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.

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).

Whether you’re a small business or brand, your content marketing strategy – or lack of one – can make or break your success online. But if content marketing is so important, why do so many brands struggle with it? Let’s break down five common problems when it comes to content marketing.

Content marketing has made a name for itself over the past few years as an effective method of brand promotion and lead generation. But one element of this new form of marketing still plagues many - successfully calculating ROI (return-on-investment). 25% of B2C marketers say they aren’t measuring the ROI of their content efforts, according to CMI’s B2C Content Market ing: 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends — North America.

We realize if you don’t know a lot about social media it may be a real pain to maintain yourself. If you’re stressing out about your social media accounts, you’re probably overthinking how easy it can be! You may think that you need a social media team to accomplish what your business needs to succeed, but thankfully it’s almost effortless to keep your followers actively interacting with your accounts.

When it comes to marketing, there is no shortage of awesome tools. You have your choice of tools not only for analytics, but also for content marketing, conversion rate optimization, email marketing, social media marketing, search, and more. But the sheer number of available tools can also be downright intimidating. Where should you start?

Do you want to sharpen your skills in marketing content but aren’t really sure where to start? We’ve compiled some of the best assets in content marketing: everything from white papers, educational videos, and podcasts to other written content.

Many of us are curating content without even thinking about it. We’re sharing that quirky New York Times article on Facebook. We’re quoting celebrity tweets and making funny (well, funny to us) quips on Twitter.

At its annual Summit last month, SiriusDecision unveiled several new frameworks and models. One that garnered a significant amount of attention from the B2B community was the Go-to-Market Execution Model, which was designed to help organizations shift from a product-centric to an audience-centric mindset.

Marketing is no longer an option, but an imperative for accounting firms. The urgency was clear at the Association for Accounting Marketing’s 2017 AAM Summit this June in Las Vegas, where marketing directors and business development pros shared the latest tools and strategies for practice growth.

In his book Smartcuts, Shane Snow shares the story of Second City, a school for actors and comedians in Chicago. As you might expect, the story starts off with a scene where comedians are practicing for an upcoming show, standing on stage, improvising jokes.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Mr. Franklin was a smart man. In the world of content marketing, attempting to move forward without a plan is a recipe for disaster. There are tens of thousands of stories about businesses that have heard content marketing works and decided to give it a try.

Recently my boss asked me to do some research on what are some of the best marketing tools we should be using at Rebrandly. I started with a simple search of ‘Best Marketing Tools‘ but found that with so many different products doing so many different things it was going to be a mammoth task to sort through them all. This took me a lot of time so I decided to write up my findings in this blog post so that I could save other people the hours, days and weeks I spent researching and testing all these different products. I’ve started my list with the 15 best marketing tools that I found across a number of different categories and then built some other great tools in each category.

As content marketing increases in popularity, it seems as though more and more companies are springing up and offering it as a service. The 2017 State of the Creator Economy study (SOCE) found that 8 out of 10 marketers were familiar with content marketing. About 70 percent of content marketers had experience with the concept in the past year. But with so many marketers and brands deploying content marketing strategies, it can be hard to identify the top content marketing companies of today.

Google recently unveiled the latest version of an advanced hardware and software system designed specifically for machine learning—and it could have huge implications for the adoption of AI, according to machine learning experts we interviewed.

White papers are often perceived as the more serious older sibling of the eBook. As such, it’s not uncommon for white papers to be—well, boring. But that doesn’t have to be the case. White papers are among most requested resource formats of B2B buyers. They should be in-depth, enlightening, and also: interesting.

There are two messages pounding into the marketing departments today: Content Management is king Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning) is changing the way we market and sell And yet proving that content has value as creators of revenue is another issue entirely. To answer how to decide what content is contributing the most to revenue, we discuss how AI and machine learning is making a star out of content that counts.

We interviewed nine experts at top marketing artificial intelligence companies to get their best advice for marketers getting started with AI. Here’s what they shared. Start with the problem you’re trying to solve.

If you’re a content marketer, how do you get started with artificial intelligence? It’s a question on a lot of professionals’ minds. That’s why we created this post to introduce you to real AI solutions that can scale, improve and personalize your content. Scale Your Content Artificial intelligence takes marketing automation to the next level. Using AI, marketers can produce content more quickly at greater scale than with an all-human team.

While the majority of marketers are now engaged in content marketing—and a whopping 76% plan to increase their content marketing investments—not everyone is as successful at it as they would like. In fact, many marketers give their content marketing efforts a C. They don’t feel they’re generating enough leads or revenue, and while they know they have to invest in content marketing, they don’t necessarily have a clear sense of how to go about it.

Investment in content marketing is on an upward trend across both B2B and B2C brands, yet only 22% of marketers feel "extremely" or "very" successful with their content marketing efforts, according to data cited in an infographic by Point Visible. Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs together conducted the study that the infographic is primarily based on, and we've reported on that data a few times, including in this overview of B2B content marketing trends and this overview of B2C content marketing trends.

Social media is still a dominant force in the consumer tech space, leading to more information being created on a daily basis than may have ever been seen before. But separating the content you want from the rest of the noise can be a challenge for dedicated events professionals. Luckily, content curation tools have come to the rescue.

Account-based marketing (ABM) has enjoyed the B2B spotlight for a few years now and it seems as if everyone is jumping on board. Even if B2B companies have been prospecting and selling to focused lists of target accounts for years, ABM as we know it today requires more.

As a social media manager, boosting key social media performance metrics such as likes, shares, mentions, and re-tweets is good, but in order to achieve optimum social media success, you also need to tap into the power of your influencers and existing customers. And the only way to appeal to them is by providing the right content at the right time.

If someone reads your entire eBook but it isn’t tracked, how much use is that to you? Not nothing, because you’ve still made a connection with a potential customer. But without asset tracking, you have no information to guide your next interaction with them. Persuading someone to download your content and fill out the form is a battle, but it’s only part of the war. Creating content that people consume and engage with builds trust.

"Curation" is one of those words that's always conveyed coolness to me. Take, for example, the job of curating art for a gallery, or curating music for a soundtrack. Cool, right? Content curation is just as much fun -- and just as important. For the uninitiated, content curation consists of finding material relevant to your audience from a variety of sources, and sharing it strategically through your communication channels. For example, writing a roundup blog post of great marketing examples would require you to curate strong samples of content relevant to what you're writing about. And while very cool, it can be tricky. There are many, many social networks, news feeds, emails, and infographics full of such content that can demand your time and attention.

Sometimes branding fails are caused by something getting lost in translation. For example, when Coors translated its slogan, “Turn It Loose,” into Spanish, it used a colloquial term for diarrhea. More often, though, branding fails happen because of a lack of a clear style guide, which can result in inconsistency or miscommunication among your content team.

Whether you are building your personal brand as a corporate team member or a solo-preneur, content marketing is the most powerful way to demonstrate your brand while delivering value to your stakeholders. The goal of content marketing is to get your audience to engage with your material. 

Content is king. Create more content. Write more blog posts. That's the story that many content marketing gurus and social media gurus have been preaching for the last few years. It's a story and an idea that has been talked about so frequently that we're now living in a world that is overcome with content. It feels like every topic is being written about. It feels like every acquisition is being analyzed. It feels like it's impossible to keep up with all the great content being created and shared.

The vast majority of marketers, agencies and social media managers still manage their social media efforts with spreadsheets and bookmarks. Instead of starting from scratch each morning – technology can help you curate content faster than ever before. Relying on manual efforts for content curation is a one way street to spending a countless number of hours hunting, digging and looking for great content. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather spend my time working on challenging projects, hanging with family or building something great.

There are few guarantees in life beyond death and taxes, but one thing’s for certain – some people love to dunk on good ideas.Case in point, content marketing. Despite being a reliable, proven way to drive traffic to your site and increase leads and sales, some people just can’t help but talk smack about content. It’s too hard, it doesn’t work, there’s no point – all favored arguments of the content marketing naysayer.

I spend a lot of time speaking with lawyers and legal marketers about their social media and content marketing strategy. Most of the conversation focuses on the content that they are writing and how they are going about promoting that content. Included in that conversation, is the post I wrote on Thought Leadership for Lawyers: 10 Tips on How to Build Your Personal Brand. I talked about starting with purpose, identifying your audience, and yes, creating and repurposing original content.

The Best Content Marketing blogs from thousands of top Content Marketing blogs in our index using search and social metrics. Data will be refreshed once a week. These blogs are ranked based on the following criteria:   

I love listening to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose kibitz on This Old Marketing. My favorite is when you can almost hear Joe roll his eyes when someone says content marketing isn’t a thing. It just came up a few weeks ago when an article made the rounds about how content marketing doesn’t even exist. I mean, really.

Social Media Marketing World 2017 (SMMW17) was a wonderful event where over 200 speakers and over 3000 attendees from over 50 different countries around the world descended on San Diego to create a historic event for social media marketers. Leading social media marketers travelled to #SMMW17 learn about best practice in the industry. There were also many celebrities and thought leaders presenting individual tracks on specific topics such as copywriting, split testing, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, content marketing, influencer marketing as well as channel specific tracks on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, Pinterest, Snapchat and live video.

Is your company inspiring trust and consumer confidence online as much as possible? If not, you’ll quickly find out that you’re leaving sales on the table. Your business can offer the strongest product or service on the market, but you won’t be able to maximize your potential without consumers who trust your brand.

The Content Marketing Institute together with Marketing Profs and Curata released an essential study recently. You need to read it. Why? Because it found that 75% of companies are increasing their investment in content marketing, and 43% are increasing staff levels. Content marketing works, and I’ll show you how and why in the next 3 minutes.

A humble upbringing in a simple and small town of Karnataka and having seen parents work at regular government organizations, entrepreneurship and venture capitalist skills were not something Dr. Gururaj Deshpande’s genes naturally contained. However, this did not prohibit him from carving an entrepreneurial career of over three decades and nurture a string of start-ups at his incubation centers.

These days, attracting talent isn’t as simple as putting out a recruiting advertisement or listing your job openings online. Job seekers have now become job shoppers. In fact, 80% of job seekers today will research an employer online before deciding whether or not to apply to a position. And they’re not just looking to see if you have a website and a careers page; they’re looking for an inside glimpse into what it’s like to work with you. This is where employer branding — currently an extremely hot recruiting topic — comes in.

Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is, like standing desks and junkets to warm climates, popular with marketers. Salesforce’s Software as a Service (SaaS) platform offers companies an interface for case management and task management, allows customers the ability to track their own cases, and provides analytical tools and other services including email alerts, Google search, and access to customer’s entitlement and contracts.