Continue Reading

How do you summarize the takeaways from a conference packed with great ideas and advice?

That’s a familiar challenge for every conference attendee who’s struggled to share their experience and learnings with managers and colleagues who couldn’t attend. It’s hard enough to boil down all the notes you took, tweets you shared, and pictures you snapped. But what about all the sessions you couldn’t watch because you can’t be everywhere at once?Continue Reading

Updated May 27, 2021

You have a documented content marketing strategy. You’ve outlined your quarterly plan, aligning your messages and goals with demand gen, sales, customer success, and other teams. But you still have slots to fill in your editorial calendar.

Most marketers have experienced this moment. You generally know what you need to produce, but specific story ideas seem just out of reach.

When this happens, you have two choices: Wait for inspiration to strike or develop a system to find stellar ideas to fill the calendar.

This post is not for those who choose to hold out for a flash of creative inspiration. It’s for anyone ready to do the dirty work of finding hidden content opportunities to shape and polish into something brilliant.Continue Reading

Updated May 3, 2021

So your content failed. You’re not alone. In between those pieces that clearly hit the mark, we’ve all published a few – or more than a few – that missed.

There’s plenty of advice on content optimization techniques to apply to articles that are already pretty good. And there’s even more on how to reuse, republish, or repurpose your highest-performing content. It’s a sure-win tactic to include in your content marketing strategy, we’ve run many articles about how to do it.Continue Reading

Updated April 15, 2021

Have you ever heard a sales leader or business exec disparage content marketing as “arts and crafts” or wonder about its business value? You aren’t the first.

The myth that content marketing is some nebulous, feel-good, unmeasured thing gets told all too often.

But why?

The business purpose of content marketing is literally written into its definition:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Continue Reading

Has there ever been a year in which marketers felt so compelled to respond to headlines – and so conflicted about whether and how to speak up? 2020 may have been extra intense, but the pressure on brands to take a stand won’t disappear in 2021.

Self-described “professional troublemaker” Luvvie Ajayi Jones offered useful advice for navigating these impulses in her keynote presentation, Speaking Truth to Power, at Content Marketing World 2020.Continue Reading

There’s no shortage of advice about how to measure content success. CMI has published plenty of it. Yet every year, we hear from content marketers struggling to understand the impact of their content marketing.

One stumbling block may be applying general advice to a living, changing, content program. No one-size-fits-all solution exists. Every team must tailor its measurement to its business goals and, often, to how well each piece of content contributes to the content marketing mission.

Continue Reading

In an extraordinary year, extraordinary content marketers rose to the occasion. They demonstrated what’s possible, moved us to action, and taught us how to protect ourselves. Here are one group and two individuals who are at the top of the game – the 2020 B2C Content Marketer of the Year finalists.
Continue Reading