Obviously for a blog to have the ‘tool up’ effect, it needs to pack a pretty intense message.

And it did.

For starters it called journalists ‘geeks’. Then things got really crazy with:

‘Eventually the tools of writers cease to be enough: Microsoft Word gives way to Excel, which gives way to MySQL. And then, almost without knowing it, you’re creating the tools yourself. Having conquered English, you start learning a few phrases in HTML, then PHP, then Python and Django. One day without warning, you find yourself tromping around a Git repository. And liking it. A new journo-hacker has been born.’

To save you the time of throwing that slab of text into Google, it’s written by a smart guy called Matt Thompson and first appeared on Poyter.org in October 2011. Agreed, that’s forever ago in this age of rapid acceleration of acceleration, but wow, what a point he makes. (Oh, and a Git Repository is a collection of files you probably got from GitHub, a socially collaborative coding platform).

Journalists need to be coders???

Well, as strange as that seems, we’d be lying if we said we didn’t usually already view digital content through the WYSIWG lens (old skoolers, that’s ‘what you see is what you get’ – and it means looking at you article on screen with the code thrown in) In fact, we have been known to ask our contributors to write in HTML so we can get the article published faster. Most freelancer writers and journalists today rarely baulk at the ‘Can you write in HTML?’ question anyway, given many of them are already running their own DIY media empires on Tumblr and WordPress.

News organisations are now hiring data visualizers too, (so do we) because that picture is worth way more than 1000 words. And if it’s interactive, so much the better – that story with plenty of data (facts) is just dying to be displayed on your fabulous new tablet or smartphone. Suddenly news is interactive…but could it be cool again? Judging by the number of developers teaming up with journalists to create powerful visualizations (likely to be seen and shared by more people and organizations than pure text-based articles) or journalists learning to code, via places like GitHub we’d say… yes!

This hopeful thought in itself had its origins in another interesting blog we read recently that boldly declared:

‘One in every four Americans receives their news digitally from mobile devices, which are helping to expand the consumption of journalism across multiple sources’

The impressive stat comes freshly minted The 2012 State of the News Media Report, conducted by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report goes on to say that laptop and desktop computers are still the main portals for delivering digital news, but smartphones and tablets are quickly closing the gap. ‘And, mobile devices also are leading users to consume more news and for longer periods of time.’

We’ll also add (just for fun), the report found that users turned to Facebook for family and friends news and Twitter for ‘real’ news like the Arab Spring uprising and The Kardashians – but more on that in another post.

Back to the business of journalists being able to talk and think like coders. They are doing it more and more because it enables them  to collaborate with developers to create a visual story so incredibly awesome and powerful, it gets shared the world over, and other journalists borrow the code to tell their own data story. Perhaps the greatest endorsement of this type of emerging journalistic skill set comes from the old masters themselves: The New York Times and The Guardian. Both media organizations have the ultimate nod to hacker journalism: the developer blog. No wonder we’re all consuming more news on our cool new devices – it’s beautiful!

Let’s hope this gradual shift in who creates and how we consume the news sparks some robust conversation, like it did with us. It’s pretty cool, and in some ways, a lot more transparent.

At the same time, however, those Hemingway favoured Moleskin notebooks still continue to sell like hotcakes.

This is the line that sums it up nicely: Creating content for a brand feels a lot like you’re running a daily news program. Bang on.

Content is responsive and reactionary. It’s created both carefully and on the fly, published then pushed out through channels, commented on, aggregated, added to, curated and consumed. Brand news coming to you live from the brand station you tune into. And if we stay with the news program metaphor (which we first heard via a fantastic JESS3 slide deck available on SlideShare), then businesses can begin to understand the argument for content that brings value. It has to, otherwise the audience will simply tune out – and there goes the customer lead or brand value with them.

Branded content must meet the needs and objectives of the business without sounding like a shameless infomercial. It’s a bigger challenge than it sounds. It also has to demonstrate ability to be engaging and needs to meet the requirements of the user (customer = this is a company that understands my industry; advocate = this is a brand we’d recommend or be associated with; talent = this is a company I want to work for).  Done well, branded content can nail all these user needs at once.

Once you have strong branded content playing on your station (website), the next thing to do is advertise that quality content – and you do that by publishing it on a range of social media channels which it helps to see as playing your digital ad. And of course, just like traditional advertising strategies, different ads suit different audiences. Sure, there’s Facebook for your general audience, Twitter for your reach audience, LinkedIn for your business audience, but there’s also SildeShare, Vimeo, YouTube, Delicious, Dribble, FFFFOUND, Forrst, Behance, Flickr, Quora, YouTube, CrunchBase, Tumblr, Visual.ly, Pinterest, AngelList, PearlTrees and that’s just for starters. Each channel has a different audience. Some channels  focus on visual content, some focus on written, and lots do both. The thing is, each member of that audience is a potential customer, a potential advocate or potential  employee.

Brands are media companies, make no mistake about it.

And even better, put on a good show, and people will record it and play to everyone they know. By this we mean, share your content to collections of audiences (a diverse spread of social channels) that will in turn, share it with their audiences (again on a variety of social channels). These are the posts you dream about, where Fan of your content X, shares one of your articles relevant to her industry Y, via her 500+ connections on LinkedIn, her 2000 Twitter followers, her (by now, although it’s growing daily) 80 Pinterest followers…. and so it goes. Your brand is in syndication mode in more markets and across more continents that you can possibly keep track of. Seinfield, eat your heart out.

And finally, there’s search. That nugget of gold we refer to when what you find is even better than what you hoped you were looking for. How great is that feeling when Google serves up something that is totally off-the-charts fantastic?  Good content is the Holy Grail, and no one knows this better than Google. Except now, so do you.

* image by Faye Valentina @Flickr

The value of electronic email marketing:

What’s changed? Beautifully designed cost-effective templates, a seamless user experience, users’ preference for curated content, third party integration and powerful social analytics packages are just some of the reasons email marketing is back to being a valuable marketing tool for businesses. Let’s also not forget they’re a little value-added package of goodness for clients (the lucky people who signed up for the newsletter).

Email Marketing is more than just open and click-thru rates

User interaction with electronic email is now measured in granular detail. Reporting includes data on who is opening the EDM, what parts of it they’re clicking on, (and what they’re ignoring) who they forwarded it to, whether they marked it as spam, whether it bounced back, who liked it on Facebook, mentioned it on Twitter or shared it on another social network. Some email providers can even show you on a map where the user is located when they open the newsletter– that gives a global perspective on where your subscribers are located and what type of device they are using to engage with your content. Throw in automatic Google Analytics link tagging to easily track your sales and conversions (leads people, leads!) and you’ve got yourself an impressively powerful email marketing tool.

‘Sourcing content to put in an email newsletter is too hard’. That old chestnut.

Wrong! As a business owner it’s your job to provide up-to-date industry-related developments and happenings for clients. That’s called a value-add and it’s a crucial part of any marketing strategy. It gives your clients confidence in their decision to place their business with you in the first place. An email newsletter is also easy for those satisfied clients to share – spreading the word about what you do and how well you do it. For the newsletter to have optimal effect, the content in the newsletter must deliver value. And there is a lot of really valuable content on industry specific topics currently being curated into EDMs (Electronic Direct Mail) and distributed to inboxes by savvy businesses intent on growing their audience and retaining their clients. Thousands of people get really excited when a subscribed to EDM hits their inbox not because they’ll get 80% off a leg wax, but because they’ll learn something about a topic or industry they’re interested in.

Those daily deal emails flooding the inbox has meant email newsletters are back in the bad corner – wrong.

Actually, thanks to those daily deal emails, the contrary is happening. Think of it this way: If you’re flooded by lousy emails, then you know a great one when you see it because quality has a habit of floating to the top. In other words, if the entire crowd is wearing black, you stand out a lot more wearing lime green. Lousy email marketing makes us truly appreciate good email marketing.

Email Marketing is primed for Content Curation

If you’re fans of ours, you’ll know this is a drum we beat as loud and often as we can. And we do it every time someone tells us their story of wanting but not being able to afford to publish high quality content. Again, we stress, online content is reaching saturation point and search, let alone users, just can’t keep up. We need content curators to organize and aggregate all that content  for us. Content curation is cost-effective content marketing that is probably the most up-to-date way of informing users (clients) that we know of and curators will become the big influencers on the internet (but that’s another article). The thing we’re getting at here, is an email newsletter is the perfect format suited to curation of content. And those people who cry ‘but we want to drive traffic to our site, not to someone else’s site/blog/forum’ just don’t get it. If I subscribe to a newsletter that curated a relevant article or blog that a, taught me something b, provided me with a great read or c, introduced me to a valuable resource to follow on Twitter or Facebook or connect with on LinkedIn – then guess what? I’m happy. I got something (knowledge) for free and that might help my business grow or my career progress.

I’ll open an email newsletter like that, any day.

*awesome carrier pidgeon picture by Mako@Flicker.

We’re a content company, creating and curating all kinds of content for our clients, so most of our thinking on this comes from our own anecdotal experience of what clients are asking for, and what we think is often the best way to tell their stories: And increasingly, it’s visual.

2011 was the year infographics went mainstream. A little over a year ago, people still thought of infographics as purely instructive visual guides – like an in-flight pamphlet on how to put on a safety vest. Sure they were helpful, and they enabled people to grasp the concept of – say, putting on a safety vest – very quickly without having to read anything, but they suffered from function at the expense of flair. Despite the lack of “excitement”, they did their job well: they enabled people to use visual cues to grasp complicated tasks…so in this time-poor, multi-tasking, multi –platform multi-messaging content-on-steroids environment we now thrive in, it was only a matter of time before we’d begin to use visual content to do the job a lot faster, simpler, effectively and more dynamically than the old forms of content.

As 2011 progressed, we began to see infographics everywhere. They were being used as marketing tools,  for survey results, timelines, branding tools, annual reports, product launches even CVs! We saw them on the TV to help us understand complex problems, we saw them in print and we defitnely saw then all over the internet. And guess what? People loved them. And not only did they love them; they shared them with their friends on social networks and printed them out and put them on their walls.

In 2011, the infographic got street cred.

Another thing we noticed this year that has gone hand-in-hand with the growth of visualizations, is the growing availability of data.  It’s everywhere. Whether it companies getting thousands of insights from their customers via online behaviour or whether it’s a simple weekly metric of user activity from a Facebook Page or even from your own blog, data became accessible to anyone. So with all that data flowing into our clutches demanding to be analysed, we needed to be able to do it simply and effectively. Enter visualizations! Just about everyone who works in an online environment has access to a dashboard of metrics that can be visualized to make it much easier to interpret and see clearly, patterns emerging in the data.  We call this format Data Visualization, and it can be as complex or simple as people want. And once people view data through one of these prisms, they’ll never want to look at a table of data again, which is another reason why we’re expecting impressive growth throughout 2012 in this space.

We also predict Big Things in 2012 for motion graphics also known as video infographics. This is a visualisation format that we get to have a lot of fun with. Think of moving visual frames that are bright and engaging – add some cool music and you’ve got yourself a visual animation that is not only fun to watch, but great for sharing. Gone are the days of embarrassing corporate drone-fest videos that no one watches and that date quickly. Instead we’ll be seeing a lot more motion graphic videos that are far more engaging, cut to the chase and use visuals to tell the story. Oh – and even better, they are a lot more cost effective for clients.

And that’s just touching the surface.

We don’t think for a New York Minute, that the growth of visual content comes at the expense of written content, but what we are seeing increasingly, is the need for a content strategy that incorporates a number of different formats. Some formats do the job better than others, and the trick is knowing which format will best tell the story you want told.

We love visualizing content, so we’re stoked for what lies in store for 2012.  We can’t wait for more and more engaging and clever visualizations to cross our screen – and we’re pretty excited when we think of the ones we’ll be making too! We have a feeling we’ll see infographics start merging with photographic and video imagry and lots more interactive infographics that create unique pieces of content that are easy to press out and fun to share. We’ll also see the emergence of  ’Data Journalism’, whereby journalists become highly skilled in researching and extracting the best data possible to tell the story.  And we’re also willing to bet that a lot more kids will be sending you CVs like you’ve never quite seen before.

Picture this: 2012, the Year of Visual Content!

And our favourite piece of visual content for for 2012? Right here:

Visualizing How a Population Grows to 7 Billion

Here’s an infographic we had a lot of fun with. The only data we had to work with was Mumbrella’s Top 30 Advertising Agencies numbered one to thirty.

The rest of the research we completed based on two criteria:

1. what was accessible

2. what we thought might tell an interesting story and possibly present a different perspective.

If you work in an advertising agency, especially one of the top 30, then we recommend you load up the printer with the nicest paper available and press “go”  - we think this will look awesome on the wall.

(just click on the link below the infographic for the printable version)

Click for a printable version of Australia’s Top 30 Ad Agencies Infographic.

According to a recent article on Big Data by the highly respected business outfit, McKinsey Quarterly,

Radical customization, constant experimentation, and novel business models will be new hallmarks of competition as companies capture and analyze huge volumes of data.

McKinsey is pointing to the fact that increasingly, data analysis is becoming a key corporate asset, and a company’s effectiveness it collect it, analyse and share it (both internally and to customers as a value add) will determine their success amongst competitors.  At the same time, along with all these advances in data collation, comes a new problem in how to display it. And even more importantly, how to display it in a way that makes it accessible – and that’s where we get excited.

Thankfully, also emerging at a rapidly innovative pace is the visualization field combining the skills of developers, statisticians, designers, illustrators and journalists, whose job it is to make the massive scale of inhuman data, well...human, or in other words, make all that Big Data accessible.

If this is hard to comprehend, it’s worth noting that we’re already used to seeing some data visualization tools being used quite commonly today. A good example of data visualisation that is standard practice is the tag cloud, where words are counted and visualized by font size in a cluster. Anyone can immediately look at the tag cloud and see, depending on size, how many times the word is mentioned in the article or site. This provides an immediate visual understanding of the main themes represented in the content.  A famous example of the tag cloud can be seen in the analysis of Barack Obama’s inaugural Presidential speech below. The guys at ReadWriteWeb also gave the inaugural speeches of Bush and Clinton the cloud tag treatment, making for some interesting comparisons on Presidential themes.

Other ways to visualize data can include colour patterns and the size of lines (thickness) on a graphical map. You can image just how much data could be visualized over time via strength or weakness of a certain colour. Essentially, good data visualization will exploit key data narratives with visual clues that our humble brains can process a lot faster than the effort it takes to make assessments and comparisons of numerical data in a table. Suddenly, well designed graphics can present huge and complex data stories in a way that is dynamic and exciting – just ask Google’s Aaron Koblin who plotted a map of every commercial flight in America over a 24 hour time period using brighter lines to identify flight routes with heavier traffic.

And naturally as we move onto more sophisticated devices, we’ll expect to be served up more sophisticated visual offerings – we’ll want our visualizations to be animated and to set to awesome music!

Visualization is enjoying the excitement of the new right now, but clearly, is on its way to being the normal technique used to display the findings of all this Big Data we have at our disposal.  And with the ever increasing daily dashboards of data (big and small) we are expected to comprehend, the need to grasp and process data quickly is going to be a business and consumer expectation.

Finally, data visualization means theatre. Thanks to the imagination and power of data visualization, there now exists plenty of opportunities for business leaders to face an audience by standing in front of a giant screen and letting the data be the visual star of the show – assuming the story is a good one to tell, of course.

** Main image is an infographic  illustrating China as a global force via its investments and business dealings, published by The Heritage Foundation.

U.S. gridiron teams are competitive off-field as well. This infographic shows the top (and bottom) teams in terms of social media follows.

By Column Five Media

Enter the infographic, the most revolutionary content innovation we’ve seen since the advent of the LOL Cat video (and slightly more useful to society) and one that represents a fundamental shift in online content marketing. For those of you still unsure what exactly an infographic is or does, it’s simple. An infographic is a visual representation of information, data or knowledge. And what’s great about them is an infographic can represent complex ideas and information beautifully and easily, which means it’s easier to interpret and understand. We also call this data visualisation, visualisation or visual journalism – that is, an alternative to words to tell an important story using facts and data in a way that people enjoy and understand quickly.

How do you make an infographic?

An infographic is born out of the collaboration between an illustrator and a researcher. The researcher takes the data and facts and draws out the narrative – the story the data is supposed to tell. The illustrator then brings that narrative alive. The creative process involved in making an infographic is pretty exciting – and pairing together researchers (often journalists) with designers and illustrators is a relatively new collaboration, because the image created doesn’t just accompany the story – it is the story!

Why infographics are here to stay

Because people love them. They enable people to grasp complex and in-depth information quickly and easily and enable the data to play a starring role. People are able to grasp ideas quickly that used to take 1000 words of copy. Who even reads and absorbs 1000 words of copy these days? In this competitive world of online content and shrinking concentration spans, the infographic is thing that catches users’ attention and doesn’t take up too much thinking time to understand – it’s the content format so beautifully suited to the times!

Data is everywhere

Today you can get a metric for just about anything. Data is everywhere – we’re saturated in it. We can monitor just about everything and see relationships and correlations between sets of data. The relationship between cause and effect is all around us. With all this data at our disposal, we need a way to make the best use of it – help people understand its meaning. Infographics are the perfect tool to enable people – and not just ‘numbers’ people – to interpret data.

People love sharing infographics

Especially in Australia. In fact, according to Google Insights, Australia is the sixth highest country in the world to search for infographics. When Mashable (the online magazine focused on digital and tech), looked at its metrics, it noticed an estimated 5% of its content was in Infographics. Of the top 25 posts on Mashable which have gone most viral (in terms of Facebook likes, Tweets and Google +), there were three infographics and two videos on the list. This shows that infographics are more likely to be shared compared to normal “blog” news from Mashable. Not bad for a content form that wasn’t even around in 2009!

Infographics should be a part of your content marketing strategy

Because we’re willing to bet, that out of all the content you have on your site, it’s the infographic that people will respond to and share.

Let’s face it, we get exhausted by all those words on the screen, and often video can be one of two things – cost prohibitive or woefully amateurish. The infographic is the perfect solution – the ideal content format for these days of information overload and time-poor users. And another thing – they’re sexy, cool, colourful and truly creative – no matter how dry your data or how dull your subject matter might be (make that used to be!)

The infographic may be the content breakthrough you’ve been waiting for, and is fast becoming an essential (and beautiful) part of an effective content strategy in an extremely crowded marketplace.

Thanks to cool sites and apps like paper.li, Pulse, Zite, News.me and of course the one that started it all Flipboard, users are now curating topics of interest to them and displaying them in a nice clean user wonderland.

And it’s happening outside the app world in the old-fashioned browser environment too. Thanks to emerging curation tools able to source the web’s seemingly infinite content pool for articles, images, blogs, news, videos, infographics relevant to just about any topic, Curated magazines (think microsites) are becoming ‘go to’ resources and online industry hubs. If this is sounding a little out there – check out the mind-mapping way of curation via pearltrees or the visual (video + images) method complete with automated voiceover thanks to a startup called Qwiki. Oh – and Google’s offering ‘Google Propeller’ is just around the corner…

While this all sounds pretty out there, it really just makes simple sense. Friends of Curated Content will know that we’ve been talking up and using content curation as the way forward on the web for ages. We curate the good content we find, and we’ve had our own unique content curated by plenty of other sites, which means our articles turn up all over the place.

We also spend a lot of time talking and listening to agencies about content. And we still think the best and most affordable solution is a mix of mostly curated with limited unique content into the mix. Here’s some of what we’ve discovered from our discussions.

Brands need to produce content so they can continue to engage their existing audience and reach out search in the hope of building a new one. (Right)

With information travelling at the speed of light and being shared by more people than ever before, thanks to social channels like Twitter and Linkedin,, high quality content is essential for Lead Generation in today’s overcrowded digital landscape.

Unique content needs to be relevant, up-to-date, engaging and SEO friendly. (Right)

Yep, content does indeed need to be all those things. With over 19.31 billion pages making up the entire World Wide Web, (and that number is growing at a staggering rate) your content needs to hit its mark and do its job, which is to standout in a highly competitive environment for the attention users. Not only do companies believe that task is expensive, they see it as pretty overwhelming. No single company can be expected to keep on top of everything all the time and write about it all – that’s plain crazy talk.

Company websites can no longer just be a digital business card. (Right)

Correct. Those days are long gone. They need to be content hubs – digital magazines specialising in content related to their industry and brand – content that potential new customers are looking for. The digital business details are for the formality of connecting.

Companies believe ‘Feeding the Content Beast’ needed for a digital magazine is cost prohibitive. (Wrong)

Lots of brands feel they simply can’t afford to allocate resources, budget and time to content creation. It’s just too expensive and time-consuming to research and keep coming up with new topics of interest. Wrong. Most of the information is already out there in amongst those 19 billion pages on the web. It’s how you find it, gather it and share it that counts.

Google will punish us for curating content already published on the web as well as the originator of the content. (Wrong)

Nope. Google loves contextual links – SEO starts with good content, not you or your company name. And authors of content love being curated and pointed to. It grows their brand under the umbrella of your brand. For example, say you owned a cheese shop and you curated an awesome blog on how to choose the perfect soft French cheese. Firstly, you are saving yourself the trouble of hiring a writer to replicate that blog. Why not just point to the original version? Secondly, you’ve given your customers access to an expert in cheese that they would have otherwise not known about. That’s providing value without demanding anything in return – that’s the sure fire way to customer loyalty. We’re not saying you shouldn’t hire writers to write unique content – that’s important, but to hire writers to continue to populate your site with only unique content just isn’t a realistic long-term proposition.

In essence, for companies to succeed – by that we mean reach new audiences and customers and grow revenue – they need to create content that potential customers are looking for. It takes a lot more than a company blog that is often out of date and corporatized to death. Customers, on the other hand, are overwhelmed by just how much content there is out there, and the time it takes to search, find and filter rather than consume it.

Curated online digital magazines provide a one-stop-shop. A fantastic hub of information and news on a particular topic that can be updated as many times a day as you like! These magazines are go-to sources on the web – because the curation – the sorting, filtering and finding – has already been done. Consumers just need to engage with the content and learn. Google plays its role too. It loves high quality content that is up-to-date and refreshed – and plenty of it.

And guess what? It’s a lot cheaper than feeding the Content Beast with unique content alone.

Stop Hesitate and Listen (wise words from the mouth of the entertaining musician, Vanilla Ice).  Because it’s not some new fangled technique that you didn’t learn, don’t know and can’t face getting your head around. It’s a pretty simple premise, really: use engaging content to attract and build an audience that has the potential to become your customer base.

The ‘content’ part of content marketing can involve a mix of articles, blogs, online magazines, edms, white papers, podcasts, infographics, data visualizations, video tutorials, image galleries – just about anything you can think of that comes under the heading of “content”.

The important thing to remember is that the content has to be relevant – it has to help and educate your audience in some way. And to do that, some of it might not even mention your actual business or service. For example, instead of publishing a blog detailing your exciting new clothing stock that has just arrived in time for spring, why not publish an article on upcoming trends for spring? You might not stock all of those clothing items considered trends, but you’ll attract someone searching for ‘clothing trends for spring’. It’s through that search, that a person might land on your site – and might discover your fabulous brand! (and your Spring range). And while yes, content marketing is a sophisticated SEO play, it’s much, much more.

Ok, we can hear the alarm bells from here. Oh sure, you understand the attractive qualities (like being known as an industry thought leader and all those  customer leads ready to convert) that high quality and relevant content can bring, but who has the ideas, budget and resourcing to create consistently engaging content that is up-to-date and relevant to your business and industry? As an ongoing concern that’s a considerable cost, right?

In some cases yes (and in those cases, the company can usually afford it so likes it that way), but in most cases, no.

Thanks to the massive amount of highly regarded content already in digital existence, as well as all that new content being published on the web somewhere in the world, every single minute of every day, there’s enough content to go around – and it’s your cost-efficient challenge to curate it (the key being: find it, organize it and share it).

Content curation enables you to have the very best content on the web right there at your fingertips. In fact, you’re probably already benefitting from some form of content curation already – you just didn’t know there was a name for it. Do you visit a webpage or use an app that aggregates content on things you’re interested in? That’s curation!

The thought of content curation can be a bit daunting, but with the right tools (many of them freely available on the web, some like Google Reader or Twitter lists, you might already be using) it’s not only simple, it’s fun. Once you start curating you’ll quickly discover enough content to update several times/day – but that in itself, can be hardcore.

We recommend a mix of unique content – that is, content you write yourself or commission to be written and published in amongst the content you curate.  Somewhere between two and five unique pieces of content published per week should do the trick nicely.

To truly understand the benefits of content marketing, it’s not a bad idea to look back at what your website was, now is, and then think about  what it needs to be.

Back in the day (oh, like less than three years ago) your website was a digital business card  outlining your product, services, pricing, location, team, testimonials, clients and hours of operation etc. You still need that, but you also need additional content. You need to demonstrate knowledge about your industry, factors affecting it, trends, ideas, innovations, tips, advice – you name it. Anything that makes me think you’re an expert who is up-to-date and on top of changing industry patterns, competitor trends, consumer demands – anything that could lead someone to reasonably consider your site a valuable resource. If that’s the outcome, then that’s content marketing doing its job.

Sure there’s a lot to take in, but content marketing is one of those great examples in life of something that sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is. So forget about heading for the hills, and start thinking about your content strategy and just how cool it will be to help and educate people.

*awesome image thanks to Kate Bingham-Burt @flickr