The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs recently published research on B2B and B2C Content Marketing in our 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends reports. While the findings give us insight into how B2B and B2C marketers are managing content marketing, we were still curious about the state of content marketing in specific key industries, and how content efforts in vertical markets were differing from those of their peers in other industries. We decided to first look at marketers who work for B2B manufacturing organizations in North America. This group has adopted content marketing at a slightly higher rate (94 percent) than their North American B2B peers across all industries (91 percent).
Let’s take a look at some of the similarities and differences:
Marketers in the manufacturing industry have the same top three objectives for content marketing as their peers across all B2B industries: brand awareness, lead generation, and customer acquisition. However, manufacturing marketers place less emphasis on thought leadership (47 percent versus 64 percent) and website traffic (47 percent versus 60 percent) as organizational goals, which indicates a disconnect, as they also cite website traffic as the primary way they measure content effectiveness. This fundamental disconnect between goals and measurement was present with B2B manufacturers when CMI surveyed them two years ago, but it has shown some improvement.
Manufacturing marketers cite video as their top content marketing tactic (it was ranked seventh by this group two years ago). Their overall use of tactics is fairly similar to that of the overall population of marketers; however, they place far less emphasis on blogs (54 percent versus 77 percent), which makes sense considering that this industry does not put strong emphasis on web traffic and thought leadership as objectives for content marketing, two areas where blogs can have significant impact.
Manufacturing marketers use print magazines at nearly twice the rate of their peers (60 percent versus 31 percent). However, only 11 percent of self-reported “best-in-class” B2B manufacturing marketers rank print magazines as “effective” or “very effective,” indicating that traditional media companies still have a stronghold on B2B manufacturers, who have traditionally used paid advertising in trade magazines to reach their audiences.
Yet, manufacturing industry marketers use YouTube more frequently than the general population of marketers do. This makes sense, considering they rank video as their top content marketing tactic. Their use of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter has risen over the last two years, yet they are somewhat behind in their adoption of Google+, Pinterest, SlideShare, and other “newer” social media options, so it will be interesting to see if they grow in these areas over the next year.
Compared with the overall content marketing population, manufacturing marketers outsource content more often: 57 percent versus 43 percent. This could be because they rely more heavily on printed material, which often requires outside assistance. Given their increased usage of video, compared to other marketers, it is likely that they are outsourcing video creation as well.
When compared with their peers across all B2B industries, marketers in manufacturing dedicate significantly less of their total marketing budgets to content marketing (22 percent versus 33 percent). However, 53 percent of manufacturing marketers say they are going to increase their content marketing spend over the next 12 months (31 percent say they will keep spending at the same level).
Like their peers, marketers for the manufacturing industry report that producing enough content is their biggest challenge. One challenge they cite more often than their B2B peers is the inability to measure content effectiveness (55 percent versus 33 percent). And they’re not only challenged with measuring content effectiveness, many are not even sure if their overall efforts are effective. We know this because only 21 percent of B2B manufacturers rank their organization as “effective” or “very effective.” On the other hand, 36 percent of B2B marketers across all industries rank themselves as “effective” or “very effective.”
On the flip side, 32 percent of manufacturing marketers rank their organizations as “not very” or “not at all” effective, compared with 17 percent of their B2B peers. This shows a need for content marketing education and improvement in the manufacturing vertical.
While it is noteworthy to understand how marketers in the manufacturing industry are managing content marketing tools and tactics, it’s also important to understand how demographics may play a role in these research findings. Here are a few notes about the demographics of this research:
· Out of a total 1,416 B2B North America respondents, 88 respondents identified themselves as working in the B2B manufacturing industry.
· About 40 percent of the B2B manufacturing respondents work for companies with 1,000 or more employees (16 percent of that figure is for companies employing more than 10,000, so these results could also reflect what larger companies are doing).
