New Research: Top-Performing Marketers Prioritize Audience Needs, Leverage Email And Educational Content For Nurturing

Ninety percent of best-in-class marketers put their audience’s informational needs above their company’s sales/promotional messages, according to new research from the Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs and Conductor.

The report, titled B2B Content Marketing 2019: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends — North America, surveyed responses from 771 B2B marketers and analyzed strategies for improving content marketing efforts and driving success. Additional findings include:

• Email and educational content are the top two ways B2B marketers nurture their audience;
• 56% of marketers have increased their spending on content creation in the past year and 37% have increased their content marketing staff; and
• The three main content marketing concerns are changes to SEO/search algorithms (61%), changes to social media algorithms (45%) and making content marketing a revenue center (41%).

“It’s terrific to see how many content marketers are putting the audience first,” said Lisa Murton Beets, Research Director at the Content Marketing Institute, in a statement. “This was a novel concept to many traditional marketers 10 years ago … [but] now it’s a common practice among the most successful content marketers surveyed [and] we can see how much marketers have adjusted their thinking.”