Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant content in order to attract and retain an audience.  Implementing content marketing into your existing marketing strategy can help to increase your number of leads and ultimately your revenue.  The infographic below shows five good reasons why content marketing should be an important piece of your overall marketing strategy and some best practices to get you started.

We have released our 2016 State Of Digital Marketing In Associations report.  In this benchmark report non-profit organizations can see how they compare to other non-profits in their digital marketing efforts.  This is our third annual digital marketing report in a row, so in addition we also have trend data to share.  Learn how your organization compares to other non-profits as Demand Metric Chief Analyst Jerry Rackley and our own CMO Suzanne Carawan discuss the results of this groundbreaking report.  If you missed this Analyst Brief Webinar it's not too late.  It is always available On-Demand at HighRoad U.

If you haven't yet viewed the Report, please take a look!

As marketers our goal is to generate a steady stream of high quality leads which will in turn produce greater revenue.  The infographic below shows how marketing automation can help us achieve this.

Marketers are busy people.  It seems you can never get everything done on your to-do list.  There is a solution and that solution is marketing automation.  Marketing automation is software that helps you execute your tasks in a faster and more efficient way.  In addition, marketing automation allows you to personalize your marketing efforts in order to generate better quality leads.  But once you have the software how do you use it to best serve your needs and to deliver the results you're looking for?  We found this article at Hubspot "What Is Marketing Automation-A Beginner's Guide".  Written by Alyssa Rimmer, the article explains in greater detail what marketing automation is and how to effectively use it.

Marketing Automation allows you to segment your audience by using the data you already have about them.  You can then personalize their experience with your organization.  The infographic below shows a basic outline of how marketing automation can personalize the sales cycle.  Marketing and sales teams can then target leads faster and more effectively.

Being able to target promising leads through the use of personas is a crucial part of any successful inbound marketing campaign.  Compiling strong data-backed profiles enable you to target prospective buyers in a more focused and relevant way.  With personas, marketing and sales teams are able to create targeted strategies which attract higher quality leads and allow for a faster transition through the conversion funnel.  Our partner BrightInfo, has an article written by Alex Embling, that explains how data-backed personas can shorten the sales cycle.