Driving awareness and conversions
through content remain the top strategy for business-to-business marketers -- but social media has become the most popular, with 87% of marketers using the medium, excluding blogs, according to a
study released Wednesday.
Articles on a company's Web site came in No. 2 at 83%, followed by 78% for electronic newsletters and 77% for blogs, according to the "B2B Content Marketing: 2013
Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends" study from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, sponsored by Brightcove.
About 54% of B2B marketers plan to increase content
marketing budgets in the next year. Some 34% said it would remain the same; 2% said it would decrease; and 10% said they were unsure. The average amount of marketing budget spent on B2B content
marketing is 33%, up from 26% in 2011.
Larger companies are more likely to outsource content creation. They are also more likely to consider ad targeting from companies like Demandbase, which
recently launched a real-time targeting platform that personalizes ads by industry, revenue, size or geography without the use of cookies or other tracking mechanisms.
On average, B2B
marketers use five social channels to distribute content. The most popular are LinkedIn at 83%, followed by Twitter at 80%, Facebook at 80%, YouTube at 61%, and Google+ at 39%. Some 64% of B2B content
marketers say they are challenged by producing enough content. Surprisingly, Pinterest is being used by more than 25% of B2B marketers.
Steve Rotter, vice president of digital
marketing solutions at Brightcove, said B2B marketers continue to invest more in online video, which rose from 52% in 2011 to 70% in 2012. About seven in ten B2B marketers create and distribute
original videos online.
Brand awareness at 79%, customer acquisition at 74%, and lead generation at 71% remain the top B2B content marketing goals. B2B marketers still use Web traffic and
sales lead quality to measure effectiveness -- at 60% and 51%, respectively.
More than 1,400 B2B marketers in North America participated in the August 2012 study.