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Research from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs indicates content marketers with a documented strategy are: Much more likely to consider themselves effective at content marketing Far less challenged with the many aspects of content marketing Able to justify why a higher percentage of the marketing budget should be spent on content marketin

Consider documenting one or more of the following goals as a starting point for your strategy: Improve brand awareness Increase engagement Generate more website traffic Expand the email list Increase marketing ROI Achieve higher customer retention, loyalty and referrals

A buyer persona reveals what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to solve a problem.

Most of your content is getting lost in the shuffle. Recycle it! Let the customer’s social activity tell you what they prefer. Engagement in social is good, but not if that’s all you get. Some top brands have made the transition to acting like publishers with dedicated internal and external teams cranking out content.

Top tactics used by savvy publishing brands are: Storytelling – high quality engaging content on an going basis Infographic Creation – relevant lists and how to’s Visual Content Marketing – compelling visuals eBook Creation – great for lead generation eMailer Personalization – targeting with relevance and being the information / education source Content Curation within an Industry – keep people coming to you because you find what’s hot and important to your customers, making it easy for them to keep current Webinars / Pod Casts / Google Hangouts – establishes authority Slide Share Presos – extends your corporate social graph and thought leadership Case Studies – SEO value and high share currency Videos to Motion Infographics – video is growing

Brands have a need for smart content routing and unique displays which enable them to maximize customer engagement and experience at every touch point, increasing site participation, and garnering higher social share just begs to get fracked.

Google +1s are more highly correlated with search rankings than any other social factor, including Facebook likes/shares and Tweets.

“We have a lot of our clients whose titles are actually changing from SEO Manager to Content Strategist,” Dotterer said. “Search engine optimization sounds like you’re doing something to the engines themselves, but what you’re really doing is optimizing online content. You optimize it by changing the content you’ve already created to better fit the voice of the consumer. You also optimize by finding the gaps in the content so we can create more.”

The importance of content creation has encouraged more companies to get their SEO, social and creative teams more involved in content strategy,

A solid lead generation strategy does both, Craig Rosenberg, author of the blog Funnelholic, told me. The appetite for content online is insatiable so marketers would be wise to indulge the public with registration-free content, Craig says. “I do believe that if people are addicted to content without the reg-path and you path stuff, it better be remarkable.” Rosenberg says the “vast majority” of your marketing funnel should be free without asking potential clients for personal info. Save the registration forms for further down the funnel where more research-heavy content like whitepapers resides.

Chris Jablonski, author Emerging Tech blog on ZDNet, who provided the following formula: 10% to 20% fully gated content, 20% to 30% name and email only, and 50% to 70% completely free.

The single-most engaging, and simple, content marketing strategy is to create a reason and method for your audience members to supply content. Whether you ask them to submit photos using your product or you’re posting an engaging question of the week and aggregating answers for a roundup blog post, you’re building in the emotional trigger: they are the content. When someone sees their own photo, their name and contribution, they share like a proud parent. It’s like your own “easy button” for creating engaging content.

2,200 consumers worldwide finds that 63 percent of respondents are highly annoyed by the way brands continue to rely on the old-fashioned strategy of blasting generic ad messages repeatedly. The poll found that the two things brands should do to make advertising more appealing to their audiences are to 1) show ads less often, and 2) make the content personalized and relevant based on consumer behavior across other channels and interactions.

78.6 percent of consumers said they are only likely to engage with a brand using coupons or other offers if those promotions are directly tied to how they have interacted with the brand previously. This can include sending offers via email, mobile or social media after they have visited a brand's website or tailoring communications based on products viewed or purchased. The poll was conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Australia.

According to The Social Times and VentureBeat article, Sephora’s Pinterest followers spend, on average, 15 times more on Sephora products than the company’s Facebook fans.

Create Rich Cards Rich cards are a form of structured data; they give users visually appealing information that is easy to understand and provides a flawless mobile search experience. They are Google’s way of taking advantage of the rise in mobile usages, which has surpassed desktop. They aren’t just easy on the eyes though. Analysts at Google state that Schema markups will become more important when it comes to search ranking as time goes on.

Create Skyscraper Content If you haven’t heard of or don’t use skyscraper content, then you’re missing out on a lot of SEO juice. The term was coined by  Brian Dean, who used it to boost his traffic by 110% in 14 days. Skyscraper content involves finding high performing content in your niche and creating something better, and then shamelessly promoting it.

Take Advantage of High-Performing Posts You know that internal linking is a good SEO practice. But, do you optimize your internal linking for maximum effect? At the beginning of this post, I told you that 73% of users don’t click past the first page. That means that your pages with less authority will be left out in the cold and will receive only the occasional stray or lucky click. You can remedy this pretty quickly. If you have pages with high authority showing up on the first page of the search results, take advantage of this and link to lower ranking posts from these high-performing posts. This strategy can lead to more clicks and higher rankings.

Only 18% of clicks on Google search results go to paid results Less than 1% of clicks on Twitter.com go to paid results The best Facebook ads get less than 10% CTR (in fact the average is .05%) Etc, etc, etc.

Organic digital traffic (search, blog, links, etc) counts for 90% or more, with $5 billion of investment. While paid (affiliate, ppc, display, etc) sends the remaining 10% of traffic but gets 800% more budget at $45 billion.

1. Create A Content Strategy Not A Blog To develop a content strategy, make sure you have great answers to these questions: Are you going to be able to attract the right people? Why will they care about you? What are you doing to earn their interest? Why are thy going to share? Will they like and trust you more?

Quuu is a simple platform to help put your content curation on autopilot, working seamlessly with Buffer to bring you the most relevant content.

use Narrow to build a targeted Twitter following. Just enter your keywords and targeted hashtags, and Narrow will identify a relevant audience for you to start building your following.

Cyfe is an all-in-one marketing dashboard of sorts that helps you zero in on what’s working and what isn’t. It’s a great analytical tool for social media management that lets you pulled detailed reports on Google Analytics, AdWords campaigns, SEO, competitive searches and even brand mentions on the web. It’s a real-time tracking tool to help you monitor and manage your KPIs.

To achieve the marketing goals you need to drive qualified traffic to your website and convert that traffic into leads. From there the sales team can pick up and convert leads into clients. This means creating and distributing content and content offers to a relevant audience. It also means content should be mapped on the buyer’s journey which is structured in: awareness, consideration and decision stages.Here are the basic things you need to do:

First, you may already be using data from customer relationship management (CRM) tools and market research to inform campaigns. But a wider array of data signals is available, from analytics on your brand's website (that could tell you your most popular products, for instance), to audience data (that could give a glimpse of age, gender, or interests), to contextual insights about which device, location, or media type delivered the most success for a campaign. The trick is to know all the sources of data available, and figure out which can fuel smarter creative.

Too often, the creative agency and production shop are brought into the campaign process after the media strategy has been decided. By informing the creative agency of all the data from the outset of the project, you can work with the agency to build more relevant creative strategies for your target audience.