Year: 2019

Be a Successful Marketer When Politics Aren’t on Your Side

Posted on by Michael Marchese

It seems like wherever we turn, Americans are fast with an increasingly factious political environment.

What was once confined to the halls of the capital has quickly made its way to main street USA. With political upheaval brings economic uncertainty. This is especially true for businesses.

Businesses need a stable economic, tax and political environment to thrive. Absent these three keys, companies have no choice but to take a more conservative and cautious approach to their business. This is especially true with marketing.

Recent gaffs such as Gillette men’s razor blade commercials are proof positive that marketers need to approach their target audiences with an abundance of caution.

What’s a CMO to do?

Fortunately, there are a couple of actions that marketers can take today to ensure that they have the budget and flexibility needed as the political environment iterates further.

Use content outsourcing to turn your fixed costs into variable costs

For most marketing departments, the two largest budgetary components are staff costs and media spend. While it is easier and more enjoyable to manage staff who are full-time and who sit right next to you (at least in most instances!), it can be dreadful having to deliver pink slips.

“At one of my previous companies, I headed up marketing,” commented Michael Marchese, Tempesta Media’s CEO. “It was the autumn of 2000, at the height of the dot com bubble. It felt like the sky was the limit. We were hiring like mad. I had over two dozen full-time staff within my department.

A couple of months later, the bubble burst. My department ultimately was cut from 24 to 4 employees, including myself. Even worse, our newly downsized team ended up taking on responsibilities of two other departments, who were completely eliminated. If I had to do it over, I would have been much more cautious in my hiring and outsourced more of the work to vendors.”

Before you go ahead and hire the next FTW (full-time employee), think twice. If 80%+ of the work can be done outside the company, outsource it. Don’t even hesitate. Just do it. What your marketing department loses in cost or productivity will be more than made up for in budgetary flexibility.

taking decision

Lock in annual contracts or not

For companies that do outsource, there are a few approaches that you can take with how you structure the contract. If your marketing budget is going to get cut, give yourself flexibility by securing subscriptions that renew on a monthly or quarterly basis.

If you are trying to lock in cost savings or fear that inflation is upon us (US inflation rates have been creeping upward), your best bet is to lock in your rates now with either an annual or multi-annual contract. Marketers can save 10% or more by locking in long-range contracts. As an example, Tempesta Media offers discounts on annual contracts.

For the content marketing industry, freelance writer pay rates have been increasing at an annualized rate of over 20% for the past 12 months.  Eventually, those cost increases are going to flow through to you.

Stress test your contingency plan

By nature, most marketers are optimistic people. They tend to look to the bright side because their jobs require them to constantly be promoting their companies.

Sometimes that optimism can be a marketer’s worst enemy. More often than not, marketers can end up putting their departments in a difficult and comfortable position because they believed their own marketing spin.To save yourself potential future pain of suffering, make sure you develop a contingency plan and budget for the unlikely event that something does not go right.

At Tempesta Media, all managers are required to submit both their draft annual operating budget along with an accompanying contingency plan. That contingency plan is based on two scenarios: one where the company falls 20% short of its annual objectives and the other where the company ends up more than 20% ahead of its annual objectives. Managers are forced to think through in advance what would happen if their budgets were cut by 20% to 40% or conversely increased.

While planning for the upside is immeasurably easier and more enjoyable, contingency planning for a potential downside is a sobering exercise. Managers quickly see how a downside environment, political or otherwise, can impact their department. It brings to the forefront the difficult decisions that they might face.

That reality helps them to better adjust their draft annual operating budgets to take into account potential planned contingencies.

For marketers in 2019, it’s no longer good enough to just meet your numbers.

Because of the environment we all face today, marketers have to plan their departments for an uncertain environment. Outsourcing, contract strategy and contingency planning are all critical tools that marketers should not overlook within their toolbox.

How to Allocate Your Content Marketing Budget Between Creation and Promotion

Posted on by Michael Marchese

The ideal allocation that we’ve seen across our customer base ranges from two to three times the amount spent on content.

That means that if you’re putting a budget together for every dollar that you spend on creating the content, you should spend an additional $2 to $3 dollars on promoting the content. Many companies in the B2B space don’t have a very large social media presence or prospect database of which to work with, so they have limited distribution on what they can do with their content.

Oftentimes, they’re going to post that content to their blog. They may share a snippet of it with their social networks or send out an email that invites prospects and customers to go and read the blog post. Even if a customer or company does all those things, it’s not enough. To be able to go to move the needle significantly, companies need to look at other ways that they can go and promote that content on the internet.

Allocating the right budget

Before you determine how you’re going to go and promote the content, you need to establish a budget. For example, most pieces of content typically run between $100 and $300. To ensure success, you should allocate between $600 and $900 per content for the promotion of it.

bullseye content marketing

Establishing goals

This is going to vary depending on what types of goals you have before you even get started with any type of content marketing program. You need to have clearly established and quantifiable goals so you can measure how well your content marketing programs are doing for B2B companies. The best approach is establishing multiple goals depending on where a prospect comes into your company and how they ultimately come out as a sale.

Your goals for each part of the funnel vary:

Top funnel – Goals include visitors to your website, time spent on your website, number of page views.

Middle funnel – Goals can include where they have gone and read other content on your site or whether they have gone and signed up for a newsletter. These goals can also be whether they’ve downloaded a new guide.

Bottom funnel – Goals are associated with things such as leads and sales.

How do you create goals?

First, you need to have a balanced set of goals equally weighted based on what your company’s corporate objectives are.

Next, establish is what is the cost per sale and cost per lead. That should be coming from this program versus your other digital marketing programs for content marketing. It works differently than what you see with traditional media.

For example, if you were to run a Google AdWords campaign, the amount of money that you spend is directly correlated to the immediate actions that happen. Let’s say you bid on certain keywords such as “content marketing” and allocate $500, that money is going to be spent fairly quickly.

Whatever happens as a result of that, in terms of clicks to your website is fairly instantaneous.

There is also little tail effect that comes with it. This means your campaign is only going to produce as well as that first 30-day period by which the campaign is run.

Another example is email. When you run an email campaign, you send that email out and the vast majority of the responses come in within the first 96 hours.

In fact, over 90 percent of all responses come in within the first 96 hours. So that means you’re going to know pretty quickly whether your campaign is successful or not and what the cost per lead is.

Content operates very differently from this. When content is first published, there is going to be some initial pickup that comes with it in terms of traffic leads and so forth. However, unlike other marketing channels, the real benefit with content marketing is that performance, while it does dissipate to some degree, continues for an extended period of time.

This is because the content itself is evergreen by nature, especially within the new site. Over time, as you start compounding and adding other pieces of content to your content marketing campaign, you start picking up higher rankings within search engines. This means more organic traffic coming in. On the social side, you start to see some veracity that happens especially if you create some compelling content.

Finally, on the influencer side, it’s content syndication. If those are running for an extended period, you’ll also pick up from that. You need to keep that in mind when you’re trying to determine what the financial goals and cost per lead are.

With a content marketing program, traditional digital media campaigns are running in 30-day increments. This means that most of your results all happen within a 30-day period. Content marketing does not have that same alignment. Most of your spending is done within the 30-day period. However, the performance is advertised over a very long period and could be up to 2 years.

notes

What are the best ways to budget for content marketing?

For small companies that are $5 million or less in revenue, they can go with anywhere from two to four pieces of content per month. They can also allocate on the ratios between promotion and creation.

On the B2C side, it’s the same thing. If you are a company between $5 million and $50 million in revenue, you’re large enough to have a much more robust content marketing program. From there, you can start introducing other portions of an overall content marketing budget. You can include content analysis and content strategy, which requires heavier allocation.

Promotion is even more dramatic as well as the content frequency. What we’re seeing is that companies are allocating anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000 of content marketing spend on an annual basis. If you’re under $5 million dollars in revenue, we’re seeing anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 being spent.

The percentage is being allocated by size of the company. Smaller companies tend to spend a larger percentage of their digital marketing budget on content marketing than larger companies do. This is because content marketing has a much higher ROI associated with other marketing channels for larger companies.

Content marketing is an excellent channel for them, but they very quickly reach saturation. It forces them to go into other digital marketing programs to build that success.

Tempesta Media’s Simple Social Share

Tempesta Media offers a micro-influencer solution called Simple Social Share. It allows companies to be able to go and invite micro-influencers to share the content that we create on their behalf with their social media followers. What this does is it creates an amplification effect and drives new people.

This can be incredibly cost-effective, and it’s just one of many different ways that are available to promote the content.

Content Formats That Are Effective and Relevant to Education

Posted on by Michael Marchese

Most businesses understand by now that content is king.

Unfortunately, however, most businesses do not have quite the same understanding about what makes content good and how to promote that content across platforms where their target audience will find it.

This is especially true in the education industry, which is struggling with declining enrollment numbers and fierce competition. Research shows that many people these days skim, rather than read, content. If this is true, then how can education institutions attract and retain interest throughout the buying cycle?

The answer lies in creating effective and relevant content formats that are properly distributed to a target audience. Here are three strategies institutions can employ to achieve this goal:

Recognize the powerful effect of improved content and web writing

Studies have found that only 16 percent of people read website content word for word. Instead, most people skim until they find words and sentences that are intriguing.

This means that education institutions must use “scannable text,” such as meaningful keywords, subheadings and bulleted lists that make it easy for readers to scan and consume content.

For example, this is one way to write a sentence about new school courses:
Our university now offers five new courses: the science of sustainability, the future of AI, gaming technology, live video marketing and augmented reality in healthcare.
Or it could be written:
Our university now offers five new courses:

  • The science of sustainability.
  • The future of AI.
  • Gaming technology.
  • Live video marketing.
  • Augmented reality in health care.

Notice how the second example jumps off the page more because it includes bullet points, and each course has its own line, providing clarity and making the content more readable?

6 tips for copywriters struggling with writer’s block

Understand how concise text and objective language can make every word count

Scannable text is not the only way to make content for education institutions readable and therefore more likely to reach a target audience. Using concise text and objective language is an effective way of communicating information without resorting to promotional content that can turn off many readers.

Promotional content that uses words like “the hottest course on campus,” or “the best faculty in the world” is often seen as boastful instead of useful. Readers expect a business to make these claims, but unless they are substantiated with evidence like actual rankings and ratings, they mean little. Instead, education institutions should make sure that their content is filled with text and language that sticks to the point without exaggeration.

For example, instead of a sentence like this one: Our university has the best faculty in the country and the most diverse student body possible…

A sentence like this one might be better: Sixty-six percent of our faculty have doctorate degrees, which ranks fifth nationally, and 55% of our student body is from another country.

The goal with any piece of content is readability, so sticking to objective language and concise text makes every word count and offers readers a more harmonious experience.

Understand why and how to capitalize on social media marketing

Education institutions must not simply create content for their websites, but must also distribute that content on social media platforms where their audiences gather.
There are several ways that schools can use social media marketing, including:

  • Promote culture, curriculum and campus activities – Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are ideal outlets for schools to brand their “product.” Whether it is posting pictures of a campus activity, showing students applying knowledge in real-life settings, or highlighting a specific program that received accolades, social media is a powerful way to reach prospects.
  • Promote research activities – Schools can use social media to promote new research that has gained attention, and spotlight faculty and students who have gained recognition for their research work.
  • Engage donors to raise money – Schools can create social media campaigns such as donor match challenges for alumni and live streaming of fundraising events to engage existing and prospective donors. Columbia’s 2012 Giving Day Campaign, which relied heavily on social media promotion, raised $7.8 million in one day.

Create and distribute

Education institutions that create quality content that is concise and informative, and distribute that content on social media platforms where their target audience gathers will maximize their marketing toward prospects.

If you need help creating a content marketing plan, please contact us today.

How Writers Can Improve Their Writing

Posted on by Anastasiia Lavrinenko

Writers often ask, “How can I get paid more for the content that I create?” In order to learn the answer to that question, you have to understand the cost components that go into creating and publishing a piece of content.

Only then can you understand the key levers at your disposal for getting paid more.

Content cost drivers

While this list does not intend to be comprehensive, it does provide a good framework for calculating the total cost of content.

  • Content strategy development – Someone needs to spend time putting together an effective content strategy that seamlessly integrates with the overall digital and offline marketing program, as well as the company’s corporate strategy. As one of many other components, the content strategy outlines the metrics that will be measured and establishes specific goals that need to be achieved. Depending on the size of the organization, budget and expertise, this effort can take anywhere from a dozen hours to hundreds of hours to develop, refine and get approved.
  • Content marketing budget development and approval – This is the pot of money that is allocated toward executing the content strategy. The budget includes money for management of the program, content creation and content distribution. Generally, it is recommended that the content distribution line item be at least equal to the content creation expense line item.
  • Editorial calendar creation – The editorial calendar takes the content strategy and turns it into an executable plan. Editorial calendars define the type, frequency and focus of planned content. The density and time period for the editorial calendar will be driven by the content marketing budget.
  • Content creation budget – Within this budget, there are several major expense components: writing expense, editing expense, workflow and plagiarism screening expense, and management expense. For most writers, the amount they get paid for content comes out of the writing expense line item.

content marketing strategy

The workflow and plagiarism screening and management expense are generally fixed costs and considered sunk costs (meaning that they are overhead and cannot easily be cut). The writing and editing expenses are generally variable costs.

With this newfound knowledge on how content marketing costs are budgeted, let’s talk about how your writing affects your pay rate.

Let’s say you write a 1,000-word blog post and are paid $X to do so. The company who has hired you has to spend $Y to edit your work. If what you submitted requires a significant amount of editing and re-work, the company’s editing costs go up.

Therefore, to compensate for this budget shortfall, the company is going to pay you less for your work going forward.

Correspondingly, you submit a 1,000-word blog post, but this time it is incredibly well-written. In this scenario, the editor spent less time editing your article. The company’s editing costs went down. Therefore, the company has more flexibility in their budget to pay you more for your work going forward. The reason being is that the company is now spending less time on editing costs.

One might ask, “What prevents the company from pocketing the savings as a result of your hard work?” It is true; some short-sighted companies may choose to do so.

Given that freelance writer turnover is significant, most companies will opt to pass the majority (if not all) of those savings onto you, instead of having to deal with the hassle and time of finding, vetting, hiring and training a new writer.

Improving your writing quality

Here are 5 specific and actionable recommendations that can help you improve your writing quality fast.

  1. Follow grammar rules.
  2. Use a style guide.
  3. Do your research.
  4. Optimize your content for your audience and search engines.
  5. Write engaging blog posts and thought leadership

You have more control over what you are paid than you realize. Creating high-quality, error-free content, which closely aligns with a customer’s voice, tone, style and culture, is the key to maximizing your writing pay rate.

Do You Need Estimated Reading Times, Part 3: What Are the Best Practices?

Posted on by Anastasiia Lavrinenko

Reading time does increase customer engagement, but it does not apply to all types of content under 1,000 words.

Adding reading times specifically relates to the audience. Most often, people arrive at blog post because they’ve done searches on search engines or clicked on social media links that direct them to that page. They needed a specific answer or very specific information for whatever it isthey’re trying to accomplish.

They are also educating themselves or trying to learn more about your company’s products or services. As a result, they need to be able to see how long it’s going to take to be able to obtain that information by putting their average reading time.

In my experience, I’ve seen that reading time improves two key statistics: time spent on site and bounce rate. If you include the reading time associated with your blog, you should be able to see an improvement of up to 20 percent in both of those metrics in a positive manner.

When it comes to longer form content such as e-guides, white papers, and e-books, including an estimated reading time is not recommended. I don’t recommend it because of the objective you wish to achieve for the reader. The reader isn’t reading an e-guide or e-book to obtain very specific information or knowledge. It’s actually much more broad. They’re trying to educate themselves on a much larger topic or area.

As a result, the reading time is not appropriate because they’re already prepared to make a significant investment of their time reading the content that you’re providing.

be creative

What makes an article attractive to readers? What is the impact of newsworthy versus evergreen content?

It’s important to differentiate both short-form versus long-form content, what makes it attractive and why is it important. It’s going to help the readers determine whether they want to make the investment. We need to further bifurcating this between B2C and B2B readers. Shorter form content makes sense for B2B readers.

However, I do want to differentiate between line staff and executive staff. Executives are especially pressed for time. As a result, they are much more judicious on how they allocate their time throughout the day.

In addition to providing the estimated reading time to potential B2B executives, you should also provide a punchy and short introduction to your article before the actual article begins. Sharp introductions should consist of one to two sentences and a couple of bullet points clearly describing what the contents are about and what value the reader is going to obtain by reading it.

By including that information, you’re much more likely to get the executives that continue to read on and potentially forward the content to subordinates within the organization.

In summary, having an estimated reading time for most situations makes sense. However, be sure to focus more on short-form than long-form content.
 

Marketing Ideas During Difficult Political Times Like a Government Shutdown

Posted on by Michael Marchese

It seems like wherever we turn, Americans are fast with an increasingly factious political environment. 

What was once confined to the halls of the capital has quickly made its way to main street USA.  With political upheaval brings economic uncertainty.  This is especially true for businesses.

Businesses need a stable economic, tax and political environment to thrive.  When these three keys are absent, companies have no choice but to take a more conservative and cautious approach to their business.  This is especially true with marketing.

Recent gaffs like Gillette’s mens razor blade commercials are proof positive that marketers need to approach their target audiences with an abundance of caution.  

What’s a CMO to do?

Fortunately, there are a couple of actions that marketers can take today to ensure that they have the budget and flexibility needed as the political environment iterates further.

Use content outsourcing to turn your fixed costs into variable costs

For most marketing departments, the two largest budgetary components are staff costs and media spend.  While it is easier and more enjoyable to manage staff, who are full-time and who sit right next to you (at least in most instances!), it can be dreadful having to deliver pink slips.

“At one of my previous companies, I headed up marketing”, commented Michael Marchese, Tempesta Media’s CEO. “It was the autumn of 2000, at the height of the dot com bubble.  It felt like the sky was the limit.  We were hiring like mad.  I had over two dozen full-time staff within my department.  A couple of months later, the bubble burst.  My department ultimately was cut and I went from managed 24 people to 3. Even worse, our newly downsized team ended up taking on responsibilities of two other departments, who were completely eliminated.  If I had to do it over, I would have been much more cautious in my hiring and outsourced more of the work to vendors.”

Before you go ahead and hire the next FTW (full-time employee), think twice.  If 80%+ of the work can be done outside the company, outsource it.  Don’t even hesitate.  Just do it.  What your marketing department loses in cost or productivity will be more than made up for in budgetary flexibility.

taking decision

Lock in annual contracts or not

If your company does outsource, there are two approaches that you can take with how you structure the contract.  If you feel that your marketing budget is going to get cut, give yourself flexibility by securing subscriptions that renew on a monthly or quarterly basis.

If you are trying to lock in cost savings or fear that inflation is upon us (US inflation rates have been creeping upward), your best bet is to lock in your rates now with either an annual or multi-annual contract.  Marketers can save 10% or more by locking in long-range contracts.  As an example, Tempesta Media offers discounts on annual contracts.

For the content marketing industry, freelance writer pay rates have been increasing at an annualized rate of over 20%, for the past 12 months.  Eventually, those cost increases are going to flow through to you.

Stress test your contingency plan

Most marketers, by nature, are optimistic people.  They tend to look to the bright side.  Why?  Because their jobs require them to constantly be promoting their companies.

Sometimes that optimism can be a marketer’s worst enemy.  More often than not, marketers can end up putting their departments in a difficult and comfortable position, because they believed their own marketing spin.

To save yourself potential future pain of suffering, make sure you develop a contingency plan and budget for the unlikely event that something does not go right.

At Tempesta Media, all managers are required to submit both their draft annual operating budget along with an accompanying contingency plan.  That contingency plan is based on two scenarios: one where the company falls 20% short of its annual objectives; the other where the company ends up more than 20% ahead of its annual objectives. 

Managers are forced to think through in advance what would happen if their budgets were cut by 20% – 40%, or conversely increased. While planning for the upside is immeasurably easier and more enjoyable. 

Contingency planning for a potential downside is a sobering exercise.

Very quickly managers see how a downside environment, political or otherwise, can impact their department.  It brings to the forefront the difficult decisions that they might face.  That reality helps them better adjust their draft annual operating budgets to take into account potential planned contingencies.

For marketers in 2019, it’s no longer good enough to just meet your numbers.  Because of the environment we all face today, marketers have to plan their departments for an uncertain environment.  Outsourcing, contract strategy and contingency planning are all critical tools that marketers should not overlook within their toolbox.

Marketing Ideas to Be Productive When Working From Home

Posted on by Michael Marchese

In Chicago, the weather has turned completely frigid and is reaching record lows.

Record negative temperatures means schools are closed and many people in the Midwest are stuck working at home. Working from home can be a huge luxury. Many employers list it is a perk on job descriptions. But with so many flexibility, freedom, and potential distractions, what are some best practices?

Marketing projects to do when working remotely

Nurturing campaigns

Nurturing campaigns can take a lot of time to plan and execute. Writing the emails, developing the content assets, and implementing the workflows are not easy tasks.

Plus, it is hard to do when there are lots of distractions. Use the time at home to develop the emails and plan what content assets needs to be created. I always find that nurturing campaigns seem more daunting than they are – you just have to get started!

Analysis

Use the time to see how your marketing programs are performing. Take a deeper dive into some of the following metrics and see where you need to focus more energy on:

google analytics

Google Analytics

  • Bounce rate
  • Organic traffic

SEO

  • Page errors
  • Redirects
  • Broken Links
  • Page Indexing
  • Meta descriptions and meta titles

Landing Pages

  • Keyword optimization
  • Conversion rates

Google AdWords

  • Bidding strategies
  • Negative keywords
  • Any new trends and google updates

Content Marketing

content marketing

Content Marketing

How is your editorial calendar? Are you keeping up with your blog? Take advantage of the quiet to list off topics that would be great for your editorial calendar. Use this time to even develop some blog posts so that you can stay ahead of the game.

Prioritize your time and marketing projects

Make sure that you keep track of how much time you are spending on different projects, as often times we aren’t using our time effectively. If there are areas where you are stretched too thin, consider finding a partner that can help take some of that off your plate.

Do You Need Estimated Reading Times Part 2: What Is Ideal?

Posted on by Anastasiia Lavrinenko

Most bloggers and corporate sites struggle to balance quantity versus quality when it comes to creating blog posts for their constituents. One of the measures used to generate an estimated reading time is the number of words in the blog post.

Recently, a lot of the data has been pointing toward a longer blog post being better from a search engine optimization perspective. However, from a readers perspective, readers have less and less time available and therefore, readers demand more value for the content that they’re reading in a shorter period of time. This divergence is creating an issue with time spent on site and what I’d call abandonment rates with people coming to the site and quickly bouncing away from it.

We recommend that the content pieces and blog posts should be somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words and should really focus on top of funnel visitors. Top of funnel visitors are are new visitors who are coming to your site. What you’re trying to do is generate awareness of your solution by generating some initial interest. Middle of the funnel content, which is content that should be between 1,000 and 2,500 words, should really focus on educating the customers and ultimately getting them to take a certain action for the purposes of this article.

content marketing

How much time is the ideal reading time for a blog article?

We’re going to focus on blog posts that are at the top funnel. At that level, I consider it a win when a reader spends more than two minutes on your site reading a piece of content.

So if you’re trying to determine the estimated reading time, you really should focus on pieces being between 2 and 4 minutes in length to read for shorter blog posts. A reading time of 2 to 4 minutes with a strong introduction will have a much lower bounce rate. Anything less than a minute on the page itself is going to create a bounce in terms of Google Analytics and SEO, so it’ll actually work against you. We try to make sure that these posts are short, punchy, to the point and really geared toward the awareness level.

For us, we target two to four minutes in length for the mid funnel-based content. It’s quite common to see someone spend 5 to 15 minutes reading that. Those are great pieces for SEO improvements. While blog posts are excellent pieces to help drive awareness through social media and morality.

To have a successful campaign, you shouldn’t just focus on an absolute metric of reading time. You should balance that between what you’re trying to accomplish and where the content fits within your overall sales and customer acquisition funnel.

In short, blog post should be 2 to 4 minutes reading time, and longer informative articles should be between 5 and 15 minutes in reading time.

How Do I Measure My B2B Versus B2C Content Marketing Program?

Posted on by Michael Marchese

Before starting a content marketing program, both B2B and B2C companies need to establish goals.

Examples of content marketing goals include:

  • Brand awareness
  • Leads
  • Sales
  • Website Traffic
  • Decrease sales cycle time
  • Improve customer satisfaction
  • And more… content marketing can have an impact on many different areas of a business

B2C content marketing goals

For B2C companies it is going to be about building brand awareness. The way brand awareness is measured is how you’re trending in the social media networks or Google Trends. Brand awareness can also be measured based on how much traffic you’re getting to your website or how many likes you’re getting on Facebook and Twitter. Those are going to be key measurements of success to see how engaged your audience is with your brand.

Secondary metrics that companies can use are channel sales, or how your sales are improving within the channel. For example, if I sell bubblegum and I sell it through 7-Eleven, Costco, and Wal-Mart, I’m going to measure success as being driving more sales at those stores for my bubblegum.

goal

B2B content marketing goals

On the B2B side, it’s actually quite different. Many B2B companies don’t really care about traffic. They’re going to be measuring leads and sales. Another key indicator for success is how a B2B company is doing compared to their competitors. Are they now ahead of their competitor on search engines for certain keyword races? Have they now established themselves as a thought leader within the space? These are the goals to be companies will be using.

What if I don’t know how to measure my marketing program?

For most companies that are just getting started in content marketing, I recommend that they go and install Google Analytics on their website. It’s free. It takes a couple minutes to install especially if you’re using a WordPress-based website. It will give you a quick overview of how much traffic and other basic metrics you’re getting to your website.

Tempesta Media will be rolling out a content analytics module within the next quarter that will be able to provide much more in-depth analytics on how your content marketing program is performing across your various channels, including your website.

Content Marketing for Startups

Posted on by Michael Marchese

A lot of startup companies are driven by people with deep technology expertise, for example, programmers or engineers, who had a great idea about a product or service.

They started developing a product or service in the hopes of ultimately being able to serve their audience. The challenge that nearly every startup faces is how you go about attracting and getting the attention of prospective customers, when you have so little budget to work with.

Start by building your website

From my own experience, my advice to startups is to create a website, even if your product or service isn’t at market yet. Get your domain up and get at least a couple pages on the website. Get an ability for prospective customers to get added to your newsletter and spend your first marketing dollars on content marketing.

It pays not to wait

Content marketing, by its very nature, takes anywhere from three to nine months (on average, 6 months) to be able to start getting traction. If you’re early on with your company and you haven’t yet launched your product or service, that lead time that you spend by building up your content marketing in your domain presence within the internet will be invaluable to use when you do launch. When it comes time to launch your new offering, you’ll already have an established presence online.

The number one mistake that startups make worldwide: They wait until their product is launched before they start doing any marketing. I would contend that startups should start marketing the day that the company becomes incorporated. This is step one.

Start with a Blog page

Step two is determining what kind of content you should create and how you should do it. The purpose is to get your content indexed within the search engines so that it can start ranking. You really need to publish at least once a week. Something that I recommend is that you get a Blog started on your website. Even if your site only has two or three pages, such as a Home page and About Us or Contact Us, there should be one more page called Blog. If you are opposed to calling it “Blog” other names could be “Insights”, “News”, “Thought Leadership”… you get the idea.

By establishing a repetitive cadence of publishing new content at least weekly, Google or the other search engines will start recognizing that you exist. They will start including those pages within their index for their search engine.

Keep in mind, you’re not going to show up high on any of the keyword terms that you aim to achieve for your business, but at least you are getting indexed. You have built up an initial reputation. Once you launch your product and/or service, then you should rapidly increase your cadence on content marketing. Your blog cadence should ultimately get to once a day. You should also make sure that you have your social media presence. So if you’re a B2B company, you should be on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re a B2C company, you should be on Twitter and Facebook, and/or potentially Instagram.

There are software plugins within WordPress that most companies start with at their website that automatically take your blog posts, create snippets of it, and publish it to your social media accounts. I strongly recommend that startups create a system to effectively promote their content to their website and across their social media channels. Once they’ve gone and started that baseline, then they’ll benefit from some initial traction.

taking decision

Create your buyer personas

Now, let’s talk about what is it that you should write about (or have written for you). Before you could even do that, you have to understand who your target audience is. Most companies, especially startups, will have one or more target audiences whom they’re trying to go after. It is actually true for startups because they haven’t quite narrowed down who is the right buyer of their product and service. In many instances, the startups haven’t even launched a product or service yet.

What we recommend is that you create a persona for each and every audience that you’re going after. That persona will include who it is that you’re targeting, their motivations, what they’re like (demographically or otherwise), and what it is that you want to convey to these people that is of importance to them or solves their pain points.

At Tempesta Media, these style guides for content or personas are what we call our Voice Profile. We include these to our assignments for every single one of our customers. It’s the most basic thing that needs to get into place before you can really start any content marketing.

Start with the right keywords

The next thing that you’ll need to do is you’ll need to identify the keyword phrases to target and ultimately rank for on the search engines.

For example, if you’re a credit card company, you don’t go trying to say “I want to rank number one in the world for credit cards.” It’s just not going to happen right off the bat. Pick some two-, three-, or four-word keyword phrases that have relatively low competition and search. You can start to rank by creating content that specifically targets those keyword phrases and appeal to the audiences who would be interested in those.

That’s where startups should start within the first three to six months of launching their content marketing. Get some early successes with these smaller keyword phrases because when you get successes with those that you build up, you gain more authority within the search engines, which means more traffic to your site. It also means that it’s going to be easier for you to rank on the higher keyword phrases or the ones that have higher volume or competition. Content marketing best practices for SEO also recommend that the the keyword phrase be in your meta title and descriptions as well.

Geotags matter, sometimes

If you do a geographic attack to it, like for example, a “lending company in Chicago”, that’s actually a whole different keyword phrase. When using geotags, best practices depend on the type of product or service you’re offering. Let’s say you’re a dry cleaner. Having the geographic appendage added to your keyword phrases is absolutely imperative because if you’re a dry cleaner in Chicago, you don’t want to attract visitors that are from Texas.

Nine Tips for Implementing Your Content Marketing Program tips

Take your customers to the next step

The next step that a customer needs to do to get their content marketing strategy off the ground is to determine what action that you want your visitor to take. In marketing terms, this is called the buyer’s journey.

Once someone is on your website and has read an article – it is time to determine what they should do next. If you’re a startup and you don’t have your product in the market, start off with something that is very low commitment from the visitors perspective. You can ask them if they want to sign up for a newsletter at the end of the article or recommend other articles that may be of value to them. This builds your credibility, keeps the prospect engage, and serves as another relationship touch point.

The more content someone reads, the more they’re going to gain an affinity toward your company. They will also positively view your company and be more likely to buy from you in the future. So at the end of each piece of content, there should be some sort of call to action. At the start, it should be something as simple as “here are some other articles that you might be interested in” or “download this e-guide on how to do X Y and Z” or “sign up for our newsletter to get timely briefings on content marketing.”

There always should be a call to action because even though start ups have numerous priorities and initiatives, there’s nothing wrong with building up a newsletter and an email list early on. There’s nothing wrong with building up an affinity with your prospective buyers.

There was one company that didn’t launch for 12 months. Within that 12-month period, they built up excitement about their potential launch through their website. They added hype right on the front page “Sign up here to be informed when we will launch.” So almost 25,000 people had signed up for their solution before it even was launched. The moment that launched, they had tremendous success right out the door because of the material that they used to build up the momentum.

Repurpose old content

The last thing that startups tend to tend to overlook is repurposing the content that’s being created. When sharing content, you can use snippets when posting in your social media networks. The other thing that’s incredibly effective as well is using micro influencer marketing to start getting the word out about what you’re talking about.

Tempesta Media offers a micro influencer marketing solution, which is very inexpensive from a budget perspective. It could be quite effective when used in conjunction with a content marketing or your SEO program.

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