The 2022 “Technology Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” report from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) is packed with revealing findings about the content goals of tech companies. For more than a decade, W2 Communications has committed to delivering the best content services for our high-tech clients, so the report arrives as “must read” material for us.
We’re very encouraged by the findings, as they illustrate how critical our content division is to our clients’ overall marketing strategies. In fact, 62 percent of technology firms outsource their content to proven professionals like us – up from 55 percent in 2020.
Yet, three-quarters of these businesses struggle to find a partner with adequate topic expertise. Our clients don’t encounter this issue because our content team brings seven decades of relevant experience, with a broad range of journalism/editorial, communications strategy, senior-level research and IT industry analyst backgrounds.
In addition to the outsourcing trends and challenges, CMI looked at how top-performing tech companies distinguish themselves. Here are highlights from that section of the report, along with how our agency supports these companies:
- 94 percent measure performance. Our digital marketing team mines vast volumes of data to build funnel models, provide dashboards and analyze metrics to assess whether the client “story” is making impact and achieving ROI goals.
- 90 percent value creativity and craft. Obviously, it’s not all about numbers. We realize that every client story is about discovery and innovation. So we collaborate with clients to “peel away the layers” and drive toward the most intriguing details about their customers’ challenges/pain points and how to resolve them, and then convey this in compelling narratives. We frequently tell these stories in unique and creative ways – with engaging analogies, pop culture references and plot lines – to separate them from the large sea of bland technology/cybersecurity content out there that all reads the same.
- 86 percent seek to build credibility/trust. As we’ve emphasized on this blog through the years, we are dedicated to an exhaustive level of research to establish a highly credible voice of authority. We’re also somewhat obsessive regarding vetting/fact-checking, which adds indispensable layers of trust.
- 83 percent prioritize audience needs over sales/promotional messaging. We are focused first and foremost on solving the targeted audience’s problems to position our clients as a respected industry thought leaders instead of businesses strictly looking to “sell things.”
At W2 Communications, we didn’t have to read the 2022 CMI report to learn about these trends. This is, after all, what we do. But it is certainly reassuring to continue to see the validation of the long-time vision of our founders/principals and team. If you’d like to know more about how we can take the often-onerous burden of content creation off of your hands – while bringing it to new levels of quality, creativity, impact and trust – then please contact us.