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.

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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.

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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.
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Great ideas can be found anywhere – and so can great B2B content marketers. They work for big companies, small companies, small corners of big companies. They lead not-so-small teams at not-so-big companies and in every set of circumstances imaginable.

It’s not the budget or the scale or the title that makes a B2B content marketer great – it’s the ability to lead people (internal teams, audiences, and customers) out of the status quo, show them how things can be better, and help them take action to make it so.

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Someone set the strategy. The content is scheduled. The brief arrived. Now comes the “fun” part – creating something.

I put fun in quotation marks because every content creator recognizes the struggle to find the right word, craft the right phrase, or just get the darn thing done.

I know this from long experience. And I infer that this experience is nearly universal from watching what visitors read on the CMI blog.

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Do you have an editorial calendar? Congratulations, you’re partway down the path to a solid content plan. (If you don’t have a content or editorial calendar, see me after class. I’d love to know how you operate.)

Most likely, you’ve felt the seemingly endless pressure to come up with great ideas to fill that calendar. And, of course, you don’t want to just fill it, you want the content to produce results.

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How do you know what your audience wants to hear from you? Ask them – through one-on-one conversations, surveys, or general market research. Asking is always useful and critical as you build your audience.

Then once you establish an audience, you can look at what they do with your content – not just what they say they do.

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