Business-to-business (B2B) marketers are well aware of writer’s block, based on March 2015 research by Kapost. Among B2B marketers in North America, nearly four in 10 said it was difficult or somewhat difficult to come up with ideas for content marketing, and half said they didn’t have enough ideas to fuel such efforts.
When brains are drained, reaching out across departments to drive ideas for marketing content can help, and 52% of respondents were doing just that. However, B2B marketers voiced a desire to expand idea generation internally. More than two-thirds said they wanted to be able to “crowdsource” ideas from internal employees more easily. Even though about six in 10 respondents found coming up with ideas for content marketing easy or somewhat easy, everyone needs help when one considers that B2B content marketers polled estimated they needed 67 ideas per quarter to be successful.
Further results highlighted how many marketing departments across an organization relied on content for success. Social media was the most dependent, at 86.7% of respondents, while between 80% and 75% cited content marketing, digital marketing, demand generation or marketing communications. Event marketing, public relations, sales enablement and product marketing were each cited by about two-thirds.
Based on November 2014 polling by Webmarketing123, B2Bs should keep videos, webinars and case studies top of mind when generating content ideas, as these ranked as the three most effective content marketing tactics among US B2B marketers. The majority also cited blogs and infographics.
Even if B2B marketers can keep their creative juices flowing, hurdles exist at the other end of the content process: measurement. Despite the fact that more than six in 10 B2B marketing execs polled worldwide in January 2015 by Regalix intended to increase their content marketing budget in the next 12 months, just 11% were very successful at tracking content marketing return on investment (ROI), vs. 25% who weren’t successful at all. The remaining 64% fell into the “somewhat” successful group, which can span a wide range.