The Channel Institute partnered with Impertion, a channel-specific demand generation company, to discover what marketing content is most valued by business-to-business technology buyers. 

We received more than 300 fully completed responses from senior technology buyers. When asked to choose “Which educational content do you prefer to receive from technology vendors?” the results were in order of preference: 

1. Free trials 2. Demos 3. Videos 4. Calculators (ROI, TCO, etc) 5. How-to Guides 6. E-Books 7. Case Studies 8. Independent Research 9. White Papers 

The question was deliberately aimed at understanding the “Middle-of-the-funnel” i.e. the “Evaluation” phase in the Buyers Journey. The results show a clear preference for practical tools to help inform and evaluate. 

When asked for general feedback on what other content would be useful for business technology buyers to shortlist vendors, responses included: 

· Comparison sheets versus other vendors and solutions · Cloud environments for testing · Proof of concept workshops on real use cases, and VM workshops · Customer results statements · Implementation history. What was easy, what was difficult, how did we overcome the difficulties? · Free and independent assessments · Webinars · Online buyer reviews  

A recurring theme from the research was the skepticism that B2B technology buyers have in relation to vendor content and claims. This may be summed up by one respondent’s request for “The truth! Not the marketing angles where everything out there will reduce costs and improve revenues and profit". 

It is clear from the survey that credibility of content is top of mind for B2B technology buyers. Independence of source for marketing content is important, which is why they look to third party communities like CIOshared.com to find content and discuss both content and solutions with their peers.