The act of content creation is still one that plagues marketers. According to the 2013 Content Marketing Institute/Marketing Profs survey, 69% of marketers say they don't have enough time to create content; 55% say they can't produce enough content; and 47%say they can't produce content that the audience actually cares about. So, hiring professional writers to do the work and deliver high quality seems like a perfect solution to the content creation conundrum. You need high quality writing, and freelancers are available, often at a good price. But here's the rub: Freelance writers complete assignments, but that's all they do.

If I ran an ad agency today, I'd be putting quite a bit of weight behind content marketing for a few years. It's a pretty surefire way to make some nice money. Decent content these days is remarkably cheap to make. It's easy to put your B team on a content marketing strategy and clients seem to be buying this stuff like there is no tomorrow. But it's a totally doomed area.

Whether you're creating your next eBook, infographic, or customer testimonial video, your content marketing should always be an expression of who your company is at its core. Here are four ways to establish your company's voice, and ensure that it gets a chance to shine in every way you communicate:

In 2014, you'd better understand your audience before you start marketing. In this era of preference marketing, buyers are in control. When online information became ubiquitous, the customer suddenly didn't have to simply accept what marketing delivered; she now had choices. To win her business, we need to create a connection that goes well beyond a transactional relationship. To me, that's the rationale behind content marketing: instead of an organization broadcasting inward-focused messages, it must deliver value to the marketplace in order to create the customer connection.

Native advertising is one of the biggest buzzwords this year in digital media, with many brands moving toward a new paradigm of creating sponsored content and in-stream ads that are more integrated with the user's experience consuming digital content. Below are some tips to help brands to capitalize on the trend to go native -- and to help their marketing messages make the transition:

It can be a hard, time-consuming process to create great content. Or, with a well-thought out strategy, it can also be fun, fast, and gratifying. Here are three quick tips to help you write, repurpose, and repackage content that engages your prospects without taking you all day to do it.

Content marketers get a lot of criticism for linkbaiting and cheap SEO hacks, but the truth is, most of us really do want to publish content that is genuinely entertaining or useful to our audience. The problem is that coming up with creative, effective content ideas can be tough when you're churning out new content all the time. I recently returned from the Brand Innovators Social Media Summit in New York, where I moderated a panel of brand marketing experts who shared tips on how some of the biggest brands in the game keep their content fresh and relevant. As …

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 93% of B2B marketers are deploying content marketing as a strategy. Quite clearly, not all of those firms are doing it well; there's a glut of poor content. Obviously, marketers are not setting out to produce poor content. Many are simply having a hard time breaking away from the old muscle memory of traditional marketing. We've been trained to do things a certain way, and now we're trying to do them completely differently. So, in an effort to help you smooth out the process, here are some things not to do when launching your …

Samsung, dubbed an official sponsor of the 86th Academy Awards, spent close to $20 million on the Oscars deal it cut with ABC. That sizable investment included airtime for traditional commercial ads, as well as host Ellen DeGeneres' much-discussed use of a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. Yet Samsung's 30-second ads and show tie-ins, despite their visibility, didn't move the needle much in terms of audience "intent to purchase," according to BrandAds. Research aside, the Ellen celebrity selfie and other product tie-ins were a great start, but to me they lacked a real payoff.

Decades ago, the "three-martini lunch" was famous (or infamous depending on your viewpoint) for the pure luxury of time (and liquor) it offered business executives during the middle of the day. For the advertising industry, this lunch gave the Don Drapers of the world the opportunity to sell prospective customers and clients on how their marketing ideas would change their businesses forever. Fast-forward to today, and this cocktail-laden lunch just isn't an option for most business professionals. What we do have today, however, is content marketing, which is arguably more effective than any martini at getting a prospective customer to …