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Creating Chemistry: Our Top 5 Content Marketing Posts of 2015

Posted on Dec 14th, 2015
Written by Joshua Nite
In this article

    Ready to elevate your B2B brand?

    TopRank Marketing drives results with content, influencer, SEO & social media marketing.

    top-content-marketing-posts

    Great content marketing is like chemistry: If you combine the right elements with careful timing and measurement, you can get a positive reaction. Get the formula wrong, and you could get no reaction at all. Or you could find yourself standing in a crater, smoke wafting up from your eyebrows.

    According to the Content Marketing Institute and Marketo’s 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, 76% of B2B and 77% of B2C marketers plan to produce more content next year than they did in 2015. But as the volume increases, effectiveness is still lagging. Buyers faced with an onslaught of information are opting out of all but the most exceptional content.

    At TopRank Online Marketing, we want to help you see great results from your content marketing experiments. So we have conducted some experiments of our own, sharing our processes and best practices, hoping you will be compelled to read and share them with your peers.

    The following five content marketing posts were our most successful chemistry experiments for 2015. You can use them to make sure your efforts create a positive reaction with your audience in 2016 and beyond. 

    #1 – Content Marketing: 6 Steps for Building a Massive Audience
    Joe Pulizzi CM

    There are few more qualified to give content marketing advice than Content Marketing Institute Founder Joe Pulizzi. At this year’s Authority Rainmaker conference, he detailed the six steps to building a business on content that form the basis of his new book, Content Inc. Our Digital Marketing Manager Evan Prokop sums up the takeaways in this liveblog of the presentation. 

    #2 – Where Social Media and SEO Fit in Today’s Content Marketing Mix

    search and social fit

    TopRank takes a holistic approach to marketing. Our content strategy builds search, promotion, and amplification into the content for maximum impact. In this post, our CEO Lee Odden shows you exactly how we get results for our clients.

    #3 – 25 Inspiring & Actionable Content Marketing Tips for (Almost) Any Situation

    25 inspirational quotes

    Content marketing is rewarding creative work, but it can be mentally exhausting. Director of Agency Marketing Ashley Zeckman has been there, and she has the remedy. These tips and quotes are perfect for a marketer in desperate need of a pick-me-up.

    #4 – Break These 6 Bad Content Marketing Habits to Set Your Content Free

    change your bad habits

    This post is proof of TopRank Marketing’s commitment to ongoing education and career development. I wouldn’t have been able to write it a year ago. But thanks to the learning opportunities here, I identified the qualities that hold content back, and was able to suggest a better way to move forward.

    #5 – Why Content Marketing Is Imperative for the Future of Public Relations

    content marketing PR

    The public relations field is undergoing a sea change right now, shifting from broadcasting to participating in the conversation. Lee surveys the current trend and offers a blueprint for the future, showing how content marketing can inform PR and vice versa.

    Bonus! 3 of Our Favorite Content Marketing Pieces that Aren’t Blog Posts 

    Measuring Your Content Marketing Box Office Success

    In the run-up to Content Marketing World 2015, we teamed up with the Content Marketing Institute for three eBooks featuring speakers from the event. This SlideShare features thoughts from marquee idols like Joe Pulizzi, Michael Brenner, Heidi Cohen, and Jason Miller, all wrapped up in the glamour of old Hollywood.

    Exposing the Generational Content Gap: Three Ways to Reach Multiple Generations

    This massive annotated infographic illustrates the results of a Buzzstream and Fractl survey of over 1200 individuals across demographics. It’s a great guide to the differences in content consumption between Millennials, Generation X, and Baby Boomers.

    Content: Rise of the New Marketing

    This documentary from the Content Marketing Institute covers the last 100+ years of content marketing (starting well before we called it content marketing) and looks toward the future as well. The film is a great piece of content marketing itself—it’s inspiring, engaging, and tells a compelling story.

    Thanks to our outstanding blogging team for their great work on these posts. And thanks to our readers for reading, commenting and sharing. We’ll use your feedback to make the blog an even better resource in 2016.

    Are there any posts you loved that didn’t make the list? Are there any aspects of content marketing you would like to see us cover more? Let us know in the comments.

    Header image via Shutterstock