Study Shows Marketers Questioning Strategies; But There’s Room for Growth with Webinars

With less than 10% of marketers saying their content marketing is effective, it’s clear that businesses need to rethink their strategies in order to drive engagement and turn insights into action.

That data comes from a study released by Heinz Marketing, sponsored by ON24, the technology leader helping companies drive human engagement and deliver actionable insights through digital experiences. The report uncovers new insights into the different content marketing strategies and their effectiveness, and how marketer’s confidence in certain tactics have faded even in just the past two years.

The results from the study are clear: marketers are having serious doubts about their content marketing, whether it’s delivering relevant material to key audiences, and if its driving revenue results.

“Marketers put too much time, resources, and creativity into their campaigns. It’s vital that they know what content is working, whether it’s reaching its target audience, and if it’s driving bottom line growth for businesses,” says Joe Hyland, CMO, ON24. “At ON24, we pride ourselves on having built a platform that provides marketers with vital insights through the customer journey and we hope those who see this study will turn to us to help them achieve all their marketing goals.”

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The study, which featured nearly 150 respondents representing a range of industries, found that:

• Content marketing is getting stale: 63% of marketers said their content marketing strategy was either not very effective or only somewhat effective, compared to just 35% in 2017.
• More content doesn’t mean more results: Two-thirds of respondents said they were either not confident or only somewhat confident that their content is driving revenue results.
• Conversion is key: 75% of respondents said that either lead conversion or sales opportunity conversion was the most important content engagement metric.
• Spray and pray? Just 13% said they were extremely or very confident that their content was driving desired results.

Of the content provided to sales organizations, case studies were the highest, with 31% saying it was provided most often, followed by product and service collateral. One opportunity for marketers to scale the impact of human-to-human interactions is through webinars. According to the marketing technology analyst firm SiriusDecisions, webinars are the highest-rated human touchpoint for buyers. There’s clearly room for marketers to grow in this area, as the Heinz study found only 11% of marketers reporting that webinars are the content provided most to sales teams.

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“The attributes that drive lead gen — from personalization to always-on content to real-time interaction — are central to ON24’s platform,” says Matt Heinz, CEO of Heinz Marketing. “There’s a reason why the best marketers turn to ON24’s industry-leading offerings to create authentic digital experiences and personalized engagement at scale.”

The results of the study were released at this week’s Webinar World 2019 during Heinz’s keynote address. The industry-leading conference featured keynotes and panel discussions from marketing leaders from Marketo, FunnyBizz, Heinz Marketing and more. It was headlined by the distinguished Peabody Award-winning correspondent and host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, Scott Simon.

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