This year’s B2B report for content marketing strategy comes from The Content Marketing Institute and relieves a few interesting aspects in terms of content effectiveness. One of the more important findings of this study is that B2B marketers with documented strategy and more effective are less challenged with every aspect of content marketing.
A documented strategy makes a difference among B2B marketer, that’s why 44% of the marketers seems to have a documented strategy. When it comes to small organizations (10-99 employee), 48% of their marketers have a documented strategy for content marketing effectiveness. 78% of the B2B marketers said they created more content than they did one year ago, especially visual content for the online communities and social media, of course.
In the United States of America, B2B marketers are using 13 different content marketing tactics in order to remain relatively consistent with their work.
2014 B2B Content Marketing Research
1. Social media is on top
87% of the B2B marketers are using social media as an important marketing tactic.
2. Articles on the official website
81% of the marketers apply this tactic in order to boost SEO and optimize their content strategy.
3. Newsletters
Who says newsletter are not cool anymore? It seems that 80% of the marketer are still using newsletters as an effective content marketing tactic
Blogs, online events, infographics, mobile contests and apps are also among those 13 marketing tactics for B2B marketing.
From the photo above we can notice that B2B marketers are becoming more open to perform content marketing on different online platform than ever before. Here we can notive an increasing amont of confidence in visual content, especially by using social media and creating infographics. Also, they realize that social media is not used just for one-to-one conversation with customers, but for awareness and brand visibility in the online environment.
B2B marketers are using social media more frequently than last year and use an average of 6 platforms, up from 5 last year. When it comes to confidence gap, marketers consider Youtube to be the second most effective social media platform, after LinkedIn, because of the increasing interest for video content. On Youtube, B2B marketers find out the possibility of sharing videos with their products and services and promote them in an engaging way for their clients.
Why B2B marketers are into visual content?
Content marketing strategy starts with the goals and 82% of the marketers consider brand awareness to be the main goal for content marketing and 74% of them think that lead generation is the most important goal. When it comes to metrics for success, B2B marketers are interested in:
- Web Traffic
- Sales Lead Quality
- Social Media Sharing
- SEO Ranking
- Time Spent on Website
- Direct Sales
This is an interesting finding, because over the last 4 years Direct Sales has consistently gone down in importance as a mesurement criterion. As long as marketers are aware of the fact that social media drive brand awarreness, not direct sales, I can say that this is an important step forward for the B2B content marketing research strategy. According to The Content Marketing Institute reasearch, 58% of the marketers will increase their content marketing budget over the next 12 month, so in 2015, we expect to see lots of improvements in this area.
Actually, this is one of the most important trends in 2015. Brand are getting more and more into visual content and this also applies to B2B market. As the interest for visual content is hardly increasing, marketers will also have to focus on optimize their website for mobile platforms and offer engaging apps for their customers. Speaking of B2B market, app-gamification is out of the question, but marketers can create specific apps that can be used as a tool by the public, such as: app for costs measurement or app for create your own digital and interactive agenda (for business people).
top image source
See also: Tips for using Twitter for marketing
