Cleveland—The average percentage of total b-to-b marketing budgets allocated to content marketing slipped slightly over the past year, to 30% from 33%, according to the newly released “2014 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America” from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. After jumping from 26% in the 2012 report to 33% in last year’s, the portion of the marketing budget dedicated to content marketing “has now settled firmly in between” at 30%, the most recent report said. However, 58% of b-to-b marketers said this year that they plan to increase their content marketing spending over the next 12 months, compared with only 54% last year. The average number of social media sites used by b-to-b marketers to distribute marketing content in the 2014 study rose to six from five last year, with LinkedIn reported as the platform used most (91%), followed by Twitter (85%) and Facebook (81%). According to the report, b-to-b content marketers were using all social media platforms more often this year than last year. For the fourth year, brand awareness was cited as the top organizational goal for b-to-b marketers (82%), followed by lead generation (74%) and customer acquisition (71%), the report said. The findings were based on electronic surveys of b-to-b marketers conducted in July and August across a variety of industries and company sizes; it yielded 1,217 responses in North America.