To summarize our new content marketing research report in four words: Content marketing is maturing.

Almost two-thirds (63%) of North American B2B marketers—and 78% of top performers among them—say they’re much more or somewhat more successful with their content marketing now than they were a year ago, according to our just-released B2B content marketing research report.

That’s good news—both for B2B organizations and for the discipline of content marketing itself, of course.

The new report, B2B Content Marketing 2018: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America, produced by MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and sponsored by Brightcove, presents findings from the 8th annual content marketing survey. (Yes, 8th!)

Some 870 B2B marketers in North America from a wide range of company sizes and industries responded to the survey in June and July 2017.

A quarter (24%) of those surveyed say their organization’s overall content marketing approach is extremely or very successful; we consider these respondents B2B content marketing top performers.

In marketing, I value quality over quantity, great writing, building an audience over stuffing a pipeline full of so-called prospects. So here are a few of my favorite takeaways from this year’s research:

  • 80% of all B2B content marketers surveyed agree their organization is focused on building audiences (i.e., one or more subscriber bases); that’s an…