The content boom: budgets up, volume surging, AI leading the charge

Content production is accelerating at a pace that’s outstripping expectations, fueled by expanding channels and AI innovations:

• Rising budgets: Over 80% of organizations plan to increase content and creative budgets in the near future, up from 70% in 2024. Notably, 29% expect significant increases, a jump from 19% in 2023.
• Volume explosion: 82% of teams reported higher content output last year, with 27% seeing significant growth. AI is the primary driver, with 75% of professionals saying it has boosted volume—30% significantly.
• Evolving ROI metrics: Success is measured through a mix of engagement (40%), brand awareness (38%), conversions/lead gen (38%), and sales revenue (38%). ROI is improving, with 28% reporting significant gains (up from 19% last year).

Teams with mature workflows are reaping the rewards, being 3x more likely to see substantial ROI. This underscores the need for investments in AI, automation, and centralized systems to handle the surge without sacrificing quality.

Content operations: maturity matters, fragmentation hurts

Operational challenges persist, but top performers are addressing them head-on. Canto’s report highlights persistent pain points like keeping up with content demands (40%) and managing volume (36%), but also shows progress in tech adoption.

• Workflow maturity: Only 43% have advanced, standardized workflows, but these teams report 48% significant ROI increases compared to 0% for those with ad-hoc processes.
• Improvement tactics: 51% are using AI for creation, tagging, and organization; 41% are enhancing cross-team collaboration; and 36% are introducing automation to cut manual work.
• AI’s role in efficiency: Widespread AI users find maintaining brand consistency extremely easy (49% vs. 6-9% for non-users).

High-ROI teams prioritize automation (47%), templates (45%), and asset distribution (33%), proving that streamlining operations directly boosts returns.

Digital Asset Management: centralization is key to avoiding chaos

Fragmented asset storage, a persistent problem, remains a major drag, with most teams using multiple systems like cloud storage (62%) and DAM solutions (47%). The consequences are clear:

Only 35% are very confident employees use up-to-date brand assets, meaning most perceive that colleagues in sales, product management, customer service and the broader marketing team are using dated, often inaccurate materials which exposes their brands to numerous risks.

In contrast, DAM users report smoother operations, and those unifying assets with product content see 4x higher ROI gains.

For product-focused teams, accuracy is critical: 88% struggle with consistency across channels, but centralized approaches reduce duplication and improve access.

Tech stack optimization: closing gaps for better scale

Content teams lose time on manual tasks, with 22% prioritizing AI automation and 21% better search/retrieval. Core capabilities like analytics (43%) and standardized workflows (41%) are established in many organizations, but only 24% have fully optimized stacks.

Teams with strong ROI excel in AI tools (59%), analytics (50%), and automated tagging (42%). As stacks mature, expect more focus on integration to eliminate silos.

AI throughout the lifecycle: from analysis to personalization

AI is embedded across operations, with top uses in performance analysis (41%), SEO optimization (40%), and tagging (39%). High-ROI teams apply it more broadly, especially in personalization (41%) and discovery (43%).

Looking ahead, teams want AI for streamlining reviews (38%), smart search (36%), and reuse recommendations (35%). Adoption is at 77%, with 81% confident in AI’s accuracy for tagging—higher among heavy users.

What this means for your marketing strategy

The report paints a clear picture: success in 2026 hinges on operational maturity. Fragmented systems fuel burnout, waste and magnify risks, while AI-driven, centralized approaches unlock speed, consistency, and ROI. If your team is stuck in manual workflows or siloed assets, now’s the time to audit and optimize.

I help businesses in Tasmania and beyond implement these strategies— from AI integration to DAM setups. If you’re ready to scale your content operations, let’s talk. Download the full Canto report here to dive deeper. Let’s turn these insights into action for your business.

Great marketing hinges on storytelling. It’s about connecting with your audience on an emotional level, weaving a tale that resonates with their aspirations and values. A product might catch the eye, but a compelling story captures the heart. Whether it’s the legacy of a sports icon or the journey of your brand, the story you tell transforms a simple sale into a memorable experience.

So, regardless of welling you are selling a physical product, a service or your mission for the team, ask yourself: what story am I telling? It’s the narrative that drives loyalty and leaves a lasting impression

Unfortunately, just 28% of respondents reported having achieved their objectives in the current survey. That’s not good enough. The case for incremental improvement has never been weaker than it is today with the pandemic disrupting our business world forever. Those that not only survive but thrive will be orchestrating leaps forward in the coming months and years, with marketing in the lead.

Thanks to the pandemic we are all moving rapidly to a digital world, where business, especially business-to-business activity, happens wherever people are.

Businesses who did not have their digital platform acts together were especially vulnerable during the pandemic-stricken 2020. They struggled to facilitate online commerce efficiently and with the ease. Their vision,  leadership, data, people, process and system silos and deficiencies were exposed by the transparent front door that is their web presence.

Critically, today’s B2B customers know what good looks like thanks to their own personal commerce experiences with the leading B2C brands. In 2021 all B2B players, must fast forward their digitisation ambitions with their marketers playing decisive roles. 

Today, no matter what industry you are in, it’s not enough to simply promote your brand and make, market and sell a product or service. You need a digital community marketplace. An integrated, self-service, collaboration environment (web + commerce + marketing automation + CRM + analytics and ERP) where you customers interact, buy (ideally, subscribe), share, engage and learn from one another. 

In this transformational climate, now, more than ever, we marketers must step up and lead. Marketers have to exercise genuine customer-focused influence and advocacy both horizontally and vertically across their organisations.

It means, for example, embracing service, supply chain and transaction management as the new marketing. There is little value in assembling and advertising blue sky brand promises if your supply chain is not close to best in class, if your customer service team is an island and your ERP landscape is a patchwork of dinosaur legacy systems with 20th century DNA. 

The Green Hat report highlights, the despite progress on many fronts, marketing must speed up.

Planning, publishing, distributing and measuring content are collective, connected challenges that modern marketing teams must master.

The proliferation of channels represents a massive burden for marketers. They cannot be effectively serviced manually by expecting marketers to engage in heroic efforts, with the aid of Excel.

Gartner says that “by 2020, 90% of brands will practice at least one form of marketing personalization. However, content — not data — will be the bottleneck and primary cause of failure”.

And Gartner also says that by 2021, the term “content marketing will be defunct as all marketing content rises to high-quality expectations of attention-limited audiences”.

“The aim is to unite and focus buyer engagement through valuable content, delivered across thousands of assets and channels where it expresses itself,” Gartner .

“Content Marketing Platforms are the ideal channel-agnostic environments to tag and apply structure to content; thus, they create a de facto unified back-end to fragmented channel experiences.

“This extends to reporting, as many B2B marketers integrate their CMP with a marketing automation platform or CRM system to link content consumption with specific buyer profiles or target accounts.”

Forrester defines a CMP as a “a solution that helps marketing teams collaborate on a content strategy, orchestrate the numerous, concurrent streams of activity by content creators, curators, and distributors inside and outside of the company, and optimize downstream cross-channel distribution to key audiences”.

Forrester says, “if content is digital’s soul, then a CMP is the church”.

A CMP enables teams to transition to some form of agile marketing (light, medium or heavy, depending on the appetite for change and the business need to accelerate the generation and distribution of better quality content more often).

Given this dynamic, I was happy to participate in a recent webinar hosted by Australian content player Simple (they call their solution a Marketing Resource Management application) and the Australian Marketing Institute.

On June 20, together with Simple’s Sara Gonzalez, marketing capability expert Rachel Rohrlach and Simple’s product chief Michael McKerlie we discussed a Simple-AMI report which found that most marketers are struggling to meet basic brand governance expectations.

A significant majority (59%) of marketers reported that responsibility for managing the customer experience now rested with the chief marketing officer or marketing team at their organisation, according to the study, Marketing Resource Management in the Age of Intelligence.

The research showed marketers, hampered by the use of static tools to manage increasingly fluid processes, are struggling to obtain a big-picture view of marketing activities in areas such as planning, budgeting, governance and workflow:

• Only 13% easily monitor their spending against budget
• Just 10% say their primary planning tool provides an up-to-date view of their marketing plan
• 51% don’t monitor their marketing process at all
• And astoundingly, 41% have no formal process to manage compliance and governance issues.

Check out the webinar at the AMI site with this email address: simple@simple.io.

Simple and its competitors are addressing the fundamental question of how can marketing claim to own the customer experience if their upstream planning, production, distributor and brand governance is not aligned and flowing?

Best-in-class B2B marketers are doubling down on marketing automation and performance metrics, according to the 2016 B2B Marketing Outlook Survey conducted by the leading digital marketing agency Green Hat and developed in conjunction with ADMA (Association for Data-Driven Marketing & Advertising).

Overall, budgets are on the rise. Of the 448 participants, 40% said their dollars are moving up. In comparison, 9% said their numbers were heading south.

However, the perennial problem of lead follow-up remains, with only 36% stating that their marketing-sourced leads were being effectively followed up their sales organisations.

I joined ADMA CEO Jodie Sangster, Telstra Wholesale’s Marketing GM Glenn Flower and Green Hat’s CEO Andrew Hausegger for an engaging discussion on the survey’s results:

Watch the Webinar Recording

This means, for example, that if $1 million is invested in content creation, then $660,000 is wasted as the assets either cannot be found or are irrelevant as they do not meet customer needs and/or are unusable because they are either inaccurate or obsolete. Smart B2B marketers are recognizing that this structural problem must be addressed. SiriusDecisions challenges marketers to truly understand the external and internal costs of content creation. The outcome can confidently be predicted to be what Sirius describes as a BSN (Big Scary Number). Sirus says:

• The majority of B2B content creation is done internally across functions, representing a huge blind spot in the marketing budget
• Most B2B organizations have a hunch they’re wasting money on content creation, but have no ability to capture the total spend − never mind analyze waste
• It’s impossible to even begin to think about return on investment without having a good handle on what the investment truly is

In the face of these realities we must commit to making systematic the production, distribution and analysis of marketing content, whilst increasing productivity, delivering measurable results and reducing organizational friction. This means changing the way we commission, produce, manage, deploy and maintain content. An integrated, efficient content operation enabling effective, transparent and accountable marketing is essential.

It makes good business sense to invest into a dedicated B2B content engine application featuring content galleries and a centralised marketing calendar, which enables marketers to map content to customer personas and buying stages and develop workflow templates to accelerate content production. Content galleries and calendars when embedded in an integrated sales-and-marketing front-end environment (CRM + marketing automation and web content management) enhance relevancy, drive utilization and influence revenue.

Marketers have long needed a genuine strategic platform designed to target each content asset for a specific buyer persona at a specific stage in the buyer’s journey. It makes a profound difference, in an accountability and transparency context, if a content object is visible to all collaborators via a content dashboard and becomes part of our workflow in a calendar format, identifying due dates for content assets and campaigns.

The ability to distribute content to all channels with a click of a button is both a time saver and an amplifier. For example, sales people, with sales collateral galleries embedded in CRM, are able to easily post to their Linkedin connections our approved content. A sophisticated content engine aggregates performance metrics and displays them in one place, including links earned and conversions. Website, marketing automation and CRM integration, means you can score content performance based on its sales funnel impact. Critically, a content marketing platform must answer the pivotal content questions:

• It is relevant?
• Is being utilised by sales and marketing?
• Is it effective? Is it resonating with customers and influencing revenue generation & retention?

These foundation revenue metrics are our ultimate engagement indicators. Genuine creativity will always be an essential ingredient in the marketing mix, but we need to measure and understand if it is driving revenue or not. If not, what do we change? What do we do more of? The performance data will give us the confidence to experiment and fail more often and get better faster.

This was my takeway after contributing to the panel discussion at the Melbourne session of marketing guru Jay Baer’s Sitecore-sponsored ANZ tour last month.

If your target is “too busy” to return calls and/or respond to email traffic, then you are not sufficiently relevant.

Jay’s high concept is “Youtility”, marketing he describes as “so useful people would pay tor it”. He says we have to be prepared to “embrace the power of eventuality”. “Relationships come together over time, typically these are micro interactions,” Jay says. “Eventuallity” may be the right way forward, but it requires a high degree of organisational and cultural maturity and patience.

Here are Jay’s principal bullet points:

• Audience attention is fragmented
• Marketing and customer service has converged
• Marketing is now a spectator sport
• Stop trying to be amazing and start being useful
• If you are useful, your customers will keep you close
• Stop aiming at “top-of-mind” awareness and move to “friend-of-mind” awareness
• Relationships must be based on trust and value
• Smart marketing is about help not hype
• From friction to research
• We hyper research everything because we can
• 67% of the B2B purchase process is conducted online – Sirius Decisions
• Relationships are created with info first and people second
• If people have to call you to buy from you, you are doing it wrong
• The better you teach the more you will sell
• It is way easier to get caught now. The truth will always come out.
• Trust is the filter through which all business success must pass
• Differentiate with transparency
• Humanity is the ultimate trust builder
• 92% trust recommendations from friends and family. 47% trust advertising – Nielsen
• Don’t’ just change the message – change the messenger