Heinz Marketing last week hosted an exclusive breakfast for Seattle’s top B2B marketing leaders featuring Tony Jaros, SVP of Research from SiriusDecisions. Our SiriusDecisions Command Center data indicates that 58% of B2B marketing organizations are planning to increase or significantly increase investment in content marketing platforms in the next 12 months.By Brian Hansford, director of client services & marketing automation practice lead for Heinz Marketing They’re typically looking for help with calendaring, distribution, workflow automation, asset management and better content analytics. With so many audiences, formats, channels and languages to support, many organizations are realizing that they need better tools to support complex and often matrixed content processes. For example, only 32% of B2B marketing organizations consistently use content performance metrics and insights to inform content strategy decisions.Īnother trend has been the tremendous growth in interest over the past couple of years in content marketing platforms in terms of technology investments. While many organizations now realize the necessity of audience-centric content strategy, many seem to still struggle with operationalizing best practices around cross-functional campaign content planning. In addition to content marketing, we still see a lot of gaps around campaign content strategy.

It is a very importance competency to have within B2B marketing today and is critical to inbound search performance. By doing so, content marketing builds top-of-funnel inbound traffic promoting early stage content that builds engagement and seeds demand via a destination hub (i.e., blog, online publication). It is a distinct discipline that blends SEO, content strategy, digital marketing and editorial expertise to create digital authority and inbound traffic around a family of topics. SiriusDecisions defines content marketing as a subset of inbound marketing activities that drives topical authority and engagement with audiences and builds a stronger digital footprint. Polewarczyk: One big trend worth noting is that there still is a lot of confusion in B2B organizations about what content marketing is and how it is different than all the other work we do in the marketing organization that involves content. In the longer-term, if organizations truly want to deliver optimized omnichannel customer experiences, enterprise-wide content strategy and operations that extend into customer support functions and other organizational functions will be required as well.ĭGR: What trends are you currently seeing in the content marketing space? And because so much of the content that sales reps use originates in the marketing and product organizations, it is also now critical to look at the content engine through lenses of the entire revenue engine: sales, marketing and product.

Identifying and addressing strategic and tactical gaps that impact content engine performance should be one of the top priorities for CMOs and their marketing organizations in 2019 and the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, less than 22% of B2B marketing organizations rate themselves as having advanced content engine maturity according to our 2018 State of B2B Content Study. As marketers, focusing on what needs to be done to drive content transformation is one of the most impactful ways of improving the customer experience. Demand Gen Report: The event theme this year is “seeing B2B through a new lens.” What advice would you give marketers looking to evolve their strategies and successfully change things up this year?Ĭhristine Polewarczyk: While many B2B organizations have articulated that digital transformation and customer experience optimization are high priorities, many are still patching problems in their content engines instead of looking holistically at the problems.

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