5 Stats Keeping B2B Marketers Up at Night

6 minute read

Upland Admin

I’m just going to put it out there—B2B marketing is HARD.

Between chasing down industry experts for content ideas, to getting your sales team to actually use that pitch deck you made, or simply getting everyone aligned on messaging—our jobs are complex and tricky.

We’ve put together some key stats keeping many B2B marketers up at night, and some tips to navigate them.

1) 65% of B2B Content Is Wasted

You’ve spent weeks upon weeks collaborating on a content asset. Your team is proud and excited to share it with your prospects. You’ve put it on the website, you’ve tweeted about it—and then what? Chances are, it’s sitting statically on the website, collecting dust forevermore.

From one B2B marketer to another—I can tell you that you’re not alone. The constant churn and burn of content we produce, and the constant demand for new ideas, can burn out even the most passionate of marketers.

That’s where the concept of recycling content comes in—and I don’t mean make your content redundant or unoriginal.

Recycling your content starts with creating a large asset like a whitepaper or eBook. By starting with a more robust asset, you can carve out more related, granular material from there. The idea here is that you aren’t forced to come up with a new idea every day or week, but instead you’re diving further into the nuances of a larger asset theme. In short, you’re actually producing higher quality content than if you were trying to continually come up with one-off content ideas.

2) 25 Cents of Every Dollar Spent on Content Is Lost Due to Inefficiencies

Are you trying to manage the production of all your marketing content in confusing, shared spreadsheets and combing through email attachments for the most revised copy of an asset?

Join the club.

Inefficiency in content production results in an estimated $958M each year in excessive spend for mid-to-large B2B US companies.

We’ve written an entire eBook on this topic, but creating a documented content production process is perhaps the best starting point to begin eliminating inefficiencies in your strategy.

By mapping a process for content types, you streamline workflows and unite tasks across campaigns, asset types, and even internal teams. The result? Your team can focus more time and energy creating high-quality, targeted content to meet your goals, and less time reinventing the wheel every time you start a new project.

Feeling skeptical? Eighty percent of top-performing marketers implement these steps into their content processes, creating a solid foundation for meeting and exceeding their revenue goals.

3) 72% of B2B Marketers Regularly Miss Deadlines

It’s tricky to balance meetings, project management, and other marketing tasks amidst impending content deadlines. Many B2B marketers juggle daily competing requests from various departments, making prioritization of content difficult.

But when 72% of B2B marketers report regularly missing their deadlines, this should be a wake up call to us all.

One way to ensure that content production is put at the top of the priority list is by making sure that your content produced aligns with corporate level goals and initiatives. Creating a content strategy solely around customer interest pieces prevents your marketing approach to tell a holistic narrative to your potential buyers. By aligning with corporate goals and projects, you establish a clear purpose and alignment to a bigger picture, which will in turn spark a deeper investment from internal stakeholders.

By leveraging broader company initiatives to build your deadline framework, you not only establish a clear purpose and alignment that you can measure and track; you create a richer experience for your audience all around.

4) The Top Complaint Among B2B Sales Reps Is That They Can’t Find Content to Send to Prospects

You’ve poured your heart and soul into creating a dazzling new whitepaper. It took cross-departmental collaboration, endless email chains, and expert cat herding skills to get this glorious asset out the door. But a month later, you find out that the sales team never used it because they couldn’t find it in the company shared drive on their own, or even worse, they never knew that it existed.

It’s a tale as old as time, but it never gets any less painful as a B2B marketer.

Your best option to mitigate this phenomenon is to create a central repository that is organized intuitively to the SALES team, not your marketing team. It might make sense to put all of the sales sheets into a shared folder called “collateral”, but what does this really mean to your sales team? B2B sales teams need different types of content according to the persona they are targeting, how deep into the purchasing process they are in, their region, and many other factors.

Instead of filing content in a way that makes sense to your team, conduct interviews among your sales team to learn the terms they use daily to find your different assets, and how and when they use that content. From there, you can build a repository that is easy for them to use because it fits into their existing paradigm.

5) Only 27% of B2B Marketers Track Content Utilization Metrics

It’s frustrating when your internal teams don’t use your content, but perhaps just as frustrating is not knowing how your content is being used. Is that data sheet you created valuable and/or relevant to your sales team when trying to close deals? 

While often overlooked, internal usage metrics matter. Knowing the value of your content to your internal teams keeps your team from wasting time and resources on irrelevant content. 

Marketing content is used at every stage of the buyer’s cycle—from first touch to closed deal to satisfied customer—and your internal teams are key distribution channels. By tracking internal use, such as internal views, downloads, and shares of your marketing content, your team can focus on creating the right content from the start. 

Don’t let these scary statistics keep you up at night. Use these tips and take control of your marketing content once and for all.

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