“Create the content, and they will come” is proving to be the mantra of marketers. In a recent study of over 250 sales, marketing, and other business professionals conducted by market research companies Ascend2 and Research Partners, almost 60 percent of those responding identified creating marketing content as the most effective inbound marketing strategy. Search engine optimization (SEO) followed closely in importance, cited by 54 percent.

Of those who participated in the study, 63 percent were from companies with fewer than fifty employees; 75 percent were from companies with a business-to-business focus.

But while the respondents pointed to content creation as the key tactic, creating effective content was singled out by 54 percent as the most difficult task to accomplish. This easily outdistanced other processes such as SEO and inbound tactic integration in degree of difficulty.

This research corroborates an earlier survey from Ascend2 that pointed to content as the key element in marketing efforts among B2B marketers.

Forty-six percent of those in the study pointed to the lack of an effective strategy as a significant problem when it came to executing effective inbound marketing processes, just slightly ahead of content creation (41 percent).

Reference:

Marketing Charts. “Content Creation Considered Most Effective Inbound Marketing Tactic”; August 15, 2014.