CMI: 2017 B2B Content Marketing Report

199IT original compilation

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) released the “2017 B2B Content Marketing Report,” analyzing North American B2B content marketing metrics, budgets, and trends.

Traditionally, content marketing teams have tended to be independent of the rest of the marketing department, a trend that is now prevalent in the B2B industry.

Overall, 92% of respondents have some form of centralized team running content marketing, suggesting that brands are aligned on improving management efficiency.

In B2B marketing, ensuring content is delivered to the right audience at the right time is key to achieving content marketing success. However, according to CMI research, only 41% of B2B marketers create content based on buyers. What is particularly surprising is that 72% of respondents care about how content affects the customer experience. Since the customer experience is mainly based on the buyer's shopping journey, mapping content to each shopping step is an important part of ensuring a good experience.

It’s no surprise that email is the most important tactic for B2B content distribution. Currently, 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content, closely followed by social media (92%). 74% of respondents believe that email is the most effective content distribution method, 29% higher than blogging.

Despite this, only 70% of B2B marketers are using email to manage content distribution. This 23 percentage point gap is because marketers shouldn’t waste time and resources manually creating email lists and sending messages.

The reason for this 23 percentage point gap is that B2B marketers shouldn’t waste time and resources manually creating email lists and sending messages without any insights.

Measuring ROI is a code that many marketers haven’t cracked. 65% of B2B content marketers don’t measure ROI at all or aren’t sure. Most incredible of all, the top reason B2B content marketers give for not measuring ROI is “no formal justification.”

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