While businesses may currently not be using digital channels to their full potential to generate sales leads and orders, 93 percent of Marketo's survey respondents indicated they want to increase their use of digital channels over the next 12 months. In fact, 56 percent state lead generation via digital channels is a primary objective for the year ahead. In addition, 52 percent of businesses want to convert more actionable business via their website. Therefore B2B companies are taking inbound marketing seriously, increasing budgets and assigning dedicated employees to content, but most are still in the early stages of full adoption. (Corroborated by HubSpot research (2)).

What are the issues UK enterprises and businesses are particularly interested in?

Buyer behavior - B2B prospects and customers are now much further along the buying cycle when they first engage with a business. This is evident by the fact that 43 percent of Sitecore respondents said their prospects are 'very well informed' or 'well informed' when they first interact with one of their sales representatives. Buyers will now ensure that they always do their homework about a business before engaging sales. These findings support well-documented research about the increasing power of the B2B buyer, who is less reliant on traditional sales engagement in the early stages of the buying cycle.

Websites are the main source of information; respondents indicated web pages that attracted the most online traffic were those that related to details about products/ services (60 percent), 'About us' pages (44 percent) and case studies/testimonials (40 percent). The fact that B2B buyers are consulting company websites demonstrates the growing practice of self-education by B2B buyers. The question arises whether B2B brands need to embrace a more differentiated, engaging and solution-based approach to their proposition and its content.

In terms of how businesses measure the success of their web content, leads captured proved the most popular metric, cited by 38 percent of respondents. However, the number of website visitors alone did not prove a particularly important metric, and general 'engagement' was only cited by 15 percent of those surveyed as a key metric to determine if content is a success. This suggests that moving beyond simple clicks and download metrics, and moving to measuring the value of a visitor's engagement with the website, is becoming more important. 'Downloads' scored 13 percent and 'shares' was opted by just 3 percent of respondents.

B2B marketers need to work on how to engage the visitor more effectively and how to work towards a 'conversion' goal, such as providing contact details, downloading relevant content.

So, returning to the question of how the UK compares to the US. The issues are the same. In both the UK and US, inbound budgets outpace outbound budgets by 16 percent, and inbound budgets in the UK actually outpace the equivalent inbound budget in the US by 4 percent!

But, as in the US, it is the content marketers who have documented content strategies that are more effective, and face fewer content marketing challenges overall. (Sources: (1) Marketo State of Content 2014, (2) HubSpot's State of European Inbound Marketing, (3) Sitecore; Digital Marketing and the New Buying Process)