Let’s start off with a short power definition of content. “Compelling images, videos and text that resonates with your target audience in a meaningful way.”

That’s a narrow definition; but, if you map your content strategy to this very focused description it will generate responses that are consistent with your content marketing strategy.

One of the greatest challenges of content market today is the lack of measurement. Most companies are stumbling blindly into content marketing via social media and worse, have no real understanding how to maximize their efforts and measure ROI in a systematic approach.

Measure your content ROI with these variables:

Clickthrough traffic
Engagement (if social media focused)
Brand development
Lead generation
Repurposed elsewhere (viral, mentioned, commented, followed liked, retweeted)

Think of Content as Anything and Anywhere your building Brand:

Text & Images
Video & Audio
Social conversations about your Brand
Blogs, Wikis, discussion groups
Corporate web sites
Mobile devices (images, text, video)

What makes good content:

Engaging and has personality
Keyword rich
Relevant and fresh
Gets picked up by the Social Stream
Fosters Community and knowledge silos
Incorporates business and/or marketing objectives

Social Content Marketing Absolutes

Content must have perceived value
You can integrate community with advertising
Should leverage social influencers
Be measurable and quantifiable

This Blog post on content marketing is a subset of a presentation made at LavaCon earlier this month - for a deeper dive please click here to go to the Slide Share Presentation.