How To Measure Content Marketing ROI (Return On Investment)

How To Measure Content Marketing ROI (Return On Investment)

by | Jun 9, 2022 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Business Intelligence & Analytics, Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution, Storytelling & Branding

How To Measure Content Marketing ROI (Return On Investment)

&Marketing, and marketing, outsourced marketing strategy

Written By

On

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!

Try the Calculator

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.

When is the Best Day to Post on LinkedIn?

When is the Best Day to Post on LinkedIn?

by | Feb 18, 2022 | Business Intelligence & Analytics, Insights, Paul Ferguson

When is the Best Day to Post on LinkedIn?

&Marketing, and marketing, outsourced marketing strategy

Written By

On

For most companies, LinkedIn is the most important social channel for their overall awareness and lead generation efforts. Yet so many organizations (we’re even guilty sometimes) just blindly post without knowing when they can best reach their audience. “When is the best day to post on LinkedIn to ensure my audience sees and engages with my awesome content?” is an age-old question and has layers to it.

But the good news is, we now have access to data that can help us answer that question. So, when is the best time to post on LinkedIn?

Well, the TLDR version of the answer is – it varies based on your audience. However, we at &Marketing don’t particularly love that answer. We also like to dig a little bit deeper and have some fun by leaning into data and building fun dashboards. So when we were posed this question, we decided to create something new that could give us an answer and potentially add to our Business Intelligence services. Here’s what we did and learned.

While you might generate some leads and back into your business goals with this approach, you’ll likely just be wasting time and money when you could be working smarter, not harder.

However, with all of the tools and data out there, it can be overwhelming or down right impossible to even know where to begin and how to leverage all of these glorious resources. Therefore, we’re going to help you find the elusive needle in the hay sack and show you three tools &Marketing leverages to save time, stop guessing, and still generate big results for our clients (and ourselves).

Business Questions to Answer:

  1. When is the best day to post on Linkedin for audience engagement?
  2. What days drive the most users to our website?
  3. Which days generate the most goal completions on our website?
  4. What type of posts generate the most engagement?
  5. What days have the best goal conversion rate?

Data Used:

We gathered three years of LinkedIn data from a combination of sources. 

  1. We used a combination of Supermetrics post data (posts, post date, images, outbound URLs, likes, comments, shares, etc.) (Sidebar: Supermetrics is a tool that aggregates data from multiple sources and brings it to your go-to reporting, analytics, or storage platform.)
  2. We took our own LinkedIn acquisition source data from Google Analytics (LinkedIn traffic, pages, goal completions, users, etc.)
  3. We used LinkedIn data from LinkedIn itself (Post content, engagement, etc.) to gather information about our audiences (unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn’t break down post data by audience demographics which would’ve been super cool. Get on that LinkedIn)

Methodology:

Taking all of this data, we built several dashboards via Microsoft Power B.I. to help us mine through the 500+ LinkedIn posts and the thousands of website sessions from LinkedIn. These dashboards helped us easily uncover insights that could apply to our business questions.

Pro Tip: Do NOT use Bitly links with your LinkedIn posts. It makes it harder to match up the data with your Analytics.

What We Uncovered

After sifting through 500+ posts and all of our LinkedIn analytics data, here is what we uncovered:

 

  • When is the best day to post on LinkedIn for audience engagement?
    For us, it is Wednesday. 38% of our most engaged posts occur on Wednesdays, encompassing roughly 33% of all our LinkedIn engagement. Interestingly enough, only 16% of all of our posts are released on Wednesdays. The day we post the most? Tuesday, closely followed by Thursday. Our least engaged day? Sunday. However, we don’t post a lot on the weekends, as both Saturday and Sunday only make up about 8% of our LinkedIn posts. The weekday with the least engagement is Friday.
  • What days drive the most users to our website?
    Since 2019, LinkedIn has driven about 5% of all our website traffic. Based on the above, one would assume it would be Wednesday. However, Tuesdays barely eked out Thursdays and Wednesdays for the most traffic to our site. Even though our Wednesday posts generate more clicks, it’s the type of post that is driving those clicks (more on that in a second). Tuesdays are generating 20% of all of our LinkedIn traffic, which means posts on Monday and Tuesday are driving the most people to our site. The post that received the most traffic was our work culture post. However, the most engaged users are users who come to our site from LinkedIn on Wednesdays, as they have the lowest bounce rate, visit the most pages, and have the longest time on site.
  • Which days generate the most goal completions on our website?
    Since 2019, LinkedIn is responsible for 9% of all our website goal completions. The day that drives the most overall goal completions is Tuesday, followed closely by Monday, which shows that the information we’re posting on Mondays and Tuesdays is more geared towards our audience taking an action on our site. 67% of all the goals generated from LinkedIn on our site are job submissions, which means our audience is highly engaged with our company and is passing along our open positions. Tuesday is also the day most responsible for non job related goal completions, think downloads or contact us.
  • What type of posts generate the most engagement on LinkedIn?
    As we stated before, Wednesday drives the most engagement, but not necessarily the most users to our site or overall goal completions. This is due to the type of posts we’ve generally posted on Wednesdays. Our most engaged LinkedIn posts are cultural posts. Our post on Women’s History Month generated almost 3 times as many clicks as the next post, which was also cultural and focused on Martin Luther King Day and our volunteer efforts. Our three most engaged posts on Tuesdays deal with inviting people to our webinars or a webinar recap, which serves to drive people back to our site.
  • What days have the best goal conversion rate?
    Though only making up 14% of all goal completions, Saturday posts have the best overall goal conversion rate of 8%. But these users only make up 8% of our LinkedIn traffic. Sunday is around 7%, but again, users only make up 7% of our LinkedIn traffic. What does this mean? We simply just don’t post enough on the weekends. Mondays make up 16% of our LinkedIn traffic and have a 6% goal conversion rate, which is the highest conversion rate for a weekday.

    What Does All This Mean About the Best Day to Post on LinkedIn? 

    We’d be silly to look at all of this data and just say, “we’re doing great!” We now have actionable insights that will help us optimize our organic LinkedIn strategy. What can we do based on the above is:

    • Take advantage of high engagement days. Post more content that drives people back to our site on Wednesdays, Tuesdays, and Mondays, as these are the days that:

    1. Our audience is most engaged with our LinkedIn content and engagement with our site.
    2. Have the best conversion rates on our site.

    • Shift our cultural posts to lower engaged days like Friday and make sure we’re driving people back to our site via a blog post or video.
    • Experiment posting on the weekends more often to take advantage of high conversion rates. Though there is not a lot of traffic from LinkedIn on these days, the quality of traffic is clearly strong and engaged. Our assumption: those who are getting on LinkedIn during the weekend have the spare time to actually explore and engage a little.

    As we mentioned in the beginning, everyone’s audience and social presence is different, so this data may be vastly different than what you uncover. The important takeaway is that all of this data is FREE and available to you via LinkedIn and your Google Analytics. When thinking about and crafting your organic social strategy, don’t neglect these valuable insights. Lean on them to make your LinkedIn presence felt by the most people. Don’t waste your valuable time just posting randomly without actually figuring out what works.

     

    Want &Marketing to perform a free analysis of your LinkedIn? Contact us today! 

    Grab Our LinkedIn eBook
    Contact &Marketing
    About the Author

    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. Follow Paul on LinkedIn.

    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.

    Want to Become a Smarter Marketer? Try These Three Analytics & Business Intelligence Tools

    Want to Become a Smarter Marketer? Try These Three Analytics & Business Intelligence Tools

    by | Jan 24, 2022 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Business Intelligence & Analytics, General, Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

    Want to Become a Smarter Marketer? Try These Three Analytics & Business Intelligence Tools

    &Marketing, and marketing, outsourced marketing strategy

    Written By

    On

    Now more than ever, marketers have a wealth of tools and data designed to help us not only understand our audience better, but uncover where that audience is living online and what they are actively searching for. This knowledge is vital for marketing strategies designed to meet overall business goals.

    Yet, with all this information on-hand and all the tools available to mine that data, many companies today are just revising marketing efforts made popular in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s; which relied on broadly plastering your message or creative assets to as many people as possible and see what sticks.

    While you might generate some leads and back into your business goals with this approach, you’ll likely just be wasting time and money when you could be working smarter, not harder.

    However, with all of the tools and data out there, it can be overwhelming or down right impossible to even know where to begin and how to leverage all of these glorious resources. Therefore, we’re going to help you find the elusive needle in the hay sack and show you three tools &Marketing leverages to save time, stop guessing, and still generate big results for our clients (and ourselves).

    3 Analytics & Business Intelligence Tools to Help You Become a Smarter Marketer

    1. SEMRush

    What is it?: Get measurable results from online marketing. Do SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC and social media marketing from just one platform. Data is good. Strategy is better. SEMRush gives you both. SEMRush knows a lot about your market and website. It gives you access to the world’s largest database of 20 billion keywords, 310 million ads, and 17 billion URLs crawled per day (“crawled” is a little jargon that means discovering and indexing content) .

    But you get more than just numbers. SEMRush analyzes the data for you and gives you instant recommendations on SEO, content marketing and advertising that can help you improve your online visibility in days.

    What it’s good for: SEMRush is great for obtaining a full listing of organic keywords that you and your competitors rank for, as well as an idea of how much traffic those terms bring to your site. SEMRush also breaks down competitors’ PPC efforts and acquisition sources. Additionally, SEMRush has recently rolled out a new feature that breaks down keyword intent, which will help you understand the gaps in your content. Lastly, SEMRush does a great job of auditing your website to identify SEO errors and challenges.

    How we use it: &Marketing uses SEMRush to back up our organic data, analyze competitors organic and paid search presence research, as well as technical SEO website audits.

    An example of a SEMRush Search

    2. GetStat

    What is it?: Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) tracking for anyone! With large-scale rank tracking and SERP analytics, you’re always the first with the answer to what’s happening on the SERPs. Not only will you be able to generate and monitor organic results, you’ll be able to uncover unknown competitors, content topics, related terms, and more!

    What it’s good for: GetStat, founded by Moz, is an excellent tool to track keywords you currently rank for and to generate high level insights on the domains that are ranking for them and all of their related searches…at scale. Imagine having to look up 100 keywords and determining how many related searches there are for each one, how many questions people are asking about each one, and what the top 20 domains that are ranking for each one. GetStat gives you all of that data at scale.

    How we use it: GetStat is a great tool to track and monitor keywords we’re looking to target. Additionally, GetStat allows us to generate reports, at scale, of the Top 20 listings, all of the People Also Ask questions (that little box on the first page of Google that tells you what else people are asking about a search query), all of the related searches, and all of the SERP features for ALL tracked keywords.

    An example of a Top 20 Dashboard report from GetStat

    3. SparkToro

    What is it?: Audience Research. Solved. Forget expensive surveys or inaccurate, manual research. SparkToro finds the websites your customers visit, social accounts they follow, hashtags they use, and more — so you can actually get to know your target audience and do marketing that works.

    Over 1,100 marketing agencies, content teams, PR leaders, and market researchers use SparkToro.

    What it’s good for: SparkToro is an excellent resource for audience research. Simply type in a phrase that users have in their profile or commonly use, or a website they frequently visit. Then you’re able to uncover demographic information about people who fit that profile, websites they visit, podcasts they listen to, social accounts they follow, and press accounts they trust.

    How we use it: We use SparkToro for audience research on our key decision makers. This tool helps us find commonalities in demographics and information consumption across multiple decision makers and helps us form strategies to best reach those audiences.

    An example of a SparkToro Search

    Data That Helps Uncover Effective Marketing Strategies

    These are just a few of the tools we use when we perform a comprehensive Business Intelligence project. The best thing about these tools is that they allow us to export data that can be aligned with one another in data visualization programs like Power BI or Tableau. Once we have all of our data, we can develop dashboards within Power BI or Tableau, that allow us to easily navigate it and help us uncover powerful insights. No more messy excel files and pivot tables and VLookUps. Just clean, easy to read dashboards with data sets that can interact with one another and be easily mined. These insights inform the creation of a successful marketing roadmap so we know the exact steps to take to help our unique clients reach their business goals.

    Example of an eCommerce Dashboard

    Interested in learning more about our Business Intelligence and Analytics practice and how it can help drive your business and marketing strategy? Check out our Business Intelligence eBook to understand how this powerful process can grow your business.

    Download eBook
    Contact &Marketing
    About the Author

    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. Follow Paul on LinkedIn.

    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.

    What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization Made Easy

    What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization Made Easy

    by | Jan 10, 2022 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Business Intelligence & Analytics, General, Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

    What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization Made Easy

    &Marketing, and marketing, outsourced marketing strategy

    Written By

    On

    When you first start to think about dipping your toes into SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, in order to enhance your marketing strategy—the pool may seem deep and daunting. You may be asking yourself, “Where do I even start?” Generally speaking, you need to start by understanding how search engines work and why they are so important to growing your business.

    Search engines like Google and Bing rank your site against competitors and various other sites, offering you a tremendous opportunity to improve your brand’s awareness and ability to be found for keywords that relate to your brand. Without a solid SEO strategy, it will be difficult for your ideal customer to find you when they’re looking for help with the solution to the problem your product or service solves for them.

    We have put together a list of ways to improve your Google rankings with little effort. But first let’s start with the basics, like what is SEO?

    What is SEO?

    SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, stands for the process of optimizing your company’s website to improve rankings and awareness through search engine sites (most often Google). Due to a large market of people constantly searching for terms across the internet, SEO is essential for your brand to be uncovered by visitors through keyword searches that may or may not be directly related to your brand name.

    Further, SEO is a low cost strategy that can produce amazing results for your business. By optimizing your content for search engines, you can ensure your target audience is always able to find you through an organic search. The higher you rank, the more traffic you’re likely to generate to your website. You can save lots of your marketing dollars by not having to pay Google to show your brand on the first page of Google in the search results for the terms that matter to your business.

    Here’s How to Improve SEO

    Ultimately, SEO optimization is neither a one-and-done activity nor a quick fix. In addition to the time it takes to manually update for SEO best practices, it also requires ongoing monitoring. Keep in mind that improvements take time to register with search engines. We typically instruct clients that it takes 8-12 weeks for SEO changes to come to fruition.

    Step 1: Connect Your Site to Search Console

    Search Console is a free, highly important tool provided by Google. Specifically, Search Console is your way of telling Google to index your site, thereby improving your search rankings as Google is able to verify the pages directly.

    Within the Search Console dashboard, you can review site issues that may be affecting your company’s ability to rank higher on Google. We highly recommend that you review your Search Console Core Web Vitals report to see what URLs may be performing poorly and hampering your site’s rankings.

    Further, you can tie back your SEO Results to Google Analytics in order to better understand how visitors are engaging with your site following an organic search click. In case of eCommerce or tracking form submissions through Google Goals, you are able to receive insight into what keywords and pages are driving the most conversions on your site.

    Step 2: Add Keywords to Your Page Titles, Descriptions, URL, and On-Page Content

    There are three important areas where you must incorporate the keyword you wish to target and rank better for in organic searches. In doing so, you are letting search engines know what your page is about and the answers you have to help address the visitor’s search.

    1. Page Title: The Page Title shows up in searches as the blue header text. Search Engines utilize this data to rank pages and it is often helpful to address top-related questions or create an actionable statement in the page title.
    2. Page Description: Similar to the page title, the page description appears in search results as the small text underneath the title. Search Engines display more content in the page description, giving you prime opportunity to write copy that catches the attention of internet users.
    3. URL: Every page on the internet (outside of the home page) has a URL slug following the domain name. This blog’s URL is “/what-is-seo”. It is highly recommended to make this URL contain the keyword as Search Engines will use the URL to determine rankings. Note: Do not change URL unless absolutely necessary or your page will take time to recover lost rankings from a switched URL.

    Step 3: Research and Target Highly Searched Keywords for New Content

    As mentioned, SEO is not a one and done strategy. New content is imperative to continue to rank well on search engines and indicates that your site is still relevant and maintained. Creating new content is the most time-intensive part of a good SEO strategy, and there are a lot of places to start.

    Most often, SEO strategies recommend targeting highly searched keywords. Using free tools, like UberSuggest, you can research how often keywords are being searched and the types of sites that frequently appear in the top rankings for that keyword.

    An easy way to get started is by choosing keywords related to your business and answering commonly asked questions about those keywords. For example, if you sell business consulting services, consider writing an article about what business consulting is. In doing so, you will begin to rank well for highly searched keywords and generate brand awareness.

    Step 4: Utilize SERP Features, such as People Also Ask (PAA)

    What are SERP Features? SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page and the features indicate the different types of results that Google displays. The most common SERP features include the map pack (i.e. when you are trying to find food near you), People Also Ask (a list of common questions and expandable answers), and the answer box (where search engines display a paragraph that may answer the search query).

    SERP Features indicate opportunity in the market to rank well and “bypass” the competition to the first page of search results. In order to bypass, you must optimize your content for the search engine so that information is read and displayed correctly. For example, phrasing your blog to answer a question, like we have done above, tells the search engine that we have an answer for a frequently asked question.

    Bonus Tip: Work with 3rd Party Sites, like Capterra or CIO.com, to Obtain Backlink Traffic

    In some cases, ranking well for keywords may be very difficult. Big sites, like Wikipedia, Capterra or CIO.com, may own the top rankings in search results for keywords with a major market with little opportunity for brands to gain awareness through their own site. When this happens, consider the phrase “If you can’t beat them, join them.”

    A popular strategy for SEO is to partner with these sites and garner backlinks back to your site. For example, sites like Capterra, who review the competitive market, offer opportunities to display your company’s information and in some cases, advertise. By partnering with these sites, you are able to grab traffic through visitors utilizing 3rd party sites to learn more about the companies that offer services they are looking for.

    Through site optimizations and strategic content marketing, you can optimize your site for SEO in order to improve your rankings on major search engines. Though it takes time for results to produce, it is a low cost and effective strategy in order to gain brand awareness. Good luck! If you need support starting out or improving your SEO strategy, reach out to us and an expert from our team can discuss specific business needs with you.

    P.S. An effective content strategy is critical to strong SEO. Download our complimentary eBook to learn how to create content that will actually attract and convert new customers for your business.

    Create Great Content

    We also recently held a webinar with an expert panel where we discuss how you can develop a marketing strategy that directly aligns with your business goals. You can watch the replay here

    Want to talk to someone on our team about how you can put all of these ideas into practice? Just fill out the form below.

    About the Author

    Marketing Manager Dexter Burgess takes the lead on implementing new tactics and promoting change through data-driven strategies. Dex works hard at client relations through consistent communication and positive feedback, never settling until the customer is understood and happy. 

    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.

    Marketing Lead Generation: Low-Budget Ways to Get Qualified Leads

    Marketing Lead Generation: Low-Budget Ways to Get Qualified Leads

    by | Dec 5, 2021 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Business Intelligence & Analytics, General, Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

    Marketing Lead Generation: Low-Budget Ways to Get Qualified Leads

    &Marketing, and marketing, outsourced marketing strategy

    Written By

    On

    When times get tough and budgets are tight, growing businesses are often quick to dub marketing as nonessential, making it one of the first things to go. Based on our experience, this is due to a common misperception that marketing is an expense, not an investment. However, many of these same companies are under pressure to improve customer acquisition, which is an uphill battle without a strategic marketing lead generation plan in place.

    In an age of instant gratification, folks often immediately make cuts to the efforts that have slowburn success because they don’t see enough quick wins and immediate return on investments. Hitting all the right touch points and building relationships takes time, but when time equals money, business often make knee-jerk decisions to slash marketing budgets first.

    Because marketing is an investment, not an expense, you can’t realize its full value based on short-term tactics and quick wins. But as we approach the end of the year, many companies are looking more at inbound marketing and trying to decide how to best invest their dollars for longterm success (spoiler alert: content is still king as 70% of marketers are actively investing in it). If you are working with minimal resources but know some of those resources need to be invested in marketing efforts, we have some low-budget ways you can improve your current marketing lead generation strategy. These three ways include: honing your strategy, leveraging content, and optimization through data.

    1. Hone Your Strategy

    Companies under a tight budget and timeline often make the mistake of skipping strategy and rushing right into tactics in their marketing lead generation efforts. Although perfection is the enemy of progress, preparation and thoughtfulness are not. Whether you’re trying to move quickly, do the bare minimum to preserve your budget, or a combination of the two, diving in blindly can lead to haphazard decision-making and will likely cost you more time and money down the road when you see minimal results and return. If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it, and everyone would be winning!

    When you’re re-examining your strategy, take a closer look at who you’re trying to reach and how you can get in front of your ideal, target customer or client. A few things to consider when doing this are:

    Conducting audience research

    The more you know about your audience, the more you can grow it and convert it. Market and competitor research can help you understand what pains your target decision makers are experiencing and what solutions they’re currently looking for to help ease those pains. Use free tools like SEMRush and UberSuggest to help you identify actual terms your audience is looking for on Google, and poll your existing audience or survey your current customers to find out what’s on their mind. A short and scrappy Google Form can work wonders and doesn’t cost a thing.

    Identifying where your audience spends the most time online

    Knowing what to say to your audience is only half the battle. The other half is figuring out where to reach them. With a tight budget you may need to prioritize just one or two marketing channels to test, so it’s important to do a bit of research to make an informed decision on which channels will yield the best results. Does your existing content get more engagement via email or social media? Does your target audience use one social media platform more than another? You can use your own native analytics and data to help answer these questions (more on that later). For example, when doing this for one of our clients, we uncovered that they had a high email conversation rate despite only sending out occasional emails. By increasing their email cadence, we quickly increased conversions.

    If you want to take this a step further, consider a tool we love called SparkToro, which dives deeper into demographic data and shows you:

    • the companies your target audience follows on social media
    • the articles they’re reading and where they get their news
    • the podcasts they listen to
    • their interests and skill-sets
    • their education
    • and much more!

    If you want to go to the very next level, check out &Marketing’s Business Intelligence and Analytics (B.I.) projects. Our B.I. projects are designed to identify where your audience is most likely to discover information about and related to your business and then create a marketing roadmap  

    2. Leverage messaging and content marketing

    Now that you’ve zeroed in on your most engaged audience, their pain points and interests, and where they get their information, it’s time to start applying that knowledge. Here’s how:

    Refresh your value proposition and key messaging

    Hone in on your value proposition and key messaging specific to the audience you identified as most engaged. By referring to the patterns you identified above, rework your value prop and your brand messaging based on the pain points most relevant to them. This will ensure your message to them is relevant and consistent across all of your marketing materials and the channels you use. Make sure your brand persona and identity aligns with the kind of voice your audience is most likely to seek and trust—you can learn more about that here.

    Repurpose old content

    Before creating new content, consider what you already have. Do you have old blogs, eBooks, or landing pages that speak to trending topics in your industry and the priority pain points you uncovered? Start repromoting this content via the channels you identified earlier. For blog posts in particular, ensure you optimize them for marketing lead generation by adding a clear call-to-action. Readers need to be directed to make a move once they finish consuming your content. Make sure your calls to action make sense, and provide both a primary and transitional option for each content piece.

    Create a new content cadence

    Use your research to identify topics that would resonate most with your audience. Be strategic about the content you create and give your audience a pathway that leads them on a journey straight to your services or products as their solution. You can do this using the traditional marketing funnel, which categorizes content as:

    • Top Funnel: This is the awareness building stage and where you engage your audience using empathy and acknowledge their problem.
    • Mid Funnel: This is where you focus on helping your audience figure out how to actually solve their problem. Most “how to” content falls here, and the middle of the funnel is the perfect place to offer value-packed content that’s gated. Essentially, that means there’s a gate, aka an entry fee to get the content, like an email address. You’re giving them tremendous value, so they’re willing to give you their content information and access to their inbox to grow the relationship.
    • Bottom Funnel: This is the closest your audience gets to buying from you and where you can start to make the direct ask. They just want proof you can provide results at this point, so case studies, statistics, and detailed sell sheets fall under this category. 64% of marketers who launch case studies find them to be effective in generating leads because the increase credibility.

    We’ve put together a robust eBook on exactly how to be intentional about creating continue that actually helps you grow your business. See how we’re practicing what we preach here?

    Get Our Content eBook

    3. Optimize through data

    The more data you have, the more you learn about your audience, and the better you can cater your content and overall marketing to their needs. By reviewing native analytics and data from your email marketing, website, or social media platforms, you can determine which of your existing customers or prospects are most engaged with your brand.

    From there, you can identify valuable patterns. Does your most engaged audience share similar demographic information? Are certain pages of your website receiving the most traffic? Is your audience clicking primarily on top-funnel content (content focused more broadly on a pain point versus your company)? Or are they actively engaged with bottom-funnel content (case studies, free demos, company video tutorials, etc)?

    Sometimes you have to throw marketing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, but at a certain point you need to study what stuck and what didn’t to figure out where to continue to spend your limited resources. Rely on your data to tell you a story, let it speak to you, and listen. Then shuffle your dollars around to learn into what’s working and step back from what isn’t.

    Ready to implement some of these low-cost strategies for marketing lead generation in the new year? Grab our marketing planning workbook below to help you get started.

    Plan Your Marketing

    We also recently held a webinar with an expert panel where we discuss how you can develop a marketing strategy that directly aligns with your business goals. You can watch the replay here

    Want to talk to someone on our team about how you can put all of these ideas into practice? Just fill out the form below.

    About the Author

    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. Follow Paul on LinkedIn.

    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.

    New Google SERP Features: What You Need to Know

    New Google SERP Features: What You Need to Know

    by | Nov 11, 2021 | Business Intelligence & Analytics, General, Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

    New Google SERP Features: What You Need to Know

    &Marketing, and marketing, outsourced marketing strategy

    Written By

    On

    On September 29, 2021 Google announced major updates to its search engine platform and Search Engine Result Page (SERP) features coming in the weeks and months ahead. Like most things in life, Google is ever evolving their platforms to offer users the best experience and help them easily discover the most relevant information while searching. While the user benefits greatly, many businesses must learn to adapt their content and SEO strategies in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest features being launched.

    Google was able to initiate and fast track these new features because they have been utilizing their Multitask Unified Model, (MUM for short), an AI system, to help them understand search information and intent. The information MUM has provided is the foundation of some awesome new Google SERP features being rolled out.

    “We’ve been experimenting with using MUM’s capabilities to make our products more helpful and enable entirely new ways to search. These new features are the latest steps we’re taking to make searching more natural and intuitive.”

    Google

    What is MUM?

    In short, MUM helps Google understand how to simplify searches based on user intent. It’s multimodal, which means it can understand information from different formats like webpages, pictures, and more—simultaneously.

    Some of the new features being rolled out for MUM include:

    • Combining words and images: Google will combine words and images using Google Lens to give you better results.
    • Video: A new feature is coming that identifies related topics in a video.
    • Things to know: Users will be able to explore topics by seeing related subtopics. This will be similar to People Also Ask but allow you to see subtopics that can be selected
    • Refine and broaden searches: These new features will effectively allow you to refine or broaden a search from your initial starting point.
    • About the result: This will be a panel that offers up more information on the website that shows up in search results, such as how a site describes itself and content about it pulled from across the web.
    • Visuals: Available now in the US, Search has a new aesthetic for topics where people are looking for visual inspiration, such as “Christmas decorating ideas.”
    • In stock filters: Google is making it easier to shop by allowing users to filter their searches to only see items that are in stock.
    • Instant shop: For shopping queries, Google Lens will make it easier to instantly shop what you see on a page from the Google app on iOS and from Google Chrome.
    • Shopping Graph database: More than 24 billion listings are teed up for a more browseable shopping experience in Google Search.

    What do these new Google SERP features mean for you?

    It appears Google is leaning heavily into more visual based searches. Although it remains to be seen how business can take advantage of these new features, we’re certain there will be opportunities to enhance your content, your site, and your products/product descriptions/feeds to highlight your business through these new features.

    Google’s core mission is to connect people to information, and these new announcements are all about enabling users to find exactly what they are looking for more easily. What’s more, is Google is continuing to refine and provide new, intuitive ways for users to search. These features may present businesses with the opportunity to get in front of users by connecting a search to another related search, making it crucial for you and your business to properly set up and categorize content.

    If Google makes the data available for exactly what features searchers are using to find and visit your website or content (such as “refine this search” or “people also ask”), you’ll be able to gather insights you can leverage to optimize your customer journey and better learn how to reach your target audiences.

    As more information becomes available, it will be interesting to see if certain schema (or structured data) codes will be needed to add this functionality on your site and search listings in order to make the most out of the new visibility opportunities these features have to offer. Be sure to continue to follow our blog for the latest information as we these details unfold.

    In the meantime, you can learn more about how all of this data should be used as your compass to direct your marketing roadmap through our Business Intelligence & Analytics eBook.

    Download the eBook

    Reach out to our team with any questions you have about the new Google SERP features, your own analytics, or how to use them to make decisions and create content your audience is looking for.

    About the Author

    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. Follow Paul on LinkedIn.

    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.