While content marketing is now considered par-for-the-course for marketing departments across all industries and business sizes, it’s important to remember that the term is fairly new. The Content Marketing Institute wasn’t founded until 2010 and the first person named Content Marketer of the Year was awarded as recently as 2012 (Joe Chernov, Hubspot).

Despite its relative infancy, content marketing has taken off — and it’s no secret why. According to Demand Metric, content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, yet generates more than three times as many leads. 

That’s where content hubs come in.

(Check out Salesforce’s new content hub! sforce.co/contenthub)

What is a content hub? There are a few different definitions that you could find if you scoured the internet, but here’s how we think about it: A content hub is a destination where website visitors can find branded, curated, social media, user generated, or any type of content related to a topic (KissMetrics).

What distinguishes a content hub from a blog or a website is that a content hub is smaller than a website, but features a more diverse array of content than a traditional blog.

So, why are hubs the future?

Content hubs feature what content marketing does best and gives the content experts the ability to curate and tailor the experience.

Content marketers are increasingly diversifying the types of content that they are producing — blog posts, e-books, and whitepapers are the building blocks of any content strategy, but marketers are also producing more infographics, interactive quizzes, videos, and standalone images. When all of these unique assets live in silos, the onus is on the consumer to do the heavy-lifting in terms of figuring out where to find those assets.

A content hub centralizes all of these assets in one place, and gives control to the content marketer to curate and tailor the experience to showcase the best content — therefore, boosting engagement and generating more leads. Quality content delivered in a simple, straightforward way is an incredibly effective combination.

See how we did it — check out the Salesforce Content Hub: sforce.co/contenthub