inboundli Marketing Picks (Issue #12) – Future-Proof Your Content Strategy

In our opinion, 2017 will be a critical year for content marketers. It's likely to be the last year when new players can cheaply build presence with content marketing, as distribution channels are getting crowded and social media networks are eager monetize their vast audiences.

This article is packed with good advice about your content strategy in the upcoming year, served as a list of short insights from 43 of the top marketing influencers (such as Rand Fishkin, Larry Kim and Jeff Bullas). The insights aren't connected, so you can use any of them without context from other insights.

Create an active marketplace for your products by building your own social media followings and email lists and becoming a leader in your niche.

Measuring social media performance is both important and hard. Social channels can drive conversions, but there are many metrics that don't mean much (at least on their own). This article examines business, performance and optimization metrics which provide marketers with the means to accurately measure the important things on social media.

One popular framework for setting goals to define performance metrics is the SMART method, meaning that goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely...

Elyse Meyer of Prism Global Marketing Solutions compiled this quick list of the upcoming HubSpot feature launches in 2016. So if you missed INBOUND16 or forgot some of the announcements, this is a great reference to help you to prepare your strategy for the upcoming year.

A simpler, more powerful foundation through HubSpot's Growth Stack: Marketing + Sales + CRM

M‍atthew Barby, the head of SEO at HubSpot, published this incredible data-driven resource about ranking high in Google searches. Matthew's blog post is based on a study of 1 million pages and provides a rare insight into ranking factors. This post is long, but if you don't feel like diving too deep into the analysis, you can skip to the conclusions that are conveniently highlighted under every important statement.

High ranking webpages in Google tend to have shorter page titles (8 words is optimal)...

This infographic is not just a visualized story, it's a useful and necessary reference to the various activities across social media networks. Covering Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, SlideShare, Instagram, Periscope and Quora, this infographic provides bite-sized advice for effectively using social media as a B2B marketer.

Although this post is from early 2016, it's still incredibly relevant to the beginning of 2017. The guiding principles didn't change and we still haven't found a more informative infographic (with emphasis on "info") about the topic.

If you don’t have a full-time team of social media experts at your disposal, your success depends on creating a simple and sensible strategy that fits your resources and goals...