Content Marketing Institute Releases New Research on Technology Content Marketing

Technology marketers continue to make progress with their content marketing and are reporting more success with their efforts than one year ago. That’s a key finding in the new Content Marketing Institute report out, Technology Content Marketing 2020: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends study, sponsored by IDG Communications, Inc.

Approximately three out of four (76%) report their organization is much more or somewhat more successful with content marketing compared with one year ago. That’s seven points higher than the overall set of B2B marketers we studied, among whom 69% felt much or somewhat more successful compared with the previous years.

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“It seems the sentiment among content marketers at technology companies is ‘We’ve got this,’” shares Kim Moutsos, VP of Editorial, Content Marketing Institute. “When we look at what makes the top performers successful, we see they treat content marketing as a strategic business function, craft content thoughtfully, experiment with distribution, and measure their results. They use content marketing not only to create brand awareness and generate leads, but also to build loyalty and subscribed audiences.”

Secret Weapons:

• The most successful invest in customer loyalty: The top three content marketing goals for respondents include: Creating brand awareness (89%), educating audiences (80%), and generating demand/leads (79%). Those who are the most successful with their content marketing, however, also put a premium on building loyalty with existing customers/clients (85%).
• They believe in the persuasive power of case studies: Technology marketers say case studies are their best-performing content type for converting leads–and they use case studies more frequently than B2B marketers in general. Most tech marketers (82%) use case studies. That’s well above the level of use we see among B2B marketers as a whole, where 69% say use case studies.
• They can show ROI: A healthy chunk (83%) of tech content marketers use metrics to measure their content performance. Among those users, 75% of the most successful technology content marketers say their ability to demonstrate content marketing ROI is excellent or very good.

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Other Key Highlights:

• Large companies—and those with bigger budgets—seek outside help with content distribution: Technology marketers who outsource are most likely to outsource content creation (88%). And while content distribution is a distant second (35%) among all respondents, the gap tightens when we look at large companies and those with bigger budgets (nearly half of both those groups outsource content distribution).
• Most use content marketing to create brand awareness and generate leads—but many leave opportunities to build long-term relationships on the table: More than 70% use content marketing successfully at the top of the sales funnel; however only 44% use it to build a subscribed audience. 
• The challenge to create content for multi-level roles continues: 59% of technology content marketers say creating content that appeals to multi-level roles within the target audience(s) is the top challenge they face. This was their top reported challenge last year as well.

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