Content marketing plays different roles at different stages in the customer journey, but there’s one role it needs to play at every stage in that journey—supporting your brand. At first glance, supporting your brand can sound like a frivolous pursuit. However, when you consider that 82% of customers always buy from a brand they’re emotionally connected to and 70% spend twice as much on those brands they connect with than those they don’t, a strong brand can make a big difference to your bottom line.

The growth of each company depends on two essential groups: its employees and its customers.

More often than not, companies put a lot of emphasis on the customer part. It’s reasonable: successful marketing can grow your company for years to come.

However, if your employees aren’t engaged and committed to that growth, even the best marketing plan won’t help. It’s thanks to dedicated employees who genuinely care about your company’s future that you’ll see true success.

Do you have a process of monitoring trending topics and content online?

Or content from your competitors?

How about mentions of your own brand (or founders and executives)?

There’s no one single place to do this. You can use Google search and social media platforms (search, hashtags, and mentions), Google alerts, and more.

These are all useful, but you might end up spending a lot of time jumping between tools and spending more time gathering this content than doing something about it—and that’s not fun, especially if you repeat this day after day.

Imagine this: You’re working on content curation for your business site’s blog. You’ve plotted out different audiences and created personas and researched which customer needs and interests you need to address. You’ve thought about which relevant content you need to keep driving traffic while advancing your other marketing goals.

And then a colleague upsets all your plans by pointing out that you’ve ignored everyone with disabilities. What do you do next?

The way we feel about newsletters here at Scoop.it was never a secret.

Some platforms diminish your reach so much it can destroy your business if you rely on them (looking at you, Facebook), and others get entirely wiped off the face of the planet (looking at you, Google+).

This dynamic will never end—platforms will always keep emerging and disappearing.

Content marketing is no longer a new fad. It is a proven model to increase your brand’s visibility, develop thought leadership, and generate leads. In fact, 65% of brands who report being successful with content marketing have gone through the time and effort of documenting their content marketing strategy. (Source CMI)

But, according to CSO Insights, only 32% of companies have a documented strategy to provide content for their salespeople. Why is this number so low? Because many organizations don’t understand why sales reps need content and what types of content to provide them to help them win more deals.

When it comes to picking the best content management system (CMS) and website platform, you can’t ignore content marketing potential.

After all, 79% of B2C content marketers agree that content marketing increases audience engagement. And 65% report that it increases leads.

There are many options to choose from when selecting your CMS and creating a website these days. But, WordPress backs the most features out of the box for stellar content success.

WordPress powers over 32% of all websites (that’s over 60 million) on the internet and with good reason. Thanks to its powerful flexibility and adaptability, WordPress is consistently named one of the best blogging platforms on the market.

Here are eight reasons why WordPress dominates the market.

Personalization can be defined in ways that suit your needs or supports your biases. In digital marketing, that may solely depend on your specialization. For example, we can define personalization for e-commerce, PPC, demand generation, and email.

But generally, personalization means using customer insights including but not limited to their behavioral pattern or demographic information to increase the relevance of our content. When done well, personalization gives the feeling that you’re speaking directly with a particular consumer or groups of consumers at a particular time. Why should you bother with personalization anyway?

A study by HubSpot shows that personalized CTAs converted 202 percent better than default versions.
A Deloitte study found that apart from just basic personalization, 36 percent of consumers expect personalized products or services.
88 percent of marketers in a survey by Evergage said personalization has helped them realize better business results and 61 percent say personalization has helped them achieve superior customer experience.
I can keep reeling out these numbers endlessly. But it will do little or nothing for you if you don’t know how all of this personalization stuff works. Let’s go into that next.

Content marketing generates 3x more leads than outbound marketing and costs as much as 62% less. It is cheaper and more result-oriented. And at the heart of every successful content strategy is not just the brains behind its execution, but the content itself.

This is what makes content the driving force on the internet. Search engines and social media sites exists largely because of content.

Today, more than half of 18 to 49-year old people get their news and information from the internet and this number is growing. When you create content your target audience devours, they will fall in love with you and your brand.

So how exactly is this done?

Here are four ways to use content for personal branding.

If you’ve spent any time reading digital marketing blogs in the past few years, you have probably heard the buzzwords “content marketing” and “sales automation” mentioned.

What you may not have heard was how to combine the two sales and marketing approaches to really hit a home run with your prospects and customers.

Before we discuss combining content marketing and sales automation, let us look a little closer at these two digital marketing approaches.

One of the best ways to build trust with your audience is by opening a two-way communication channel.

Social media has provided this for a long time now. Everyone can now tweet, message, and tag brands through channels they hang out on.

When you’re on the business side of this interaction, there’s a problem (and it’s not quite obvious): these platforms dictate the rules of your engagement with the users.

As any successful content marketer knows, the key to building a business and remaining profitable is to regularly onboard new clients. As part of this onboarding process, you have to show prospective clients that you’re worth being hired. And with the right portfolio, you can do just that.

The Purpose and Utility of a Portfolio
Portfolios are often used in creative fields like graphic design, architecture, or art. But they can also be used in more traditional fields, such as marketing. As a content marketer, a portfolio can set you apart and give you a chance to reach more prospective clients and show them you’re worthy of being considered for their projects.

When people think about art, their minds tend to circle around things like painting, drawing, sculpting, or photography. But writing is just as much a creative art form. And as a content writer, you have to make sure your creative juices are constantly flowing.

Is Creativity Really That Elusive?
As a content writer, your livelihood depends on your ability to capture creativity and turn it into well-crafted sentences that satisfy your clients and motivate your readers to action. And with all of the pressure to constantly produce content, creativity can seem rather elusive at times. But is this just a figment of our imaginations?

Everything you do online to market your business boils down to a simple end goal: attracting qualified traffic that you can successfully convert into clients and customers. Many strategies and channels will help you do…

Accordingly to the 2013 Content Marketing Benchmarks, Trends and Budgets, 68% of marketers were using content curation as a content marketing tactic. Some years have passed, but many marketers will agree that content curation is just as important today.

Content curation is like coupons. According to Couponbuffer, over 300 billion coupons are distributed, but only 0.7% are redeemed. Similarly, millions of content in different formats are created daily, but very little ever gets to an end user.

 Just as coupon redemption is important for customers and marketers alike, content curation is vital for both marketers and their audience. But how? Here are some ways content curation compliments your content marketing efforts.

Copywriting is the craft and sometimes art of writing words to achieve a specific purpose, usually to sell something. SEO copywriting is writing content for the specific purpose of better ranking the content, or the page that contains it, in search engine query results. As the search engine in question is usually Google, it’s easy to say that SEO copywriting is mostly writing content that Google likes. But is it, really?

One update after the other, Google has been trying to get its search algorithms closer to understanding how and why people search for what they search. The tech giant keeps surprising us with new interesting things it can do to better understand what people want when they search and what they get from content when they see it as a search result.

SEO copywriting is also about people. They are the ones you aim to please, after all, and it’s not like Google isn’t in the business of doing exactly that. It all comes down to giving people what they need because they are your audience, they are the people for whom you’re writing the content. But because it is the way your content gets to the audience, you have to keep Google happy as well.

You put a lot of time and money into content marketing for your business, but how can you know if the investment is paying off? If you’re not tracking these important metrics, you could be missing critical information necessary for making decisions about which campaigns are the most profitable and which should be shelved.

The unstoppable advancing tech-life has dramatically molded our lives in various ways. From buying recipe books to searching your favorite recipe online within minutes, indeed it’s a drastic change in lifestyle. Similarly,  85 percent of brands use content marketing instead of any other form of marketing.

However, according to Zazzle Media, the ratio of success with content marketing is quite low, as the percentages highlight. Companies find it difficult to come up with high quality, engaging content which results in a loss of traffic flow.

Source: Behance.net In a world governed by mobile technology, there is a seemingly endless offering of education and organizational apps, each claiming to be the best in its particular niche (study, time management, etc.). Superlatives,…

According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.

What this means, according to Derek Halpern of Social Triggers, is “You can no longer pump out half-assed content and win. Now you’ve got to research GREAT content, and publish only the best.”

The good news: you don’t need to create that much content.

In fact, Halpern recommends you only spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time promoting it.

And why this works is found in the “Marketing Rule of 7.”

For years, Scoop.it has provided content solutions for individuals and the enterprise. When I talk with Scoop.it customers, they often ask about the differences between solutions and which is best suited for their needs. I…