B2B content marketing: The facts

Our recently published Content Benchmarking Report reveals that B2B is clearly still content obsessed. And things aren’t going to change any time soon, reports Alex Aspinall

We’ve been charting the meteoric rise of content in B2B marketing, and indeed across the communications landscape as a whole, for several years now.  And it’s been pretty impressive. Such is the extent of content’s (and inbound marketing’s) presence in the space that it’s increasingly hard to remember a time when content initiatives didn’t dominate B2B marketing activity. After all, why would you ever not want to provide your prospects with useful, timely content designed to solve their business challenges?

In many ways it’s because inbound marketing, and the content that fuels the fire, is such an obvious winner in B2B that we are now forced to reflect on the phenomena of content overload. This is one of the main issues flagged in greater detail in this year’s full report. In this feature we have distilled the report down, selecting some of its most salient themes.

Turn up the volume 
Marketers are committed to content. And our research underlines this commitment. Right at the outset of the research survey, we asked marketers to quantify the contribution they felt content marketing was making to their organisations. And the feedback was – almost – unanimous. Ninety-nine per cent of respondents stated that they saw content as being either ‘very’ or ‘quite’ important to their organisation. And furthermore, 91 per cent stated they felt some degree of support from their senior managers for content efforts.

That such widespread belief in the value of content marketing exists, is great news. And, as you’d expect, it means there’s a lot of content work going on. In fact, you could argue that it’s directly causing the previously mentioned content overload we’re all battling with each day.

Over the last 12 months, 83 per cent of our respondents have increased the amount of content they are producing. When you remember that we were already discussing content overload more than a year ago, you start to understand the level of output we’re looking at here.

But the market shows very little sign of easing up on content production. When asked to predict what would happen to their content output levels over the coming year, 82 per cent of marketers stated that they anticipated gearing up output once again. Only one per cent of our respondents stated that they were expecting to produce less content in the coming year. 

In a bid to quantify the impact this extreme content focus is having on marketing departments we asked respondents to state how much of their resources were now attributed to content activity. Unsurprisingly, the commitment is significant. Our respondents stated that on average content now takes up 45 per cent of a marketing department’s time and 31 per cent of its budget. These figures represent notable increases from the situation only two years ago when the figures were 37 per cent and 28 per cent respectively. If our prediction of further increases come to pass, it will be very possible that by this time next year content will take up half of all marketing’s time and a third of its budget.

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Where’s the strategy?
With the level of belief the B2B marketing industry en masse seems to have in content, and especially given the considerable sums of time and effort organisations are putting in to content activities, it is rather disappointing to have to report that there still exists a gulf between how important brands regard content as being and how seriously they are taking it.

The worst manifestation of this is that 31 per cent of B2B brands are still approaching their content activities without formalised content strategies in place. While it does provide us with a useful sound bite headline, we must also highlight that this is a scenario that really needs addressing as a matter of urgency. The statistic also represents an area in which the industry has failed to progress over the last 12 months (last year 32 per cent were not approaching their content initiatives strategically).

In an era dominated by content overload, crowded social streams and depleting attention spans, brands that are approaching their prospects with well thought-out strategically relevant content stand a far better chance of securing the returns they are looking for than the brands firing out ad hoc pieces that may or may not resonate. If your organisation falls into the latter camp, it is hard to think of an area that needs attention as more of a priority. Your content efforts will fail if they are not strategic.

And even for the 69 per cent that are currently working to strategic plans, it’s worth remembering that a critical evaluation of what you are doing is always worthwhile. All sensible content strategies include within them an emphasis on continual assessment and improvement.

Tailor made?
Another area in which our report returns a ‘could do better’ verdict on much marketing activity is the level of sophistication currently being displayed with content tailoring and personalisation. It stands to reason that the more relevant a message or piece of content is to the recipient, the greater resonance it will have. But for many the more advanced levels of tailoring remain something to strive towards rather than something already in place.

Encouragingly, 54 per cent of respondents reported that they were tailoring content based on the position a buyer may be in the buyer journey. This should be seen as stage one; prospects can find themselves walking down a path that broadly resonates with their level of interest.

However, things get far more worthwhile when a brand (or at least the technology systems it has in place) recognises individuals as markets of one and pre-selects the most appropriate content for them based on their previous actions. And this is where things fall down slightly. Only 16 per cent were able to identify individual profiles and serve them content based on their specific position.

It’s fair to say that only the most advanced content marketing outfits are able to deliver along these lines with any level of regularity, but it’s also true that the best way to navigate the increasingly cluttered content landscape is to serve prospects with the most appropriate messages at the right time. Personalisation is the future.

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A culture of content
It’s not all doom and gloom in this year’s report, though. We’d hate to give that impression. Among several positive news stories to draw on is that there is evidence to suggest that a culture of content is blooming in B2B. We’ve already highlighted the level of importance marketers and their senior managers are attaching to content. But the positivity is extending beyond the confines of the marketing department too.

For example, more than three-quarters of our respondents (76 per cent) stated that other departments within their business were actively encouraged to contribute to the organisation’s content marketing operation. This represents a significant increase on the 59 per cent who claimed a similar scenario last year.

The benefits of drawing on an organisation’s collective expertise when it comes to content marketing should be obvious. Although much of the work will take place in the marketing department, colleagues from across almost all other areas of the business have a great deal to offer in terms of subject specialisation, customer feedback, business strategy and simply having a different take on the challenges your customers face. You should pursue and encourage collaboration wherever possible.

Sales enablement
That something that could be so easily pigeonholed as a ‘marketing concern’ is spreading throughout many organisations is a really positive thing. But, as anyone involved in marketing will know, no discussion regarding interdepartmental alignment would be complete without an examination of the marketing/sales relationship. And content has an important role to play here.

Indeed, this is a fact acknowledged by a sizeable chunk of our respondents, who are already feeling some benefit. Seventy-one per cent stated that their sales team was regularly using the content they were producing as part of prospecting, sales pitches and in their general interactions with customers. This in itself is really encouraging and it increases the chances of cross-channel brand continuity.

But there is a greater potential gain here too. And that is when marketers are able to close the loop and turn colleagues’ interest in content into a fully formed sales enablement initiative. This involves establishing a process for sales to feed back on the content they are using. All comments, criticisms and compliments from the front-line are valuable when it comes to honing future messages, increasing relevancy and meeting shared objectives. This is something we should all be striving towards.  

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The data issue
Many of the areas for improvement flagged, both in this overview and in the full report, rely on marketing departments growing increasingly shrewd when it comes to interrogating the data that their content programmes create. And for this reason it seems appropriate to dedicate a fair amount of real estate to the issue.

Effective data analysis should be used to guide strategic planning, it is essential for attempts to increase the personalisation of content initiatives, it underpins successful sales enablement programmes and it should be right at the heart of your attempts to quantify just how successful your content programmes have been. Indeed, at the risk of overstating the case, you could argue that data analytics is, at the very least, equally as important in content marketing as more obviously related skills such as writing, design and publishing expertise.  

For all these reasons, the data skills gap we highlighted in the course of this research should come as a wake-up call for marketers.

A sizeable 48 per cent of our respondents were honest enough to admit their organisation was either ‘weak’ or ‘very weak’ in data analytics. And while this problem is likely to manifest outside the marketing department as much as it does within the immediate team, marketers are well advised to face the challenge head-on. For marketing leaders this may mean securing budget to invest in bringing data analytics skills in to the department, while for more junior marketers it might mean seeking out the training opportunities that would allow them to plug the gap themselves.

The secret to continued (and increasing) content marketing success in the future lies in a brand’s ability to interpret the messages hidden in the mountains of data being harvested online each day.

Predictions and conclusions
This year’s Content Marketing Benchmarking Report suggests that the industry is at something of a crossroads when it comes to content. While relatively few brands are able to make entirely data-driven decisions regarding the content they produce, and guarantee that it is only seen by those prospects for which it is most relevant, there are some that are making inroads. And with the predicted intensification of the content overload phenomena, things are only going to get harder for the brands producing content on an ad hoc basis, and firing out at the mass market.

Regardless of how far along the journey to content marketing nirvana your brand is, the good news is that it’s never too late to start improving your performance. Below are some of the main action points included in the conclusion from this year’s report. They should serve as an excellent starting point for anyone looking to conduct an audit of exactly how well they are doing.

• Despite acknowledging the importance of content marketing, too many marketers are still operating without formalised content strategies. It is essential your content operation is founded on a properly thought-out strategy.

 • With output set to increase in the coming year, content overload is showing no sign of abating. It’s more important than ever that marketers ensure the content they are producing is capable of attracting prospect attention.

• Tailoring content and messages to match buyer journey stages is an effective way of increasing the likelihood of cut-through. Personalising content to individuals based on their previous actions should be the aim, though.

• Including departments, particularly sales, from across the business in the content creation process will serve to improve the quality of content being produced and the results generated.

• Skills gaps still exist when it comes to content marketing, particularly with regard to data analytics. Marketers should seek to recruit and up skill in this area.

Content Marketing Benchmarking Report
This feature is based on statistics from our Content Marketing Benchmarking Report. For the complete findings and analysis of the B2B marketing content landscape download the report. It is available for free to premium members and to buy for non-members.

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