12 Weeks of Content Marketing Insights
The results are back from our latest survey of B2B marketing professionals on their Content Marketing practices. Over 230 respondents contributed to new findings on the growing importance of the content marketing space in integrated marketing campaigns, demand generation and awareness programs.
For the next 12 weeks, we’ll highlight findings from our research showing the challenges B2B marketers face with rapidly changing programs and budget constraints, and innovative ways best-in-class marketers have found to scale and report the success of their content marketing campaigns.
Week 1: The Importance of Content Marketing, and Content Marketing Budgets
Since we did our last State of Content Marketing survey in 2011, the focus on content marketing has grown quickly at enterprise marketing organizations. In our latest survey, 76% of respondents reported that content marketing was a “Major Objective” at their organization.
However, our results also show that, compared to two years ago, budgets for content marketing — and content production in general — are not growing as rapidly across the board. The result? B2B marketing teams are under pressure to supply more content than ever before, but also need to do it more efficiently than ever before.
Increasing numbers of organizations cite content marketing as a major initiative. Yet budgets are tight with nearly half of marketers reporting that budgets will be static this year, compared to only 17% in 2011. Some respondents are even reporting their budgets may slightly decrease, a new development since our last survey.
In our last chart this week, you can see that the average allocation of funds to content production has also dropped. This underscores the need to get more efficient at creating effective content and exploring options beyond traditional techniques.
Next week we’ll cover the top challenges B2B marketers report with their content marketing programs. Subscribe or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn to get all the posts in this series.
