Sales and marketing. The best of friends, and the worst of foes. Ultimately, both of these teams are responsible for the growth of the company, and yet, we find ourselves in a situation reminiscent of the book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: a relationship full of tension and friction! But there are ways to make the relationship better.

Getting original ideas off the ground is hard enough. Unfortunately, when we add all the curating, collecting, and collaborating necessary for full-scale engagement, overwhelmed is an understatement.

Content intelligence has been getting a lot of buzz lately, and rightfully so. Content marketers are in need of some real strategic help on a big data scale. This is no secret, either. So much so, in fact, there are now at least 15 martech vendors that specialize in just this one aspect of AI-driven analytics—content intelligence.

Use content curation to keep your brand visible on existing owned, social, and third party media even if your resources are limited.

Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, we’ve put together this list of the best marketing blogs on the web to answer all of these questions.

Together, we’ll explore the finer points in this blog of the “Top 25 Best Digital Data Driven Marketing Tools to Boost ROI” that you can use to help enhance your digital marketing campaigns.

Digital marketing and stock markets share the same trait: they are constantly changing. What used to be the norm is obsolete only a few months later. The trends marketers need to pay attention to in 2018 are HTTPS and voice search.

Here are six quick KPIs you should measure to prove your content’s value and help dictate your content marketing strategy.

2017 marks the 8th year we’ve published a list featuring “women who rock” in the digital marketing space.

With just a few days left in 2017, it’s time to plan for the year ahead. We know brands will continue to focus on visual content in 2018, but which visual storytelling trends will take off in the new year?

Despite a lot of recent, exciting innovations in MarTech, 65% of brands have no plans to invest in emerging technologies in the year to come. According to Matt McGee , former editor-in-chief at MarTech Today, brands are instead dedicating their budgets to more tried-and-true initiatives, such as analytics and content marketing, in an effort to get the most return on their investments.

Not all B2B content marketing distribution is created equal. But you knew that! Maximize your B2B content marketing distribution by  integrating it into your content marketing strategy. This will help  yield an expected outcome. To improve your B2B content marketing distribution, let’s examine 2018 B2B Content Marketing Research conducted by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. It will help expose opportunities to improve your distribution reach and results. (Welcome CMI Market Research Director Lisa Murton Beets!)  

It’s October and you know what that means? Its B2B Marketing influencer speaker list time again. One of my all-time favorite conferences is MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston and for the past few years I’ve had some fun listing out a top list of speakers ranked by influence around the topic of “B2B marketing”. As usual, I used the influencer marketing platform Traackr to import the list of speakers from #mpb2b 2017 and rank them according to a combination of topical resonance and relevance as well as network reach related to “b2b marketing”.  Of course, use of their platform in this way is like 1% of what Traackr can do. I imagine they cringe every time I use their robust tool for such a simple list – but hey, they provide me with access and I use the tool as I see fit.

HASBROUCK HEIGHTS, N.J., Sept. 28, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Demand Gen Reporthas announced the winners of its inaugural B2B Innovator Awards, which recognize some of the most forward-thinking practitioners in the B2B industry.   Garnering more than 100 nominations from B2B executives across verticals, the Demand Gen Report team assessed and selected 34 final winners in 11 categories. These winners were acknowledged for thinking outside of the box and for helping to develop and foster innovative concepts and strategies for their organizations and the B2B industry at large. In addition to being featured in the B2B Innovator Awards special report publishing today, winners will also be recognized at the B2B Marketing Exchange, to be held February 19-21, 2018 in Scottsdale, Arizona.  

Pawan Deshpande is founder and CEO of content curation and marketing platform Curata, Inc. Before founding Curata, Pawan has held software engineering and research positions at Microsoft and Google, in between research done at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He holds several patents in areas such as social networking and machine transliteration.

When I started my business website, I knew then that I needed to know how to rank in Google to get better exposure. I did my research but somehow I was not able to find the answer I was looking for. I thought that SEO tools were nothing more than things that could enhance the appeal of my site. I knew then that they would be able to help me attract many visitors to check me out. I tried the suggested tools for SEO to make my business website run smoothly and was quite content with the amount of traffic (which I found out later to be poor) that I had.

Your competition is always increasing, with literally hundreds of companies finding their way online every single day. Even if these businesses are not in your industry, the digital noise they create is keeping your best clients from finding you. If you want the best product for literally every aspect of your new business, we have your solutions listed below – immediately actionable quality responses from the top minds in the business. Let’s take a look at the products these established experts have chosen as essential for the modern business startup.

Conducting a content audit is on the list of best practices for nearly every content marketer. Yet 37 percent of content marketers never complete a content audit. A content audit helps you develop and navigate a content strategy. It enables you to allocate and analyze all of your existing content to identify what’s working and what isn’t. Most importantly, a content audit informs how you optimize both existing and future content.

Welcome to The Content Marketing Weekly, where we feature the latest news and trends in the content marketing industry. This week, we’ve got everything you need to know about where video marketing is headed, how to make crucial changes to your strategy and much 

Content marketing can be time-consuming - what with planning, strategizing, creating, measuring and optimising it - but with the right tools at hand, you can make your life so much easier. In this list, you'll be able to find tools for every stage of the process: getting content ideas, writing better content, research tools, content creation tools, tools that help you get more

Chances are, you’re looking to improve the results from your content marketing. Maybe you want to get more visitors, convert more leads, or make more sales. Whatever it is, your goal is to learn more about effective content marketing. And that’s a great goal. According to IMPACT Branding and Design, 77 percent of marketers now use content marketing, but 66 percent of businesses rate that content as “basic.”

Poorly designed content marketing campaigns can make even the most ambitious projects crumble. Marketers get so caught up in managing different tools and systems for multi-channel campaign delivery that they fail to recognize the most important part of this marketing mission: strategy.

Content marketing isn’t a fad. In fact, it keeps gaining traction. Nearly 70% of B2B buyers say they rely more on content to make purchasing decisions than they did in 2016. Publishing and sharing content is now an essential marketing tactic to reach new customers and capture new business.

If you’re just starting a business, you know that social media marketing is a great way to increase your brand awareness. It’s affordable and effective, and it has a low barrier to entry. There’s no need to hire an expensive ad agency to promote your site on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

A disorganized content storage system adds significant hours to your workload every week. It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting a new content marketing role, trying to find content on a certain topic, updating your tracking, or trying to make intelligent content strategy decisions. Organization matters.  

With content planning, development tasks, client collaboration and design requests pouring in from all directions, your business can easily get buried in projects. It’s no wonder why there are so many project management tools on the market. There are literally hundreds of tools claiming to make planning, managing and completing projects easier, but how do know which to choose?

Marketing isn’t about products, it’s about the people who use them. Understanding these people, from the language they use to the interests and values they hold, will ensure your marketing has impact. While demand comes from consumers, business to business marketing is about meeting the needs of other professionals. These are the people you want to reach, and that means taking a unique approach.

As a content marketing agency, it’s safe to say that we’d never write a blog that slams our industry or profession. We believe content marketing to be a powerful tool, and that’s why we do what we do. However, while we at Southerly are totally convinced, we understand that other people may not yet be content marketing converts.

Creating content day in and day out is exhausting. Constantly coming up with creative ideas and pushing yourself to come up with things you’ve never thought of is incredibly hard. But luckily, TopRank Marketing’s Executive Content Chef, Ashley Zeckman, was in the kitchen to help us cook up strategies for content creation at Digital Summit Minneapolis.

Social media is the cradle of unique and trending content. The challenge of finding content relevant to your cause is genuine thanks to the millions of accounts on each platform. Information keeps pouring in from all directions. Looking for particular content that you need can be a time-consuming affair if you are looking towards winnowing them manually.

When it comes to using content curation on social media, the saying “everyone is doing it” is actually true. According to curation giant Curata, best-in-class marketers use a content marketing mix of 65% created content and 25% curated content, and nearly every business is doing some kind of curation. In fact, the company’s benchmark back in 2014 showed that only 5% of businesses didn’t use curation tactics. So if curation is a basic need for marketing - why isn’t every company using it to its full potential?

Content marketing is one of the most hot-button topics in the business world today. While the concept of content marketing is nothing new, consumer accessibility to brand messaging has accelerated with the evolution of the internet, and the importance of publishing top-notch content has skyrocketed.

Let’s face facts. Putting together even the most basic marketing campaign can take a toll on you. Forget about having enough manpower. There’s no getting around the fact that creating new content from scratch on a regular basis gets draining pretty quickly. And to make things worse, the needs of the average consumer keep growing.

Content intelligence (CI) is the shiny new toy of content marketing. Like many new technologies, some users may try to adopt content intelligence technology before they fully understand it, and fail to fully realize its benefits. Content intelligence software is expanding in variety and function, so it’s important to understand the pain points content intelligence addresses.

As a marketer, your job is to generate leads that, ultimately, convert to dollars. More often than not you’re expected to work miracles with little time and a stingy budget. It’s a huge challenge for marketers in organizations big and small, across all industries.

TL;DR: Why I am such a believer in content marketing and how I run the entire process. What is the real effort (time) I put into each stage and what professional tools I love using? I hope this article will help you build an efficient content marketing operation that will satisfy, and impress your managers!

Content marketers face some tough uphill battles. They need to create more content than ever. That content faces more competition than ever, so it must perform well to justify the investment in it. And that investment is significant, because you need trained staff to create all of this content.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to permeate the marketing landscape. But how do you best use it to your advantage? One exciting application is a new marketing technology called content intelligence, which utilizes artificial intelligence and big data to offer unprecedented marketing insights.

Isn’t it great when a friend gives you the inside scoop on a fantastic film or a restaurant you’ll love? Saves you hassle. They know what you like, you know it’ll meet your high standards. In a Nielsen Global Trust survey, eighty-three percent of respondents in 60 countries said they trusted recommendations from friends and family. When a trusted source makes a suggestion, you know it’ll be worth your time (and your dime).