7 Highlights from the B2C Benchmarking Report 2016

business-to-consumer content marketers should understand. [caption id="attachment_12667" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Source — 2016 B2C Content Marketing Report[/caption]

1. Communication is key to a B2C marketer’s success.

This year’s B2C research proved that good communication is an important part of content marketing success. This observation is the same with B2B marketers, but it’s more apparent with B2C marketers. Here’s how B2C marketers compare to B2B marketers:

• Meet with their teams more often to examine their content marketing progress.
• Their team meetings are more valuable.
• They’re even more likely to document their editorial mission and content marketing strategy.
• They believe their organization is more effective with their content marketing efforts.

2. More marketers document their content marketing strategy.

B2C marketers are making strides with their documenting efforts. 37 percent reported documenting their strategy this year compared to only 27 percent last year. And as you should expect, research shows that documented content marketing strategies are more effective than marketers who only have a verbal strategy or don’t have one at all.

3. About half meet daily or weekly to go over their content marketing program.

Forty-eight percent of B2C marketers get together with their team for content marketing discussions either every day or every week. Twenty-eight percent of those marketers find these meetings extremely valuable, while 31 percent say they are very valuable.

4. Infographics have the greatest year-over-year increase.

Sixty-two percent of B2C marketers are using infographics this year, compared to just 45 percent last year. This content marketing tactic’s effectiveness rating also increased this year, 42 percent last year up to 63 percent this year.

5. Facebook is the most used social media platform.

Not only is Facebook the most used platform by B2C marketers, they’re also getting better results with it. And this year, surveyors rated Facebook more effective than last year, from 58 percent up to 66 percent.

6. B2C marketers have changed their paid methods for distributing and promoting content.

In the past, B2C marketers mostly used print and other offline promotion techniques to distribute their content. Now, they use promoted posts, social ads and SEM as their paid methods to distribute and promote their content.

7. Content marketing is receiving more of the marketing budget.

This year, B2C marketers are putting 32 percent of their total marketing budget to content marketing versus only 25 percent last year.]]>