By Cheryl Ambruch

Are you content marketing? How are you diversifying your social media? When was your last business blog? Your website is mobile friendly, right? The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) just released its 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America. The reveals were not completely surprising and, for those of us who adore organic content, quite exciting.

Here are some highlights from this benchmark study:

What is content marketing? According to CMI, content marketing is a marketing technique that involves creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action. Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it. In essence, it means creating content that is truly useful and helpful for your target audience.

Unclear of overall effectiveness? That’s scary, but not surprising! Content marketing is evolving. It is a work in progress. Terms such as content engineering, data-driven content creation, brand storytelling and content pillars are new—no one was emphasizing content with quite this degree of gusto 18 months ago.

So, how do you measure content effectiveness? There are some telltale indicators that your content is moving your brand in the right direction. Common content marketing measurements include:

Gains to any, or all, of these measurable content effectiveness trackers signal your content is helping your business in one key way: awareness. Generating awareness can come from press releases, blog posts, guest blogging posts, social media updates, media coverage and many other content strategies.

Ultimately, the success or failure of any content marketing campaign drills down to quality. If you create content that is high-quality and reflects the interests, issues and concerns of your clientele, you are not spinning your wheels. When it comes to content creation these days, try to keep three simple values in mind:

The Good: Develop a content schedule and actively manage your company’s deployment of effective, unique and original content. Explore the most effective content platforms—guest blogging, social media, white papers—to share your expertise. Create engaging, fresh content that reflects not only the expertise of your business but also your company’s brand. Remember, content is a reflection of your company’s personality, expertise and market positioning. Only good content is worthy of affiliation with your business.

The Blog: Are you blogging? Why not! That’s not a question, it’s a declaration. Blogging is an exceptional opportunity to embrace and control content that is effective in the promotion and marketing of your business. Share your expertise. Share it on your website. Share it by guest blogging! If you are not incorporating blogging directly for your business or via guest blogging, you are missing out on a controllable content format that allows you to leverage the voice of your business.

The User: Ultimately, all the blogs, white papers and social media posts in the world are meaningless if you aren’t keeping one critical element in mind at all times: the user. Who is your target audience? Who is reading your blog? What are the demographics of the online publications that are currently featuring your guest blogs? Who “likes” you on Facebook and retweets your expertise on Twitter? Write for your readers … your users! Remember, Google puts the user experience first. Do the same, and you will be a company that is not only marketing online via content strategies, but actually publishing all the best attributes of your brand.

Cheryl Ambruch is Online Marketing Director at Miles Technologies, an IT solutions provider.