What’s 25 cents in a marketing budget? Hardly worth worrying about, right?
Well, when it’s 25 cents out of every dollar, that’s a quarter worth your attention.
About 25 cents out of every dollar allocated to marketing content in B2B budgets is wasted due to inefficient processes, according to a study of more than 3,000 B2B marketers conducted by Gleanster (and commissioned by Kapost). That’s a sadly substantial portion of cash when you realize that B2B firms spend $5.2 billion a year on content creation.
Content has become a top concern particularly in B2B (67% of B2B marketers cited it as a top priority this year) because content is what fuels every stage of the buyer’s journey, each channel used to reach those buyers, and equip internal teams to facilitate each stage of that journey. But even as marketers invest more in content production and the delivery channels for that content, few are focusing on how to equip the marketers to efficiently produce the content needed.
Lacking a consistent content process and framework for optimizing content, marketers instead are using a hodgepodge of disconnected tools and systems to plan, distribute, and measure content. These might include spreadsheets, Word docs, Google docs, or various calendars, to name just a few. More likely, most are using all of the above.
The result is a lack of visibility across teams and an inconsistent set of workflows, leading to the kind of pains you’ve come to expect in B2B marketing: missed deadlines, duplicative content, inability to find resources, disconnected teams, and so on and so on. The content production process ends up looking like something below.
If B2B marketing wants to get serious about content, we need to invest in building the internal processes, focusing on how content is planned and mapped to strategic goals, how teams can work across functions and channels, providing better visibility throughout the organization, and optimizing the distribution and reporting around content.
The mantra in B2B has been to act like a publisher. Publishers don’t just publish, they establish processes to ensure every aspect of the production process is efficient.
In other words, marketers need to stop letting quarters fall out of their pockets.