2014 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks

Nearly two-thirds (63%) of B2B marketers plan to allocate a greater portion of their marketing budgets to content marketing over the next 12 months, according to a recent report from Starfleet Media.

Moreover, almost a quarter (23%) of the B2B marketers surveyed plan to more than double their spending on content marketing in the year ahead.

None of marketers surveyed plan to reduce their spending on content marketing over the next 12 months.

Most respondents (56%) say they spent less than half of their marketing budgets on content marketing over the previous 12 months.

Below, additional key findings from the report, which was based on data from a survey of 261 B2B marketing and sales professionals from around the world.

Content Types

• Case studies/client success stories were the most common content types developed by respondents over the previous 12 months (69% created).
• Other popular content types include whitepapers (63% created), webinars/videos (59%), and e-books (53%).

Distribution Tactics

• Respondents say they keep 80% of their major content marketing assets gated on average (i.e., registration required to access). However, certain content types are rarely gated, such as infographics (92% never require registration to access).
• 96% of the companies surveyed use their sales/account teams to distribute content marketing assets.
• 92% tweet out new assets; 90% have company blogs; 85% post new content to Facebook.

Outsourcing

• 68% of respondents say they outsourced some of their content development over the previous 12 months.
• 64% outsourced some content-asset design.
• Marketers report that their plans to outsource over the next 12 months will increase slightly in the areas of demand generation (54% plan to outsource) and content marketing strategy (35% plan to outsource).

Third-Party Content vs. Branded Content

• 89% of the marketers surveyed agree or strongly agree that unbiased third-party content is generally perceived as more credible than company-branded content.
• 76% agree or strongly agree that unbiased third-party content generally produces higher-quality leads than company-branded content.

Metrics

84% of respondents measure the success of content marketing campaigns by the number of leads generated; 78% track sales conversions; 66% measure the quality of leads.

About the research: The report was based on data from a survey of 261 B2B marketing and sales professionals from around the world (71% from North America; 23% Europe; 6% other). Respondents came from a range of company sizes: 16% very large, 21% large, 18% medium, 27% small, 18% very small.