B2B Content Marketing on a Steady Rise

Bangalore: According to a recent finding from the MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute, B2B marketers on average, spend thirty-three percent of their marketing budgets on content marketing— which has seen a seven percent spike since 2011. Approximately fifty-four percent of b2b marketers have indicated that they plan on increasing content marketing spending in the coming year.

Although b-to-b marketers are turning to content marketing increasingly, fewer than half of these companies (36 percent) believe they are good at producing effective content. While the data exclusively represents respondents from 1416 North American companies, the information is of much relevance to marketers in all growing economies as content marketing is spreading like wild fire globally.

Today, b2b marketers still continue to rate in-person events as the most valuable tactic they have, with sixty-seven percent believing so. And about sixty-four percent of respondents said case studies serve as an efficient marketing tactic, which even beats out Webinars and Webcasting at sixty-one percent.

On the whole, a whopping ninety-one percent of b2b respondents use content marketing and in most cases- the bigger the brand, the more tactics are employed. Articles on a website are an especially popular content marketing tactic at eighty-three percent followed by newsletters (seventy-eight percent). Print magazine usage, the finding points out, remained the same at thirty-one percent.

Video seems to be the new attention grabber in digital media, with an astounding 70 percent of respondents saying they use video (up from 52 percent since 2011). Social media is a growing platform b2b marketers use to distribute content—about eighty-seven percent are using social media, which has seen a thirteen percent increase since last year. In general, b2b marketers use about five social networking sites to distribute content. LinkedIn tops the networking list at eighty-three percent, followed by Twitter at eighty percent. Pinterest is also quickly gaining popularity among respondents.

Social media is progressively being used to determine the effectiveness of content marketing, with about forty-five percent of the respondents using social sharing as a measurement tool. Even though, social may be on the rise, b2b marketers  still look at more time-honored benchmarks—about sixty percent of b2b marketers still use Web traffic to determine content marketing success, with fifty-one percent looking toward sales lead quality.  However, producing sufficient content is the most bothersome challenge faced by b2b marketers, with approximately sixty-four percent of respondents saying they face the challenge frequently.