From blog.hubspot.com

Co-marketing is a fantastic way to gain new contacts without having to wait for organic search to kick in … but it’s not always an easy job.

The challenging part of co-marketing all boils down to one thing: your partner. Can you find partners who launch campaigns with the same strategy and thoughtfulness you do? Oftentimes, it’s a struggle.

If you’re having trouble finding and evaluating co-marketing partners, keep on reading. In this post, I’ll outline 10 tips for making sure you’re entering into a healthy and prosperous co-marketing partnership.

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Author : Christine White

From toprankblog.com

This year brought many opportunities for innovation, creativity and growth for the team at TopRank Marketing.

On a personal note, I was beyond excited to re-join the team and dive head first into my new role as Director of Agency Marketing. In this role, part of my responsibilities include ensuring that our team provides creative, engaging, actionable and innovative content for our blog readers each week.

In 2015, our team published nearly 300 blog posts and amassed over 1.4 million unique pageviews for our blog content alone.

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Author : toprankblog.com

From contentmarketinginstitute.com

In 2013, Joe Pulizzi published a popular post called 8 Remarkable (and Stolen) Content Marketing Ideas. In it, he shared his favorite ideas from others in the content marketing space.

While those original “stolen” ideas are definitely worth revisiting, here are seven more from 2015 that came from blog posts and Content Marketing World speakers. Each of these things has changed my thinking, directly attributed to better content, or is expected to be implemented in 2016. (Not only am I stealing people’s ideas, but I’m also stealing Joe’s post format.)

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Author : Michele Linn

From toprankblog.com

For any brand, reputation is everything—and reputations are often built (or torn down) with earned media. From a glowing news article about one of your products to that horrific Yelp review, every brand experiences the benefits and drawbacks of earned media.

And in today’s socially connected world, marketers are increasing their use of earned media as a contact marketing tactic as it continues to be a crucial factor in consumer decision making.

In fact, a study by Nielsen and InPowered shows that expert content—credible, third-party articles and reviews—is the most effective source of information in impacting consumers along all stages of the purchase process across product categories.

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Author : toprankblog.com

From hbr.org

The business world is awash in ideas for new products, services, and business models. Thanks to powerful ideation approaches such as design thinking and crowdsourcing, it has become incredibly easy and relatively inexpensive for companies to obtain a vast number of novel concepts, from both insiders and outsiders such as customers, designers, and scientists. Yet many organizations still struggle to identify and capture big opportunities. A division head at a global consumer electronics corporation recently told me, “We have a mass of ideas, but honestly, we don’t know what to do with them.

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Author : Roberto Verganti