The B2B Content Marketing Trends 2012 report came out today. It is by Holger Schulze who conducted the survey and compiled the report – great work.
It is a great overview of where B2B content marketing is going and has been. The SlideShare is embedded below. It is of no surprise that the top three things goals are, lead generation, market education and brand awareness.
Here are a few items that popped out at me:
I am a bit surprised that Facebook and Youtube have much higher usage than SlideShare or Google+. And I am still a bit confused in the growing (or not) popularity of Google+.- Content marketing budgets grew 50% from last year – that is HUGE. They grew from 20% of marketers overall budget in 2011 to 30% in 2012. It is huge growth, however earlier this week I saw a breakdown of one company’s lead generation and close rate from content marketing verses outbound efforts. Outbound generated two+ times the leads, at three times the cost as content marketing. But the kicker was that the content marketing leads had the hire number of closings and more revenue per close! Overall, content marketing generated 1.5 times the revenue at one-third the cost! Make you wonder why the shift is not even higher?
- Most of the content marketing budget was spent on trade and in-person events. Yes, these cost the most. You can also see that they are not the most effective, but a close second. Other forms of content marketing are just as effective and cost much less. I wonder what the tipping point would be.
- Most markets are increasing content production – no surprise there.
- Biggest challenge? Time to product content – near and dear to my heart, giving that the B2B ContentEngine is a tool to help with just that.
- 39% of respondents are using curated content as part of their content strategy. This is at the core of our curation tool suite so this makes me happy also.
Here is the report:
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