Content marketing is the new black. It's just sooooo fashionable!

This is somewhat of a surprise when you think about it, content marketing is hardly new. So why the renewed interest?

Consider this statistic: Marketing Sherpa reports well over 80% of B2B buyers start their purchasing journey online.

Your buyers are researching their options, connecting with their peers, all online and all without referring to you or your competitors. Good, useful, well constructed, valuable content is highly prized by buyers in an online world crammed with information that is little more than simply noise.

Your second job as a B2B marketer is to get your content into the hands of your buyers or at least in front of their eyeballs.

Get these two elements right and your firm will dramatically increase the quantity and particularly the quality of leads. With better quality leads, conversion rates will soar and you lead-to-revenue ratios will significantly increase. In short your funnel will flow more efficiently.

This is why content marketing is receiving so much attention presently.

Don’t be fooled by its unglamorous appearance and unassuming nature. Your blog is your most powerful survival tool in the B2B marketing jungle.

Just like a swiss army knife, it can perform a multitude of functions required for survival. These functions include:

In the world of B2B marketing, creating content is only half the battle. There’s little use in spending hours creating high quality content if nobody ever finds it. For this reason, it’s crucial to have a content distribution plan.

To give you a head start, we’ve put together a list of effective B2B content distribution channels plus tips on how to get the most out of each channel.

Time is a valuable thing. B2B marketers often don’t notice it go by as the pendulum swings.

As B2B marketers, we've got a lot on our plates, so anything that saves us even a few seconds of time is invaluable.

So we've put together a list of 10 tools that will give you some of your precious time back. 

In many organisations, it's an eyebrow-raising moment when the words "marketing" and "maths" are uttered in the same sentence. 

Many marketers are blissfully ignorant of the harsh realities of business, revenue and profits, making decisions based on instinct whilst the sales team huff and puff about how marketing live in cloud cuckoo land, not the real world of monthly targets. CEOs and CFOs allocate the marketing budget as a cost centre and scoff at the idea of a marketer taking a seat at the boardroom table.

What happens to prospects when they leak from your funnel? I'm talking about people who have expressed interest in your products or services, but somewhere along the line they dropped off the radar. 

The issue of leaked leads is not a pleasant conversation for most organisations, particularly for the sales team. It's understandable, most people would prefer to discuss successes. It's better to focus on why we have won, not why we have lost, right?

There are a myriad of ways to fail at blogging for business, in fact, too many! So we had to hack down this list to the top thirteen:

1. Don’t EVER plan

Failing to plan is planning to fail. Therefore, in order to fail at blogging, you must avoid planning at all costs. This means no keyword research, no editorial calendars and giving no thought whatsoever to post topics. The aim here is to stumble through the dark without even the remotest sense of direction.

New data from a Marketing Sherpa survey of more than 1,500 search marketers has revealed that more than 50% of CMOs see content creation as a very effective tactic to improve SEO rankings. Keyword research followed closely behind, with 43% finding this strategy very effective. External link building has slid to 5^th place, with 35% rating it as very effective.

This data comes in the wake of Google’s ‘Penguin’ algorithm update, the latest in a series of updates designed to combat web spam and reward websites with high quality content. Consequently, we predict that ‘old school’ SEO tactics will fall further out of favour and that content, link quality and social signals will be the most significant indicators of authority. 

But what are the implications for B2B marketing?