We’ve all known (and probably been part of) small, focused teams that seem to produce incredible results. Unless these teams hang on to their tight focus, though, even the most impressive typically hit a wall. The organizational pressure to do more too often outpaces the team’s ability to keep up.
B2C marketers may be about to hit that stage given the signs that popped up as we read through the survey data and fill-in responses to the latest annual content marketing research. (You can read the full results in B2C Content Marketing 2018: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America, produced by CMI and MarketingProfs.)
Content marketing success increases, but can it last?
Don’t get us wrong – the B2C research reveals many encouraging findings. We saw a higher level of reported success with content marketing, the same level of commitment to content marketing, an increased focus on building an audience, and a higher value placed on creativity and craft in content creation, among other positive signs.
For example, 78% of B2C marketers say they’re moderately to extremely successful (compared with 70% the previous year).
At the same time, we noted a decrease in the total marketing budget spent on content marketing. For all responding marketers, spending decreased by four percentage points year over year (22% vs. 26%); however, the decrease was more notable year over year among the B2C top performers (26% vs. 38%).
Of course, those results could mean B2C content marketing efforts truly are getting lean and mean – prioritizing the content activities that matter most for their organizations. In fact, 53% say they’re discontinuing content marketing activities found to be ineffective to concentrate on those that yield the best results.
One finding, though, makes us question how long organizations can sustain their increased success while decreasing the budget devoted to it: the lack of a documented content marketing strategy. Only 38% of respondents have one (pretty close to last year’s 40%).
Stay true to the documented strategy
We talk about the need for a documented content marketing strategy every year. And yet most marketers still don’t have one. If you doubt the need to document your strategy, consider the response from a marketer who does have a documented strategy to the survey question: “What content marketing challenges, if any, do you need to overcome in 2018?”
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