2019 - Page 9 of 11 - Outsource Digital Marketing With Tempesta Media

How to Convince Your Boss That Content Marketing Is Important

Posted on February 22, 2019September 3, 2023 by Michael Marchese

We all know how difficult it can be to convince your boss of something, especially when they are set in their ways.

However, when there’s a business case, it’s really important to make sure you stick to the facts and talk about the return on investment. Content marketing is a perfect example of something they can be discussed using real statistics in your industry.

Start at the beginning about what content marketing is

Content marketing could be considered something new and revolutionary (even though it’s not new anymore :). So when you talk about your company’s current state of content marketing, don’t jump to where you want to be.

Explain what content marketing is.
Tie content marketing into your other marketing channels and your overall sales process.
Explain the difference in buying patterns today. Today buyers aren’t waiting for the phone to ring to learn more about your company, they are doing the research on their own to educate themselves about your industry, your business, your products. Keep in mind, they are also doing this for your competitors, so lets hope you have better content than they do!
Focus on your particular industry and don’t get lost in the weeds.

Examples of companies that are benefiting from content marketing

The examples provide a visual and practical solution for your boss to interpret. The examples are most practical if they can relate to your business and industry. When elaborating on these examples, explain the outcome after implementing a content marketing program. Some examples of great content marketing programs can be found here: 16 Companies Dominating the World With Content Marketing Campaigns.

Use numbers to explain the cost of not utilizing content marketing

CEO’s love numbers – especially when the numbers relate to increased sales, increased revenue, and increased leads. Here are a few ideas to demonstrate how content marketing is a strategic investment for your business.

Conversion rate – content marketing assets could improve your pipeline conversion rate – even by
Nurturing program – calculate the number of dead leads you have and a 2% conversion rate per each nurturing email for the ROI of using content marketing for a nurturing campaign. Increased website traffic – use the cost per lead across a brand value for your company to demonstrate the impact.

We have a great resource for you: Infographic: Consequences of Not Using Content Marketing

Website Traffic | Content Marketing for Revenue Growth and Increased Leads: Part 2

Posted on February 21, 2019September 3, 2023 by Michael Marchese

“If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is around to actually hear it – did it make a sound?“

Perhaps you’ve heard this age-old debate. It’s quite fitting for this chapter, where we will talk about distribution methods for content and website structure tactics for maximum engagement. That’s because your content can be some of the best your industry has ever seen – but if no one actually sees the content, it’s as if it doesn’t exist.

1. Before anything else, know your audience

Who are you trying to reach?
What is a typical day in their lives like?
How old are they? Where do they live? What do they want?
You can’t create amazing content that quality leads will want to read if you don’t know who you’re creating the content for.

2. Build a solid foundation

Create epic, cornerstone, evergreen, keyworded, visually rich content. Here’s what we mean:

Epic. Create long-form content that tells a compelling story and offers useful solutions.
Cornerstone. Your content needs to be authoritative. Show that you know your business inside and out.
Evergreen. Your content should be relevant no matter the time of year or what’s going on in the news. It’s always there to help when people need it.
Keyworded. Use primary keywords for what you’re trying to be found for. Don’t forget secondary keywords as well as long-tail keywords that consider every last type of potential customer who may need you.
Visually rich. Pepper your content with relevant, appealing images and graphics that help to tell your story and make your points.

3. Utilize your owned media

Post the content on your company blog and distribute via company social media channels. Include the content in your e-newsletter, and use it to gather more subscribers.

Now, reach a little further.

Reach out to relevant bloggers and ask for guest blogging opportunities.
Reach out to relevant social media influencers and ask them to review and write about your product or service.
Consider sponsored content by using resources such as Outbrain or LinkedIn Sponsored Content.

4. Drive traffic to your content with search engine optimization (SEO)

When you know your audience and have fully defined the different faces and personalities that an ideal lead can embody, your SEO strategy can begin to take shape. When you know your leads, it’s easier to pinpoint what they might be looking for when they happen to find your content instead.

Find target keywords. Do your research – For example, put some possible keywords into a Google search and see what comes up. Are your competitors ranking for those terms? Then maybe you should be, too.

Monitor search engine results page (SERP) rankings. When someone searches for one of your target keywords, where are you in the results? Are you on Page 1? Are you not there at all? Continuously monitor your SERP rankings for your blog posts and website and adjust as needed.

Optimize your homepage and blog.

Use keyword research tools to help build and then narrow down a solid list.
Audit your website content to ensure it follows SEO best practices.
- Does your website use keyword-rich titles?
- Is the text broken up into short paragraphs using easy-to-read, plain language?
- Do you use lists where possible to help break up text?
- Are relevant links to other websites peppered throughout your content to help it build backlinks and authority?
- Scan for mistakes.
  - Don’t overdo it on the keywords – search engines can figure out what you’re up to and penalize your website for it.
  - Don’t duplicate content on your site.
  - Fix broken links.
  - Convert to an SSL website. Switching to https:// preserves your referral data and assures both search engine and visitors that you provide a safe online experience.

Utilize social media. Remember when we talked about where your potential leads hang out? Well, chances are, they’re hanging out on social media, but WHERE on social media?

Focus your efforts. It’s very tempting to be everywhere at any time to appeal to as many potential customers as possible, but this isn’t the way to go. Find out where your customers hang out and then focus on preferably no more than two or three social networks. Better to be amazing at a couple than spread too thin across many.

Leverage audience targeting. Facebook is particularly good at this. Using your social networks’ analytics capabilities, zero in on who engages with your content the most and then cater to their habits, such as the times of day that they are likely to be online.

Bake social into your website. Make sure your website prominently utilizes social sharing buttons.

Questions to Ask a Content Marketing Candidate During an Interview

Posted on February 20, 2019November 27, 2024 by Michael Marchese

Interviews are a great way to examine a candidates qualifications and also see if the candidate is a good cultural fit for your business.

Interviews are a bad recruitment tool if the candidate fools you into hiring them or doesn’t perform well in an interview setting. Nevertheless, it is nearly impossible to hire employees without an interview. We’ve gone ahead and compiled some questions to ask next time you interview someone for a content marketing position.

External competition and content marketing recommendations

Asking about the competition it’s a great idea – in almost any interview. In regards to a content marketing interview, dive deeper by asking some of the following questions:

Who would you say are our companies biggest competitors?
What are your thoughts on the competition?
What do you think our company is doing well compared to the competition?
How do you think our company could improve on after considering the competition?

Asking for competitor content marketing recommendations not only shows how invested the candidate is in a potential job at your company but you also see their ability to research and interpret new information. Content marketers need to be able to pick up on trends, identify gaps, and take information to transform the message.

For example, a successful content marketing person will look at the competitors website and see where that competitor might have gaps in their existing content offerings. Those gaps could lead to great topics for future blog posts.

Additionally, that person may also pick up on trends and key components of the competitors’ business to inform their current company of strategic recommendations to get ahead of the curve.

Ask about the target audience and how they will segment their messaging

Content marketing is successful when the content appeals to the target audience and the person that you are engaging. For example, a great candidate will interpret the company’s business objective and describe key components of who the audience is. If a candidate can suggest aspects of the audience based on informed research that indicates deep interest in the position and the ability to think in the mindset of the reader.

Content that is written in the right voice will perform better and match your brand. Proper messaging and segmentation within a content marketing program will also deliver the best results.

Workflow management style to stay on top of content marketing projects

Ask about the candidates typical work flow management style. Content marketing typically requires a lot of different components, stages, and deliverables that can be difficult to manage at one time.

A great question during the interview process is how would you manage multiple different projects at one time? This will demonstrate how the candidate thinks and organizes information. This question should determine how the candidate can handle managing a project from start to finish.

How to Optimize Your Ads for Amazon

Posted on February 19, 2019September 3, 2023 by Michael Marchese

When you’re launching a new product and selling it on Amazon, you want to get as much exposure as possible.

Amazon ads can elevate your product above the competition and help increase your sales and conversions. If handled correctly, it is a valuable and efficient service. If not, then you can end up spending a lot of money and get little return from it. There are ways for you to optimize your Amazon ads just like your PPC ads for Google.

Find the best keywords for product descriptions

When people go to Amazon, they use search queries to find products. These queries often include keywords that you can use to best show up in the search results. Keywords come in two specific types: short tail and long tail.

Short tail keywords are more general and may have a higher volume, but also higher competition. If you want to include these keywords in your campaign, then set the bids higher for them. These high volume keywords are likely the most common ones associated with your niche or product.

Long tail keywords are more specific, including more words, and tend to be less volume, but also less competitive and cheaper. You want to find keywords that have the lowest Advertising Cost of Sales. Add these keywords to your campaign or a secondary higher budget campaign to get the best bang for your buck. When you’re testing new keywords, be they short or long tail, it’s best to start with higher bids and adjust from there.

You will get a sense of where the bids are floating at and receive data on them faster, since they’re going to be used most often. Optimizing your keyword campaigns continues with testing different match types: exact, broad and phrase. It allows you to see which match type leads to the most conversions with the lowest spend. Learn more about keyword types and best practices from ADBADGER.

Let Amazon’s fingers do the walking

You can create an automatic campaign set up by Amazon that gets everything going for you, but you don’t have to use it for all your Amazon ads. You can let Amazon do the keyword work for you by downloading the keyword report and using their keywords.

This gives you the opportunity to create your own campaign around those keywords, but you still control every aspect from bids to overall budgets.

Amazon’s search term reports can also show you keywords that you don’t want to rank well for because they may not be associated with your product. These keywords can be negatively matched, so you’re not spending money on irrelevant keywords. Check the search term reports often for new keywords.

Your products promote ad success

Don’t treat your product listing as just a formality as it’s vital to your ad success. The listing should be informative and descriptive and filled with the keywords you’ve chosen for your ads. Why? Amazon sees these keywords and will bring your product and product ad up in search queries. Keyword optimization of your listing does double duty for both paid and organic search.

If you’re listing several products and some of them aren’t selling well, then remove them from the main campaign and put them in a separate one with a smaller budget. Don’t let a few low sellers drag down your overall campaign. As your more power products sell even more, they may end up increasing the sales of the other products.
If you’re looking to improve your E-commerce with excellent product descriptions – contact Tempesta Media to learn more.

Parts of a Lead Funnel | Content Marketing for Revenue Growth and Increased Leads: Part 1

Posted on February 18, 2019September 3, 2023 by Michael Marchese

When the company PTC wanted to sell a more user-friendly version of computer-aided design (CAD) software called Creo, they knew they would need more than just a sales pitch to reach a mostly flat market.

They used content marketing to position themselves as thought leaders, explaining the problems plaguing CAD users and showing how their product solved those problems. They launched a microsite to introduce their product to the world and organized an editorial calendar chock-full of content that told their story.

As a result, their microsite topped 100,000 visitors just after launch. Their growth continues, with more than 70 percent of site traffic coming from new visitors. PTC’s content marketing program proved to be an ideal way to attract, convert and retain customers because it helped to achieve these key goals:

Expand brand awareness and credibility
Increase customer loyalty
Build website traffic
Provide thought leadership
Nurture leads and sales in a nonthreatening, helpful way

Their content helped entice customers into what is called the “lead funnel“: the journey that a potential customer takes from interested party to loyal customer. The lead funnel can be divided into four key parts:

Discovery

This is the “widest” part of the funnel that casts the largest reach. It’s a discovery phase when potential customers find your product or service through content delivered by a variety of means. PTC’s discovery phase involved the distribution of original articles, interviews and best practice guides published on their blog to help drive traffic to their microsite.

Consideration

Potential customers begin to associate you with the product or service that you offer and will be looking for examples of how your product or service performs. Once people visited their microsite, PTC capitalized on the opportunity by offering videos of product demonstrations and behind-the-scenes interviews with staff.

Conversion

Potential customers turn into actual customers after reviewing clear product or service information and hearing testimonials from people who actually use it. When site visitors were ready to convert, PTC was ready with video interviews of customers and strategic partners offering insights on their experience with Creo software.

Retention

In this phase, you continue to nurture your customers by providing high-quality customer service that inspires them to turn into company evangelists. PTC’s content marketing efforts continue to this day thanks to solid strategic planning that ensured customer-focused content would be created and strategically distributed to keep customers coming back.

Lead funnel personalities

Along their journey, potential customers will take on a number of roles before they assume the role of customer:

Visitor. They come into contact with your company via one of your touchpoints, such as your social media presence, website, a salesperson, et cetera.
Lead. They decide that they would like to receive information from your company or have someone from your company contact them. The information that you provide piques interest in your product or service.
Qualified lead. Anyone who has taken the next step and asked for specifics about your product or service as part of a demonstrated interest in buying.
Opportunity. Someone who has indicated they are willing and able to buy your product or service. As with the other stages of the funnel, your job is to continue nurturing this lead by providing the information and resources they need to make the purchase.
Customer. Anyone who has purchased your product or service. Your job isn’t done after a sale! To keep these new customers, you must continue to engage and nurture them so they remain happy with your product or service.

How fast potential customers move through your lead funnel will depend a great deal on what you’re selling. Do you sell a moderately priced product that instantly solves a problem, such as in retail sales? Or is it a service requiring a significant upfront investment that pays off over time, such as a suite of software or services for the technology industry?

The bigger the investment, the slower customers will convert, and understandably so. If they’re investing a lot of money in your product or service, they are going to want to do as much research as possible. If you’re there to provide it to them every step of the way, your investment in quality content will eventually pay off.

How to Create Content for a Niche Industry

Posted on February 15, 2019September 3, 2023 by Michael Marchese

Few businesses, if any, can be all things to all people. In fact, it can be an extremely effective strategy for companies of all sizes to recognize and narrowly define their niche market.

Targeting a smaller audience and taking steps to dominate their market via a focused content marketing strategy is key to generating leads and positioning a company as a leader in their niche market.

Although a company may think that it’s best to reach a very broad market, focusing their content on a smaller target audience is a great way to ensure that the content is relevant to the reader. It may seem way too time-consuming to consistently create content for each of your various target audiences, however, with the right partner, this can be executed effectively at scale.

Define your target audience

Zero in on one key audience segment – Most companies are uncertain about what defines an actual target audience. Many companies will target multiple audiences in hopes to flesh out which one makes more sense for their business. Most content marketers will advise against pursuing more than one audience within a content marketing campaign as the relevance and performance will decrease.
Focus on a demographic range – Narrow the audience based on who will be making the majority of the purchasing decisions regarding your product or service. Demographics such as age, income levels and geographic location can be used to appeal to the readers.
Pain points – Define what the pain points are for your target audience. The content should help to solve some of the struggles that this audience faces. Develop a content strategy with topics that reflect this audiences’ daily job responsibility, education level and decision-making process.
Reflect proper timing – Time your content marketing campaign to match the seasonality and buying process of your audience. Ensure that your content marketing assets and campaigns are ready and launched with enough time to meet increased demand.

Industry expertise

The content must provide valuable information to the reader. Content without substance won’t provide the results necessary to generate more leads and establish your company as a thought leader. Tempesta Media has thousands of writers across hundreds of industries with real-world expertise in your field. They go through a stringent vetting process and have to qualify for industry expertise by writing for Tempesta Media in that industry before writing for any customers.

The writing team is optimized based on this industry expertise and who is the best cultural fit. Because the same writers write for your company on an ongoing basis, the quality continues to improve.

By ensuring that your writing team has proper industry expertise, the quality is extremely high and saves customers the time it would take to write the content themselves.

To successfully target and create a content plan for a niche market, many companies choose to employ the expertise, knowledge and experience of a comprehensive content and marketing solution provider. They will create content for many niche industries and employ vetted writers with real-world industry experience. If a company doesn’t have a clear content strategy, the in-house staff will perform the time-extensive tasks of creating content for a niche market, SEO and lead generation, competitor analysis, editing services, voice profile, and so much more.

Tempesta Media is a leader in developing and delivering content for niche industries and driving accountable results for customers. In fact, our writer vetting process is so effective that editing and revisions average less than 0.5 per content piece across all the content that we create!

Because results matter, our comprehensive content marketing solution saves companies up to 80 percent compared to in-house alternatives. In addition, you’ll be assigned a personal account manager who will work with you throughout the entire process and manage the voice, style and final outcome of your content.

How Many Content Pieces Should You Create, Post, and Promote?

Posted on February 14, 2019September 3, 2023 by Michael Marchese

Budget, time, and content marketing goals are the most important deciding factors when it comes to determining the quantity of content you wish to create.

Content marketing frequency recommendations for small companies

Small companies and start ups typically feel that their marketing teams are stretched too thin. They wear many hats so scaling their content marketing department can be the most challenging. Instead of creating many pieces of content and promoting each one individually, small companies should consider picking one or two articles each month. Focus on those articles, re purpose them, promote them, and drive traffic to them so that you can get the most bang for your buck.

These pieces of content need to be syndicated and promoted heavily using that same ratio that you identified with proper content marketing budgeting. So as your business grows, you’ll simply begin promoting more pieces of content. If you’re a larger company with a large budget, you can spend even more money on the promotional aspect that goes with it. In addition, they also go with much longer pieces of content.

While a smaller company may average 800 to 1,200 words for each piece of content that they’re reading, larger companies tend to go and promote mid- and lower-funnel type of content. These tend to be e-guides, case studies, and other long-form content that are over 2,000 words. That’s how they’re able to go and scale up their programs significantly.

Content marketing budgeting – B2B versus B2C

It does change from industry to industry. For B2B, the emphasis is on promotion. For B2C amplification, the emphasis is actually on content creation. For B2B, I recommend budgeting two to three times the cost of content in terms of promotion. In the B2C side, you may see a 1:1 ratio because getting that content out and using initial promotion tend to go out to a much larger audience.

When you have a larger audience, there’s a higher likelihood of getting morality associated with the content and getting rankings to appear faster. On the B2B side, you tend to have a much smaller audience, which means you have to work that much harder to be able to go and get the word out about the content that you’re creating.

How to Incorporate Valentine’s Day Into Your Content Marketing

Posted on February 13, 2019November 26, 2024 by Michael Marchese

Why not take advantage of a holiday to increase your open rates or blog traffic?

Seasonality is a great thing to take advantage of when it comes to marketing. It dramatically impacts your SEO – take a look at google search trends to see how seasonality effects your business.

Valentines Day is one of those holidays that you either hate or you love. Most people probably don’t like Valentine’s Day because it is corny and overrated. If you are looking to take advantage of the hype, here are some ideas.

Use a fun subject line

Here are a few play on words to help you start thinking of LOVE-ly subject lines:

Galentines Day
Sweet
Love
Be Mine
Roses are red…
XOXO

Author a blog with a partner

Use this time of year to create an article with one of your partners. It is a great way to “reignite the fire” with that partner while also doing something valuable for your marketing program.

Promotions

Perhaps there is a short discount that can encourage people to sign up before love runs out! Keep in mind that discounts should never hurt your brand or lead to increased churn.

Random act of kindness for a customer or prospect

A small Starbucks gift card, a hand written note, a phone call just to say you’re thinking of them can go a long way! It makes you more personable.

Content Marketing for Revenue Growth and Increased Leads

Posted on February 13, 2019August 7, 2023 by Michael Marchese

Before we begin, let’s get something straight: Your business is incredible. The value that you offer is beyond anything that your competitors could even dream of rivaling.

Everyone should buy from you. In fact, they’d be pretty crazy not to.

A lot of businesses think this is the kind of messaging that’s going to generate them into sales. If you’re reading this guide, congratulations. You know there’s a better way.

In a world where information is literally at everyone’s fingertips, potential customers can see an empty sales pitch from 10 Google search results away. They seek to do themselves before asking for help and rely on friends and trusted influencers to map their journey toward a purchase.

This is why a flashy advertisement that is demanding a person to buy something just doesn’t cut it anymore. To zero in on the people in most need of your product or service, you need to empower them with good information, win their trust as an influencer and – finally – become their friend.

With a solid content marketing program, you can achieve all three. Our series will include the following key topics:

The parts of a lead funnel
How to get traffic with content
How to obtain and qualify leads with content
Using content marketing to nurture your leads
Post-conversion content marketing

Stay tuned to learn how to create a content marketing program that attracts and converts leads for your business!

Embracing a B2B Manufacturing Marketing Strategy Mentality

Posted on February 12, 2019November 29, 2024 by Michael Marchese

The way businesses of all shapes and sizes go about marketing their products and services has changed drastically in the past few years.

This is also true in the manufacturing world. Today, more and more marketers in the manufacturing arena are focusing on a B2B manufacturing marketing strategy. Here are some things businesses should know to determine if they should embrace this mentality.

Understanding e-commerce trends and predictions

At one point, E-commerce consisted of simple communication between the buyer and the seller. However, in recent years, this is no longer the case. Today, many manufacturers are selling into new industries, developing new products and utilizing the internet to increase their business in a number of ways.

One of the biggest trends that seems to be affecting e-commerce the most is that consumers are now expecting a different type of shopping experience. E-commerce focuses on providing consumers with an engaging experience that allows them to interact with their favorite products and services on a unique level.

Naturally, there are several benefits to adopting E-commerce in manufacturing. For starters, doing so opens a business up to a whole world of consumers and business partners. It is also a very cost-effective approach to business. Since much of the marketing strategies require very little in the way of budget, businesses can accomplish quite a bit while receiving a huge return on investment.

There are also savings in the way of resources. For example, businesses can cut down on the paper and resources they use when they focus on an E-commerce marketing strategy. With these benefits, it is easy to see why more businesses and manufacturers are starting to change their strategies to fit with these trends.

How do E-commerce trends affect the manufacturing industry?

Due to all the trends and predictions, E-commerce is changing the way the manufacturing industry works. One of the most important items to understand is that E-commerce is changing the way buyers buy. Sales in the E-commerce arena are expected to hit $1.1 trillion by 2020.

More and more consumers are completing all of their research and purchases online than ever before. What better person to fill consumers in on products and services than the manufacturer? Providing consumers with detailed information that will lead them to buy certain products is crucial. This means business will need to ensure the right amount of accurate information can easily be found about their products online.

Face-to-face selling opportunities on the decline

It is also important to realize that many consumers will not ever be interacting with a sales team at all. Face-to-face selling opportunities are on the decline, and businesses no longer have the same type of power to say what they want to say about their own products. Consumers will now be learning the information about products on their own without relying on the company to give them the information.

Today, it is much more common for businesses to communicate with consumers via email, social media, text messaging and other forms of communication other than face-to-face. While this does take the personal factor out of the selling process, it is a great way to save money and resources, and it frees up time for marketers to focus on other facets of the company.

Consumer culture of convenience in manufacturing

Consumer culture has also changed in the world we live in. Consumers are no longer willing to wait and are impatient. They also know what they want and know how to find it. Most consumers can utilize the internet well and can quickly find the information they need.

For this reason, manufacturing companies are being forced to cater to a culture of convenience. Shipping times and methods must be fast and high-quality ones. The goal is to bring products closer to the consumer so that they are the obvious option when it comes time to make a purchase.

In the world of manufacturing, e-commerce is quickly becoming a huge part of the equation. Manufacturers of all types are starting to realize the impact E-commerce is having on their sales and are adjusting quickly.

These are just a few of the things businesses will want to consider when they are considering focusing on an E-commerce marketing strategy. Learning everything possible about this form of marketing strategy is one of the best ways to ensure a manufacturer is successful.

Strategy and Management

Sophisticated Platform

Deep Analytics