Why Content Marketing Is the One Thing B2B Companies Should Focus On

Content marketing has undoubtedly gained a lot of focus in recent years, especially since the reach of the distribution channels has increased tremendously. Being committed to this type of marketing can make a world of difference in generating awareness, educating prospects and even current customers about the products and services, and in turning prospects into customers or even brand evangelists.

Read on to find what a recent industry study has revealed about B2B content marketing, what channels you should focus on and what to expect after using it!

Content Marketing for B2B Tech Is Not a Matter of If but How

The number of B2B marketers thinking that content marketing can provide valuable information to anyone interested in specific companies increases year after year. Moreover, by being able to gauge the number of people subscribed to your sources of information, you can get a pretty accurate idea of what common characteristics they have.

How Popular Is Content Marketing with B2B Companies?

According to the 2018 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends survey by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), as many as 91% of B2B respondents admitted that they use content marketing in one form or another. However, the nonusers are not completely against it, as 54% of them claimed that they would launch a content marketing initiative within the next year. Most notably, only 4% of the current nonusers had used in the past but stopped due to it being ineffective. That translates into 0.36% of all respondents, which is nothing short of impressive.

What Is The Most Common Content Marketing Team Size & Structure?

More than half of the respondents (53%) revealed that they used either a small team or even a single person for all marketing and content marketing efforts across the entire company. Next, 26% of B2B companies have a centralized content marketing group in charge of multiple brands across the company. At the opposite end, an equal percentage of respondents (4%) pointed out that either they rely on an unusual team structure, or that they have a content marketing team in charge of each brand.

Should You Choose an Internal or an External Team?

About 56% of the respondents claimed that they outsource at least one content marketing activity, which is not surprising at all. Out of all activities, content creation is the most outsourced, with 47%, followed by content promotion or distribution (23%), content marketing measurement (11%) and content marketing strategy (9%).

Depending on the complexity of the tasks and the budget that you are willing to invest, outsourcing content marketing might be preferable. That’s not because the activities are difficult, but because the experts know better what type of content would perform best on which channels.

How Committed Are B2B Companies to Content Marketing?

Out of all respondents to the survey, 56% were either very committed or extremely committed to content marketing, which arguably wouldn’t have been the case, hadn’t content marketing been effective. The reasons behind this choice range from building audiences (80%) and valuing creativity (74%) to having realistic expectations about what content marketing can achieve (62%) or just having ample time to produce content marketing results (59%).

What Channels Are the Most Effective for B2B Content Marketing?

When it comes to distributing content, B2B marketers prefer email (93%), social media (92%) and blogs (79%), followed by in-person events (56%) and webinars (55%). As for the social media platforms of choice, B2B marketers have a preference for:

• LinkedIn (97%)
• Twitter (87%)
• Facebook (86%)
• YouTube (60%)
• Instagram (30%)
• Google+ (28%)

The top 3 are in the same order when it comes to effectiveness, but B2B marketers have rated LinkedIn a lot more effective than the other platforms, emphasizing this way the B2B nature of this social network.

Because B2B marketers rely on tried and tested platforms to distribute platform, rather than on exotic ones, the difficulty of the task is moderate. A small team of experts who are knowledgeable of the best practices could easily overcome any challenges met along the way.

What Are the Effects of Content Marketing?

While not many (25%) agree that content marketing has decreased the cost of customer acquisition, the majority concluded that content marketing can increase:

• Organization’s sales (51%)
• Number of leads (72%)
• Audience engagement (77%)

To make such statements, each company needs to select carefully the key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor. To give you an idea, B2B marketers have rated the alignment of their metrics with content marketing goals as:

• Excellent (3%)
• Very good (16%)
• Good (27%)
• Fair (24%)
• Poor (13%)
• Too soon to tell (8%)
• Unsure (4%)
• Don’t use content marketing metrics (4%)

Ensuring a perfect alignment between the goals and the metrics used for measuring the progress is essential in any aspect of the business, and content marketing makes no exception.

Do you represent a B2B tech company and are experiencing challenges while implementing content marketing activities? We’d love to hear from you in order to provide a solution that’s tailored to your needs. Get in touch with us!