How Mature Is Your B2B Content Marketing Practice?
To attract attention and build a following, B2B marketers must shift their content marketing from being product-focused to building relationships. How is your organization navigating this transition? Take our short self-assessment to find out.
The assessment will yield customized results and recommendations based on your responses and should take no more than 2 minutes to complete.
Please select the option that best describes your current capabilities for the following statements:
Please select the option that best describes your current capabilities for the following statements:
Please select the option that best describes your current capabilities for the following statements:
Please select the option that best describes your current capabilities for the following statements:
Please select the option that best describes your current capabilities for the following statements:
Results Overview
To catch customers' attention, B2B marketers first need to understand how their capabilities and resources rank against five competencies that increase editorial mastery and upgrade content marketing practices from conventional to leading-edge. Our assessment evaluates participants across 5 key disciplines:
Customer understanding
Does your content identify topics that concern both prospects and customers?
Brand alignment
Do you create content that reflects your mission and brand and speaks to buyer issues or desires?
Relevant content development
Does your content reflect key themes and forward-leaning ideas that capture attention and create interactions?
Distribution to build audience
Do you tailor content distribution to build relationships across the customer life cycle?
Content performance monitoring
Do you measure, optimize, and iterate content marketing to deliver value to both customers and the business?
Where is your firm today, and what can you do to deliver content marketing experiences in the future? Continue to see your personal results and recommendations.
Recommendations
Beginner
Intermediate
AdvancedYour maturity result:
Beginner
Your score means your content marketing maturity is only at the beginning stage.
- Your content is too focused on your products and what you do, and not focused enough on your customers.
- Content creation is piecemeal and reactive to demands from sales, product, or campaign management.
- Content lacks cornerstone topics or central themes.
You need align your content strategy and road map around your customers' journey, and select key themes that are educational and speak to issues that reflect customer concerns.
- Third-party expertise can help lend credibility to your content and ensure your content aligns to the issues that matter most to your customers.
Your dissemination plans for content should similarly focus on your customers. Your distribution strategy should take into account engagement and relationship goals and adjust to buyers' changing preferences.
- If you are not already, start tracking customer interaction data with your content and use it to prioritize topics, formats, channels, and use cases.
- Begin to regularly measure, correlate, and report on how your content affects the sales process, pipeline health, retention, and cross-sell/upsell opportunities.
Intermediate
Your score means your content marketing maturity has advanced to the intermediate stage. You have a defined content strategy, editorial calendar, and processes aligned to producing content that addresses the different stages of your customers' journeys.
- Focus more on themes that demonstrate customer empathy or thought leadership in the market.
- Make sure your content is grounded in research-based insights that address future-facing customer issues - but also experiment with content that is humorous, inspiring, or strikes an emotional tone.
- Create and commission content with third parties to demonstrate that your thinking represents the market, not just your business objectives and offerings. Turn to your customers as advocate partners in this endeavor.
- Refine your dissemination metrics -- make sure you always capture data on how customers interact with your content and use that to evolve your strategy around content promotion.
- Move from measuring how content influences the sales process, pipeline health, retention, and cross-sell/upsell opportunities to how content changes/increases customer engagement across their lifecycle.
- Use that insight to increase your content marketing practice's visibility inside your organization.
Advanced
Congratulations, your score means that your content is advanced!
- Experiment with content marketing themes that are more provocative or inspiring and represent major issues facing your customers or industry.
- Keep the customer as the north star in your content planning, creation, and dissemination. Besides continuing to create and commission content with third parties, extend this practice to curating and collaborating.
- Make your use of third-party authors and sources more symbiotic and less commercial.
- Develop content that gets recognized by and involves the whole market - including partners.
If you are not already, focus more on real-time, action-based metrics to assess the impact of your content on the brand, buyers, and the business to predict what to take on next.
- Demonstrate a direct link between content publication, marketing effectiveness, and business results -- and use this to elevate your content marketing practice across the organization.
- Keep optimizing your distribution strategy based on real-time customer interaction data and you will continue to create content that helps build a strong brand identity, generate demand, and increase advocacy among current customers.
View your detailed results
Methodology And Disclaimers
Methodology
In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 300 decision-makers in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand to evaluate the current state of their technology and operational strategy. The study was completed in February 2018.
Disclaimers
Although great care has been taken to ensure the accuracy and completeness of this assessment, Client and Forrester are unable to accept any legal responsibility for any actions taken on the basis of the information contained herein.