It’s out! The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs B2B “Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends Report” for 2017 has landed. CMI vice-president, Michele Linn, joined the team to discuss the annual snapshot of the state of business-to-business content marketing in the North American market.

Here are some key take-outs:

• 62 per cent of marketers say they feel more successful with their content marketing this year than they have in the past.
• Top performing marketers have a documented strategy, clarity about what success is, commitment to content marketing, and a consistent approach to publication.

“The content marketers that are staying the course are starting to realise that this works. Content marketers have known that for a long time but we’ve been asking our employers and clients to trust us on that.” — Sarah

• 89 per cent of marketers (B2B in North America) are doing content marketing and of the 11 per cent not doing content marketing, 52 per cent plan to start within the next year.
• Businesses and brands that are struggling with content marketing aren’t actually doing content marketing, they’re just using content in their marketing. Content in marketing does not equal content marketing.

“We took a new look at the data to provide marketers with different insights. We wanted to figure out what (kinds of content) marketers found the most critical.” — Michele Linn, Content Marketing Institute vice-president.

• Ask yourself what kinds of stories you’d tell if you didn’t have to make money. Now tell those stories.
• The most successful content marketers know success doesn’t happen overnight. You need to stick with it. This year’s data shows that.

“We have a lot of new data around people’s attitudes to content marketing and the people who are most successful have a strategy — they know what success looks like and they give it time.” — Michele Linn, Content Marketing Institute vice-president.

Here are the links you might need

• Here’s a link to the Content Marketing Institute B2B 2017 report.

Have you heard the one about…

Recently James, Sarah and Nic spoke to Jonathan Crossfield about avoiding epic social media mistakes.

And here’s a discussion about the world’s top content marketing projects, based on the Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 Awards.

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