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.”

As the business world evolves, so does the need for brands to adapt their customer-facing strategies. If you’ve paid attention to what other companies have been doing over the last few years, then you’ve probably noticed the increase in brand activism.

If your brand isn’t already participating in some form of activism, now’s the time to jump on board. And the only way to ensure success is through proper alignment with your content strategy.

Hey [Your Name Here], When was the last time you received an email starting like this? Probably, you get a couple of emails that use your first name and contain offers that are not very…