Rebecca Lieb is an analyst at Altimeter Group, where she covers digital advertising and marketing. She's also a consultant, author, and sought-after speaker. Formerly, Rebecca was VP of Econsultancy's US operations, and VP and editor-in-chief of The ClickZ Network for more than seven years. She is also the author of Content Marketing: Think Like a Publisher—How to Use Content to Market Online and in Social Media and The Truth About Search Engine Optimization.

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I invited Rebecca to Marketing Smarts to talk about her recent research report, The Content Marketing Software Landscape: Marketer Needs and Vendor Solutions. Marketers will find the report incredibly helpful as they try to navigate the marketing software landscape, which currently has some 150 vendors, each offering a different solution (or array of solutions) to marketers' common problems.

Here are just a few highlights from our conversation:

No content marketing software will work for you until you have a strategy (08:56): "Strategy is really the underpinning of content marketing. Content marketing is the product, but strategy is the plan. It's like building a building without blueprints. You really need those blueprints and that architectural guidance to build something that's going to make sense. You can't build a building and then decide to put plumbing in. Maybe you can, it's just going to be way more expensive, way more complicated, and certainly not as elegant a solution if you try to retrofit solutions into something that's already left the station, so to speak. (I'm mixing metaphors.)"

All marketing is content marketing (13:24): "Content is the atomic particle of all marketing. Without content, you don't have social media. You also don't have owned media—the stuff on your website, on your blog. And you also don't have advertising, because content in advertising is the creative. It's the words, it's the images, it's the audiovisual. So, we believe that the marketing cloud in very short order, in just two or three years' time, is going to be the content stack plus the ad stack. This is also very much a function of converged media—the convergence of paid, owned, and earned media—into new forms of advertising and marketing, such as native advertising."

Choose content marketing software you can use throughout your organization (17:04): "Look around the corner: This is way bigger than Marketing. It's Customer Service and it's Sales and it's Recruiting, so it's HR. It's every customer touchpoint. It also gets into internal communications, social networks, product people. It's enterprisewide."

To learn more, visit AltimeterGroup.com or RebeccaLieb.com, or follow Rebecca on Twitter: @lieblink.

Rebecca and I discussed much more, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

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Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

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Published on July 30, 2014