Last month, Stone Ward held its annual Digital Swagger event, a summit where we talk about trends in the digital marketing space and explain how to integrate some of these trends into the communications plans for our clients. The theme of this year’s Digital Swagger was content marketing. Content marketing is a very hot topic this year in digital communications conversations. And with good reason: great content allows for your brand to be found online (search engine optimization) and serves to build relationships with customers — both before and after they are customers.

I’ll be sharing pieces of our summit throughout the coming weeks here on the blog. Today’s post serves as an introduction to the series. To kick off the discussion, 360 Filmworks produced this animated video that demonstrates the process, benefits and general flow of producing and distributing content online. The key takeaway from understanding the machine that is content marketing is that it is a continuous process requiring constant attention to the details. Throughout this series, I will focus on those details, one by one.