LookBookHQ and
Oracle Eloqua recently published the findings of their
Eloqua Community State of Content Marketing Survey 2014. This was a survey of the Oracle Eloqua "community," which I believe means users of Oracle Eloqua's marketing automation software.
The Oracle Eloqua software is an "enterprise-level" B2B marketing automation solution, so many of the respondents to this survey were affiliated with larger organizations. For example, 66% of the respondents work at companies with more than 500 employees. Fifty-one percent of the respondents had annual marketing budgets of more than $500,000, and 38% had annual marketing budgets of more than $1 million. These survey findings are interesting because they reflect the attitudes and practices of sophisticated marketing organizations that should be more "advanced" than average firms when it comes to content marketing.
Here's a brief summary of some of the findings.
Content Objectives
The top four objectives for content marketing identified by survey respondents were:
- Demand/lead generation (88%)
- Lead nurturing (66%)
- Brand awareness (58%)
- Sales enablement (51%)
Volume of Content Produced
Participants in the LookBookHQ/Oracle Eloqua survey were asked: On average how much new content (excluding blog posts) is your company producing? Here's how the participants responded.
- Multiple assets per week (29%)
- One asset per week (13%)
- One asset every two weeks (20%)
- One asset per month (28%)
- One asset per quarter or less (7%)
My Take: This is the first survey I've seen that quantifies the volume of content that marketers are producing. I was somewhat surprised that 42% of respondents said they are producing at least one new content asset per week. In my experience, that's an aggressive content development pace. I suspect that smaller companies are producing significantly less, if you don't include blog posts and social media updates.
Content Marketing Challenges
The single biggest content marketing challenge identified by survey respondents (24%) was "getting our target audience to engage with our content." However, 44% of respondents identified some aspect of content production as the biggest challenge. The specific challenges were as follows:
- Creating enough targeted content (23%)
- Creating enough content (16%)
- Creating content that helps our sales teams (5%)
My Take: In the CMI/MarketingProfs survey discussed earlier, the top three content marketing challenges identified by respondents were lack of time (69%), producing enough content (55%), and producing the kind of content that engages (47%). So, the results from the LookBookHQ/Oracle Eloqua survey are quite similar to the CMI/MarketingProfs findings. To me, these findings make the point that producing enough quality content is not easy, even for relatively large organizations with substantial marketing budgets.
Other Interesting Findings
- Blogging is a mainstream marketing activity. Thirty-nine percent of survey respondents said they publish at least six posts per month.
- Seventy-five percent of respondents said they are repurposing content assets at least two times (59% said 2-5 times).
