Creating Engaging Content is Priority and Challenge for B2B Marketers

Looking ahead to 2016, B2B content marketers are focused on creating more engaging content than ever before.

This week, MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute released their sixth annual joint report, ““B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.” They asked more than 1,500 respondents from North America what their priorities and challenges were in content marketing.

Producing engaging content was noted as the top challenge and priority among respondents.  Sixty percent named engaging content as their top challenge while 72 percent named creating engaging content as their top priority.

Other priorities for B2B content creators included gaining a better understanding of what content is effective—and what isn’t (65 percent), finding more/better ways to repurpose content (57 percent), creating visual content (51 percent) and becoming better storytellers (41 percent).

“My sense is that many of us vastly undervalue writing in the content process, which is why we have a tough time creating ‘engaging content’—and why that has consistently been a top challenge in the past six years,” wrote Ann Handley, chief content officer of MarketingProfs.

In addition to producing engaging content, two of the other top challenges for B2B content marketers centered on accurately measuring content effectiveness and ROI.

Content Marketing ‘Crucial Technology’ to Success

A survey published by TechValidate and Spear Marketing Group in September found that 85 percent of B2B marketers are focusing on content marketing above all other marketing technologies.

Within marketers’ content strategies, blog posts (76 percent) are considered to be key. White papers (69 percent) and webinars (61 percent) are also proving to be valuable assets.

Despite the value of content marketing, this survey also found 43 percent of B2B marketers were struggling to create meaningful content. In the future, 36 percent of B2B marketers foresee this being a challenge.

[Editor Note] Additional analysis can also be found here: Documentation and Communication Lead To B2B Content Marketing Success