Over the past few years, both B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) content marketing has exploded, driven by multiple changes to Google’s algorithms, which now reward unique, original, high-quality content. Marketers everywhere, in businesses large and small, are scrambling not only to find or create high-quality content, but to distribute that content in strategic ways aligned with their brand and designed to generate real, and measurable, results.

We believe that content marketing will continue to be a major area of focus in 2016. Those who are already using content marketing extensively will likely spend more time assessing and analyzing the effectiveness of their efforts and looking for ways to become increasingly more efficient (gain more results with less effort/cost) across all of their communication channels. Those who have not yet started using content marketing in a strategic way are likely to begin.

Most of our work is done in the B2B realm. Content marketing is different in B2B than in B2C; one of the big differences is that visual is not as highly valued. We’ve blogged about this in the past.  B2B content marketers need to find ways that they can educate or inform their audiences in meaningful ways tied to the products or services they deliver. They must do so in such a way that their insights and input is valued more than insights and input from other sources. That means that this content must be authoritative, credible and, above all, not overtly promotional.

We have a few recommendations for B2B marketers in 2016:

• Carefully consider the outcomes they are hoping for from all of their marketing efforts.
• Determine how content marketing can fit into those efforts.
• Catalog/audit current content/content sources to determine where gaps may exist.
• Develop a plan for leveraging existing and developing new content that can be deployed across all communication channels.
• Build in methods of measuring the impact of these efforts in meaningful ways.

We specialize in assessing/auditing content and working with clients to develop and implement strategic communication plans to address their online marketing needs. Contact us to learn more.