Content marketing can be defined as a strategic approach of marketing, which involves creation and distribution of valuable, relevant and consistent content in order to attract and retain a defined audience and to encourage profitable response from them. Most organizations have increasingly adopted content marketing in recent times, but only a few of them have been really effective at it. Some of the world’s best marketers know how important it is to have a documented content marketing strategy and an editorial mission statement. Frequent meetings with their team and experimentation with various tactics are some of the methods that top marketers adopt in order to ensure their content marketing success. We present some of the key takeaways of the 2016 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report, published by MarketingProfs in association with the Content Marketing Institute:

• Documentation of content marketing strategy, knowing what it takes for content marketing to be successful, good communication with the team, and experience are the factors that increase the effectiveness of content marketing.

• Most effective content marketers meet daily or weekly to discuss the progress of their content marketing strategy.

• Most of the sophisticated marketers allocate 46% of their marketing budget to content marketing.

• Lead generation and sales would be the most important goals for B2B content marketers over the next 12 months.

• The priority of B2B content marketers over the next one year would be to focus heavily on creating engaging content.

Most organizations use content marketing today, but –

• Only 32% of them have content marketing maturity at a sophisticated level.

• Only 30% of them claim that they are effective at content marketing.

• 40% of them have a clear understanding on what an effective or successful content marketing program looks like.

• Only 30% of them actually have a documented content marketing strategy.

• Only 28% of them have a documented editorial mission statement for their targeted audience.

• 44% of them conduct team meetings in person or virtually to discuss the progress or results of their content marketing program.

• 54% are of the opinion that these team meetings help the organization to be more effective at content marketing. Among them, 70% say that daily or weekly meetings are more valuable.

• 76 % of them have stated that they were likely to produce more content in 2016.

• 93% of them use social media as a part of their content marketing tactics, of which usage of illustrations and photos constituted 76%

• 75% of them say in-person events are effective tactics.

• 94% of them use LinkedIn to distribute content.

• 66% of them find LinkedIn effective.

• 66% of them use Search Engine Marketing to promote or distribute content.

• 55% of them consider Search Engine Marketing as effective.

• 72% of them encourage their audience to subscribe to their eNewsletters.

• 85% of them considered lead generation to be the most important content marketing goal in the next 12 months.

• 28% is the average percentage of their total marketing budget spent on content marketing.

• 51% of them are willing to increase their spending on content marketing.

• 60% of them consider producing engaging content to be among the top content marketing challenges.

Find out more about the 2016 B2B Content Marketing Trends report here.

- Excerpted by the NetMarketer Editorial Team