According to the latest study by the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of business-to-business (B2B) companies are ramping up their content marketing spending for 2012. The study also found that:

• 90 percent of B2B companies are using some form of content marketing
  
• B2B companies will invest 26 percent of their total budgets on content marketing

The changes to Google Panda have made content marketing a necessity, particularly for B2B companies who need real content to get found in search results. Content marketing includes white papers and case studies, two things that are specialties of mine. If your B2B company is looking for a writer who can also research and interview, contact me. Your competition is already spending money on content marketing, so don't get left behind - or at the bottom of search results.

"May you live in interesting times" is considered to be an old Chinese curse. After all, "interesting," according to the American Heritage Dictionary, means "arousing or holding the attention; absorbing." Nothing in there says that "interesting" translates to "positive." Think of the last car accident you saw; most people slowed down and looked because it was interesting. 

Right now, we live in interesting marketing times. With the advent of social media, marketing seems to get squeezed down to 140-character Tweets and short Facebook updates. But B2B marketers know better. We know that B2B marketing can only use a little bit of this strategy, because our products are complex and require more explanation than a Tweet allows. Content marketing has surfaced as the answer to this conundrum: case studies, white papers, and blog entries are all ways that B2B marketers can cut through the clutter of short information bursts and provide a substantial amount of information to prospects and customers.

The key, then, is to leverage content to appeal to our prospects. We need to do the research on them, find out what their pain points are, and how we can solve them with our products and services. We need to look closely at their organizations to find out what is already working as well as what isn't working at all, and then we need to communicate our solutions clearly.

These are definitely interesting times for B2B marketers as we further split from B2C marketing tactics to appeal to our customers, some of whom still see Tweets and Facebook pages as frivolous and expect more from us. We'll rise to that challenge and provide content that answers their questions.