Adam Kasper, chief media officer at Havas, predicts that the content marketing business will grow, as content comes closer to media buying, and automation will have a huge impact on this growth.

As you consider your organization's content strategy, perhaps the biggest inflection point is quantity versus quality. How much versus how good? It can be very difficult to do both, particularly for organizations with limited resources.

I recently wrote about the latest Content Marketing Lumascape, which showed just how crowded this market is getting. It made me wonder how much of this is technology tricks and how much is just tried-and-true principles tied up in a neat bow. To answer that question, I reached out to David Brown, executive vice president of Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, a content marketing company that sits within Meredith Corporation.

Marketers want content, but they need lots of help. According to the Content Marketing Institute's 2014 trends report, 93% of B2B marketers say they use content marketing, but less than half (42%) think their efforts are effective. One of the greatest challenges companies face is producing steady streams of engaging content.

I could never be in sales. It's not that I don't like to "sell" in my writing -- in fact, I think as content marketers, we all, to some extent, channel our inner salespeople. But as marketers, we're allowed to do so in a much more indirect way, introducing the context within which someone might want to purchase our product or service rather than saying overtly, "Here's my product and have I got a deal for you." But in some cases, being subtle in our content marketing may also be doing us a disservice.

Last week Federated Media split its legacy content marketing business from its programmatic, ad-buying business, which is now called sovrn. Whether this move spells an end for Federated Media or whether the content marketing arm will bloom again at LIN Media is unclear. But surely it marks the end of an era, so I thought we could reflect on the intellectual legacy that Federated Media left behind.

Marketers have learned that brand-oriented content can deliver ad messages to engaged and interested consumers, and this practice will likely continue to grow in popularity in 2014. Advertisers looking to go one step further would be wise to get ahead of the following trends in the coming year.

In an online social community flooded with content, attempts to effectively communicate your message can feel like sending a letter out to sea in a bottle. Effective content marketing requires an atlas to help you navigate the stormy digital space so you can not only get your message across, but get it to the people who need it most.

B2B advertisers are increasingly developing their own video content as marketing tools. Online video can inform prospective clients, create thought leadership and even drive leads. However, there are many pitfalls associated with creating B2B content. Here are five tips on how to better manage your custom video content efforts.

In my last column, "Content Reigns Supreme," I talked about how "creating branded content is not easy, but when done well, it shines." To create content that inspires customers to engage, I suggested some basic guidelines that included paying close attention to the storytelling aspect of content creation. The "not easy" part, particularly for content purveyors, is protecting that story as it is being created. The greatest threat to compelling, branded content is losing the story along the way, on a road that's fraught with peril.