customers," adds the co-author of the upcoming book, Content Rules.
"Even though the practice has been around for over 100 years, most marketers are brand new to content marketing," says Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42 and the Content Marketing Institute and co-author of Get Content Get Customers. "Marketers have transformed themselves into authors and publishers, and in doing so have ventured into areas where they must develop new key competencies to be effective," he adds.
Below, additional findings from B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, which provides a detailed look at content marketing tactics, social media, goals, measurements, budgets, outsourcing, and challenges; it also highlights the practices of self-described best-in-class content marketers.
Usage and Effectiveness
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Comments
Excellent info and valuable stats here. Thanks.
The big surprise we found is the "Confidence Gap." While the general practice of marketing with content in B2B companies is now widespread, marketers lack confidence in the effectiveness of specific tactics for their own marketing. confidence is actually highest for traditional media including in-person (face-to-face) events, webinars and enewsletters. For social media tactics, LinkedIn is actually as widely used as Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
Very good and interesting post. I was particularly struck by the inability to create engaging content (36%) or enough content (31%). It's clear that while more and more companies are trying to become content marketers, they are not ready to become content marketers.
Arthur Germain and Jeff Ogden
http://www.gocsg.com
http://www.findnewcustomers.com
Great report! Helps validate some of my thinking around content and the buying process. I wonder if those that view certain tactics as ineffective ever chalk it up to simply bad content. Thanks for sharing! http://myndfuel.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/content-marketing-dont-blame-the-c...
What about the methods we use to communicate content? The medium is the message, right? Forget tactics for a moment. If producing engaging content is the marketer's biggest challenge, let's recognize the vehicle that has proven to be most engaging. Video. It's the biggest growth area across all marketing categories for a reason: it works. Video impacts SEO, drives online traffic, increases engagement and effectively communicates ANY MESSAGE. Now, back to tactics. Video can be integrated into social media, article posting, events, newsletters, blogs, white papers, online advertising, mobile, webinars/webcasts and more. And it saves time, money and resources. Did I miss anything?