October 1, 2014
By Maria Minsker, contributing writer

How Mature Is Content Marketing?

company Web site, online advertising, email, and social media, and 16 percent developing solely sales materials and collateral, brands are focusing far too much on acquisition and not enough on the rest of the journey, which includes post-sale interactions, support conversations, and any upselling or cross-selling follow-up engagements, she adds.

Marketers also often don't emphasize the right things in the content they create.

For example, while 71 percent say their content features case studies or customer stories, only 3 percent say this is a primary focus. "Potential customers want to develop a deep understanding of what a vendor has done for other customers in a similar industry or space. This helps them start to see what the company can do for their business as well," Ramos says.

Putting more emphasis on other types of content, such as research and perspectives, can also help. However, only 12 percent currently make publishing research and perspectives central to their content marketing, and none engage external experts.

If marketers are ready to get serious about their content strategy, Ramos recommends thinking more about building relationships, not just deal opportunities. "By focusing too much on acquisition, brands can lose some of the emphasis on valuable communications not driven by a sale," Ramos says. While more than three-quarters of respondents say that they frequently communicate with their customer base, only 5 percent make this a priority, proving that most brand managers only reach out to their customers when a sale is at stake, she explains.

To build more effective two-way conversations with customers, consistently incorporating customer feedback into editorial processes is crucial. This involves not only listening to customer input, but also actively soliciting feedback and updating content with more customer-relevant items.

And when it comes to measuring the impact that marketing content ultimately has on business and revenue, "marketing leaders must establish a cadence around measuring usage and correlating customer interaction with change in pipeline, retention, and current-account growth," Ramos wrote in the report.

The report also urges B2B marketers to incorporate more real-time action-based metrics into their key performance indicators to equip sales and marketing teams with a better understanding of the role that content plays in business directly, as well as help them better plan upcoming content.

Most marketers still have a long road ahead before their content reaches a mature level, but the efforts to engage customers and prospects at multiple points along their customer journeys will no doubt pay off, Ramos asserts. "Great marketing content delivers value to potential customers, and clearly demonstrates how your brand is uniquely equipped to solve a problem or fulfill a need that these customers have. It's a powerful demand generation tool that can boost brand visibility,"she says.