Your customers are busy. Preoccupied and stressed. They feel the strain of the economy. Despite the many distractions they face, you have to find a way to successfully connect with them. The key to that connection is content–but not just any content. By creating relevant, engaging and informational content you will find that not only will your prospects become customers, but also that you will build loyalty with your existing customers.

That’s why it’s no surprise that the Junta42’s Content Marketing Spending Report indicates that 59 percent of business marketers plan to increase their content marketing budgets in 2010. Budgets are increasing too, with total marketing spends as a percentage of total budgets increasing to 33 percent this year, from 29 percent. The top distribution channels for content are: e-newsletters (63 percent), blogs (63 percent), white papers (48 percent), article marketing (48 percent) and case studies (46 percent).
Once you institute a content marketing program, measure your efforts to make sure you’re on the right track. You can’t just create content in a vacuum and post it to your site: You have to know what’s working to know what adjustments to make in your strategy. According to the recent Face of the New Marketer study, 81 percent of marketers want to improve the quality of their content, while 41 percent have trouble interpreting the related data and 62 percent say they may not be tracking the right metrics for online performance. To meet your objectives, study the data to learn what content is attracting the most activity so that you maximize your content marketing efforts and reap the rewards of your performance.