Content marketing is king. It far surpasses search engine marketing, public relations, print, television and radio advertising as the go-to marketing tool for today’s business-to-business entrepreneur.
A recent survey conducted by HiveFire, a Cambridge, Massachusetts based internet marketing solutions company, surveyed nearly 400 marketing professionals about the state of the business-to-business market and learned that marketers are backing away from traditional channels and are instead concentrating on increased and improved content. In fact, according to HiveFire’s B2B Marketing Trends Survey Report, twice as many marketers employ content marketing than do print, TV and radio.
And what is content marketing?
Simply put it is original content including, white papers, blog posts, case studies, videos and photos created for the purpose of generating leads. And more importantly leads that have shown a clear interest in a specific field. The HiveFire study found that 82 percent of B2B marketers employ content marketing into their strategy far outpacing search engine marketing at 70 percent, events at 68 percent, public relations at 64 percent and print/TV/radio advertising at 32 percent.
Seventy-eight percent of respondents said that driving sales and leads was the top marketing goal of their organization, followed by boosting brand awareness and establishing or maintaining thought leadership (both at 35 percent). Another 28 percent said their primary goal was to increase web traffic and 24 percent said it was to improve search results.
Cost efficiency is also a driving force behind content marketing. Nearly half of the content marketers interviewed said they allot less than a third of their budgets to these important marketing expenditures. In addition B2B marketers believe that the majority of their customers and prospects are online, thus they want to engage with them in the most meaningful way possible.
CLICK HERE to read the entire article at Entrepreneur.com.
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