B2B brand elevation firm 10Fold announced survey findings this week revealing marketing executives focus a substantial portion of their budget on creating and delivering new content at an astounding—and ever-increasing—frequency.
According to the research, nearly one-third of respondents are now producing content daily or hourly—and three-quarters of tech marketers plan to generate three times more content in the next 12 months than they did in the previous year.
The report—which looks at current and planned content marketing budgets, frequency, type, development and measurement of content programs—also found that 42 percent will spend $250,000 or more in the next 12 months on content.
Beyond frequency and budgets, measuring the effectiveness of content is still a challenge for marketing execs. The research revealed that feedback from customers and sales teams are the most important ways U.S. tech marketing executives are judging content effectiveness. These answers ranked higher than the response of using marketing automation tools, indicating that soliciting customer feedback never goes out of style.
“We’ve heard for some time now that ‘content is king,’ but understanding the type of content that works best and knowing how frequently to produce that content are the next logical questions,” said Susan Thomas, founder and CEO of 10Fold, in a news release. “Our primary goal with this research was to capture deeper analytics about content plans and budgets to help our customers and the tech community develop stronger content strategies.”
Other key research findings:
- Social media, video and webinars are cited as the best content “types” among all respondents
- Top executives prefer video as a content medium
- 44 percent of respondents say that lack of domain expertise is the top barrier for creating quality content
- 99 percent of respondents use third parties to create at least 25 percent of their content
- 83 percent of respondents report that third party generated content is at least above average
- 80 percent leverage basic tools (Google Analytics) to track and measure content impact; followed by 60 percent using marketing automation systems
“The marketplace is constantly changing, making [this] research survey on content timely and insightful. The findings should help tech marketing VPs and CMOs that are barraged with conflicting priorities build out their marketing strategies based on facts,” said David Gehringer, principal of Dimensional Research, which conducted the research, in the release. “Based on the results of our research for 10Fold, there is no doubt that there is an insatiable demand among technology companies for content that has technical relevancy and that is delivered in a form, such as video and blogs, that is appealing to their buyers.”
The new survey, “2017 Content Insights from U.S. Tech Marketing Execs,” was conducted in the late Summer of 2017 by Dimensional Research, and targeted U.S. marketing executives working for technology companies that had budget and oversight authority for marketing content. A total of 176 marketing executives were qualified to complete the survey. Results were also analyzed based on the participant’s geography, the industries the companies sell into, and the size of company for which s/he works.
