This is a guest post by Martina Stričak from Point Visible. 

Can you believe it, it's 2017 and content is still the king? Some things never change!

You know what they say – if something is good, why change it? No matter how much marketers are trying to find other ways to promote services or products, it all always comes down to creating great content.

As time goes by and different things become popular and less popular, content marketing is going through changes as well, but it's always here.

Over the last few years, a vast majority of marketers, both B2B and B2C, stated that content marketing is a major part of their general marketing strategy and budget for the upcoming year. In fact, for 2017, ¾ of marketers said they will invest more in content marketing than in 2016. There has to be something in it, right?

Well, there definitely is. With increased number of various apps and extensions that are made to block „traditional“ online ads (like banners and pop ups), content marketing has become a go-to way of promoting a product or a service.

By 2017, video content will represent 74% of all internet traffic.

I can't say that I'm surprised. 

Visual content was the biggest marketing trend for me for 2016. There were a lot of people and businesses jumping on it, particularly on the use of video or social networks that support videos and cool visuals such as Snapchat and Instagram. 

We've heard a lot about video during INBOUND16 as well where visuals and video were prominent more or less in every talk. 

Venngage went a step further and gathered the insights from marketing people about visual trends and put the results into a handy infographic that I want to show you today. (Disclaimer: I took part in the survey too.)

Here are some of the most interesting findings: 

When I started working on the Inbound PR concept, my initial thought was that PR pros are really great at content creation and storytelling but they were pretty bad at measurement. I remember that from my days working in the industry.

On the other hand, inbound marketing people are well versed in data and numbers - this is what I saw from working with hundreds of agencies as a consultant at HubSpot. 

Then I decided to dig into the two disciplines. 

What's Public Relations? 

As per definition, public relations is the strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics. This comes from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) which is the leading PR organisation in the world.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) in the UK – the other leading PR body – argues that:

"Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics."

As you can see from the definitions, PR is all about reputation and engaging in meaningful relationships with various publics.

With 19,500 attendees, INBOUND16 was again a fantastic event for marketing, sales and communications professionals as well as agency people. 

The four days were packed with sessions and networking opportunities.

Last year, I learned a lot about the agency business and what my agency partners from HubSpot were struggling with or excelling at. I came out of the conference with eight key takeaways for agencies. 

This year, I felt like the week had three main big themes that were visible in one way or another throughout all talks and conversations with other people attending.

I want to cover these with you this week. Let's get started.

3 Big Key Learnings from #INBOUND16

Many of my partners and customers at HubSpot struggle with content creation. 

They'd come to me and usually say at least one of those three things:

• "Oh, we are not getting enough traffic as we've wanted to."
• "Our landing pages are not converting."
• "My leads are not good." 

The main reason for all of these issues always revolves around one thing: your thought process behind your content creation. So how did you approach this in the first place step by step? Basically, what was your strategy for content creation. 

Now, the way to go about creating content for inbound is pretty straightforward, but believe me, done the other way around by so many PR and marketing professionals.

This is why today I want to walk you through how exactly you should go about creating content for inbound so that you generate proper traffic and good quality leads because you can’t just blast out 10 blog posts on some cool topics and hope for wonders.   

The 4 Key Steps to Doing Content Creation for Inbound