Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Are you looking to shorten the sales cycle for your business in 2014? Are you looking to take more of a strategic approach to marketing that can be analyzed and measured? Would you be interested in reducing your lead generation costs by 62% in 2014?

Actually, content marketing is nothing new, in fact, John Deere started using content marketing in 1895 when he published a magazine called The Furrow. The goal of the magazine was to seen as a resource for their customers.

The Furrow had educational content and focused on teaching farmers how to be more fruitful business owners. The magazine now has a 1.5 million circulation in 40 countries and 12 different languages.

Well, I could sit here and write my opinions or I could share some numbers (proof) with you. Here you go…

As storytelling becomes more and more part of marketing, another trend has come into focus: Brands are becoming more visual.

... It underscores a point we made in Content Rules about the opportunity of e-books (quoting Jonathan Kranz):

"What’s the difference between an e-book and a white paper? A white paper is a guy in a grey flannel suit: a man of stature who wants to establish authority by demonstrating what he knows in a formal manner. The e-book, meanwhile, is the colleague in a Hawaiian shirt who sits next to you at the bar, eager to share insights hard won through experience"....

According to a 2012 study by AOL and Nielsen, 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared every day. By now, the mantra of “content is king” has been relentlessly drilled into our collective heads – but more isn’t always necessarily better.

Quality is important – but how do you know if you’re really producing content that’s engaging your audience? Perhaps even more importantly, how are you measuring the results?

If you write and share it – will they come?

Let’s take a look at several new findings made as a result of a joint study between the Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs and Brightcove and what they could mean for next year’s content marketing trends...

Regardless of being a brand or persona, our goal is to be seen as a source.Something people can rely on with their expectations for our niche content.

The following inbound marketing blogs are my personal favorites, for two main reasons:

1. They consistently create top internet marketing content

2. As a blog, they are live examples of how to achieve inbound marketing success.

It’s a bit circular, how the greatest inbound marketing blogs are, in themselves, the best examples of inbound marketing. At any rate, here they are...