Is Your Tech Company Keeping Pace with Content Marketing?

Although our country’s technology hub is in Silicon Valley, the influence of tech companies both big and small are far-reaching and ever-present.

The world of content marketing is no exception as more and more tech companies, whether they’re behemoths or startups, realize and harness the power of top-notch content.

I’ve covered the Content Marketing Institute’s research in the past, including their B2C and B2B reports. Here, I’ll be going over their recent “2018 Technology Content Marketing” report and reviewing the findings it contains. Let’s get started.

Who Are the Tech Companies?

In this report, 274 for-profit technology companies are represented. The majority of those companies are midsize (100-999 employees) and made between $1 million and $1 billion in 2016.

Content Marketing IRL

Let’s get an inside look at how content marketing is used within tech companies.

Percentage of Tech Respondents Who Use Content Marketing

Content marketing is no niche practice: a whopping 96 percent of tech companies now use content marketing.

Tech Companies’ Content Marketing Maturity Level

Additionally, content marketing is far from being new to the tech world. The majority of companies (35 percent) rate their content marketing maturity level as being “mature,” meaning that they have found success with content marketing but have not yet integrated it seamlessly across their organization.

Content Marketing In-House Team Structure

Within tech companies, most content marketing departments are likely to consist of a small or one-person team that serves the entire organization, with a centralized content marketing group coming in second.

Content Marketing Outsourcing

When it comes to outsourcing, more than half of tech companies have their content created by outside organizations. That is to say, most of the content being produced for tech companies is not created in-house.

Where Content Marketing Goes, Success Follows

Content marketing isn’t just an abstract concept–it generates measurable success.

Commitment to Content Marketing

Even tech companies need words–computers might communicate with numbers, but humans (read: customers) communicate with language. Thus, it’s not surprising that the vast majority of tech companies are either very or extremely committed to content marketing.

Success of Organizations’ Content Marketing Approach

Further, an impressive 81 percent of tech companies rate their content marketing approach as being either moderately, very or extremely successful.

Content Marketing Success Then and Now

The success of content marketing in the tech industry isn’t stagnating, either–68 percent of companies rate their content marketing approach as being either somewhat or much more successful than it was one year ago.

Factors for Success

The top three reasons for that success were higher-quality and more efficient content creation, strategy development or adjustment and improved content distribution.

A Solid Strategy

As Jessica has explained before, many elements need to come together to form a comprehensive content strategy.

Tech Marketers’ Content Strategy

In the tech world, 43 percent of companies have a documented content strategy, while 34 percent have an undocumented strategy.

Content Marketing Technologies

When it comes to managing content marketing efforts, tech companies use a variety of digital technologies, with analytics tools being by far the most popular.

Creation and Distributions

Developing a high-quality content strategy is only half the battle–companies must then tackle the creative process itself.

What’s Considered During Content Creation

While creating content, tech companies focus on ensuring that their content is credible, considering how their content will impact a person’s experience with their organization and creating content for their audience.

Project Management Flow

This seems to be working for most companies, since 72 percent rate their project management flow as being good or better.

Content Types Used

In terms of the types of content that tech companies prefer, social media posts, case studies and ebooks/white papers are the most commonly used.

The Most Effective Content Types

Which of those types are the most effective? According to the most successful tech companies, the answer is ebooks/white papers, case studies and research reports. Notice that the least successful companies swapped out research reports for videos.

Formats of Distribution

To distribute their content, nearly 100 percent of tech companies use email, while 91 percent use social media platforms and 89 percent use blogs.

Interestingly, both the most successful and least successful companies find email, blogs and webinars/webcasts/virtual events to be the most effective methods of distribution.

Social Platforms

When choosing social media platforms, most companies choose LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, which are also the three platforms that both the most successful and least successful companies find to be the most effective.

Talking Money

Money makes the world go round, and the same applies to the world of content marketing.

Content Marketing Budget

Excluding respondents who were unsure, 24 percent of tech companies spend between 10 and 24 percent of their overall marketing budget on content marketing.

Anticipated Content Marketing Spending

Over the course of the next year, 42 percent of companies expect to increase their content marketing budget, while an equal percentage expect their budget to remain the same.

What It Boils Down To

When we look at the Content Marketing Institute’s findings altogether, it’s clear that content marketing plays in integral part in the success of tech companies both big and small.

Overall, the most successful companies are those extremely or very committed to content marketing, have a mature or sophisticated project management flow and have a documented content marketing strategy.

At the end of the day, it’s essential that tech companies remember they’re selling their products and services to people, whether those people are consumers or other businesses. Whether you’re selling mobile games or self-driving cars, top-notch content is what you need to build your audience, generate leads and retain interest in your company.

If you’re part of the 56 percent of companies who want to outsource their tech content, check out bizbuzzcontent’s content creation services. In fact, we offer a suite of services specially tailored to suit the unique needs of SaaS providers and tech companies.

What do you think is the most important takeaway from this report? Let’s talk about it in the comments!