Author: Michael Marchese

Michael is the founder and CEO of Tempesta Media. He is responsible for corporate strategy, executive team leadership, and overall business operations across all the company’s segments. With over 25 years of experience, he has held various strategic and operating positions. ​​As a recognized expert, he has served on numerous committees for the following industry associations: SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization), IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau), CGA (Casual Gaming Association), and the MMA (Mobile Marketing Association).

Tempesta Media Wins Gold Award at AVA Digital Awards for Exceptional Content Marketing Series

Posted on by Michael Marchese

Recognized for Helping Businesses Navigate the Post-COVID Landscape: Tempesta Media Wins Gold at AVA Digital Awards.

MICHIGAN CITY, IN, May 12, 2023 – Tempesta Media, a leading provider of digital marketing solutions, has been awarded a Gold prize at the AVA Digital Awards for its outstanding content marketing series. The award recognizes Tempesta Media’s excellence in Digital Marketing – Content Marketing – Blog Series for the exceptional blog series: “Finding a Path Forward Post-COVID.”

The AVA Digital Awards are one of the industry’s most prestigious honors. The organization evaluates entries from around the world and is the preeminent third-party evaluator of creative work, having judged over 300,000 entries since its formation in 1994.

“We are thrilled to have won a Gold award for the content marketing series that we have created,” said Michael Marchese, CEO of Tempesta Media. “This is an example of our dedication to providing our clients with the highest quality expert content that drives results.”

Tempesta Media’s content marketing series is designed to help businesses find a path forward in a post-COVID world. The series covers a range of topics, from digital transformation to content strategy, and is a valuable resource for B2B companies looking to drive leads and revenue.

ABOUT TEMPESTA MEDIA

Tempesta Media is the leading performance-based provider of digital marketing solutions that drives revenue. Using our targeted approach to digital marketing, Bullseye Effect ™, we efficiently maximize results and ROI. Tempesta Media helps businesses become industry leaders.

Tempesta Media’s MSP Bullseye Effect™ Increased Marketing Leads for Raiven by 255%

Posted on by Michael Marchese

Turnkey digital marketing solution exceeded business goals for leads, users and domain authority

MICHIGAN CITY, INDIANA, US, April 10, 2023 – Through its managed service, Tempesta Media increased marketing leads for Raiven by 255% over the past two years. Raiven is a leading purchasing platform that helps businesses make smarter sourcing and procurement decisions.

The platform transformed its revenue growth by utilizing Tempesta Media’s Bullseye Effect, which is part of its managed service provider (MSP). The MSP solution drives revenue growth for clients through expert content.

“Tempesta Media’s Bullseye Effect solution is the key to our marketing strategy,” said Brett Knox, CEO of Raiven. “Our revenue has grown by securing more leads in new and innovative ways.”

Tempesta Media’s managed service solution removes the cost of hiring content, influencer, and social media marketing specialists and helps businesses exceed their ROI goals and create timely content.

Over the past two years, Raiven’s digital marketing goals were surpassed by using Tempesta Media Bullseye Effect. Raiven’s increased revenue was driven by:

  • marketing leads up 230% in total:
          ○ direct leads increased by 175%,
          ○ referral by 125%,
          ○ organic by 100%
  • users up 971%
  • domain authority up 3,000%

Tempesta Media’s Managed Service provider (MSP) uses these marketing tactics to achieve its results:

  • Prova™ 90-point assessment
  • CoreForm™ platform
  • a team of subject matter experts
  • Simple Social Share™
  • influencer marketing
  • a team for customer success

“Our Tempesta Media’s Managed Service provider (MSP) through its Bullseye Effect helps marketers leverage organic content for high ROI, lead generation, and revenue, and is tailored for marketing results in financial services, healthcare and technology,” said Michael Marchese, CEO, and Founder of Tempesta Media.

ABOUT TEMPESTA MEDIA

Tempesta Media is the leading performance-based provider of digital marketing solutions that drives revenue. Using our targeted approach to digital marketing, Bullseye Effect ™ , we efficiently maximize results and ROI. Tempesta Media helps businesses become industry leaders. Contact us at Sales@TempestaMedia.com.

ABOUT RAIVEN

Raiven is a leading purchasing, procurement, and supply chain management platform enabling contractors and facility managers to digitally transform their procurement process and obtain significant discounts on their most purchased items. Raiven’s cloud-based procurement platform helps businesses purchase smarter and more efficiently through patent-pending AI algorithms that find in-stock products at the lowest prices. Learn more about Raiven at www.raiven.com and on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Is There a Black Swan Event Lurking in Your Company’s Marketing Department?

Posted on by Michael Marchese

Here’s how to Identify your next marketing black swan risk before it hits your company.


The news was filled last week with stories of bank failures, including that of Silicon Valley Bank. Faced with having insufficient funds to meet upcoming payrolls, the CEOs of many companies with now-unavailable deposits at these banks have likely had a sleep-deprived roller-coaster of a weekend.

Imagine waking up on a Friday morning to have your CFO or controller tell you that nearly all your ready cash has vanished. How would you feel?

Having gone through a similar rapid collapse over 20 years ago during the dot-com bust, I can tell you the experience is right up there with back surgery! At the time, I headed up marketing for a B2B supply chain and procurement software company. Like most companies, we were trying to grow as fast as possible to secure the best valuation for our upcoming capital raise.

I will never forget it. We received a $30 million term sheet on a $300 million pre-money valuation the week before the NASDAQ peaked. We all had dollar signs in our eyes and dreams of an upcoming IPO in a couple of years.

Instead, the very next week, the NASDAQ began to crash and with it went our term sheet. Over about 10 days, I went from planning to double my 20+ employee marketing team to trying to determine which 15 or 16 individuals I would lay off immediately.  Six months later, we ran out of cash and closed the company. Not fun!

History does not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

The mental scars of such events stay with you throughout your career. It’s one of the reasons Tempesta Media avoided being affected by the recent bank closings. Early on, we diversified our debt and capital sources. In short, we bucked the norm and so never went deep in the red relative to our revenue.

Over the next few months, everyone will discuss treasury management. What was once just an afterthought will be talked about at length. While everyone is rightly focused on this topic, they should also be aware that the next black-swan event–marketing channel concentration risk–is fast approaching.

risk

What is marketing channel concentration risk?

As the term implies, marketing channel concentration risk becomes a problem when firms rely too heavily on a small number of customer acquisition channels to maintain and grow their customer base.

Why should you be concerned about this risk? Because customer acquisition channels suffer extinction-level events during major recessions.

What is a customer acquisition channel extinction event?

Many small and mid-sized businesses operating at the time of the 2008 recession saw their marketing programs go through a massive upheaval. Before the recession, tested, reliable and consistent channels like magazine advertising, newspaper coupon inserts and direct mail were the marketing mainstays of hundreds of thousands of businesses. Several years later, many of these channels declined significantly or disappeared altogether. Numerous businesses that overrelied on the channels failed as buyer behavior shifted materially.

More recently, way too many firms went out of business during the COVID-related two-plus-year event-marketing hiatus because they couldn’t adapt quickly to the new marketing environment.

Despite these examples, here we are in 2023 after the worst banking scare in years, and businesses still haven’t learned the marketing channel concentration risk lesson.

disruption

Marketing channel concentration risk puts millions of businesses at risk for disruption.

I cannot tell you how many companies I talk to whose business relies wholly on one or two customer acquisition channels.

No customer acquisition marketing channel remains static from one year to the next. Competitive dynamics, new technology, changing prospective buyer behavior and many other factors cause individual channels to change, often becoming more or less effective than the year before.  

Yet, more firms than you would believe cling to one or two channels, optimizing at the edges, exposing themselves to disruption should a major recession hit.

How do you know if your company’s marketing channels are too concentrated?

In an ideal world, no one channel should represent more than 20% of your firm’s total customer acquisition volume. Translation: Make sure you have at least five different customer acquisition channels for your business. Anything less puts you at risk for trouble.

Getting to a diversified customer acquisition channel mix.

If your company has fewer than five customer acquisition channels or any one customer acquisition channel represents more than 20% to 25% of your new revenue, you have a problem.

To fix this, your marketing department should be testing new customer acquisition channels continually. Such testing is not a one-off thing, that is, it should be an ongoing function within your marketing department. You should test new options at least once each quarter. We also advise our clients to allocate 20% of their entire customer acquisition budgets expressly for testing new marketing channel testing.  

When is marketing concentration risk an emergency?

If your company has any one channel representing more than 50% of your overall new revenue, you have an emergency on your hands, especially given that the US economy appears to be teetering on the edge of recession.

Whatever your circumstances, you must make channel diversification a strategic corporate priority and allocate the resources needed to resolve or prevent marketing concentration risk. 

marketing channels

What channels should I test?

While every business has unique target customers, for B2B businesses that use digital marketing for direct (e-commerce) or indirect (lead generation) customer acquisition, we suggest Tempesta Media’s Bullesye Effect™, which takes a targeted approach to test new digital marketing channels. Starting with the highest ROI areas–content and SEO marketing–the methodology gradually expands into new channels that increase distribution but may have lower ROIs. However, when CMOs deploy these channels as part of a portfolio approach to customer acquisition, they can maximize distribution and channel diversity with a blended ROI target.

My marketing department is generalist and small. How can we master new channels quickly?

Many B2B companies have cut marketing staffing over the years, leaving themselves with a skeleton crew. While the crew members may be excellent experts regarding their companies and superb project managers, they might also be generalists in marketing knowledge.

Efforts to build internal channel-specific expertise most often prove futile because customer acquisition channels change so rapidly.

Consequently, an increasing number of B2B businesses, especially mid-market and enterprise companies, outsource the testing and execution of specific digital marketing channels. Such outsourcing has become increasingly attractive with the emergence of digital marketing-managed service providers.

What’s the difference between an advertising/marketing agency and a digital marketing-managed service provider?

In essence, a marketing agency brings human expertise to the table. They have experts on staff who know how to launch, optimize and scale new marketing channels.

Digital marketing-managed service providers take the agency model to the next level. They bring sophisticated marketing technology, deep analytics and industry-specific and human expertise together as one bundled solution. This saves businesses significant money and can drive better results. More importantly, these providers can get new channels in marketing quickly, allowing you to diversify faster.

Be ready for the next black-swan event today.

Like many businesses affected by this weekend’s banking disruption, you don’t want to be blindsided by a customer acquisition channel suddenly drying up. Take proactive measures now to strengthen and diversify your marketing. It may save you from having a harrowing “all-hands-on-deck” weekend sometime in the future.

Use a Managed Service Provider to Elevate Your Marketing Efforts

Posted on by Michael Marchese

Managed service providers (MSPs) can help you achieve your digital marketing goals. They have the tools to scale your promotional efforts while reducing marketing costs. Elevate your business services marketing with an MSP.

Your customers interact with multiple channels before they make a purchase. For example, they will see an ad on Facebook and then recognize your brand name in the SERPs or engage with your email marketing before they convert. As more businesses understand the typical customer journey, their digital marketing efforts are expanding.

According to a report by CMO, more than 65% of businesses are expanding the number of channels they use to promote their brands – including 58.6% of B2B service providers. But unfortunately, it’s not easy to scale your efforts and launch new marketing programs with your existing resources. As a result, your business risks losing market share this year as your competitors ramp up their efforts.

There are solutions available to you. For example, managed service provider (MSP) marketing might be able to help you expand your digital efforts effectively. Learn more about this business services marketing option and how it can work for you.

company growth

Who needs managed service providers (MSPs)?

MSPs help businesses of all sizes, industries, and budgets but are particularly beneficial to firms that offer business services. Whether you run a niche SaaS company or provide support for healthcare brands, you can work with MSPs to achieve your marketing, sales and retention goals. Here are a few situations when an MSP can help your business:

  • You can’t afford to grow your marketing team. The average salary for a digital marketing professional (as of December 2022) is $57,337 per year. However, salary expectations can range above $100,000 for specialty roles and job postings in cities with high costs of living. Instead of hiring in-house specialists, you could scale your efforts to a higher level by contracting an MSP.
  • You don’t have a marketing team at all. Small business owners, in particular, can benefit from MSPs. You can focus on managing your operations and running a profitable company rather than keeping up with the latest digital marketing for business trends.
  • Your company wants to add a new channel. Digital marketing is an incredibly diverse field. You can’t expect your in-house content marketing specialist to keep up with SEM trends. Instead, you can hire an MSP to take over your paid ads and focus their time exclusively on these efforts.
  • Your company wants to dominate the market. Business service enterprises that lead the way in their fields often have a control hub of in-house employees working with specialized MSPs. If you have significant growth plans for 2023 and beyond, consider hiring a provider that can meet your current needs while preparing to execute your vision for growth.

These are just a few examples of companies that can benefit from MSPs for business services marketing. An effective MSP will evaluate your budget, industry, and goals before providing marketing strategies for business service growth.

What are the benefits of hiring managed service providers?

Your marketing strategies will evolve as your business grows and changes. There’s a big difference between the marketing needs of a startup and the enterprise it will grow into. Managed service providers can develop marketing strategies that produce new leads, convert customers and increase retention rates. They offer ongoing analyses of the changing market and strive to stay ahead of consumer demands.

Here are a few benefits of MSPs:

  • Stay on top of the latest trends. The success of an MSP depends on its ability to provide relevant strategies and innovative plans to clients. Hire a firm to keep up with the latest changes to Google’s search algorithm or popular social media platforms so you don’t have to. An effective MSP should follow the latest trends and come to you with ideas to improve your marketing efforts.
  • Scale your efforts. You can enjoy faster results when hiring an MSP instead of hiring an in-house team member. Skip over the recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training processes by working with an experienced service provider. Remember, it can take up to 12 months for the average employee to reach their full performance potential.
  • Reduce your workload. A trusted digital marketing partner will remove items from your workload. They will be accountable for reporting their success and will take steps to troubleshoot issues. This allows you to take on more of a supervisory role over your digital marketing footprint.
  • Save money. Find an MSP that meets your budgetary needs. Digital marketers usually charge between $1,000 to $11,000 per month for SEO services with similar rates for social media marketing. Email marketing providers charge between $335 to $3,500 per month. Some MSPs offer discounted rates to companies that hire them to manage multiple digital marketing channels at once.

MSPs also provide lower risk levels for business services marketing. For example, if you aren’t happy with your service provider, you can leave them and find another firm to work with. This is easier than developing an in-house team and counting on your staff to be successful.

successful marketing strategy

How do managed service providers ensure success?

When you hire a managed service provider, the team will work closely with your business to understand which key performance indicators (KPIs) you need to improve. Then, they will set high-level goals based on your business needs (ex., increased brand recognition and reduced churn) and tie specific metrics to these goals. For example, an SEO agency will track your brand’s search demand, indicating name recognition within the industry.

From there, your MSP will set windows to meet these goals and report on their efforts. At first, you might have a weekly check-in with your MSP as their efforts ramp up, which expands to monthly reviews with the organization.

Remember that different digital marketing channels come with different windows to see results. A company that runs paid ads or launches an email campaign can report results within a few weeks. SEO and content marketing companies might need longer windows (at least six months) for their efforts to drive results.

As long as you are aligned with your MSP on the metrics you expect them to track – and the goals they need to meet – you can continue improving your digital marketing efforts.

What should you look for in a managed service provider?

MSPs are as diverse as the companies they represent, so you must shop around to find a good fit for your business. However, a quality MSP can provide a long-term partnership that lasts for years. These companies can help you grow your business and evolve within your industry.

Here are a few factors to review as you search for a digital marketing service provider:

  • Industry experience. Look for a firm that has other clients within your industry. These don’t have to be competitors in business services, but they should operate within your field. This ensures the MSP understands your customers, your terminology, and any legal limitations related to your marketing efforts.
  • Average client size. What kind of companies does the MSP typically represent? If your business is the firm’s biggest client, your growth options might be limited; however, if your business is the smallest client, you might not get the attention you deserve. Look for MSPs that are used to working with companies of your size.
  • Specialty or full-service capabilities. Decide whether you want to work with different agencies to handle each aspect of your digital marketing efforts or a firm that can handle everything. If you are interviewing full-service MSPs, ask about packages to receive discounts on your digital marketing plans.
  • Cost. Consider the cost of the MSP compared to the services they provide. The best MSP for your needs might not be the most expensive (or cheapest) option. Also, check each company’s different pricing plans; some MSPs charge flat-rate prices while others base their fees on marketing spending or sales.

During your search, ask to see case studies from previous or existing clients. Request samples of reports to see how firms prove results and sample contracts to learn how you can hold your MSP accountable. This will allow you to take action if you aren’t happy with the work they provide.

types of digital marketing

Setting up the standards for MSPs

When considering an MSP for your business, deliver your goals to your future contractor and decide whether their services and software platform makes it easy to manage all your digital efforts. Check if they have a full-service system that can handle all types of your marketing needs, for example:

  • content marketing,
  • video content,
  • influencer marketing,
  • email campaigns.

If you chose partnership with Tempesta Media, we will start with the Prova assessment. This is a comprehensive tool that analyzes more than 90 aspects of your current digital marketing program to identify opportunities to drive better results. We will assess your social media presence, brand positioning, and content marketing performance while initiating improvement strategies.

By studying the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, we will be able to capitalize on any identified areas of weakness that will yield insights benefiting your company. This will give the possibility to highlight why potential customers should choose you over the competition, driving leads to your company.

Take the first steps to work with Tempesta Media and schedule a meeting with us to get your marketing assessment.

Marketing in the Tech Industry: How MSP Marketing Solutions Generate Leads

Posted on by Michael Marchese

Lead generation is the pivotal moment when a user becomes a potential client. This is the critical point at which your tech company stands out from the crowd. Increase the number and quality of leads to grow the number of real customers.

Lead generation can be challenging for tech companies as you have to deliver a result-oriented approach to strengthen your digital presence while laying the foundation for a successful long-term relationship with new customers.

The hardship begins with the difference between having a static audience and a dynamic one. Your sales team should have a marketing solution tailor-made for each customer’s needs.

Many tech companies immediately confront two main challenges when developing their lead-generation strategies:

  1. The overwhelming amount of content available online obstructs potential leads – it becomes the customer’s responsibility to sift data and seek products or services.
  2. Achieving visibility and reaching out to the right prospects are not overnight processes. Companies often lack the in-house resources to bring a comprehensive strategy to fruition.

As a result, savvy tech companies are turning to managed service providers (MSP) to up their game.

laptop screen

Shaping the user experience

The old saying that you never get a second chance to make a first impression has never applied more than in today’s digital marketplace. When a potential client hits your site or landing page, it’s the first step in building the complete user experience. How will that customer gauge the significance of your brand, the quality of your content?

Understanding your audience

MSP marketing solutions can ensure this initial contact is a positive, immersive experience by conducting thorough research into your audience and market.

Utilizing analytics and metrics specific to your scope, your MSP partner can develop a detailed buying journey map. This map will highlight the pain points of your audience and the various means prospects use to evaluate tech products.

For instance, 30% of product searches now launch immediately via search engine. An MSP can identify how to leverage SEO — including off-page — to connect you with the largest pool of potential buyers.

Increasing visibility

Visibility is another vital factor for facilitating initial contact with a prospect. Getting your content to rank at the top of search result pages is no longer sufficient. Optimizing content to achieve visibility can include:

  • Image results. Create infographics for each of your most important pages and services.
  • Featured snippets. Work with your on-page SEO and write eye-catching snippets.
  • Interactive result blocks. Use outlines to allow the users preview pages.

An MSP can help develop successful marketing for tech companies via multiple SEO strategies:

  • Keyword research helps identify searches that reflect the pain points of the audience.
  • Using the latest SEO best practices will ensure you meet the criteria Google values with its recent helpful content update.
  • Evaluation of your competitors’ SEO strategies against your own will optimize your visibility.

Content marketing and inbound lead generation

Marketing for technology companies delivers better results with a big-picture approach. Studying points for recalibration of your existing plan and exploring how to anticipate future needs change the game. By outsourcing SEO to an MSP, you benefit from a one-stop, synergy-driven approach — all your SEO and content creation is generated by the same partner, ensuring that every piece you publish will align with your SEO strategy.

Your content will also meet the user expectations produced by the optimized metadata displayed in search results — a critical factor for a lower bounce rate.

With two-thirds of marketers increasing their content creation budget in 2022, it’s more important than ever to adopt a competitive content marketing strategy. Here’s how an MSP can help:

  • An MSP can create a content calendar to help you publish fresh content often.
  • This partner can identify innovative ideas to help your audience keep up with the latest tech trends.
  • Being one of the first tech companies to discuss new trends will turn you into a thought leader.
  • An MSP can map the user journey and create high-quality content that consistently meets user needs at different stages of this journey.
  • Working with an MSP is an opportunity to explore a wide range of content formats and publication channels. Examples include blogging, guest posting, FAQ pages, white papers.

SEO strategy

The specifics that only professionals can cope with

On-page SEO. Even if you publish 100 articles on your website, it won’t always attract prospects. Marketing for technology companies calls for prioritizing visibility in search results, which is something an MSP can achieve by creating copy where the right keywords occur naturally. During the content development process, your MSP will optimize content to generate leads.

Off-page SEO. Plus, an MSP can optimize metadata and develop a strategic linking structure. Your vendor will also build a network of backlinks from authoritative sources to support indexing and ranking for tech topics.

Publication channels are another important aspect of any successful marketing for tech companies’ campaigns. Working with an MSP means you’ll have access to a team of digital marketing experts who can identify the right channels for distributing your content.

Typically, your marketing vendor will help you leverage a mix of owned and earned channels:

  • Owned channels can include your website and blog, as well as your email list, gated content, and social media profiles.
  • Earned media channels can include tech publications and press releases. You can also use online discussion platforms or social media groups.

Achieving continuous engagement

After establishing an initial touchpoint where the prospect develops awareness of your tech company and services, the next step is to lay the foundation for continuous engagement.

With B2B buying journeys becoming increasingly complex, a fast conversion isn’t a realistic goal. Instead, leveraging content to achieve continuous engagement will ensure that your solution remains one of the top options the average six to ten buyers involved in the decision-making process consider.

Providing a clear next step

Creating the initial contact isn’t enough to generate a qualified lead. As the B2B buying journey grows in complexity, prospects have an average of 59% more interactions with vendors.

Marketing for technology companies requires a series of contacts. You need to provide a clear next step to keep prospects engaged. You also need to build a flexible path since every prospect will have a unique buying journey.

 

iMac with a motivating screen wallpaper

Rethink marketing for tech companies with an MSP

MSP marketing solutions can make a difference at every stage of the buying journey:

  • At the top of the funnel, an MSP can help establish a positive initial contact by leveraging audience research, SEO strategies, and valuable content.
  • An MSP can leverage multiple content formats as well as an omnichannel model to achieve continuous engagement and increase prospect sophistication throughout the middle of the funnel.
  • A marketing partner can remove barriers to purchase to help prospects reach the bottom of the funnel besides developing content that supports purchase decisions and enhances customer satisfaction.

Do you need help with lead generation? As a managed service provider, Tempesta Media can identify and implement the right strategies for your niche. Beyond helping with lead generation, our comprehensive marketing plans can nurture leads and result in an effective and scalable sales funnel built around quality content and trustworthiness.

How is Tempesta Media different from other MSPs? Besides working with an experienced team of marketing and copywriting experts, we rely on two unique solutions to develop highly customized marketing plans:

  • Our Prova assessment is a 90-point audit that helps us get to know your organization, your audience, and your market better. This assessment establishes a baseline we use to inform our recommendations.
  • Our MSP service is a turnkey digital marketing solution we use to create marketing plans adapted to the unique needs and budget of each customer. This platform relies on modules that we can add or remove as needed for services like content creation, SEO, social media marketing, paid ads, and more.

Are you ready to take the next step in your digital marketing strategy? Contact us to learn more about working with an MSP or scheduling your initial Prova assessment!

How Many External Links Should I Include in My Blog Article?

Posted on by Michael Marchese

A content marketing strategy is a great way to build your audience and grow your sales. Using smart strategies, such as integrating external links, can build your authority and improve SERPs.

While other search engines exist, Google is the one most companies use as their gauge for designing SEO strategies. Along with death and taxes, one thing is always certain: Google is going to update its algorithm several times a year as it deems fit. Major algorithm updates by the tech giant can throw any SEO strategy into chaos. That said, one consistency is the use of links in online content.

Links play a key role in search engine rankings

As Google and other search algorithms evolve, one of the key things they still look for is links. Inbound, outbound, and internal links all play a pivotal role in your search engine ranking. There are three basic types of links:

  • Internal links – From your site to another page on your site.
  • External links – From your site to another website.
  • Inbound links – From another site to your blog.

Using a good balance of links you control (internal and external) is important. Inbound links are out of your control, but the better your content, the more likely other websites will link to your content for the authority and value you provide audiences.

taking decision

The basics of inbound links

Inbound links are arguably the most important of the three. They are like a vote of confidence for your website from a third party. Websites that include a link to your site tell search engines that your page is a trustworthy source others go to for essential advice and information.

While they are critically important for SEO, inbound links are also some of the hardest to obtain. It’s important that good external links come from trusted sites, not artificial links created through fake or spam sites like:

  • Blogs.
  • Wikis.
  • Social media profiles.
  • Directories.
  • Guestbooks.

These low-quality inbound links could actually have the opposite effect and harm your SEO if a search engine punishes you and moves your results down the page. In previous years, the above emerged, along with link farms and other ways to manipulate rankings. Search engines became wise to these and other sketchy strategies used to generate traffic.

Google and others now penalize websites using these techniques. With algorithm updates throughout the years, such as Google’s Page Experience, search engines are getting better at spotting artificial links and evaluating page and link quality.

The best way to get high-quality inbound links from trustworthy sources is to create great content and promote it so others will see it, read it, and share it with their own audience. As you get more votes of confidence through these links, search engines will notice.

Examples of good external links for your content strategy

External links lead a reader from your website to a site elsewhere on the web. External linking happens when you link to an outside source that you reference in your blog article.

Any SEO practitioner worth their salt knows it helps to include links in a piece of content. External links greatly benefit your website in terms of building visibility and adding credibility to your content. Just as important is that they add value to the readers’ experience because the links connect them to other valuable information while reading your content. Audiences will see you care about them and want to provide them with the best information possible.

readability improving

How to identify a high-quality external link

Content marketers should not use just any link though. As with any source of information, there are good and bad examples of external links. Linking to news events, reputable statistics (e.g., illustrating a point you want to make), or additional reading to expand on a topic are all good resources to provide your readers. Search engines know and consider this as they rank pages.

How to identify a high-quality external link:

  • The website you are linking to is regarded as a high authority in the industry. A well-respected source will boost people’s confidence in your content.
  • The link is not from a direct competitor’s website (at least, not from the same location).
  • The link leads to a source known for content relevant to the subject matter.
  • The source links to mostly informational websites instead of your competitor companies.
  • The site you are linking to has attracted regular readers and a substantial number of visitors.
  • The source has valid information that gets fact-checked (e.g., the opposite of Wikipedia).

Once you’ve chosen the links to include, you must take other factors into consideration, such as the number of links.

How many external links should you have in a content article?

External links encourage readers to click away from your blog article, so you must limit these links and set them to open in a new tab. That way, readers won’t abandon your site entirely. Abandoning your site increases bounce rates, which hurts your website traffic. A perfect example of why SEO can be so tricky!

What, then, is the ideal number of external links that you should include in your article?

With Google constantly making algorithm changes, no number can ever be set in stone. Some say 2-5 external links is best, depending on the length of the content. Still, others would not put a limit on the number of external links. Many industry experts, however, advise against linking more than once to the same page.

Based on what we’ve found from our own research, we recommend 1-2 external links for every 500 words of content. Limit your total number of external links to 5 (which would be for a very long article, approximately 2,000 words long).

 

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What is the best way to include an external link in an article?

An external link should be placed within the body of the content. Readers appreciate knowing what they’ll get if they click a link. That is why an external link should be properly emphasized using a concise, relevant, and contextual anchor text. The hyperlinked text within the sentence you are linking from should convince the reader that clicking it leads to additional, valuable information.

What external links should be avoided within the content?

Not all external links are created equal. By all means, take great care including external links within any quality content. Avoid using links that are outdated or “spammy” in nature. Instead of linking to poor-quality websites, link to reputable experts and authoritative sources, such as:

  • Journalistic sources (The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Forbes, Content Marketing Institute, etc.).
  • Reliable sources on .gov and .edu domains.
  • Well-established sources such as Pew Internet, Nielsen, and Gartner.
  • Experts and thought leaders (but avoid competitors).

To ensure your links retain their quality, perform a periodic link audit to ensure links are still working and current.

Tempesta Media’s philosophy on external links

Tempesta Media writers and editors meticulously check all external links to ensure they do not lead to competitor websites. They make sure each link works. A broken link is not a good thing. No one wants to be greeted by a web page that is inaccessible because it has moved or the target website is offline. A working link leads to a good reader experience and increased traffic.

Finally, no content should be caught linking to outdated sources with information that may now be incorrect or irrelevant. At Tempesta Media, all external links within a content piece are verified to ensure they are accurate and up to date.

Related reading: Now that you’ve learned about external links, want to learn about internal links? Read our blog article: 8 tips on how to incorporate internal links to your content.

Want a strategic approach toward building your online presence?

Tempesta Media offers a number of services to help businesses bolster their online presence, grow their audiences, and ultimately expand their businesses. To get you started, we can provide you with a digital marketing assessment Prova that helps you assess your current strengths and weaknesses and provide many other services to help bring your company to the level of visibility you want to achieve at an affordable price point.

To learn more about our digital marketing managed service solution Performica, contact Tempesta Media today. We’re happy to answer any questions or address your concerns.

Top Channels and Strategies MSP Marketing Services Leverage to Yield Results

Posted on by Michael Marchese

A sound marketing strategy is more important than ever. As businesses face challenges linked to shrinking profit margins and heightened competition, generating a steady stream of leads and forming strong connections with prospects and customers can create a path forward.

For many organizations, in-house capabilities aren’t always a good match for the challenges linked to developing a digital marketing strategy. As a result, outsourcing marketing to managed service providers is on the rise.

What do these vendors do? Learn more about MSP marketing services, how these partners can develop customized strategies, and what the main benefits of working with an MSP are.

What is an MSP?

Outsourcing is on the rise. For many businesses, COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation and resulted in new workflows that facilitate working with remote partners.

A majority of small businesses plan on outsourcing some tasks this year, and 24% are planning to outsource marketing.

The traditional agency model isn’t always a good fit for these small and medium organizations. As more SMBs seek digital marketing services packages, the MSP model emerges as a solution.

Managed service providers appeared in the late 1990s in the IT field. These businesses offered a subscription model with a monthly fee for a variety of IT services. One of the advantages is to have access to a flexible offering with different service tiers or customizable packages.

This model translates well to marketing. Between the rise of the omnichannel model and innovations in analytics, many marketers find that they need a flexible partner who can take a customized approach.

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What do MSP marketing services do?

MSPs typically have a flexible model where customers can build digital marketing services packages with different elements. The services can vary from one vendor to another, but most MSPs offer these core building blocks.

SEO

Search engine optimization can get technical with practices like managing redirects or adding no-follow tags to your links. A successful SEO campaign requires skills and a thorough understanding of the signals search engines use to rank pages.

You also have to find the right balance between optimizing your content and developing copy that remains engaging and easy to read. It’s crucial to keep up with the latest trends, such as mobile-friendliness or Google’s recent helpful content update.

Visibility in search results has become a major differentiator. Competing with in-house resources is often not realistic. Plus, implementing SEO in-house means you’ll have to go through a trial-and-error process to figure out which strategies yield results.

Outsourcing SEO to an MSP makes sense:

  • MSPs have SEO experts on staff. These professionals have years of experience and will know right away which on-page and off-site strategies are relevant to your goals.
  • An MSP can improve your ROI by taking a strategic approach. Experts can analyze what your competitors are doing and keep track of search trends for your niche to focus on the most profitable SEO strategies.
  • Having the same team work on your SEO campaign and other aspects of your marketing strategy means that you’ll get more out of your marketing budget as content creation or social media linking practices support your SEO strategy.

Content creation and publication

Prioritizing content creation is more important than ever:

  • Google’s latest update favors quality content that delivers value to users.
  • The buying journey is becoming increasingly digital and self-directed. Content plays a crucial role in supporting a wide range of buying tasks.
  • With the end of third-party cookie support, a content-first strategy can replace retargeting campaigns.

It’s no surprise that 71% of the most successful businesses describe their content creation strategy as mature while only 5% of the least successful organizations have a mature content strategy.

Like many other aspects of your digital marketing plan, managing content creation in-house can be challenging. On average, it can take five hours to create an 800-word blog post. This process involves multiple employees and takes up valuable time.

An MSP can complement your team’s ability to write, or take over the entire content creation program:

  • MSP marketing services give you access to talented writers who use their industry knowledge and writing skills to create content that supports conversions, a top content marketing goal for 65% of brands.
  • Editors can oversee your campaigns and make sure content is consistent with your branding preferences. They will also ensure that content meets spelling, grammatical, and readability requirements.
  • SEO experts can optimize your content to generate more organic traffic.

Beyond writing and editing, an MSP can help with publication:

  • You can work with your MSP to create a content creation schedule. The MSP will deliver fresh content regularly to keep your audience engaged and support your SEO efforts.
  • A steady stream of content will help you stay active on channels like social media or email.
  • Publishing content regularly makes it easier to establish your brand as a thought leader by discussing the latest trends.
  • An MSP can use data to identify the best channels for content publication based on your target audience’s preferences and behaviors.

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Social media

Social media users now exceed 58% of the world’s population. Social media usage keeps growing with the user base increasing by 10% between 2021 and 2022.

These platforms have changed the way we communicate. They’re also shaping our buying habits. Consumers are likely to turn to social media to discover new products or find reviews, but social media is also important for the B2B niche. LinkedIn is now a top platform for 40% of B2B marketers.

Managing social media in-house is time-consuming. Tracking results is challenging since vanity metrics can reduce visibility over your ROI. Plus, managing some aspects like paid ads or analytics can be technical.

MSP marketing services can help:

  • Social media marketing experts can develop a strategic approach and identify the right platforms and content formats.
  • These experts can also optimize your posts for engagement with engaging copy, hashtags, or images.
  • They can even track engagement and determine the best time of day to post.
  • You can work with an MSP to develop guidelines employees can follow when interacting with social media users for branding purposes.
  • An MSP can track results and uncover your social media ROI by focusing on meaningful KPIs.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing has an average ROI of $5.78 for each dollar spent. Over 90% of marketers are now using influencer marketing, and this fast-growing channel goes beyond consumer products. There is an emerging market for B2B influencers who can make a difference by using their industry expertise to endorse products.

Launching an influencer marketing campaign can yield drastic results. Tempesta Media was able to increase leads by more than 300% for a customer by leveraging a mix of content creation, social media marketing, and influencer marketing strategies.

Getting started with influencer marketing can be intimidating. Finding the right influencers, managing these partnerships, and developing guidelines for content creation and endorsement requires some experience with this channel.

Reaching out to an MSP will ensure that you get the most out of influencer marketing. A vendor can help you leverage this trend by using data to identify the right influencers, vetting these partners, and tracking results.

Email marketing

Branded emails remain an effective way of keeping prospects and customers engaged. Delivering the right email at the right time can help a prospect move along their buying journey or cement a long-term relationship with a customer.

Email marketing spending is up. While only 50% of marketers described their email strategy as aligned with their other marketing practices in 2020, this percentage was up to 95% in 2021. A growing number of marketers are taking a deliberate and strategic approach to nurturing leads via email.

Nurturing email has the potential of becoming a cornerstone of your marketing plan. It’s a channel that allows you to engage and nurture leads while delivering personalized content that meets the expectations of your audience.

However, managing email marketing in-house includes a few challenges:

  • Implementing segmentation and other personalization techniques can be difficult.
  • You’ll get more out of your email marketing efforts if you rely on software designed to help you track results, automate tasks, and more. Choosing and learning to use the right email marketing software is a potential barrier.
  • Tracking your open rate, click-through rate, and other KPIs will help you make better decisions for your email campaigns. However, implementing an analytics campaign represents an investment of time and resources.
  • Coordinating your email marketing efforts with your overall content marketing strategy and other channels can be challenging.

MSP marketing services can help you get more out of your email campaigns. You’ll get to work with experienced professionals who can design and implement successful campaigns:

  • Your MSP can take steps to improve your email deliverability rate and avoid spam folders and filters.
  • A vendor with a strong data strategy can leverage analytics to improve your open rate and boost engagement.
  • Outsourcing content production means you’ll get a steady stream of fresh content for your email list.
  • You can also count on your MSP to optimize email series and turn this channel into a reliable qualified lead generation tool.
  • An MSP partner can also help you keep up with the latest privacy trends and best practices for sending emails.

Paid ads

Half of the marketing budgets don’t invest enough to maximize ROI. Marketers are turning this trend around by increasing spending, and social advertising and paid search are emerging as the top spending categories.

Paid ads are an opportunity to improve visibility in search, reach out to specific audience segments, and more. However, several obstacles can prevent you from optimizing an in-house paid advertisement campaign:

  • The bidding process can be technical. A sound bidding strategy ensures that you’re not overspending on ads while delivering the best ROI possible.
  • Third-party cookie support is coming to an end. For many marketers, switching to a strategy that relies on first-party data can be a challenge.
  • A successful paid ad strategy needs to account for your SEO efforts and other organic strategies. Failing to coordinate your efforts can result in unnecessary competition between your different pages or ads.
  • It’s also important to analyze how your competitors use paid ads. Once you know more about the channels or keywords used, you can adapt your approach to limit direct competition.
  • Paid advertising is a long-term commitment. You need to invest time and resources to test strategies, track results, and optimize campaigns.

Due to the technical nature of paid ads, MSP marketing services can make a difference thanks to their expertise. Paid advertisement is an area where an MSP can deliver measurable results and help you maximize your ROI by targeting the right keywords, creating compelling ads, and actively optimizing your campaigns.

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Remarketing

Repetition is crucial for awareness and information retention. With the average internet user seeing thousands of ads every day, it’s easy to develop ad blindness and ignore branded content.

Remarketing helps users remember and notice your brand. It increases awareness by creating a series of connections with a user.

Remarketing isn’t about showing the same content repeatedly. Instead, a sound remarketing strategy should deliver value and promote engagement by following the user through the different stages of the buying journey.

Once you combine your remarketing strategy with your sales funnel model, you can create meaningful touchpoints at different stages of the user’s journey. Each touchpoint can deliver a memorable experience or provide the user with the information they need to move to the next stage. Creating a succession of touchpoints helps users remember your brand. It also establishes your business as a trusted source of information.

With the end of third-party cookie support planned for 2024, there is a strong need to take a new approach to remarketing that prioritizes first-party data.

MSP marketing services can help you plan a successful transition to first-party data. You can also work with an MSP to uncover valuable insights into the buying journey to identify the best touchpoints for remarketing. Plus, digital marketing services packages that include content marketing will result in a more organic experience as your content marketing strategy supports remarketing at different stages of the buying journey.

developing content marketing strategy

Fully customized digital marketing packages

There is no one-size-fits-all in marketing. With MSP marketing services, you can expect a flexible and highly customized approach.

The offering will vary from one vendor to another, but MSPs stand out thanks to their fully customized solutions. You’ll typically work with a professional who acts as an account manager. This expert will get to know your organization, goals, and challenges.

Your go-to person will develop a customized package with marketing services and service tiers that make sense for your goals and budget.

In most cases, MSPs complete audits or assessments to learn more about your current marketing efforts. They will look at your current results, the audience you’re targeting, and the channels you use. They can also analyze your market and competitors.

This initial assessment is a strong baseline for building a marketing plan that addresses your unique goals and challenges. Your MSP will use this initial assessment to recommend digital marketing service packages with content, channels, and strategies that make sense for your organization.

This approach ensures that you don’t pay for things you don’t need. You can also expect fast results and an optimized ROI.

The benefits of MSP marketing services

Why outsource marketing to an MSP? Let’s recap the main benefits of working with these highly flexible and result-oriented partners:

  • An MSP helps you save valuable time by taking over a wide range of marketing-related tasks. Your in-house team can focus on other important things.
  • Managing costs is easy. Most MSPs have a monthly subscription model. Costs are transparent and you can plan future spending. Plus, you can adjust your personalized package if your budget fluctuates.
  • MSPs have employees with years of experience when it comes to working on content creation, SEO, paid ad campaigns, and more. You’ll benefit from this extensive expertise at a fraction of the cost of hiring in-house experts.
  • Thanks to their highly personalized approach, MSPs are able to offer customized digital marketing services packages that reflect your needs and goals without having to pay for things you don’t need.
  • The MSP model values transparency and is result-oriented. You can expect regular reports to track how your marketing campaigns are performing, constant optimization, and recommendations for taking your marketing efforts to the next level.
  • Besides being comfortable with the latest marketing software, MSP employees keep up with the latest trends and best practices.

marketing idea

Summary

The MSP model is on the rise as more businesses decide to outsource marketing. It’s also emerging as an ideal solution for small and medium organizations due to the highly personalized nature of this model.

From saving time to reducing costs and getting measurable results, there are many benefits associated with MSPs. The capabilities can vary from one vendor to another, but you’ll typically build a customized service package with elements like SEO, content creation, email marketing, paid ads, remarketing, and more.

Does the MSP model sound like a good fit for your organization? Tempesta Media has over a decade of experience in helping clients achieve their marketing goals.

Our first step is to complete a thorough 90-point digital marketing assessment to get to know our new clients better. We can then work together to build a customized service package with our Performica framework that includes modules for content marketing, email marketing, social media, influencer marketing, SEO, and much more.

Learn more about our Prova digital assessment to get started, find out more about our Performica framework, or take a closer look at our pricing options.

Top 10 Benefits of Outsourcing to an MSP Marketing Company

Posted on by Michael Marchese

Outsourced marketing solutions are the future of digital marketing.

Digital marketing is at the core of the modern business model. Digital channels have become crucial for connecting with customers, becoming an industry leader, and achieving growth.

However, a successful digital marketing strategy requires an amount of work and a level of expertise that is often difficult to achieve with in-house capabilities, especially for small and medium businesses.

As a result, more organizations are turning to outsourcing. A marketing partner can take over time-consuming tasks, deliver consistent results, and help improve marketing ROI.

Find out why businesses are opting for the MSP marketing company model, and which benefits they derive from these partnerships.

1. Save valuable time

The average workweek can vary a lot from one organization to another. For some entrepreneurs, it’s not unusual to work 50 hours a week. Others are responding to labor challenges and inflation by reducing work hours to avoid increasing compensation.

Time is a valuable resource. Managing this resource successfully directly affects growth. Whether your marketing team works 50 hours a week or is adopting shorter workdays, you need a strategic approach to managing time and focusing on creating the most value possible during work hours.

For businesses without a dedicated marketing team, content creation tasks are an afterthought in a busy schedule. Crafting quality pieces of content can take several hours and involve multiple employees, which means project managers often have to choose between sacrificing quality or slowing down the production schedule.

An MSP marketing company can take over a wide range of marketing-related tasks and free up valuable time. You can retain some marketing tasks in-house and give employees plenty of time to develop high-quality content or decide to have employees focus on other important tasks, such as phone or in-person interactions with customers.

2. Manage costs

Marketing spending is up. On average, businesses are spending 9.5% of their revenue compared to 6.4% last year. In spite of this increase, marketing budgets are still lower than pre-pandemic levels.

In-house marketing can be costly. An employee costs close to $39 an hour between compensation and benefits, and this amount can be higher for positions that call for more competitive wages. You also have to factor in the cost of hiring and training.

As the buying journey continues to become increasingly digital, customers expect to connect with brands on their preferred channels. Adopting an omnichannel approach and coordinating your marketing efforts means you need a multi-disciplinary marketing team with experts in areas like email, social media, paid ads, analytics, copywriting, editing, SEO, and more.

Small and medium organizations typically don’t have the resources needed to put together a large team. Employees often end up wearing many hats and might lack the time, training, and expertise for the scope of their work. Providing your team with the latest marketing tools and software will also add to your in-house costs.

One of the benefits of outsourcing digital marketing is that you can choose an MSP with a monthly subscription model. You’ll get to build a customized package with a predictable cost, and you’ll have access to experts with expertise in several areas. Plus, the result-oriented approach means you can expect to get a measurable return on your investment.

3. Access top marketing talents

An MSP marketing company gives you access to some of the top talents in different marketing fields.

Putting together an internal team with the same level and scope of expertise can be challenging for most businesses. Hiring requires an investment of time and resources, and some talents are in high demand and can be tough to attract and retain.

In the tech industry, 48% of businesses have a small marketing team, sometimes with a single employee. This trend isn’t isolated. In spite of higher marketing budgets, most businesses don’t plan on increasing their marketing team size.

Keeping up with the demands of a digital marketing plan can be difficult and overwhelming for a single employee or a small team. The benefits of outsourcing digital marketing include having access to these different roles through your MSP vendor:

  • Your MSP can fulfill the role of a CMO by helping you develop a vision and overall strategy.
  • Account managers can act as marketing and project managers. These professionals take a CMO’s vision, turn it into a concrete plan, and coordinate the execution.
  • You’ll also get to work with market research experts who can help you study your market and competition or keep up with the latest trends.
  • Many MSPs offer analytics capabilities. This service replaces an internal analytics expert who can measure and optimize your marketing performance.
  • One of the benefits of content marketing outsourcing is that you’ll have access to a wide pool of copywriters and other content creators with industry expertise.
  • You’ll also work with editors who can ensure your content meets quality standards and is ready for publication.
  • MSPs also have social media managers on staff. These professionals can build and manage an online community on your behalf.
  • Your MSP will have SEO experts who can optimize your content.
  • You might also need to work with PR experts who can manage press releases, mentions in the news, and more.

An MSP marketing company gives you access to all these different roles as needed. You’ll get to work with some of the top talents in the marketing industry without any of the costs and challenges linked to hiring and retention. Plus, the MSP model means all these roles belong to the same organization and can work together to achieve consistent results.

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4. Get marketing results fast

Tempesta Media was able to increase leads by 53% for customers in only three months by using a mix of content marketing, off-site and on-site SEO, and paid ads. This kind of fast result is what you can expect when working with an MSP.

The benefits of outsourcing digital marketing include having access to a team of experienced professionals. These experts have worked on similar campaigns in the past and know which strategies will yield the results you’re looking for.

In-house teams make the best decisions possible based on the information available to them, but their limited experience compared to an MSP partner means that there is often a trial-and-error process. It can take weeks or even months to get even data to optimize or decide to scrape a marketing campaign.

This approach is costly, and it gives your competitors the opportunity to strengthen their digital presence while you’re testing different strategies.

Once you identify a strategy that works well, it’s only a matter of time before you have to make changes to response to the latest market trends. An MSP can make you more reactive by identifying the right strategies faster and anticipating these changes.

5. Adopt a proactive approach

Switching from a reactive approach to a proactive marketing plan allows you to anticipate issues before they arise. No matter how closely you monitor marketing performance and other factors, a reactive marketing strategy means that new challenges have time to impact your organization negatively before you respond.

An MSP marketing company can anticipate changes by conducting market research and monitoring the results of your marketing campaigns. For instance, the vendor you choose to work with can anticipate when you’ll need to focus on new client acquisition or adopt a new channel to keep up with the competition.

Being proactive will help you meet customers’ expectations. If a company fails to anticipate their needs, 45% of consumers will switch brands.

A proactive approach will also turn your brand into an early adopter when new channels and trends emerge for your niche. Plus, the benefits of outsourcing content marketing include being able to publish content on short notice to address the latest hot topics for your niche and establish yourself as a thought leader.

6. Benefit from a personalized outsourcing

One of the benefits of content marketing outsourcing with an MSP is the highly personalized approach these vendors take.

It’s true that outsourcing isn’t without its share of potential drawbacks. Finding the right partner can be a challenge. You can end up with a partner that doesn’t match your culture or vision. A common concern is that your marketing partner won’t be able to reproduce the voice and branding that made your organization unique.

The rise of digital marketing means users have access to more content than they can consume. Achieving authenticity and using hyper-focused channels that make sense for your audience are crucial strategies for standing out.

The kind of personalization that only an MSP can offer will make a difference. The MSP marketing company you choose to work with will get to know your organization, your market, and your target audience to develop a customized approach aligned with your goals and the expectations of your audience.

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7. Build flexible and scalable marketing processes

Digital marketing moves fast. There is always a new trend to incorporate, an emerging platform to turn into a new channel, or a new industry issue to address for thought leadership.

There are other potential reasons why flexibility can give you an advantage:

  • You might need to amp up your marketing capabilities for a specific campaign or event, such as a promotion or new product launch.
  • Your organization is going to grow over time, and your digital presence should grow with it. Reaching out to a new niche can be a crucial factor for growth.
  • Landing a new contract with a major client can cause your needs to change overnight.
  • Resilience is key in the current business landscape. You might have to make some unplanned spending cuts and temporarily scale back on your marketing efforts.

This level of flexibility can be difficult to achieve with an in-house team. The main variable you can use to create a flexible team is hiring. However, HR professionals agree that it takes around 60 days to hire a new employee, and you’ll have to give new hires a month or two to catch up and become fluent in your company culture.

Outsourcing to an MSP marketing company means you can build a customized marketing package. Your vendor will give you the possibility to include different services or choose a service tier. It’s a flexible model where you can add or remove services as needed.

You can make changes to your package to develop a presence on a new channel, increase content production for an event, or get help for a special project. An MSP makes you scalable, and you can scale up quickly so you don’t miss out on any opportunities.

8. Keep up with the latest trends

Digital marketing evolves at a fast pace. Marketers need to constantly think ahead and identify the next trend that aligns with their target audience’s preferences and behaviors.

Keeping up with the latest trends means developing a presence on emerging social media platforms that resonate with your target audience. It also means adjusting your SEO strategy to reflect the latest search engine algorithm update or updating your content marketing plan to account for new formats and preferences in consuming content.

For instance, with over 123 million voice assistant users, a growing number of brands are optimizing their content to appear in featured snippets that the Google assistant can read out loud. Some brands are also exploring video results, slideshows, and other varied content formats that increasingly appear in search results.

Keeping up with the latest digital marketing trends is also important in the context of Generation Z coming of age. You need an inclusive marketing plan that addresses the needs and expectations of these digital natives.

With 64% of 18 to 26 years old seeing their brand choices as a form of activism, many brands are rethinking their core values. An updated marketing strategy is crucial for clearly communicating your commitment to the societal and environmental issues that young adults care about.

In-house teams already have a lot on their plate, and there might not be enough time to keep up with the latest trends. Plus, developing a modern marketing plan also requires identifying the trends aligned with a company’s branding strategy and target audience. It’s also crucial to learn enough about a new practice or platform to implement a new strategy successfully.

Investing in the wrong marketing trends can be a costly mistake and adopting a trend after a competitor has already done so won’t yield the same ROI.

One benefits of outsourcing digital marketing to an MSP is that you’ll get help from a team of industry experts. These professionals know what is happening in their field. They can anticipate the next trends and determine the latest practices and strategies that correspond to your marketing goals.

bullseye content marketing

9. Increase your marketing ROI with a result-oriented strategy

Among B2C marketers, a staggering 48% are unsure of their in-house team’s capability to demonstrate content marketing ROI. This statistic reveals that failing to track marketing performance is a widespread issue.

Several obstacles can stand in the way of implementing an effective strategy to track results in-house:

  • Without a proper analytics strategy in place, visibility over marketing performance is difficult to assess. In-house teams don’t always have sufficient resources and skills to implement successful analytics programs.
  • Not having enough data to inform decisions means in-house teams often take a trial-and-error approach. As a result, marketing campaigns are often scraped before they can generate a consistent ROI. A succession of short-lived campaigns can be costly.
  • Establishing clear goals and a timeline is challenging for teams that lack experience or don’t have enough historical data.
  • In some cases, the capabilities of the in-house team in terms of time and budget aren’t realistic for the organization’s marketing goals.

One of the benefits of content marketing outsourcing with an MSP marketing company is that you’ll work with your vendor to discuss your goals, create a concrete marketing plan, and break down this plan into smaller steps with a specific timeline. MSPs use a result-oriented model to optimize your marketing ROI and help you unlock growth.

MSPs also rely on analytics experts to track performance with precision. This data allows an MSP to be more reactive and adjust a marketing strategy if needed.

Analytics improve transparency since you’ll receive regular reports that show how your marketing campaigns are performing. This information can support future decisions and even give you a competitive edge since analytics currently supports only 53% of marketing decisions.

10. Get access to the right tools and tech

Among CMOs, 26% consider data and analytics as one of the top capability gaps for their marketing department. As digital marketing becomes increasingly complex and technical, having access to the right tools can make a significant difference.

Adopting marketing software and other tools in-house isn’t always practical. There is a significant upfront investment linked to implementing a new solution. There are also ongoing costs with software subscriptions or licenses.

Selecting marketing software that meets the needs of your in-house team can be challenging, especially if your marketing experts lack experience with this type of buying decision. Adoption can be another barrier since not all employees are comfortable with technical tools and training represents an additional expense.

Challenges expand beyond your in-house marketing team. Running marketing apps in the cloud or hosting marketing software on-premise requires help from an IT department. For small and medium organizations, the current capabilities of the IT team and IT infrastructure might be insufficient.

Failing to adopt modern marketing tools and tech can hurt the performance of a marketing plan and make it difficult to compete against organizations with a larger tech budget.

Working with an MSP marketing company means you’ll have access to marketers who can rely on a number of tech solutions to optimize your campaign. You won’t have to incur additional costs linked to implementing these tech tools and the MSP team will already have plenty of experience with these apps and software products.

Technology can give you an advantage in the following area:

  • An analytics solution can significantly improve visibility over different digital channels, help you measure results, and support decisions.
  • Finding the right balance between personalization and data privacy is tricky. Data privacy management software helps you streamline the collection and usage of customer data to mitigate risks, improve compliance, and ultimately deliver a better experience.
  • A CRM solution can bridge any existing gaps between your marketing efforts and your sales team. You can gather valuable insights about your customers and prospects, automate personalized content distribution, and more.
  • Marketing automation solutions can help you save time on a wide range of tasks, including content publication, personalized emails, reminder emails, and more.

10+.Embrace innovation

Outsourcing creates value in more than one way. One of the benefits of working with a third-party vendor is to gain a new perspective.

Besides giving you access to new skills, an MSP marketing company with a diverse team of professionals will bring fresh ideas to the table. Your new partner will help you consider issues from a different angle and might come up with solutions you would have never thought of.

The post-COVID market is volatile and navigating inflation, labor mismatches, geopolitical uncertainties, and other challenges might require a significant strategic shift. Innovation is more important than ever and could be the key to unlocking growth.

Summary

Thanks to their holistic and result-oriented approach, MSPs can address a wide range of marketing challenges that businesses of all sizes face.

The two most common reasons for outsourcing are saving time and managing costs but working with an MSP marketing company has many other advantages. You’ll get access to a wider talent pool, benefit from a flexible and scalable marketing plan, leverage the latest tech tools and trends, and much more.

Are you wondering how an MSP could help your brand? At Tempesta Media, we have been supporting the marketing goals of our customers for a decade with a unique blend of expertise, dedication, and result-oriented planning.

Our secret? We take the time to get to know every customer before developing a highly personalized plan. We use our Prova assessment, a two-week process that covers 90 points, to learn as much as we can about a business and its market.

Next, we use our Performica framework to develop a customized marketing strategy. Performica is a turnkey solution that allows us to build flexible marketing packages by selecting modules aligned with the unique goals of each customer while taking their budget into consideration.

We’ll deliver regular updates regarding how your campaigns are performing and take your feedback into consideration to continuously improve your marketing plan. Our flexible Performica framework also means you can add or remove modules as needed for areas like content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, SEO, and more.

Learn more about how Performica works and how it could transform your digital marketing strategy.

How to Promote FAQ Articles and Why They’ll Improve Your Website

Posted on by Michael Marchese

As the buying journey becomes increasingly self-directed, marketers need to offer resources designed to help prospects access the information they need.

Here’s why a great FAQ website is a must-have tool to enhance the user experience and help prospects move along the buying journey.

How to promote and share FAQ articles

Build a FAQ section on your website with dedicated pages for each Q&A. By structuring your FAQ section so that each query is hyperlinked to a separate page, each answer becomes searchable on your site and Google.

Incorporate your FAQ articles into your site’s knowledge base. Some marketing tools have great knowledge bases, for example, HubSpot’s service hub. Customers and prospects should also be able to easily spot it on the Home page and the navigation menu.

FAQ articles will also be useful in areas where visitors go when they need assistance, such as the Contact Us page.

Chatbots have become much more advanced thanks to artificial intelligence. The chatbot can open with a helpful Q&A based on a user’s action on your website. Or you can trigger the chatbot to respond to specific questions with helpful articles. This helps the customer by providing a quick, prompt answer. It also saves your team time by not having to answer each question individually.

New features and platform updates are best accompanied by helpful articles to ensure users help themselves.

Why is FAQ content a great strategy to incorporate?

When done right, FAQ articles can provide real value to both your business and your readers.

Visitors will see it as a demonstration of your expertise as it relates to your product or service and business model. By directly addressing their concerns and removing any purchase obstacles, you also show more value to your customers and prospects.

As an SEO strategy, FAQ articles increase the frequency with which you publish new content, as these pieces are typically easier to create and there are many opportunities to add new responses. FAQs improve your website performance, as they tally up the number of pages visited per session and improve bounce rates.

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How to identify the right questions to add to your FAQ website

The purpose of a FAQ page is addressing barriers to knowledge. Whether a user needs to know more about a product or needs proof that they can trust you, these barriers stand in the way of the purchase.

The first step to developing an effective FAQ page is to identify the questions your audience is likely to have. However, with sales representatives having approximately 5% of a prospect’s time during the buying journey, you’ll have to use a variety of methods to better understand what the buying journey looks like and which questions are likely to arise:

  • Customer service representatives can help. Mine the questions they receive the most.
  • Traffic patterns can show which pages get the most clicks and give you an idea of the topics visitors want to learn more about.
  • Use Google Search Console to track the searches that lead users to your content. These searches can reflect common questions among your visitors.
  • Go further by getting your target audience involved. Use a mix of interviews, surveys, and focus groups to ask about the information buyers need at different stages of their journey.

The set-it-and-forget-it approach won’t work for your FAQ page. You need to keep this content current by using search trends, feedback from customers, and input from your customer service team to identify new questions you should add.

Writing compelling responses

Now that you have a list of questions for your FAQ website, you can craft compelling answers. A good FAQ answer should be easy to understand and straight to the point. It should clearly, fully address the need for information.

Use these tips to create effective FAQ answers:

  • Start your answers with Yes or No when possible. Focus on readability, and make sure you deliver a full answer to the question.
  • Avoid technical jargon. Write from the point of view of your audience and use terms and expressions they would use.
  • Use bold or italics to draw attention to important words or sentences and make important information stand out.
  • With close to 60% of traffic being on mobile, it’s important to optimize your content for small screens. Keep your answers under three or four lines.
  • The Q&A format is ideal to let your voice and branding come through in your writing. Think of writing FAQ answers as a conversation to make your content more engaging.
  • Some questions might call for more nuanced answers. Write a summary and invite visitors to a link offering more about the topic.

Linking to and from your FAQ page

Get more out of your FAQ page by incorporating it into your internal linking scheme. Since clutter can get in the way of navigation, it’s best to keep your main menu options to five or six links. If you don’t have room to add your FAQ page to your main, add it to your secondary navigation scheme under About or Resources.

You should also link to your FAQ website in your footer. The idea behind this practice is that users might scroll through an entire page without finding the information they need. Seeing a link to your FAQ provides them with a helpful next step. Plus, linking to your FAQ in your footer is a common practice and visitors will expect to find the link there.

Your FAQ page is an important element in the content consumption journey. It can be a great way to suggest next steps by sharing a few internal links in your answers, while supporting your SEO efforts:

  • Add links to your Contact page. A sidebar can make this link more noticeable, but you can also incorporate a contact link to your copy if some answers are too complex to explain on your FAQ page in detail.
  • Link to pillar pages for topics users might want to explore in depth.
  • For questions that require a lengthy answer, link to blog posts with more detailed information.
  • You can also link to specific documents, including product manuals, warranties, privacy policies, and return policies.

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The importance of a user-friendly FAQ page

Ideally, your FAQ website helps users come away with a clear answer to their questions and a positive opinion of your brand.

Creating a user-friendly FAQ page with an engaging design can be challenging due to the amount of content to include. You can create a comprehensive FAQ page while facilitating navigation with these solutions:

  • Use an accordion design where users have to click on a question to reveal the answer. Users can see more questions at a glance and easily find the ones relevant to the current task.
  • Organize your questions in categories so users can easily jump to the section that is relevant to them.
  • A search bar for your FAQ page or entire website will allow users to look up their questions and find helpful content from your Q&As.
  • Use words and expressions your audience would use instead of technical jargon. It will help users locate relevant content with a search bar or the Ctrl+F feature.

FAQ pages and the self-directed journey

The modern buyer is autonomous and self-driven. For many prospects, the buying journey is about consuming content at their own pace and on their own terms. This approach empowers buyers, but it can create some challenges when information isn’t readily available.

By mapping this self-directed journey, you can better understand potential barriers or pain points and address them by developing relevant FAQ content. Inviting prospects to visit your FAQ page at the right moment in their journey can also help them progress to the next stage.

Here is how you can develop a FAQ page that supports the self-directed buying journey:

  • Craft answers that provide enough details to address the request for information so that the prospect has everything they need to progress to the next stage of their journey.
  • Make sure your FAQ includes answers relevant to different stages of the journey, including practical concerns like cost, compatibility, or support options.
  • Provide an alternative to the FAQ page in case your answers don’t meet a user’s needs. A link to contact customer service is a must-have feature.
  • A good FAQ page should reduce the workload of your customer service team. This reduced workload is an opportunity to focus on delivering more engaging experiences when a prospect or customer contacts a representative.

Turn your FAQ into a pivot for human contact

Your FAQ website can become an important pivot in the user’s journey. With the buying journey becoming increasingly self-directed, you need to look for touchpoints that create opportunities for human contact.

Prospects who visit your FAQ page are fulfilling a need for knowledge, and while some answers can be short and concise, others can act as a pivot for exploring a topic in more detail with the help of a customer service representative or salesperson.

Turning your FAQ page into a pivot for human contact will help optimize the user journey, an approach that can result in a 20% increase in customer satisfaction and boost revenues by 15%.

Use these tips to leverage your FAQ page and generate human contacts:

  • Add a contact link that is immediately visible.
  • Write copy that encourages readers to reach out.
  • Explain the value of using the contact link. For instance, you can point to a representative who will provide a more personalized answer.
  • Offer different ways of contacting you.

Not all answers are good candidates to act as pivots. Focus on optimizing answers that denote a higher level of sophistication from the prospect as well as questions where personalized answers would provide more value.

Leverage your FAQ website to build trust

Did you know that around two-thirds of consumers are unlikely to make a purchase if a brand loses trust? Trust is a crucial factor shaping buying decisions and customer retention, especially in the context of digital buying journeys where prospects have to share data with vendors and make decisions without in-person interactions.

There are different strategies you can use to build trust, from managing your online reputation to providing outstanding customer service. You can also focus on building transparency to turn prospects into leads.

A FAQ page will make your brand more transparent by immediately providing users with the information they need. You can use your FAQ to anticipate concerns, share information in a clear and concise manner, and show that you have nothing to hide.

Making your FAQ page easy to find by using internal links and using your answers to link to other relevant pages also shows that you value transparency. You also show dedication to providing as much information as possible so prospects can make the best decision.

Plus, encouraging users to contact you if they can’t find the information they need shows you care about their concerns.

Your FAQ page and search results

As prospects gather information to complete various tasks during their buying journey, they will turn to search engines to issue questions. They might have a specific question about a product or service, need information about billing or support, or want to clarify your policies regarding returns or cancelations.

Optimizing your FAQ website can help provide prospects with clear answers directly on the search engine result page. With Google using formats like featured snippets or People Also Ask results, users can find answers to their questions without having to visit a webpage.

Targeting these result types will increase visibility in search results. It can also help drive clicks from users who need more information. With 53% of web traffic coming from organic search, an optimized FAQ page can have a positive impact on SEO and traffic.

Plus, optimizing your answers for these result types ensures that search engines won’t show content from your competitors or other sources when displaying direct answers.

Here’s how you can increase your chances of having your answers featured in Google results:

  • Write clear answers that are short enough to appear in featured snippets. Keep your answers below the 50-word range if possible.
  • Optimize your questions and answers with strong keywords to indicate what your content is about.
  • Use natural-sounding questions that reflect the queries users would issue. With over 123 million voice assistant users, natural-sounding questions will also help you capture traffic from voice searches.

FAQs and content creation opportunities

Your FAQ page can be a starting point for developing great content creation ideas. If you find yourself struggling to write a concise answer, the question could benefit from a more detailed blog post to provide users with the information they need. You can also craft blog posts to extend on some of your answers, illustrate them with examples, or discuss different scenarios.

Plus, adding links to these blog posts on your FAQ page will support content discovery as well as helping your SEO strategy.

You can also get more out of your FAQ page by using this content for your social media and email marketing campaigns. You can, for instance, share a weekly Q&A on social media as a question of the week. It’s an original way to keep your audience engaged with short posts that provide value.

You can do something similar by adding a Q&A to the bottom of your weekly newsletter and give recipients an additional reason to open emails.

Get help crafting a successful FAQ page

From identifying the right questions to writing compelling answers, creating a great FAQ page can be challenging. It’s also important to consider how this page will fit in your overall SEO and content marketing strategies.

As a managed service provider, Tempesta Media can develop a high-quality FAQ website that engages and converts.

We can deliver highly personalized content creation services thanks to our unique 90-point Prova digital marketing assessment. This assessment allows us to learn more about your goals, branding, and market so we have a solid foundation to work on when developing personalized content.

Next, we’ll create a customized marketing plan with our managed solution. We’ll use the findings of our Prova assessment to select the modules and strategies that make sense for your unique goals and budget. With modules like content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, paid ads, and much more, we can develop a FAQ page aligned with your goals and help with other aspects of your digital presence.

Contact us to learn more or schedule your initial Prova assessment!

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Podcast Episode: 2023 Trends in Content and Digital Marketing for Companies in the Finance and Wealth Management Industry

Posted on by Michael Marchese

The content marketing industry is an ever-changing landscape. Every year, new trends emerge, and old ones fade away.

Marketing is becoming more interactive and less mainstream. There are many new ways to reach customers, such as social media marketing or influencer marketing. As a result, companies must be more creative in reaching their target audience because they can’t rely on traditional advertising methods anymore.

One of the main points to remember is that marketing in the digital age is all about creating content that resonates with your target audience and provides them with value, rather than just pushing products out there and hoping they will buy them.

Content Marketing is a crucial part of digital marketing, which is essential for financial and wealth businesses to succeed. A business’s content should be valuable, easy to share, and engaging. The content should also be optimized for search engines and social media channels to reach as many people as possible.

In the More Perfect Marketing Podcast, hosted by David Baer, Michael Marchese shares the trends in content marketing and digital marketing for companies in the finance and wealth management industries in the year 2023:

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