My answer is that content marketing’s influence permeates all aspects of the sales process throughout the buyers’ journey, though it may not always be obvious.

With so much information available online, buyers are spending more time researching and becoming more informed before any conversation with a salesperson. Experts disagree on how much of the buying process occurs before a sales touch (some studies estimate between 50% and 70%), however but they do agree that interactions with sales are still a hugely important influencer during the buying process.

This means that before a lead ever speaks to a sales rep, he or she has likely engaged with content on one of your channels. Your prospect has likely taken a visit to your website, read an email, seen your posts on social media, heard a presentation at an event, or experienced your brand through any number of your channels.

Sometimes a lead will discover and access content on their own; other times sales will direct a lead’s attention to relevant content. Content marketing and sales shouldn’t operate as completely separate spheres operationally because there’s so much crossover in practice. Content marketing and sales work in tandem to attract relevant leads and helps those leads arrive at a purchasing decision.

To help attract, convert, and retain customers at every stage of the sales funnel, you should align your content strategy to the buyer’s journey, from discovery and consideration through evaluation and decision–and beyond.

Content Marketing Buyers’ Journey: Discovery

The companies that rely on content marketing the most are high-consideration products or services with longer sales cycles. Discovery to purchase isn’t meant to take place within a few minutes or even a few days. But providing great content opportunities where the prospect can engage more deeply sets the stage for a consultative sales process.

Let’s start where your prospect starts–with discovery. If a prospect’s first interaction is with your website, it is likely that they got there via search. And if they started via search, they are beginning with a specific intention, such as looking for a solution to a problem or more information about a specific issue. The intent at this stage is informational and is often self-directed, that is, without the intervention of the demand gen or sales teams.

The company blog is often the first digital touchpoint for search traffic. Therefore, content on this dynamic area of your website should be highly targeted, relevant, and timely. A blog should primarily seek to educate, inspire, and help. Essentially, it’s a relationship building channel and its purpose is to lay the groundwork for future conversations that will lead to revenue.

A heavy-handed approach (read: lots of self-serving sales messages, aggressive retargeting, or too many annoying popups) can be counterproductive on your blog. A prospect can be easily turned-off because they feel “pushed” to take action instead of “pulled.”

Additionally, social media content is also a prevalent discovery channel. More specifically, amplification by macro or micro peers and influencers can be a very effective first line of interest. The “discovery” of your brand comes with the context or even the endorsement of someone they know.

Content Marketing Buyers’ Journey: Consideration

Once a prospect understands who you are and what you’re about, they’ll begin to explore how you might help them solve a problem. For example, when reading Curata’s blog, any visitor would instantly know that we play in the content marketing space because we cover topics related to those issues and opportunities. But to get more specific about what we do, we’d have to lead them to content that specifically communicates how we help our customers.

At this point, prospects are typically still engaging with content (not sales) to understand the basics of what your company can do for them. Once your prospect has consumed this content, sales can more readily have next-level conversations when they get leads on the phone. Used in this way, content marketing is helping to create a more efficient sales funnel. However, that comes with a big “if;” success at this step can only come if the content effectively communicates who the company is, why they exist, and what they have to offer.

Most B2B companies have a “Solutions” area of their website. But often this messaging can be overly complex or not differentiated enough for a prospect to get a clear understanding of what a company actually does. If sales has to spend a precious call clarifying basic concepts and clearing up misconceptions, that’s wasted time and goodwill that could have been spent guiding a lead further down the buyer’s journey.

Great consideration content doesn’t begin and end with your “solutions” section, however. Having strong “leave behind” sales enablement content that a sales team can utilize in their follow-ups reinforces the key messages that a sales rep may introduce during a discovery call or a product demo. This kind of content helps your company frame the sales discussion even if no one from your team is in the room. Imagine that content–be it a link, video, or even a guide–being shared by a potential customer with his or her boss and peers.  

Content Marketing Buyers’ Journey: Evaluation

The line between consideration content and evaluation content can sometimes be a bit fuzzy. My rule of thumb is that during the consideration phase, a lead or opportunity is seeking to understand what your company does and which problems you solve. During the evaluation stage, they are seeking to understand how well your solution might work for them.

There’s a lot of variation amongst B2B companies in terms of how much evaluation content they should make publicly available, i.e., what can be published on their website versus what is exclusively in sales enablement materials. Some companies don’t like to make too much publicly available because of competitive or intellectual property issues. Regardless of where this information lives, evaluation content is crucial not just for making the sale, but in setting expectations for your post-sale relationship.

Evaluation content needs to be specific and clear to avoid misconceptions. Though these materials should be well-designed and clearly communicated (like everything else you do), substance over style rules the day in this instance. Some examples of evaluation content might be descriptions of integrations, competitive comparisons, and case studies.

A note about case studies: often companies think of case studies and testimonials interchangeably. I think there are some important distinctions. A testimonial is essentially an endorsement of your company by someone in a specific role at a specific company. Often testimonials are on your website where someone in the consideration stage can see a person like them having success with your product. Testimonials are typically short and sweet.

A case study, by contrast, should be much, much more specific. Good case studies detail what the company did, how they did it, the role your solution played, and what the outcomes were. True case studies are intended for the evaluation and/or decision making stages.

Third Party Content

When it comes to evaluation stage, another opportunity to consider is where the prospect is sourcing their information. A company website may be a primary source, but it’s certainly not the only one. Review sites, long part of the ecommerce world, have begun to make a big impact in B2B. G2Crowd, TrustRadius, and GetApp are just a few examples of peer-to-peer review sites that your prospects may check to get the unvarnished truth. And, of course, expert review sources such as Forrester’s Wave Report or Gartner’s Magic Quadrant can help buyers verify any preconceptions or claims.

Being proactive about the content that appears on those sites is a great way to build positive consensus on your product or service. Asking successful customers to leave reviews and addressing negative ones can help you manage your company’s reputation. Additionally, developing relationships with the big consulting houses is certainly a long-term strategy, but can one that can certainly payoff.

Content Marketing Buyers’ Journey: Decision

In the decision stage, victory is close, but it is far from certain. The buyer is now seeking to understand if the cost of your product or service is worth the price. They need to have a reasonable expectation of what their gains will be and what is included in their costs. The price of the product is just one factor. They also need to understand their internal costs for launching, integrating, and maintaining your product.

A healthy relationship between your content marketing and your customer success organizations can help you create content that answers these questions and supports the decision phase. This content helps the buyer understand what resources they will have access to and what they can expect post-sale.

For example, resources that describe training and adoption plans, educational tools, peer-to-peer networks, and even technical implementation will give the buyer confidence that this isn’t your company’s first rodeo. Planning templates that outline the steps your primary buyer will have to take can be especially helpful.

Content Marketing Buyers’ Journey: Retention

After the sale closes, many marketers forget about customer retention. But content marketing can play a big role in supporting customer retention, too. If your company continues to provide information and resources that speak deeply to the needs and interests of your customers, it will keep that relationship strong and support the value they get out of your product or service. Building trust isn’t a one-time activity; it needs to be continuous, especially in subscription-based business models. 

Though the focus tends to be at the top of the funnel, content marketing is influential at every stage of the customer relationship. Your content is more than what you put on your website; it’s present in every interaction your company has with your customers.

To help decide, we’ve created a list of content marketing conferences and events featuring the date, location, estimated number of attendees, conference owner and broad category each falls in. These are all important factors for assessing the value of an event, so it’ll be an invaluable resource as you plan your conference schedule for 2018. This list was updated as of November 16, 2017.

When available, we’ve included where to keep track of the event on Twitter, even if you aren’t able to attend.

You might also be looking to write previews or recaps about these events. Be sure to download Curata’s editorial calendar template to align all content with your upcoming schedule.

Feedback Welcome

If you think we’ve missed an event, or if you’d like to add insight into your experience with one of these events, please do so below in the comments section. All dates are in the format: month/day/year.

Are you unable to attend one of these content marketing conferences, but still looking for content marketing advice? Download Curata’s free eBook The Content Marketing Pyramid. It features a comprehensive framework to help develop and execute an effective content marketing strategy.

The expectations for a content marketer’s areas of expertise have inflated in every direction. We’ve needed to evolve into masters of multiple formats as diverse as blog posts, whitepapers, social media, webinars, videos, podcasts, snaps, and other assorted forms of micro content. This multiplicity of formats and channels also means that the role of the content marketer has expanded from the traditional roles of writer and editor to include designer, videographer, and often ad hoc website developer among others.

What’s more, content marketing has become more operationalized, making organizational skills such as project management, people management, technology evaluation, and especially data analyzation increasingly important. Even the title of “content marketer” might be somewhat outdated given that we support not just marketing in all its permutations, but also sales, customer success, HR, and any number of other departments or initiatives at our organizations.

With such a diversity of channels, roles, and spheres of influence, content marketing KPIs can be very difficult to define.

Content Marketing Influence: Hiding in Plain Sight?

But content’s omnipresence ironically might be responsible for making its full impact opaque. Most marketing analytics and attribution tools are focused on a specific function or point in the funnel (such as SEO, acquisition, or demand generation) instead of measuring the impact of the content that all of these functions utilize. It’s like David Foster Wallace’s famous anecdote about the invisibility of ubiquity.

Content Marketing KPIs: Siloed Data, Siloed Knowledge, Siloed Access

For many of us, trying to measure the ROI of content marketing is like trying to measure water in the ocean: overwhelming and too slippery to pin down. Think of all the different types of data a marketing team may use to determine what a successful program looks like: search position, social shares, pageviews, conversions, MQLS, opportunity value, and revenue. These are all different types of data using different systems used by different teams for different purposes. Sounds insane, right? Yet here we are. And this problem is compounded for the content marketer because none of these things are actually meant to measure content marketing KPIs, at least not primarily or fully.

What’s even more pernicious is that not only is data across different marketing functions siloed, but so is access to and knowledge of these different systems. The majority of content marketers are focused on creating, managing, and distributing ever-increasing amounts of content on an ever-increasing number of channels, not Salesforce. And the folks who are responsible for the complexities of marketing automation or CRM systems are typically focused on lead and account performance, not content’s influence on those leads and accounts. So when it comes to content marketing KPIs, their point of view is often limited to conversion rates of gated content items, not all the links the chain that might have lead up to that conversion.

Create a Content Marketing KPI Structure That Fits With Your Business Model and Culture

All of these missed connections results in a very limited perspective on content marketing’s impact. For the content marketer, that means that we are often perceived as an internal service organization instead of as a strategic partner equal to acquisition or lead generation. If that sounds familiar, then one of your main goals should be to work to change that perception. It can be a chicken-and-egg problem, but the best place to start is by developing content marketing KPIs that speak to your company’s business model and culture.

Understanding what your organization values, where content is playing a role, and how content marketing is perceived by both the marketing function and the wider business will allow you to map content marketing KPIs that are both comprehensive and readily received. It also helps you understand if you’re currently measuring the things that truly reflect your impact.

Inclusive content marketing KPIs allow you to prove content marketing’s value to your organization. But beyond proving your worth, the right KPIs will allow you to grow as well. You’ll be able to quantify and justify spend on your content program, perhaps even expanding your program to include additional content formats (like video) or improve the depth of your team’s design or coding skills with specialized hires.

Take Control of Your Team’s Time and Resources

Even more importantly, inclusive content marketing KPIs based on what you know works. Too many content marketers have to make guesses about what to create because their metrics are insufficient. Or even worse, content marketers may spend a lot of time creating content just to placate the “hunches” or opinions of people throughout the company. Sometimes these perspectives can be helpful, but other times it just sends the content team chasing their tails. A solid, data-based approach using the right content marketing KPIs gives you firm ground on which to make decisions about what and where to spend your team’s time and resources. Data-driven content creation will help earn your seat at the strategic table.

So how does the content marketer map KPIs that demonstrate content’s true impact on the organization?

First, you have to deeply understand your business. Discovering the answers to these questions is an essential starting point:

• What is your company’s business model? How does your company make money?
• What is your company known for? What does is want to be known for?
• Who are your company’s customers?
• What does your company value internally? (actions speak louder than words)
• In what ways is success defined for the business overall?

Once you’ve defined the big picture, hone in on marketing’s role within the business:

• In what ways does marketing contribute to the organization’s goals?
• How is that contribution measured today?
• Is the marketing function perceived as a service organization or strategic partner?
• What are all the different sub-functions within marketing?
• Are the marketing functions equally credited with driving marketing’s contributions? If not, which areas are credited the most?

Then dig into content’s role in both the marketing function and in the wider organization:

• What are content’s current responsibilities?
• What are content’s current KPIs? Do they encompass all of your responsibilities?
• How does content support all of marketing’s sub-functions?
• Do other business units utilize content that your team creates?
• Does your team create content specifically for these other business units?

Having insight into these questions will help you identify what your company values and how it defines success. You can also uncover any new opportunities to demonstrate content marketing’s impact through data.

Aligning Your Content Marketing KPIs to Success Stages

Revenue generation or revenue influence is the ultimate measure of success. However, it should not be the only measure. Some experts advocate for using revenue as the only metric, but I think this is over-committing. The revenue metric is the result of getting a lot of other metrics right along the way. Especially for businesses with long sales cycles, it could take months (or years) to get feedback on your work if your only measure of success comes at the very end of the cycle.

I recommend aligning your content marketing KPIs to the traditional funnel model, especially if your business is oriented around lead generation. Funnel models have certainly changed over the years with more and more complex stages. Start with a simple Top of, Middle, and Bottom reporting framework first. This will be easy to understand and share with others in your organization.

Strategic Content Marketing KPIs vs. Operational Content Marketing KPIs

One other thing to consider is that KPIs aren’t the only kinds of reports you’ll need. There’s a whole other class of reporting that I like to categorize as “operational” content reporting.  Those are reports that help you make specific decisions: what to write, what to promote, what to socialize with your sales team. The following KPIs are intended to help you track your program’s high-level success and contribution to the business at each funnel stage. They are by no means the only reports you could and should create, but they are foundational and are the best candidates for an executive dashboard.

Content Marketing KPIs: Top of Funnel

These KPIs are intended to measure awareness and interest. For the content marketer that almost always includes both search and website metrics. 

Average Position of Unbranded Terms

This query report based on Google’s Search Console data within Google Analytics shows the average position – or SERP (search engine results page) rank – of all the unbranded terms that a user types into Google to surface a URL from your website. The lower the number, the closer it is to the first position on page 1. From a KPI perspective, your objective should be to get that number as low as possible.

“Unbranded” means the search query does not contain your brand name. Most brands rank in the top spot for their branded terms. By focusing on unbranded terms, you can get a better line of sight into the performance of your thought leadership topics. Since this is taking into account all of your unbranded terms, the average position for all those terms may be quite high, especially if you are in a highly competitive space.

Another option for this report is to further refine unbranded terms into topic clusters. You can create reports that are focused on one keyword or a group of related keywords. This report is important because it tells you how competitive you are in the search channel via your position and if (via the CTR) users’ intent matches up with the content you are creating.

Percentage of Organic Users on Website

This report is based on Google Analytics’ Audience Overview. I added a segment of organic traffic (traffic on your website that came from search engines), to isolate the performance of that segment and compare it to overall traffic or even other segments such as display advertising. I think it’s most powerful to represent these numbers as percentages. Based on this example, you could report that organic accounts for 74 percent of all users (or unique visitors) and new users and 71 percent of all sessions (or visits) to your website.

Recently, top of funnel metrics like these have gotten a bad rap in the industry as “vanity metrics.” I think that’s a bit unfair. Sure, visits do not equal revenue (heck they don’t even equal conversions), but for most companies, there’d be no leads without traffic, no opportunities without leads, and no revenue without opportunities. At best, it is incomplete to only use top of funnel metrics as your indicators of success. But if you are using full funnel KPIs in the proper context, then I believe they have a place on your strategic content marketing KPI dashboard and in a data-driven content marketing strategy.

Content Marketing KPIs: The Middle of the Funnel

These are content marketing KPIs that meant to measure depth of engagement and intent to purchase.

Percentage of Organic Traffic That Converts

This is a Google Analytics conversion report that gets much more specific than the organic traffic report. In this example, the GA instance has many different options for goal completions. The goal many content marketers would interested in at this point are conversions from premium pieces of content: white papers, webinars, videos, etc. For others it might be a demo or contact request or a newsletter sign up. You could even run different reports against different website goals. Again, expressing this metric as a percentage of the whole allows you to quantify your impact.

One thing to note is that these conversions don’t necessarily equal leads. A conversion may be completed by an known lead or existing customer, therefore would not be a new lead. That’s why I consider this report a great measure of engagement and possible intent to purchase.

Another option for this report is to hone in on a particular area of your site, say, the Resources section that houses all your ebooks. Use a Goal URL report and filter by page path:

New Leads by Program & Asset

This Marketo report takes the concept of conversions a step further and allows you see how many new leads your premium content generated. Instead of using anonymous data like Google Analytics does, a marketing automation program such as Marketo will be able to show you the number of “New Names” your content generated versus names that might have already existed in your database. Post-conversion, those previously “unknown” leads are now “known” leads. Because you have to create a distinct Marketo program for every piece of content to get this performance data, most marketing organizations only create programs for premium or gated assets and not for ungated assets such as blog posts.

MQLs by Program & Asset

This Salesforce report takes the concept of a “new name” or a lead and takes it still a step further. An MQL (marketing qualified lead) or an AQL (automation qualified lead) are leads that go through a qualification process before marketing hands them off to sales. It’s an indication of both the quantity and quality of leads your content has generated.

These reports are similar, but the differences between them can tell you different things about your content. For example, if a content item is high on conversions but low on new names, then you may need to figure out a better way to reach new audiences. If a piece is driving a lot of new names but very few MQLs, then it might not be attracting the right kind of leads for your business.

Content Marketing KPIs: Bottom of the Funnel

These are metrics that measure content marketing’s influence on opportunities and revenue.

Pipeline Generated

This Curata report uses advanced content metrics to show the dollar value of the pipeline created by content marketing. The report tracks all of the content consumed by a contact associated with an opportunity before the opportunity was created. Essentially it shows you how effective your content is at creating new opportunities. An important thing to note is that Curata can track gated as well as ungated content influence. If you are struggling to measure blog performance or connect any top of funnel content to bottom of funnel metrics, this type of report may be able to help.

Pipeline Touched

This KPI shows the total value of opportunities that were nurtured by content (again, all content both gated and ungated). The report tracks what the opportunities’ contacts consumed while the opportunities were open. This report tells you how much and which content items were part of the purchasing decision process.

Revenue Influenced

And here is the ultimate content marketing KPI: how to calculate content ROI. this report shows how much revenue is influenced by content marketing. The report shows the value of won opportunities where contacts consumed content anywhere along the journey prior to the opportunity close date.

Similar to the progression through the middle of the funnel from conversion, to lead, to MQL, these bottom of funnel KPIs show the influence of content through what has traditionally been thought of as the sales process.

Hopefully these suggestions for strategic content marketing KPIs for the top, middle, and bottom of your funnel points you in the right direction for building a strategic content marketing dashboard for your company.

Don’t worry, this isn’t another blog post about the need for content strategy. Although yes, this is a key factor in a successful content marketing practice. However, it is one of at least four areas the best content marketers dedicate their time to: strategy, production, distribution, and analytics.

Looking for an effective content marketing editorial calendar template? Download Curata’s free editorial calendar template.

We’re going to deep dive into one specific area for this post: editorial calendars as part of content marketing production. A consistent best practice of leading content marketers is using an editorial calendar as part of the production process (pictured below).

Curata research shows over 90% of companies are now using a content marketing editorial calendar. More importantly, the “best of the best” marketers view their editorial calendar as more than a simple spreadsheet. It serves as a living, breathing, planning tool and timeline to:

1. Align team members around a common content strategy, cadence and workflow.
2. Track operational tasks and metrics needed to streamline content creation.
3. Attribute an explicit set of labels or meta tags to individual pieces of content to provide a foundation for subsequent analysis of content performance and ROI.
4. Provide a “parking lot” for great content creation ideas.
5. Facilitate better reuse and repurposing of existing content.
6. Manage the contribution of internal and external contributors, reviewers, and writers; including the ability to crowdsource content across your organization.

Let’s Get Some Things Straight

Let’s clarify several things before detailing the core elements of an editorial calendar template for content marketing.

1. What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the process of developing, executing, and delivering the content and related assets needed to create, nurture, and grow a company’s customer base. Note that content marketing should impact all areas of the buyer creation process—from awareness building to lead generation to sales enablement.

2. Who’s Responsible for Content Marketing?
All the tools, processes, and technologies in the world cannot, alone, make a great content marketing strategy. Someone must be accountable for its development and execution, even if they and their team aren’t responsible for all content creation. 42 percent of companies have an executive responsible for content marketing, with this number increasing to 51% by 2017.

3. Can I Simply Use a Spreadsheet for My Editorial Calendar?
Yes—but Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are time-consuming to use and offer limited functionality compared to dedicated calendar software. The editorial calendar template we provide below offers significant advantages compared to normal spreadsheets, thanks to being designed specifically for content marketing.

• Incorporate data into your content marketing process: Metadata collected as part of calendar management in your content marketing platform is the secret sauce for uncovering valuable operations and performance insights. These include the ability to measure content impact on your pipeline, measure by type of content, content pyramid/program, etc; and enabling content asset tracking/audits.

• Increased process adoption: Easy to use for increased adoption and a better content management process. Calendar software advantages include:
  • drop-down field options for more rapid and accurate data entry.
  • auto-fill data cells for efficient meta-tagging.
  • a clean interface for more productive content marketing management meetings (e.g., filtered views; customized views by time period).
  • simple drag-and-drop and auto reschedule capability to accommodate schedule changes and adding new content on-the-fly.

• Better workflow management: Keep your team on schedule through outbound communications and enable visibility into your teams’ work.

• Real-time synchronization for collaboration: No version control issues.

• Data security: Assuming your solution is software as a service (SaaS), your data remains in the cloud for data protection, so someone can’t delete a master file such as with Google Spreadsheet.

• Enables governance: For example, assuring in-process content is aligned with content strategy, and enabling content audits to identify content creation gaps.

If you are not already using an editorial calendar template as part of a more comprehensive content marketing platform, review your options for this type of software to boost your content marketing impact. Check out the Curata CMP content marketing platform or other companies’ software as presented in Ultimate List of Content Marketing Tools.

Core Attributes of a High Impact Editorial Calendar Template for Content Marketing

At Curata we publish hundreds of pieces of content every year for an audience of over 80,000 content marketers per month. This process includes tapping into multiple data sources and leveraging many writers—both internal and external. We identified 12 core attributes in our editorial calendar template used for every piece of content we produce, including eBooks, PowerPoint presentations, infographics, blog posts, and SlideShares.

1. Title

Be bold, be relevant, and stay on target with your content strategy and SEO goals.

• Resources for title selection:
  • BuzzSumo.com for social media activity around given topics/titles.
  • UberSuggest.org for ideas on keyword groups.
  • Google Adwords Keyword Planner to evaluate search volume.
  • Your content marketing team: At Curata we often select from multiple title options for the final title. (Do ensure your title is true to the actual content of your post or piece of content. No one likes misleading clickbait.)
• Other good blog posts for title selection:
  • Write the Best Titles for Content Marketing: A 10-Point Checklist by Roger C. Parker.
  • How to Write Compelling Titles for Blogs & Content by Heidi Cohen.

2. Publish Date

Have an estimated publish date, then update if required once content goes live.

3. Content Type

This field describes which type of content is being produced. It not only helps with the production process, but enables you to analyze the impact of different types of content on engagement and your pipeline. Here are examples of the “Content Type” fields we use at Curata.

Types of content:

• Blog post: infographic
• Blog post: long-form
• Blog post: short-form
• Blog post: curated
• eBook
• SlideShare
• Webinar (PowerPoint presentation)

A significant part of any content marketing strategy is your blog. Don’t have one or need help boosting its impact on your pipeline? Check out what the blogging 10K club are up to in this survey of 428 marketers: Business Blogging Secrets Revealed.

4. Status

Track the progress of a content item through the content marketing supply chain. The “pitching,” “submitted,” and “accepted” descriptors are useful for when your team is creating syndicated content for another company’s editor to publish on their blog.

Status levels:

• Not started
• Work in progress/process (WIP)
• Pitching
• Submitted
• Accepted
• Scheduled
• Posted/Published

5. Media Type

Your digital content may live in many locations across the Internet. Therefore the best multi-channel content marketing strategies include content publication across three different media types: Owned, Earned, and Paid. Build your owned media as the foundational element of your content marketing strategy, and tap into the power of earned and paid media as on-ramps into your owned media.

Types of media:

• Owned = your corporate blog, corporate website, corporate microsite.
• Earned = press pick-up, guest posts on other companies’ blogs.
• Paid = Taboola, Outbrain, Vocus, Shareaholic, media properties.

6. Media Entity

Put simply, the publishing destination of your content. Examples include:

• [your company] blog
• [your company] web site
• [your company] microsite (including name of microsite)
• [your company] LinkedIn Page
• [profile name] LinkedIn post
• other companies’ blogs
• media entities: Boston.com; Content Marketing Institute; MarketingProfs.com

7. Writer

The person responsible for writing the content, such as an internal writer, freelancer, or agency.

8. Author

The person whose name is formally attributed to the content. The writer may be different to the author when a ghostwriter is used and/or when a writer is basing content on thought leadership or content assets originated by the author, such as a company executive or product marketer.

9. Owner

The person with ultimate accountability for completion and publishing of the content. In some situations, the owner may also be the author and writer of a specific piece of content, e.g., a content marketing editor.

10. Pyramid

Curata uses the Content Marketing Pyramid framework pictured above to address two of content marketers’ greatest challenges:

1. Facilitating the execution of a well planned content strategy.
2. Optimizing the reuse and repurposing of content into multiple formats and through multiple distribution channels. Only 22% of companies have a specific process in place to ensure optimal content reuse and repurposing.

The top part of each Pyramid represents primary research, secondary research and/or thought leadership for a gated content asset such as an eBook. The remaining parts of the Pyramid are derivatives of this core content asset, consisting of reused and repurposed core content for different formats and channels.

Examples of Pyramids executed by Curata’s content marketing team include:

• 2015 Content Marketing Tactics and Technology Study
  • Gated: 2015 Content Marketing Tactics and Technology Planner
  • Long-form blog post: Content Marketing Benchmarks: A 2015 Roadmap
  • Infographic: Content Marketing Strategy: 6 Stats and Tips to Survive and Thrive
• The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation
  • Gated: The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation
  • Long-form blog post: The Definitive Guide to Content Curation

The high level bullets above are what Curata enters into the field “Pyramid” within its editorial calendar in Curata CMP. Attributing an individual piece of content to a specific pyramid enables you to analyze the pipeline impact of all pieces of content within that pyramid. For example, the marketing leads generated per pyramid. (To see these analytics for Curata’s content marketing process in action, feel free to schedule a demo with our content marketing experts.)

11. Persona

Content strategy should identify and develop personas that represent audience segments to give you a better understanding of who you’re talking to when crafting communications. Key parts of each persona include:

• Persona Name: This name is entered into the editorial calendar under the “Persona” field for each piece of content.  Examples of what Curata includes in this field include: Digital Marketing Darla; Editor Elaine; and Marketing Operations Michael.
• Title: Typical title of this individual.
• Background: A description of the individual, such as their role, field, or study, and other personal and/or professional background about the persona.
• Goals: What motivates people for this persona? How is their success measured in an organization? What are their objectives?
• Frustration and Pain Points
• Organizational Structure: Where their role typically sits within an organization, i.e., the reporting structure.
• Narrative: Informal descriptions or stories of the individual’s professional life. These narratives are a great way to help your content marketing team truly understand the persona, enabling them to create more relevant content.
• Sample individuals: It’s always great to include pictures, names, and titles of real people.

Similar to a pyramid, attributing an individual piece of content to a specific persona enables you to analyze the pipeline impact of all pieces of content within that persona. You can even use this attribute to complete an audit of which content you have (or don’t have) for specific personas. Such insights are great for your regular content strategy development and content gap analysis.

12. Buying Stage

Another important part of content strategy is identifying audience buying stages. In fact, 50% of the best content marketing teams create content according to stages in the buying cycle. Work with your demand generation team to identify and understand these stages.

Creating content for a specific buyer stage helps ensure content is relevant to its intended audience and increases the conversion rate of buyers in your pipeline. Attributing an individual piece of content to a specific buying stage also enables you to complete an audit of which content you have (or lack) for specific buying stages. Such insights are extremely useful for your regular content strategy development and content gap analysis.

Buying stage examples include:

• TOFU: Top of Funnel
• MOFU: Middle of Funnel
• BOFU: Bottom of Funnel

OR

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Retention
• Advocacy

Not only do these editorial calendar fields help streamline your content production process, they enable better analysis of your content to determine what is and isn’t working. Finally, please do add any additional fields you may be using in the comments section below.

Looking for a calendar template already loaded with the above attributes? Download Curata’s free editorial calendar template below.

This blog post has an overview of interview questions and responses. For a full list of interview questions, the ideal responses, and evaluation criteria, download Curata’s Content Marketing Interview Template.

Growth in Content Marketing Jobs

In the past three years there has been an uptick in content marketing related positions available at all levels, from interns to executives. Perusing the available openings on job boards, the most common titles include:

• Content Marketing Specialist
• Content Marketing Manager
• Content Marketing Strategist
• Content Marketing Intern
• Vice President of Content Marketing
• Chief Content Officer (rare)
• Content Marketing Associate

Looking at job trends on Indeed.com reinforces this: the inclusion of “content marketing” in job descriptions has skyrocketed nearly 400% in recent years.

Must Have Content Marketing Competencies

Below are some of the must-have competencies to identify in your next content marketer. These may vary slightly depending upon your organization and what level individual you’re looking to hire.

• Passion and Talent for Content Marketing (and writing). This is number one on my list.  You need to be a great writer and editor, highly creative, able to tell a story, and most importantly—love doing content marketing. Although more detailed questions are provided below, you need to understand if your candidate really loves content marketing, and if they will take the initiative to develop and grow in the role.
• Aligning Content with Market/Customer Needs. Content marketing is the process for developing, executing, and delivering the content and related assets needed to create, nurture and grow a company’s customer base. If you don’t have the capability to understand a market (e.g., be able to listen to customers and influencers, and identify their communicated and latent needs), you simply won’t be able to deliver great, engaging content.
• Understanding What Drives Successful Content. Some of the best writers in the world will never be successful content marketers. A superstar content marketer must understand what drives success in their market and within their organization (e.g., understanding Google search, measuring performance, translating data into insight).
• Maintaining a Consistent Supply of Quality Content. This competency deals a lot more with operations than simply content creation. Producing and delivering great content on time on a regular basis is no easy feat.
• Action-Oriented. Being a content marketer requires working with many people that don’t report to you, and getting them to deliver a product or service that can make or break your own success. This can include content from a product marketer, SEO insight from the digital team, and promotion by the social media team. Your content marketer should have the drive and creativity to do what it takes to get the product (i.e., content) out the door, optimize its promotion, and be prepared to do things differently when required. They need to be able to take a risk when necessary.
• Multi-Tasking. This is the ability to manage many activities and prioritize deliverables in a demanding, fast-paced environment. No doubt there’s some overlap here with being action-oriented, however, the need to be a great project manager cannot be under-estimated—especially for more senior staff.
• Desire and Ability to Work in a [Small/Large] Company. Select which version is best for your organization. There are significant differences between the two environments.
• Understanding and Use of Technology. Take a look at this Content Marketing Tools map and you’ll quickly understand the opportunity and challenge that exists for today’s marketer to tap into the power of new software.

Must Ask Content Marketing Interview Questions

Below are some of the must ask interview questions for any content marketing position, aligned with the competencies described above. Many of the questions are low level and tactical rather than strategic in nature—and more appropriate for a content marketing specialist than a Vice President of Content Marketing.

My philosophy however, is that in order to run a content team and create a content strategy, you need to know how to perform the duties of the team you manage. So I also ask senior level hires these same interview questions. Refer to the Content Marketing Interview Template for a more comprehensive list of interview questions as well as examples of poor, mediocre, and great responses to these interview questions.

Passion and Talent for Content Marketing (and Writing)

What do you enjoy about writing?

• Why it’s important to ask this: Content marketing is a lot more than writing; however, I consider this talent to be a foundational element of a superstar content marketer. You have to love what you do.
• What to look out for: Look for indicators that they have a passion for writing. Understand what drives their passion, what outlets they’ve used to express this passion, and what personal benefits they get out of creating content.

Describe how you determined the style, tone, and voice for a specific piece of content you recently completed.

• Why it’s important to ask this: Your content marketer will need to express a unique voice and opinion in their work. However, they also need to adapt their own style as a function of your company’s needs, the audience, format of the content, person they’re writing for, and so on.
• What to look out for: Look and ask for specific examples of how they modified their style, as well as asking them to identify why this is important.

Provide a specific example of content you created that entertained and/or educated your readers.

• Why it’s important to ask this: Content marketing is about adding value to your readers, such as providing an infographic that educates about their industry, or creating an entertaining video that helps them with their job or career. Your team needs to create content that provides entertainment such as through story-telling or comedy in order to stand out from the crowd, and to capture and sustain their attention.
• What to look out for: Look for examples of their content that told a story, used humor, and/or educated their audience about something other than a company’s products. Bonus points if the candidate has delivered more unique formats of content, such as infographics, podcasts or interactive content. Ask for examples of where they’ve used visual content, including why they were or weren’t successful.

What content marketing blogs do you read?

• Why it’s important to ask this: Is the candidate really interested in content marketing? Do they take personal initiative to educate themselves and grow as a content marketer? Or will they only grow solely through your mentorship on the job?
• What to look out for: See if they mention specific blogs. If they just say, “you know, all of them,” or “the usual ones,” they are likely not reading any.

Describe a situation in which you were given feedback on a content piece.

• Why it’s important to ask this: I certainly want a content marketer to have an opinion about what works and what doesn’t work. However, it’s also important that they can accept critiques about their work and make changes as necessary.
• What to look out for: Understand what type of feedback they received, how it made them feel—and most importantly—what they did with that feedback.

What process do you use when proofreading?

• Why it’s important to ask this: I certainly want a content marketer to have an opinion about what works and what doesn’t work. however, it’s also important that they are able to accept critique about their work and make changes as necessary.
• What to look out for: Attention to to detail and an understanding of proper usage of the english language is key elements of quality content. (Did you catch the three mistakes?) Follow-up questions could include:
  • What are some of your greatest “pet peeves” when editing someone else’s writing?
  • Which style guide(s) do you depend upon? See “Great Responses” in the Content Marketing Interview template.

Aligning Content with Market and Customer Needs

How do you decide which content topics to focus on and what format that content should take?

• Why it’s important to ask this: What drives a person to invest their time and effort into creating content? Is it anecdotal insight such as a hallway conversation with a sales person—which may be a good place to begin investigating an idea, but not the final driver for its execution? Or is creation more data-driven, such as through Google Analytics or insight from a content marketing platform?
• What to look out for: Be wary if your candidate indicates their past content development was primarily driven by what their boss told them to write about; or they have no understanding of what goes into content strategy. A follow-up question could be: “Describe your company’s content strategy, including key steps in its development.”

It’s your first day on the job. Walk me through the steps you’d take to develop a content strategy for our organization.

This is more of a case study type of question, better suited for senior hires. Check out the following eBook as a resource to best understand responses for this question: How to Create a Content Strategy: The Content Marketing Pyramid.

Understanding What Drives Successful Content

What makes content “successful”?

• Why it’s important to ask this: In order to create great content, you have to know how to discern which content is doing well in the first place.
• What to look out for: There are many answers to this question, so this helps tease out what type of content marketer the candidate is. Here are some possible answers:
  • “Traffic”
  • “Repeat visitors”
  • “Retweets and likes”
  • “Search engine ranking”
  • “Comments”
  • “Leads and sales”
  • “It depends”

The more they name off and can sensibly explain the importance of, the better.

Walk me through how you create a blog post.

• Why it’s important to ask this: This is a good question to tease out which parts of the content lifecycle the candidate is familiar with. Do they only have experience with copywriting, or can they come up with blog ideas themselves? Do they stop at writing the blog post, or do they keep promotion on social media in mind as well?
• What to look out for: You should look for a response that captures the whole process from start to finish, from ideation to production to distribution to analytics. A great answer will include specific tools and details. Here’s an example of great and mediocre responses.

How do to decide what to content create?

• Mediocre Responses:
  • My manager tells me what I should write about and gives me an outline.
  • I look at what’s trending and pick an interesting topic.
• Great Responses:
  • I keep a backlog of keywords that people are searching for in Google related to my target topic, and create posts based on the backlog.
  • I set up Google News alerts and a feed reader to look at which topics are trending in the news that relate to my topic area. I come up with spins on those topics to newsjack those stories.
  • I regularly ask the sales team what questions their prospects are asking, and use the responses as fodder for my next post.

What steps do you take when you actually create your content?

• Mediocre Responses:
  • I write my blog post in Word and then post it when it’s ready.
• Great Responses:
  • I write my blog post in Word, add hyperlinks to at least three other pieces of content on our site that we’ve published, and add at least one hyperlink to a third party resource.
  • I ensure there’s an associated featured image for the post by going to a stock image site.
  • I always make sure there’s a clear call to action at the end of each post.
  • For quality control, I make sure at least one other person has proofread it before publishing.
  • I optimize the title for a target keyword by looking at what terms people are searching for in Google.

After you have published your content, how do you promote it?

• Mediocre Responses:
  • I publish my content on WordPress, and then tweet it out as well.
• Great Responses:
  • I publish the post on our blog using WordPress.
  • I then schedule a minimum of four tweets at different times of the day in HootSuite.
  • I email coworkers to retweet and share my post as well.
  • I ask the demand generation team to include it in the next email newsletter to our database.

How do you know if your content has performed well or not?

• Mediocre Response:
  • Usually I just know if it’s done well or not.
• Great Response:
  • I look at Google Analytics after a few days to see how many page views it has received.
  • I search on Google for the target keyword I was optimizing for to see if it ranked in the first page.
  • I look at the Twitter counter on the post to see how many tweets cite this post.

How does Google rank content?

• Why it’s important to ask this: I am always surprised by how few marketers at any level understand how Google really ranks content. Though you’re not interviewing for an SEO position, content marketing is intrinsically tied to search engine optimization; everyone should know the basics when creating content.
• What to look for: You don’t need a candidate to know the PageRank formula, but rather the basic premise behind Google’s ranking algorithm, along with other auxiliary factors that help with SEO. For example, many naive marketers think Google ranks content largely on meta tags and keyword stuffing. In reality, Google primarily ranks content on inbound links, and the authority of the sites doing the linking. It’s a bonus if a candidate can mention other contributing factors such as the text of the hyperlink, the title tag, keywords in the URL, and others.

What are some good ways to get other people to link to your content?

• Why it’s important to ask this: The candidate may understand Google ranks content based on inbound links, but they also need to know how to accumulate inbound links.
• What to look for: A good content marketer knows how to get links by producing great link worthy content, and promoting it in a clever manner. Here are some good responses to the questions:
  • I interview influencers, not only because they have good things to say, but because they promote the resulting content to a large audience as well—and some of those people will end up linking back to my interview.
  • I include content others can reuse. For example, I may create a quick infographic that other bloggers may want to curate or include in their own posts, with a link back to mine.
  • I write long form content so I have the most comprehensive and authoritative post on a particular subject, which tempts others to link to me as the reference source.

Take Home Assignment: Produce an original writing sample

• Why it’s important to ask this: Many candidates may come in with writing samples from the past, but they may not accurately reflect the candidate’s capabilities. For example, the sample may have been proofed by a manager. Furthermore, it doesn’t accurately assess whether the candidate can create content that relates to your specific industry and topics.
• What to look for: I typically ask candidates to download one of our eBooks and summarize them in a 400 word blog post to bring to the second round interview. Things I look for from the resulting sample are:
  • Grammar, spelling, and attention to detail. Did they care enough about the job to proofread the post?
  • Title of the post. Did they come up with a creative title for the post? Is it SEO optimized? Or did they just copy the title of the eBook?
  • Call to Action. Did they include a call to action to the full eBook at the end of the post?
  • Paragraphs and structure. Is the post quickly skimmable? Or is it a wall of words?

Similar to interviews for other positions where candidates are asked riddles, the candidate may not use these skills every day on the job, but all of the above interview questions help tease out if they are cut out to be a well rounded content marketer.

The Interview: Where to Go From Here

Even if they make it through all the above interview questions with flying colors, it does not necessarily mean they’re a fit. It’s important to screen for cultural fit, and to make sure they have a good work ethic.

If they are a strong candidate on these fronts, as a hiring manager it’s your turn to answer some of the candidate’s interview questions: Why should they work at your company? How is your vision for content marketing any different to any other marketing department out there?

Employers: What do You Think?

Since being a professional “content marketer” is a relatively new role, we would love to hear which interview questions you have found to be effective. Please let us know in the comments below.

Content Marketers: Come Work at Curata

If you think you are cut out to be a content marketer, come work at Curata! There’s no better place to be a content marketer than at a company that serves content marketing departments of all sizes, big and small. Apply now to be our next content marketing superstar. 

We look forward to meeting you and grilling you on the above interview questions (although you now know the answers we’re looking for). For a full list of interview questions, ideal responses, and evaluation criteria, download Curata’s Content Marketing Interview Template.

Despite the fact that 86 percent of brands have adopted content marketing practices, 82 percent of marketers say they’re not receiving training – WrittenT

To start learning right away, check out our content marketing expert series below.

No matter what level of experience you have – whether you’ve been in the industry for a while or are looking to break in—creating a plan for growing your career expertise is beneficial.

Pam Didner, Content Marketing Consultant, Author, Speaker | @PamDidner

Having a plan is a good starting point. At the end of the day content marketing is about getting your hands dirty. Start producing different types of content pieces and syndicate/promote ​them. Then, use analytics to optimize them. It’s a journey, my friends! 

Fortunately, there are many online content marketing courses that provide content marketing knowledge for people of all levels. Whether you’re an experienced marketer looking to learn more about the latest trends or you’re a small business owner seeking ideas for how to use content marketing to advance your business, there’s a learning opportunity out there for you.

This article addresses some of the top online content marketing courses available today. It gives you details on courses that can fill in your knowledge gaps so you – and your content marketing – can be more successful.

How to Determine What Course Is Right for You

Before starting any online content marketing course, you should think about what your knowledge gaps are and what you would like to get out of the course. There are a variety of online content marketing courses designed for specific purposes, so you’re sure to find one that fits your specific goal.

General Understanding

A broad overview on best practices is the best choice for people who want to grow their overall understanding of content marketing. There are different types of overview programs available, depending on what you want to achieve with your knowledge:

• Starting or Growing A Career in Content Marketing: If you’re looking to start or grow a career as a content marketer, look for a class that can give you full, in-depth understanding of all aspects of content marketing.

Many colleges and universities offer certificate programs in content marketing or have content marketing as part of an overall marketing certificate program. For example, Northwestern University allows you to specialize in content marketing and Cornell offers content marketing as part of an overall marketing certificate program. (more programs are listed later in this article.) 

• Professional Development: If you’re looking to take a class to build on the work you are currently doing in marketing or other parts of your organization, you can choose from a variety of online or in person seminars. These types of online content marketing courses will help you gain further insight into what content marketing is, how it is done, and what makes it successful. At these classes, you may also hear about a topic or idea that you’d like to learn more about in the deeper-dive class described above.
• Introduction or Knowledge Enhancement: There a plenty of content marketing webinars offered by companies and professional association. While some of these webinars may have a sales pitch included with them, they will provide a good overview specific ideas or topics. A webinar can be a good start to developing your understanding of content marketing.

­­­

Knowledge on a Specific Topic

In addition to these broad overviews, you can also learn about a specific sub-topic of content marketing. These online content marketing courses focus on a specific area of content marketing, including:

• SEO: Effective content writing for search engine optimization (SEO).
• Paid Traffic: Learn how to make the most of your online advertising.
• Social: Get the information you need to better leverage social media.
• PR: Learn how fit public relations into your content marketing.
• Metrics: Advice on how to analyze your results.

Andrew Davis, Bestselling Author & Keynote Speaker | @DrewDavisHere

Changing the way you measure the impact of your content marketing is one of the easiest ways to improve. Instead of measuring views, visits, leads, or downloads measure revenue per subscriber.

More details about specific classes are available later in the article.

Think carefully about how much time you can realistically put into a content marketing course.  Also, consider how much time and resources you will have to implement what you learn after the course.

Sally Hubbard, Senior Editor, Tech Antitrust Enforcement, Host of Women Killing It! podcast | @Sally_Hubbard

I feel myself and so many people I know spend our days running, running, and rushing on the hamster wheel, but where you are going is not where you are meant to be going. It’s all a waste of time. We all tell ourselves we don’t have time, but what is more of a waste of time than killing yourself to get somewhere you don’t want to go?

If you have limited time and budget, taking an in-depth course so you can implement an entire content strategy might not be the best approach. Instead, take a seminar on starting a blog or creating a podcast. Implement these ideas into your business and grow from there.

Tap Into Your Content Marketing Software

If you use software to support your content marketing – or are looking into software – don’t overlook the software company’s educational offerings.

Many larger marketing software companies offer online content marketing courses for free. These courses will simultaneously teach you how to use their software and how to strategize your content marketing activity. Here are some examples:

• HubSpot Academy: Offers a variety of courses and certifications for all levels and types of marketers.
• Marketo: Get certified on Marketo’s own software or learn more about marketing operations, analytics, or demand generation.

Read more about the different content marketing software options.

How Much Are You Willing to Pay?

Costs for online content marketing courses range from free to thousands of dollars. Before determining how much to spend, consider what the ROI will be for the course.

If you already have a robust set of content marketing expertise, you probably don’t need an expensive course promising to teach you content marketing from the ground up. Alternatively, you don’t need an expensive analytics course if you have not yet started to create content.

Now that you’ve decided what type of content marketing course might be right for you, we’ve got a comprehensive list of resources you can choose from.

Top Online Content Marketing Courses 

Universities

UC Davis: This is an in-depth, five-week course for people already in the marketing profession. This course is a collaboration between UC Davis and Copyblogger. Though it is offered through a college, the course is not for academic credit.

Northwestern University: This course goes beyond just writing and moves into other information that’s extremely important but often glazed over in content marketing. The first month of learning for this course is free. After that it costs $49 dollars a month.

Harvard University:  This new five-day program delivers the proven framework and foundational tools marketers need to design, implement, and manage a successful digital marketing strategy that achieves their business objectives. Students engage in hands-on exercises that help them build buyer and influencer personas, capture and measure critical data, communicate more effectively, and drive deeper customer loyalty and market share.

Paid Courses

Marketing Motive: This is a self-paced advanced content marketing course that covers the basic strategies and tactics for all types of B2B and B2C content marketing, including blogging, email, social, and more. The focus on this course is on content creation rather than more complex topics like SEO, analytics, and paid promotion. Users can buy 180 days of access for a cost of 299 dollars.

Lynda: Lynda.com offers a variety of online content marketing courses, from basic topics like “What is Content Marketing” to output-specific courses that cover topics like creating a podcast or writing a blog post.

Lynda is a great option for those looking to continue learning about other topics such as graphic design or coding. Lynda.com requires a membership which costs 20 to 30 dollars a month.

Content Marketing University: This is one of the most popular sources for information on content marketing. The organization offers over 30 hours of curriculum covering all aspects of content marketing. The course is led by marketing leaders including Robert Rose. Over 25 percent of Fortune 100 companies have attended this course. The course costs 995 dollars a person with discounts available for alum and non-profits.

LinkedIn e-Learning: The popular social media site has a learning platform where students can learn how to develop, implement, and measure a winning marketing strategy using today’s tools and platforms. LinkedIn’s marketing course is designed to help students to master traditional marketing skills and provide information on the latest digital tools and techniques. The course covers everything from branding and public relations to SEO, PPC, web analytics, and social media marketing. The first week is of the course is free.

Free Online Courses

There are many free online courses that can improve your content marketing skills. These are made available for a variety of time investments. Here are some of my favorites:

Content Strategy Courses:: Content strategy courses offers both a free and paid version of their course as well as the option to take the entire course or only the modules you think would be useful to your business from buyer personas to content promotion. The free course covers 8 mini lessons broken up into 5 days with short lessons that range from 2-20 minutes each. The paid course has a star lineup of instructors and some impressive success stories. The paid course starts at 997 dollars.

GA Academy: Analytics Academy helps you learn about Google’s measurement tools so that you can grow your business through intelligent data collection and analysis. Therea are several courses offered as a part of this academy including eCommerce analytics, GA for beginners and Google tag manager.

Data Analytics and Exel Pivot Tables: This Excel Business Intelligence training course is for all business users who are required to develop management reports, analyze data or ask ad-hoc questions of their data.These are critical skills for content marketers. In a recent report entitled ‘Big data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,’ McKinsey Consulting reports that data skills will become the basis for competition, innovation, growth and productivity. The report also highlights the need for approximately 1.5 million managers in United States with data skills.

Marketing in a Digital World: This course examines how digital tools, such as the Internet, smartphones, and 3D printing, are revolutionizing the world of marketing by shifting the balance of power from firms to consumers.

Marketing in a Digital World is one of the most popular courses on Coursera, with over 150,000 learners. This class is rated by Class Central as one of the Top 50 MOOCs of All Time

Quicksprout University: Even if you are new to SEO, this online resource will help you with traffic-generation by providing conversion tutorials from the trusted co-founder of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg.

Pay Per Click University: This training program is produced by WordStream, and students can pick from a variety of courses, including Pay-Per-Click 101, Pay-Per-Click 102 and advanced Pay-Per-Click.

Google Digital Marketing Course: This is an adwords certification course. Students may use the Digital Marketing course as a self-study training pack that can be completed at their own pace or professors may choose to incorporate the modules into their lesson plans. If opting into the optional AdWords Certification category, Google recommends that students review pay particular attention to the AdWords Fundamentals module.

SEO Training on Udemy: Optimizing a web site for search engines requires looking at many unique elements. These course gives practitioners of SEO insight into these elements, helping them to understand the broad field of website optimization

Content Marketing for B2B Enterprises: This course takes students through a four-step content marketing process. The course is structured in 19 video lessons, each lesson will take around 5 minutes. The entire course clocks in around 35 minutes. So, if you have an hour, you can knock this out over lunch!

The marketing courses listed above make up only a small sample of all the courses available to you to help expand your content marketing. You can find other lists of resources in these round ups online.

Content marketing courses are a great way to learn how to improve your marketing programs.

For free content marketing education, check out our own online content marketing expert series in the link below.

Robert Rose and I just launched our combined sixth book, Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit, at Content Marketing World this September. The book’s key idea makes a case that the majority of businesses approach marketing entirely the wrong way … and that we need to kill the marketing we know and replace it with a new approach: marketing as a profit center.

Below is an excerpt from the introduction of the book that we will also discuss on this upcoming webinar courtesy of Curata. Robert and I truly believe that tomorrow’s businesses are in the process of transforming marketing into something completely new and different, and that building audiences and monetizing those audiences are the future of our practice. Enjoy!

Reprinted with the permission of Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose in association with McGraw-Hill Education.

In the 1970s, Israeli psychologists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a research paper titled “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers”. The findings were that even professional academics mistook a very small part for the whole when making decisions. For example, even though flipping a coin is always a 50/50 proposition, if a subject was to flip it 100 times, but the first two times turned up heads, the subject would believe that the majority of flips would turn up heads – at least higher than the true probability. This is also known as the “gambler’s fallacy” where in Roulette we see red or black running hot, and we begin to think that red or black is more likely to occur, when statistically, it’s not.

As human beings, the more we see something, the more this becomes our reality, regardless of whether our sample size is too small to draw any real conclusions.

In the mid-1980s, Don Redelmeier was assigned to Sunnybrook Hospital just outside Toronto to serve as a check against certain hospital decisions. Specifically, Redelmeier was brought in to question each doctor’s diagnosis and provide feedback as to the probability the doctor was correct.

Obviously, this was something that the Sunnybrook doctors were not fans of … at first. Where did a generalist from the trauma center (Redelmeier) get the right to question a qualified physician?

But Redelmeier, and others like him, found that doctors “… had exaggerated confidence based on their expert experience.” Simply put, doctors would see problems and solutions around their core expertise, and would often times ignore other signals where they were not as familiar.

The problem was not what doctors didn’t know, it’s what they knew that would get them into trouble.

In November of last year, I took my son Adam to a high school open house. While he was taking a few of the sample classes during the morning sessions, I was doing the same with a group of parents. My first class of the day was called the “Theory of Knowledge”.

The assignment was simple: view a painting of a building and discuss what you “know” about the painting. Our group tried to discern when it was created, whether it was real or fictitious, and, if it was real, was it a famous place?

Once the discussion was completed, the instructor told us that the painter was Adolf Hitler. From that moment on, everything about the conversation was immediately altered. A few people even became emotional upon hearing thisinformation. The truth was, once the majority of the class found out this one piece of information, they could no longer view it as a piece of art.

What the class “knew” could never be undone and would affect their perception of that piece of art, and perhaps others like it, forever.

Does What We Know Hold Us Back in Marketing?

No, this is not a psychology, medical, or art history book, but the previous examples are definitely applicable. For the past 20 years, Robert and I have worked with CEOs, chief marketing officers, VPs of sales and marketing, and marketing practitioners from brands around the world. In each case, some part of their marketing and/or sales process was broken.

We go in, we analyze, we advise and (hopefully) compel these marketers and sales professionals to fix what they can with the resources they have. But what we’ve realized in the past few years has become, to say the least, disturbing.

Combined, this book, Killing Marketing, is our sixth such effort. Normally when creating the work-product such as a book, we start with the answer to a question. For example, in my 2013 book Epic Content Marketing, I talk about how marketers can build loyal and profitable relationships with customers by delivering consistently valuable content in order to drive sales. In 2015, Robert (with Carla Johnson) wrote the book Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, which outlines an approach on how content-driven experiences can be created, managed, scaled, promoted, and measured in today’s business environment.

This book, however, does not start with an answer … it begins with questions … questions that Robert and I are desperate to find the answers to.

What if what we’ve been taught or experienced in marketing doesn’t show us the full picture?

What if we’ve limited our view of marketing to one area (what we know), and that is not allowing us to see the full potential of what can be accomplished (what we do not know yet)?

What if placing marketing solely in the marketing department is killing the approach of marketing as a strategic business process?

In other words, what if everything we KNOW to be true about marketing is actually what’s holding back our business?

The Day Hollywood Changed

Let’s try to make this more tangible with a popular movie example.

American Graffiti, still today, is one of the most profitable movies of all time. The film grossed over $140 million USD at the box office; it was made on a budget of less than $1 million. After the success of Graffiti, director George Lucas was in demand, and he started pitching his next venture, a science fiction movie called “Star Wars,” to Hollywood studios.

At the time, Hollywood was seeing a number of science fiction flops, and the industry did not see Star Wars as a bankable concept. Ultimately, 20th Century Fox decided to take a chance on the film. Still, the executives at Fox were sure the movie was going to be a flop and decided to let Lucas pass on an additional $500,000 directing fee in exchange for full licensing and merchandising rights. The studio believed they just saved a half-million dollars with no downside.

From 1977 to 2015 (before the Disney release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens), Star Wars movies pulled in just over $5 billion in ticket sales. During that same period, merchandising sales were $12 billion.

That’s right … 20th Century Fox sold off merchandising rights to George Lucas for pennies and lost out on a vast majority of the franchise revenue. They believed, as most of Hollywood insiders did at the time, that you make money from movies on ticket sales. Period.

George Lucas looked at the business in an entirely different way, and changed the industry forever.

Is it possible that the majority of CEOs and chief marketing officers are looking at marketing based on their own limited references (what they believe to be true about marketing), and not seeing the full potential (what they may not know), like the Hollywood insiders did? Are they killing their marketing from the inside without being aware of it?

The Purpose of Marketing

In one of his 70 books on marketing, famed marketing professor Philip Kotler explained that the “mantra of marketing was CCDVTP.” It was an acronym that suggested that the core function of marketing should be to:

C: CREATE. C: COMMUNICATE AND D: DELIVER. V: THE VALUE. T: TO THE TARGET MARKET. P: AT A PROFIT.

Now, of course, the “profit” that Kotler speaks about is the idea that marketing should ultimately drive more sales of product than it should create costs in order to facilitate those sales. This is what marketers call return on investment (ROI) of marketing.

Most of our marketing in the past 50 years has revolved around advertising, or renting space in channels to garner attention and, hopefully, change consumer behavior. But over the past decade, innovative enterprises have found a “new” way to deliver value to their target markets, by creating relevant and compelling content, gearing it toward specific audience groups, and then, over time, seeing positive behavior changes in the audience which, ultimately, are profitable to the business (this approach is called content marketing). Although the approach is relatively new to most organizations, the goals have remained the same.

In general, enterprises create and distribute non-product-related content to impact the business in three ways:

• Increase revenue (sales goal or winning customers)
• Save costs (savings goal or creating customers at a lower cost)
• Create more loyal customers (retention goal or keeping customers)

But, recently, there’s a new approach that has businesses re-evaluating the entire function of marketing.

A Fourth Model: Marketing as Profit Center

I had an opportunity to hear Robert Sperl, editorial director of Red Bull’s magazine Red Bulletin, explain the origin of Red Bull Media House. In 2005, the beverage giant was a major sponsor of Formula 1 racing. They had a simple goal for one of the races: to deliver a printed guide to exiting fans with the race results immediately following the race.

Prior to each race, the Red Bull editorial team gathered insider stories about the drivers and fun facts about the history of each race, and then assembled and printed the bulk of each magazine before the race began. To complete the magazine and add the race results, they lugged a 1-ton Heidelberg press to each track. As soon as the race was over, they quickly printed the results on the Heidelberg and distributed the magazines to attendees as they were leaving the race — an astounding feat done in almost record time.

Two years later, Red Bull decided to evolve the race publication into a men’s lifestyle magazine. It launched what became Red Bulletin in five countries, with 70% international and 30% localized content. Today, Red Bulletin magazine is published in five languages and is distributed in 10 countries. It prints and distributes over two million copies each month, including 550,000 mailed to paid subscribers.

The Red Bulletin is not measured by the number of Red Bull cans it sells, or how it persuades Red Bull customers to buy and drink more. It is measured just like a media company — Red Bull Media House enters into initiatives that are profitable on their own merit, just like The Washington Post, CNN, or the Financial Times.

Today, Red Bull Media House is one of the world’s most successful media companies. What started as a simple magazine has evolved into TV series, documentaries, world-class events, a music studio, merchandising, and they even license their content to traditional media companies like The New York Times.

While other enterprises were dabbling in media as, at best, a side project, how did Red Bull see this opportunity? Simple … Robert Sperl, and the majority of the other members of the Red Bull media staff, came from the publishing and media industry. Like George Lucas, the Red Bull content team saw the business model in front of them as a natural progression, instead of looking past it as so many marketers did before them.

Today, the Red Bull Model is being replicated in varying degrees across the business spectrum. Business-to-business (B2B) companies, business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, and even not-for-profits are starting to realize that as they focus on creating valuable and engaging content – a new model appears: marketing as a profit center.

Can we actually move marketing from the cost line of the financials to the revenue line? Can marketing actually serve multiple business models?

Our book – Killing Marketing – presents an entirely new business model for marketing, one that both leverages the disruptive forces facing marketing and advertising as it also fundamentally changes the purpose of marketing in the business. Like the Hollywood insiders falling down on Star Wars’ merchandising revenue, we believe marketers are, in most cases, blind to this new opportunity.

A few are starting to see that, to be successful, we need to kill our old marketing beliefs to discover a new model.

Cloud CRM giant Salesforce holds an event in San Francisco every year called Dreamforce. It is one of the most valuable physical events in the world, drawing in over 150,000 people and hundreds of sponsors each year.

Johnson & Johnson operates BabyCenter.com as a completely separate division of the company. BabyCenter reaches more than 45 million parents a month from every corner of the globe through its 11 owned and operated properties in nine different languages. Eight of every 10 U.S. mothers use BabyCenter.

LEGO’s The LEGO Movie was created as a for-profit initiative. On a $60 million budget, worldwide grosses of the movie totaled nearly a half-billion dollars.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg, often barely noticeable to marketers or even dismissed as irregularities or luck. But in the near future, this model will be the rule, not the exception, for every innovative company on the planet.

Driving Value Outside of Products

According to SiriusDecisions, there is a 1-in-25 chance to reach a C-level executive through outbound marketing. There must be a better way.

We’re beginning to see the signs of that better way.

In 2016, both Pepsi and Mondelez announced the launch of media divisions. In both cases, the marketing leaders at these organizations talked openly about a portion of their media being self-sustaining or even profitable.

A few months later, electronics manufacturing powerhouse and Fortune 500 enterprise Arrow Electronics acquired a number of B2B media brands from UBM, one of the largest media and event companies in the world (and parent company of CMI). Not only has Arrow purchased amazingly valuable subscriber lists and editorial talent, but it also purchased standalone marketing that is profitable unto itself.

Red Bull, Johnson & Johnson, and Arrow Electronics still market their products like other organizations, including advertising and traditional public relations. But these enterprises, through their content-driven and audience-building initiatives, drive value outside the day-to-day products they sell, and are monetizing it directly. They are, in every sense of the word, “media” companies.

Of course these initiatives sell more cans, more baby formula, and more electrical components. The delivery of amazingly helpful content keeps customers longer, keeps them buying more, and even helps new customers close faster. The engagement in the content reveals deep insight about customer behavior, and leads to the development of new products and services. All that, and the marketing pays for itself, and even generates a profit for the business.

This is the future of IBM, of General Motors, of Cisco Systems … creating owned media that can not only generate more leads and opportunities, but is so good that the marketing pays for itself.

To learn more from Joe Pullizzi, check out his upcoming webinar.

But then you don’t.

To realize the potential content marketing offers, it’s critical to have a plan. It sounds simple, yet it’s a step many content marketers don’t take. Seventy percent of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy (Altimeter), and only 29 percent of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose content (Curata).

That’s because creating such a plan is daunting. It requires marketers to analyze where their marketing efforts have been and what they want it to achieve in the future.

If you are one of the 70 percent of marketers operating without a plan, take heart: we’ve got the information and templates you need to guide you through the planning process and produce a content plan that can generate results.

Content Marketing Plan Is More than Just Content

Why is it so hard for marketers to create a strategic plan for their content? Let’s start by taking a look at what content marketing is:

The Content Marketing Institute defines it this way:

Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Note the emphasis on strategy in this statement. Taking a strategic approach to your content plan ensures your message cuts through the clutter and reaches your target audience with the right information at the right time.

The Value of a Content Marketing Plan

More than an editorial calendar, a content marketing plan document is your road map to a successful content marketing effort. There are several benefits to having this level of planning in place before you start sharing content.

To start, a good strategy document will clearly define the key elements of your effort. It will specifically outline who you will be talking to, what you will say and how to say it, where the content will be promoted, and how you will know when you have been successful.

Having this type of plan keeps everyone involved in creating and sharing your content on the same page, ensuring you have the resources needed to manage all aspects of a successful content campaign. From writing and posting to sharing and tracking, each member of the team knows what needs to happen and when.

Moreover, you have a road map or guide that you can share with others in your organization. This ensures that your content marketing goals are in alignment with—and are fully supporting—the goals of your organization.

Sharing your plan also gets others in your organization to buy into the role that content plays in making the organization successful. This not only supports your efforts but also gives you a team of employees who are engaged and willing to share the company’s content.

Understanding the value your content strategy brings is a good first step. Now let’s look at how to create that strategy and at the templates that are available to guide the process along the way.

The Start of a Successful Content Plan

The Content Audit

You can’t tell where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. That’s why the first step in creating your content strategy plan starts with a content audit.

To start, gather all your content that is currently produced by your organization: keywords, blog, website, social media, etc. Then, using a content inventory spreadsheet, to chart how successful each of these elements has been to your content strategy. Read more about how to conduct an audit.

Now take the time to analyze the results.

To start, you’ll want to see what content was most successful and what didn’t meet your expectations. Try to get a sense for the reasons behind these outcomes.

You’ll also want to note what’s in your content “library” so you can reuse that content in your strategy document. It’s also important to note gaps in your subject areas so that you can create new content to fill that void.

The content audit will take some time and effort. But as you will see later in this post, it gives you the details needed to build your content marketing plan.

Defining the Audience for Your Content Marketing Plan

With the audit completed, you’re ready to take the next—and most critical—step in developing your content strategy. Here you’ll want to define the purpose of your content marketing plan.

Purpose is a big topic but essentially it comes down to two important elements: who are you targeting with your content, and what do you want them to do with the information you provide?

Let’s start with the audience.

Todd Wheatland, Author and Speaker, Global Strategy at King Content | @ToddWheatland

Content strategies typically fail because they haven’t really understood the audience well enough. Everything that comes afterwards is based on that starting point – make it count!

Review the information you compiled in your content audit to see who is responding to what content. As you do this, be aware that some of the business problems or trends that were an issue in the past might not be relevant to the strategy you are building today.

Also, look at your buyer personas. If they are up to date, these composites of ideal customers will help you understand the current needs and problems.

Collaborate with your sales and marketing teams. As this article notes, all too often sales and marketing act as a silos, each focused on its own effort.  But when you bring these two teams together, it can have a positive impact your content strategy.

Ask your sales team about the customers and prospects they talk to on a regular basis. What are these prospects telling your salespeople about their problems, the industry, and the role your product or service plays in making their life better? You can gather a wealth of useable information in one conversation.

Matching Content with Your Audience

With this audience defined, you then want to consider what action you want your content to inspire.

To find out, start with the information gathered in the content audit. Look at what content areas were successful, and ask yourself the following:

• What is the message of this content?
• Who are these messages targeted toward?
• Why was this piece successful?
• Are these still the right messages for the right audience?

Analyzing what content was successful with which audience gives you a start on developing your content messages.

Now let’s look at what you want the audience to do with the content you create.

For example, if you are trying to gain awareness in your marketplace, then content that is education-based will be beneficial. This type of content can shed new light on a business problem your prospects have. Then include information that shows them new ways (such as your product) to solve that problem.

If you want to gain sales or interest in your product or service, then your content will need to be more focused on specific benefits while still being educational. This type of content can encourage a new understanding of your product but should never be an all-out sales piece.

Your content can also be used to change perceptions. This level of content goes beyond an education and includes a high level of persuasion.

These are just a few ideas. To be inspired, read this in-depth look at how to connect content with your buyers.

Finally, no matter what type of content you create, be sure that your content is compelling enough to give the reader the information he or she needs to think or act in a new way.

Creating Your Editorial Calendar

Congratulations!

You’ve done your audit, defined the audience and the goals of your content strategy. If you’ve used the content audit template we have provided along the way, then you now have the information you need to develop your editorial calendar.

In short, the editorial calendar is the working document that provides everyone involved in your content effort with the information they need to produce, deliver and promote the content strategy plan.

Adele Revella, CEO of Buyer Persona Institute | @buyerpersona

When you map your buyer’s journey, make sure you first have insight into the questions your buyers ask and which answers they want to hear. Your competitors are focused only on where and how to deliver content, but buyers consistently tell us that it’s the substance of the content that matters.

At high level, your editorial calendar needs to answer the critical questions of who, what, where, when and why of your content strategy:

• Who? Who on your content team is responsible for the creation, posting and promotion of the content? In addition, this question also asks to whom are you targeting this content? Customers, prospects, the market as a whole?
• What?What is the goal of the content? What information will it include and what is the desired action you want the reader to take?

Also, what format will the content take? Is it a video, blog post, infographic, or podcast? Keep in mind that a lot of the content you create can be repurposed in another format. A blog post can easily be turned into an infographic, for example. The editorial calendar is a good place to note what can be repurposed and how.

• Where?What channels will you use to promote the content? This can include your owned channels such as your Facebook Page, blog, website, YouTube channel, email newsletters, etc. You can also include any paid promotions that further promote your content.

The editorial calendar is also a good place to keep the URLs associated with where your contented has been posted.

• When?You need to plan all the critical dates associated with creating and distributing your content. Be sure to allow enough time for the development of written or visual elements you’ll want to include with your content, including images, illustrations for infographics, and charts.
• Why? Why create this content? What outcome do you expect to receive from this effort? Charting this information ensures that your content aligns with the goals of your organization, and can also show you where you need to add additional resources or subject areas.

You’ll also want to note what results you achieved from your content marketing activity. Including details about the actual outcome helps you understand where your success has been and lets you prepare for the next content audit!

Now that you’ve got the high-level view of how to create an editorial calendar, read more about how to capture and track this information so that your team – and your strategy – stays on target.

Tracking and Reporting on Your Success

There are dozens of ways to measure the effectiveness of your content strategy. But, as Rebecca Lieb, Digital Advertising, Media & Content Analyst, Altimeter (@lieblink) notes, what matters the most is that you are providing data on the metrics that are important to your organization. She says:

It makes no difference whatsoever what MY most important content marketing metric is—the real question is: what metric, what key performance indicator is most important to your business? No two marketers’ objectives are exactly alike. What matters is aligning against business goals, not all the abstract things you can measure.

As we have noted all along, sharing your content strategy with others in your organization ensures that you get their buy-in and demonstrates how the content strategy supports other sales and marketing initiatives. It is critical to keep that spirit of collaboration alive during the reporting process.

Before engaging your content strategy, ask what metrics are important to your company and be sure you can provide the relevant data on that metric.

Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey & Founder of WordStream | @LarryKim

Use Google Analytics (User Explorer), Facebook Audience Insights, Twitter Analytics (etc.) to get a better idea of the demographics, behaviors and interests associated with your prospects and customers. Ensure that your content creation and promotion efforts are aligned with your audience data.

For example, if your organization values the consumption of content, then you will want to provide details on how many people are consuming your content, how often it is being shared, and by whom.

If leads and sales are the yardstick by which your efforts are measured, you’ll want to offer a different set of statistics. Provide your organization with data on how well content marketing is supporting lead generation and lead nurturing activities. Or, include data that shows how the content strategy is supporting sales, helping to fill the pipeline and move prospects along until they ultimately drive revenue.

Here’s an example of content marketing analytics and the type of information that can be detailed in your report.

Content marketing can be a vital resource for an organization. Be sure you have the data you need to fully demonstrate just how valuable it is. A vital part of your content marketing plan is the editorial  calendar. For a detailed editorial calendar template, look here.

Although marketers have been practicing content marketing for decades, digital marketing coupled with a new, buyer 2.0 environment has created a whole new set of opportunities and challenges in the content marketing realm. This next generation of content marketing is producing significant dividends for marketers as they continue to invest in this effort to further drive leads and revenue. [source]

• 75% of marketers are increasing investment in content marketing
• 42% of companies have an executive responsible for content marketing, reaching 49% in 2017
• Key process areas are being established such as content strategy, production (with an editorial calendar and workflow management), distribution and analytics.
• 57% of leading marketers predict an increase in marketing analytics spending.

There has been a mind-numbing proliferation of technology vendors and solutions to address the needs of content and digital marketers. Curata’s content marketing tools map has increased from 40 vendors to over 130 vendors in its most recent version.

What is a Content Marketing Platform?

Regardless of which market studies you look at, content marketers have the following evergreen challenges:

• Limited budget for staff and program spend.
• Creating enough quality content on a regular basis, whether in-house or externally sourced.
• Distributing content across multiple channels, including publication and promotion.
• Measuring the impact of content, i.e., what works and what doesn’t work to drive awareness, leads and sales enablement.

Content Marketing Platforms (CMPs) help marketers solve these challenges. A definition of a Content Marketing Platform is as follows:

A Content Marketing Platform is a software solution that helps marketers be more successful in driving awareness, leads and revenue from their content. This platform enables a data-driven, scalable, and multi-channel approach across four process areas: strategy, production, distribution (publication and promotion) and analytics. 

A Vision for the Content Marketing Platform

The below framework provides additional details about the four key process areas addressed by a CMP. Ultimately, a CMP helps content marketers develop and execute an effective and efficient content marketing strategy.

The following frameworks offer additional perspectives as to what processes and related tactics are addressed by a Content Marketing Platform.

• CMI’s Content Marketing Framework:
  

  Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose assembled the framework based upon their own success at the Content Marketing Institute. These areas represent common elements of a high impact content marketing practice.

• Content Marketing Framework for Startups:
  

  Lee Odden, a thought leader in the content marketing space and CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, put together this simple to follow, yet powerful, framework for successful content marketing.

• Content Marketing Use Cases & Subcategories:
  

  Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter did a very thorough job identifying the more tactical areas required to fulfill three key use cases for content marketing: Feed the Beast, Refine (including content analytics, segmentation, and promotion), and Govern.     

• Content Marketing in 7 Steps:
  

  Jay Baer of Convince and Convert put this framework together using the knowledge gained from helping many big brands form their own content marketing strategy. His seven-step approach helps kickstart the process of formulating a content strategy, a process he says can take up to 60 days.

• 8 Steps to Fast-Track Your Content Marketing Plan:
  

  Content marketing expert and consultant Barry Feldman created a comprehensive post outlining this eight-step content marketing plan to quadruple your leads.

• 13 Step Content Marketing Plan:
  

  Heidi Cohen, content marketing expert and President of Riverside Marketing Strategies, provides these 13 steps to successfully establishing a content marketing strategy:

• Determine the goals for your content marketing plan.
• Know your content marketing audience.
• Incorporate your brand into your content.
• Determine what information your audience seeks.
• Tell your firm’s “once upon a time.”
• Use different content formats.
• Build an editorial calendar.
• Make your content attractive to prospective readers.
• Make your content findable.
• Allocate sufficient resources.
• Distribute content.
• Promote content.
• Measure content marketing results.

What a Content Marketing Platform Is—and What it Isn’t

There are countless tools available to help marketers work their way through each of the process areas and tactics described above. Only a small fraction of them however, have the mission of addressing most, or all of these areas in one solution. To help marketers navigate the sea of vendors across the content marketing technology space, here are some clarifications of what a CMP solution is and isn’t:

A content management system (CMS) for the web is NOT a Content Marketing Platform.

A CMS is designed to run web sites (e.g., corporate web sites, blogs, content repositories), and to avoid the need for manual coding. Their main function is to “store and organize files, and provide version-controlled access to their data.” [source] CMPs are designed to orchestrate the development, delivery, and analysis of content to CMSs, as well as many other types of digital media entities. A foundational element of a Content Marketing Platform is its ability to interact within an ecosystem of marketing teams, processes, and technologies, without being the sole hub for content delivery. Examples of CMSs include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Percussion and Uberflip.

• The value enabled by a CMP cannot be provided by a marketing automation platform (MAP) such as Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, etc. MAPs are designed to plan, execute, and measure demand generation campaigns and the interaction with leads from these campaigns. MAPs are lead-focused, not content-focused. However, MAP data is a key component of the value provided by a CMP, as detailed below.

• A CMP provides interoperability with the various software systems that make up the marketing technology ecosystem, such as:
  • Multiple CMSs
  • Social channels or Social Media Management Systems
  • Marketing Automation
  • Sales Force Automation
  • Content repositories: Ask anyone that has attempted to stop the use of SharePoint systems how likely it is you’ll get everyone to use only one content storage area. Therefore a CMP should—either today or as part of its roadmap—interoperate with different content repositories.
  • Email as a method of collaboration amongst internal and external teams will not be replaced anytime soon. Attempting to get all parties involved in content marketing onto one system only reduces the potential for technology adoption. Therefore a CMP should interoperate with email applications, and be able to track communication about specific content pieces as part of orchestrating the content production process.

• A CMP enables orchestration of the content production process in a minimally invasive manner.
  • Team alignment: A high impact content marketing strategy requires alignment and interaction with many functions across marketing. For example, content marketers may have to interact with product marketing for content creation, social media for promotion, or marketing operations for analytics. A CMP enables collaboration across these different teams without requiring all of them log into the CMP, increasing its adoption and impact.
  • Content creation tool: Some CMP vendors require content creation within their own platform, necessitating all content creators to be trained on system usage and to interact with it on a regular basis. Other CMP vendors track content creation progress in a less process-invasive manner, enabling the continued use of industry standard creation tools such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Spreadsheets, Photoshop, and WordPress.

• CMPs are not limited to a specific content type or publishing environment, working with any:
  • content format, e.g., video, text, images.
  • type of content, e.g., ebooks, white papers, infographics, blog posts.
  • source, e.g., created, curated, licensed, outsourced, crowdsourced content.
  • distribution channels, e.g., paid, earned, owned.
  • content internal to or external to the CMP.

A CMP enables the measurement of your content’s impact across awareness building (such as social channels, Google Analytics), demand generation (such as leads generated and influenced), and sales pipeline impact (such as sales opportunities generated and influenced). This is only possible if a CMP is capable of aggregating data from many applications, both within and external to your company. Even better is if a CMP can measure the pipeline impact of content published off-site on someone else’s blog or media property.

Where Should a Content Marketing Platform Sit in Your Marketing & Sales Technology Stack?

To understand how a CMP fits into your technology stack, begin with a basic question: What are the ultimate objectives of marketing and sales technologies? The bottom line—or should I say the top line, is REVENUE. That’s where our story begins.

The Advent of Sales Force Automation

Right around at the turn of the millennium there was a shift from the expensive, outbound sales model to inbound telephone and Internet-enabled sales. This change was driven by the advent of the Internet and the resulting online presentation tools such as WebEx, which effectively enabled salespeople to perform demonstrations of software and presentations—and ultimately close deals—without ever meeting their customers in person.

But the growth of insides sales teams was chaotic. Unlike outside sales people who each carry their own physical rolodexes, inside sales teams manage their leads in spreadsheets.

While this was a large advancement over the prior generation, it presented a host of new problems such as:

• How are leads and territories assigned across a sales team?
• Sales managers need to keep tabs on sales activities being performed by their teams.
• A sales account executive needs to know what prior interactions a company has had with an account.
• How can sales management easily report and predict their pipeline revenue across large and sometimes geographically distributed sales teams?

The solution to the above challenges was Sales Force Automation (SFA) platforms (often misidentified as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems) such as Salesforce, Oracle, Siebel, and Microsoft Dynamics among others. These systems:

• Let sales managers hold their teams accountable in terms of their sales activities.
• Offer transparency for reporting.
• Provide a means to scale sales teams.

Most importantly, they provide value for the everyday sales representative: convenience, efficiency and a single unified interface as a source of leads, activities, and deals.

The Rise of Marketing Automation Platforms

With the growth of inside sales teams, there was increased demand for leads, particularly online-sourced leads, to feed these teams. Pressure rapidly shifted to marketing teams to create more and more leads.

Demand generation teams stepped in to help address this challenge, employing a variety of techniques such as email, newsletters, and events. Over the next few years, demand generation teams and related marketing disciplines faced a similar set of scaling challenges as the sales teams once had:

• How do demand generation teams effectively manage marketing-generated leads?
• How can marketing operations have a single unified view of all marketing leads and associated marketing activities against those leads?
• What’s the best way for marketing to measure the effectiveness of their demand generation campaigns?

About seven years later in 2007 or so came another type of platform in the emerging stack: Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) from vendors such as Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Act-On and to some extent, HubSpot, amongst many others.

These platforms allowed marketers to:

• Keep a single unified repository of all leads.
• Track all digital marketing activities associated with those leads, be it on a website, via email, or through pay-per-click campaigns.
• Easily push qualified leads into Sales Force Automation systems.

Suddenly, marketers now had insight, visibility and self-accountability for their lead generation and nurturing campaigns.

The Emergence of the Content Marketing Platform

SFA platforms fuel revenue by tracking and supplying sales opportunities and leads. Marketing Automation Platforms drive SFA by supplying marketing qualified leads. But what drives the marketing activities and leads of Marketing Automation Platforms? Content!

Content is the fundamental currency for marketing automation.

Like a car without gas, marketing automation can’t get very far without content.

Content is needed for everything from a website (which is tracked by marketing automation), to email campaigns, to even pay-per-click landing page offers.

If not for content, many of marketing automation’s key components would cease to function. Drip campaigns come to a halt if there is no content to drip to leads. Lead scoring would stop without content for a lead to browse on a site. With no content, many demand generation campaigns would come to a halt because there would be no enticing offers for many lead capture landing pages.

Content is crucial to the customer acquisition process—so what tools and technologies can support this? There are myriad content marketing tools out there. But there’s still a need for a Content Marketing Platform (CMP) that sits on top of the Marketing Automation Platform and Sales Force Automation system. A CMP needs to supply content downstream to generate and nurture leads, that are then converted to opportunities and revenue by sales.

Similar to the pains that demand generation and sales teams have gone through in the past, many of today’s content marketers have little accountability and transparency in terms of how their content is performing. Their content and the associated metadata is often warehoused and stored in multiple disparate systems and spreadsheets.

Much like its predecessors, a CMP enables content marketers to:

• Have a unified, consolidated view of their entire content supply chain from ideation to production to promotion.
• Have top-down visibility on how their content is impacting lead generation and marketing pipeline, and sales pipeline and revenue generation.

With a CMP, content marketing managers suddenly have a data-driven and scalable way of managing their content supply chain and understanding their contribution to business growth.

Where Does a Content Marketing Platform Sit in the Marketing Technology Ecosystem?

The following figure depicts the location of a CMP in the marketing technology ecosystem. There are certainly many other categories and vendors within this ecosystem. However, these are the most important integrations and/or handoffs that need to occur for effective implementation of content marketing.

Who Sells a Content Marketing Platform?

You can find a lot of companies that may appear to have Content Marketing Platforms from a cursory view of their website. However, many offer point solutions and are more aptly described as content marketing “software” vendors, and/or don’t meet the broader definition provided at the beginning of this post.

We have assembled a list of the current vendors who have begun to solidify the vision of a Content Marketing Platform. Each of the following companies is further defined according to different categories to make it easier to distinguish each company’s area of expertise.

B2B Content Marketing Platforms:

Curata CMP
The Curata CMP Content Marketing Platform is designed specifically for B2B marketers to help drive leads and revenue from content. Key components to find in Curata CMP include strategy, production (e.g., calendaring, workflow) and analytics.

• Sample customers: Xerox, Lionbridge, RingLead, Yesler, Alcatel-Lucent
• Pricing: Starting at $999/month

Kapost
Kapost’s Content Marketing Platform allows marketers to collaborate, distribute, and analyze all content types within a single platform.

• Sample customers: LeadMD, ThermoFisher Scientific, AT&T, Dun & Bradstreet
• Pricing: $3,500/month

Eloqua (formerly Compendium)
This was a startup company acquired by Oracle in 2013. It has now been absorbed into the Oracle Marketing Cloud under the product name Oracle Eloqua Content Marketing.

• Sample customers: Eaton, Bass Pro Shops, Indiana University
• Pricing: $2,000+/month

B2C Content Marketing Platforms:

Percolate
Percolate is a leading social relationship management platform that also offers unique content management capabilities for large B2C companies.

• Sample customers: GE, Unilever, Chobani, Mastercard, Amtrak
• Pricing: $5,000/month to $15,000/month

Newscred
NewsCred helps brands manage the entire content marketing process on one platform. By managing content creation, distribution and measurement, it enables vendors to scale and streamline the entire customer experience.

• Sample customers: Pepsi, The Hartford, ConAgra Foods, VISA
• Pricing:  $2,950/month to $10,500+/month

Services-Oriented Content Marketing Platforms:

These companies by contrast, have a core value with content creation services that they either deliver or field to a marketplace of professionals. On top of the services, they have built content marketing software.

Skyword
Skyword’s motto is “Moving Stories. Forward.” Skyword provides access to a community of thousands of freelance writers and videographers, an editorial team, and program managers. The Skyword Platform makes it easy to produce, optimize, and promote content to create meaningful, lasting relationships.

• Sample customers: New Balance, MasterCard, Stack, GMC
• Pricing: Dependent on the volume of writing services needed

Contently
Contently meanwhile, helps you “tell great stories.” It helps leading brands build loyal audiences through premium, original content, and also offers software that lets marketers orchestrate content creation, approval, distribution, and measurement.

• Sample customers: GE, American Express, IBM, Walmart
• Pricing: $3,000 – $25,000 a month

The Future of Content Marketing Technology

The modern practice of content marketing has only recently begun to reach the masses. Organizations are beginning to staff their teams with content marketing experts, and processes are beginning to take shape to better tap into the power of a common focus (and investment) around content. The proliferation of content marketing vendors is therefore due to the many challenges (and opportunities) for marketers. In the future, the Content Marketing Platform will sit in the center of this technology landscape.

This will enable marketers to streamline their processes, and ultimately better scale content operations.

So, where to start? Look within your own organization to pinpoint specific needs. Do you have someone in place to lead content marketing? Have you developed a content marketing strategy in alignment with other parts of your organization? Are you using an editorial calendar to facilitate alignment and to help execute your strategy? Are you quantifying the return on your content marketing investment through more advanced metrics?

To help answer these questions and many more, download our free checklist to start scaling your content operations. This checklist will help you:

• Define content marketing and build internal support
• Develop a content marketing supply chain
• Consolidate and integrate marketing applications

This post was co-written by Michael Gerard.

Creating a podcast, however, isn’t easy. For a step-by-step on creating your own podcast, look here. The first step for creating a podcast as a content marketer, is listening to the best content marketing podcasts there are. Here’s a list of top content marketing podcasts you should listen to to improve both your content marketing skills and podcast knowledge. Two birds, one stone.

1.) Content Inc. by Joe Pulizzi

What It Is: A podcast by Content Marketing Institute founder, Joe Pulizzi. This podcast originally served as part of a “podcast-to-book” strategy in which Pulizzi was using each content marketing podcast episode as a future chapter of his book, Content Inc. This podcast is no longer actively produced, but there are 200 episodes still available on the Content Marketing Institute website. The podcast covers all things content from mixing media, to analysis of Starbucks’s content campaigns.
Listen to This For:

• A shorter podcast (each one runs no more than ten minutes in length)
• One quick tidbit of actionable information. The titles give you an idea of what you’ll learn. Feel free to scroll back through past podcasts for topics you’re interested in.

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 31 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @JoePulizzi

2.) Unthinkable by Jay Acunzo

What It Is: A podcast written by an alum of HubSpot and Google; a content marketer who’s sick of people producing bad content.
Listen to This For:

• Creative inspiration
• Awesome stories and well-written intros

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 105 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @jayacunzo

3. The Marketing Companion by Mark Schaefer

What It Is: Mark Schaefer and Tom Webster keep it fun and fresh in this podcast. Podcasts are organized by topic so you can pick and choose.
Listen to This For:

• Laughs while you learn
• Episode titles like: Love, Politics and Content Marketing or I wasn’t a desperate entrepreneur and that’s why I failed

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 42 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @markschaefer

4.) Exponent.FM

What It Is: A tech and society podcast for the intellectual marketer. This description of their most recent podcast sums it up. “Ben and James discuss the different levels of aggregation, Facebook and Russian ads, and why it’s worth defending the future.”
Listen to This For:

• Broader views on the way tech not only impacts your marketing and business, but also society
• Ideation and bringing the bigger picture home to your specific marketing activities

Number of Stars on iTunes 4.5 Stars, 145 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @exponentfm

5.) Serial

What It Is: A podcast told from the creators of This American Life. Narrates one nonfiction story over multiple episodes.
Listen to This For:

• Great storytelling
• Leisurely listening (not marketing related)

Number of Stars on iTunes: 4.5 Stars, 9460 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @serial

6.) The Pivot by Todd Wheatland

What It Is: A podcast told by marketing expert Todd Wheatland. This fireside chat format in which Todd dives into the backstories of other marketing influencers.

Listen to This For:

• Insight into successful marketers beyond their “expert hacks”.

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 10 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @ToddWheatland

7.) Duct Tape Marketing Podcast

What It Is: Interviews with authors, experts and thought leaders sharing business marketing tips, tactics and resources hosted by one of America’s leading small-business marketing experts – John Jantsch.

Listen to this For:

• Insights beyond specific tactics or campaigns
• Real questions around your career, not just your job. The importance of having a side hustle, sales as an entrepreneur, and sonic branding

Number of Stars on iTunes: 4.5 Stars, 103 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @ducttape

8.) Copyblogger

What It Is: Recently rebranded to Rainmaker FM, this podcast brings you the best tips, tactics, stories and strategies for accelerating your business. Each day delivers eye-opening advice on some vital aspect of the ever-evolving digital-marketing landscape.

Watch this For:

• Timely advice with your business in mind

Number of Stars on iTunes: 4.5 Stars, 218 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @copyblogger

9.) The Urbanist

What It Is: With an influential audience of city mayors, urban planners and architects, this is Monocle’s guide to making better cities, be it new technology, state-of-the-art subways or compact apartments.

Listen to This For:

• A great example on creating “how-to” content that isn’t boring. The urbanist combines interesting storytelling, current events, and compelling point-of-view to give its listeners top-quality how-to content on urban planning

Number of Stars on iTunes: 4.5 Stars, 228 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @Monocle24

10.) Mad Marketing

What It Is: A podcast by the “sales lion,” Marcus Sheridan covering topics from the importance of good people in marketing, finding your talents, and vulnerability, all the way to the more tactical topics like Facebook growth and artificial intelligence.

Listen to This For:

• Realm off-the-cuff advice directly from Marcus Sheridan
• To ask your own questions and hopefully have them answered on-air
• If you’re sick of the fireside-chat style podcast that’s become so popular across industries

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 69 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @TheSalesLion

11.) Online Marketing Made Easy

What It Is: Expert interviews, mini-execution plans, and intimate behind-the-scenes secrets from the host, Amy Porterfield’s biggest launches. 
Listen to This for:

• Advice on how an individual can start their own online business and grow subscribers
• Getting into the tactical nitty gritty of everything from starting an online course to growing webinar followers

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 654 Rating
Tweet the Author: @AmyPorterfiel

12.) Longform

What It Is : This podcast consists of a weekly conversation with a nonfiction writer. 
Listen to this For:

• Inspiration to perfect your non-fiction writing
• Outside-the-box thinking
• New ideas to improve your creative process

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 526 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @longformpodcast

13.) Growth Byte

What It Is: This podcast finds the best startup growth content online and summarizes it for you in 2-3 minute audio “bytes.”
Listen to This For:

• When you don’t have time to listen to a full-length podcast
• A quick understanding of what content is working for high-growth startups
• Tactics to help your own growth

Number of Stars on iTunes: N/A
Tweet the Author: @growthhackertv

14.) Marketing Over Coffee

What It Is: Marketing Over Coffee covers both classic and new marketing. Your hosts, John J. Wall and Christopher S. Penn, record the show in a local coffee shop every week and publish the show on Thursday mornings.

Listen to This For:

• Marketing and tech intersections
• Social media, SEO, email marketing and other tactics

Number of Stars on iTunes: 4.5 Stars, 137 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @johnjwall and @cspenn 

15.) Content Matters

What It Is : A talk show about all things content marketing featuring Andy Crestodina and Barry Feldman. Each 22-minute episode explores a significant tactic that makes content marketing effective.
Listen to this For:

• All things content from building your team to content creation to measurement
• Interesting and knowledgeable hosts

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 9 Ratings
Tweet the Author @crestodina  and @FeldmanCreative

16.) Digiday

What It Is: Each podcast has a guest speaker giving their opinion on a specific topic (usually a polarizing one in  the marketing space).
Listen to this For:

• Thought provoking content that you may or may not agree with
• Blunt honesty from the host

Number of Stars on iTunes: 4.5 Stars, 22 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @Digiday

17.) The Art of Paid Traffic

What It Is:  Facebook ads expert Rick Mulready reveals the best paid traffic tips, tactics, and strategies for generating leads and sales for your business. Automation and affordability are the name of the game.
Listen to this For:

• A niche topic podcast that will actually educate you on paid traffic
• If you’re tired of listening to people telling you the way to get more traffic/better content is to “do better”

Number of Stars on iTunesL 5 Stars, 291 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @rickmulready ‏

18.) The #AskGaryVee Show

What It Is: Hosted by entrepreneur, CEO, investor, vlogger, and public speaker Gary Vaynerchuk. You’ll find a mix #AskGaryVee show episodes, keynote speeches on marketing and business, segments from DAILYVEE video series, interviews and fireside chats given, as well as new and current thoughts recorded originally for this podcast.
Listen to this For:

• A great example of repurposing content effectively
• A mix of information on marketing, entrepreneurship, becoming and influencer, general tips on becoming successful

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 2412 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @garyvee

19.) Content Warfare

What It Is: Every week on the Content Warfare Podcast, Ryan Hanley interviews the Internet’s most prolific content creators to extract their secrets for winning the battle for attention online. Popular guests include: Chris Brogan, Marcus Sheridan, Mark Schaefer and Gini Dietrich. Popular topics include: content marketing, writing, podcasting, social media and audience building.
Listen to this For:

• Advice on creating content that converts
• Compelling fireside-chat style episodes with the industry experts you attend conferences to see

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 89 Ratings
Tweet the Author @RyanHanley_Com

20.) Sporkful

What It Is: As you probably guessed, not a marketing podcast. This is a podcast about food. BUT a really great podcast that you could learn a  thing or two from.
Listen to this For:

• A podcast covering a topic that most people would say requires a visual element
• To better understand how you might use a podcast even if it’s not a conventional medium for your space

Number of Stars on iTunes: 4.5 Stars, 771 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @TheSporkful

21.) The Growth Show

What It Is: HubSpot’s business podcast answers questions around how to grow a company, a movement, or an idea. Each week they sit down with someone who has achieved remarkable growth (or has tried to) and unpack just how they did it.
Listen to this For:

• Real businesses and real issues
• Talking through why something that should have worked didn’t

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 175 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @hubspot

 22.) You Must Remember This

What It Is : You Must Remember This is a storytelling podcast exploring the secret or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century. It’s the brainchild and passion project of Karina Longworth, who writes, narrates, records and edits each episode. It is a heavily-researched work of creative nonfiction: navigating through conflicting reports, mythology, and institutionalized spin.
Listen to this For:

• A reminder that a deep passion for a subject can produce a very interesting result
• To experience first-hand how one person can carry a podcast from ideation to post-production

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 2379 Ratings
Tweet the Author @rememberthispod or @karinalongworth

23.) The Sophisticated Marketer

What It Is: LinkedIn podcast hosted by resident content marketing guru Jason Miller.
Listen to this For:

• Top marketing interviews from around the world
• Jason Millers “rock and roll” flare

Number of Stars on iTunes: 4.5 Stars, 34 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @JasonMillerCA

24.) General Electric’s Theater Podcasts

What It Is: The Message and LifeAfter: GE has two hit podcast series under it’s belt. Both are nonfiction, science stories meant to awaken the listener’s nerdy side in 40s and 50s style radio storytelling.
Listen to this For:

• A creative take on what podcasting could be
• More inspiration on turning you “boring” subject matter into something people actually care about

Number of Stars on iTunes: N/A
Tweet the Author: N/A unless you wanna tweet at GE?

25.) Conversion Cast

What It Is: The ConversionCast unveils the inner workings and marketing secrets of one of software startup, Leadpages. You’ll discover how this Inc 500 company with over 40,000 (and growing) paying customers rocketed into existence. Moreover, you’ll learn exactly how they find, convert, and keep their customers. 
Listen to this For:

• Metrics: Like actual metrics

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 188 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @ConversionCast

26.) StartUp

What It Is: A series by Gimlet Media on “what it’s actually like to start a business”
Listen to this For:

• Lessons on starting a business
• How to navigate common roadblocks and achieve milestones

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 5319 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @podcaststartup

27.) The Fizzle Show

What It Is :Weekly insights for small business owners who want to earn a living doing something they care about. A highly reviewed and very entertaining show focusing on modern business essentials: self employment, marketing, productivity, selling things online, motivation, audience growth and work-life balance.
Listen to this For:

• More information on how to use your creative talents to make money
• Growing a business online
• Increasing freelancing work

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 522 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @Fizzle

 28.) Seeking Wisdom

What It Is: A podcast from tech-startup, Drift about personal and professional growth hosted by David Cancel and Dave Gerhardt.
Listen to this For:

• A super-smart marketer and super-smart entrepreneur in the same podcast
• Everything you care about in terms of your career growth

Number of Stars on iTunes: 5 Stars, 299 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @dcancel or @davegerhardt

29.) Moneyball for Marketing

What It Is: Crimson Marketing’s CEO Glenn Gow interviews the best and the brightest marketing minds. He and his guests talk about the incredible changes happening in marketing organizations around Big Data and marketing technology. Moneyball for Marketing features marketing technology insights from the top marketers in the world.
Listen to this For:

• Great guests focused on teaching the audience

Number of Stars on Itunes: 5 Stars, 114 Rankings
Tweet the author: @glenngow1 ‏

30.) Marketing Speak

What it Is: Tips, tricks, and new insights that the top players in the digital marketing world are using to grow their brands and businesses.

Listen to this for

• Top marketing experts talking about what they know the most about
• Tactical advice on a variety of topics from influencer marketing to link building

Number of Stars on Itunes: 5 Stars, 18 Ratings
Tweet the author: @mktg_speak

 31.) Learn to Code with Me

What it Is: A coding podcast for beginners. We’re always talking about how, as content marketers, we should expand our skill sets. Code is one place to start.

Listen to this For:

• Beginner information on coding
• Some interesting stuff on the coding industry that doesn’t necessarily pertain to you

Number of Stars on Itunes: 5 stars, 115 ratings
Tweet the author @learncodewithme

32.) Social Media Marketing Podcast

What it Is: Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner helps your business navigate the social jungle with success stories and expert interviews from leading social media marketing pros. Discover how successful businesses employ social media, learn new strategies and tactics, and gain actionable tips to improve your social media marketing. 

Listen to this For:

• Marketing insight from a social perspective
• If you think social is useless (they’ll prove you wrong)

Number of Stars on Itunes: 5 Stars, 560 Ratings
Tweet the Author @Mike_Stelzner

 33.) The SaaS Content Marketing Show

What it Is: Learn how to turn your SaaS company into a real user magnet with targeted content strategies. Every two weeks this content marketing podcast brings SaaS founders, CEOs, and marketers training, insights, and tools to launch and manage a successful content marketing strategy. 

Listen to this For:

• Information specific to SaaS content marketers. This niche information makes it all the more actionable

Number of Stars on Itunes: N/A
Tweet the Author: @pawelgra7

34.) Edge of the Web

What it Is: Winner of Best Podcast from Content Marketing Institute this past year, Edge of the Web is a weekly SEO podcast discussing all things within SEO, social media, content jarketing and digital marketing. Hosts Erin Sparks, Douglas Karr, and Tom Brodbeck discuss the latest news and trends in the SEO industry as well as interviews with some of the top names in digital marketing.

Listen to this For:

• Advice and discussion directly related to the most current events in marketing
• A deep-dive into current best practices for SEO

Number of Stars on Itunes:5 Stars, 10 Ratings
Tweet the Author: @EdgeWebRadio 

Did we forget your podcast? Feel free to tweet us suggestions to add to the list @curata

Podcasting can be an important part of your editorial strategy. For more in-depth editorial calendar planning, download our editorial calendar template.