Marketing to other businesses (B2B) is very different from marketing to consumers. We’ve heard and talked a lot about Content Marketing in past, although it mostly has been focused on consumers – B2C. I just came across an interesting bit of research from Eccolo Media that looks specifically at content marketing in the B2B space.
Infographic by Eccolo Media
For the past few years, Eccolo Media has been surveying B2B marketers and buyers to get a pulse on the market. In their 2015 B2B Technology Content Survey Report they created an infographic describing which content has the most clout for B2B.
The first thing to note from the report is all the different types of marketing content that are available and used by B2B marketers. Most of these are tried and true marketing vehicles: white papers, email messages, case studies, product brochures. But Eccolo Media has also asked about webinars, blog posts, ebooks and even podcasts.
B2B customers consumed all of these content types. In fact, no less than 25% of the respondents consumed at least one of these types of content. That tells us that various types of content are important to reach the right audience.
However, the most revealing data is shown in the chart I’ve included here: What content types are the most influential for a B2B customer. You can see that our old friend “product brochures and data sheets” still come out as the top influencer. White papers and case studies came in second and third.
For all those marketers trying to influence B2B customers through email campaigns, the survey results here show that email influences only 15% of the buyers. That is only slightly higher than social media and print magazines. Also interesting is that tweets on Twitter were the least influential of all the content types.
Again, this data is for B2B marketing only. When you are looking to create or update your content strategy, you should take into account this kind of research data.
