Where will the budgets get spent?
Every year, content marketing research reveals that B2B budgets are set to rise. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 39 per cent of B2B companies will increase their content marketing budgets in 2017.
But how and where will this money be spent?
Unfortunately – apologies in advance – this post is not in a position to answer that question. It would be great if we could predict the winner of the 3.15pm at Kempton Park tomorrow, but we can’t.
We can, however, make some educated guesses. A relatively small proportion of the increase will be spent on producing more content. Instead, the additional spend is likely to be focused on the following areas:
Data
Data has been a mainstay of marketing for some time but there is likely to be a move into targeting particular groups of people. This laser focus will see the creation of additional content that can be bolted together to create larger documents.
Testing
There will be more testing of content. Buzzfeed already tests multiple headlines via Facebook and other channels. This sort of pre-emptive analytics is becoming the norm at the sharp end of online publishing.
There’s no point in spending lots of money pushing content through Facebook if you don’t know how people will respond to it. A change of headline or image can have an enormous effect on click-through rates.
No matter how wonderful your copy is, if people don’t click through on the headline they won’t read any of it.
Pushing
There’s not much to add here – it has all been said before. But more money will be required, especially for the bigger brands, to push content on Facebook, LinkedIn or other networks where their target markets hang out.
Conclusion
Overall, there may be more of a focus on effective content. How it fits into the funnel then converts and takes people through the sales process as well as loyalty and relationship marketing will become increasingly important.
Yes, content marketing is journalism – but there will be more to it than that. Content marketing is destined to become journalism’s more sophisticated cousin. Taking it there is where the money may well go.
Where will the budget go? is part of Content24, the blog for London content marketing agency FirstWord.