Developing a solid inbound marketing and content strategy is something that most companies struggle with. In fact, a study from Ascend2 and its research partners revealed that 46% of the marketing, sales, and business professionals surveyed around the world said that the lack of an effective strategy and the creation of content are the most challenging obstacles to reaching the next level of inbound marketing performance. LeadG2 uses a 7-Step Lead Generation Process to help our clients navigate and embrace an inbound marketing culture.

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!

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.

Creating compelling, strategic premium content as part of your lead generation strategy is only half the battle. The next—sometimes overlooked—step involves the promotion of your content across a variety of channels including both inbound and outbound methodologies. This article is meant to give you a comprehensive overview of the top places you should be promoting your premium content offers in order to drive prospects to the corresponding landing page with a form. While every campaign may not include all of these elements, the more you can incorporate into your plan, the more potential buyers you will reach with your offer.

As part of the LeadG2 series on "The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing" we're looking at each of these ten commandments and the importance of each one. The seventh of "The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing" is: You must have premium content (white papers, guides etc) on your website if you intend to generate leads. (Tweet This)

Inbound marketing and lead generation seem to be synonymous. It makes sense — inbound marketing has proven to be an effective and cost-efficient method to capture online leads and build robust sales pipelines. Consequently, inbound marketing methodologies and the content that drives it seem to be a widely-accepted component of every CMO’s marketing strategy.

But sales teams shouldn’t let these valuable resources be labeled “For Marketing’s Purposes Only."  In fact, the premium content that’s been created to attract visitors and convert leads can also be effectively leveraged to enable the sales person and accelerate the sales process. Below are 5 ways content can be leveraged to help position the salesperson as a thought leader/subject matter expert and guide the prospect to the next best step in their buying journey.

It's no secret that content creation is the hub of inbound marketing. But building a piece of content doesn't necessarily equal new business. Just because you build it doesn't mean they're all going to come. The real question, if you are a marketer, is how to squeeze the life out of a single piece of content in order to get more visitors and new leads.

We recently wrapped up a whitepaper/guide for one of our clients in the staffing and recruiting industry. The guide has really great information in it, super helpful to their target persona, and the design fits their branding standards and looks great. When all was said and done, our client then turned to us and asked, "now what?"  

As content marketers, one of the primary tools that we use to reach our audience is blog post content and long form content that provide our visitors with educational and informative information. Because the success of content marketing programs rely on the consistent publishing of content, many programs fail due to the lack of participation by internal teams and lack of content creation.  

One reason that internal teams lack content is that employees believe their writing skills are not good enough or that they are not writers. This may be true for a few members of your team (Yes, I have seen some blog posts that look like they were written by 3rd graders. . . ) but generally, as long as you have someone who can edit the content, any of your employees can create valuable blog posts.

There are a number of best practices when it comes to creating graphic content. In this post, let’s take a look at some ways to make or your graphic content more effective, broken down by the types of content.