Building Bridges for Bridge & Burn: How small lifestyle brands use content to extend their reach online

Many have heralded the death of quality content and mourn the demise of paid roles for traditional writers and publishers in the digital age. But in fact, a new model for marketing is opening up new avenues for quality content. Brand publishing, also known as content marketing, will drive the future of content. This paper examines this development and best practices for brand publishers within the current marketing landscape. Chapter one looks back through the past ten years to consider the factors that have caused this shift. Chapter two looks at brand publishing in action, outlining the characteristics of successful branded content and addressing some of the risks and pitfalls to which marketers can fall prey when they publish original content. Chapter three quantifies the impact of brand newsrooms on the bottom line and establishes which metrics are worth measuring. Finally, chapter four sees this new model of marketing applied to a growing apparel brand based in Portland, Oregon, and reveals the impact that a documented content strategy had when executed in the summer of 2014.