What Beer Taught Me About Content Marketing – Be the Most Interesting Man in the World

What do an imported beer and content marketing have in common?

Well, I just finished reading a great post by Junta42’s Joe Pulizzi, Are My Customers Interested in What I Have to Say? and one of the charts from the 2010 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends study in that post really jumped out to me.

Before we get too far into this, let’s take a step back as I think we can all acknowledge three things:

1). Content Marketing is Important

The study shows B2B marketers allocate approximately 26% of their total marketing budgets to content marketing initiatives and that 51% of B2B marketers plan to increase their spend in content marketing over the next 12 months

2). Content Marketing is Growing

According to the same study, investment in content marketing has been on the rise for each the last 3 years

3). Sometimes, Beer Commercials are Hilarious

Do I really need research to back this one up?

So, with those 3 things in mind, the chart I referenced earlier shows the results when B2B marketers were asked about their Biggest Content Marketing Challenge.

Biggest Content Marketing Challenge (click to enlarge)

This clearly indicates to me that many companies need to seek out the right help on one of the real basics – Be Interesting, Frequently.  This is where our friend the hilarious beer commercial comes in.  Yup, I’m talking about The Most Interesting Man in the World.

If the key to content marketing — and this is going to sound obvious – is having good content and enough of it, then it looks like a whole lot of folks (57%) are really finding this to be a huge challenge.  This, despite the fact that Budget (20%) and C-Level Buy-In (11%) didn’t crack the top 2, which means in many companies the budget and support is likely there for help.

Think again of our friend The Most Interesting Man in the World (“people hang on his every word, even the prepositions”) the next time you start your content creation process.

So whether it’s a blog post, an email newsletter, a video, an eBook, a white paper or any other form of content, it’s critical that you communicate your idea in an unbelievably engaging and memorable way, and do so regularly.

About Right Source:

The Marketing Trenches blog provides thought leadership from actual marketing practitioners, not from professional thought leaders. Designed to help business leaders make more educated marketing decisions, our insights come directly from our experience in the trenches. You can find more from Right Source on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn.