Today’s content marketers face tons of challenges. For starters, they have to create a lot of content. Most brands distribute unique content across email, blogs, general webpages, social media, and one-to-one marketing campaigns every day. They also have to manage a team of supporting content producers, usually with tools that aren’t equipped to scale (for example, a spreadsheet editorial calendar). Finally, they must prove content marketing ROI using data from multiple disjointed systems. And that ROI is a pretty significant investment: B2B content marketers surveyed by Content Marketing Inst ..read more

I work with a lot of content marketers in a lot of different organizations. While the businesses and messages are different, they all want to know the same thing: what is content marketing’s impact on sales? My answer is that content marketing’s influence permeates all aspects of the sales process throughout the buyers’ journey, though it may not always be obvious. With so much information available online, buyers are spending more time researching and becoming more informed before any conversation with a salesperson. Experts disagree on how much of the buying process occurs before a ..read more

A roundup of this week’s best content marketing content for content marketers.  1. Discover Hidden Backlink Opportunities This post from the Portent blog is a great how-to resource for discovering great backlink building or co-marketing opportunities hidden in your Google Analytics You should know the channels that drive tons of leads…While that’s great information, your boss will probably also know what’s obviously working. What we want are traffic sources that are unsung heroes in your marketing mix. See Also: Content Marketing Moneyball: The Secret Strategy to Data-Driven Content Suc ..read more

Marketers are just as in love with the permanent distraction machine—the Internet—as anyone else. (Probably more.) The availability of webinars, virtual events, social media discussions, Slack, and Google Hangouts is terrific. But when we step away from our screens, we still gain a lot of value from good old-fashioned in-person interactions at an event. As attendees, we get to build our networks, learn about our peers’ innovations, and find great new solutions to bring back to our organizations. As sponsors, meeting prospects and customers face-to-face is invaluable for creating strong relatio ..read more

These are our picks for the best content marketing articles, inspiration, and how-tos of the week. You could say it’s a roundup of the best content marketing content for content marketers (how meta).  1. Google Search Algorithm Explainer If you have a hard time keeping Panda, Penguin, and Pigeon straight, Brafton’s handy infographic is a good primer. Modern SEO attempts to establish high relevance in as many of Google’s ranking criteria as possible. What’s important to understand is that those criteria have changed since 2015, and SEO has changed with them. More than ever, they err ..read more

January is way too late to start making the resolutions that will shape your content marketing strategy in the year ahead. Here are six commitments that should be a part of any content marketing plan for 2018. 1. Find the time to go long. Analyze the data on content marketing influence and authority (as LinkedIn did in a groundbreaking recent study with Buzzfeed) and one finding is overwhelmingly clear: content gets more impactful and effective the longer it is. Blog posts over 1,000 words are far more effective than shorter posts. Over 2,000 words, effectiveness leaps up again. Why is this ..read more

Vogue runs this somewhat ridiculous video series called “73 Questions,” where they follow celebrities around their homes with a video camera while asking 73 rapid-fire questions. I suppose this gives the fans insight into both the celebrity’s decorating style as well as their inner lives. But don’t let my scorn fool you, because obviously I’ve watched it. During Taylor Swift’s “73 Questions,” the interviewer asked her, “What does creativity mean to you?” She answered, “Creativity is getting inspiration and having that lightning bolt moment and then having the hard work ethic to sit down at th ..read more

Today videos are ruling the digital marketing world. And that’s no surprise if we consider that, according to Cisco, in 2016 videos accounted for more than 70% of the internet traffic and the forecast suggests it will be up to 82% by 2021. But as videos offer a wide variety of content types, marketers should be very careful to identify their audience’s needs in order to hit the mark with the right video format. And how can you determine which type of video will be more effective? A good strategy is to focus on the buyer’s journey, this basically means to use a specific video format according t ..read more

Are the content marketing KPIs you use selling your work short? Are you struggling with how to better quantify content marketing’s impact on your organization, especially when it comes down to dollars? It’s okay to admit it; you’re definitely not alone. Content, although named king just a few years ago, now seems to be scrambling to make sure the emperor does, in fact, have clothes. So what’s the problem? The expectations for a content marketer’s areas of expertise have inflated in every direction. We’ve needed to evolve into masters of multiple formats as diverse as blog posts, whitepapers, s ..read more

Today’s content marketers face tons of challenges. For starters, they have to create a lot of content. Most brands distribute unique content across email, blogs, general webpages, social media, and one-to-one marketing campaigns every day. They also have to manage a team of supporting content producers, usually with tools that aren’t equipped to scale (for example, a spreadsheet editorial calendar). Finally, they must prove content marketing ROI using data from multiple disjointed systems. And that ROI is a pretty significant investment: B2B content marketers surveyed by Content Marketing Inst ..read more