Has Your Business Embraced Content Marketing Strategies?

Welcome to the Social Media Era, for today’s business entrepreneur, there is one marketing strategy that stands above the rest.

When it comes to promoting your business, a content marketing strategy is the king of advertising. It surpasses print, television and radio, even search engine and PR marketing.

HiveFire, an Internet marketing software solutions company based in Cambridge, recently surveyed 400 professionals from the marketing industry, regarding the current state of the business-to-business (B2B) marketing.

They learned that there is a general view among people, about the best form of marketing.

Businesses are moving from traditional marketing ways such as search engine marketing to content marketing. Making it the most-used tool for brand-enhancing.

According to the results of HiveFire’s B2B Marketing Trends Survey Report, almost twice as many B2B marketers currently use content marketing strategies instead of print, TV and radio advertising.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is the creation and on-line publication of original content such as blog posts, case studies, white papers, videos and photos.

What Is The Purpose of Content Marketing?

The purpose of it is to generate leads for search engines to find, enhance a company’s on-line presence, and put the company’s expertise and skills on display, for the world to see. Researchers discovered that an overwhelming 82% of B2B marketers now incorporate content marketing as a marketing strategy in their operations.

Search engine marketing is used the second most at about 70%, then followed by special event creation at 68%, traditional PR methods at 64% and in last place, print/TV/radio advertising at 32%.

Over three quarters of respondents said driving sales and leads was the end goal of their marketing plan. Thirty five percent of those survyed said brand awareness and establishing or maintaining thought leadership was their organizations goal, 28% primary goal was to increase their web traffic on existing websites and 24% said it was to improve search results in google.

The reason behind the success of content marketing is its ability to generate qualified leads in search engines, an over branded competitive environment, without breaking the bank.

Almost 50% of the content marketers questioned said they dedicated less than a third of their marketing budgets to such endeavours.

In addition to being budget friendly, B2B marketers also believe most of their clients and prospective clients are on-line, which is why it is best to focus marketing efforts on the Internet.

What Is Content Curation?

Lastly, we learned from the survey that “content curation” (the process of finding, organising and sharing content) continues to grow as an important marketing strategy.

Seen as a way for people to fuel their marketing plans, content curation does have its problems. About 70% of content curators say they lack the time to put in the proper effort, 66% also said a lack of original and quality content is a massive setback, 38% claim the difficulty in measuring results is the stumbling block with 37% saying lack of staff to do the work is a hindrance.In spite of these problems, this survey makes it very clear that content marketing is only going to grow form strength to strength. And should be an essential part of any modern business.