12 Weeks of Content Marketing Insights
Welcome to the third post in our series on the current state of B2B Content Marketing, based on our recent survey of over 230 B2B marketing professionals.
Week 3: The Time it Takes to Create Content
We asked B2B marketing professionals how long on average it takes them to produce a finished piece of content:
42% of respondents said that each piece of content takes between 2-5 weeks to produce, while 13% said it takes them 10 weeks or more to produce a finished piece of content. Ouch!
Challenges contributing to the slow process are the time it takes to get approval of the content, having a variety of different stakeholders to consult, and a simple lack of time to commit to the project.
A Digital Marketing Strategist sums up the time crunch:
“Getting work done [is the biggest challenge.] People will buy into marketing but getting the work done is hard as most people are too busy with client work.”
How long does it take to create different types of content?
Let’s take a closer look at which types of content are the most — and least — time-consuming to create:
Whitepapers, case studies, and product videos, and customer videos were among the types of content rated as most time-consuming to produce.
Even whitepapers written by 3rd party analysts were rated as requiring a large time commitment – most likely due to communicating marketing messages and specifics to an outside organization.
Surprisingly, the marketers we surveyed viewed producing case studies and customer testimonials as more time consuming than creating sales presentations, data sheets, and product collateral.
Which types of content are the most widely used?
Looking deeper at the data from the chart above, we can get some insights into which types of content are used more widely than others. Here they are, from most-used to least-used:
- Data Sheets / Product Collateral
- Case Studies
- Sales Presentations
- Business/Thought Leadership Whitepapers
- Customer Testimonials
- Product Videos/Demos
- Solution Collateral
- Technical Whitepapers
- Blog Posts
- Customer Videos
- Customized Microsites
- 3rd Party Whitepapers (eg. Industry Analysts)
- TCO/ROI Calculators / Analysis
Stay Tuned
Next week we’ll take a deeper dive into how long it takes B2B marketers to create customer case studies.
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