According to a new eMarketer report, content from B2B marketers will surge in 2016.
“With this amplified emphasis on content marketing, these marketers have evolved in their approach and strategies—they are looking at the long game and realizing that although waiting 18 to 24 months for results is not ideal, it is the new reality,” notes eMarketer.
The back-up data comes from a September, 2015 study by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs and it shows that 76 percent of B2B marketers in North America said they expect to create more content in 2016 than they did in 2015.
That means budgets will get bigger, too. More than half of B2B marketers said they expect to spend more on content marketing in the next year.
“No matter the reason, content marketing delivers results, especially when it comes to the more traditional end goal: generating leads to feed the sales funnel,” the report summary explains. “In a July 2015 Ascend2 study of B2B marketing professionals, 43 percent of respondents asserted that content marketing was one of the most effective tactics for lead generation.”
Garnering leads is good, but it’s just the start of marketing.
“Over the same period, other performance metrics gained ground, including sales conversions (from 78 percent in 2014 to 86 percent in 2015) and quality of leads (66 percent to 72 percent),” reports eMarketer. “Also interesting was the share of B2B marketers who considered cost savings and marketing ROI as a performance metric: In both 2014 and 2015, roughly 45 percent used savings as a way to measure the success of content marketing.”
