Creating engaging content is the single most important activity to succeed with content marketing –  Engaging content drives social and organic traffic, establishes authority, educates buyers and much more. Without engagement, content doesn't serve any of these purposes. It doesn't get shared on social media, doesn't get inbound links and most importantly, it never gets read. The great thing about creating engaging content is that it's entirely in your hands.

The challenge with the term “engaging content” is that it can mean many things, but it generally means content that’s good for your audience and good for your business. Your company needs to specifically define what “good” means for it and you need to define what’s “good” for your audience based on research. Here is how CMWorld presenters define engagement for their purposes...

For a B2B business, especially in a niche industry, creating the right content is an iterative process: You write content, measure the results, reevaluate your understanding of your audience and start the cycle all over again. It is therefore critical to continually review your content's performance and make timely adjustments. In this article, the marketing mastermind Neil Patel explains how to spot it when your content isn't engaging your audience.

Let’s be honest. Creating pulse-quickening, super-engaging content that blows the socks off every single reader 100% of the time probably isn’t realistic. It would be nice, yeah. But it just doesn’t happen. This is especially true for companies in so-called boring industries—micro-niches with very few people having an overwhelming interest in the subject matter...

There is one secret that all engaging content shares in common – it always comes with a great headline. Headlines get clicks on social media, in search results, email newsletters etc.. Without a great headline, even the best content stands no chance online. At inboundli, we have a simple guideline for creating headlines, we make 10 or more of them for each article and gradually narrow down the list. It's safe to say that as much thought goes into this single line of text as into the whole body of the article.

Someone once said, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Don’t believe them. People do that all the time. Just go to your local bookstore (or amazon.com) and see for yourself. A book—or your blog post—may contain the secret to the origins of the universe, but no one will read it if the title doesn’t persuade them to stick around...

Inbound marketing is a great strategy to build organic acquisition channels over time – this statement is probably not very surprising coming from a company named "inboundli". What might be more surprising is that we advocate Outbound Marketing almost as often as inbound. For many marketers, outbound marketing immediately invokes negative connotations which is understandable considering it's past. However, past is past and thanks to hyper-targeting and subtle outreach methods, outbound marketing has evolved into a viable acquisition strategy worth your consideration. Today, it is complimentary to inbound marketing and together they make the most use of great content.

Content creation has become a main B2B marketing focus over the last few years. Until fairly recently, however, many marketers have leveraged their content for inbound marketing strategies alone, while neglecting all the possible impact content could have via outbound marketing strategies. But that’s all changing, and for good reason...

To wrap up this‍ week's issue we picked an infographic that can help to evaluate whether there is a disconnect between how you create and actually consume content.

Is the marketing you’re doing actually what you would want as a consumer? Surprisingly, for many Fortune 1000 marketers the answer is no. A live survey conducted with over 1,200 marketers from companies like IBM, Verizon, JPMorgan, Intel and MasterCard at the #ThinkContent Summit earlier this month found that there is a major disconnect between the marketer and consumer mindset.