As inbound marketing gains in popularity, some companies are playing catch up, while others are reaping the rewards of their efforts and refining their strategies. The cardinal rule in content marketing hasn’t changed along with the calendar year: it will forever be to focus on helpful, useful content that is well written and produced. As more and more companies see the ROI of inbound and shift more marketing dollars to content marketing, it’s important to know where to focus your attention:

Do NOT buy that marketing automation software (just yet). Before you pull the trigger, please read this blog post first.

Marketing automation is an incredibly valuable tool that is transforming the marketing industry. In the space of one year, the number of marketing technology companies has nearly doubled, rising to nearly 2,000 in 2015 according to Marketing Land.

However, it still faces an embarrassingly high failure rate of 60 percent. According to the Sales Benchmark Index, three out of five marketing automation installations fail, meaning they are under-utilized, not used at all, or eventually canceled.

With any marketing, the end goal is to make money, right? If you talk to some marketers, you’d think their primary goal is “brand consistency” or “generating awareness” or “increasing website traffic.” But in the end, these aren’t the real reasons we as marketers get up in the morning and do our jobs. We are here to help our companies make money. Otherwise, our jobs wouldn’t exist. Thus it’s imperative that our content marketing efforts convert website visitors into leads, and eventually, into customers. But how does that happen?