The Contentious State of Business-to-Business Content Marketing According to Marketo

Marketo recently produced an infographic that talks about “the contentious state of content marketing” among B2B marketers. The data is pulled from the latest content marketing study conducted by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute.

We don’t think the state is contentious so much as misunderstood. Content Marketing is a relatively new field and too many practioners don’t seem to know how to link up content with other tools in their arsenal as B2B marketers.

For example, in the infographic, the very phrase “using social media to distribute their content” gives us shivers. We don’t recommend that our clients distribute their content. Instead, we recommend that our clients leverage their content, to generate leads or nurture them. Putting a link to your content in social media makes a lot of sense in LinkedIn and Twitter – for example – because these are both places where other users follow people who provide valuable link. Fred Wilson (AVC) first coined the name for this kind of thing, calling it a “referred link”, way back when in 2008 when he predicted that referred links was what made Twitter so valuable (He was right – but then he’s a smart man, feminist, and right about a lot of things).

If you use content marketing as the basis of a lead generation or lead nurturing campaign then your content marketing initiative will have ROI built into it. Content Marketing makes little sense without being grounded in the basic disciplines of lead generation, lead nurturing, and – of course – ROI / attribution modeling.

What do you think? Below you’ll find the full infographic from Marketo: