A recently released study titled B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends reports that nine of ten B2B marketers have made content marketing part of their demand generation strategy. The study was completed by MarketingProfs and provides a great deal of insight into the current and future state of the B2B marketing practice.
Habits of Highly Successful B2B Content Marketers
The authors of the survey, Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute and Ann Handley of MarketingProfs, took a closer look at respondents who claim their content marketing results are either “effective” or “highly effective”. They identified the following common best practices among this elite group of marketers and also discussed the findings in this recent blog post of content marketing effectiveness.
How to Improve Results Content Marketing Results (from CMI and Marketing Profs)
Spend More Money
Best-in-class marketers invest 31% of their budgets in content marketing whereas the least effective are allocating only18%
Align Content with the Buying Cycle
The most effective content marketers are more likely to segment their content based on the buying cycle (45% of best in class compared to 29% of “laggards”).
Involve the C-suite
Successful content marketers are also less likely to lack executive buy-in (8% of best in class versus 17% of laggards).
Benchmarking your content marketing program to best in class results such as these is a great way to identify areas for improving your results. Even if you’re new to content marketing, studying other programs will help you develop a model for your own.