A new study from BtoB magazine and Junta42, a content marketing community search engine, found increased custom content spending from 150 marketing decision makers they surveyed during the last week of March, 2008.
The online survey of targeted BtoB magazine readers asked respondents how much of their marketing budget is spent on custom publishing; where they go to find information about custom publishing services; and how they source products and services to support custom publishing efforts.
Marketers identified 22 custom publishing products. The graph below shows the distribution of products used as part of their marketing.
Source: http://www.junta42.com/resources/Business_to_Business_Custom_Publishing_Research/
The study found that "42% of marketers increased their spending on customized content marketing activities in 2008. Only 12% decreased their content marketing spend, while 46% left their custom budgets unchanged."
44% of respondents are "unwilling to invest money identifying the best providers." While a majority use search engines and word of mouth when seeking qualified content providers and/or custom publishers to produce their content-based projects.
Discussion
By Henk Gianotten on Apr 23, 2008
The text belonging to the chart reads: "As a percentage, business marketers engage in the following customized content/custom publishing activities. Respondents were allowed to select as many activities that they currently produce as part of their marketing." So we now know that of these 150 respondents 44 use newsletters for employees, 10 of them publish an employee magazine and 26 even made a "print book". However this does not tell us how much is spend for the books, the magazines, the newsletters etc. Nice to know that 103 respondents make e-mail newsletters but that's simple compared to an employee magazine.
It would be great if you could make available more info on the costs of these products. It looks like a research report stating that only 1% of corporations use gravure, 18% web offset, 68% sheet offset and 99% digital print. The value of the 18% web offset is most probably higher than the (spending) value of the 99% digital print (users).
By Joe Pulizzi on Apr 24, 2008
Henk...thanks for the input. You are correct and I would have liked to have more on what they are spending on each. Really, what this tells us is that btob marketers are spending a lot of time and money on these activities as a whole (versus buying space), and that they are increasing investments in this area. Next time, our hope is to get more granular.
Keep them coming.
Joe Pulizzi
Junta42