METRICS & GOALS hree out of four respondents (75%) said their organization measures “WORK-FROM-HOME FORCED US TO DO MORE WEBINARS INSTEAD Tcontent performance. Those who measure said website engagement OF LIVE EVENTS, WHICH ENDED UP INCREASING OUR ACTUAL (69%), conversions (67%), website traffic (65%), and email engagement AUDIENCE 10X. AND NOT A JUNK AUDIENCE EITHER, BUT A (64%) provided the most insight into B2B content performance in the last RELEVANT AUDIENCE THAT WE WEREN’T REACHING BEFORE.” 12 months. The most successful surpass their peers in several key areas According to one respondent, “The pandemic has made it possible to Regarding goals, all respondents were using content marketing show the longer-term ROI of each content investment as we focused on successfully to create brand awareness. The most successful stood apart optimizing, improving, and distributing content we already had to increase in three key areas: engagement AND conversions across the buyer journey.” • Building loyalty with existing clients and customers (78% vs. 60%) And while leads didn’t provide the highest levels of insight, numerous • Nurturing subscribers/audiences/leads (64% vs. 49%) respondents mentioned that the number of leads was down, but lead • Generating sales/revenue (57% vs. 42%) quality had improved: For more ways the top performers stood out, see page 38. “Work-from-home forced us to do more webinars instead of live events, which ended up increasing our actual audience 10x. And not a junk audience either, but a relevant audience that we weren’t reaching before.” “Before COVID, 50% of our leads came from in-person events. We’ve had to double down on focusing on email marketing, SEO, SEM, and emails. Things are slower, yes, but the quality of leads is quite high.” 34