NEW YORK, Jan. 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --  As consumers and audiences become more informed and create their own conversations around brands and products, content marketing has become an essential strategy for small businesses looking to engage. By providing interesting, informative content relevant to their target audience, small business marketers can actually help direct the conversation and experience that consumers are having about their brand. As with any marketing tool, creating repeat success lies in understanding and analyzing the results of your efforts; for example, if you are promoting a piece of content via a blog post, tweet or press release, actual click-throughs to the piece of content are just as important as views of the promotional piece. Link-tracking is an essential reporting feature savvy content marketers can build into their content marketing efforts to gauge audience interest and determine outcomes.

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In his latest article on PR Newswire's Small Business PR Toolkit, Jon Henshaw, Co-Founder of Raven Tools, offers a compelling argument for continued use of link shorteners in an age where nearly every social channel shortens links automatically.  Shortening your own links using a platform such as bit.ly, Tiny URL or URL Builder allows you to create URLs that accurately describe your campaign, and allow you to keep track of the impact campaign variables such as topic, content type and campaign source have on the success of your marketing efforts.

To learn more:  http://bit.ly/LZ6Svl

PR Newswire's Small Business PR Toolkit is a comprehensive resource that provides small businesses and entrepreneurs the tools to develop an affordable public relations and marketing plan that helps generate interest from potential customers, engage with key audiences and grow their businesses.   The toolkit features relevant content such as informative white papers, interactive webinars and how-to articles and premium access to educational resources, as well as the opportunity to take advantage of special offers designed specifically for small businesses. To request information on how PR Newswire can help your small business, click here. You can receive updates on new Small Business PR Toolkit content by following @prnsmallbiz on Twitter.

About PR Newswire                                

PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com) is the premier global provider of multimedia platforms that enable marketers, corporate communicators, sustainability officers, public affairs and investor relations officers to leverage content to engage with all their key audiences. Having pioneered the commercial news distribution industry 60 years ago, PR Newswire today provides end-to-end solutions to produce, optimize and target content — from rich media to online video to multimedia — and then distribute content and measure results across traditional, digital, mobile and social channels. Combining the world's largest multi-channel, multi-cultural content distribution and optimization network with comprehensive workflow tools and platforms, PR Newswire enables the world's enterprises to engage opportunity everywhere it exists. PR Newswire serves tens of thousands of clients from offices in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, and is a UBM plc company.

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