Most business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers are seeing improved results from content marketing and plan to increase their spend on it in the year ahead.

Some 55% of B2C marketers say their content marketing efforts are somewhat more successful compared with a year ago, and 29% say their efforts are much more successful.

Moreover, a majority (57%) of B2C marketers say they plan to boost their content marketing spend in 2019, with 28% expecting their content budget to increase 1%-9% and 29% expecting their content budget to increase more than 9%.

Where is all of that extra spend going to go? If recent history is any indication, largely toward content development and paying to reach audiences: Some 56% of marketers who increased their content marketing budget over the previous 12 months say they spent more on content creation and 37% say they spent more on paid distribution.

Those are among the insights from the just-published B2C Content Marketing 2019: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report from MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute. The companion report on business-to-business (B2B) content marketing was released in early October.

The B2C report, now in its seventh year, is based on data from a survey of 299 business-to-consumer marketers and is chock-full of useful information for firms planning their 2019 content marketing strategies and budgets.

Some additional key findings:

• Just 42% of B2C marketers rate their organization's content marketing maturity level as mature or sophisticated.
• Some 81% percent of B2C marketers say their organization is creating content that builds loyalty with existing clients/customers.
• Only one-third of B2C marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.
• Social media tops the list of paid methods B2C marketers use to distribute content.

B2C marketers who say their organizations are extremely/very committed to content marketing report a higher level of overall content marketing success compared with their less committed peers; they’re also more likely to report they’ve used content marketing successfully to reach goals, such as educating the audience and building customer loyalty.

Below, some selected chapter headings from the report and a chart from each of those chapters:

Success, Maturity, and Commitment

Strategy and Opinions