62% Of B2B Marketers Say They’ve Improved At Content Marketing

Marketers attributed their success to two main factors, according to a new study from Content Marketing Institute.

B2B marketers are becoming more content with content marketing, according to a new study from Content Marketing Institute.

In particular, 62% of the of 1,102 B2B marketers polled said that compared to a year ago, their organizations’ overall approach to content marketing has been much more or somewhat more successful. The marketers attributed that rise to two main factors: doing a better job with content creation (85%) and developing or adjusting their content marketing strategy (72%), the 2017 “B2B Content Marketing” benchmark report revealed.

Despite such success, only 28% of respondents said they were in the sophisticated/mature phase of content marketing maturity. Most (55%) said they had small content marketing teams serving the entire organization. Still, 70% said that they planned to produce more content in the coming year. Content marketing programs take about 29% of marketers’ overall budget, on average.

Media

This year, social media content was the most common tactic used for content marketing, the study found. Some 83% of marketers said they used social media content, and 80% cited blogs. In 2017, however, only 40% pointed to social media and 52% pointed to blogs. On the rise for next year: email newsletters (40%), ebooks/white papers (38%), in-person events (36%), webinars/webcasts (32%), and video (30%).

Those who said their content marketing has improved over the past year cited higher quality or more efficient content as the primary impetus. Of those who said it has stagnated or worsened, 57% blamed the lack of time devoted to it.

When it comes to judging the success of content marketing programs, 78% of marketers cited website traffic as the primary metric.

Takeaways

The survey looked at marketers who were running successful content marketing programs to figure out what made them successful. One major practice among successful content marketers was documentation. Some 61% of the “most successful” respondents said they had a documented content marketing strategy. Overall, 37% of marketers said they had a documented strategy, while 41% said they had one, but it wasn’t documented.

Michele Linn, VP of the Content Marketing Institute, said “documented” merely means writing down the strategy somewhere. “What we’ve found is that people who actually take the time to write down their strategy are typically more effective than those who have it in their mind only,” she said. Other best practices include having a differentiated story to tell, measuring results, and having a clear view of what a successful content marketing program would look like. Some 41% of respondents said they had that degree of clarity in their organizations.

Above all, Linn advised marketers to be patient. “The longer you do it, the better you get at it,” Linn said. “Content marketing just takes time, and it takes a lot of resilience to keep doing it. It’s a long-term strategy.”