People talk about content marketing as if it is some new development when in fact content marketing has been around for hundreds of years, and has been used by leading advertising agencies across the US for more than a decade. What is new is not the strategy, it is the medium, message, and opportunities to engage that have changed as a result of social media, blogging and the web.
Despite the title of the infographic below misrepresenting content marketing as being separate from traditional advertising, as opposed to an integral part, it provides valuable insight into the developing role content marketing is playing in business to business (B2B) marketing for companies small and large.
Content Marketing B2B Business
Content marketing plays an important role in B2B marketing. According to the infographic 26% of B2B marketing budgets are spent on content marketing. Both large companies and small use content marketing with the only real difference being the number of content marketing tactics and resources for the creation of compelling content.
Online Content Marketing Challenges
As the name suggestions, the biggest challenges in content marketing is creating lots of compelling content. To address this problems companies are investing more of their marketing budgets into content marketing.
With an increase in the amount of valuable and educational content as a by product of the focus on content marketing, consumers are becoming more discerning about content quality. The infographic’s report that 36% of marketers struggle to create engaging content, another 21% find it challenging to produce enough content, 2% don’t have enough of a budget for content, and 9% struggle to produce a variety of content. This highlights the challenges faced by marketers when ramping up content marketing efforts.
Executives Get Content Marketing
C-level executives understand the value of content marketing. Only 11% of B2B marketers claim their biggest challenging is C-level executive buy-in.
Future of Online Content Marketing
51% of marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget. This will fuel an even larger influx of content targeted at niche markets. The impact of this influx of valuable content distributed through social media and the web is still unknown. One question that is on our minds is, will content marketing reach a point where the cost of developing engaging content that stands out and gets the attention of consumers becomes so expensive to produce that it will not be practical?
Infographic courtesy of Marketo.