According to Forrester’s most recent benchmark report on B2B content marketing, 51 percent of B2B marketers believe that, compared to their peers, their content marketing practices are very mature. Yet, 87 percent find developing engaging content to be a major challenge. When asked if their content brought value back to the business during the past 12 months, only 14 percent of B2B marketers believed their content to be very effective. Eighty-five percent of B2B marketers said the content did not create value or only somewhat did.
The biggest mistake B2B content marketers make is that they do not develop content that aligns their organization’s strategic business goals to the content consumption needs of their customers. Instead, they focus on creating volumes of content to fill channels and meet sales activity demands. This is not to say that content should not support sales activities, but it should do so by leveraging content to create a compelling and consistent customer experience.
In order to develop effective and engaging content, it is imperative that all content development efforts are aligned to a documented content strategy that bridges your organization’s strategic business objectives with your customers’ key topics of interest while strategically infusing your corporate messaging throughout. You must also understand how and where your customers like to consume content, and you need to constantly monitor the performance of your content in order to strengthen the impact it has with your customers while quantifying the value it brings back to the business.
The 14 percent of B2B marketers who are developing and delivering effective content are those marketers who have spent the time and resources necessary to understand what keeps their customers up at night and provide solutions and new perspectives that elevate their customers’ experience throughout each stage of the customer lifecycle.
Learn how to accelerate business growth with messaging continuity throughout the customer experience here.
