Introduction

Content Marketing Statistics: Content marketing is a smart way for modern-day businesses to connect with their audience by sharing helpful and interesting content. Instead of directly selling products or services, this marketing strategy focuses on providing value to customers. This strategy uses blogs, videos, social media posts, and other formats to inform, educate, or entertain people.

The goal is to build trust, improve brand awareness, and encourage customer loyalty over time. Good content marketing answers customer questions, solves problems, and creates a strong connection with the audience. Businesses use this approach to stand out in a crowded market and drive more sales. In today's digital world, content marketing has become an essential tool for engaging audiences and cost-effectively growing businesses.

In the United States, ********** of business-to-business (B2B) buyers look for products online before purchasing them, a 2023 survey revealed. Regardless of where the purchase is finalized, online channels are key in the product discovery phase. ** percent of surveyed B2B buyers browsed online marketplaces like Amazon while over ********* of respondents checked online adverts.

According to a study executed in late 2021, content development was the leading business-to-business marketing strategy for 2022, as ** percent of responding B2B companies placed it among their top three marketing areas to invest in over the following year. Mentioned by ** percent and ** percent of companies respectively, website/SEO marketing and digital media advertising followed in second and third position. In contrast, **** percent of respondents planned to make traditional media advertising one of their main investments.

Digitalization of the selling process was the area most heavily invested in by B2B companies in Germany in the first quarter of 2023. Around ** percent of companies invested in content marketing.
Importance of B2B investments
E-commerce is a fast-paced market, so companies must constantly invest to maximize their profits. Around ** percent of B2B companies in Germany expected their online revenue to either stay stable or increase in the upcoming months. Therefore, it is logical that these companies are investing heavily in the digitalization of the selling process and social media, since a smoother customer experience often results in higher revenues. The main points of focus for B2B businesses when it came to investing in their online stores were SEO/SEA, relaunching/ replatforming, and product data maintenance. SEO and SEA are different methods of ensuring that a website scores higher in search engine results, so the customers easily find it. This is an important investment because more traffic on the website increases the chances of purchases being made, which, of course, leads to higher revenues.
Are marketplaces a must?
Traditionally, marketplaces were used to describe a square or area in which a market was held. Vendors would come and sell their merchandise together in different towns each day, providing the residents a one-stop shop to buy various necessities. Nowadays, marketplaces typically refer to online sites such as Amazon or eBay. The principle, however, is very similar to that of the traditional marketplace, with small and large companies all selling their products on the same site. Many people turn to websites such as these to find products they need, which means that companies who only sell products on their own site are missing out on this consumer base