It appears that content marketing has been growing rapidly in popularity, especially in business to business marketing. It has become one of the more prominent forms of marketing amongst the many, and it has become very important to keep tabs on the state of content marketing on the web. A recent eMarketer article details the recent challenges that have begun appearing in the content marketing world, referring to data from a content curation platform called Curata. The company’s “B2B Marketing Trends 2012 Report” shows information that points to originality arising as the biggest challenge that content marketers are facing today, closely followed by time management.
To get a better sense of how popular content marketing has actually become, the information from Curata shows that 87% of all business to business marketers are now using content marketing as part of their marketing campaigns this year. In 2011, the percentage was at 82%. So, with an already high level of interest in content marketing, 5% is quite a significant increase. This year, content marketing was the highest of all tactics that were studied. Just behind it with 62% was search marketing, which seems to get more attention that content marketing does.
To avoid the challenges that come with content marketing, some marketers chose to have their marketing curated, according to the study.
But doing it well is another story. Among those using content marketing, 57% used content curation specifically as part of their strategy. And just 43% of those respondents said their content curation programs had been successful by the standards they had chosen to measure them. On the other hand, another 43% said they didn’t even attempt to measure their programs’ success.
For content marketers who take on the challenge, the biggest issue according to the study was creating original content in their marketing campaigns. A total of 69% of the respondents in the study said that originality was their largest issue in creating a successful content marketing campaign. After that, 65% of the respondents said that finding the time to create content for marketing was the largest issue they experienced. Another 43% of content marketers, who could not create original content, said that their biggest issue was finding high-quality content. Other issues that content marketers faced included difficulty measuring results (40%), allocating staff to market with content (34%), finding ways to share content (24%), organizing content (22%), securing senior level buy-ins (15%), and finding how content marketing fits into the marketing strategy (12%).
Clearly, content marketing has become very popular amongst marketers of all types, and it will continue to grow in popularity. Therefore, marketers need to seek solutions to creating original content, through research and creative thinking. Creating original content clearly is not easy, but it is necessary in order to see the results that all marketers want. It takes time, which is another popular issue, but when original content is created, it usually proves to create great results, therefore it is worthwhile.
