Which type of content drives the strongest ROI in your B2B lead generation playbook? Eccolo Media has released 2015 B2B Technology Content Survey Report, Volume Two and shared the results in an interesting infographic. For the report, they asked technology buyers, which included engineers up through to the c-suite, how much content they consume and what content they pay attention to the most.
Quality Not Quantity
I am very glad to read this near the top of the infographic: The more content we produce, the more likely it is to fail. Marketers have been good at producing large volumes of content, but not quality content and not the right types of content. In fact, the survey results indicated that 48% consume 2 to 5 collateral assets before they are ready to make a purchase. 25% said they consumed 6 to 8 collateral assets. So focus on creating quality, relevant content!
What type of content should we create?
It is interesting to learn that the buyers said they read the same number of emails as white papers. however, when asked which was more influential in their purchasing decision, over 30% chose white papers. Approximately 15% said the emails were the more influential.
When looking at the larger picture, here are the types of assets used to evaluate a technology purchase:
- 57% – product brochures / data sheets
- 52% – email
- 52% – white papers
- 42% – competitive vendor worksheets
- 42% – case studies or success stories
- 35% – customer magazines or publications
- 35% – detailed technology guides / implementation scenarios
- 35% – video or multimedia files
- 34% – webinar
- 34% – social content on networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn
- 31% – web slideshows
- 30% – e-newsletters / digests
- 30% – blog articles
- 25% – tweets
- 25% – infographics
- 24% – eBooks
- 24% – podcasts / audio files
However the top 5 most influential assets were:
1. Product brochures/data sheets
2. White papers
3. Case studies success stories
4. Detailed technology guides / implementation scenarios
5. Competitive vendor worksheets
What types of content work best for you and does this survey change your mind about the types of content assets you are going to be focusing on in 2015?
