You've bought in to the idea of content marketing, and you're following all the best practices. The customer research is done and you're writing content targeted at your buyer personas. You're starting to see results. There's been a boost in organic traffic. Shares on social media are up. You are psyched, and if you have a team, they're psyched, too. But you're also a little overwhelmed by the amount of work it took to get to this point.

A branding guideline, or a brand style guide, or a style guide, is a document that details all the particulars of how your company presents itself to the world. It's a reference tool that enables your startup to be consistent in delineating what your brand looks, feels, and sounds like.

From the current crop of articles out there, one might get the impression that inbound marketing was set to eliminate outbound in the battle for eyeballs. We don’t think that’s an accurate assessment at all. In fact, if you look closely you’ll see that a growing number of agencies and in-house marketing departments alike are adopting a hybrid approach. They’re taking the best pieces of each methodology and combining their power to improve ROI even more than either could do alone.

Contrary to what seems to be a commonly held belief, content marketing is not a one-and-done operation. Just as content marketing is itself a long-game, you have to be in it for the long haul to see the kinds of amazing results you’ve read about. But then, we hope most of you already know this part.

“Inbound” and “lead generating” may not be two phrases that you often think of together. Well, it may be time you did. Inbound marketing is a long game, that’s true. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t also work for you in the near term as well, like bringing in quality leads. There are, in fact, many ways inbound marketing tactics can help increase lead generation, for today’s article we’re going to focus in on three primary aspects of your inbound strategy that have a particular impact on lead generation: content, social media presence, and website optimization/SEO.

The idea of a content marketing funnel is to create content that resonates with your target market at every stage of their buyer’s journey. Those stages, in case you're new to this topic, are Awareness, Evaluation/Consideration, Conversion/Purchase, and Delight/Retention.