Content Marketing Strategy Growing, While Others On Decline Says Survey

Last week at Curata, we released our findings from our second annual B2B Marketing Trends Report for 2012. After surveying over 450 marketing professionals, we discovered a few consistencies and surprises as compared to last year’s report. Here is a brief overview of some of our findings.

Content marketing is the leading marketing strategy. 87% of B2B marketers are using content marketing, outpacing all other marketing strategies including Search Engine Marketing (67%), Events (62%), Publication Relations (56%), and Print/Radio/TV (26%). This closely parallels Content Marketing Institute’s and MarketingProfs’ own 2013 B2B Content Marketing Report where they reported that 91% of B2B Marketers use content marketing. The difference may be explained by the fact that the CMI report includes events, and certain print publications as forms of content marketing, which are not included in our definition of content marketing.

Content marketing is growing as a strategy, while all other forms are on the decline. The adoption of content marketing has increased from 82% of marketers last year to 87% this year. All other marketing strategies have seen a decline in adoption since last year.

Limited resources continues to be the biggest content marketing challenge. The three biggest challenges marketers cite are limited budget (27%), limited staff (25%), and generating new content (21%). Again this align’s with CMI’s 2013 B2B Marketing report where many of the the top content marketing challenges were content production and resource issues: Producing enough content (29%), Product content that engages (18%), Lack of Budget (14%).

Content Curation is a relatively new but increasingly adopted content marketing approach. B2B marketers are increasingly turning to content curation to help drive their content marketing strategy, as it enables them to accomplish their goals while addressing limited resource challenges. 57% of respondents are currently using content curation. Although content curation has been adopted by most, it is still in its early stages. 34%of marketers have been curating for less than six months.

This is just a snapshot of a few of the insights revealed in the report. For pages more of additional analysis, and graphs, download the full Curata B2B Marketing Trends Survey Report 2012 here.