Quick quiz: When was the last time you hit your local multiplex to catch a new flick, cheered as your favorite team took the field, or just vegged out on the couch binge-watching a show on Netflix or Hulu. If it takes you longer than a few seconds to come up with your answer, you just made an entertainment marketer cry.

Sports and entertainment properties can seem like an easy sell for marketers. Brands in this space can play a major role in how people define and express their personal identities, as well as impacting how we shape and experience our society, at large. And, as our collective passion for popular culture expands, we are coming to expect greater access to the athletes and entertainers we love – a trend simultaneously accelerating digital media innovation, fueling development of more live experiences, and driving more engaging storytelling on all platforms. Continue Reading

Editor’s note: You may have missed this article when CMI published it last year. We’re publishing this update since blogging continues to be among the tactics content marketers consider most critical to their success.

Despite how much work is involved, blogging often is thought of as one of the most basic points of entry into the content marketing game: It’s a versatile technique with a lot of creative possibilities, options, and approaches; yet it doesn’t require a lot of technical expertise or equipment to produce and maintain.

Blogging is also a powerful means of building an audience for your brand, and sustaining their interest over time – something every content effort should strive to achieve. Not to mention it can help fuel your other content marketing channels, since blog posts are easily adapted for use on social media or in email newsletters.Continue Reading

In our tech-driven culture, you might think that technology brands should have it easy when it comes to marketing their products and services.

From self-driving cars to customer-service chatbots and smart refrigerators that place grocery orders to cloud apps that enable global teams to collaborate in real time, technology is the ultimate driver of beneficial change. It pushes the boundaries of what humans can achieve while simultaneously becoming more deeply entrenched in everything we do in our daily lives. In terms of both its potential and its current value, few industries offer a more universal appeal.Continue Reading

I’ve heard there are people out there who truly believe that “getting there is half the fun.” I, on the other hand, feel that when it comes to traveling, everything that happens between my initial decision to leave my house and my lying on a beach chair with a fruity drink in my hand is just stress-inducing static and delayed gratification.

To reduce the friction I’m likely to experience at any step of my journey, I rely pretty heavily on online travel advice (from both the pros and amateurs). And, judging from the sheer number of businesses that cater to the ever-expanding online travel and tourism category, I’m certainly not alone. Continue Reading

Do you have trouble communicating the benefits your business provides in terms that the government will allow and that consumers can relate to? Have you experienced problems with public perception that hinder your ability to earn trust and foster greater support in the marketplace? Do you feel constrained in your ability to creatively communicate meaningful stories due to the complex and highly regulated nature of your products and processes?

If you commonly experience the symptoms described, you may be suffering from a condition called “being a pharmaceutical industry marketer.” Thankfully, content marketing can help you address and overcome these issues – and you don’t even have to talk to your primary care physician to get started.Continue Reading

Would you turn down an opportunity to increase the value and impact of your content marketing program with just a few tweaks to your email list? How about the chance to earn rock-star-level praise from your executive team for achieving better returns on your company’s email marketing investment? When you consider just how valuable email subscribers can be to content marketing success, I’d be surprised if you haven’t already pulled out your credit card and started looking for the “sign-me-up” button to take advantage of this amazing offer right now.

Sorry … I spend way too much time watching late-night infomercials. But seriously …Continue Reading

You might be surprised to learn that, for me, the arrival of spring marks the return of two of my favorite traditions: watching the start of the Major League Baseball season and creating CMI’s annual Content Marketing Playbook. And, as it turns out, the two have quite a few things in common.

For example, like our national pastime here in the United States, content marketing can seem deceptively easy from an outsider’s perspective; yet, it actually requires a complex combination of strategy, skill, and savvy use of the right assets at the right time. Smart content marketers know there are incremental gains they can make with every play, calculated risks to take on the way, and, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, a tremendous potential to gain loyal fans by giving their audience an experience to remember.Continue Reading

One of the greatest benefits of content marketing is its ability to play matchmaker: to help eligible businesses find and engage with its most desirable consumers – i.e., those who might have an active interest in what they have to offer. And because it is such a powerful driver of awareness, search is one of the main contributing factors to how successful your content will be at attracting those qualified leads.

While it’s not always fully transparent how or when Google’s search bots will crawl and index your content – let alone exactly how its search algorithm determines its rankings –content marketers don’t have to just sit back and wait for Google to pass judgment on whether their work merits a first-page listing on the search engine results page (SERP). In fact, you can take plenty of deliberate SEO actions to boost your content’s value in the eyes of your target audience – if you have the right strategies in place.Continue Reading