[Research Round-Up] The Latest From NetLine On B2B Content Consumption

(This Research Round-Up discusses the 2024 B2B content consumption report from NetLine Corporation. NetLine publishes this report annually, and it consistently provides a wealth of real-world insights about how business professionals actually consume marketing content.)

Source:  NetLine Corporation

Virtually all B2B companies are now using content marketing in several forms, and therefore understanding how business professionals consume content is now critical to marketing success. The 2024 State of B2B Content Consumption & Demand Report by NetLine Corporation provides valuable insights on this vital issue.

NetLine operates a content syndication platform, and this report is based on data from 6.2 million content registrations on the platform in 2023. The NetLine research is particularly valuable for two reasons.

First, it captures the real-world consumption behaviors of business professionals. The data used for the report was not derived from surveys or interviews but from actual engagements with B2B content.

And second, the report is based on first-party data. The business professionals who use the NetLine platform voluntarily share information about themselves and the organizations they work for in exchange for access to the content resources available on the platform.

For these reasons, the report contains a wealth of detailed information about content consumption behaviors, and I encourage you to review the full 38-page report.

Here are a few highlights from the report.

Content Consumption Continues Rising

As measured by registrations on the NetLine platform, overall B2B content consumption in 2023 increased by 14.3% compared to 2022 levels. NetLine's data shows that the total demand for B2B content has grown by 77% since the 2019 edition of the research. Content consumption by C-level executives is also still on the rise, growing by 7% year-over-year.

It's not surprising that demand for content about artificial intelligence exploded in 2023. The consumption of content relating to AI by NetLine registrants increased 5.5x year-over-year, and NetLine expects demand for AI content in 2024 will increase 1.9x over last year.

Most Popular Content Formats

The ten most requested content formats in 2023 were:

1. eBooks
2. Guides
3. Cheat Sheets
4. White Papers
5. Research Reports
6. Tips & Tricks Guides
7. Articles
8. Book Summaries
9. On-Demand Webinars
10. Live Webinars 

Collectively, these ten content formats accounted for 87% of all content registrations last year, and eBooks alone were 39.5% of total registrations. 

The Consumption Gap Widens

One of the more useful insights provided by the report relates to the consumption gap, which NetLine defines as the time between the moment content is requested and the moment it's opened for consumption. This data point is important because it provides a guide for timing follow-up contacts with potential buyers. After all, it makes little sense to contact a potential buyer about a content resource before he or she has reviewed the content.

In 2023, the average consumption gap was 31.2 hours, up from 28.7 hours in 2022. The consumption gap has varied over the past several years. The largest gap ever recorded by NetLine was 33.3 hours in 2021, while the smallest was 27.1 hours in 2018. The lesson here is that you should wait at least two days before you try to follow up with people who have viewed, listened to, or downloaded your content.

Content Consumption and Buyer Intent

For the past few years, NetLine's research has suggested that the content format a potential buyer chooses to consume is a good indicator of readiness to buy. In the latest analysis, NetLine identified six content formats that are more likely to be associated with a buying decision over the next year - playbooks, case studies, trend reports, analyst reports, white papers, and live webinars.

One format that is notably absent from this list is eBooks. Despite being the most frequently requested type of content last year, eBooks were not strongly associated with shorter-term purchase intention. This shouldn't be surprising because most eBooks are designed to appeal primarily to potential buyers who are in the early stages of the buying process.

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The NetLine report contains several other valuable findings, and I recommend you take the time to read the full report.

Is B2B Marketing Fulfilling Its Revenue Growth Mandate?

Many B2B company leaders now expect marketing to drive revenue growth, and B2B marketing has evolved in response to this expectation. But has it changed enough to meet the revenue growth mandate? Data from "The CMO Survey" suggest that more change may be needed.

Marketing has always played the starring role in driving revenue growth in the B2C world, but marketing was not viewed as a principal driver of revenue growth in most B2B companies until a few years ago. Sales typically owned the revenue line of the income statement, and marketing's main job was to support the salesforce.

This started to change in the early 2000s with the appearance of B2B marketing automation software applications, which enabled marketing to take responsibility for a larger portion of the B2B buying process.

During the second decade of the 2000s, driving revenue growth became the "prime directive" of the marketing function in many B2B companies. In a 2016 survey of CMOs and other senior marketing leaders by the CMO Council and Deloitte, 33% of the respondents said the senior executives and board members of their company saw revenue growth as the primary mandate of marketing.

More recent research shows that the revenue growth mandate is still present.

• A 2023 survey of CEOs by Boathouse asked respondents to identify the top five problems they wanted marketing to help them solve. The two problems most frequently selected by the respondents were "create new customers, retain existing customers, drive revenue growth" and "drive sales and grow market share."

• In a 2021 survey of marketing leaders by the CMO Council and Televerde, 63% of the respondents said they were under very high or extreme pressure to deliver on revenue targets.

Given the obvious importance of the issue, it's appropriate to ask whether B2B marketing leaders have fully embraced the growth challenge and altered their activities to meet that challenge. There's no question B2B marketing has changed in response to the revenue growth mandate. The question is:  Has it changed enough?

Data from "The CMO Survey" can be used to help answer this question. "The CMO Survey" is a semi-annual survey of senior marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies that's been conducted since 2008. It's directed by Dr. Christine Moorman and sponsored by Deloitte LLP, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, and the American Marketing Association.

In every edition of the survey, respondents have been asked to identify activities and functions that marketing is primarily responsible for in their company. Many of these activities and functions contribute to or impact revenue growth. Therefore, how survey respondents answer this question can indicate the extent to which marketing has taken - or has been given - primary responsibility for driving revenue growth.

The survey includes responses from both B2B and B2C marketers. However, one of the survey reports (the "Firm and Industry Breakout Report") makes it possible to isolate the responses from B2B marketers, and the following analysis is based on those responses.

The tables below are based on data from the Spring 2024 edition and the February 2020 edition of the survey. The Spring 2024 edition was released only a few days ago and therefore provides the latest available data. I used the February 2020 edition for comparison purposes because that was the last edition conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The following table shows the ten activities and functions that were identified as marketing-led by a majority of the 2024 survey respondents. The table also shows the percentages of respondents who identified these activities or functions as marketing-led in the 2020 edition of the survey.

The following table shows the same information for the 15 activities and functions that less than a majority of the 2024 survey respondents said marketing is primarily responsible for in their company.

These survey findings suggest that marketing's scope of responsibility has not significantly expanded beyond marketing communications activities in most B2B companies. More importantly, these findings indicate that marketing isn't leading many activities and functions that play essential roles in revenue growth. Consider the following points.

First, only about a third (35.7%) of the 2024 survey respondents said marketing is primarily responsible for revenue growth in their company. 

Second, seven of the ten activities that a majority of the 2024 respondents said marketing is primarily responsible for (shown in red in the first table) are essentially communications activities. These are necessary for revenue growth, but they are not all that's required.

Lastly, less than half of the 2024 respondents said that marketing is primarily responsible for the following activities or functions:

• Customer Insight (47.9%)
• Competitive Intelligence (47.1%)
• Customer Experience (37.1%)
• Market Entry Strategies (32.1%)
• New Products or Services (28.6%)
• Market Selection (21.4%)

All these activities or functions are essential for successful revenue growth initiatives, yet they still aren't within the purview of marketing at most B2B companies.

These survey findings should prompt B2B marketing leaders to consider whether they are sufficiently involved in all the activities that are vital for developing successful revenue growth initiatives and programs.

Top image courtesy of Ryan Milani via Flickr (CC).