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).

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.