If you’re still not sure whether content marketing can help your business grow in the upcoming year, let’s take a closer look at a few findings from a recent study involving 1,426 business-to-business marketers from North America. The study was recently conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.
The number one challenge for content marketing professionals surveyed was creating enough content, with 64% saying so. 52% said that producing engaging content was their biggest challenge. To help offset these, consider repurposing and recycling older material, spread existing content across all platforms and take relevant customer feedback, letters and testimonials and utilize for your content creation. Though difficult, the more content you create the better.
For content distribution tactics, the study showed 87% of marketers use social media to distribute their content, more than articles, email newsletters, blogs and other strategies. Another discovery tying in with this is that the typical company used 12 various content marketing tactics on average. For your content strategy, the more tactics you utilize, the more your voice will be heard. Furthermore, if you can utilize non-web tactics such as printed white-papers, emails, newsletters, etc., the greater your content distribution and the larger your voice.
A very surprising find from this study is that more marketers (83%) are using LinkedIn as their main media channel for content distribution. Twitter and Facebook are a close second with 80% each, respectively, and YouTube at 61%. Though the difference isn’t substantial, it says quite a bit about LinkedIn as a B2B tool for disseminating information.
This study revealed a lot more about the state of content marketing and its impact on future B2B. If you’re still on the fence about content marketing, this study demonstrates the truly successful marketers are those who invested the most resources in trying new strategies to create and distribute compelling content.