Looking for a tip to optimize your content marketing success? This study from the Aberdeen Group shows that marketers who use content marketing software platforms get dramatically higher performance.

Content marketing and social media marketing obviously overlap in many ways, but they are two distinct entities, with different focal points, goals and processes. Here is a closer look at these two interrelated parts of marketing's ongoing evolution and their practice.

More and more marketers are taking up the challenge of content marketing and they are taking on a brand new function in their organizations: It is that of a publisher. The challenges and the new roles do not end there, however. As media publishers have evolved in the digital era, they have found that in order to succeed they need not only produce great content, but also must cultivate their community of influencers in their sector. These influencers serve the key function of providing content input, participating in the content production process, and supplying links, retweets, and Facebook “likes.” These contributions are critical to the development of content quality, site audience, and SEO rank, which in turn drive the core objectives of content marketing, including brand awareness and lead generation. So, congratulations marketers. You now must not only transform yourselves into publishers but also into community managers! To better understand these evolving roles and excel in them,...

The greatest challenge facing content marketers is the production of the content itself. The 2010 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Study shows this clearly: The biggest content marketing challenge identified was “producing engaging content” (36 percent) followed by the very similar “producing enough content” (21 percent) in second place. For content to be effective, it needs to speak to the authentic challenges and issues that customers face. And it becomes very daunting for content marketing teams to uncover these customer issues day after day and produce compelling content. Continue reading

The media publishing industry is undergoing tremendous transformation in its transition to digital. One of the more powerful forces in this change are economics, and the oft-repeated phrase is that media is trading “print dollars for digital dimes.” In other words, as media moves more online, publishers are receiving only a fraction of the revenue they used to receive in print for the equivalent amount of content produced. Continue reading