Tech Content Marketers Talk Content Creation Challenges, Tools, and Trends [New Research]

In CMI’s latest research, 68% of tech content marketers named creating content that appeals to multiple roles as their top challenge. Despite this, many tech marketers think well of their content marketing programs: 75% say their organization’s content marketing is more successful compared with its performance a year ago. Only one other finding saw the difference between top performers and the overall respondent set at less than 10 percentage points: 91% of tech content marketers who are top performers say their organization cares about creating content to build customer loyalty as compared to 82% of all tech marketers. Interestingly, 73% of top performers reported success using content marketing at the customer loyalty stage. Nearly every tech marketer (92%) said they use email to nurture their audiences. Not surprisingly, plenty of tech marketers (64%) reported increased use of video compared to the previous year. Content technology Marketers in tech companies aren’t lacking for content technology. Other technologies widely used by tech marketers include: But are tech marketers more proficient with content tech than other marketers? They’re doing the audience research they need, they’re nurturing those audiences, and they’ve got technologies (and skills) to apply. How does that compare to your experience working at a tech company (or in content marketing in general)?

Author: Kim Moutsos / Source: Content Marketing Institute

Does any industry face a more complex audience journey and marketing/sales process than B2B technology? Consider the number of people who influence a sale, the length of the decision-making cycle, the competing interests of the people who purchase, implement, manage, and use the technology. It’s a lot.

Whether or not they have the most difficult jobs, tech content marketers feel the challenge of that complexity. In CMI’s latest research, 68% of tech content marketers named creating content that appeals to multiple roles as their top challenge.

Despite this, many tech marketers think well of their content marketing programs: 75% say their organization’s content marketing is more successful compared with its performance a year ago.

These are a few of the findings in Technology Content Marketing 2019: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends sponsored by IDG Communications, Inc. The new report looks at responses from 364 content marketers at for-profit technology companies who participated in the ninth annual Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs survey conducted in June/July 2018. The respondents include tech marketers at B2B (85%), B2C (3%), and B2B and B2C companies (12%).

Here’s what else they told us about how they use content marketing.

Struggle to create content for multiple roles is real

I mentioned that 68% of tech content marketers overall say they struggle to create content that appeals to multiple roles. And that makes sense, considering the many people in distinct roles who influence a tech purchase.

This finding is one of the few in which the tech content marketers who consider themselves very/extremely successful (labeled top performers in the chart below) struggle almost as much as everyone else (66% vs. 68%).

Only one other finding saw the difference between top performers and the overall respondent set at less than 10 percentage points: 91% of tech content marketers who are top performers say their organization cares about creating content to build customer loyalty as compared to 82% of all tech marketers.

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Difficulty surfaces at the bottom of the funnel

Only 53% of tech marketers said they used content marketing successfully to build customer loyalty over the previous year. That success is a lot less than their reported success for early funnel goals – creating brand awareness (84%), generating demand/leads (80%), and educating audiences (74%).