The disarmingly simple conclusion

Successful content marketing may depend on being diligent, looking at the data, and going where few others have gone before. But it’s not rocket science.

The astonishing takeaway from our study is… not that astonishing?

If a marketer is currently seeing huge success with their content, there’s a good chance they’re following some well-established best practices:

01. Creating a mix of short and in-depth content
02. Using psychology to optimize engagement
03. Embracing the innovative and interactive
04. Applying data-driven personalization
05. Ensuring everything is visually on-brand
06. Measuring a deeper set of metrics

That dedication to metrics speaks to a wider mindset shared by the most successful content marketers—and one of the biggest differences between them and their less successful counterparts.

The fact is, very successful content marketers are more than twice as likely to take a strongly data-led approach to their B2B content marketing.

Very successful content marketers are more than 2x as likely to take a strongly data-led approach.

And it’s a virtuous circle. Armed with a dashboard full of data to prove the impact of their content, they’re also seeing significantly larger upticks in their content budget, year on year.

If that’s not a reason to sharpen up your content marketing, we don’t know what is.

We hope you’ve found this report useful, whether it’s reinforced your hard-won content marketing experience, or inspired you to change up your strategy, and use your growing budget to steal some impactful moves from your peers.

We’re planning to conduct this type of survey, in bigger and better ways, year on year.

Let us know what question you’d most like to put to marketers next time around…

This study has identified six best practices. But which do you think is the most important?

Creating a mix of short and in-depth content
Using psychology to optimize engagement
Embracing the innovative and interactive
Applying data-driven personalization
Ensuring everything is visually on-brand
Measuring a deeper set of metrics