For many businesses, the key to making sales is to first generate leads.
Leads are valuable because they’re the people who have indicated organic interest in your content and your business by giving you their information in some way, whether it’s by filling out a form to download an ebook, completing an online survey, or something else.
Not having enough of the right people on your content team is a problem for many of today’s marketers. In fact, 38% of B2B marketers say HR and staffing issues are responsible for delayed success in content marketing, and 22% blame a lack of training and education.
Developing, executing, and measuring a content marketing plan can be difficult under the best of circumstances. But when you’re not adequately staffed, even the most well-conceived content marketing plan can struggle.
When I was eight, I became stuck on a particularly tough Where’s Waldo scene. It was so difficult that I became convinced that Waldo — the character I needed to find — wasn’t in it at all. I began thinking the whole thing was a joke, full of red herrings.
And then I found him. And after that, I could never un-see him. And, strangely, whenever I saw a classmate struggling with that same difficult scene, I’d become frustrated, even angry.
Successful content marketing is about creating a connection between your audience and your brand.
This doesn’t mean just throwing content at them. It means creating content that they truly value — content that serves their needs and addresses their biggest pain points. And this type of content is much easier to create when it’s informed and driven by empathy.
As a marketer, you’re used to leveraging a variety of channels to promote your business, up to and including content marketing.
According to HubSpot’s annual State of Inbound report, 60% of marketers reported “blog content creation” as one of their top priorities — with interactive content creation (41%), long-form content creation (33%), and visual content creation (33%) not far behind.
![10 Pieces of Content Your Audience Really Wants to See [New Data]](http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/53/contentfeatured.jpg)
Content marketing is constantly evolving, which is what we here on the HubSpot blogging team love about our jobs. It keeps things interesting. And while it’s easy to get caught up in experimenting with innovative content, it’s important that we pay close attention to how our readers are changing, too.
In the past, content marketing revolved around one thing: your blog. Marketers lived by the promise that if they wrote quality articles on their website’s blog, traffic would come. And after decades of interruptive television commercials and dinnertime cold calling, it was a welcome change in the world of marketing and selling.
But, your website isn’t as important as you think — at least not on its own.
Inbound marketing is about matching the way you market and sell with the way people actually want to shop and buy. And after reading the 2016 State of Inbound report, it became clear that inbound was beginning to change at a pace more rapid than anything we’ve seen before.
New technologies were being introduced. Consumers’ habits were evolving. Things were different.
Greetings, readers. Welcome to the HubSpot Marketing Blog.
We’re very happy to have you here. You might not realize it, but getting here was no easy task. Today, in 2016, I blog for a living, which is pretty great. But were it not for the long, twisty journey that got blogging to its current state, I might not be here. You might not be reading this.
One of the barriers to getting your work read and widely shared in the age of information overload is time. With research revealing that 55% of pageviews are less than 15 seconds in duration, your content needs to provide value and pique interest quickly to align with your readers’ behavior.
This doesn’t mean that you should stop producing long-form content all together.
Growing traffic can be a bittersweet experience when you’re first starting out in content marketing. On one hand, you’re thrilled to see your posts gaining traction as incoming traffic and engagement climbs. On the other hand, your growing audience demands frequent content updates and they expect you to deliver good material.
You might be able to manage the content by yourself initially, or with the help of an in-house employee or freelancer.
Have you ever seen something in the window of a shop that you just had to have — and then bought it immediately?
In most cases, that’s not how purchases are made. (And thank goodness, otherwise many of us marketers would be out of a job.)
On Tuesday, Instagram introduced Instagram Stories, a new feature with remarkable similarities to Snapchat.
Stories provides Instagram users with a place to share posts at a higher frequency. While Instagram photos are typically reserved for perfectly composed shots, Stories allows you to share the little moments that may not be as picture-perfect.
Like many of you, I’m a trained marketer and more of a “do-it-yourself” designer. Sure, I read through The Marketer;s Crash Course in Visual Content Creation and learned some sweet PowerPoint and Photoshop tricks that have helped me a lot with my content marketing job. ;But I really wanted to take my design skills to the next level….Continue Reading
