Managing a successful ad agency can be troublesome, it requires great organizational skills, advanced multi-tasking abilities and exceptional attention to details. As the projects pile up, we have to make sure that our company’s positive reputation won’t go to waste. We can either hire more employees or consultants, which may cause an opposite effect, introducing chaos and disagreement into our company, or we can look for a solution that will surely and swiftly streamline our operations and sort out all the work in our agency.

Content marketing has become a major part of marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes. But content marketing alone is not a silver bullet to problems and your business might find it a struggle to get the campaign working as intended.

The best bite-sized advice from the best marketers.

Gone are the days of reliance on printed materials or TV adverts to communicate with an audience, marketers are now faced with a myriad of marketing communications tools to help spread their message. Although traditional tools still hold much merit, marketers must move with the times (and often be ahead of them!) in order to connect with their audience.

Did you know that on average 25% of marketers’ content is curated? If you’re doing it right, content curation can help you develop relationships with influencers, save you time, and help you build authority by providing your audience with high-quality information that’s relevant. Here are a few resources we’ve curated to help you get your strategy on track.

Content marketing strategy is slowly becoming the responsibility of executives within marketing organizations, though most content marketing teams are still lean and mean. The “Content Marketing Staffing and Tactics Barometer 2016” report from Curata found that many organizations now have executive oversight for content strategy, though the shift toward that trend has occurred more slowly than some had predicted.

Creating engaging content that speaks to a brand’s audience is time-consuming and costly. A 2014 report from The CMO Survey revealed that smaller companies with revenues of less than $25 million directed 12.7 percent of their budgets into marketing.

Marketing conference season is in full swing—Is your conference content? For content marketers, conferences are amazing opportunities to create, distribute and consume content. They’re laser-focused on a specific topic.

Earlier this year, my friend Sean Callahan here at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions revealed the 12 favorite apps from some of the most influential marketing folks. I loved this post and so with their permission, I'm sharing those here along with my own favorite apps for work.

Content marketing can be a successful marketing channel for your business. It is a game-changer in the world of marketing because it helps inform your audience before making them your customer.

Bored customers are bad news for your business. If consumers are basically falling asleep reading your blog content, they’re not going to stick around long enough to share it or tell their friends, let alone buy your products.

Content marketing has become a key part of any business’s B2B marketing strategy. But how do you know if it’s actually working? It’s easy to just look at page views and judge how well your content is doing, but there are far more methodical ways to analyse how effective your content marketing strategy is.

Each day, CMI wants to help our fellow content marketers hone their skills and get more successful at the craft. I know our team is constantly inspired by all the ways that the industry has taken our advice and run with it.

As a marketer and professor, I’m often asked,“What are the top marketing books I need to read?” I’m also asked, ”What are the top marketing books should I recommend my boss or team read?”

Data-driven marketing has become standard as it makes marketing more of a science and less of a guessing game. Marketers have access to Big Data, analytics, and metrics to optimize campaigns, improve customer experience, reduce customer churn, and make better decisions. But, data-driven marketing success is not a guarantee: marketers need to know how to use the data and how to understand it if they are going to capitalize on it. That’s why developing a sound data-driven marketing strategy is critical to business today.

Without question, the Content Marketing World conference is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to all things content. This is where I should segue into a Death Star reference and something about a love child between Joe or Robert and Princess Leia. Or was it Chewbacca? I kid.

Every day, individuals and brands are creating and publishing as many as 27 million pieces of new content online. It’s no wonder that one of the biggest challenges content marketers face today is getting their content seen. So what can your brand do to stand out and get a customer’s attention, and ultimately turn that engagement into sales for your business?

Over 4,000 marketers will make their annual pilgrimage to Cleveland this week to attend Content Marketing World (aka CMWorld or CMW). CMWorld brings together the best minds in marketing to exchange stories, predict trends, and gripe about overused buzzwords (these are content creators, after all!). In the spirit of learning, we wanted to call out a handful of select marketing influencers who marketers turn to for trusted advice. The following list is comprised of the most influential marketers that are speaking at CMWorld this year, as well as leading day-to-day online conversations.

“There are two types of entrepreneurs in the community,” says Ari Kalfayan, founder of the Startup & Tech Mixer. “One, they just want to get rich… and that’s fine and we’re totally okay with that. And the other side is people who actually want to enact change in the world.” This second type of business is known as a purpose-driven business, aka a profit-earning enterprise with a conscience.

Curata, a Boston-based content marketing software company, added Amber Picotte as its new vice president of marketing. She was formerly the director of product marketing at Upserve (fka Swipely).

When it’s done well, content curation can form an integral part of your content marketing strategy. The online world is in dire need of capable content curators to sift and sort through the myriad of social networks, news feeds and emails that contribute to information overload. Make no mistake. Curating content is a skill that takes dedicated time and effort. However, there are some tools for content curation that can improve your workflow and increase your efficiency. 

Companies in the Boston tech scene turned up the heat and brought the party this summer. We recently asked our BIZZpage customers to submit their favorite photos of their company's summer gatherings, parties, and celebrations. Since we have had an overwhelming response with many fun and fantastic submissions, we've created a mini series to share with you all. Enjoy the first round of photos. Stay tuned for more to come!

We’re at the point in the content marketing adoption cycle when a lot of people have bought into the philosophy but are struggling to see results. That could be for many reasons: lack of executive buy-in, inconsistent publication schedules, loose internal governance processes or a dearth of internal content creators.

Sometimes 3 questions are all it takes to understand what marketing pros across various business niches are doing to up their game. We reached out to 45 founders, digital marketers, social media strategists, and content experts with just 3 questions:

I have tasks assigned to myself in our project management tool that ping me each month about creating more in-depth content. I’m constantly resetting due dates and putting this off. Are you in the same boat?

For something that’s so high up on the B2B marketing agenda, there’s a lot of confusion surrounding the practice of account-based marketing (ABM). So we spoke with two specialists to go beyond the myriad statistics attesting its importance and ask: what is ABM?  

Content creation isn't just a matter of locating, producing, or disseminating a certain quantity of information. Of most importance is the quality of the information. But what if you're strapped for time, budget, or personnel? Then consider the practice of curation as a viable alternative to creating content from scratch.

Organizations of all sizes and across a range of industries are busy hiring people to manage their content. After all, the expertise and skills needed to run a successful content marketing strategy differ from those of the average marketer, so it makes sense to bring content specialists into the fold.

Don’t hate me for saying it, but it’s one of the final Fridays before the post-Labor Day bustle begins. Hope you’re all up to something fun this weekend - the beach, rooftop drinks… you know the drill.

A recent report from Mattermark and Drift found that the majority of fast-growing B2B companies are using content to drive demand and educate target audiences.

Content marketing has become a highly competitive landscape. Thousands of writers, brands, marketers and entrepreneurs compete day in and day out for attention on the web. But did you know that a single consumer is exposed to thousands of marketing messages every single day? And that 50% of content marketers don’t know what success looks like?

If your career has plateaued, publishing a compelling white paper can improve your visibility and stature by demonstrating your ability to recognize and solve problems. While the term “white paper” might freak you out, writing a technical document needn’t be intimidating. Here are the keys to crafting one that successfully sells you and your potential:

Curata, a provider of advanced content marketing software, has announced that Amber Picotte has been appointed as the company’s new Vice President of Marketing. At Curata, Picotte will focus on scaling marketing processes in such a way that demand for the company’s software will be heightened.  

Curation is an often-overlooked part of the content marketing mix. Which is understandable. It’s hard to create enough engaging content to fill an editorial calendar without thinking about sharing content from external sources.

Using content recommendation tools is a great way to improve your site metrics, including overall page views, visit duration and bounce rate. The right content recommendation tool will keep more people on your site and for longer, which can help you raise your overall search rankings and attract even more visitors. There are dozens of content recommendation tools you can use. Here are 10 to consider for your site:

With thousands of tools available to marketers, choosing the right fit can feel overwhelming. Here’s a sampling of content creation solutions to get your search started. We’ve divided it into three sections: create, curate, and measure.

Improving your social media presence is not easy if you do not have the right strategy. Establishing your social media presence can be very challenging. Major brands and companies have recognized the opportunity of expanding their business on social media. Content is still one of the best ways to improve your business and to connect with your audience. Compelling content improves your visibility on social media and involves people with your business. 

We all remember the time not long ago when short-form content ruled. In a 1997 blog post titled “How Users Read on the Web,” famed web usability expert Jakob Nielsen stated: “They don’t. People rarely read web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.” Later, he confirmed this claim in his 2008 study, summarizing: “On the average web page, users have time to read at most 28 percent of the words during an average visit; 20 percent is more likely.”

Melania was recently accused of taking excerpts from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech from the Democratic National Convention and using them in her own speech at this year’s Republican National Convention. If you’re a marketer, think of Melania’s speech as a piece of poorly curated content that wasn’t cited properly.

If you’ve been blogging a while you may start to notice that your writing is getting stale or you go through periods of writer’s block. If you’re also running a small business, trying to balance a multitude of business development tasks with producing engaging content for your blog can be a challenge.