Here’s a scary fact: 50% of businesses fail in the first five years of business, and 66% in the first 10 years.

In other words, if you’re in business for less than five years, you stand a 50-50 chance of surviving.

Here’s some more food for thought: lack of understanding for the market is among the leading reasons businesses fail. Where’s the demand? How is competition doing? What are the problems and opportunities?

Market intelligence is the answer to these questions. Market intelligence includes consistent collection and analysis of all data that’s relevant to a company, such as customers, competitors, market trends, suppliers, and more.

The real benefit comes from turning those insights into data-driven decisions and actions that keep the business growing and evolving.

Content insights powers up your market intelligence and your chances of surviving in the market.

We’ve already drilled into the importance of content intelligence, and it became overwhelmingly clear that for something so important, companies are collecting market knowledge quite sporadically.

As it turns out, marketing departments are the ones usually taking the lead on this. However, it’s no secret that almost every marketer already has more than they can handle on their plate.

In fact, one study revealed that 88% of marketers would prefer spending more time on strategy as opposed to preparing reports and analysis. It’s easy to see how content insights that empower market intelligence get neglected in the pursuit of strategic work.

There are many different angles from which you can approach content marketing, but it’s unwise to proceed very far without first developing a budget. A content marketing budget keeps you grounded, provides direction, and ensures a positive return on investment.

How many times have you encountered a problem or challenge in your own life and conducted a quick Google search to find a solution? If you’re like most, this is a daily occurrence.

From a business perspective, the rise of the self-service, DIY culture presents a unique opportunity to develop a carefully crafted content strategy that reaches your audience and moves them to action. Do you have a plan that allows you to capitalize on this trend?

When you think about content, in terms of business, what sort of mediums and strategies come to mind? If you’re like most, your focus immediately shifts towards content marketing – things like blog posts, press releases, social media, and landing page optimization. But content isn’t always outwardly facing.

There’s a time and place for having an internal content strategy and your company shouldn’t ignore the role it could play in pushing your business forward

Writing for a single target audience is a challenge for most writers. You have to get in tune with your audience’s perspectives, histories, values, wants, and needs, then choose a topic that suits them and adopt a tone they can relate to. Even if you’re used to writing for a particular niche, it’s still exhausting work.

So what happens when you want to target two different audience segments?

Content Readability refers to the ability of your content to attract the target audience with its simplicity, clarity, relatability, and natural flow, from start to finish.

The B2B marketers confront numerous challenges to drive their content marketing campaign. However, nothing tests them quite like creating engaging content.

In fact, 60% of the content marketers surveyed during the 2016 B2B Content Marketing Trends put “Producing engaging content” as their #1 challenge.

Bad news, content marketers: traditional storytelling has gone mainstream. Once a coveted tool among content marketers, storytelling has prompted professionals of all backgrounds to inform and inspire their audiences with strategically relatable content.

In a market where 92% of consumers prefer stories in messaging, marketing teams will need more than facts and figures to tell a good story. They’ll need empathetic storytelling. Good empathetic storytelling simply makes us feel better—usually by generating a chemical response in our brains that heightens our focus and helps us build connections with others.