Content Marketing Seen As Important But Brands Slow To Act [Survey]

Econsultancy and Outbrain recently released a content marketing survey report that highlights the importance content marketing but also that marketers have been slow to define their strategy.

The survey was representative of 1,300 respondents from both the brand and the agency worlds.

The report covers the importance of content marketing, the maturity of content marketing strategy, the main objectives and barriers of content marketing and also the tactics used the most.

While the report costs $400, Econsultancy and Outbrain are offering this sample content marketing survey report at no charge.

Here are the high level results that they shared publicly and the implications for B2B Marketing leaders'

Content Marketing Is Important

9 of every 10 (90%) of the respondents to the survey claimed that content marketing will become more important over the next 12 months. I'm not sure what the other 10% believe but I guess there's a skeptic in every bunch.

Agencies and consultants are slightly ahead of that number with 93% considering content marketing as becoming more important.

Brands Are Slow To Act

While so many respondents think content marketing is becoming more important, only 38% have a defined a content marketing strategy.

What are the biggest barriers? Just over half of brands (54%) don't have an individual who is responsible for content marketing in-house and more than two-thirds (66%) don't have any budget allotted for content marketing efforts.

When asked specifically about the most common barriers to content marketing efforts, 42% of brand survey respondents cited a lack of human resources and 35% cited a lack of budget as the areas which prevented effective content marketing.

What Does This Mean For B2B Marketers?

Econsultancy reported that B2B marketers are focused more on generating leads, thought leadership and nurturing leads than our B2C counterparts. But the main objectives of content marketing efforts across the board are still mainly reach (traffic and pageviews), engagement and conversion (sales).

B2B Marketing leaders clearly need to close the gap between thinking content marketing is important and acting decisively on defining their content strategy, putting the right people in place and assigning them a budget (says the B2B content marketing guy!)

I think this report can provide great ammunition for all of us in content marketing to explain the importance of these roles in our organizations. And hopefully will act as evidence for marketing leaders that now is the time to make a move.

What do you see as the main barriers to content marketing efforts today? Let me know what you think in the comments below and follow the conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+.