“Content is king.” This is the would-be mantra of successful marketers everywhere. By now, we know that creating content, especially on a consistent basis via a blog, is the key to inbound marketing and SEO growth. So, how do you measure the effectiveness of the content you have created?

Below are three common reasons that drive B2B organizations to create a content strategy:

After the 2008 financial crisis, the Wall Street banks were clearly one of the largest and most hated industries in the country. The recession erased all of the positive impressions people had for this industry. If the business of big banking had a tagline during this tumultuous period, it would be "You suffer, we sail."

The basics of a positioning statement are pretty simple—know what you sell, who your target market is, and why you are better than your competition. While you can put these pieces together to create a basic positioning statement, your audience may still feel uninspired.

The novelist and short story writer Ernest Hemingway is known for his famous Iceberg Theory—to only explicitly include one-eighth of the details in the story, and leave the other seven-eighths implicit and underwater. For example, his story “Hills Like White Elephants” is about a man convincing his significant other to have an abortion, but the word abortion is never mentioned.

Sometimes the best way to appeal to customers is by doing something totally unrelated to what you do. It can be a critical step towards developing a distinct and likeable brand personality.  

The senses are a near-universal way to connect with people. They are anchors for memory, and that is the goal of marketing—to get ideas related to your company to live in people’s brains.

We know that brand equity is potent. When you have brand equity, you go from selling a product to selling a feeling. But brand equity is intangible, so it is difficult to study. Luckily, we have David Aaker. Aaker developed a model with five essential parameters to measure brand equity.

I was recently shopping for polo shirts and was surprised at the options. The Old Navy pique polo shirts top out at about $14. Ok, that’s acceptable. The Ralph Lauren pique polo shirts cost up to $90. Wow. Logo + “Thermovent” + “hint of stretch” = $76? The answer to why one is so much more expensive lies in each company’s brand positioning.

The term ‘branding’ is lobbed around like a volleyball these days. You’ll hear statements from all corners of the marketing world:

"We need to build brand-awareness.”
“This campaign launch has to be ‘on-brand’.”
“I want to develop a sub-brand for this new product launch.”

The word ‘brand’ has become synonymous with ‘identity.' In reality, a brand and its identity are two separate things.

Picture this: It’s your first week at a new company, and you’re ready to meet with your agency to develop some new marketing initiatives. As you dig into your organization’s branding materials, you gasp in horror. What decade is this logo from? Who approved this color usage? Is there even a web-friendly version of the corporate font available?

 For some marketers, leading a branding—or rebranding—initiative is the holy grail.