Video, a powerful tool in the storytelling arsenal, has become more important in the last two years, according to 83% of marketers.

That’s one key finding from Content Marketing Institute’s new Video & Visual Storytelling Survey sponsored by Vidyard.Continue Reading

We hear a lot these days about “sales enablement.” While there are various definitions, sales enablement boils down to helping your sales team be as successful as possible.

How do marketers develop sales content within their companies? Is the content useful to the salespeople for whom it is developed? Where is it stored and managed so salespeople can access it? How is it measured?

These are just some of the questions CMI set out to answer in our latest survey, Creating Content for Sales Enablement. All respondents indicated they are involved in some way with creating content for their company’s sales teams. We heard mostly from content marketing/content strategy leaders (39%), marketing leaders (28%), and content creators (24%).Continue Reading

Are you focusing more on generating demand, leads, and conversions from your content marketing? If so, you’re not alone – especially if you work for a technology company.

A key trend in our recent annual content marketing research is an increased emphasis on demand and lead generation and conversion measurement among tech marketers. Whether that is a long-term change or a blip caused by pandemic-related pressures remains to be seen.

Let’s look more closely at this and other findings released today in Technology Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends with Insights for 2021 sponsored by IDG Communications Inc. The report reflects responses from 290 content marketers at for-profit technology companies who participated in the 11^th annual Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs survey in July 2020.Continue Reading

Manufacturing content marketers have done the big things to adapt in a COVID-19 world. Seventy percent have changed their targeting/messaging strategy, 60% have adjusted their editorial calendar, and 57% have put more resources toward social media/online communities.

Those are a few findings from the Manufacturing Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2021 report from the Content Marketing Institute, sponsored by GlobalSpec. The report presents the responses from the manufacturing content marketers who took part in our broader 11^th annual content marketing survey.

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If you were to guess the top challenge facing content marketers working in the manufacturing industry in 2020, you’d likely get it wrong.

It’s not communicating complex ideas in a digestible way. Nor is it getting access to experts to explain these complicated concepts.

The top challenge in manufacturing is one content marketers in many industries share: overcoming the traditional marketing-and-sales mindset.

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Editor’s note: Because research continues to be one of the most effective cornerstones of content marketing, Lisa Murton Beets updates her 2017 and 2018 articles on the subject.

Heading into the fall is a great time to evaluate your content marketing. How have you done so far this year? If your program isn’t yet where you want it to be, now’s the time to start making some tweaks.

Here are some key takeaways from CMI’s research over the last 12 months to help inform that work.

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The outlook for B2C content marketing looks bright if budgets are any indication. Fifty-seven percent of B2C marketers surveyed expect their 2019 content marketing budget to increase over 2018, and 29% of those expect it to increase by more than 9%.

We don’t yet know where those increases will be spent, of course. But our latest research reveals that 56% of B2C marketers who increased spending over the last 12 months did so in the area of content creation.

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Too many manufacturing organizations are still talking about themselves in the content they create.

According to our new research, Manufacturing Content Marketing 2019: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends sponsored by IEEE GlobalSpec, only half of manufacturing marketers always or frequently prioritize their audience’s informational needs over their sales/promotional message while creating content.

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