When you invest in content, you want the most people to see it. So you launch it where it has the best chance to be seen by the highest number of the right people in the shortest time.

Unfortunately, that means your content fights with everyone else’s for attention.

Does it make more sense to publish your content in a quiet space or try to stand out in a noisy one?

The art of deciding where to place content for the biggest impact is called media planning. And it’s at the heart of every great marketing strategy.Continue Reading

Content marketing is growing exponentially. But the advancement ladder for content practitioners is missing most of its rungs.

While many organizations consider content marketing an important, functional strategy (pardon us while we at CMI pat ourselves on the back), most have no idea how to build a career ladder for this function (and we stop patting ourselves on the back).

In most businesses I visit, I find confusion about where these content practitioners should live in the organization structure. Worse, I see a dead end for many.

To move up, talented content practitioners must move on – meaning they move out of the team and maybe away from the brand.Continue Reading

Spoiler alert to 2021: We’re not going to wake up to a “new normal” in February, March, or any time thereafter. We’re already here.

The pandemic simply accelerated the fundamental changes already underway, as the B2C Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2021 report, produced by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, shows.

By some estimates, consumer digital behavior jumped ahead five years in just eight weeks. The events of 2020 hit the warp-speed button on the disruption scale.Continue Reading

Ocean waves are beautiful. Entertaining. Sometimes destructive.

And they’re consistent. They change, but they never stop.

In marketing, we try to create big, loud waves that as many people as possible will notice. But we also want those waves to have the right kind of impact on the people we’re trying to reach. And, of course, we must be able to afford to reach those people and show the value of the impact we’ve made.Continue Reading

It’s time to get your content marketing governance in order.

Now, you might see the word “governance” and think, “We don’t need governance. That’s too big for us. We’re only a handful of people.” Or you might think, “that’s above my pay grade.” You may be right. Many of the changes and authority required to install a good content marketing governance plan may be out of your control.

But that doesn’t permit you to forego any kind of order. Let’s talk about the first, manageable step – creating an editorial board.Continue Reading

We can agree 2020 was disruptive, weird, and put us all into new territory regarding our demand generation strategies. If we thought digital marketing was changing fast as 2019 ushered in the ’20s, well, 2020 said, “Hold my beer.”

We not only have experienced increased pressure to create trustworthy, differentiated content but to boost top-of-funnel demand for our products and services. For many businesses, there’s been an exponential increase in the need to be more digital, develop more direct relationships with customers, and do it all from the confines of remote work.Continue Reading

Owned media (your websites, content marketing hubs, commerce platforms) are core pieces of digital strategy. But confusion abounds over their ability to collect audience data – what can be acquired, how it is governed, and how it can be used in content marketing strategies.

You likely are still navigating the wave of regulatory acronyms – including GDPR and CCPA – that rocked the industry in the last couple of years. Then, you have to ponder Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies, Apple’s new bar for data privacy, and other data-related changes.

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A new data trend has brands wondering if the digital marketing party might be over for good. Robert Rose sets the record straight on what it is, why it matters, and what it means for content marketing’s future.

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