Content creation is the backbone of a successful organization. You can’t educate potential and current customers about your client’s products or services without well-written and provoking emails, blog posts, white papers, etc. And you can’t hold their attention if your client’s website doesn’t provide educational and detailed content. To figure out what customers want from business content, Pares.ly conducted a survey of over 800 content marketers to discover what engages customers best. Here’s what they found.

Content Creation Must-Knows

Purpose

Parse.ly surveyed what all content creation is based on: purpose. The top reasons surveyed companies engage in content marketing are to:

Create brand awareness
Educate readers
Build credibility and trust
Generate demand leads
Generate sales and revenue

However, Parse.ly found that the purposes of content creation differ between business-to-business (B2B) companies and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. Both types of companies value creating brand awareness above all else, but that’s the only similarly placed motive. B2B companies primarily use content to generate demand and leads and build credibility and trust. Meanwhile, B2C companies value content’s ability to educate their readers over building credibility and trust.

Channels

“Owned channels support the largest volume of content activities,” says Parse.ly. “While both B2B and B2C companies activate this content across many channels, there is a strong preference for owned channels for content distribution.” The top content marketing activities both types of companies are creating are:

Blog posts and short articles (that they distribute on their own websites and blogs)
Social media posts (organic social media is preferred over paid)
- B2B companies prefer LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter (in that order) for both organic and paid social media posts)
- B2C companies prefer Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (in that order) for both organic and paid social media posts)
Email newsletters (emails are sent to the companies’ own database)
Videos (posted on their own websites or social media channels)
Case studies (posted on their websites)

Overall, most businesses use an average of four to seven channels for content creation in order to drive top-of-funnel conversions. “While most decidedly favor leveraging channels they own (e.g. website/blog), paid channels are still part of the mix for more than half of our respondents,” says Parse.ly. “With so many avenues to address and seed, it’s little wonder that the demands for content and content budgets continue to grow.”

Types

An interesting find by Parse.ly is that 35% of content marketers wish that they could create more videos. However, they feel as if they don’t have the resources to do so. As such, Parse.ly estimates 2022 will be the year that video will start having a bigger role in companies’ content marketing strategies.

Long-form content has also piqued the interest of content marketers. 24% of companies would like to create more infographics and another 24% plan to invest in more e‑books and guides. Additionally, 22% of companies plan to increase the number of reports they release and many plan to release more white papers (19%) and case studies (18%).

Performance

A big problem many companies are facing is that about 49% don’t know how the content they create is performing. Another 9% don’t track their metrics at all and 8% aren’t sure if their metrics are being tracked. Parse.ly says this is because they aren’t using the proper tools. “Page views and email clicks, so-called ‘vanity metrics,’ offer little hard analysis of how content is performing, and don’t tell the full story of a customer’s lifecycle journey.” Thorough reviews of content performance is exactly what your clients need to be confident enough to boost content creation. If you can provide that for them, they’ll know how to properly strategize their outreach going forward.

Other content creation information your clients may find valuable is the type of marketing content their target audiences respond to. AudienceSCAN on AdMall by SalesFuel can provide those details for your next meeting. On AdMall, you can see what percentage of each audience took action based on which advertising media types, as well as demographic information, insight into their future spending plans and more.

Content creation is crucial for your client’s business. If you can help them create the types of content they want and help them make their strategies more affective, you’ll continue to win their loyalty and their business.

Photo by Daniel Thomas