It’s not that content marketers aren’t interested in tech. We are! It does mean, however, that leaders are wary of spending right now. Contributors include the tepid economic expectations this year, coupled with the fact that marketers aren’t using the lion’s share of the martech capabilities they already have. The result is C-suites are continuing to ask marketers to do more with less, a trend we also saw last year.

What does that mean for the hot technologies in marketing right now? A year ago, we reported on our own survey findings showing the ways in which content technology investments mirror our functions’ biggest challenges.

Research from third-party sources for this year shows many of the same tech trends that make us more efficient and more impactful. Unsurprisingly, it all starts with AI.

Generative AI really is affecting content marketing trends!

There is a predictable pattern in technology — a hot new technology grabs everyone’s attention and attracts major investment, only to be followed by a period of disappointment after it fails to produce immediate returns. In the case of generative AI, however, the pattern looks different.

Two years after the release of generative AI, marketing leaders are still excited about its promise and payoff. A survey from Boston Consulting Group finds that 70% of marketing functions already use it. McKinsey estimates that the economic benefits of adopting generative AI could result in between $6.1 to $7.9 trillion in value.

According to multiple surveys, AI is already enabling content marketing teams to produce more content faster and with greater accuracy. Given the fact that creating enough content to meet demand is among content marketing’s top challenges, generative AI’s biggest benefit, regardless of content type, is helping us to keep up with growing expectations. It is not replacing human talent. Nor is investment slowing down. On the contrary, casual experiments are giving way to more formal adoption.

Content marketing teams need customer data to optimize impact

AI’s extended reach is creating an opportunity for marketers to up their customer data game. After all, AI runs on data. In addition, parallel trends related to data privacy and the ongoing retirement of third-party cookies make it clear that businesses need more maturity in customer data and analytics.

Thankfully, one of the benefits of higher-quality data programs is that content marketers can do even better. By “better,” I mean produce more targeted content that results in higher customer engagement.

Customer data will result in better AI-generated content

Most marketing functions adopting generative AI so far have used off-the-shelf solutions. Even as content marketing teams are embedding those tools into their workflows, the most tech-forward organizations are building their own large language models using their own data (LLMs are the foundation on which gen AI platforms operate).

Not every organization has the resources to build its own model. Yet organizations can still augment standard models with in-house data for better outputs that require less manual fact-checking or style refinements.

Customer data drives better content marketing engagement

Beyond improving generative AI outputs, data maturity will also enable content marketers to more effectively use predictive analytics and machine learning to uncover insights into customer needs.

A perennial challenge for content marketers is emphasizing the right content to drive impact. One of the primary ways we have to stay ahead of copycat content is to write about what our customers want to know.

We may find that out by collecting and analyzing direct and indirect sources of customer data. Direct methods include surveys, voice of the customer programs, focus groups, and others. Indirect methods include channel tracking and social listening.

Interest in customer data is not new, but it continues to rise as a critical technology-driven content marketing trend because content teams still struggle so much to use it. For example, your organization may house the data you have in disparate systems. Or, relevant sources of data may belong to other functions that don’t want to or know how to share them with you.

For those reasons and others, businesses have increased investment in customer data platforms (CDPs) to centralize data and gain a single view of the customer to drive marketing practices.

Future tech will enable more efficient creation

Even with generative AI on their side and better data informing their work, content teams will need to up their game with sound processes and an easy-to-use technology stack. So, even as you embrace the hot technologies of the year, don’t forget to leverage your content marketing platform to get the most out of what you do to drive collaboration and streamline workflows.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs

How are marketing budgets expected to change in the next few years?

Sources like the semi-annual CMO Survey predict that if economic conditions improve, marketing budgets will gradually increase. In the meantime, content teams only increase their relevance by optimizing how they work and showing positive returns from current investments — including in your content marketing.

What are the potential drawbacks of relying heavily on generative AI for content creation?

One potential drawback of using AI for content is creating high volumes of low-quality content that includes misinformation. To avoid this risk, make sure to keep a human involved in the content creation process, and implement strong fact-checking practices as part of your content processes.

How can I leverage data to improve content marketing?

Leveraging data is not just about knowing your customer (though that is critical). It is also about knowing what is working in your content marketing program and what you need to stop doing to get the most out of your budget. That requires you to continue to leverage data to understand your audience, while also tracking content performance to identify opportunities for amplification.

To stay on top of B2C and B2B content marketing trends as they happen, subscribe to The Content Strategist and follow us on Instagram.

The post Tech Advances That Are Impacting Content Marketing Trends appeared first on Contently.

By that, I don’t mean you can talk to me by dialing zero on a landline, or that I operate heavy machinery. Rather, I love bringing order to things. I love helping people and businesses reach their peak performance and be their absolute best.

I started my career as a financial analyst, but the last dozen years of my career have been spent in content, on the revenue side of the fast-changing digital media and marketing landscape. At Everyday Health, Dotdash, and most recently as chief business officer at Time Inc., I leaned hard into content services to transform the business and combat fast-receding, traditional revenue channels.

The digital revolution has delivered a whirlwind of changes, but one thing has remained constant: Content is the best way for companies to connect with people. Throughout the consumer journey, it’s the essential component to delivering on the promise of your brand.

As someone who values execution excellence above all else though, one thing has always pained me: the incredible level of content chaos inside enterprise organizations.

Content is a more complicated challenge than anyone realizes. It’s one thing to create a great Instagram video, one solid sales deck, or a single one-sheet. It’s an entirely other thing to create consistent, high-quality content that ladders up to business goals across all of your channels, lines of business, and geographies. Very few brands have figured it out—a big reason that the top 5 percent of branded content drives 90 percent of all engagement.

There hasn’t been a great solution to that chaos. On one end of the spectrum, agencies and native ad studios specialize in creating one-off series, content hubs, or social campaigns. On the other end of the spectrum, technology platforms offer a way to organize and measure pieces of your content program. But neither of these approaches solves the massive challenges enterprise organizations face.

Enterprises need an overarching content strategy to align their teams and empower them to create content that builds relationships with their audience. Then, they need technology to execute that strategy, saving them from the hell of spreadsheets and never-ending email threads. And finally, they need incredible creators who can help them compete with the millions of other stories buzzing in their audience’s pocket every second of every day.

I was obsessing over this issue a few months ago, when I got the call from the recruiter.

The founders of Contently wanted to talk to me. I knew of Contently—a fast-growing startup the world’s biggest brands are using to power their content programs. But then I learned more about their vision and offering: a solution that combines strategy, technology, and a global creative talent network to help brands tackle their core content ailments, not just individual symptoms.

Then, they asked me to become their new CEO. I said yes.

I’ve been working with the team for a month now, and I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity ahead of us. It’s an opportunity to usher in a new era for content marketing; one that’s not defined by what a company is (an agency, a content marketing platform, AI enabled technology) but rather by the problems it solves.

Internally, we’re calling this the Content Solutions Era. (Trademark pending.)

It’s not just our existing capabilities that make me believe we can usher in this age. It’s also the culture of innovation inside these walls. Contently is filled with creative, visionary people who care deeply for each other and our clients. There’s a hunger here to solve the increasingly complex challenges marketers face. Everyone is willing to experiment, innovate, and unearth uncommon solutions using the tools at their disposal: incredible content strategy expertise, powerful technology, and the highest-rated, most specialized creative talent network on earth.

Our work is just beginning. I’m thrilled to dive in and uncover all the ways we can help our clients, prospects, and the marketing community at large. And as an operator, I can’t wait to help you escape content chaos.

The post Why I’m Placing the Biggest Bet of My Life on Content appeared first on Contently.

At the 2019 Contently Summit, we wanted to focus on a different model. One that empowers marketers to collaborate with other people in their companies, instead of setting them up for failure or burnout. Our theme this year was Masters of Content. We wanted to riff on content mastery and a “master’s degree” of sorts, which played into our educational event.

Over 200 people showed up to the PlayStation Theater in Times Square to hear from some of the best brands in content marketing. Here’s a list of the most important things we learned.

1. Sales enablement needs to improve

Alignment was on everyone’s mind from the beginning of the day. Christine Polewarczyk, senior director of content strategy and operations for SiriusDecisions, took the stage in the morning to talk about content transformation, and a big part of her keynote looked at process. When we talk about content maturity, are all involved teams working in sync? Do they have a centralized place to share knowledge and give feedback?

The answer, in many cases, is no. SiriusDecisions found that, on average, salespeople have to look in six different places to find the content they need. This is usually not an indictment on sales or marketing teams. Both could do a better job communicating. To stick with the education theme, it’s like a group project, only the group split in two and the sides aren’t talking to each other.

Love this Einstein quote shared by Christine Polewarczyk at #mastersofcontent — if you want better marketing content, you’ve got to change the way you think about marketing. pic.twitter.com/Fn1MROyyeb

— Heather (@cabo_fanatic) March 20, 2019

Polewarczyk laid the foundation for the rest of the program. With enablement, alignment, and visibility as core concerns, many speakers who followed explained how they managed to bring their teams together and drive meaningful results.

2. Content marketers and data analysts should become friends

We like to say content marketing is an art and a science. Few companies embody that combination more than RBC. The Canadian financial institution has scaled its content program to dozens of teams, offering marketers a model for growth and success.

People throw around the term “data-driven” a lot, but RBC gave more context to how that actually works in practice. Jason Lewin, director of digital marketing and optimization, explained that RBC uses content data to tell a story internally. Lewin checks RBC’s custom dashboards every day, as does Ashleigh Patterson, senior director of global content marketing and social media. They sync regularly to check on factors like leads, campaign performance, and traffic channel data.

This reporting fuels a lot of the new campaigns and programs RBC puts out into the world. As Lewin put it: “Storytelling is data with a soul.”

3. The divide between journalism and marketing is exaggerated

Content marketing is not journalism. There’s a firm line drawn in the sand. But that doesn’t mean the skills required to do one are much different than the other. It’s no secret that veteran reporters have crossed over the River Styx for better job security and pay while still getting to flex creatively.

The editor within me is stoked about this process. #MastersofContent @contently pic.twitter.com/4ysojqKsNl

— Kristen Dunleavy (@KristenWritesIt) March 20, 2019

The similarities run much deeper than that, though. Robin Bennefield, editorial director of Marriott creative and content marketing, mentioned that journalists still care about ROI. (Bennefield spent more than a decade working full-time and freelancing for traditional media companies.) Her point often gets lost in the debate of journalism vs. marketing, but it was a healthy reminder that everyone is competing for attention, regardless of whether you’re writing for The New York Times or running a legacy brand publication.

4. The food at Contently events has gotten much better

I found out one of the first Contently Summits was mostly catered with… pretzels? Thankfully, that was before my time. As someone who regularly eats two lunches and dislikes the term “snackable content,” I’m glad we graduated from salty knots to three kinds of mac and cheese.

5. Don’t get tied up in exact dollar amounts (at first)

Marketers can point to dozens of metrics to show that their content “works.” Some of those metrics are better than others, which has made some skeptical of the benefits of content marketing. Usually, those people have blinders on for hard revenue numbers.

Showing how content impacts your bottomline matters, but it can’t be the only thing that matters if you’re just getting started. Shawna Dennis, VP of marketing and communications for MD Financial, cautioned that brands should focus on building relationships with the right audience before they think about cashing in on them. Find out where the audience hangs out, what they like to learn, and what they already know.

“No one questions a brand’s need for a website,” Dennis said. “Content should be non-negotiable too.”

6. There are multiple ways to scale

The longer I work in marketing, the more I realize there are very few absolutes. Sure, there are helpful models for success, but that doesn’t mean there’s only one way to get there.

In the Ask a Content Strategist Q&A session, Giuseppe Caltabiano, who oversees Contently’s EMEA strategy program, went over a few of the different ways brands can think about international growth. The overall takeaway can be summed up by two words: It depends.

Yes, that is our own @giusec quoting himself during his presentation. It's ok though, this panel is about him sharing his expertise. #MastersofContent #AskaStrategist pic.twitter.com/K3682cpaXU

— Contently (@contently) March 20, 2019

That may not satisfy someone looking for an easy fix, but that’s okay. For example, how you localize depends on the maturity of your content program and the size of your company. If you’re a small or mid-sized business, you’ll be fine translating existing content into another language. If you’re a large company with plenty of resources, teaming up with on-the-ground writers and videographers can give you a more personal approach. Both ways will work well and help you expand internationally.

7. The future of content marketing is complete visibility

Tools and technology have to make it easier for content marketers to work across their companies. Without that, we’ll all be stuck in content chaos, struggling to be more efficient and effective.

On stage, Sanjay Ginde, Contently VP of engineering; Sunil Chaudhary, product director; and Katie Dreier, senior product manager, revealed that the need for visibility and alignment drives a lot of what our product team builds for customers. The future of marketing seems to be headed in the direction of automated insights, tech integrations, and simpler distribution.

That won’t change the fact that marketers need to keep creating compelling content that speaks to the right audience. But it will change how difficult it is for them to make smarter decisions and share intel with their colleagues. The best technology will free up these people to focus their energy on a few core tasks instead of trying to do everything.

In other words, they won’t have to be Swiss Army knives anymore. Instead, they can just focus on being as sharp as possible.

The post The 7 Most Important Takeaways From the Contently Summit appeared first on Contently.

Every year since 2010, the Content Marketing Institute has put out one of those studies on the state of content marketing. CMI’s analysis of B2B content marketing is a prime example of how to get earned media. Positive statistics demand coverage and dominate headlines. But I wanted to dig deeper to draw out more unorthodox insights from the report—and not all of them are good.

Here are 4 takeaways that examine the state of B2B content marketing and point out some areas where marketers need to improve.

Centralized content teams are the norm

Traditionally, content teams have been siloed from the rest of the marketing department. The idea of a centralized content operation, however, is something analysts like SiriusDecisions have been advocating for years. And according to CMI’s study, that centralization is currently taking place across the B2B space.

Overall, 92 percent of respondents have some form of a centralized team running content marketing. That data point is a big deal, suggesting that brands are making alignment and organizational efficiency priorities. (It’s worth noting, though, that the individual answers may be a bit flawed since a “centralized content marketing group that works with multiple brands/product lines throughout the organization” overlaps a lot with “small (or one-person) marketing/content marketing team [that] serves the entire organization.”)

This graph struck me as an interesting starting point for further research. I’d be curious to know what kind of content these teams create: Are they mostly producing content for a blog? Or are they also heavily involved in sales enablement, event content, customer success content, and so on? Perhaps that’s something for next year’s study.

More content needs to map to the buyer’s journey

We talk a lot about the importance of mapping content to the buyer’s journey, and we’re not alone. Particularly in B2B marketing, ensuring that you have content for the right audience at the right time is key to achieving content marketing success.

Yet, per CMI’s study, only 41 percent of B2B marketers claim to create content based on the buyer’s journey. That’s particularly surprising given that 72 percent of respondents are concerned with how content impacts customer experience. Since customer experience is largely based on a buyer’s journey through the sales funnel, mapping content to each step should be an important part of ensuring a great experience.

B2B marketers aren’t using tech to manage email

If your inbox looks anything like mine, it shouldn’t be surprising that email is the most used content distribution tactic in B2B. Ninety-three percent of B2B marketers use email to distribute content. (Social media is right behind at 92 percent.) And 74 percent of respondents named email as the most effective distribution format, 29 percent above the next closest method (blogs).

Despite this, only 70 percent of B2B marketers are using email tools to manage their distribution. That gap of 23 percentage points is concerning because B2B marketers shouldn’t be wasting time and resources by manually creating email lists and sending out messages without any insight into their performance.

An ROI reckoning is coming

Measuring ROI is one code that plenty of marketers still have trouble cracking. Sixty-five percent of B2B marketers either don’t measure it at all or are “unsure” if they measure the ROI of their content marketing. Incredibly, the most given reason for why is that there isn’t a “formal justification required.” Thirty-eight percent of respondents also admitted that measuring ROI is too difficult.

There’s no getting around that measuring the hard impact of your content requires intensive organizational capabilities and lots of hard work. But the marketers who aren’t even trying to figure out how to track ROI won’t stick around much longer.

At some point in every competent business, executives will question the marketing budget, and content marketers will have to justify their work. If those 38 percent of B2B marketers aren’t prepared, they risk losing everything they’ve built. And if that happens, don’t be surprised if this normally rosy study suddenly gets much bleaker.

The post The 4 Most Important Takeaways From CMI’s B2B Content Marketing Study appeared first on Contently.

To be clear, I’m not casting a stone. As a fellow editor, I’m often guilty of similar infractions, even if they’re unintentional. Right now, 1,285 unread messages sit in my inbox, including a few pitches from freelancers or marketers looking for a guest byline on The Content Strategist. Ideally, I get back to everyone immediately—and I respond to most pitches within a few days. But a few slip through the Gmail cracks, pushed down below important emails from colleagues and unimportant outreach emails with subject lines like “HUGE WEBSITE PROBLEM – I CAN HELP.” Then I forget about the pitches, until a week or two goes by and I receive a helpful reminder from the writer.

The system needs to be better.

When I launched The Freelancer in 2014, during my rookie year at Contently, I wrote that “becoming a freelancer is like choosing to fight a battle you know you’ll eventually lose.” Since then, the battle has improved. There’s more infrastructure for self-employed creatives and more places willing to pay them good rates. But if there’s one area that’s worsened, it’s the communication between freelancers and the decision-makers who commission work. That’s why Contently’s pitch feature has been such an important part of our platform.

The purpose of the feature is simple: It organizes freelance ideas in one place that’s free of clutter and distraction. Editors evaluating pitches can accept, decline, or start a thread if they have questions and want more information. There’s also a place for pitch requests, which companies can use if they already have a theme in mind and want to put out a call for new ideas.

From a creative perspective, pitches have fueled great content from brands and media companies alike. But a more structured system only helps these companies streamline the editorial process and produce better work. (Editors could always try to hack together a workaround by manually adding pitches to folders in Gmail, but that doesn’t solve the underlying problem in the way that a technology platform can.)

My biggest fear as a freelancer is never hearing back. A rejected pitch hurts, but at least you can move on instead of torturing yourself with the possibility that nobody looked at your idea. My biggest fear as an editor, meanwhile, is not having enough time. Editors handle so many small tasks that add up over the day, and I’m always running through a mental checklist to fill out that spreadsheet, schedule that meeting, and answer that forgotten email. Keeping both sides connected eliminates those fears.

Besides, as everyone in the media world obsesses over data and insights, shouldn’t we analyze pitches the same way we do audience stats? In our platform, I can sort pitches by contributor or category to see if any trends show up. So if John Smith submitted 12 pitches over the last year and I accepted four, then I should be able to give him better (and quicker) feedback. Maybe he succeeds when pitching stories about Facebook. Or maybe feature articles with multiple interviews fare better than proposed Q&As. Either way, looking at all of that information lined up in a central location should make us both better at our jobs.

I don’t expect editors to change their habits overnight. Even some of the best freelance advice out there makes it clear that contributors will have to get comfortable nudging editors about their pitches. But there is a better way that’s helped some brands become incredibly efficient and effective publishers. For everyone else, though, we’ll just have to wait and see … which, unfortunately, is something most freelancers are already used to by now.

The post Attention Editors: We Need to Fix the Pitching Process appeared first on Contently.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Marketing and sales, despite working toward a common revenue goal, struggle to align. Marketing brings in the leads, but sales doesn’t like them. Sales sells the product, but marketing doesn’t like how they sell it.

Molly Soat, editor-in-chief at the American Marketing Association, puts it best: “Aligning sales and marketing teams is a problem as old as the corporate structure.”

As a B2B software company, Contently is not immune to this challenge. We believed our content was a valuable sales enablement tool, and we had regular communication with the sales team. But there was room for our process to improve. Our communication mostly consisted of informal meetings, where details could get lost in translation. Plus, we needed more visibility throughout the content production and sales distribution processes.

To shore up the alignment between teams, we decided to test out a solution. Why not use our software to run a sales enablement publication? We had the technology to create a new internal operation only accessible to the sales and marketing teams. So, in a matter of 15 minutes, we did. Here’s how it worked.

Formalizing an informal process

After we added the sales and marketing team members to our new “Sales Enablement” publication, we set guidelines to ensure communication was simple and clear.

Below you can see the way we formatted guidelines for the sales team to submit asset requests. In addition to including the creative concept, we had each sales rep record their names, title, the intended audience, and the asset type.

In the past, this process was largely unstructured. A salesperson might make a passing request for a deck, but without documented details, the execution would often break down.

By formalizing the process, the sales team really had to think and be explicit about the value of each request. It also ensured that we could produce exactly what they wanted, rather than just taking an educated guess that would have to go through multiple iterations.

Improved visibility

Without our platform, identifying sales enablement gaps was a guessing game. Maybe someone felt like we were missing one-sheeters, but there was no of way of backing up that intuition.

However, once the sales team pitched story ideas and asset requests through the platform, the marketing team gathered a concrete understanding of what was missing (and what wasn’t). We could see which type of assets were in demand, what types of prospects needed more content support, and so on. As a secondary benefit, when sales reps pitched topics that already existed, the feature helped us understand which assets were hard to find.

Finally, after assets were distributed to the sales team, we could turn to Contently Analytics to see which content was most effective.

From hieroglyphics to art

Overall, this new process brought structure to our cross-department collaboration. The platform provided a place for us to document our content plans and tie them to production with deadlines, workflows, and a spot on our editorial calendar. Additionally, linking production back to analytics gave us a comprehensive view of the marketing-sales content engine.

In other words, technology helped us achieve the seemingly impossible feat of alignment between marketing and sales. Over the first few months the publication was active, salespeople asked for specific case studies, internal on-boarding documents, and competitive analysis.

In one case, a senior sales executive pitched an infographic that would demonstrate how brands worked with Contently from strategy to distribution. In his pitch, he included a sketch from his tablet:

The design team used the sketch as a springboard for the visual concept, and our content team expanded on his text. His pitch was an extremely helpful guide for this project, giving us a clear foundation that led to the final version of the infographic. Since it was published in late April, the graphic has been one of our top-performing pieces of content, attracting over 4,000 readers and 11,000 minutes of attention time.

Technology helped us achieve the seemingly impossible feat of alignment between marketing and sales.

Since the sales enablement publication has only been around for a few months, there’s still room for more collaboration. For instance, salespeople could fill out monthly requests for a sales enablement series. We could send an analytics report of the sales enablement content to the sales team once a quarter so they stay on top of asset performance. But we’ve already seen the value of aligning marketing and sales through technology.

Marketing and sales are going to have overlapping goals—but when they’re on the same page for how to achieve those goals, both sides are happier. Engagement increases, deals move through the funnel at a faster rate, and marketers and salespeople can work more efficiently and effectively.

The post How Content Marketing Technology Can Solve Your Sales Enablement Woes appeared first on Contently.

Last summer, however, HubSpot got on the wrong side of the news when it fired its CMO, fined its CEO, and watched its VP of content resign after word got out that high-level employees had violated the company’s ethics policies trying to get a manuscript of a critical tell-all book written by Dan Lyons, who worked at HubSpot as a marketing fellow for two years.

In the immediate aftermath, one of the world’s largest inbound marketing hubs had to undergo a major shift in leadership. Enter Kipp Bodnar, who worked as HubSpot’s VP of marketing for two years before inheriting the title of CMO. Following the departures of the executives, Bodnar had his work cut out for him—he needed to make people forget about the scandal and restore their faith in the company as one of the smartest players in marketing.

Since filling the role in July, Bodnar has put an emphasis on nurturing HubSpot’s loyal audience while continuing to use content that focuses on testing and innovation. We spoke to him about his responsibility to educate the marketing community, how HubSpot integrates content across departments, and why email marketing could fade quicker than you might think.

You inherited quite a sticky PR situation this past summer. Did content play a role in protecting Hubspot during the media firing squad?

I think what we’re really talking about is content going beyond marketing. Every organization in the company is responsible.

Some of the most important and popular content we’ve ever created is around our company culture. If you look at one of our most successful pieces ever viewed it’s our culture code text that co-founder Dharmesh Shah put together. It outlines the values and the culture of HubSpot, and I think that’s why it has been viewed millions of times.

I’ve definitely read that.

Right, it’s a great piece of content. It serves a marketing purpose, but it’s not a marketing purpose to generate new revenue to the business. It’s actually an even more important marketing purpose, which is to bring on really amazing and educated people who are in line with the core values and mission of the company. Our support team is just really awesome. They create a massive amount of content to make sure our customers have really quick access to the answers they need.

How have you led HubSpot as its new CMO?

My job is to help be a steward for the entire marketing industry because we hold an educational role—a trusted role—to help marketing and sales professionals learn best practices, but also the new trends and changes in the industry.

We’re a decade into inbound marketing, and I think we’re starting to see some shifts. It’s not inconceivable that there is a world where marketers could get more traffic from Slack than email in a couple years. It’s our job to understand those things and help educate folks on that. I think there’s a lot of changing trends in the marketing industry, and it’s my core responsibility to help be a steward for them and the industry at large.

How is content marketing different from 10 years ago?

I think if you look at the first decade of content marketing, you’ll find a major increase in transparency and trust. The buying process fundamentally changed.

People have become more reliant on user reviews and articles they’ve read on search engines than to a sales rep holding them hostage. Inbound marketing became a massive part of the entire buyer awareness and education process. A key part of that was blogging, and then came social media and, in recent years, infographics—much more visual content. Now there’s audio in the terms of podcasts and video in the terms of Facebook and YouTube.

How do you convince management to invest more in technology and services that can empower your content marketing?

Everybody has a quarterly goal, monthly goals, annual goals—they have very clear goals they’re trying to accomplish. A marketer’s job is to help them understand that leveraging content is going to align with those goals in very specific ways. It’ll enable them to over-achieve those goals because it’s a more efficient method of marketing.

How do you connect content strategy and social channel engagement to ROI?

For social, we look at if we are expanding our awareness and our reach at the top of our social media funnel. Are more people connecting with us on networks or are more people engaging with us? Because that’s going to grow our community.

We also want to understand how that community is turning into customers, so we’re looking at site visits, lead conversions and, ultimately, conversions into customers, as our metric for how successful we’re doing on social media.

There’s other things that you want to take in and consider, but, ultimately, when you’re thinking about allocating marketing dollars and allocating people’s time, you need some very specific revenue metrics to make those decisions.

How do you gauge the impact of individual pieces of content as part of this collective machine?

There’s a bunch of different content formats, messages, and strategies that are designed to accomplish different things. Our podcast is deeply engaging with a core audience of marketing and sales leaders, while on our core marketing blog, we’re a little more focused on reaching a large portion of the marketing-practitioner audience. For that reason, we care more about raw visits on that blog than we do raw number of listeners on the podcast episode.

The rise of podcast in the last year or two is really interesting to me. What stage of the buyer’s journey do you think it satisfies?

Podcasting is really just delivering audio via some type of subscription feed. So, it can accomplish anything. You could have a podcast that’s just dedicated to your customers—the people who have already paid you money—because you want them to be happy and get more value out of the product or service you’re offering. In that case, it’s the very bottom of that marketing funnel.

I think different people, different companies, use them for different purposes. It’s really the content and the message that you’re delivering through that platform that ultimately determines where it’s going to have that impact.

How can marketers take the customer from the early awareness stage and move them further along, like you’re saying, to this conversion stage?

What you really have to do is talk to people who have purchased your product. Understand what they used in that consideration process, what was most effective for them, and when it was effective to receive that information. Based on that buyer’s journey, you can build out targeted nurturing for buyer personas who are aware of the company but need some deeper education.

Verbal conversations are really important when you are trying to uncover information. As a marketer, you don’t want to go into those conversations assuming that you know exactly what every prospecting customer needs to make this decision. I need to have the ability to dig in and say, “Oh, so you came to our website. What pages specifically did you look at on our website? Was there anything that was specifically helpful? Did you know how to configure the price for the product that you’re looking for?” That’s really hard to do in an environment that’s not a one-to-one conversation.

What does the evolution of content marketing tell us about where we are headed?

If you look forward, I think you’re really seeing a decentralization of content.

If you’re a company today and you’re doing content well, you’re doing it across a lot of different platforms and in a lot of different formats. Just because someone reads your blog might not mean that they also watch your Facebook videos or they also subscribe to your podcasts. So you have different touch points with different people in your community.

What is the biggest trend approaching the marketing world? Or maybe one that’s already here?

It went from email to collaborative documents like Google and Box and Dropbox, and now we’re adopting Slack and WhatsApp and all of these different collaboration tools. I think that how teams collaborate and share information with each other is likely going to change, and that impacts how a marketer reaches those teams.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

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