B2B marketers report that successful content marketing creates brand awareness, educates audiences and builds credibility, and it appears that in the first half of this year, engagement with B2B content has grown. Indeed, a report from PathFactory reveals that the average view time grew by 63% over H1 2020.
PathFactory’s data, which is based on content engagement data across the company’s entire customer base, indicates that view time is not the only engagement metric that saw year-over-year (y-o-y) growth in H1. The number of visitors increased by 55% y-o-y, while time spent per session (+47%) and unique assets viewed (+43%) also saw notable growth.
Although there has been some lift in areas such as average view time, average session time, and binge rate for unknown visitors, engagement with content remains the highest among known visitors. In fact, known visitors spent more than twice as much time per session than unknown visitors, while their binge rate was three times higher than unknown visitors.
ABM efforts have had a positive impact on marketing-generated revenue for many this year. PathFactory posits that due to ABM the average number of known visitors per account grew by 50% y-o-y.
Presentations See the Biggest Gains in Distribution
It’s not just engagement that has increased over the past year. Some 40% of assets in content libraries were created in the past year. This is compared to content that is 2-3 years old (27%) and 3 or more years old (33%).
While content such as brochures, data sheets and webpages have seen distribution drop this year, there was been a big leap in the distribution of presentations — up 63% over H1 last year. The distribution of guides (+32%) and whitepapers (+15%) also increased year-over-year during H1.
Presentations saw an increase of 24% y-o-y in the average view time, as well. However, it’s whitepapers that have seen the largest increase in view time this year. About half of B2B content marketers say that white papers have been a top-performing content type in the past 12 months. PathFactory’s data shows that whitepapers had a lift of 142% y-o-y in average view time.Â
The data also illustrates the difference between known and unknown visitors when it comes to preferred content types. Known visitors are spending the most time viewing webinars, best practices and webcasts, while unknown visitors spend the most time with solution notes, newsletters and how-tos.
Top Content Topics
PathFactory reveals that marketers added close to twice as many assets around the top 10 topics this year. Security, network security and the cloud saw the largest increases in content activation for the year.
Furthermore, with personalization a key priority, it’s one of the topics that had the most engagement during the year. Visitors spent an average of 15 minutes and 40 seconds consuming content about personalization this year, with only hospitality (17:26) and policy (16:42) seeing a higher average view time.
The full report can be found here.
About the Data: Findings are based on PathFactory content engagement data across its entire customer base.
