Content Marketing Expected to Surge in 2016

A recently release eMarketer report has revealed that content from B2B marketers is expected to surge in 2016. While content marketing requires a consistent and sustained effort, it has been proven effective, and B2B marketers see this marketing tactic becoming more relevant to the success of business marketing strategies.

Based on data from a September 2015 study by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs, a significant 76 percent of North American B2B marketers are expecting to create more content in 2016 than they did in 2015. All this means several things for small business marketers going forward.

Content marketing budgets will be bigger. In fact, more than half of B2B marketers reported that they expect to spend more on content marketing in 2016.
Marketing strategies are shifting. With an increased emphasis on content marketing, marketers are looking at the long game and accepting that results that take 18 to 24 months to achieve is the new reality.

According to the eMarketer report, the reason for this shift is firmly rooted in the fact that content marketing delivers solid results when it comes to generating leads to feed the sales funnel. The report looked at a July 2015 Ascend2 study, where 43 percent of B2B marketing professionals asserted that content marketing was one of their most effective strategies in the area of lead generation.

eMarketer reports that content marketing also positively impacts other performance areas, including sales conversions and quality of leads (reported in the study as growing from 78 percent in 2014 to 86 percent in 2015 and from 66 percent in 2014 to 72 percent in 2015, respectively). Cost savings and overall marketing ROIs (returns on investments) also demonstrated the effectiveness of content marketing.