Love them or hate them, buyer personas are key to creating successful marketing strategies and effective content. By understanding the needs, wants, and behaviors of your ideal customers, you can tailor your messaging and campaigns to better resonate with them.

But here’s the catch: Developing buyer personas requires research, analysis, and attention to detail.

The good news is that if you’re willing to invest the effort, the result will yield a powerful tool in your content toolbox.

Even marketers at tech companies don’t have an edge when it comes to content management technology.

Slightly more than one in four (28%) say they have the right tech to manage content across the organization. But most haven’t acquired the right tech (29%) or have the tech but aren’t using its potential (32%). (And 11% aren’t sure about it all.)

That’s one of the findings in CMI’s newly released Technology Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2023. Sponsored by Foundry, an IDG, Inc. company, the survey encompasses responses from 278 tech marketers in our July 2022 content marketing questionnaire.

It’s common wisdom among marketers that most long-form content should be, at most, mildly promotional.

The goal is to help the reader or prospect. Then, prospects will gradually come to see the company as expert at solving their problems, and they’ll sign up for a demo or reach out for a discovery call. That is how long-form content grows businesses.

But not all marketing content should be nonpromotional. The question is, then, How promotional should each marketing content asset be? How do companies figure out the proper level of promotion across their content marketing mix?