Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends in B2B Content Marketing for 2016!

The Content Marketing Institute from the US has published their new „B2B Content Marketing 2016” report and the results are eye opening. The study shows that Social Media and blogs, along with case studies and newsletters, are still a major part of Content strategies. Written content is still King!

The Content Marketing Institute from the US has published their new „B2B Content Marketing 2016” report and the results are eye opening. The study shows that Social Media and blogs, along with case studies and newsletters, are still a major part of Content strategies. Written content is still King! We are happy to see that Content marketers are still using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to great effect. All in all, 76% of responders expected that their budgets for content creation will continue to grow in 2016.

Key Takeaways

The key-takeaway, generally speaking, is that the more organized and well documented your content strategy is, the higher the effectiveness of the programme will be. So let’s take a look at the steps one by one.

Step 1: Content marketers understand what successful Content Marketing looks like.

Although 88% of respondents claimed that they are applying Content Marketing, only 30% stated that these campaigns were actually effective, and most responders marked the effectiveness of their programmes as neutral. Only 44% of responders stated that their organization knew what a successful content marketing programme even looks like. And knowing this is important, because 79% of high-performers have clarity on what a successful programme looks like, while 77% of the least successful content marketers self-admittedly did not have this clarity. The metrics given to define success are seen below.

Step 2: They document their content marketing strategy

Documenting your content marketing strategy, which means creating some type of written road map, had a strong positive correlation with success. 53% of those responders satisfied with their programs had documented strategies while 40% of the least successful respondents didn’t. Documentation certainly helps with the planning and organization process. It also helps you set some general goals and visualize the program holistically. The strategy should answer the question “What are we going to do?”

Step 3: They document their editorial mission statement

In addition to documenting the strategy, it was also found that documenting a global mission statement bound the more successful respondents, as 56% of those going through the trouble of creating and documenting a strategy had also documented their mission statement. Mission statements are helpful in getting the whole team pulling in the same direction. It answers the question of “Why are we doing this?” It gives meaning and reason to ambitious editorial calendars and time-consuming community management.

Step 4: They communicate frequently with the team

Content Marketing is about communicating with your clients. How can you expect to do that if you are not communicating within your internal team? The study shows that teams that meet more frequently obtained the better results, as 61% of the top performing respondents meet daily or at least weekly. Does this mean that all meetings are wonderful and necessary? Probably not, but avoiding getting on the same page regularly is also not conducive to reaching your content goals.

We found this study very interesting and, as always, Textbroker is here to support you with all your content creation needs.