As a marketing executive our number one asset is to create compelling content that is of interest to our prospects and customers. We do that to get recognized as thought leaders in our space and to attract prospects for the companies we market.

In today's data driven marketing world every company is looking for marketers that can generate leads and revenue, but what most CEOs need to understand is that "Content Marketing is Truly the New Gold Rush" and when done right it is the number one source of leads and revenue. Robert Rose the Chief Strategist at the Content Marketing Institute, wrote a great article titled How to Survive the Disillusionment of Content Marketing.

Using traditional ways of creating content internally will get you stuck in Death Valley as one of the leading edge Silicon Valley CMOs Jascha Kaykas-Wolff often says. Especially in start-up world most CMOs do not have the resources to write enough compelling and thought leadership content. So if you continue to think you can generate content the traditional way, you will be out-beaten by companies who are using the new way to generate content that actually resonates with their prospects and customers. And the new gold rush is called "Customer Generated Content".

So you ask how do I find this customer generated content? Well, some of it is being generated in social media. Your customers are on your social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and are engaging in conversations using the hash tags you have created. But to do it right, you need to:

1. Use Customer Community to Generate Content

Create a customer community where your customers can engage in conversations with each other about your product and services. A customer community allows your customers to give you feedback, ask questions, make suggestions and when done correctly is the best place to identify and reward your top brand advocates. Companies like Get Satisfaction, Lithium and Jive provide on-line communities that you can leverage for creating this type of a community. Once you do that your customers will start generating content that you can leverage for all type of marketing.

2. Let Your Customers Drive Your Marketing Campaigns

Instead of generating an entire quarterly campaign calendar, pick one or two themes and seed the thoughts with your customers using Infographics and blogs. Then leverage social media and the community to get feedback from your customers and you will see the theme can result in multiple campaigns.

At Get Satisfaction, we came up with "The Business Value of Community" as a theme and started an infographic on "Many Hats of Community Managers". We then started a contest for the best video on how our customers are using the community and the value they are seeing. We ended up with over 10 awesome videos that our customers sent to us and we placed in the resource center of our website and over 11 million social mentions of the infographic, including an article in Mashable.

3. Find Your Champions and Give Them Recognition

You will be surprised that most brand advocates are not bragging about your products to get a financial reward or a discount coupon. They do it because they love your brand and the best reward you can give them is the recognition as a savvy user of your products.

At Mindjet, the marketing team recognized someone who was very active in the community, but was using an alias for his name and no picture and contributing frequently in a positive way. They contacted him via email and realized he was a very successful consultant and a power user of the Mindjet solution. So Mindjet started interacting with him, promoting his blog and made him an active contributor to the Mindjet blog and a key member of the customer advisory.

4. Use Customers to Help Prospects Through the Buying Journey

Now that you have all this great content being generated by your customers and advocates, you can use it in many ways to leverage your customers to help prospects pick your products vs. the competitors and make the buying journey end up at your company. Take relevant content and especially praise and those that answer questions about your product and embed those throughout your website and marketing landing pages. Not only are you now using "word-of-mouth" content to attract and convince buyers, you will also dramatically increase the SEO of your website and landing pages.

So don't get stuck in Death Valley. Find the new gold rush of content marketing and listen and partner with your customers.