New eMarketer report examines best practices for engaging customers across multiple digital channels

Brands are looking to content marketing both to deepen engagement with their customers and prospects and to break through digital marketing’s clutter and audience indifference, according to a new eMarketer report, “Best Practices for Content Marketing: Engaging Consumers Across Multiple Digital Channels.”

With the rise of content marketing, some brands are now behaving like media companies, producing content across various media, including video, photography, infographics and articles. Video is increasingly the prime outlet for content marketing. Nearly 87% of US brand and agency marketers polled in January 2012 by Outbrain said they created video for content marketing.

However, many brands find this shift of perspective difficult, since effective content marketing demands turning away from conventional self-promotion. The lack of overt promotion helps attract an audience to consume the content, share it, comment on it, and even create it.

The report examines the 11 most important rules for content marketing, such as “Lose your ego,” and answers key questions including:

What makes content marketing different from the rest of a company’s advertising and marketing?

What are the core best practices for effective content marketing?

Can content marketing be measured well enough to convince more brands to up their investment in it?

By approaching content marketing through the best practices outlined in the report, brands will be able to improve their existing content strategies or, for those brands newer to the tactic, find practical entry points or better ways to ramp up their efforts.

“Successful content marketing requires that ‘marketing’ be minimized,” said eMarketer. “The content needs to inform, entertain, educate, inspire—but it cannot sell, because today’s sophisticated consumer will quickly detect that.”