Top 50 Brands in Content Marketing

Marketing principles are being turned upside down. Brands have historically paid for media to deliver their messages. But now, those brands are becoming the media, attracting their own audiences. And not just within social networks, but through their own online publications. This new strategy is known as content marketing, and it has been embraced by leading brands like American Express, IBM, and General Mills, with more joining the ranks every day.

As marketers pursue their own content marketing strategies, they’ll need a roadmap of the content marketing landscape, a guide to the precedents set by the pioneers. For that reason, we’ve compiled this list, “Top Brands in Content Marketing in 2012.”

We conducted a study analyzing top content marketing operations, evaluating them through qualitative and quantitative measures of their websites, content, and search and social efforts. Our lead findings are presented in the following slideshow.

To continue reading 11 through 50 of the Top Content Marketing Brands in 2012, click here.

A Note on Methodology

The Content Marketing Index, created by Kapost’s research team, scores brands on a scale of zero to 400 – with 400 representing the most strategic and successful use of content marketing.

This list began with a large group of brands that are practicing content marketing and was then distilled down to a group of 75 for more rigorous analysis.

That analysis included both empirical and subjective evaluation, both of which were converted into relative numerical scores. Areas of analysis included website features, search efforts, content, and social attribution. Dimensions deemed to be of greater importance were weighted more significantly in calculating the overall Content Marketing Index score.

For a complete review of the methodology, please click here.

Disclosure: Verizon, No. 9 on this list, is a client.

Cameron Naish and Will Riseley also contributed to this analysis.

This story was originally published on March 5, 2012, and comes in at No. 2 on our countdown of the 10 most popular ClickZ news stories of 2012. As ClickZ looks back over the past year, we’re celebrating the best of 2012, as determined by our readers. Enjoy!