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Last year was the first time I attended HubSpot’s annual conference, INBOUND. It was so amazing and overwhelming, it’s a miracle my head didn’t explode daily. I did learn a few things I’d like to share with those who will be attending this year, whether you’re vets or newbies to this mother of all marketing conferences.

Not to sound like Scrooge, but I really hate all of these Christmas and Black Friday in July promotions. Come on, you pay your ad agencies millions of dollars. I’m sure they have art directors, creative directors and copywriters with the skills and desire to come up with something more creative, too.

On the flip side, I very much enjoyed the cookie I ate at our Christmas in July happy hour last week. 

Lessons from BuzzFeed and NewsCred’s webinar, “Creating Content for Millennials: Why It Matters + Strategies for Success”

Beyoncé wasn’t built in a day—neither was BuzzFeed. And both began their ascents around the same time.

It was 2005 when Bey realized there was only one, true Destiny’s Child. And it was 2006 when Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti launched BuzzFeed as “an experimental lab that focused on tracking viral content and making things people wanted to share.” Score.

More marketers are spending time, money and resources on content marketing than ever before. In fact, 42 percent of businesses now publish new content at least weekly. However, the majority of these efforts continue to fail. Why is this? While the reasons are wide-ranging, I see some mistakes happening over and over again:

A recent study by Ascend2 revealed that 53 percent of marketers feel a lack of internal content creation resources is their biggest content marketing challenge. If content marketing is part of your job description, you may feel 53 percent is a little low, given all the researching, writing, editing and image searching that goes into creating a single blog post. Luckily, your audience can appreciate content you share that isn’t necessarily penned by you. Sharing content with your prospects and customers that you didn’t create to build trust and credibility is called “content curation,” and it’s an important tool in the content marketer’s toolbox.