12 Weeks of Content Marketing Insights
Welcome to the second post in our series on the current state of B2B Content Marketing, based on our recent survey of over 230 B2B marketing professionals.
Week 2: The top content-creation challenges B2B Marketers Face
The Most Common Challenges: Time, labor, and getting customers to talk
We asked B2B marketing professionals what their biggest content-creation challenges were, and the top 3 most-reported challenges were 1) the time it takes, 2) the effort involved, and 3) the difficulty of getting customers to talk.
The Fastest-Growing Challenges
Compared to our last survey of B2B marketers in 2011, lack of time and the cost of content creation were the two challenges that grew the most. This jives with our other research showing that demand for new content is outpacing budget growth in 2013.
More Challenges Across the Board
As marketing organizations have become more focused on content marketing over the last few years, marketers have rated the difficulty of executing a successful content marketing campaign as more difficult across the board. Trouble getting specific stats/metrics, finding enough customers to go on record, and shortfall of content for all use cases all increased moderately. This is compounded by the overall message that marketing teams have been tasked with doing more with less.
This director of marketing put it very succinctly:
“Our top challenge is time vs. the marketing roadmap. We have a very aggressive timeline in place, and not enough resources.”
The bright spot: Marketers are more comfortable with Content Creation
B2B marketing professionals seem to be more comfortable with content creation than before — “lack of expertise” was the only challenge that decreased since our last survey.
Stay Tuned
Next week we’ll cover another critical issue marketing teams face — how fast they can create content, and which types of content are the most (and least) time-consuming to produce.
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