Customer Experience

By adaptive - October 7th, 2014

As content marketing continues to move across the corporate landscape, new benchmark testing reveals social media as an essential delivery channel

The latest B2B content marketing benchmark report from the Content Marketing Institute makes for interesting reading if your corporation needs to understand why content is still king. Since the advent of the Web, quality content has continued to be sought out by consumers and businesses alike.

After the inception of social media, content became even more important. And now as we enter a post social media age, corporations in the B2B space now realise that a content marketing strategy is absolutely vital to their continued profitability.

“For the first time, we asked marketers which paid advertising methods they use to promote/distribute content — and of those, which they consider to be most effective,” says the Content Marketing Institute. “On average, B2B marketers are using three paid advertising methods, with 80% using at least one. Search engine marketing tops the list as the most used (and most effective).

“While the adoption rates for the ‘newer’ paid methods of native advertising and content discovery tools isn’t very high yet, 36% of those who use them say they are effective (giving them a higher confidence rating than marketers give for the more established paid methods of ‘print or other offline promotion’ and ‘traditional online banner ads’).”

Social media though, is clearly the area when B2B marketers are making the most effort. The report concludes:

• 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute their content.
• 88% of B2B marketers use Twitter to distribute their content.
• 84% of B2B marketers use Facebook to distribute their content.

The Content Marketing Institute concludes: “B2B marketers use an average of 13 content marketing tactics — the same as reported last year. Of these tactics, 92% cite social media content (other than blogs) as the most used, followed by eNewsletters (83%), and articles on their website (81%). Infographics as a tactic saw the biggest rise in usage (from 51% last year to 62% this year).”

Social media then is now playing an increasing role in B2B marketing – something that will continue to expand, as the rules of engagement come into focus. Corporations within the B2B space should have a clear content creation strategy, as progressively this kind of content will deliver high levels of partner engagement.

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