The Content Marketing Institute recently published its latest 2014 B2B Content Marketing Report, which contains some interesting insights about the role content marketing plays in successful B2B marketing strategies.
Viewing the report got us thinking about the way the content marketing realm has broadened for B2B marketers. Here are our top five take-aways from the report which B2B enterprises can use to leverage your content marketing strategies for the next year.
Now we need no special marketing report to believe that. The rate of acceptance however comes as a surprise. A wonderful surprise that is. The report found that 93% of all B2B marketers use content marketing in their marketing mix.
44% of these marketers leverage their efforts by maintaining a chronicled content strategy. We only wish the other 56% would follow suit and get the best of content marketing for their B2B relationship building and sales efforts.
42% of B2B marketers told CMI they were perfectly happy with their content marketing potency. The previous year only 36% believed they were effective at content marketing.
The 6% jump is courtesy to those B2B marketers who understood the leverage that effective content marketing provides to their sales teams and quickly got to sharpening their saws. B2B marketers with an established and documented content strategy beat those without one (66% to 11%), in feeling effective at content marketing.
There you have it! Another reason why the 54% of content marketers without a pre-formed strategy need to begin documenting.
48% of SMEs maintain a documented content marketing strategy, while only 41% of the larger B2B sellers, with over a thousand employees, care to maintain documented strategies for content marketing.
With the primary goal of 82% of B2B content marketers set at creating and increasing brand awareness, content marketing now receives an average 30% of the total marketing budget.
Further, 73% of B2B marketers now appoint a person to specially oversee their content marketing strategies. Smaller marketers, more cautious as they are, outweigh the larger ones (78% to 58%) in appointing a person to oversee their content marketing operations.
WebDAM's infographic about the content marketing trends for 2014 reveals that B2B companies which blogged regularly enjoyed better lead generation – 67% higher than B2B companies with no online presence on blogging websites.
Further, 79% of the big B2B market players find blogging the most conducive form of content marketing.
The report from CMI revealed that B2B marketers typically keep 13 strategies under their sleeves and have become extremely confident in the use of these tactics.
The top 10 places in the most popular tactics for content marketing were taken by the following:
Apart from these, B2B marketers are also gearing up for mobile devices. Mobile apps, specific mobile content, creation of mobile websites were included in the top 20 strategies content marketers in B2B operations.
The good news is B2B marketers have embraced social media as an integral part of their content marketing strategy - use of social media is the top tactic of choice for B2B content marketers. The better news is they have ventured into the deeper waters of social media, beyond popular sites like Facebook and Twitter.
91% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing, 73% use YouTube and 55% utilize Google+. Need more happy surprises? 40% B2B marketers are now using Slide Share for content marketing and another 22% are delivering information via pictures on Instagram.
Here again, smaller companies beat the larger ones. Compared to only the 38% of B2B marketing giants that use Slide Share, a whole 50% of the smaller B2B marketers effectively use the website for content marketing.
Thanks to to Alex for sharing his thoughts and opinions in this blog post. Alex owns Acuity Training which offers Adobe Training courses. You can follow Acuity Training on Twitter at @AcuityTraining
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