The B2B Content Marketing Trends Report

Holger Shulze always does a terrific job analysing the world of content marketing and his latest survey (sponsored by IDG Enterprise and others) is no exception. It’s called B2B Content Marketing Trends and I’ve embedded it below.

Holger ran a survey of members of the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn and got 740 responses – plenty to make the survey statistically significant. It’s an excellent overview of who’s doing content marketing, how and why.

Remember, these are tech marketers, so they may not reflect the grand, glorious sweep of B2B.

A few highlights:

Come of the results aren’t that surprising:

• Growth – content marketing has moved from 20% to 30% of budgets. Seems low as a slice of the pie but a 50% rise feels about right. Onward and upward. And 84% of respondents predict a rise next year. (Buy shares in Velocity).

• Goals – lead generation, market education and brand awareness are the top three.

• Social – LinkedIn is top for content sharing, followed by Twitter, then Facebook and YouTube.

• Metrics – Web traffic, then views/downloads, then lead quantity and quality; revenues come a bit low but at least people are being honest.

• Outsourcing – marketers are going outside for content creation. Thank God.

• Marketing Automation – is on the rise. Only 25% are actively using it for content marketing but another 19% are experimenting.

But others did raise an eyebrow or three:

• Press releases are still in the top three tactics, below case studies and white papers/ebooks. I’m not sure I’d even call them content marketing but I am a bit surprised people are still doing them (they do fall way down the table that ranks tactics for effectiveness).

• Blogging is mid-table on the effectiveness rating (page 5). I do think this may be because the impact of a blog can be diffuse and hidden.  Case studies are at the top which makes me wonder how effectiveness is being measured here.

Anyway — it’s a really good report. So dig in: