How well are we as B2B marketers managing our content today?
It’s a big question, and it involves a lot of nuance. We can’t answer it by simply saying, “we create really high-quality content!” or “we’re really great at responding to sales requests!”
No, we need to look at how we tackle the full content lifecycle—from planning to distribution and back again—to get a sense for how well we’re living up to our teams’ potential and driving real value with content marketing. We have to ask ourselves: “Does my team understand how their work connects to our company’s goals?”, “How do we deal with ad hoc requests?”, and even, “do our workflows give empower creators to get their work done efficiently and well?”
To make it trickier, the answers to these questions don’t exist in a vacuum. There’s no singular definition of what “good” looks like.
That’s why it’s useful to take a peek at how our peers are doing. If we’re below average, it may be a clue that we’re losing the external customer experience battle through sub-par internal practices. If we’re middling or—dare we wish it—ahead of the game, we can get a better understanding of how our strengths can position us to win, and where we should funnel resources to get better.
Unless you’ve got double-agents planted on your peers’ and competitors’ marketing teams who report back how well the other guys are prioritizing their content plans and what their distribution strategy looks like, it can be hard to know whether you’re alone in your struggles or unique in your successes.
Luckily, we’re here to help—no fake spy mustaches required. The answers are all here, in our 2020 State of Content Operations benchmark report. In it, we’re breaking down in-depth answers from 400 B2B marketers on everything from strategy and production to distribution and best-practices.
Want a taste of the marketing real-talk we’re serving up? Here are three of our favorite findings, in fancy gif (pronounced gif, not gif, for the record) format:
1. Content personalization has a ways to go
2. Taxonomies are all the rage (but aren’t all aligned)
3. True consistency is still a dream (but we have some ideas on how to get there)
Get the Data for Yourself
There’s much more where that came from. Grab your copy of the report and let us know how your team stacks up.