The most recent B2B content marketing benchmarks, budgets, and trends report for 2017 is out. Here are a few interesting key takeaways to take from the report.
1. Content marketing spend vs. increasing amount of original content
Of those polled, 70% said they expected to be generating more unique content, but only 39% of those expected to increase their marketing spending. If you’re wondering how so many marketers expect to generate more original content for the same amount of spend, consider optimizing existing content to boost site traffic.
Content audits are a great way to capitalize on work you’ve already done while keeping your content fresh and relevant to readers and search engines. Besides, there’s little point to inundating a website or campaign with more content if your old content is still performing well. In the case of original content vs. new content, less is more as long as the content is high quality. Refreshing old content is, generally speaking, more preferable than generating brand new marketing material if you are still seeing a high return on your investment on creating that content.
2. Content marketers are going after lead generation and brand awareness
It’s integral to any marketing campaign to establish clear goals early. Goals are how your company will gauge the success of its content marketing, but also how it will direct those same marketing efforts.
Lead generation is a logical goal for marketers, and so is increasing your brand awareness; but the interesting part is that fewer than 45% of marketers are worried about creating brand advocates. Never underestimate the power of customer evangelism because if you aren’t encouraging positive feedback or providing your audience with a space to build that fan base, then you’re missing out.
We’ve talked about relationship management before and how it can be used to frame public perception of your brand, so if you’re not actively engaging with your customers and managing the relationship your brand has with them, you’re losing an opportunity to have others help to expand your brand awareness.
With social media, viral videos, and brand enthusiasts, it’s never been easier to increase the reach of your brand. If you have customers out there spreading word of how awesome you are, doesn’t that kind of tie into generating new leads as well? The more people who know about you, the greater your opportunity for new leads.
3. Email isn’t dying as quickly (or at all) as some marketers believed
There’s been a deal of consternation among industries as to whether email is a dying marketing channel, or if it’s simply being wasted on the younger generation. Despite the many varied articles and blogs regarding the topic, the marketers polled by CMI—93% of them—were utilizing email to distribute their content.
4. Social media is still top of its game as a go-to marketing tactic
While content marketers are still using an array of tactics, social media is being used by more than 80% of them, which isn’t really a huge surprise. With the changes Facebook made to its business pages and platforms like LinkedIn for B2B businesses, social media is an ideal channel and tactic for content marketers.
It’s also important to note the continued popularity of infographics and whitepapers. These tactics are fairly evergreen, as well as being a reliable way to get backlinks. Remember that whole ‘less is more’ line from earlier? Well, implementing a few updates to an existing (but potentially out of date) eBook, whitepaper or infographic can make it good as new again, or in the case of content marketing, relevant.
5. Site traffic the leading metric for content marketing measurement
Content marketers have been using website traffic as a metric to measure results of their content marketing efforts, but they’ve also been paying attention to sales, the quality of those sales leads, and conversion rates. You could argue that it’s strange to see how few marketers cited higher conversion rates or even SEO rankings as a metric. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see that despite social media content being one of the top tactics being used, only 22% are using social media sharing as a metric of measure.
Marketing trends come and go, but paying attention to what we’ve been doing as content marketers is the only way to adjust course when we notice patterns that really aren’t optimizing tactics that work.
