I cringe when I hear terms like “content marketing shop.”

Shops are where you go to buy things—commodities. You can put the “things” in your cart, check out, and use them when you get home. Content marketing isn’t a “thing” you can put in your cart and start using right when you get back to the office.

But many companies— at least 44% are outsourcing their content creation, according to the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends annual report—are out there looking for businesses that they may call “content marketing shops” or “content marketing agencies.” Read the rest of this entry »

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first modern marketer. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster … able to write, edit, analyze, create, code, distribute, and ideate better than ever before.

Over the last two decades, old marketing has become new marketing. Push marketing has given way to pull marketing. Buyer beware turned into seller beware. Advertising approaches are being replaced by content approaches.

It should come as no surprise, then, that marketers have changed – dramatically.

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A few weeks ago, we visited our friends at Ringio, a virtual PBX provider, to deliver a social media workshop. As a startup inhabited by almost exclusively engineering types, social media marketing rarely rises to the top of the priority list, and when it does, it is met with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Talking to companies about using social media for prospecting, branding or recruiting is nothing new for us, but the Ringio folks wanted to put an interesting twist on the topic. They didn’t want to talk about social media marketing for the company, but rather how the individuals inside the company could use social media to build their professional brands.

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Content marketing is indisputably hot. Budgets are up. Business awareness is up. Demand for information and services is up. Look no further than the Google Trends charts below, comparing search interest for social media marketing and content marketing.

Right now, content marketing is where social media marketing was in 2010—at the beginning of a long, powerful ascent. Read the rest of this entry »

According to the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends annual report, the majority of companies say that they will increase their content marketing spending in the next 12 months. Additionally, only 44% of companies outsource their content creation, down from 58% in 2011. Companies are not only seeing the value of content marketing, but they are trying to find ways to execute content marketing programs in-house.

Having worked with both types of companies—the 44% that outsource and the 56% that insource—I’ve seen good, bad, and ugly in both approaches. When I am asked in which direction a company should go (I certainly have a built-in bias, but remember, we work with both types), my answer is, of course…it depends.

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