Earlier this year, a study by Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, the CMO Council’s ROI Center, and NetLine found that online content from B2B marketers affected 85% of business-to-business (B2B) buyers when they were actively making vendor selection and purchase decisions. It’s not surprising that content marketing is now a key part of B2B and B2C marketing plans.
In fact, research from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProf’s B2B Content Marketing 2014 report revealed that 92% of B2B marketers are using content marketing and 42% consider themselves to be effective at content marketing. Similarly, research from the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Prof’s B2C Content Marketing 2014 report found that 90% of B2C marketers are now using content marketing and 34% believe they are effective at content marketing.
Taking a closer look at the data from both the B2B Content Marketing 2014 and B2C Content Marketing 2014 studies, there are many more similarities between marketers:
- Have a documented content strategy: B2B = 44%, B2C = 39%
- Have someone in place to oversee content marketing strategy: B2B = 73%, B2C = 67%
- Producing more content than they did a year ago: B2B = 73%, B2C = 72%
- Average number of content marketing tactics used: B2B = 13, B2C = 12
- Top content marketing goal for both B2B and B2C is raising brand awareness: B2B = 82%, B2C = 79%
- Top content marketing metric for both B2B and B2C is web traffic: B2B = 63%, B2C = 66%
- Plan to increase content marketing budgets in the next 12 months: B2B = 58%, B2C = 60%
- Average amount of marketing budget allocated to content marketing: B2B = 30%, B2C = 24%
- Top challenge for both B2B and B2C is a lack of time: B2B = 69%, B2C = 57%
Both B2B (95%) and B2C (91%) marketers segment their content in at least one way. However, an interesting difference between B2B and B2C marketers that was revealed in the reports is how content is segmented. For B2B marketers, the most popular way to tailor content is using industry trends (65%), but for B2C marketers, the top way is using profiles of individual decision makers (56%).
It’s also interesting to note that four content marketing tactics hold the top spots for both B2B and B2C marketers in terms of usage. Those tactics are social media (other than blogs), articles on the company/brand website, enewsletters, and blogs.
To put things into perspective visually, take a look at the two infographics below.
The first infographic, Confidence Boost: Marketers Get More Savvy with Content Marketing, was published on the LinkedIn blog and highlights many of the findings from the B2B Content Marketing 2014 study.
Next is the B2C Content Marketing in 2013 infographic from Uberflip, which uses data from research conducted earlier this year (note the sources at the bottom of the infographic for more information).
How does your company and brand stack up against other B2B or B2C content marketers?
Image: Raphael Straub
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
