Originality is Content Marketers’ Greatest Challenge.

Content marketing continues to inch up in importance for business-to-business firms, according to research from content curation platform Curata.

The company’s “B2B Marketing Trends 2012 Report” found that 87% of US B2B marketers have used content marketing this year—the most popular tactic of any queried. That was up 5 percentage points from usage levels in 2011, impressive considering the already-high level of interest in content marketing.

But doing it well is another story. Among those using content marketing, 57% used content curation specifically as part of their strategy. And just 43% of those respondents said their content curation programs had been successful by the standards they had chosen to measure them. On the other hand, another 43% said they didn’t even attempt to measure their programs’ success.

The biggest challenge for content marketing as a whole, according to the survey, was simply creating original content—something that will come as no surprise to those tasked with writing or designing creative. Finding the time for content marketing was also a problem for nearly two-thirds of respondents.

The popularity of content marketing appears clear, especially among B2Bs. And measurement is undoubtedly improving as programs become more sophisticated and the marketers executing content strategies become more experienced with them. But devoting the energy to creating and executing original, valuable content will be a precursor to any other successes on the content marketing front.

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