Inbound Marketing Age

Let’s rewind for a moment.

It’s 2008 and blogging is 'the thing to do' in business marketing. Helping to generate website traffic, improve SEO and promote your business, the concept slowly, yet gradually, starts to gain traction.

With little competition (at least back then), it was highly effective. Simply adding pages to your site while demonstrating a sound understanding of a subject and its keywords was enough to rank.

That was of course, before the activity evolved into what we know today. And the complexities and competition in blogging now make it far harder to rank by blogging alone.

Marketing has been radically transformed over the past decade or so as a result of the internet and other technological factors.

In fact, marketing has always has, and still is, evolving – but the pace of that evolution has accelerated rapidly.

This had led to traditional models of sales and marketing being drastically revised, or thrown out altogether, and any business that doesn’t acknowledge and adapt to these momentous changes is destined to be at a distinct and potentially ruinous disadvantage.

For the last decade, brands have been focusing their efforts on content marketing.

B2C and B2B brands alike have been churning out blog posts, creating eBooks, and promoting them on social media in an effort to generate more leads and customers.

But if everyone in your industry is blogging, and everyone is promoting those blog posts on their social channels, that's a vast amount of content vying for the attention of your ideal customers.

Then there's all the other content unrelated to your industry that's tugging at their sleeve, from the latest Netflix documentary to the biggest news stories.

Editor's note: This blog post was originally published in June 2014.

A few years back, I spoke to Anna Lawlor, who at the time was the writer and director of Social i Media, who offered some fascinating insights into why writing and thinking like a journalist can give content creators a real edge. Anna is now co-founder and Head of Content & PR at Luminescence Communications Ltd, a company specialising in creating high quality communications for professional services.

What Anna had to say back in 2014 still rings true today, and she offers some interesting thoughts on how content marketers should be thinking like journalists.

Content marketing and brand publishing: the terms are often used interchangeably, and now even more concurrently, but what is their relationship and how are they evolving together?

And, how do you make the transition from content marketer to brand publisher? 

We are seeing the reinvention of content marketing, with some of the world’s biggest brands purporting exponential growth and success thanks to a publisher's mindset. 

In the wake of content saturation and multifarious outlets for broadcasting, publishing and sharing, ‘anyone can be a journalist’, and this is something we, as marketers, must now take advantage of.

More importantly, this is why brands need to shift the focus towards 'media'.

Images are nice, aren't they? I mean, they are pretty to look at and brighten up a post.

But there's more to images than decoration when it comes to attracting business to your content.

In fact, images are absolutely essential for a whole host of reasons – but let’s start with a few facts, some data and the hard science of images effect on SEO.

Editor's note: This post was originally written in 2016 and has since been updated for relevance and accuracy.

There have been plenty of articles written on the importance of using inbound marketing, including social media, to publicise events - but very little on the importance of events to inbound marketing and your overall B2B marketing strategy.

Inbound marketing content thrives on stories, but sometimes they can be a bit thin on the ground. So what can you do? Well, you can create your own story, and that’s essentially what creating an event is all about.

Here are just four reasons why events make for great content, and how to maximise their benefit.

Long form written content is traditionally highly prized by marketers because we know its power. It gets better SERP rankings than short form, it’s seen as more authoritative by search engines, and quite often it's considered more shareable. 

Well-written, with the right keywords and centred around carefully chosen topics of ‘evergreen’ relevance, a long form piece of content (such as an ebook) can become a cornerstone of your digital real estate.

It will drive traffic to your site and support a virtuous circle of discovery, sharing and conversion.

Finding an agency that's a good fit could be the difference between your best year and your worse: the make or break project, the campaign that gets you recognised (for the right reasons or the wrong...), the money well invested, or the money wasted.

Ultimately, it will be one your most important working partnerships.

But when you're partnering with a different organisation - with new people, new values and new ideas, how to do you know if this one is the right fit? 

87% of marketing professionals use video as a digital marketing tool. And Cisco has predicted that by 2021, more than 80% of internet traffic will be video.

The demand is there, as is the accessibility and affordability. The big question is, where do you start?

Here's an introduction to the 3 most impactful B2B videos your business can create.

There are around 170 million active* websites in the world today (*out of a grand total of around 1.7 billion hostnames) with an estimated 5.6 billion web pages indexed in search engines. WordPress alone sees around 70 million new posts a month.

So if you are writing a blog post and you want that blog post to be seen, how can you possibly reach your audience when there is just so much content out there?