Content marketing remains a challenge to many business-to-business (B2B) marketers, according to a new survey by Finite – a body representing the global B2B technology marketing community. It found that 35% of B2B marketers struggled to produce enough content to reach and engage with audiences in 2020.
The challenges facing B2B marketers right now
- Finite grilled over 600 B2B tech marketers with 11 questions relating to return on investment (ROI), key performance indicators (KPIs) and search engine optimisation (SEO) to arrive at its findings.
- As you would expect, a dearth of physical interaction had pushed B2B companies to prioritise digital content – but 35% of respondents conceded they were struggling to author sufficient content to reach their audiences.
- Another stumbling block came in tailoring their output to engage the right people, with 26% admitting they struggled to do so. 16% meanwhile cited measuring ROI as their greatest difficulty.
- Elsewhere the report found that 68% of B2B marketers remain confident in their approach to content marketing, although just 43% have defined KPIs and a worrying 18% have rarely or never defined content marketing KPIs.
ROI is an issue too
- Management has long been obsessed with ROI as a crucial barometer of success. Despite this, a mere 8% of marketers said they were able to attribute ROI to their content plan.
- This apparent discrepancy is explained by Adelle Kehoe, head of content at marketing platform MVF, who said: “By focusing on exact ROI, you are inherently missing the point of content marketing.”
- The broad report also found that the proportion of marketers valuing SEO as important to their marketing strategy stood at just 70% – a jarringly low proportion given it is a central pillar of digital content.
- Attempting to make sense of this James Rowland, digital performance director at Refinitiv, a financial data supplier, commented: “It’s surprising to me that the figure is only 70%. Many decision-makers are working from home and in this virtual environment, they are consuming much more content online. Search engines in many cases are the gateways to this.”
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