Out of all the current marketing methods, content marketing is now the most popular among B2B marketers, a new study has found.
US company HiveFire asked B2B professionals about their current strategies and tactics regarding B2B marketing. The research concluded that content marketing is the top tactic chosen by the majority of these professionals, proving more popular than other techniques such as public relations, events and paid advertising.
Why is content marketing growing in popularity among companies? Reasons are simple: content marketing is effective and economical.
Data from the study supports this reasoning. Limited budget (28%) and limited staff (23%) are the two main issues that businesses identify as marketing challenges. This means that companies need something affordable but good.
The study also revealed that the top goal for companies in their marketing strategy is driving leads with 78% of them responding to this in the survey. Establishing/maintaining thought leadership and boosting brand awareness came in with 35% of B2B marketers replies.
Content marketing can easily achieve these business goals, which is probably why companies in different countries trust this method.
On top of that, the research found that content marketing is chosen by businesses no matter what the length of their sales cycle.
Overall, 86% of those having a sales cycle of 1-3 months use content marketing; 83% of companies with sales cycles longer than a year. On top of this, more than six out of ten companies (66%) with a short sales cycle (1 to 7 days) also turned to content marketing to develop their marketing strategy.
The secrets of content marketing success:
The success of content marketing is comprised of the following reasons:
- It brings something new and relevant to customers and readers, which builds their trust in your brand.
- It builds up your website with interesting content, which makes it look fresh and authentic.
- It is reasonably cheap, which gives businesses the chance of obtaining the above mentioned benefits without exceeding their marketing budget.