Effective Content Marketing Can Yield Magnified Customer Engagement

In the larger picture of increased customer loyalty and enhanced customer experience, effective content marketing is viewed as a key element to magnified customer engagement.

Earlier this year, Greg Sultan, SVP Strategist for Customer Communications Group, told Loyalty360 that content marketing plays an important role in the overall customer journey that can lead, ultimately, to brand loyalty.

“Consumers go through a buying process with multiple stages,” Sultan explained. “It runs from recognizing that they have a problem to feeling comfortable with their purchase decision. Content plays an important part of each stage. Our research indicates that consumers are searching for content in multiple channels and you have to be where the consumer is, or you will miss your opportunity to influence the stage they are in of the buying process.” 

According to a new research report released today from the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of top performers are extremely or very committed to content marketing, compared to 63% of the overall sample and 35% of the bottom performers. Clearly, brands that want to be successful with content marketing need to make it a priority.

The report, “B2B Content Marketing: 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends — North America, examined the findings gathered from the 7th annual content marketing survey conducted by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, and sponsored by Brightcove.

More than 1,100 B2B marketers in North America from diverse industries and a wide range of company sizes responded to the survey in July and August 2016.

Here are some of the key findings from the report:

22% of B2B marketers say their organization’s overall content marketing approach is extremely or very successful; the report characterizes these respondents as this year’s B2B top content marketing performers.

62% of B2B marketers say their organization’s s overall content marketing approach is much more or somewhat more successful than one year ago.

B2B marketers attribute their increased success with content marketing over the past year to two main factors: Content creation (85%) and strategy (72%).

72% of B2B marketers measure content marketing ROI (compared with 88% of top performers).

68% of B2B marketers agree that their organization is realistic about what content marketing can achieve (compared with 91% of top performers).

76% of B2B marketers say they always or frequently prioritize delivering content quality over content quantity.

49% of B2B marketers measure content marketing ROI at the top-of-the-funnel (lead gen, building an audience), making it the phase of the buyer’s journey where they are most likely to measure ROI.

75% of B2B marketers agree that they/their team can demonstrate, with metrics, how content marketing has increased audience engagement.

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