Matt Heinz, President, Heinz Marketing INC.

It’s no secret that today’s buyers are overwhelmed. The average consumer experiences tremendous marketing fatigue, and with the proliferation of available marketing channels, content formats, and competition, buyers are bombarded from every angle—and the experience isn’t always a positive one. New research from Uberflip and Heinz Marketing has uncovered how today’s B2B marketing leaders utilize, manage and optimize content to accelerate the buyer’s journey, shorten sales cycles, and increase marketing’s impact on revenue. This presentation promised to deliver specific evidence and actionable advice to improve content’s revenue ROI for your organization. Initially, Cecily Strong from SNL was supposed to be in this time slot. However, as it is difficult to book celebrities, Matt Heinz gladly stepped in to fill her place and give us a dose of marketing genius. He immediately called out the elephant in the room, which is that it’s hard for anyone to follow a comedian. However, he made a conscious effort to include some themes and jokes from Saturday Night Live to lighten up the audience’s mood.

Key Insights

Content remains highly important for demand, but is widely ineffective

• 82% of marketing leaders agree that content is important to achieve their marketing goals
• 1 in 2 respondents believe their marketing is ineffective
• This is considering all platforms used to promote and direct leads to content (i.e., email marketing, social media, etc.)

Personalization is important for all marketing leaders but most efforts to personalize have not been executed effectively

• 72% of B2B marketers agree that it is important that their prospects receive personalized content
• Over 50% of marketers believe their personalization efforts have been ineffective

While all roads lead to content, the journey is often cut short

• 42% of marketers see good results by suggesting additional activities for a lead to take once they land on their site
• Unfortunately, the vast majority of respondents see mixed results and varied levels of implementation
• A whopping 20% of marketers don’t currently take any suggestions

Creating a digital content destination is challenging for marketing teams

• Only 1 in 2 marketing leaders say they are able to create landing pages, blog posts, web pages, and other digital content destinations easily
• 36% report they are able to create digital content, but doing so takes time and the help of IT
• 8% can’t create digital content, but would like to

Marketers crave better data to improve the ways they personalize content, create new content, and manage the entire content experience

• Data drives everything, yet it’s the third most deficient capability in today’s marketing programs
• 1 in 2 marketers wish to improve their current data capabilities
• 1 in 3 marketers wish to add new, greater capabilities

Key Takeaways

1. Today's marketing leaders are not only continuing but are accelerating the buyer journey with content
2. Effective and important content really is the number one priority across the board for marketing leaders in the financial, tech, healthcare and manufacturing industries and the biggest opportunity for B2B marketers