Webinar: How to Steal Your Competitors’ Online Share and Grow Your Digital Presence (Without Blowing Your Budget on Ads)

Webinar: How to Steal Your Competitors’ Online Share and Grow Your Digital Presence (Without Blowing Your Budget on Ads)

Webinar: How to Steal Your Competitors’ Online Share and Grow Your Digital Presence (Without Blowing Your Budget on Ads)

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You can steal your competitor’s online traffic without paying for Google ads

With detailed market intelligence and a solid content strategy, you can compete with your Goliath competitors for your buyers’ attention without spending all of your marketing budget on Google ads.

Your Bigger Competitors are Getting Tons of Traffic Online, But You Can Beat Them

75% of people don’t click beyond the first page of Google when they search for help or answers online. Your larger competitors are ranking first and second organically and have the biggest share of voice online. On top of that, it’s likely the content you are creating isn’t answering the questions or solving the problems your buyers and customers are experiencing.

These obstacles are preventing you from beating those competitors and getting your target customers to visit your site and see your offers instead might feel insurmountable (especially without paying for ads so you can skip the line).

The good news is, it is possible to level the playing field with strong SEO and content marketing, grounded in solid research.

Grow Your Online Traffic and Steal Your Competitors’ Share of Voice

Watch Founder & CEO, Rajat Kapur as he hosts our Head of Business Intelligence & Analytics, Paul Ferguson, and our Director of Content, Beth McDonough, for a jam-packed, interactive webinar. You will learn how to:

  • Win a bigger share of voice online by finding gaps in your competitor’s content and learn where your audience is going for information
  • Reach your ideal audience online without paying for ads
  • Identify which of your traditional competitors are doing well and discover others you didn’t think you had.
  • Steal clicks from your competitors (even those which are much larger with bigger budgets)
  • Reveal opportunities to expand your digital footprint
  • Reduce your marketing costs by finding inefficiencies in your current spend
  • Identify gaps within your content marketing strategy
  • Win Google by getting ahead of organic listing by utilizing SERP features

Proven Results

We have applied these methods to clients across industries and seen success:

Cello Cheese
Drug Rehab Facility
Services Franchise

About Rajat Kapur

As the Founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, Raj strives to provide growing businesses of all sizes unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj brings two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and startups.

About Paul Ferguson

Marketing Director Paul Ferguson helps clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences.

About Beth McDonough

As the Director of Content for &Marketing, Beth focuses on helping brands grow their business through personality driven, value-centric messaging and data-infused copywriting. The content department at &Marketing leverages SEO, analytics, proven marketing strategy, and compelling storytelling tactics to build brand awareness, attract, and convert new customers.

 About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

How To Measure Content Marketing ROI (Return On Investment)

How To Measure Content Marketing ROI (Return On Investment)

How To Measure Content Marketing ROI (Return On Investment)

&Marketing, and marketing, outsourced marketing strategy

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The targeting, planning, and tracking of content marketing campaigns continue to get more sophisticated as new capabilities and tools are tailored to the task. However, CMI recently reported that 44% of marketers still find some aspects of improving content measurement challenging, though it remains a top priority.

Measuring their return on investment, or content marketing ROI, is increasingly essential because customers engage with content at every stage of their journey. Forrester found that a customer engages with 11.4 pieces of content before purchasing. Furthermore, the customer journey is rarely linear, especially in the B2B sales funnel. Instead, potential customers may dip in and out of the funnel several times, sampling different pieces of your content before converting.

Measuring content marketing ROI is not an exact science, but tried-and-true best practices are emerging. Read on to learn more about content marketing ROI, measuring it, and which metrics are truly vital.

What is Content Marketing ROI?

Simply put, content marketing ROI is a percentage showing how much you earned from content marketing compared to what you spent producing and distributing it. It is one of the most critical measures of the success of a content marketing program because it is directly tied to revenue.

However, content marketing ROI has been challenging for marketers to quantify because, as mentioned above, the customer journey is often anything but straightforward. Content marketing is, after all, a long-term strategy, which makes attribution more difficult to determine. Plus, content alone won’t necessarily generate ROI – it is most valuable when created to bring value to additional channels like email, ads, etc.

What Are The 4 Steps Involved In Measuring Content Marketing ROI?

Marketers have developed a formula to determine the content marketing ROI percentage. Still, many more metrics are not tied directly to revenue but help provide a holistic view of the success of your content marketing campaigns. First, we’ll explain the formula.

Step One

Add up how much you’ve spent producing content. This could include images, video, audio, the content creator’s salary, work done by other departments, etc.

Step Two

To that number, add what it costs you to distribute the content. This could include tools/software used for creation and distribution or paid promotions. If you are using those tools for multiple purposes, use a percentage of that cost – for example, are you using email solely to distribute content? Perhaps not, so focus on only the portion of the cost attributed to content. This sum represents the total cost of producing all of your content, or your investment.

Step Three

Add up all of the sales or leads (you must establish a lead value) that resulted directly from a piece of content. This is your return.

Step Four

To that number, add what it costs you to distribute the content. This could include tools/software used for creation and distribution or paid promotions. If you are using those tools for multiple purposes, use a percentage of that cost – for example, are you using email solely to distribute content? Perhaps not, so focus on only the portion of the cost attributed to content. This sum represents the total cost of producing all of your content, or your investment.

Which Content Marketing Metrics Really Matter?

The first thing you should know is that it is counterproductive to try to track all possible metrics. Instead, you should hone in on specific metrics depending on what you want to accomplish with your content. When you begin a new content marketing project or campaign, focus on metrics that support your key goals and provide you with information you can use to optimize the project or campaign. Don’t wait until the piece is released to decide which metrics are important. Plan ahead and limit yourself to the most meaningful and actionable information.

Here are some key metrics to consider linked to some common goals:

To Measure Revenue Potential: Lead Quality and Sales

There are many ways to measure lead quality, which are likely to vary from business to business. For example, if you have Google Analytics set up on your website, you can see whether visitors spend time on important pages. Set up a goal for those pages and view the results at Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization. Another way to evaluate lead quality is by looking at traffic, bounce rates, and conversions together. For example, high traffic with high bounce rates and low conversions can indicate low lead quality.

In B2C, if you want to know how many leads turned into sales and the value of those sales, you’ll need eCommerce enabled in Google Analytics. At Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, you’ll find a Page View column that can show which pages are driving the most revenue. However, this only works for straightforward, one-session conversions, which aren’t that common for most websites. You can learn more by visiting Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions, which measures conversions that each channel assisted with, and sorting by landing page. For B2B, focus on form submissions.

To Evaluate SEO Performance: SEO Success and Exposure/Authority

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) increases website traffic by helping your website rank higher in search engine results, where potential customers are more likely to click. Measuring the success of your SEO often involves looking at whether you rank well for your target keywords (this is vital), have high-authority inbound links, and are popping up in relevant answer boxes. You can check this by using a private/incognito window to search for key terms and seeing how well you rank. Tools like Moz’s Link Explorer that can give you specific measurements around domain and page authority, and show you your inbound links. Compare your SEO success with your social engagement to see how well your content uses keywords and whether it is finding the right audience.

The more exposure you get and the more you establish your brand’s authority both online and offline, the more people will want to share and link to your content. The Moz tool offers good insight into authority by domain and page, but you should also be sure to track offline metrics like instances of media coverage and participation in industry events. While authority is valuable, it can be challenging to track, so you may want to get creative with the types of metrics you measure here. For example, don’t forget to pay attention to what people have to say about your brand on social media.

You can also see what terms your blogs get impressions and clicks for in Search Console or Analytics. Additionally, there are tools (like Search Analytics for Sheets) that will continuously and automatically export out all queries your pages get impressions for so you can monitor average position and help determine which terms to target for new content.

To Track Engagement: Web Traffic, Onsite Engagement, and Social Media ROI

Without traffic, you can’t generate revenue on your site, so web traffic is an important metric to combine with others for a well-rounded view. You can use Google Analytics to see how much traffic a content piece is driving by visiting Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. This view shows you which pages visitors first land on, sorted by highest-traffic pages first. Next, look at where your traffic is coming from (referral traffic) by clicking on a specific page and clicking Secondary Dimension > Acquisition > Source/Medium.

Once people arrive at your website, you’ll want to understand how much time they spend on which pages. Low bounce rates are a good sign that your content is well-received, but there are also other important onsite engagement metrics. In Google Analytics, go to Audience > Overview to see pages per session, bounce rate, and average session duration. To see how fast visitors are bouncing off a specific piece of content, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages and find its URL.

Social media shares are important to track because social proof and peer recommendations have become so critical in the purchase process. You can see how much traffic you get from specific platforms at Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals, and the Social > Overview page can show you how much revenue that traffic has earned you.

Try &Marketing’s Content Marketing ROI Calculator

Using &Marketing’s Content Marketing ROI Calculator is your first step toward creating a thoughtful content strategy that aligns with your business goals. This calculator will help you determine which keywords and topics will generate the most organic traffic and conversions on your website (depending on where your content ranks for those keywords on Google). It also calculates how much it would cost to get those same results via paid advertising. This comparison will help you determine whether it’d be more cost-effective to invest in paid advertising or organic content, or a combination of the two!

Looking for more guidance around understanding and optimizing your content marketing ROI? Contact us today!

About the Authors

Marketing Director Paul Ferguson helps clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences.

Content Specialist Kim Steinmetz helps brands and thought leaders discover and develop their unique voice and tone while establishing authority on a topic through compelling messaging and copywriting. An accomplished writer and marketer with over a decade of experience, Kim is well-versed in both B2C and B2B content.

About &Marketing

&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.

Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?

We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.

Why is Marketing Important? The Value Marketing Offers Your Business

Why is Marketing Important? The Value Marketing Offers Your Business

Why is Marketing Important? The Value Marketing Offers Your Business

&Marketing, and marketing, outsourced marketing strategy

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From building brand awareness, ensuring consistent messaging, to bringing in leads—your marketing department breathes life into your company from top to bottom through your customer’s eyes. Marketing does some seriously heavy lifting to help grow a business, but which lift is the most important one? When some of the work marketing does happens behind the scenes, what do business owners see as the strongest value-add?

We conducted a recent LinkedIn poll to answer a common question: “What’s the most important contribution a marketing department can provide to a company?”

The answers ran a wide gamut, but a few clear winners came up on top in the court of public opinion. Read on for an in-depth look into the role of marketing within a company. The most popular answers are broken down below, with the highest result last.

    Why is Marketing Important?

    1. Customer-Centric Culture

    A little less than one-fifth (16%) of respondents to our survey said the most crucial role of marketing is to deliver a “customer-centric culture.” But what does it look like in practice?

    Your marketing team is responsible for all of your messaging, including the construction of your target customer personas. These are archetypes of people who represent your “ideal” client base: from demographics to hobbies and typical online behavior, your buyer persona represents who you are directing your marketing efforts toward overall. This helps you build all of your efforts with this customer’s needs and wants in mind.

    Good branding strategies never lose sight of this all-important individual. Customers feel included and invited to interact with your brand (and hopefully into your marketing and sales funnel to close the deal) when they are being directly spoken to and empathized with in your messaging. When interacting with brand materials, your clients “should also have increased awareness of and engagement with a firm’s brand, products …. all of which show that the brand is integrated into their priorities in a positive and productive way,” says Barbara Kaplan, CEO of BSK Strategies.

    2. Growing Customer Awareness

    You may offer the best product or service in your industry, but your best customers could be passing you by for a competitor if they aren’t familiar with your brand. According to our survey, 29% of participants believe the most important role of a marketing department is to ensure that “customers know the brand(s).”

    Robert Curtiss, a National Account Manager with Business Group Resources, provides a poignant example of the power of brand recognition, “Can I have a kleenex? I spilled coke on the Formica because I was distracted by the Zamboni crashing into the jet-ski. That Zamboni driver should get a seeing-eye dog!”

    As humorous as it is outlandish, Curtiss’s example holds water: Brand recognition is king in the court of public notice. Being the first brand that springs to mind for your category is a powerful way to “live rent-free” in your customers’ minds.

    Through consistent application of brand guidelines, thought leadership work, and positive product and service placement, your marketing team is responsible for growing customer awareness.

    3. Delivering Positive ROI

    At the end of the day, your marketing team is there to provide a positive return on investment for the money you give them. This was the most popular choice, with nearly half (46%) of our respondents choosing it over other options. It seems the most obvious answer in business terms: your marketing team exists to convert the money you give them into more money for your business.

    But is it that simple? “Positive ROI is a lagging indicator of a customer centric culture, customers knowing the brand, and everything else a marketing department does,” stipulates Mark H. Johnson, Talent Optimization Manager with PI Midlantic. “It’s all about financial results.” According to quite a few other commenters, Johnson hit the nail on the head with this analysis.

    While delivering favorable ROI is a final result of a successful marketing team, their primary objectives, such as building a brand image, spreading awareness, and creating customer journeys, will all ultimately serve the purpose of creating a positive ROI. It follows that while this should be the main goal of your marketing strategy (and any other department in your business, in most cases), it can be achieved through a range of other avenues.

    Not insignificantly. 9% of our respondents reported that the most important role of a marketing team is something else entirely. They may be onto something: from crafting client relationships to reflecting business values, reaching out to press, representing new releases, and more—chances are, your marketing team is busy creating more opportunities for your business growth than you realize.

    Darren Sudman, Founder of Unless, an outsourced corporate social responsiblity consultancy, made a case for his answer. “Reflect the culture, purpose and value proposition. If those are aligned and well received, everything else takes care of itself,” says Sudman.

    It’s a tried and true method to follow. The great Simon Sinek famously wrapped up his vision for marketing in rather succinct terms: “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe.”

    If people are always going to buy your “why” before your “what,” perhaps the answer to the question “why is marketing important” lies within being able to connect and communicate your company’s why and your customer’s why.

    Not sure if you’re communicating to the right customer, or don’t have a clear idea of the story you’re telling them? Download our Narrative Marketing Outline to help get that process started.

    What do you think is the most important role for a marketing department? If you’d like to discuss this topic further or get help identifying the role your marketing department plays and how we can help fill those gaps, contact our team!

    About the Author

    As the Managing Director of &Marketing (and-marketing.com), Rajat “Raj” Kapur strives to provide small, medium, and mid-market businesses unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. His team of professionals can either augment an existing team, or outsource the marketing function for a client.

     

    About &Marketing

    &Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.

    Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?

    We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.