Lead Gen to be the Top Priority for B2B Marketers in 2015

IDG Enterprise recently teamed up with the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn to conduct its annual B2B Content Marketing Survey, showing that lead generation is the number one goal of content marketers looking ahead to 2015, followed by thought leadership.

Additionally, data showed that although only 30 percent of companies have a formally documented content strategy, those that do are more likely to be effective. However, content marketing didn’t come without challenges in 2014.

“The most mentioned content marketing challenge is finding enough time and resources to create content,” wrote the authors of the survey. “The next biggest content marketing challenge is producing enough content, followed by producing truly engaging content to serve the needs of marketing programs.”

About 34 percent of content marketers said that developing a consistent content strategy was an issue in 2014. A total of 31 percent of survey respondents said that budget continued to be a problem when it came to producing content.

An Increase in Budget on the Horizon

A survey conducted by StrongView in early December showed that approximately 54 percent of marketers expect their budgets to increase within the next year. This is an increase from 46 percent of people who said the same when the survey was conducted in 2013. Additionally, respondents said that they see their budgets growing by at least 10 percent.

“Accessing and leveraging customer data continues to be the top challenge facing email marketers in 2015, due to issues related to data cleanliness, budget and resources,” wrote the authors of the report. “The data also shows that triggered and lifecycle programs will be the top targets of increased spend, as email marketers embrace email automation to enable more one-to-one messaging.”

About 40 percent of respondents said that they expect to maintain current spend levels in 2015. Email marketing led the way in terms of programs that will see an increase in spend, with 60 percent of people claiming that this is primarily how they will use their money.