The buzz around Content Marketing is hard to miss. In fact, a new study from eConsultancy reports that 90% of respondents believe content marketing will increase in importance in the coming year.

However, the same report shows that only 38% of companies have a content marketing strategy in place.

Why the disconnect? 73% of digital marketers agree that brands are becoming publishers and 64% believe content marketing is becoming its own discipline (we'd argue that it always has been). Yet no strategy to support the effort? That's nuts!

Content marketing stratey has to begin with an objective. Yet the survey shows that even when an objective is set, only 2 of the top 6 content marketing objectives are directly related to revenue (#4 - Increased Sales, #6 Generate Leads).

In our book, content marketing is all about sales revenue. While it's important to increase engagement, site traffic, and brand awareness those objectives must be tied to sales or why bother.

- What good is engagement if it doesn't generate a sales lead?
- Why measure site traffic if you aren't using your web site drive sales?
- What does it matter if the world knows your brand but everyone buys from your competitor?

Today's metrics driven marketing means that every activity can be followed from contact to lead to sales and beyond. Don't use content marketing to increase your SEO results, use your SEO results to increase sales!

If you're adding content marketing to your mix this year, and you should be, be sure you understand why. If you aren't building your content marketing strategy to drive sales, our results show that you won't stay with it. Why not? Well, because you aren't seeing any bottom line benefit!!

By developing and following a specific content marketing strategy, business-to-business (B2B) marketers will find more success in every aspect of their marketing. 

This is just one of the key takeaways from B2B Content Marketing: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends–North America released this week by Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs.

Some other highlights that caught our eye:

• 58% of businesses rate their content marketing as ineffective.
• 1/3 of even the most effective content marketers don't have a documented content marketing strategy (89% of the least effective companies don't either).
• 73% of B2B companies are producing more content marketing than this they did a year ago.
• Confidence in content marketing is growing.
• The depth and breadth of social media used by B2B companies is growing.
• But only LinkedIn is rated as effective by more than 50% of respondents
• LeadGen trails only Brand Awareness among B2B marketing goals.

There is much more meat to this study. We suggest you check it out here:

Where could you improve your content marketing? Let us know in the comments section below!