The latest benchmark research suggests that B2B content marketers, regardless of company size, industry sector or geographic location, have an awful lot in common. For starters, and not surprisingly, they share the same motivations.
Indeed, companies across the board invest in content marketing for the same basic reasons: to raise brand visibility, to generate more (and better) leads, and to demonstrate thought leadership.
They also mainly rely on the same content distribution tactics (direct sales and account management outreach top virtually everyone’s list, followed by tweeting and blogging). They use the same performance metrics for tracking and measuring the success of their content marketing programs (with “number of leads” and “sales conversions” invariably ranking high for gated content assets). And they wrestle with most of the same challenges as they look to make a big splash (but, alas, often failing to do so) with their content marketing efforts.
They also allocate roughly the same percentage of their marketing budgets to activities related to content marketing, whether their overall marketing budgets are in the five figures or the eight figures. What’s more, according to the research, almost one-quarter of companies plan to more than double their spending on content marketing over the next 12 months. This, again, is true on a universal basis.
Very large and large companies are nearly just as likely to outsource content development and design functions as midsize and small companies that may lack in-house resources. While resource constraints are obviously less likely to be an issue for large and very large companies than for small and very small companies, companies of all sizes and across nearly all industries reportedly struggle almost the same when it comes to creating compelling content. As everyone who dabbles in content marketing already knows, the ability to generate high-quality leads, as well as sufficient numbers of leads, is almost always a function of having compelling content.
This isn’t to say that all B2B content marketers are necessarily in the same boat, however. There are a few areas where notable disparities arise in the research data, owing in large part to differing levels of experience, maturity and resource capabilities. For example, large and very large companies are nearly twice as likely as small and very small companies to calculate marketing ROI. A few of other disparities are noted below.
