Your audience often can't explain why they act on some content and ignore others. These eight research-backed tactics work with your prospects' hardwired subconscious buying process. See how top brands apply them.
Fictional adman Don Draper pitched it in 1960. Marketers have practiced it for decades. Now “vibe-led content” gives you the buzzword executives want to hear and a chance to prove content’s strategic value.
Cannes Lions introduced AI Craft awards to recognize work enhanced by AI. But the qualifying criteria reveal a bigger question every marketing team should ask — even if you never plan to enter an awards competition.
Storytelling has changed, and that’s a good thing for brands that pay attention. Marketing leaders from Zoom, Reddit, WARC, and OWOW discuss how to rethink storytelling for AI, fragmented channels, and audience-led narratives.
AI and algorithms — not your team or audience — decide what content a lot of people see. But experts presenting at Content Marketing World say that’s exactly why you can’t abandon your owned content.
You know the script. Vendors perform "transformational AI." Marketers perform "on track." Nobody says what's true. Imagine what could happen if everybody finally drops the act.
Listen to the platform first and your B2B social media strategy is more likely to succeed. Expert Amy Watts covers what brands get wrong on TikTok and LinkedIn and digs into raw video, employee-generated content, and personal branding.
Tilray Brands made consumer insights a cross-functional tool. See how quicker access to real-time data reshaped its retailer meetings, PR outreach, and brand innovation strategy.
Too many AI content initiatives sit on top of a content strategy problem. Follow this five-domain audit to surface what’s really broken — and how humans and AI can fix it before Q4 planning begins.
Ready to refresh your marketing education resources? Your peers rely on these 91 blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and videos for AI, SEO, PR, strategy, and inspiration. Add their trusted favorites and less-familiar titles to your queue.
Candid insights are unlikely to come from surveys and AI answers. Small, in-person gatherings — advisory boards, executive dinners, and customer councils — generate fresh findings. Here’s what makes them work and how to run them well.
The AI bumper sticker debate — augment or replace — has always been the wrong question. New data shows 88% use AI, but only 39% see ROI. In your mid-year marketing update, answer the better AI question.
Marketers are hitting a breaking point with do-more-with-less expectations. AMA's Molly Soat previews new research on which marketing skills AI will disrupt — and which ones it never will.
NFL teams turned a boring schedule release into a creative sport. Steal these six plays, from video game missions to street Pictionary, to make monotonous information worth your audience's time.
A multi-brand healthcare company was losing ground. It didn’t have a content problem. It had an alignment problem. Here’s the maturity model that fixed it. Any marketing organization can do it without more people or tools.
Even successful content initiatives get canceled. When that happens, don’t let the work disappear. Follow this three-phase process to protect what matters, respect your audience, and turn the setback into your next opportunity.
Too many promotional emails. Plummeting open rates. Here’s how American Airlines changed its loyalty program email strategy. Using existing data, it rebuilt the program around smarter personalization.
Your case for content marketing keeps losing not because of what you say but because of what you’re pitching. Learn how one journalist-turned-content-marketer reframed the ask and got the budget.
Too many speakers miss the real value of being on stage by attempting to sell. Instead, they should embrace the audience. Learn why intent matters and more to transform your brand’s speaking engagements into successful marketing.
LinkedIn’s new algorithm now rewards substance over shortcuts. Here’s what the data and LinkedIn’s own engineers say has changed — and what your B2B brand should do to stay visible and relevant.
Content operations gets the assets out the door. Content orchestration decides which assets are worth building. Most teams do the first. Here's how to build the other.
What propels award-winning content to the top? Content Marketing Awards winners from United Airlines and Fortune Brand Studio share their tough decisions and authentic approaches. Plus, a Content Marketing Awards judge gives her perspective.
Attracting and keeping an audience’s attention with words isn’t easy. These two dozen tips, numerous tools, and motivating examples will make it easier.
Content-led marketing blends storytelling with owned, earned, and paid media to meet this AI-dominated moment. Here’s how to start shifting your strategy.
Is your company sabotaging its marketing team? Drawing on CMI’s latest research, Robert Rose breaks down the three costly mistakes happening now that may not reveal themselves for months or even a few years.
Is your annual original research losing its impact? Do your benchmark questions deliver not-so-interesting results? Is your audience still aligned with your marketing goals? If not, it’s time to reassess the study, the questions, the audience, and the formats.
Most marketers prioritize strategy and judgment skills. Yet the majority plan to spend more time on tech optimization than creative work. It's a trap that many are falling into, which risks eroding the very skills that make them valuable.
AI writing isn’t the problem. It has, however, exploded the volume of mediocre writing. AI detectors won't fix that. Use this two-stage editing process to turn AI-generated drafts into content that works for your audience and brand.
Short-term AI efficiency gains come with long-term talent pipeline costs. See why successful marketing leaders must invest in lasting team growth and how to start doing it today.
Marketers don’t expect employers to help them advance their skills and networks. Instead, they’re building career hedges: taking side gigs to get that and a little money, too. Here’s what to know and what leaders should do in response.
Marketers in regulated industries have to follow the rules. However, that doesn’t mean the content has to be boring, technical, or uninspired. Learn how to create a content marketing program that’s both compliant and creative.
What really works in email marketing? Data culled from billions of sends reveals tips, from user-preferred content formats to context-based personalization and more. Read on to identify what to test to improve your email strategy.
Automating entry-level tasks doesn’t erase the value of human experience. Skipping junior hires may save budgets now, but will create long-term challenges for talent pipelines. What is a marketer to do?
AI engines are the new gatekeepers to your brand. Content governance is one of the biggest tools to ensure they reveal the brand identity you’ve created. Learn why and more about how to cultivate content authenticity in the zero-click era.
The 2026 Career and Salary Outlook: Content and Marketing Professionals report shows rising layoffs and higher workloads, but also a surprising expansion of hiring and higher salaries among experienced marketers.
AI may not be taking most jobs directly, but layoffs, longer job hunts, and heavier workloads are reshaping the marketing career outlook. See how salaries and opportunities are shifting in CMI’s latest research.
How does your compensation compare — and what does this year actually look like for marketing professionals? We surveyed 644 marketers for the 2026 Career and Salary Report to understand compensation benchmarks, role shifts, and how careers are really evolving in an AI-buffeted job market.
Few dealmakers pay attention to the content assets in M&A. Explore real-life scenarios of how acquired content affects revenue, trust, and long-term success. And learn what clause a seller added that eventually saved marketing results.
New research reveals the quiet redistribution of content and marketing work happening under the cover of AI-efficiency claims. Here’s what you can do about it.
If your content teams use AI without shared prompts, modular structure, and automated workflows, you’re undermining your brand’s discoverability. Here’s a model to unite your marketing in the age of AI.
Authentic relationships, not passive audiences, drive conversations. Learn the formula for community alchemy to create trusted spaces where your audience feels seen, heard, and valued.
Winning awards is nice. Turning that recognition into a powerful marketing strategy is better. Your peers share their best advice for using honors to build trust, drive growth, and amplify brand credibility.
To understand content marketing’s value, you need everyone to agree on what to measure. Try this four-step process to design objectives, key results, performance indicators, and metrics that leave no question about your content marketing’s impact.
AI doesn’t just create content; it judges yours. That 10-year-old blog post? It could shape what prospects learn about your brand now. Here's what content health means in 2026, and how to fix the cracks.
Once reliable metrics fail to capture marketing’s true impact on business growth. Shifting your measurement focus from activity to impact is key to meeting leadership’s higher expectations for ROI and performance. Here’s how.
AI search engines prioritize relevance over volume. Learn three lessons from HubSpot’s rebuilt content strategy to survive the evolving search landscape. Assess how well you’re set up to attract the right audience and earn citations.
You know what matters in audience relationships: trust, empathy, consistency, and advocacy. Now you can track how your content influences these dimensions. Here’s how.
Every marketer wants their brand cited by AI search engines. But not every marketer uses this little-known tactic to know what’s working. Learn that and more to optimize for AI.
When the CMO of a health product company commissioned AI research to reposition the brand, she quietly ran a parallel study with real consumers. Here's what happened when the two market research studies came back.
Want to sharpen your skills, grow your brand, or expand how you think? Add one or more of these 45 books to your reading list, all suggested by your peers and all authored (or co-authored) by women.
To measure the trust content marketing creates, look beyond surface metrics. Focus on these signals to assess the strength of audience relationships across empathy, value, trust, and advocacy.
Influencer marketing is growing up in 2026. It’s maturing from sponsored posts, one-off partnerships, and fuzzy metrics into a well-defined, long-term strategy. And it all starts with a patient approach.
Reddit has attracted users to thousands of niche forums for years. Now, it’s attracting the attention of traditional and AI search citations and 116 million daily users. Does it have your brand’s attention? Here's why it should.
Before agentic AI exposes every gap in your content strategy, implement the CRISP framework — a practical roadmap for getting marketing, IT, product, and sales aligned and ready.
You can’t measure the health of your audience relationship using funnels or pipelines. You need a latticework. It’s an integral component of the recently introduced Audience Trust Index, a better way to assess if your marketing is doing its job.
You don’t need a superhero to rescue your brand’s visibility in AI-generated answers. Just prioritize these three content signals drawn from an analysis of 17 million citations.
The gated e-book fell flat. Few visitors to the landing page provided email addresses, and half of those addresses weren't good. The CMO said enough, ungated the content, and reshaped pipeline growth, demo requests, and marketing-sourced revenue.
AI generative search doesn’t reward the brands with the most content. It rewards the ones it deems credible. Here’s how earned media builds signals that get your brand cited in AI answers, even if you never crack CNN or The New York Times.
Trust is the new currency in content marketing, but you can’t track it with attention-based metrics. Try this framework to assess your most important asset.
Does your enterprise treat content strategy like a decoration — something to showcase but rarely use? Change that in 2026. Learn fixes for scaling strategy, AI challenges, personalization gaps, and more in CMI’s enterprise roundtable.
Struggling to generate high-quality demand? Make this the first day to build a new demand-gen framework in 39 days. Spark intent signals, align marketing and sales, and build a self-sustaining loop. Your sales team will thank you.
Zillow uses AI for product innovation, but its marketing uses familiar AI tools to streamline workflows and empower creative storytelling. Learn how this performance-oriented team makes an impact beyond the measurable.
AI has made efficiency so cheap that effort and friction now signal value. That’s why including proof of work and inviting people into your “factory” is now critical to brand trust.
PR and content marketing work well together, but they need different metrics. Reporting only on reach, impressions, and mentions misses the real value. Follow this five-stage framework to prove content’s worth throughout the journey.
Frustrated by AI tools that fall short? The solution isn’t trying tool after tool. It lies in building an agentic AI workflow that aligns tools, memory, and human oversight. Follow this advice to do just that.
B2B marketing in 2026 demands more than polished content. Find out how tension, conflict, and authenticity can help your brand stand out and earn trust.
Without independent, third-party sources in your content, audiences may think it is too promotional or self-serving. Learn how to find external sources that raise trust in your content.
Readers don’t consume every word on the page. Fortunately, they also behave in predictable ways. That’s why you should pay careful attention to content design. Learn how to do it right with this eight-step process.
Ever been to Bookstagram, Instagram’s corner for book lovers? People visit for the emotional connections, not recommendations. Your B2B brand can lean into its tropes, tension, and thirst traps to build an obsessed, loyal audience.
Speaking with one voice no longer works. To build trust, brands need to get comfortable telling the same truths in different ways to connect with distinct audiences in their own spaces. Here’s how it’s done.
When Southwest Airlines got rid of its renegade identity in 2026, its day-to-day content marketing seemed a little lost. Learn the missteps and how to ensure your brand’s content aligns with the company’s evolution.
“What should our brand do?” Have you ever asked that question about the impact of breaking news or viral trends on your content? Here’s a two-question quiz to guide your response.
Marketers who stare only at dashboards will likely crash their brand’s strategies with misspend and misaligned activities. However, if you create this foundation for the data strategy, AI can help with proactive recommendations.
Agentic AI isn’t just a prompting system. It can shift how marketers think about work, from tools to roles, and from outputs to systems. Integrating AI agents can elevate you in the profession and your brand in the marketplace.
