December 9, 2015 | less than a minute read

What will be the most common B2B Content Marketing Challenge in 2016?

Passle

Heba Hosny compares B2B Marketing's 2015 and 2016 results with some interesting conclusions. Shockingly, fewer B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy (35% vs 32%) and, this is no coincidence, fewer felt they had an effective content marketing strategy (38% vs 30%).

Creating engaging content remains the most common B2B content marketing challenge with 60% of marketers ranking it top of the list (followed by measuring content effectiveness, and producing content consistently).

Hosny's conclusion is to focus on your users to initiate and encourage personas driven content. This makes common sense: if you want people to engage with your content, engage with them too!

However, her suggestions are very much based on the assumption that people are talking about your brand in the first place. If that's not the case, you're going to have to take steps to start that conversation.

Start by creating content that will be of interest to your audience: what are they struggling with? what might they find entertaining?

Most importantly, don't forget to document and monitor your strategy!

This section brings us to a widely shared B2B content marketing challenge: Creating engaging content. As mentioned earlier, successful B2B marketers rap their entire content marketing strategy around buyers personas pain points, interests and expectations. The majority of marketers who find creating engaging content a challenge are probably missing out on this part. In other words, their content does not speak to the core needs of their target customers.