Attempting to tackle your entire content marketing to-do list in one day could be overwhelming. Actually, it would be VERY overwhelming. But if you can commit to doing one thing each day over the next 12 days leading up to Christmas, you'll be on the road to improving your overall content marketing efforts that will have you ringing in the New Year on the right foot!

You have a blog. Great. Are you analyzing it? Are you tracking its performance? Do you know if your efforts are paying off? Time is money, and if you're spending time on a blog for your company, that's money. And if you're investing dollars in your blog, you'll definitely want to know if it's paying off!

If you are tracking blog analytics, what are you tracking? Traffic? Great. That's good. But you know what's great and drives sales? Conversions! Here are 5 tips to optimize your blog content so that it helps to increase conversion rates and get more qualified leads.

Have you been churning out quality content for years for your business and industry? Does traffic to your blog still come from old posts? Are ebooks published three years ago still converting? You're not alone.

There are some key components of marketing that fit together to create a solid B2B marketing campaign plan that drives results and delivers desired business results. Ensure you are utilizing each of these when planning your B2B marketing campaign plans. 

Content creation can be a robust process depending on the amount of content you are publishing during a set timeframe. To keep your process organized and strategic (and to keep marketers sane), we’ve found a detailed content calendar is key. This post lists a few benefits of using a content calendar and a few items we think should be included on every content calendar to make it most efficient and beneficial.

Creating compelling B2B content is only half the battle when it comes to a solid content marketing strategy for your business. While your content must be grammatically correct, educational, formatted properly, and a good representation of your brand, it must also be strategically created following proven best practices that most inbound marketers follow. These tactics are what help ensure your content isn’t just interesting or nice to read, but ultimately driving prospects closer to doing business with you and taking some kind of action or next step.

Is it Time to Update Your Content Marketing Game?

I’m starting to believe that content marketing as part of executing a growth strategy is reaching a point of saturation and diminishing returns.

Quantity over quality. Poor writing. Lack of strategic focus. Advertorial. One and done efforts with little to no promotion. Hiring cheap and getting cheap results.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Good journalism can teach us a thing or two about creating blog posts. Journalists and inbound marketers who are dedicated to their craft have something in common: they commit to doing the things that engage their readers. 

Here are five lessons from journalism that companies can apply to their blog writing to increase engagement—and get better results.

At some point in your career, it’s likely that you’ll have a conversation with a C-suiter who will tell you that your marketing budget is being cut because the company must tighten its belt.

That conversation will quickly put a damper on how you think you’re being perceived by the company and will likely have a negative effect on your enthusiasm to champion some really great marketing ideas. 

It’s not that the C-suite doesn’t like you, or doesn’t appreciate your efforts, or like the work you’re doing. When you’re told that you face a budget cut, what this means is that you’re not showing value —a return on investment—for how the marketing budget is being spent.

There are a number of culprits that may be in play here:

When Pinterest first came onto the social media scene in 2010, most B2B marketers wrote it off as “a great place for mommy bloggers.” This perception, whether real or imagined, has led to a slower adoption of Pinterest by B2B marketers as an acceptable social media platform. Many B2B marketers default to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn when looking for ways to promote their products and increasing brand awareness. But’s that not all that Pinterest is good for.  

While Pinterest is a wonderful platform for curating images of things that you like, it’s also a great place for B2B marketers to educate leads and prospects about their offerings and to generate website traffic. Pinterest is also an ideal place to find inspiration and new ideas on a wide array of topics. At times, I have been so inspired by what I have found on Pinterest, it’s reminded me of the inspiration from a TED Talk, but with still images.