From generating leads to building longer-lasting and closer relationships current customers, marketers are discovering that smart content, deployed strategically, is key to reaching a wide array of business objectives.

Yet where in the marketing budget are such content strategies as “thought leadership,” or customer-support video how-tos, email newsletters or recurring customer publications?

Answering that question is just one of the topics explored in a new, free eBook, from Hammock, The 2012 Content Marketing Budget Guide: We’re all media companies now. How should our marketing budgets change?

The Nashville (TN) Tennessean recently profiled Hammock Inc. in an interview with founder Rex Hammock.The interview focused on how Hammock Inc. has revamped its approach to publishing “by no longer viewing publishing as producing products, but solving problems” for our clients, according to Rex, who confesses to being an “accidental-geek” in the interview.

Rex explains that “Our business for clients tends to be post-purchase. After you create a relationship with a customer, how do you build a deeper relationship? How do you have more educated customers, not so much about your product but how your product helps them do what they do?”

Helping Wounded Warriors heal is a major concern of our client The Marine Corps League.

Recently, an article in Semper Fi, the League’s member magazine we assist them in publishing, reported on post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury. These often invisible wounds are what many call the signature wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.