Enterprise Content Marketing Research: Where Does Success Lie in 2014?

Over the last several months, there has been a lot of discussion among marketers and industry thought leaders around the challenges involved with integrating content marketing across the enterprise. At Content Marketing World Sydney, CMI’s lead strategist, Robert Rose, even presented a new Content Creation Management (CCM) model that you’ll hear a lot about from us over the upcoming months.

The latest CMI research confirms that integration is indeed the most often cited challenge among business-to-business (B2B) enterprise marketers (i.e., at companies with 1,000+ employees). These and other findings appear in our new report, B2B Enterprise Marketing: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends — North America, sponsored by Marketo. The study looks at how the content marketing habits of enterprise marketers have changed over the last year, and how the approaches used by marketers at these companies differ from those of other B2B marketers.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Enterprise marketers’ effectiveness stays flat

Only 32 percent of enterprise marketers say they are effective at content marketing, compared with 42 percent of B2B marketers overall. This is the same effectiveness rating enterprise marketers gave themselves last year.

A documented content strategy improves effectiveness

B2B enterprise marketers who have a documented content strategy are more effective than those who do not have a strategy (49 percent vs. 32 percent) and are more likely to be producing “significantly more” content than they did one year ago.

Enterprise marketers are using more tactics and social media this year

Enterprise marketers are using more content marketing tactics (17 vs. 16) and social media this year than they did last year (6 vs. 4). In addition, they use more tactics than their B2B peers overall.

Lack of integration and producing engaging content are big challenges

Sixty percent of enterprise marketers say they are challenged with a lack of integration across marketing, making it their most often cited challenge. Furthermore, 15 percent said it was their biggest challenge. While enterprise marketers have made strides this year with producing enough content and a variety of content (when compared with last year), producing engaging content remains their biggest challenge, just slightly surpassing lack of integration (16 percent vs. 15 percent).

They’re outsourcing more content creation

Among marketers at companies of all sizes, enterprise marketers outsource the most content creation. This year, 73 percent are outsourcing content, compared with 65 percent last year.

Download the full report to learn more, including:

1. What social media platforms enterprise marketers consider most effective

2. What metrics they use to measure effectiveness

3. What percentage of their total marketing budget is allocated to content marketing

4. How much content they are producing compared to one year ago

Watch for CMI to announce more original research on enterprise business throughout this year, and let us know how you think these numbers match up to your experiences in the comments below.