eMarketer Webinar: Maximizing your B2B Content Marketing ROI

© 2016 eMarketer Inc.
Made possible by
Maximizing your B2B Content
Marketing ROI
Jillian Ryan
Analyst
April 7, 2016

Today’s Agenda:
 The Evolving B2B Content Marketing Landscape
 Thinking Long-Term: Nurturing Leads
 Laying the Groundwork for Maximum Return
 Creation, Dissemination and Optimization
 The Cost-Effective Flywheel

The Evolving B2B Content
Marketing Landscape

B2B marketers expect to increase their content
creation efforts this year
 76% anticipated creating
more content in 2016
than they did in 2015

The Changing Digital Ad Landscape
 Traditional digital streams are oversaturated and too
expensive
 Concerns like ad blindness, viewability and ad blocking
make it harder to reach B2B buyers
 Digital ad campaigns are a one-shot strategy
 Content provides a permanent “home.” Unlike an ad, it
doesn’t disappear if an action doesn’t occur straight
away

Content can create an authentic story and
relationship with the customer
“Content marketing
allows for a two-way
exchange, and a
meaningful,
authentic dialogue
and conversation
with the
customer.”
—Steve Chadwick, Director,
Marketing Communications,
Verizon Enterprise
Solutions
“Content marketing
facilitates a
long-term value
exchange between
brands and
buyers, creating
customers who stay
longer and buy more.”
—Joe Pulizzi, Founder and
CEO, The Content
Marketing Institute

B2B marketing budgets aren’t heavily invested in
content marketing
72%

Content marketing is deemed effective

Content marketing generates leads

Thinking Long-Term:
Nurturing Leads

The number of leads
is no longer content
marketing’s leading
performance metric.
Sales conversions is
the top consideration,
with lead quality and
cost savings rising in
importance, too

B2B marketers are focused on conversion rates

Generating leads isn’t enough to show success;
leads are people and need to be nurtured
“When a lead enters
the funnel, they
need to have
consumed enough
content from you
that they’re ready
to make a
purchase.”
—Annette Barnes Promes,
CMO, Moz
“Buyers want to
understand how
different vendors see
the world. The more
content they read,
the more they get a
sense of what a
company offers.”
—Tomasz Tunguz, venture
capitalist, Redpoint Ventures

B2B buyers consume a lot of content before
making a purchase

Content marketing can feel like a waiting game
“In order for content marketing to work, we’ve got to create value before
we extract that value. Extracting value too soon kills the
relationship with the customer, and that’s why, in a lot of cases,
content marketing doesn’t work.”
—Joe Pulizzi, Founder and CEO, The Content Marketing Institute
“The No. 1 cardinal sin is that B2B marketers do not stick
with content marketing long enough. They are quick to say, ‘It’s
underperforming. Let’s not do content marketing anymore.’ And no matter
the challenges, that is the worst thing to do.”
—Jeremy Goldman, CEO and Founder, Firebrand Group

Laying the Groundwork for
Maximum Return

Some B2Bs have problems with the basics
38% of B2B marketers have “no content strategy that
tracks to business.”
Source: CMO Council, Content ROI Center and NetLine, Q2 2015
92% of B2B marketers have trouble meeting content
deadlines, and 90% felt that redundant content
creation was inefficient.
Source: Gleanster in association with Kapost, April 2015

Building a content marketing engine takes time
“Looking back, it was an incredibly
hard journey. Even just getting the
right people in place and getting all of
marketing to take content seriously as
an organization, it was difficult,
like herding cats.”
—Amrita Thapar, Content Leader, Genpact

Know your audience and their buyer journey
 Content becomes irrelevant if individual assets are
designed for more than a single audience
 Generic content can be a wasted effort. It must be
designed for a specific archetype and be
audience-focused
 Brands need to understand who they are speaking to:
1. Who the buyers are
2. Where they are in the buyer journey

B2Bs recognize the importance of audience
82%
used buyer
personas and buyer
journey maps
Source: Akoonu, August 2015
93%
believed
understanding the
customer buying
journey is important
Source: Regalix, January 2016

Developing buyer profiles:
62% of senior B2B marketing and sales professionals in
North America used persona-based marketing to drive
content creation.
58% modeled best customers and identified best
audience segments.
Common criteria to develop buyer personas included: job
function, title, core buyer pain points, product interest,
purchase authority, and size/revenue of the company.
(Source: Dun & Bradstreet, December 2015)

A B2B buyer’s department is also important to
consider when creating content

Audience research streamlines content marketing
“After categorizing
content based on
parts of our
customer’s journey,
we realized that we were
producing a lot more at the
top of the funnel than we
did mid- and post-sale.”
—Loni Stark, Senior Director,
Strategy and Product Marketing,
Adobe
“We talk to our current
clients, to prospects, and
we define what that
customer lifecycle journey
looks like, to find
challenges and
opportunities to
answer their
questions with our
content.”
—Ken Wincko, SVP, Marketing,
PR Newswire

Creation, Dissemination
and Optimization

Effective content types vary depending on your
company’s goals …
 For B2Bs looking
to drive leads,
white papers and
webinars were
the best content
marketing tactics

… but certain
content types are
more effective at
various stages of
the buying
process

US B2B buyers
found third-party
and analyst
reports to be the
most valuable
type of content
during the
decision-making
process

Other B2B buyer attitudes on content marketing:
100% placed a higher emphasis on the trustworthiness
of the source, and 95% were willing to consider
vendor-related content trustworthy. Source: Demand Gen Report, January 2016
On-demand and mobile-optimized content were
important factors for content consumption.
83% found themselves overwhelmed by the amount of
content available.

The majority of
B2B buyers have
opinions on how
content can be
improved

Utilizing the right channel to disseminate
content isn’t a one-and-done deal
 Two-thirds of US B2B
enterprise marketers
delivered content via five
or more different
marketing tactics

Common digital
distribution
channels for B2B
marketing
executives
included website,
email, SEO and
social

Just as the
effectiveness of
content type varies
across the buying
cycle, so does the
preferred content
channel

Email and LinkedIn were the leading channels
used for sharing business-related content

B2B marketers implemented the following
optimization tactics in 2015:
 A/B and/or
multivariate testing
 Landing page
optimization
 Progressive profiling

Testing enhances performance and provides insight
“We’re looking at content
consumption to understand
what’s top of mind for the
market so that we can then
double-down in those
areas, whether it’s
through additional
content or specific
campaigns that are
tied to those topics.”
—Andy Hilton, Vice President of
Communications, Content and
Brand, ADP
“When content was
underperforming, we
studied the variables—the
title, summary, the site’s
structure, the location on
the landing page—and we
tested, optimized it.
We saw a double-digit
lift in conversion.”
—Ken Wincko, SVP, Marketing,
PR Newswire

Repurposing existing assets maximizes effort
“We produce in-depth
content about specific
business challenges. Then
we make derivative
content for our
audience who may
not want to commit
to reading a 20-page
report.”
—Loni Stark, Senior Director,
Strategy and Product
Marketing, Adobe
“We deconstruct our
content into more
relevant, snackable,
consumable pieces
along the buying journey
rather than pushing full
reports out and hoping
somebody reads it.”
—Steve Chadwick, Director,
Marketing Communications,
Verizon Enterprise Solutions

The Cost-Effective
Flywheel

Spinning the Flywheel

Content marketing’s long tail provides
“compounding returns”
 The freshest content
usually doesn’t see the
most traffic
 As content is shared,
linked to and indexed by
search engines, it gets
more traffic over time
 Evergreen content creates
the flywheel, delivering
increased results through
its long tail

Content marketing allows B2B companies to truly
own their audience, rather than just rent it
“Trying to rent an audience
through media is getting
more expensive, less
effective. But if you own
your audience
through content, they
keep coming back.”
—Patricia Travaline, CMO,
Skyword
“By dealing more directly with
your customer through your
content, you have more
data and a better
understanding of your
customer.”
—Jeremy Goldman, CEO and
Founder, Firebrand Group

A cost-effective investment?
“yes…”
“over time…”
“with the right investment…”

Let’s recap:
 Content marketing is effective; more content is being produced
to create authenticity and value
 B2B buyers are real people with a long decision-making
process and marketers must think long-term and nurture leads
 Pre-work must be done before starting to create content in
order to maximize return
 Effective content marketing strategies must incorporate a
continual process of content creation, dissemination and
optimization
 As the flywheel spins, momentum allows for compounding
returns and B2B marketers often begin to own their audience,
thus maximizing cost-effectiveness over time

Copyright © 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Oracle Marketing Cloud
Kaila Garrison
Head of Product Marketing
Oracle Marketing Cloud
Winning with an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Everyone Believes Content is King
of enterprise CMOs said that
content marketing is important
to their business in 2014.
91%
indexed pages of content in
Google. In 2008, only 1 trillion.
30TRILLION of marketers say they are
producing more content
than they did a year ago.
73% of content is wasted
each day.
70%
But it Fails to Deliver

Content is Not Strategic
of Marketers say they lack a consistent
or integrated content strategy
– Altimeter Group
70%
Marketers employ the “spray & pray” approach
instead of an overall strategy.

of customers are frustrated
that web content doesn’t
map to their interest
74%
Mark Jones, 29
INETERESTS: Skiing, Grilling,
Camping, Base Jumping
There is a Broken Marketers Experience for Content
Content is Not Personalized
As a result we have a broken customer experience.

It’s Time for Marketers to
Take a Different Approach.

Scale Relevant Content Across Customer Journey
With Oracle’s Content Marketing solution, create personas and deliver your audience
relevant, contextualized content throughout their journey

Enterprise Ready
Create large volumes of
targeted content
Why The Oracle Marketing Cloud?
Deliver Personalized
Experience
Provide 1:1 messaging
through content developed
for specific personas and
funnel stages
Marketing Simplicity
Provide central view of
editorial schedule, content
repository, and analytics

Learn more about digital marketing with an
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Jillian Ryan
Analyst
Maximizing your B2B Content
Marketing ROI
 B2B Content Marketing in the US: Maximizing ROI and
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Workplace, Budgets and Tactics Must Follow
 Marketing Automation: Examining Users and Usage, and
What's Coming Next
 Marketing Technology: The Six Developments That Matter the
Most in 2016

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eMarketer Webinar: Maximizing your B2B Content Marketing ROI