Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Last year was a great year for content marketing, one that saw it established as a key discipline as brands looked to create a genuine rapport with their target audience. And there were big names leading the charge; the likes of Coca-Cola and Red Bull both embed content strategy as an integral part of their overall marketing strategy.

Of course, with this new-found celebrity status comes a greater spotlight, and there are a number of key recurring themes and trends that marketers and brand owners need to get to grips with, if they are to really push forward with their content marketing strategies for 2013:

1. Content marketing is no longer a fad… so get your strategies in order...

Over the past two days, we brought you posts on the intersection of brand journalism and social media (co-written by Tim Gray, content strategist at online marketing/web design firm Blue Fountain Media). Today we conclude the series by reviewing distribution issues and offering several more examples of “owned media” sites that get the new PR equation just right.

The final step in the three-part journey from traditional PR to brand journalism is getting maximum participation...

[This post includes several excellent examples of successful content marketing ~ Jeff]

As with many social media marketing practices, blog syndication is an effective tool but has the potential to result in certain disadvantages as well. The main aim should be based on finding a balance between the pros and cons and assess the potential positive impact of blog syndication on your overall blogging strategy....

Titles play a key role in getting eyes on your content. Create compelling content titles based on your analytics using this 12-step process.

In the content marketing rush, it can be hard to slow down and think about an essential element of each piece of compelling content: its title. Yet titles feed onto social media sites and play a big role in search engine optimization (SEO). 

Because of this impact, titles also influence the amount of traffic a content marketing blog garners, as the Content Marketing Institute recently found out. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working with CMI to figure out exactly what makes a good title, and how to make every single title shine.

Forget guesswork and gut feelings — we dug deep into CMI’s analytics to find out exactly which types of titles made the traffic roll in. Of course, many factors play into blog post traffic, but our research shows clear correlations between certain types of titles and higher or lower page views....