14 B2B Content Marketing statistics Will Help Marketers Reach the Next Level

Longer buying processes and smaller and more specific audiences are common challenges for B2B marketers. By dealing directly with other companies, your business needs to demonstrate immense expertise in the solutions it offers, which can be achieved with a good content marketing strategy.

As you know, the digital marketing scenario changes with extreme agility. Therefore, the brands that achieve the greatest success are those that track trends and know how to approach the customer in the most appropriate way, which includes the choice of proper channels and the production of content considered relevant.

To help you stay on top of the subject, we’ve prepared this list with 14 B2B content marketing strategies.

Understanding the data and knowing how to act on it can elevate your marketing efforts to another level. After all, data intelligence is fundamental for efficient decision-making. Want to know more? Keep reading!

    1. Most B2B marketers say lead generation is their most important content marketing goal.

    A complete content marketing strategy can achieve several objectives, such as increasing brand equity and educating potential consumers. In a B2B business, however, the main goal is to find more and more business opportunities.

    Unlike B2C businesses, which focus on building relationships with individuals, B2C has lead generation as its main priority. This fact is indicated in a study conducted by Ring Lead, in which 85% of respondents stated that generating new business opportunities is their primary goal in strategy.

    2. Most professionals believe that having a good content strategy is a major key to their success.

    To achieve the main objective and generate new prospects for the company, it is essential to have a well-structured content strategy.

    In the B2B Content Marketing study, conducted in 2017, 72% of the professionals interviewed stated that the production of quality materials was the main factor in their success over the last few years.

    This fact is reinforced by a study by the Content Marketing Institute, which points out that an excellent content strategy if paired with good SEO practices, generates three times more leads than an investment in sponsored links.

    3. The “most successful” content marketers have a documented strategy in place.

    There is no point in establishing a strategy if you don’t map out your results and don’t count on efficient planning. After all, you need to rely on pre-defined performance metrics and collect data that indicates the efficiency of the approach.

    By cross-referencing this information, you will be able to identify points that can be optimized.

    You can determine your most relevant metrics according to the characteristics of your company and your objectives in the market. But if you’re wondering about the most used indicators to evaluate a content strategy, the answer is Total Sales, according to HubSpot research.

    This idea is reinforced by B2B Content Marketing 2020, which indicated that 69% of the companies considered most successful in the B2B scenario had a documented strategy.

    Also, among the worst performers, only 16% have such an approach.

    4. The majority of B2B marketers credit e-mail as the most effective distribution channel for demand gen efforts.

    Emails remain as one of the main channels for you to communicate with your public, especially for nutrition and conversion purposes.

    Using newsletters to keep leads informed about their content is just one way to use email marketing to your advantage.

    According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 79% of B2B professionals believe that email is the most efficient channel in generating demand for the solutions offered. Also, the financial returns are visible.

    According to Smart Insights, this type of strategy presents an ROI of $40.00 for every dollar spent.

    5. Strategic landing pages are used by most B2B businesses to acquire leads.

    But how do you establish an email marketing approach without counting potential customer contact lists? Impossible, don’t you agree?

    As buying leads is not a practical option, you need to find other ways to capture the information and contact those interested in your services. That’s where the landing pages come in.

    These pages, which offer some valuable content in exchange for visitors providing data, are used by 68% of B2B businesses to acquire leads, as indicated by Marketo. If you want to increase the efficiency of this feature further, consider turning your landing pages into interactive.

    6. Most of the successful B2B companies craft their contents based on specific stages of the buyer’s journey

    You’ve heard of the customer lifecycle journey, right? It’s the journey the consumer takes from the moment he discovers he has a problem to the moment he acquires his solution, which can extend to customer loyalty.

    Your brand needs to create the motivation to lead them through the stages of the journey.

    To do this, nothing better than producing content specifically based on each stage. In the discovery phase, for example, educational materials, such as blog posts and infographics, may be an appropriate option.

    In the conversion phase, using interactive calculators to highlight the available benefits may be what you need to close the sale.

    By observing the results of B2B Marketing Content, this idea becomes even more evident. Among the most successful companies, 74% use this type of approach.

    Among the worst performers, only 26% adopt specific content for each stage of the journey.

    7. More than half of B2B marketers prioritize creating visual assets as part of their content marketing strategy.

    In addition to producing differentiated content for each stage of the funnel, it is essential to diversify the formats used. Texts, videos, images, audios are just some examples of materials that can contribute to the conversion of your leads.

    Among these, one of the most prominent is the visual content.

    According to HubSpot, 51% of B2B marketers focus on visual elements to optimize the consumer experience. Here, there is no more explicit example than the use of infographics, preferably interactive.

    According to Forbes, 84% of companies that use this resource consider it very useful.

    8. Top-performing B2B blog posts include “the future of.”

    Speaking about different content formats, blog posts remain the flagship of several digital marketing strategies. According to the OptionMonster study, more than 409 million people access more than 40 billion blog pages per month, generating about 77 million monthly comments.

    To generate such engagement, however, it is essential to excel in attracting the audience’s attention, which starts with the choice of subject and title of the post.

    As the B2B audience is hugely connected to market trends, it is no surprise to note, in this Buzzsumo study, that the best performing posts have the words “the future of” in their title. Other relevant headlines include:

    •   “How to use”
    •   “Need to”
    •   “How to create”
    •   “Here is how”
    •   “You need to know”

    9. Most companies outsource their content marketing

    Increasingly relevant in companies of all segments, content marketing is an activity that can take much time from the company’s professionals. For you to have an idea, OptionMonster points out that the average production time of a blog post is three and a half hours.

    Of course, many companies outsource this type of service to have professional support and avoid overloading their employees.

    Approximately 62% of businesses that already work with a content marketing strategy have a partner for the production and dissemination of the materials.

    10. Almost all marketers believe that content interactive influences buyer’s decisions.

    Articles containing elements of interactivity are rising in popularity among marketers. Calculators, infographics, quizzes, and e-books are just some of the examples of interactive content that can positively impact the consumer journey.

    In this study, conducted by Ion in partnership with Demand Metric, 96% of marketing professionals believe that an interactive marketing strategy has the power to influence the buyer’s decision-making process.

    11. Most marketers believe interactive content is effective at educating buyers

    If we stop to analyze each step of the journey individually, we will notice that interactive content can be extremely efficient for several purposes. At the discovery stage, for example, your company needs to have proper levels of organic reach, which can be achieved by content sharing.

    In Ion’s study with Demand Metrics, 63% of the professionals interviewed stated that interactivity is at least somewhat effective in stimulating users to share the material. When asked about static content, only 32% shared the same sentiment.

    Once you succeed in reaching and attracting a lead, you need to nurture them with informational content, enabling their education on the subject.

    At this stage, interactivity is also a great ally. 90% of the respondents said they believe in the effectiveness of interactive content to achieve this kind of goal.

    12. 88% of marketers will increase the production of interactive content this year.

    If you still have doubts about the current relevance of interactive content production, it’s time to put them aside. According to Go Gulf, this kind of strategy has attracted so much attention from marketers that 88% of them promise to insert interactivity in 10-30% of their content produced in the year 2020.

    This can be explained mainly by the impact the strategy can have on the company’s finances. According to the Demand Metric survey with Ion, 68% of the participants interviewed stated that they have been observing revenue growth in their companies.

    It is essential, however, to know what types of content are the most effective.

    According to the same survey, 22.6% of marketers who work with interactive marketing consider that assessments are the formats that present the best results, followed closely by interactive white papers, mentioned by 22% of participants.

    Quizzes and contests come right after, with 19% each.

    13. Most marketers believe content is most effective in the early stage of the journey.

    We can separate the consumer’s journey into three stages: early, middle and late. The first is when the lead becomes aware of his problem and begins to seek information and solutions that solve help them.

    The second represents the stage when consumers start to compare different alternatives to buy from, while the late stage is where the purchase happens.

    According to marketers interviewed by Ion, the use of content is more effective in dealing with leads in the early stage of the funnel. 46% think that way. Another 40% point to the middle stage as the most important phase for content use, while 14% consider it to be the late stage.

    14. More and more marketers are adopting videos in their content strategy.

    Another content format that has been gaining more and more followers is video, which may or may not be interactive. Audiovisual content is more natural to consume, especially for people who have more busy routines. It is also a way to adapt to the preferences of the younger generation and enable their engagement.

    A study by Animoto, for example, revealed that 75% of millennials consume videos on social networks every day.

    In addition, this content format is perceived as reliable by 40% of users who fit this age group. Millennials, however, are not the only ones who consume videos on the Internet.

    According to a Cisco survey, videos will, by 2022, account for 82% of Internet traffic. It is not surprising to note in another study, conducted by Invisia, that the consumption of this type of content shows an annual growth of approximately 100%.

    Attentive to the market, 89% of marketers already make use of video in their content strategies.

    By analyzing these B2B content marketing statistics, you will notice trends your company can explore to optimize the customer’s lifecycle journey. As you’ve seen, using different channels and always cherishing the lead’s experience are some points that cannot be ignored.

    Also, the quality and relevance of your content are critical to attracting, converting, and retaining customers.

    The production of interactive content is growing actively and shows no signs of slowing down. How about learning more about it? In this article, we detail what interactive marketing is and how it works. Check it out!

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