59% of B2C Companies to Spend More on Content Marketing in 2020

BY Kathy Crosett
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Your B2C clients spend heavily on content marketing. They should be tracking which content forms are delivering the best ROI. And to measure ROI, they should establish what they hope to gain from their content marketing. The Content Marketing Institute has just published its 2020 B2C Research Report. Here’s what they say about how businesses are managing their content marketing and where you can find opportunity.

Content Marketing Goals

B2C operators create content for specific parts of the purchase funnel as follows:

  • Top of funnel: brand awareness 43%
  • Mid-​funnel: consideration and intent 20%
  • Late-​funnel: evaluation and purchase 18%
  • Post purchase: loyalty and brand advocacy 12%
  • Other: 7%

Content Marketing Formats

B2B operators often rely on technical content like white papers to demonstrate their expertise to the target audiences. B2C companies often target more than one persona, and they may develop varying content types to connect with these folks. The top content forms they employ break out as follows:

  • Social media tweets and posts 94%
  • Blog posts/​short articles 80%
  • Email newsletters 74%
  • Videos (not including live streaming) 66%
  • Infographics/​Charts/​Photos 54%
  • In-​person events 50%

To succeed with contact marketing, your clients have to get the right materials in front of their target audiences at the right time. Most businesses use a mix of channels to optimize their reach. The most frequently used organic channels include social media (93%), blog/​website (85%) and email (79%).

Businesses understand that they need to use paid channels as well. At least 85% opt to invest in paid distribution. Social media and promoted posts rank first in this category, coming in at 89%. B2C companies also use:

  • SEM/​PPC 68%
  • Banner ads promoting content 50%
  • Sponsorships 44%
  • Native advertising 40%

The Results

Content marketing expense represents a significant sum. Businesses with over 100 employees spend about $337,000 annually on this activity. The budget for companies with 99 or fewer employees comes in at $111,000. Given this investment, marketers want to know that their content initiatives are working. Companies who participated in the CMI survey reported the following formats worked best to help them meet specific goals.

  • Brand Awareness: the best formats include blog post/​short article and social media content (both at 31%)
  • Securing Leads: email newsletters (16%) and social content or in-​person events (both at 13%)
  • Lead Nurturing: email newsletters (24%) and social content (18%)
  • Lead Conversion: in-​person events (22%) and email newsletters (21%)

The Opportunity

Generating content for marketing use requires a consistent and concerted effort. Many of your clients likely don’t have the internal resources to devote to this task. In fact, larger businesses, those with 100 or more employees, are likely to hire an outside provider (65%). Overall, 55% of businesses use outside companies. Smaller businesses are slightly less likely to do so. About 43% of businesses with fewer than 100 employees outsource one or more parts of the content marketing task. For purposes of this report, the CMI broke this form of marketing into multiple steps, including creation, distribution, technology, strategy, editorial planning and measurement. Marketers outsource the creation piece of the task most frequently (80%).

In 2020, your B2C clients will emphasize the quality and quantity of their content marketing efforts. And they want to increase the size of their audience. You can help them identify the kind of content that appeals to their target audiences by running a Digital Audit at AdMall by SalesFuel.


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