Higher Quality Content Helps B2B Marketers Find Positive ROI

New research shows that B2B marketers are realizing more success with content marketing, and a number of different factors are contributing to their positive ROI.

The “2018 Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – North America” report from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs recently found that over the last year, higher quality content creation (78 percent) has been the top driver of success for B2B marketers deploying content marketing. This was followed by more developed strategies (72 percent), and better content distribution (50 percent).

The majority of respondents (53 percent) claim that their overall content marketing approach has been at least “moderately successful.” On top of this, about 20 percent claim that it has been “very successful.”

About 62 percent of respondents believe that their organization now has “realistic expectations about what content marketing can achieve,” which may be why they have a more optimistic outlook on their content marketing efforts. Approximately 47 percent are also discontinuing ineffective content marketing activities in order to focus on the most efficient processes.

In addition, nearly 80 percent of B2B marketers agree that their companies have been focused on building audiences / subscriber bases. Seventy-four percent agree that their organization now values creativity and craft in content creation and production.

B2B Marketers and Content Marketing in 2016

Looking back on the same report one year ago, B2B marketers were already deploying content marketing tactics, but struggling to find success.

The “B2B Content Marketing 2017: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America” report from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs showed that 89 percent of B2B marketers were using content marketing. However, just 29 percent claimed their strategies were “sophisticated” or “mature.” The majority ranked their maturity level as “adolescent.”

At the time, only 22 percent of B2B marketers rated their content marketing approaches as “very or extremely successful.” The majority (53 percent) claimed it was “moderately successful.” However, high quality content appeared to be paying off for respondents. About 85 percent claimed that creating higher quality, more efficient content contributed to their success over the past 12 months.