There are many tools available to aid in finding industry-specific quality content that you can share with your audience to continually position your brand as an expert. Additionally, these content pieces can serve as inspiration for future content concepts. Below are nine tools and concepts to utilize for content curation:

Pinterest

Pinterest is best known as an image-sharing site, but it is so much more. Many companies use Pinterest to share their own content, but do not use it to its full potential for content curation.

There are a number of Pinterest boards pinned with excellent infographics, blog posts and articles specific to almost every industry. When you find these boards, not only can you repin these images to your own boards, but you can also follow the image through to the originating site, grab the link and share on your other networks.

Follow Hashtags & Keywords

Many of you are on Twitter, sharing your content and engaging with your brand’s followers. But, as you most likely only follow a portion of the people and brands in your industry, you may be missing out on quality content that is being shared.

To maximize your efforts, track keywords, hashtags and brand names so you constantly have a stream of content at your fingertips. Using a third-party application like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to set up saved searches for hashtags and keywords is an easy way to monitor industry blog posts, videos, infographics and more, so you can then share them with your audience.

Storify

Storytelling is an important part of content marketing, and Storify makes telling a story through social media fairly simple. Used by many journalists and news organizations, Storify allows you to easily curate online content centered on a specific event or niche in order to tell a story.

The tool allows you to aggregate text, documents, videos, images and social media posts to convey a narrative of a topic of your choosing. You can then share your story across all of your distribution channels.

LinkedIn Signal

As it is a professional social network, people use LinkedIn to share industry blog posts, news articles and more. When you log into LinkedIn, you can see all the content your network is sharing right on your home screen. However, what about the content shared by people in your industry whom you aren’t connected with?

LinkedIn Signal allows you to search content by keyword that is shared by your network, second connections, third connections and everyone. You can find Signal by navigating to the “News” tab from the main navigation, choosing “Signal” in the drop-down menu and entering a keyword.

List.ly

List-centric content is often popular on social networks, so using List.ly to create lists — about anything — is a no-brainer. You can make a list of the top influencers, tools, videos, infographics, etc., specific to any industry — users can then vote items up or down or add their own suggestions to your list.

Additionally, you (or anyone) can easily share lists through social networks and even embed lists to a website or blog post. List.ly is great for content curation, but it also adds a community aspect to the aggregation process, which is always a plus.

Subscribe To Newsletters & Blogs

Most websites and blogs have a way people can subscribe to have content delivered to them in some way. Some websites have a monthly newsletter that includes Web content, while blogs often offer readers a subscription to posts through email or via RSS feed.

Subscribe to newsletters offered by industry websites and to your favorite industry blogs, then share this content on your social channels. Chances are you will be getting newsletters and blog posts on varying days throughout the month, so you’ll be constantly supplied with fresh content.

Delicious

After going dark for a few years, Delicious is back up and running. What was once a simple bookmarking site is now a full-blown social sharing network, as you can now connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts and share on a variety of networks.

You can search for content through tags (keywords) and find links shared by your network and others. You can then save those links to your Delicious page — but you also have the option of sharing to Facebook, Twitter or Google+, making content aggregation and sharing a breeze.

Google

If you don’t already have Google Alerts, set up for top industry keywords and do so now, as it is the easiest way to have content delivered right to your inbox. Google Alerts will notify you via email when new blog posts, news articles, videos, etc., are released; so by setting up alerts for industry keywords, you’ll get new links every day.

Additionally, you can utilize Google News to aggregate industry-specific content. You can do so by setting up a saved keyword search in Google News, which allows you to easily find local and national news coverage on specific topics. Google Alerts and Google News are excellent ways to ensure you’re keeping up to date on the latest industry information available.

Curata

Curating content can take lots of time — time that some businesses don’t have. Luckily, there are tools like Curata that make gathering relevant, high-quality content a more efficient process. Not only does the tool allow you to find, organize and share content very easily, it learns your content preferences so the most relevant content (to you, personally) is presented first.

Additionally, with a bookmarklet browser plugin, it’s easy to add content found on the Web to your Curata account, so it can then be worked into your publishing plan. With dedicated support for users, even those who are just getting started with content curation can utilize Curata.

Summary

Overall, it is recommended to have a content curation plan as part of your content marketing strategy, as it is imperative to share content other than your own on your social networks and even on your website. Consider following the rule of thirds:

• Spend one third of your time posting your own blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, etc.
• Spend one third of your time sharing the content from an external source
• Spend one third of your time engaging in conversations and asking questions

The rule of thirds in social sharing ensures that you’re not just pushing content to your audience — and, that when you do share content, it comes from a variety of sources. When it comes to distributing content besides your own, consider using the above tools and concepts to discover quality content to share with your network.

What content curation tools do you use? Please let us know in the Comments below.

All images courtesy of Vertical Measures.

However, many marketers unfamiliar with content marketing don’t know where to begin to develop a successful plan.  They understand the concept, but still don’t know how to get started. In this post, seven content marketing experts share their advice for those looking to begin their content marketing journey.

1. Bernie Borges

Bernie Borges is CEO of Find and Convert, as well as a social business evangelist, blogger and host of the new digital TV show, Social Business Engine. His thoughts:

Start by segmenting your customers into personas with a clear distinction for each one. For example, women over the age of 40, or in B2B, identify a specific title in a specific industry. Identify the most common problems and questions for each persona.

Then, simply answer each question in a dedicated blog article, white paper, e-book, video, infographic, webinar or all of the above. Stay narrowly focused on one topic in each content piece. But (and this is very important), before you start to produce content, go find these people in online communities and engage with them.

Do NOT (I repeat do not) attempt to sell them anything. Just engage with them about whatever they’re discussing. Then, when you produce your content and share it with them, they will accept you as a credible source of relevant content, and they may share it with their network. Rinse and repeat.

2. Heidi Cohen

Heidi Cohen is an actionable marketing expert in digital, social media and content marketing. Her suggestions:

Before dashing off to create content, you need to answer the question: Why do you need content marketing now? What has changed in your marketing environment or target market that’s causing the need for content marketing?

To help you get organized, here are three important elements you must define to get structure for your content marketing plans:

1. Decide why you need content marketing. This means setting goals for your content marketing efforts. Answer the question: What do you want your content to accomplish? Are you looking to build your brand, increase traffic to your website, or drive sales? The more specific your answers, the better able you’ll be to craft an effective marketing plan.
2. Determine who your target audience is. Are you talking to customers, influencers or users of your products? Create a marketing persona as well as a social media persona so that you know what your market’s needs and pain points are. This allows you to craft content tailored to them. It also helps you target where to place and share your information.
3. Select appropriate content marketing metrics. Don’t wait until after you’ve published your content to figure out how to measure your results. Choose appropriate metrics that help achieve your business goals and ensure you can track them. This means picking measures that relate back to your content marketing objectives.

Once you’ve crafted your response to these three points, you can start to build your content marketing plan.

3. Joe Griffin

Joe Griffin is the CEO and Co-Founder at iAcquire, a digital brand strategy and marketing services company. His thoughts:

You should first check to see if a formal content strategy has been defined. Whether a content strategy is defined or not, you will need to perform a content audit. There are many popular templates and how-to guides to make this job easier.

Usually, the process requires spidering the website to capture the URL’s (something like Screaming Frog will do the trick), and then a manual process of categorizing the content into use states. You may want to look into some of the many resources out there that talk about how to create remarkable content.

Creating great content needs a strategy, too. First, you need to understand the audience that will consume (your buyers and fans), promote (your internal outreach and PR teams), and share the content (buyers and influencers).

Identifying your audience can be an easy or complex process, depending on how important content marketing is to you. Yahoo! and Facebook provide some great demographic data you can use, or you can run surveys internally and externally to capture that audience detail.

The other thing you want to do is get your influencers involved during the content development process. If you want your content to go viral, you need to create stakeholders. Now you have people who will be that much more excited to share your content on their site and social channels once the content is done.

Use Followerwonk and Simply Measured to discover your influencers in social media. Getting them involved is critical to the promotion side of your content marketing.

Once you have your content completed, you need to promote it. Make sure to optimize your content for search. Also, make sure you are using up-to-date rich snippets and schema.org meta data.

Then, you need make sure your influencers share your finished product. Follow that up with marketing to your email list, and lastly, use your PR team to contact bloggers and other industry folks who want to know your content exists.

4. Ann Handley

Ann Handley is the author of Content Rules and the Chief Content Officer at Marketing Profs, a business publishing entity based in Los Angeles, CA. Her advice:

I’d look at 3 things, in this order:

1. Focus on the Why. Why are you creating a content marketing program at all? What do you hope to accomplish or achieve? What’s the burning business problem your content can help you address? More leads? More sales? More engagement? Shorter sales cycle? It could be any of those things, or something else entirely. But have a strategy.

2. Focus on the What. What can you or your organization help your customers with? What can you do to serve them? Help them? Shoulder their burdens? Ease their pain? This means you focus relentlessly and tirelessly on serving, not selling. Create your content plan around the needs and pain of your customer(s), and then plan to serve their needs consistently and expertly.

3. Focus on the How. How are you going to deliver that content? What’s the best platform, or platforms? Is it an eBook or webinar or video series or podcast or what? Or, is it all of those? And how will you further amplify those efforts through social channels (externally) and also (internally) through reimagining that content across various platforms and in various formats.

There’s no magic bullet answer to this last piece of advice (or to any of these, for that matter). But that said, I don’t think a company can live without a blog (or a flexible content management system that’s blog-like), because you need to be able to publish and amplify content easily and quickly. If you have to call IT every time you want to publish something new to your website, that’s adding an unnecessary level of complexity that dissuades creation and (ultimately) hinders success.

5. Kristi Hines

Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and professional blogger. Her blog, Kikolani, focuses on blog marketing and blogging tips. Her perspective:

The best way to get started with content marketing is by researching content in your industry. First, try performing some Google searches for blogs, infographics, eBooks, webinars, and other types of content, along with relevant industry keywords. Also search networks like YouTube for video content and SlideShare for presentations.

Next, take a look at competitors in your industry. Observe what kind of content they produce on their website and share on social networks. A quick look at your competitor’s backlink profile should also reveal content they produce for other sites in the form of infographics, guest posts, and article marketing.

Another place to research is Q&A networks like Quora. You will likely find lots of people asking questions about your industry. Take a look at these questions to spark some topic ideas for your own content, and also see what content has been linked to within the answers.

Last, but not least, perform some keyword research. When you type in the main keywords for your business focus in tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, you can get hundreds of ideas for content. Just take the keywords the tool suggests and try to turn each into a content title.

6. Tom Martin

Tom Martin, founder of Converse Digital, is a no-nonsense, straight-talking 20-year veteran of the advertising and marketing business who favors stiff drinks, good debates and developing innovative digital marketing strategies to help companies grow their business. His thoughts:

The first thing you should do is define your Propinquity Points — those places online and offline where your customers and prospects are turning to find helpful information that makes them better at doing their job.

Then, before you even think a thought — much less write a word — do research. Dive deep into the content at each of those Propinquity Points, field a survey, and call as many customers and prospects as you can to understand what content or educational needs are currently unmet. Make filling those unmet content needs your goal, and once you’ve developed a good library of such content, go back out to those Propinquity Points and begin seeding all that great, helpful content you just created.

7. Todd Wheatland

Todd Wheatland is the VP of Thought Leadership & Marketing at Kelly Services, and can’t stop talking about content marketing. His suggestions:

Listen to potential customers.

Answer their questions. Add value. Give generously.

Repeat.

But you paid good money, so let me pad that out a bit.

Starting anything is hard. Forcing yourself to break the inertia is the single most difficult part of the process. If you have an existing business and you’re really starting content marketing from scratch, I’d recommend starting by diving into the conversations already taking place in your industry/solution space. What are people talking about? What’s troubling them? Identify the most vocal influencers in the space, follow their discussions, promote their content, and help them out.

Have a look around inside your business and find out who the people are that might have the answers to some of those questions being asked – and maybe they’re already doing so. Create the mechanisms for them to add value to those conversations. Develop content specifically flowing from those topics, the issues people are already talking about. Establish some “big” content pieces, like research reports or whitepapers, and then create dozens of smaller pieces of content from these.

Quietly strangle anyone who tries to sell instead of help. Establish social outposts that you can sustain ongoing – not just as a one-way broadcast channel, but also as a mechanism to connect and engage with the community of your interest. Measure what worked, focusing on trends, not absolute numbers. Keep listening. Start again.

Summary

Overall, kicking off any new marketing initiative can be difficult, but often, just starting is the hardest part. That certainly rings true in content marketing, especially since it can be such a cultural change for an organization. Though the concept may be intimidating at first, when executed successfully, content marketing can be extremely beneficial to almost any organization. So what are you waiting for?

However, with the widespread use of infographics in marketing increasing every day, there is growing concern about maintaining infographic quality. Some believe that infographic marketing will go the way of article marketing if we begin to sacrifice content quality and placement. Thus, this post will focus on advice from experts on what they think makes a truly great infographic.

1. Alberto Cairo

Alberto Cairo teaches infographics and visualization at the School of Communication of the University of Miami and is the author of ‘The Functional Art: an Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization.”

• What makes an excellent infographic?

Good data properly and rigorously processed and organized, structure (narrative or otherwise), copy, and finally, visual style.

An infographic should be thought of as a cognitive tool for understanding, an extension of our visual system: a consequence of this is that its form (or forms) should match the tasks it is supposed to help me complete.

The first step any designer should take before even switching on the computer is to ask herself: “What do I want my reader to get from this graphic? What will the reader try to do with it?”.

Then, she should choose graphic forms accordingly: Do you want to show the geographical pattern of scattering of a variable? Then, you may need a bubble or choropleth map. Do you want readers to be able to accurately compare values and rank the regions? Then, maps or bubbles are inappropriate and you need to use a bar graph or a dot plot. In other words, think about function before you think about aesthetics.

• What should my expectations be for an infographic? 

An infographic is a visual presentation of evidence, not just a pretty picture. Therefore, you should look for accuracy, depth, and a presentation that matches what the human visual brain can and cannot do. This is something many designers don’t really get: the goal of a graphic is not to make numbers “interesting,” but to transform those numbers (or other phenomena) into visual shapes from which the human brain can extract meaning.

As I wrote in The Functional Art, a graphic should not be something to be seen, but something to be read and understood. It is not a presentation that you passively absorb, but a visual device you should be able to manipulate and analyze to better comprehend a story.

2. Dan Dannenberg

Daniel Dannenberg is an Infographic Designer for Vertical Measures, a content marketing agency, who loves a good chart, video production, solid graphic design, complex illustrations and a constant rotation of new Spotify playlists.

• What makes an excellent infographic?

Bottom line: choose the right designer. Find an infographic designer that has experience, possesses sharp design skills, handles data accurately and shows variety and growth through their work.

Then, work with the designer to create a memorable experience. An infographic should leave an impression through compelling data, portrayed through a consistent, clear, unique design and legible type that magnifies the information rather than taking away from it. A great designer can do this.

• What should my expectations be for an infographic?

Know the infographic creation process of your chosen designer, from what steps you are involved in, to the number of revisions, and the turnaround time. This all lends itself toward what you can expect from your infographic. From that point on, you can carve out a solid topic prior to the design step of the process; and then, trust in your designer to provide a content piece that suits the medium and is worthy of your audience’s attention.

3. Jack Hagley

Jack Hagley is a London based graphic designer specializing in infographics.

• What makes an excellent infographic?

I am going to explain the concept of infographics as a sandwich. As a BLT is an excellent sandwich, this will be my example. Think of this almost as an infographic, but with words.

• Concept: The idea for the sandwich: as in thinking, “I wonder what would happen if I combined bacon, lettuce and tomato?”
• Data: The ingredients. Collect bread, bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayo.
• Story: The recipe. This tells us what to do when, and how it should happen.
• Design: The process of combining all the ingredients into a delicious sandwich and placing it nicely on a plate.

It may, of course, happen that you get the ingredients first and have to work out what to make, rather than the other way around.

• What should my expectations be for an infographic?

To continue my sandwich metaphor: What should my expectations of a sandwich be? A good idea, presented with obvious care and attention. Ingredients well combined and from reputable sources. Looks great, easy to consume and won’t give me a stomach ache because the bacon was off.

The only difference between a great infographic and a great sandwich is that you don’t want to share the sandwich.

4. Matt Siltala

Matt Siltala is the President and Founder of Avalaunch Media, an Internet marketing agency.

• What makes an excellent infographic?  

I think one of the biggest factors in the success of an infographic is whether it’s “timely.”  For instance, we timed this ‘True Cost of the iPhone 5‘ graphic to coincide with the iPhone 5′s release.

Since the iPhone 5 itself was buzzing, there were a lot of publishers willing to run a graphic that introduced a new perspective on a popular topic. Mashable, Gizmodo, Huffington Post and others were willing to run this graphic because it was relevant right then.   

• What should my expectations be for an infographic?  

I think you should expect an infographic to be one of your site pages that really sees some social media sharing. People outside our industry are not sick of infographics, despite what a lot of marketers tell you.

Generally speaking, a well-done graphic/image will be shared better than almost any other content you can produce. Good infographics will also help build links. There is nothing more awesome than running a report on a graphic and seeing several powerful links (from big publishers, .edu’s, etc).

All of this exposure is great for branding and reputation management, as well. Of course, you are not going to hit a grand slam every time, but if we can inspire some real social interaction and build 10+ quality links with a graphic, I am pretty excited.

5. Dave Snyder

Dave Snyder is the CEO of Copypress, a content lifecycle company.

• What makes an excellent infographic?

Infographics are a medium, so amazing content makes an amazing infographic. Emotional appeal, concrete visuals, credible data points, and in the end, amazing art work, all go into an excellent infographic.

Truly terrible infographics don’t hit on any of these marks; they simply try to graphically represent “something.”

• What should my expectations be for an infographic?

If I am purchasing an infographic or any other piece of content at a premium price I am looking to achieve the following:

1. Generate initial traffic
2. Generate residual link value for search
3. Generate primary or secondary conversions

Some of the sub-par work I am seeing done in the infographic space is being done simply to generate links, and the practitioners don’t really understand how content spreads.

Just because something is formatted as an image doesn’t make it more likely to get links. Yes, people are more likely to grab and share images due to a lack of issues with dupe content, but no one wants to put an ugly image on their site just to get free content.

6.  Jesse Thomas

Jesse Thomas is the founder and CEO of the amazing interactive agency JESS3, who focuses on information design.

• What makes an excellent infographic?

An excellent infographic is one that’s beautiful and interesting enough to make people want to print it and hang it on their walls. But in its life on the Web, the primary purpose of an infographic is to spark informed conversation and action. That means having a point of view and expressing it in a way that empowers the audience to speak or act.

It should also be meaningful. Data can capture so much truth about the world that our senses can’t, but that value is lost if the data isn’t put into context — and it’s some combination of moronic and unethical when it’s put into the wrong context.

And, of course, an excellent infographic is one that not only makes readers say, “This is awesome;” it makes them say, “This is awesome… and now I’m gonna share it with everyone I know!”

• What should my expectations be for an infographic?

You should expect it to be visually appealing — both beautiful and clean. I know those are subjective terms, but infographics are visual storytelling devices, and the difference between poor design and great design is like the difference between watching a film that was shot on an old flip phone by a seven-year-old versus one shot on 70mm film by a pro.

As a piece of Web content, an infographic should set the tone for conversation, which means speaking the audience’s language. Is it a conversation for the boardroom or the barroom, the ladies’ room or the locker room? An infographic should be intelligent and tell the audience something they don’t already know, but say it with words and terms they do.

Lastly, do your homework. Know your data and your audience, because you can be sure they‘ll know if you don‘t. To rephrase the tagline from Alien: on the Internet, everyone can hear you fail.

7. Mike Volpe

Mike Volpe is the Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, a marketing software company.

• What makes an excellent infographic?

Great infographics have high information density. Unfortunately, most infographics these days are really just charts, but with more drawing on them.  The best infographics convey a lot of information in a lot less space than it would take to write about the topic or have regular graphs of the data.

• What should my expectations be for an infographic?

You should expect to learn something and have your perception of the world challenged so you think about things in a new way, if only for a moment.  Too many infographics today have no interesting data, nothing that makes you stop and ask yourself a question or ponder if you should re-evaluate your assumptions about how the world works.

8. Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace is the President of NowSourcing, Inc., a leader in infographic design and promotion, based in Louisville, KY.

• What makes an excellent infographic?

Infographics are so much more than a pretty picture.  The art and science behind an excellent infographic is truly a team effort. In short, you need all of the following to win:

• Focused research — many people shortcut this step, don’t validate data, and pull information from Wikipedia and random blog posts.
• Storytelling — infographics aren’t just another PowerPoint slide. It’s got to be a cohesive story and not just unrelated bullet points.
• Good design — self-explanatory, but you’d be surprised :)
• QA — spelling and grammar count
• Promotion — the ability to move that needle

• What should my expectations be for an infographic?

As with anything in life, you get what you put into it. You should have clearly defined goals before you start the project. Some clients want pure visibility, others are looking for big links, or direct sales.

That said, a good infographic will bring you dozens of links and thousands of page views. On a higher end, we’ve seen some infographics get hundreds of links and total reach into the tens of millions. It depends on how well received the infographic is beyond the initial promotion.

What do you think makes a great infographic? Let me know in the comments!

There are many ways to collect content for your website from your fans, followers, clients, etc. Consider these options for user-generated content for marketing:

Content Contests

All Images Courtesy of Vertical Measures

Contests are a great way to acquire content from your followers and fans. Some industries are better fits for contests than others, but most businesses can hold some kind of contest. Contests seeking user-generated content can take on many forms. For example:

• Ask your fans to create a video and upload it to YouTube, tagging it a certain way
• Ask followers to tweet a photo and use a specific hashtag
• Create an app for your Facebook page to incorporate video, photos or written word content contests
• Ask your audience to write a poem and submit it on your website or via email
• Ask your audience to create a caption for a photo or to name a video

All of the above contest examples involve users providing content you can then use to promote your business. Once you have content from your audience, you can feature submissions in a blog post and across your social networks. Depending on how large your company is or how big your contest gets, you may end up with content for a few weeks or months.

There are many ways to get your audience excited about a contest, and excitement = entries. For example, last year, the American Red Cross launched a contest that combined a few popular themes with their own mission and ended up with some great content because of it.

They launched a website, SavingZombies.com, for their contest that tied into the zombie phenomenon and the Mayan apocalypse (that was supposed to happen last December). The American Red Cross asked users to create videos explaining what they would include in their “go bags” — a survival kit that includes three days worth of supplies — in case of the zombie apocalypse.

The contest was successful because not only did it tie back to their original message of being prepared for a disaster; it sparked the interest of many due to the zombie and Mayan calendar hype.

Online Communities

Whether you ask or not, customers usually have something to say about your product or service. Perhaps your audience has ideas on business enhancements or would like to connect with other customers? One way to combine both ideas is by creating an online community.

Creating a community for your audience not only connects people with similar interests, but it can be a content creation goldmine. Have users create and submit content through your community.

For example, Starbucks created a website, My Starbucks Idea, for customers to submit ideas that could potentially come to fruition. Once one posts an idea, others are allowed to comment and vote on the idea. On the Ideas in Action section of the website, Starbucks employees announce ideas that are being brought to life. Currently, there are more than 143, 000 ideas posted on the site.

Starbucks was able to harness the passion that customers share for its products and turn it into something useful for both customers and the business, while promoting user-generated content creation.

Another example of an online community that uses fans to generate content is Breast Cancer Answers, a frequently asked questions video library where leading experts answer questions on video for breast cancer patients. In the Breast Cancer Survivor Tips section of the website, there are videos of breast cancer survivors sharing their wisdom and providing support for those still in treatment. Many of these women have large personal followings and promote the videos directly to their audiences, which is highly-targeted free marketing.

Breast Cancer Answers simply converted the passion and camaraderie that is characteristic of breast cancer survivors into powerful content that contributes to the community while simultaneously advancing search and exposure for Breast Cancer Answers.

Encourage Reviews

Something as simple as a review of your product or service can go a long way when it comes to content marketing. Encourage your customers to leave reviews and allow them to leave those reviews in a number of ways.

For e-commerce sites, asking for a review on the product page is a great tactic, but consider going a step further by sending a follow-up email requesting a review after an order has been received. Additionally, through social media listening and monitoring, you can ask online users discussing your product or service for a review.

For other types of businesses, try to solicit reviews in a way that is specific to your business and industry. You can ask for reviews through email marketing campaigns, on social sites, through a form on your website or in person through review forms.

Partner With Your Customers

Depending on your business, you may know some of your customers really well – especially long-time and repeat customers. If this is the case, contemplate partnering with these customers in a way that will benefit both of you.

You can do this in a number of ways. For example, case studies are a great way to highlight customers while simultaneously highlighting your own success. If someone has had tremendous experiences, made notable strides or achieved something new as a result of your product or service, a case study is a way to showcase their achievements while promoting your product or service. Many times customers will agree to be featured in a case study because it isn’t self-serving to your company – it provides them exposure as well.

In some cases you may be able to partner with a customer for cross-promotion marketing. It’s simple: you can promote their business/blog/art/etc., and they will promote you as a vendor. These types of partnerships can be very beneficial, as your business will be introduced to a new audience.

Double Promotions

Another positive attribute of user-generated content is on the promotion side. When users are involved in content pieces, they will want to promote their content, too. As a result, not only will you be promoting the content, but the user will as well.

For example, when a user enters a video contest, they will most likely share it with their network — family, friends, Facebook, Twitter, etc., especially when voting comes into play. Because of this, their network will share the content, too, promoting their loved one or friend. A ripple effect of promotion is created, which can benefit your business greatly.

Overall, there are many ways to work user-generated content into your content marketing plan. Whether it is through a contest, community, review or partnership, user-generated content marketing is some of the most influential marketing a business can participate in. Harness the power of your fans, followers, customers and audience through user-generated content marketing plans.

What tips do you have for user-generated content marketing? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

One of the questions I am often asked is: “What kind of content marketing can I do on a very limited budget?” One of the many positives of employing content marketing in your marketing plan is that it can be done on a budget and still produce worthwhile results.

Consider the following scenario: you have $1,000 per month you can allocate to outsourcing, and you have six hours per week (24 hours per month) that you can spend creating, editing or promoting content. How can you make the most of your budget and time?

Budget By Content Medium

First, you will need to plan ahead (as much as a year) to determine what media you want to use for your various content marketing projects.

Often times, the content medium will dictate how much money you spend on a content project – depending on whether you need to outsource the work or not. Consider the media below:

• Infographics: Do you have a graphic design team in house, or do you need to outsource this portion of your project? If you need to outsource, talk to designers or agencies to see how much an infographic will cost you. Is it an hourly or flat rate? This can affect the scope of your project, considering your $1000-per-month budget.
• Written Content: Written content can get pricey– fast, especially for more technical and research-intensive work. If you’re looking to produce a whitepaper for your content marketing, you may not be able to afford to outsource the lot of it, or you may need to spend a couple months’ worth of your budget to get this accomplished. Since the bulk of content is typically of the written variety, you will need to put some careful thought into allocating your funds and time.
• Video: Though video seems expensive, it doesn’t have to be. Believe it or not, video shot on a cell phone or digital camera can work just as well as “television ready” video content. If you want a high-quality produced video, your $1000/mo. budget probably won’t cut it. But, if you can shoot the video yourself and edit it in-house, or even hire a freelance video editor, your outsourcing budget could go a long way.
• Photos: Photos, like video, can be expensive — but they don’t have to be. Even cell phone-quality photos can make great content — especially with all the filters and photo editing apps available.

Map Out Your Budget Allocation

Next, you should map out your budget allocation for the next six to 12 months based on the different media you are going to target. For example you may choose to do the following:

• Outsource the production of two infographics over the course of the year ($3,000)
• Outsource the production of two free guides (10-12 pages) for prospects and clients to download ($3,600)
• Hire an editor to edit and finalize one blog post per week for one year ($2,600)
• Hire a writer to create one article per month, for you to place on third-party sites ($1,800)

That’s a total of $11,000, leaving you $1,000 to spend on promotions (see below) or on creating another piece of content that comes to mind over the year ahead.

Make The Most Of Your Time

Though 24 hours per month may not seem like a lot of time, it can be – if you make the most of it. For instance, using the above content outsourcing example, you might spend your time on the following:

• Two hours per week: Drafting one blog post per week which you will hand off to your editor (above) to finalize. You will then publish on your blog. I recommend picking a specific day of the week for publishing and sticking to it.
• Five hours per month: Managing your outsourced projects listed above (the monthly articles for third party sites and the quarterly infographic or free guide).
• One hour per week: Draft and schedule social media messages to promote your new blog posts and other content. Write messaging specific to each social media network. Be sure to research and include relevant hashtags in tweets, pay attention to character limits and get a custom shortened link. Schedule messages for the week or longer.
• 15 minutes per day: Respond to tweets, posts, comments, etc. Interact with others about your content. Be social and converse with your audience. This may be difficult, as it is easy to lose track of time on social media. But in this example, we only have 24 hours per month to work with, so discipline is a must.
• One hour per month: Track and report your findings. Reporting content marketing efforts on a monthly basis makes benchmarking easier, and also allows you to tweak your strategy going forward.

This is approximately 24 hours per month. Admittedly, it will be difficult to stay focused and on track, but if you use an editorial calendar and schedule these tasks you just might surprise yourself.

Additionally, you can ask staff to participate in content marketing projects to maximize efforts. Some staff might be willing to write a corporate blog post once in a while if they understood the value it brings to both the business and their own personal brand.

Some companies have discovered outstanding writers where they would least expect it. Consider asking someone in the warehouse to write about deliveries, or an accountant to explain the financial aspect, or a sales professional to discuss the most frequently asked question in your industry.

You might even go as far as giving a small ($25-$50) bonus to the staff writer if the post meets certain minimum criteria like word count, use of an image, and so on. Or, you could have a contest based on post metrics like traffic, links, etc., as sometimes, a bit of friendly competition can get the creative juices flowing.

Make Use Of Extra Funds

In the example above, we managed to save $1,000 of your total budget. There are other ways to utilize your budget to help your content marketing campaign.

Depending on your content marketing campaign, it may make sense for you to purchase media to promote your content. You could spend some of your budget on Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads or promoted tweets.

Where you spend your budget will depend on the goals of your campaign and how much you can achieve in-house vs. what you need to outsource.

Scale To Your Budget

You may be able to spend more than $1,000 and six hours a week on a content marketing project. In that case, you can scale these activities to make your budget and availability work for you.

If you have a bigger budget, you may be able to repurpose your content into different media through outsourcing. If you have more time to dedicate to content marketing, utilize in-house resources the best you can, and devote more time to content promotion, distribution and interaction with your audience.

Always Measure

At the end of a content marketing campaign, it is imperative to measure for success, so you know what to do (and what not to do) next time. Go through your monthly reports and determine what social networks provided the most value, how well the medium(s) were received by your audience and measure the ROI of paid efforts. By understanding what works and what doesn’t work, you will be able to better optimize your budget and time the next time around.

There are many ways to slice and dice a $1,000 budget and six hours a week on a content marketing project — you will have to find what works for you and your audience.

However, one thing is for sure: it can be done, and it can be successful. Just because you don’t have an unlimited budget for content marketing doesn’t mean you can’t garner results. Through effective planning and measurement, you can make a limited content marketing budget go a long way.

What tips do you have for content marketing on a budget? Let us know in the comment section below.

We’ve evolved from painting the walls of caves to the written word, to plays and movies, to the present ability to tell stories online in the form of videos, blog posts and on social media sites. However, despite the many changes in storytelling, some of the fundamentals have remained the same.

Extraordinary stories are relatable to people of all ages and walks of life and either call on our attention or respond to something in our lives. Memorable stories have characters people care about, along with a problem or issue that ebbs and flows. And of course, all stories must have a conclusion, or there was no point in even listening to the story in the first place.

As marketers, we are constantly telling stories to our audiences, particularly through content marketing. When employing content marketing as a tactic, it is imperative to connect with your audience through storytelling.

But what makes a story truly exceptional, even when the subject matter isn’t the most interesting? Here are eight compelling storytelling techniques you might consider to enhance content marketing:

1. Remember The Essentials

We discussed the fundamentals above, and, though it seems obvious, don’t skip out on these essential parts of storytelling. Think about it: without memorable characters, what good is a great plot line?

Similarly, if you have an interesting story full of peaks and valleys, but no conclusion, people will just be confused and unsatisfied with your story.

Make sure to include each basic element of storytelling in your storyboard, blog post or other content project.

2. Learn From The Masters

Study successful storytellers including fiction and non-fiction writers, playwrights, directors, actors and even storytellers in your industry.

Find out what inspired them to tell stories. Read their histories and explore their processes. Borrow what you can from their methodology, patterns and idiosyncrasies. These people were successful storytellers for a reason, so see what you can learn about their methods and apply them to your own content projects.

3. Discover Different Media

Storytelling comes in many forms – articles, novels, movies, blog posts, videos presentations and more.

Don’t be afraid to dabble in different media – maybe even go out of your comfort zone. Be sure to research what medium your target audience prefers and also consider which medium works best for the story you are trying to tell.

If your story has lots of dialogue, perhaps a video would be best. If the story is a narrative, the written word may be better. Check out tools like Prezi, Tiki-Toki and Visual.ly that are transforming the way we present information, data and stories.

4.  Dissect Your Favorite Stories

Your favorite stories are your favorites for a reason. Pull apart your favorite stories and find out why you really like them.

Is it the plot line or the characters? Does the story teach a lesson that resonates with you? It may be easy to see why you love certain movies or novels, but applying it to business may be more difficult.

Think of your favorite YouTube videos or blog posts – why do you like them so much? Then apply your findings to your own story.

5. Fascinate Your Audience

Working to fascinate your audience may not be an easy feat, depending on what industry you’re in. But if you do fascinate them, they will surely remember your story and your brand.

To tap into your audience’s fascinations, consider working in one of our seven fascination triggers. These triggers, as described by branding expert Sally Hogshead, include: power, lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, vice and trust. She explains, “By mastering the triggers, your ideas become more memorable.”

6. Be Honest

Whether you are telling the story of your brand or telling a story about your industry, it is extremely important to tell the truth. If you aren’t truthful, people will know. And once one person knows, everyone will know. The last thing you want is to be known as dishonest.

While some degree of enthusiasm is permitted in marketing and in business, it’s not a good idea to embellish your stories just to earn the interest of your audience. That kind of attention is short-lived and it is not a sustainable approach to marketing.

7. Keep The Audience’s Interests In Mind

Think about what is interesting to your audience as consumers and work that storyline.

What interests you as an insider may not match up with what consumers are interested in, and that’s okay. But who is the story for? Tell the story for your audience, and always keep their interests in mind throughout the creative process.

8. Show Your Personality

Sometimes brands are afraid of letting their personality show for fear of being labeled a certain way. The fact is, people connect with other people, and even more so with other people who are similar to themselves in some way.

If your story doesn’t divulge something personal or unfamiliar about your brand or business, your story could end up being boring. People don’t spend time with boring stories – they move on to something that is compelling and engaging. Don’t let your story get skipped over. Share your personality and individuality with your audience.

Overall, there are many techniques to telling a memorable story. Most importantly, be true to your brand and tell a story that you are proud of, that can be repeated for many years to come.

Though the way we tell stories has changed a great deal from prehistoric times and storytelling is constantly progressing, one thing is for sure: everyone enjoys a great story, and that’s not going to change.

When creating content pieces for content marketing use, it is important to consider both the topic of the content and also the type or format of the content you are producing. Be sure both align with your customers’ needs. For example, a short video may work great for one target audience, but a comprehensive whitepaper may speak to another audience better.

When brainstorming content marketing ideas, ask yourself the following questions:

• What questions do customers frequently have about our products or services?
• What information can I give to my customers that positions my business as a leader in the industry?
• What content does my audience want or need to make a decision?

By answering these questions, you will start to uncover what content is useful to your customers. Now, it is your job to provide that content to your customers, keeping keyword research in mind, in a format that is engaging and easily digestible.

However, there are several types of content many organizations seem to avoid. Consider the following types of content that you probably aren’t creating currently, but you should:

1. Pricing/Cost

If you’ve done keyword research about your products or services, chances are you have come across data that shows people are searching for cost and pricing information.

People are always going to search for pricing and won’t make a decision until they find out. However, many businesses are afraid of creating content disclosing price and cost, assuming consumers expect exact pricing. Conversely, that isn’t the case most of the time.

You don’t have to specify the exact cost of a product or service in your blog post or on your landing page that discusses pricing. Instead, just address it by including a range or indicating an estimate. The truth is, you need to provide your customers this information. You will gain a huge competitive advantage if you are the only one in your industry creating content around pricing.

2. Comparisons

Other types of content that consumers use to make purchasing decisions are comparisons and reviews. Again, some companies are concerned about creating content that compares their products to a competitor. However, if you can position your product or service to come out on top, does it matter that you mention your competitor’s name? Not really.

Think about the last time you shopped for a TV, car, phone, etc. You probably looked for reviews or comparisons. Maybe even searching for product 1 vs. product 2.

People want comparison and review content, so it is your job to create content featuring your product or service that will be found by potential customers. Otherwise, you risk your competitors creating content in which their product or service outperforms yours.

3. Free Guides

Free guides and whitepapers may require more of an investment than other content types, but are worth the venture in many industries. Free guides and whitepapers work well in marketing situations where one of your key focuses is to drive leads to your website, or build your email list.

Create free guides or whitepapers that can aid customers without giving away your business’ proprietary processes, and give it away for free. Just require a name and email address in exchange for downloading the document. Don’t ask for too much information, as that may deter people from downloading the document.

Then, use collected email addresses to grow your marketing list and nurture those leads. Be sure your free guide or whitepaper offers great worth, as a low-value piece can discourage downloads, as well. The best part about this type of content (almost any type, really) is that once it’s produced and put online, it just keeps working for you for years to come.

4. Interviews

Interviews are a very simple way to provide great content to your audience while simultaneously positioning yourself as an expert in your industry. Interviews can be video or text-based — both are easily consumed by consumers.

Start by reaching out to experts in your field and discuss moving forward with either a video or text-based interview format. For video interviews, schedule a time that works for both parties and record via Google+ Hangout or even Skype.

For text-based interviews, consider sending the interviewee 10-12 questions and ask him/her to answer as many as they are comfortable with. When finished, you have a blog post. By interviewing experts in your field, you become an expert as well, as your website provides expert information.

5. Video

Believe it or not, creating video content is not as hard as you think, and it’s always getting easier. Between Google+ Hangouts, the ability to record Skype and webinar sessions, and almost everyone having access to some sort of video recording device, creating video content can’t get much simpler.

As previously mentioned, video interviews make great content pieces. Be sure to record webinars to repurpose them into video content. Also, don’t be afraid to shoot your own video. Use a smart phone camera or invest in a more serious camera and create video content about your products, services, team members and anything else that would be beneficial and interesting to your audience.

The key with video is to just jump in and start filming. You might leave a lot on the cutting room floor, but it will never happen if you don’t start filming.

In summary, there are many different types of content you can generate for your content marketing campaigns. However, it is crucial to consider the above types of content that can truly set you apart from your competition. These types of content are often overlooked by businesses but can provide customers with the information they need and are searching for. If you provide it – you win!

Typically, content marketing projects have lots of moving parts that come together at different times to form a cohesive campaign. As a result, using a editorial content calendar is crucial in managing the content marketing process.

Calendar Management And Template

There are many ways to format and lay out an editorial content calendar. However, your team’s editorial content calendar should include an annual look, in addition to content plans by month for the entire year, always staying 60 to 90 days ahead. Additionally, you should appoint one person to manage the editing and upkeep of the calendar to avoid confusion among team members.

Your content editorial calendar should be available for all team members to view, either in a shared document online or saved somewhere on your business’ shared drive.

The calendar, created and managed in a spreadsheet, can take on a variety of shapes and sizes. Below is an example template of the editorial calendar we use at Vertical Measures (feel free to download).

This calendar includes your content marketing plans for the year at a glance and offers a separate sheet to be used for each month, which includes a deeper look into each content project. Let’s take a closer look at how you might use this template or create your own original.

Year View

When developing your editorial content calendar, it is important to think ahead as far as possible. Look forward a year to events and happenings that could affect future content projects.

A great way to collect ideas for the full-year view of your editorial calendar is to gather team members to brainstorm for events coming up in the following year, like holidays or annual events. Consider researching industry events that you can create content around. Try to plan for 12 months in advance to avoid roadblocks throughout the year. Consider the following when brainstorming for the coming year:

• Business Quarters: What are your quarterly goals? What resources do you/will you have each quarter? What is your quarterly content marketing budget? Having this information at hand can make it easier for the calendar manager to stay on track with goals, resources and budget.
• Selling Cycles:  Does your business have specific cycles or trends throughout the year? Include any information regarding your selling cycles that can aid content producers and editors in their projects.
• Seasons:  Does natural seasonality affect your business or does your industry have its own conceptual seasons? This data can be useful when brainstorming content ideas.
• Holidays: What major holidays or industry-specific holidays could you create content around? Additionally, the actual holiday dates are important for developing publishing schedules.
• Events: What industry events are you attending? Or what events will be happening near you? This information is crucial to plan content projects ahead of time.
• Product Launches: What product launches should customers be aware of? Typically, some content will be focused on specific product launches throughout the year.
• Deadlines: What are the current production deadlines for content that the team has set to meet? Deadlines that are already set in stone should be recorded so other content projects can be planned around them.
• Company Goals: What are your specific goals for the business? What are you hoping to accomplish through these content projects?
• Metrics: What overall metrics will you be tracking? Will you be looking at links, traffic and conversions? Outline goals upfront so content producers and editors can work to create content to effectively meet them.

Monthly Calendar Creation

Each content project has its own row, ordered by the publish date. Due date and publish date should be filled in chronologically. The remaining columns should be filled out following these recommendations:

• Title/Description: What is the title of the content piece? Describe the piece so others can identify the main theme and message.
• Status: What is the current status of this project? This column could be color-coded or labeled with different categories like “in progress,” “on hold” or “with editor,” so the standing of the content project is easily identifiable.
• Type of Content: What type of content is this piece? Types of content include blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, slide shows, whitepapers, etc. This information is important for resource planning as well, to identify content trends and popularity.
• Producer/Designer: Who is responsible for the creation of this piece? This person will be in charge of completing the content piece and managing the project throughout.
• Editor: Who is the editor for this content project? The editor is generally the last person who sees the content piece before it is distributed. This person is responsible for double-checking spelling and grammar while fact-checking content as well.
• Target Audience: Is this content piece intended for potential customers, current customers or another audience? What demographic are you targeting? It is important to identify this information before content distribution.
• Distribution Channels: Where will this content live? What social networks will be this content be shared on? Be sure the content distribution channels match where the target audience hangs out online for maximum content exposure.
• Promotion: What promotional efforts will take place to distribute this content piece? Will this content piece be leveraged by another digital marketing channel? Perhaps a content piece can be used in other online marketing efforts, giving your content a longer life cycle.
• Meta Data Tags: What tags or keywords are associated with this content piece? Be sure to check with the SEO team on the best tags and keywords to use with each content piece for maximum SEO potential. What good is your quality content if it can’t be found? Ensure your content is optimized not just for your audience, but for search engines too.
• Metrics: What success metrics are you measuring this content projects against? Are there baseline measurements? What are they? These metrics and baselines will depict whether a content project is successful or not.
• Notes: Are there any specific instructions or notes regarding this content piece? Are there updates to the project’s status? Add anything extra worth noting in this column.

Customize Your Calendar

You should look into customizing your editorial content calendar to fit your organization’s specific needs. Consider these additional columns:

• Image Link: If the content project is text based, having an Image Link column could help the person posting the content. The link could be to a website or to a folder or image on your shared drive.
• Social Updates:  This could be the same as the Promotion column, but could also be an additional section. If you plan on sharing this content across social networks (which you should!), you may consider including Tweets, Facebook status updates and Google+ posts that can easily be copied by all that have access to the document.

Overall, there are many ways to adapt these editorial calendar suggestions to make it your own. The important part is getting your content projects organized in a way that is easily digestible for your team and the person managing the process.

Utilizing an editorial calendar for content marketing projects is important in more ways than one. Not only will your content be organized in a way that makes sense – chronologically by month – you will have a record of all of your past content projects.

Having a list of past content projects on hand allows for easier reporting and quick recognition of milestones and achievements. Additionally, content marketing project organization can aid in brainstorming future projects and provide content repurposing and refreshing ideas.

From keyword tools and question-and-answer sites to open discussion forums and backlink analyzers, there are tools designed to help you with every step of your content marketing research.

But don’t let the sheer number of tools available drive you into analysis paralysis. Remember, this is an idea generation strategy, so try them all, pick a few favorites and make this a part your continuous content research and planning. Here are twelve you should be using if you aren’t already:

1.      Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

All research starts with keywords, so if you haven’t already conducted thorough keyword research for your business, I recommend this as your very first step. The Google AdWords: Keyword Tool is one of the best free keyword tools available to marketers. This tool is tied directly into Google AdWords, and it uses approximate search frequency from Google (read: don’t rely too heavily on this search frequency data).

This tool can tell you which keywords are searched more than others based on broad, exact or phrase match volumes, depending on your settings. You can also view local (U.S.) or global data, which is essential for some location-based businesses. Additional data includes local search trends and location and languages for international research.

Overall, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool is extremely useful for the optimization part of any content marketing campaign. It is imperative to optimize your compelling content, otherwise, it may not be found.

2.       Soovle

This is a great little site to help quickly generate ideas. All you need to do is enter a keyword phrase and Soovle will display keyword suggestions from up to 15 different websites. You are able to customize which sites are included, which can be useful depending on your niche. For example, Amazon and eBay are choices, so if you are in the ecommerce business, these choices make more sense for your research.

This tool is helpful for researching quickly across a number of platforms. You also have the ability to save searches, making it easy to see how keywords have performed over time.  This tool provides a different keyword research perspective compared to the Google AdWords tool.

3.       Ubersuggest.Org

This next tool is similar to Soovle, but Ubersuggest alphabetizes the results – and that’s a good thing, because the results are plentiful. Using Ubersuggest is easy: type a term in the search box, choose a language, choose where you would like your results from (the Web overall, or certain verticals like shopping or news) and click suggest. The tool takes your base search term, adds a letter or a number after it and brings back alphabetical keyword suggestions.

Ubersuggest allows you to add suggested keywords to your “basket,” which is just a collection of the keywords you have selected. You are then able to export your basket as a text file or copy and paste it, so you may do further research.

  4.       Topix.Com

Topix.com is a helpful resource for anyone looking for content ideas. Just enter a search term and the Topix engine will produce results that include news articles, forums, question-and-answer sites and blog posts that relate to your keyword.

The variety of search results allows you to find a vast amount of information from all over the world in just a few seconds. If you’re looking for geo-specific results, Topix allows you to set a location to get local results, making this idea engine a content marketing research hotspot for local, national and global businesses.

  5.       Bottlenose

Bottlenose is a relatively new tool which can be used to highlight trending articles and social commentary based on specific keywords. It’s a social search engine and can really help you create news or hot topic-led content.

While Twitter, Facebook and other large social media networks are great for content marketing research, there is so much information available, it can become hard to digest. Bottlenose allows you to view social media information in a way that is more easily digestible.

  6.       Spezify

Similar to Bottlenose, Spezify is also a social search engine – though it is less structured and more visually interesting. This tool creates a tapestry of related tweets, images, music etc. And not only does it look cool, it’s also extremely useful.

Spezify offers a different way to take in the abundance of social information. For visual learners, there couldn’t be a more effective tool. Also, the range of sites Spezify searches is across all industries and verticals, which makes it useful for a variety of different projects.

  7.       Yahoo Answers

Question-and-answer sites can be a gold mine. Yahoo Answers is one of the biggest answer sites, getting millions of questions and answers. The way it works is pretty simple: people submit questions and the Yahoo Answers community answers them. When someone submits a question, the person has to categorize it by topic, which makes it easy to find and easy to answer.

Yahoo! developed a point system so other users rank answers and the “best” answers are given the most points. Users that accrue points have proven to be reputable and are granted certain privileges, such as the ability to ask, answer, vote, and rate more often.

Wouldn’t we all like to know what questions our customers have about our products and services so we can answer them with our marketing? We can, through answer sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora.

  8.       Quora

This Q&A site is considered more high-end compared to Yahoo Answers. Quora is a continually improving and refining its collection of questions and answers. The questions and answers on Quora are reviewed, edited, flagged (useful or not) and organized by users. Like Yahoo Answers, the questions are categorized for easy browsing.

The creator of Quora has said the goal is to have each question page be the best available resource for someone who wants to know the answer to any particular question. Though Quora is only a few years old, this site is rapidly growing and the average caliber of answers is quite high. This site is a great resource for finding out what type of content could be useful to customers by learning what industry questions are frequently asked.

  9.       LinkedIn Discussions

LinkedIn is best known as a B2B website connecting people. But did you know they have lots of great discussions going on too? There are thousands of industry groups on LinkedIn – truly something for everyone. In these groups, industry professionals discuss industry news, events, standards and more.

These group discussions can give insight into industry communities that may not be found elsewhere. By perusing these industry groups, you can see frequently asked questions, spot industry trends and identify sentiment towards products or services. As LinkedIn requires a LinkedIn account login for participation, discussions are full of high-quality content, as people are held accountable for their contributions.

  10.       Discussions On Google

One of my favorites is Google Discussions.  It’s not easy to find on the Google.com page, but if you perform a keyword search and click “More” on the left column, you will find “Discussions.” This is a very easy way to find people discussing products or services specific to your industry.

A Google discussion search usually brings results from question-and-answer sites, review sites and more. By browsing these results, you can gain insight into consumers’ thoughts, experiences and questions with products or services, making Google discussion search a valuable content marketing research tool.  While you are there, you just might want to participate in the discussions!

  11.       Open Site Explorer

The SEOmoz tool Open Site Explorer pulls the back link profile of websites, making it tremendously useful for content marketing research. By using the “Top Pages” tab and browsing a competitor’s back links, you can see where they have been successful in content marketing.

Are lots of reputable websites linking to one certain piece of content? Are there lots of spammy sites linking to their landing pages? What blog post has the most back links? The answers to these questions can provide a look into your competitor’s content marketing strategy, allowing you to fill in the gaps or piggy back off of what they have started. What is working for them could work for you – if you do it better.

12.   Your staff

Last but not least: talk to your employees.  Interview the person in the warehouse, the delivery gal, accounting team, sales people, the help desk, and so on. Ask them what questions they are asked by your customers. You will discover all sorts of ideas. And believe me, if they are being asked in person, people are searching online for those answers, too.

This is where you come in. You need to provide the answers to these questions in your content in a compelling way. You must produce quality content that positions your brand as the expert in your industry – the company to trust – so consumers will choose you over your competition.

Conclusion

With these tools, almost anyone in any industry can generate hundreds of content ideas. Did I miss your favorite content marketing research tool or method? Or do you have any great examples of how you put one of these tools to use? Let me know in the comments below.

Though it may seem like a straightforward concept (create great content and share it), content marketing isn’t all that simple.

For a content marketing campaign to be successful, a well-developed strategy is necessary — taking industry, content type, distribution channels and more into consideration. If you create web pages, blog posts, videos or other types of content online, you are considered a publisher. So, it’s time to think like a publisher when it comes to developing your content marketing strategy.

Take Stock Of Where You Are

Before you dive into developing a strategy, take an inventory of your existing content. You make be able to repurpose or reuse some old content for a new content marketing initiative. Perhaps an old blog post can be updated to be timely and relevant again, or a video can be edited to include new information.

If the core idea of an old piece of content can work for a new piece, you will be ahead of the game. With an inventory of your content assets complete, it’s time to start setting goals for upcoming content marketing projects.

Set Goals

One of the most important parts of any online marketing campaign is to have a goal in mind before strategy development. If you aren’t sure what you want to accomplish, how are you going to strategize the best way to succeed?  You need to define what success looks like for your content marketing campaign. Ask yourself: “Why am I creating this content? And what do I want this content to do for my website and business?

Maybe the goal is to drive traffic to your website, or maybe the goal is to get people to sign up for your newsletter. Other goals might include customer retention, lead generation, thought leadership or higher conversion rates.

Goals can change or vary by each content piece you produce. The important thing is that each content piece you create for content marketing purposes ties back to achieving a business goal.  Developing a content marketing strategy takes significant time and effort. Be sure that all the time you spend creating compelling content yields positive results for your business.  By modeling your content creation around your main business objectives, your content development process will be more productive, which maximizes return on investment.

Once you know what it is you want to achieve with your content, it will be easier to decipher what metrics to measure success against. It’s best to establish benchmarks before a content marketing piece goes live to truly measure the impact of that content.

Research

With any strategy development comes research, and lots of it. When building a content strategy, there is a great deal to consider, including:

• Audience – think demographics, psychographics and behaviors
• Online market – what websites does your audience spend time on?
• Keyword research – what keywords should you be associating with your content for maximum search engine optimization (SEO) value?
• Social listening – what are people sharing? what questions are people asking? where are content gaps?

After researching the above areas, you should be on your way to conceptualizing your content.

Editorial Plan

Though creating an editorial plan and calendar are steps that are often overlooked, these are key elements to a content marketing strategy. First, consider the tone and voice of your brand and find a way to apply it to your content.

You want to be sure your tone speaks directly to your target audience, without lacking personality. It’s important that your company’s voice shines through in content pieces across a variety of channels, as not to confuse your audience. Being consistent with messaging in cross-channel marketing efforts is necessary for brands who want to keep their audience loyal.

Don’t skip out on creating an editorial calendar. Most businesses do not use an editorial calendar for content marketing campaigns, and it costs them. Being organized will save you time in the long run and will also reduce the risk of forgetting a step in your content marketing plan.

An editorial calendar is a great place to emphasize industry events, holidays, marketing themes and other marketing initiatives that are happening. This way, you can plan your content marketing campaign around everything else that is going on with your business.

Consider including the following elements in your editorial and content plan:

• Dates – as this is an editorial calendar, organize by date
• Themes – if your website has a monthly theme or a holiday theme used in marketing
• Events – highlight industry events to coordinate content marketing initiatives
• Content piece - be as descriptive as possible, as some content pieces may be “repurposed” versions of older content
• Distribution channel(s) – where is the content going
• Content owner – who owns this content and who is responsible for distribution
• Meta data – to save time, you might include the meta data so it is easily accessible for distribution

Your editorial calendar may need to be adjusted as you put it to practical use, but the basics should be the same. This calendar is useful for a number of reasons. An editorial calendar showcases the big picture, but also details of each marketing initiative. Being able to see a number of different projects, events and business happenings highlighted at a high-level is useful for many different business teams.

Content Creation

The creation part is where the magic happens. The opportunities are endless when it comes to content creation, between blog posts, infographics, videos, slideshows, photo albums, podcasts and more. As a part of your strategy and planning, you will need to determine who will be creating your content. This might be internal staff or partners, or it might even be outsourced to content development agencies.

Think about drafting a creative brief for your content creator. This way messaging, concepts and ideas won’t get lost during the creation process. Provide your content creator with all the research you have to ensure he/she sees the whole picture and can work to get the message across efficiently.

Content Distribution and Promotion

Distributing your content is one of the most important steps in a content marketing strategy. After all, it is what content marketing is all about. There are plenty of places to distribute content, depending on the content medium. Each distribution channel should be noted on your editorial calendar.

Promotion is what drives traffic and links back to your original content. Be sure to include traditional PR and blogger outreach efforts as part of your plan, as they can be very important in giving your content the exposure it deserves. At a very minimum, share a link to your content on each social media channel your brand is active on. Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn are probably all on your promotion list, but don’t forget about niche social media sites, too.

Results Measurement

Remember those goals we discussed in the beginning of this article? Remember those benchmarks you were supposed to establish? After your content marketing campaign has been deployed, it’s time to start measuring. Of course, results measurement is a continuous process, but can be started right away.

Measure your results against the benchmarks recorded for your established goals, but also look at trends and other metrics. You may be surprised to see the positive affects a quality content piece that’s well distributed and promoted can have on your website and online presence.

Content marketing can be extremely beneficial for your business if it is done correctly, and if you consider the above points when developing your strategy.

Please feel free to add your own tips and suggestions in the comments below.