"What kind of content can we create that people will want to collect and share with others?"

An important article by Dave McMullen, partner and lead strategist at redpepper interactive agency. Via Adrants.

Say the word "advertising" at a cocktail party and most people will immediately engage in a conversation about their favourite television spots. To be a part of this conversation used to be the holy grail of advertising.

Then along came the search engine, and along with it came a new holy grail--the top spot in a list of search results. While the whole world was clamoring for Google's coveted number one, unsponsored search result listing, Facebook and Twitter began not-so-quietly supplanting Google as the central nervous system of the world wide web. These two social media juggernauts gave rise to an engagement era during which the once lauded "impression" began to fall out of favor as a legitimate measure of a return on marketing investment. And, as a result, yet another era in marketing arose. And we're smack dab in the middle of it at this very moment in time.Welcome to the sharing era--an era in which a company's brand awareness and advertising messages have fallen, quite literally, into the hands of the market.

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New research : Nine out of 10 B2B marketers are currently using content marketing to grow their businesses. Are you?

According to MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Insitute's recent study, titled B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends, about one-quarter of marketers' annual budgets is spent on content marketing.

In addition, nine out of 10 B2B marketers are currently using content marketing to grow their businesses, However, content curation remains the biggest issue. Researchers found that 41 percent experienced challenges producing the type of content that engages prospects and customers. Similar results were found in an earlier study from HiveFire, which revealed the No. 1 content marketing challenge to be creating original content (73.6  percent). Making the time to do so (73 percent), finding high quality content (43 percent) and difficulty measuring results (36.5 percent) were also viewed as primary roadblocks.
Time may be an issue for marketers who utilize social media to distribute content, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. According to the MarketingProfs study, the platforms are used by 73 percent, 71 percent and 70 percent, respectively. However, these outlets need to be constantly updated and monitored to achieve results, and can fail if nobody is assigned to the task.



Drive up your content curation marketing thrust by using the new ‘Brand Journalism’ plan from theMarketingblog. Call Will Corry today 01784 434 412 for a chinwag will@themarketingblog.co.uk