Top Characteristics Of Successful B2B Content, October 2014 [CHART]

How do business executives feel about content marketing – and do their perspectives align with content marketers’ efforts? A recent study from the Economist Group developed in association with Peppercomm provides a host of fascinating insights, arguing that brand marketers are “missing the mark” by, well, marketing. It’s hard to argue that marketers engaging in content marketing should stop marketing, of course. The point, instead, is that content should not resemble a sales pitch; when asked the main reasons why content fails to change their perceptions, B2B audiences were most likely to report, by a significant margin, that it was because the content seemed more like a sales pitch than valuable information.

To connect with their audiences, content marketers should focus on creating content that gives a sense of the general, or widely held outlook, of industry peers, as executives tab this the type of content that has been most useful in helping them make an informed business decision. B2B audiences also find content that presents two sides of a complicated issue to be more useful to their decisions than content that confirms an idea they have about an aspect of a marketplace. Read the rest at MarketingCharts.