One of the more intriguing numbers for me in the brand-new, always-fascinating B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks/Budgets/Trends for 2014 is where online presentations fit in the list of tactics now being used by content marketers. (Kudos to Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs for fielding this study each year.)
63% of them say they’re using online presentations, putting online preso’s on the list of top ten tactics. That’s on a par with white papers (64%) and webinar/webcasts (62%), and well ahead of other well-worn tactics like research reports (44%), eBooks (34%), and podcasts (26%).
If there’s a downside to the report, it’s that marketers are split at the moment on whether online presentations are effective in their marketing mix, though that anxiety is reflected in content marketing tactics pretty much across the board. That’s a reflection, I think, of the newness of many of these tactics. And in fact, the usage/confidence gap is greatest in social media, with 87% using it but only 49% of those believing it’s effective (marketers are most uneasy about the effectiveness of Google+, Vine, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook).
So clearly there is work to do for those of us who believe in online presentations as a content marketing tool. Here are some of the things on the to-do list:
- bring marketers up to speed on the state of the art in online presentations — many are probably using older, less capable channels;
- help marketers get the most out of their online presentation platforms, by offering best practices, skills coaching, and the like; and
- expose the 37% of B2B marketers who are not using online presentations to the benefits of doing so — especially the ability to create lots of interactive video content quickly from assets and talent that already exists in just about every organization.
That last point is even more salient because of what this research says about the challenges that marketers most face: lack of time, producing enough content, producing enough content, and lack of budget. Online presentations address all of these concerns.
At OnlinePresentations.com, we’re going to rise to the challenge of improving the position of online presentations in the Top 10. We will measure our success with marketers, in part, by whether we can help increase that 63% and improve the confidence levels even more.
The entire study has been put into an online presentation on SlideShare, and is embedded below. I’m looking forward to seeing if the folks at CMI or MarketingProfs give us their commentary by creating a narrated online presentation as well!
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