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03/13/2014

The Day in the Life of a Content Marketer

Congratulations! You have officially entered the world of content marketing—a world rife with editorial calendars, social media platforms, inbound/outbound marketing campaigns, SEO metrics, demand generation… or have you? For starters, do you even know how to define “demand generation?” Do you even have a documented content strategy in place?

The reality is that while many top-level marketers claim to “walk the walk and talk the talk” when it comes to content marketing, a vast majority are merely only wading in the content marketing pool—rather than diving in head first. Need proof? While 93 percent of B2B marketers and 90 percent of B2C marketers are leveraging content marketing tactics, only 42 percent and 34 percent, respectively, feel their strategies are effective.

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03/12/2014

March Madness is Here: Give Your Business a Competitive Edge with Content Marketing

The madness has officially begun. In less than a week, college basketball teams across the U.S. will compete in what has become one of the biggest annual sporting events in the country besides the Superbowl (which was a total bust). For months, coaches have been preparing their players for the “Big Dance” doing everything they can to gain a competitive advantage.

So what does this all have to do with content marketing? Simply put: Content marketing gives businesses the edge they need to thrive in today’s highly competitive market. Below are three ways content marketing can make you a champion. Continue reading “March Madness is Here: Give Your Business a Competitive Edge with Content Marketing”

03/11/2014

Three Considerations Accelerating the Content Marketing Movement

Historically, there are those junctures in time in which we simply start accepting that a new fate is on the horizon: it happened back in the 19^th century with the invention of the typewriter, again in the late 90’s with the dot-com bubble, and more recently with the innovation of the smartphone. And it seems once again we are at the crossroads of a massive shift rocking the business environment—that of content marketing.

Simply put, we are at that familiar place we have been centuries before where early adopters are embracing this avant-garde approach to marketing, full of gumption, while others remain on the sidelines wondering if this trend will really stay. But all one has to do is take a look at history to know that content marketing is only at its dawn. Let’s take a look at three major forces that are forever changing the way in which we go-to-market: Continue reading “Three Considerations Accelerating the Content Marketing Movement”

03/10/2014

Ready to do Some Content Marketing Spring Cleaning This Year?

If you’re anything like me, then you’ve been counting down the hours—not days, but hours—until spring comes rolling along. And now that it’s just around the corner (only 10 days away!) it’s time to start thinking about everything spring: birds chirping once again; buggies buzzing around; the soon-to-be beach weather; and the 2014 MLB and NCAA seasons if you’re a sports lover.

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03/07/2014

Blogging Lessons from Fantasy Baseball: Use Your Assets Wisely

Earlier this week I participated in the annual player draft for my fantasy baseball league, a time-honored tradition that takes place all over the country and helps drive the $3.6 billion fantasy sports industry. In years past, our league had used a traditional “snake” format for drafting, which simply means that teams draft in a linear order in each round, the order reverses the following round and this continues until all team rosters are full.

This year, however, we decided to try a new auction format, where each team is given a budget of 260 virtual dollars to bid on players any way they desire. The auction draft is more complicated than a traditional system but can also be more stimulating, as the level of strategy necessary increases immensely.

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03/04/2014

Content Marketing: Forever Changing Our View of Cutting-Edge Marketing

“Content marketing is fundamentally changing everything about marketing,” Steve Rotter, Brightcove’s vice president of marketing, put out there as his opening remark for his ContentTECH presentation titled “Video Technology Bootcamp – Fueling Your Content Marketing with Video.” From the way we staff our marketing departments to the way we allocate our budgets, content marketing is rocking the business space, Rotter argued during last week’s virtual event. Moreover, failure to recognize this movement leaves you trailing limply behind the competition.

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03/03/2014

Advertising on Facebook? You Might Want to Read This

With over one billion users of the social media network scattered across the globe, sensible marketers simply cannot afford to overlook Facebook. Rather, they must study the site’s metrics, how posts are read and other information related to user behavior to capitalize on the sheer number of users that could potentially be exposed to their brand.

Taking into consideration that 23 percent of Facebook users check the site at least five times a day and 47 percent say the social media network has the greatest impact on their purchasing behavior (up from 24 percent in 2011), marketers need to study precisely how the site works and try to understand it as well as they can. And that’s not an easy task, considering the site’s regularly changing algorithms, security measures and other features being added or augmented often. Continue reading “Advertising on Facebook? You Might Want to Read This”

02/27/2014

Why Discomfort in Marketing is a Good Thing

Ironically enough, I have written about virtual events and conferences for years. Yet up until yesterday, I had never actually participated in such a gathering—a poorly cut corner by me as a marketer—because, let’s face it, demoing the products you will be writing about before putting pen to paper is critical. But, hey… the day slips away from all of us from time to time, right?

So you can imagine how incredibly excited I was to attend my very first virtual conference yesterday, ContentTECH, which was sponsored by the Content Marketing Institute. So excited in fact that I ran a test on my computer two hours in advance to make sure everything would run flawlessly, created a schedule of every session I wanted to attend, and had a little too much fun—OK a lot of fun—letting my coworkers know that I was “heading into a session” and “making my way to the keynote room.”

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02/26/2014

Quick Social Media Reminders for the Small Business

By now, everyone is aware of the crucial role that social media plays in content marketing. From Twitter to Facebook to Instrgram, placing social media front and center has proven to be a golden content marketing strategy, not to mention it holds the power to significantly increase return on investment. In fact, a new HootSuite infographic displaying the results of a recent LinkedIn study shows that 89 percent of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) find social media to be effective for their content marketing strategy.

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