Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Marketers Use, Invest Heavily in Content Marketing

CLEVELAND, Nov. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- A new study from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs , sponsored by Pace, shows that business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers are heavily using and significantly investing in content marketing. Eighty-six percent of B2C organizations market with content — regardless of company size or industry.

B2C organizations use an average of 12 tactics. The most popular tactics are social media (excluding blogs) (84%), articles on a company's website (84%), eNewsletters (78%), and blogs (77%).  While these results are similar to the habits of B2B marketers, B2C marketers are using mobile content, mobile apps, print magazines, and print newsletters more than their B2B peers.

"It's exciting to be able to benchmark B2C and B2B content marketing efforts and quantify differences by marketing type," says Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute and co-author of Managing Content Marketing. "One interesting difference is how each group uses social media. For B2C marketers, Facebook is the most popular platform by far, with 90% of respondents indicating they use this for content distribution. This differs from B2B, in which LinkedIn is the most popular platform, with 83% of respondents using this (compared to 51% of B2C marketers)."

Like their B2B peers, B2C marketers are investing heavily in content marketing. They spend 28% of their marketing budgets on content marketing, and 55% of B2C marketers are planning to increase their content marketing spend over the next 12 months.

"Another similarity between B2C and B2C marketers is that both groups lack confidence that they are executing content marketing effectively," says Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and co-author of Content Rules. "But B2C marketers cite lack of budget as their biggest challenge (23%), whereas B2B marketers are most challenged with producing enough content (29%)."

B2C Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America is the first annual survey from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs about content marketing in the business-to-consumer (B2C) space. The research is sponsored by Pace. Over 350 B2C marketers in North America from diverse industries and a wide range of company sizes were surveyed in August 2012. The full report can be found here.

About the Content Marketing Institute
Content Marketing Institute (CMI) is the leading global content marketing education and training organization. CMI teaches enterprise brands how to attract and retain customers through compelling, multi-channel storytelling. CMI's Content Marketing World event is the largest content marketing-focused event. CMI also produces the quarterly magazine Chief Content Officer, and provides strategic consulting and content marketing research for some of the best-known brands in the world. Get more content marketing resources at ContentMarketingInstitute.com. CMI is a division of Z Squared Media, a 2012 Inc. 500 company.

About MarketingProfs
MarketingProfs is a professional development resource that offers actionable know-how designed to make you a smarter marketer. More than 423,000 MarketingProfs subscribers rely on it to stay up-to-date on the most important trends in marketing — from social media and content marketing to lead generation, email marketing, and more. MarketingProfs delivers enhanced professional development training via online seminars and short webcasts, in-depth how-to reports, research, interactive planning tools, online courses, and the premiere in-person event for B2B marketers, the B2B Forum. Subscribe to our actionable daily newsletter at Marketingprofs.com.

About Pace
Pace is a custom content marketing leader, producing multi-channel content that delivers results for a diverse client base. Our staff of more than 300 professionals consistently produces award-winning work in a variety of media, including digital, mobile content, social media, magazines, catalogs, books, videos, and e-commerce solutions. Pace was founded and is owned by Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, the current chair of the American Red Cross, and is based in Greensboro, N.C. For more information, please visit http://twitter.com/PaceComm or http://www.linkedin.com/company/pace-communications.

SOURCE Content Marketing Institute