Content Marketers Still Have a Lot of Growing Up to do

CLEVELAND, Sept. 30, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Many marketers are still in the awkward adolescent phase when it comes to the maturity of their content marketing programs. That's just one of the key findings in the new B2B content marketing research published today by Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs.

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This is the sixth year for one of the most highly-anticipated content marketing research reports in the world. Sponsored by Brightcove, B2B Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America includes findings from 1,521 North American business-to-business (B2B) marketers—just a slice of the thousands of marketers surveyed in 25 industries worldwide.

New this year, we asked marketers to assess their content marketing maturity level. Twenty-nine percent of respondents rate themselves as "adolescent"- having a business case, seeing early success, and becoming more sophisticated with measurement and scaling. Twenty-seven percent rated themselves as "young" - experiencing growing pains, and challenged with creating a cohesive strategy and measurement plan. Only eight percent rated their programs as "sophisticated." The results showed that, in general, the more mature the organization, the more effective it is at content marketing.

"We also asked marketers whether their organizations know what success or effectiveness looks like when it comes to content marketing. Fifty-five percent said no or were unsure," explains Joe Pulizzi, founder, Content Marketing Institute and author, Content Inc. "We can do better. The research shows that marketers who have clarity around success are more effective at content marketing than those who don't—they simply get better results."

Additionally, 76% of B2B organizations plan to produce more content in 2016. And 51% plan to spend more on their content marketing next year. Seventy-two percent say creating more engaging content is their top priority for internal content creators.

"It's great that organizations want to create more content, but they need to be braver and bolder with that content," says Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs, and author of Everybody Writes. "They can no longer afford to play it safe. Organizations must focus on telling more authentic stories targeting the specific challenges of their audience."

Read more about the eye-opening findings in the report or download the full report now.
For research charts, pictures, quotes and more, you can grab them from Dropbox.
To view all CMI research visit contentmarketinginstitutecom/research.

About Content Marketing Institute:
Content Marketing Institute is the leading global content marketing education and training organization, teaching enterprise brands how to attract and retain customers through compelling, multi-channel storytelling. CMI's Content Marketing World event, the largest content marketing-focused event, is held every September in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, and the Intelligent Content Conference event is held every spring. CMI publishes the bi-monthly magazine Chief Content Officer, and provides strategic consulting and content marketing research for some of the best-known brands in the world. CMI has been named an Inc. 5000 company for the last four years. Watch this video to learn more about CMI.

About MarketingProfs
MarketingProfs offers real-world education for modern marketers. More than 600,000 marketing professionals worldwide rely on our free daily publications, virtual conferences, MarketingProfs University, and more to stay up to date on the most important trends and tactics in marketing—and how to apply them to their businesses. Visit MarketingProfs.com for more.

About Brightcove
Brightcove Inc. is the leading global provider of powerful cloud solutions for delivering and monetizing video across connected devices. The company offers a full suite of products and services that reduce the cost and complexity associated with publishing, distributing, measuring, and monetizing video across devices. Brightcove has more than 5,000 customers in over 70 countries that rely on the company's cloud solutions to successfully publish high-quality video experiences to audiences everywhere. To learn more, visit www.brightcove.com.

SOURCE The Content Marketing Institute