B2B Enterprise Marketers are Inching Toward Sophisticated Content Marketing

Many B2B marketers have a content marketing strategy, but new research sheds light on how B2B enterprise marketers, in particular, are finding success with this tactic.

The “B2B Enterprise Content Marketing 2017: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America” report from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs recently discovered that 53 percent of B2B enterprise marketers are extremely/very committed to content marketing.

However, just 28 percent said their strategies are sophisticated/mature and only 25 percent stated that their company is clear on what effective or successful content marketing looks like.

That being said, statistics show that 54 percent of B2B enterprise marketers are much more or somewhat more successful with content marketing than they were one year ago.

Higher quality and more efficient content creation (84 percent) and strategy development (74 percent) were the leading reasons why B2B enterprise marketers saw an increase in success over the past year. Making content marketing a greater priority (60 percent) and measuring content to show results (56 percent) have also played significant roles in the documented improvement.

“Most Effective” vs. “Least Effective” Content Marketers

In 2016, the Content Marketing Institute and Marketo released a similar report titled “B2B Enterprise Content Marketing,” which gauged the differences between the least and most effective B2B enterprise marketers.

It showed that 64 percent of the “most effective” B2B enterprise marketers were a part of organizations that had a clear view of what a successful content marketing program looks like. This was in comparison to just 18 percent of their “least effective” counterparts.

The majority of the most effective B2B enterprise marketers said that they also met daily or weekly to discuss their content marketing plan. Only 19 percent of least effective B2B enterprise marketers did the same.