Think of this post as an extension of my previous article “Why Industrial News Releases Make Good Blog Posts.” Let me start with some findings and statistics from different B2B content marketing studies that I have downloaded and read in the past couple of weeks.
First up is 2012 B2B Content Marketing Trends by Holger Schulze (@holgerschulze) who is the author of the syndicated blog “Everything Technology Marketing.” He recently surveyed the 30,000+ members B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn on various issues related to B2B content marketing.
Among B2B Technology Marketers, the leading content marketing tactics are case studies (62 percent) followed by white papers/ebooks (61 percent) and press releases (58 percent). Those are the results in response to the question, “What content marketing tactics do you actively use?” The chart below shows the complete breakdown of answers.
For more details, download the full report “B2B Content Marketing Trends 2012.”
“More B2B marketers are using content marketing to achieve organizational goals” is one of the key findings from the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks report released by The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs. Content marketing goals cited by the respondents to the survey are shown in the chart below.
What kinds of content build thought leadership and increase awareness for industrial companies? For the answer to that question, I turned to the whitepaper, “Content Marketing for Industrial Marketers” from GlobalSpec. According to their research, the types of content that will highlight your expertise in a given field and create confidence in your industrial company are:
NOTE: Their list is an alphabetical listing and doesn’t show preference or effectiveness.
Which content formats are considered most effective in engaging prospects and delivering a message? I’ll use another chart from 2012 B2B Content Marketing Trends report to provide answers to that question.
How do you leverage press releases (news releases) to improve your content marketing results? For answers, look at this webinar presentation that was moderated by Joe Pulizzi (@juntajoe), founder of the Content Marketing Institute. He was joined by Bob Canaway (@bobcanaway), Director of Marketing, Ektron and Michael Pranikoff (@mpranikoff), Director of Emerging Media, PR Newswire.
Now that you know more about using news or press releases, the question to ask yourself is, “Do I outsource my content creation for industrial marketing or can I do it myself?” As I have said here many times before, what works best is a mix of DiY and outsourced help.
Let’s chat to determine if this will be a good fit for both of us. It will be a friendly conversation to get to know each other better, not a high-pressure sales pitch.