Tag: content optimization

What Social Media Optimization Can Do for Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Posted on by Anastasiia Lavrinenko

Social media optimization is a strategic and purposeful approach to growing your presence on this channel. Read on for some of the top strategies you can use to optimize your social media accounts.

Social media marketing allows you to connect with your audience like few other channels can. It’s also a significant investment of time and resources. Focusing on social media optimization will help you get more out of what you invest in this channel.

What is social media optimization?

Why is your brand present on social media? If you joined Facebook because your competitors use this platform or if you share tweets because your audience expects it, you’re not optimizing your social media presence.

Instead of simply existing on social media and posting occasionally, optimization is about taking a strategic approach and turning this channel into a powerful agent for growth. It’s the difference between being proactive and reactive.

Your business has goals. Social media can support these goals by helping with brand awareness, outreach, sales, and other aspects of your mission. With optimization, you’re adopting the strategies that make the most sense for achieving these goals.

social media like

The basics of social media optimization

There are four key areas to focus on to optimize your presence on social media.

Adopt a strategic approach

Social media optimization begins with goals. These goals need to be measurable and aligned with your broader business objectives. If applicable, you should also think about these goals in relation to the other channels you use and to your paid social campaigns.

Everything you do on social media should support your goals. A common mistake is to focus on vanity metrics such as the number of followers your Twitter account gets. With optimization, your focus shifts to metrics and actions that translate into results.

Establishing clear goals will inform the way you grow your social media presence. It can help you identify the platforms to join. For instance, LinkedIn is one of the fastest-growing platforms for B2B marketing, but Facebook is the best social network for reaching out to men between the ages of 25 and 34.

If you want to schedule your publications to get as many impressions as possible from your target audience, your goals can also inform your post-development strategy and help you with automated social media marketing.

You can go further by using social media analytics. Tracking things like which platform results in the most sales, which network brings in leads that spend the most, or what type of content generates the most engagement will help you fine-tune your efforts.

Achieving continuous improvement through goal-setting and analytics can be technical. It’s something a social media management partner can help you with, and social media management pricing is justified by the results you’ll get.

Build a strong profile

The purpose of a social media profile is to tell users at a glance what you do and what differentiates you from other businesses.

A strong profile should be immediately recognizable, which is why it’s important to integrate your social media marketing efforts with your other campaigns. Consistent branding with your copy and graphics will increase brand recognition and awareness.

You’ll also need a compelling description of your business with some strong keywords to capture traffic from social searches. Don’t forget to add a link to your website, your contact information, and a name, address, and phone number (NAP) mention to support your local SEO goals if applicable.

Optimize your activity

Posting content is at the heart of your social media presence. You can write posts specifically for a social network, curate posts with links to third-party sources, or integrate your social media presence with your content marketing efforts to share links to your own blog posts or news stories.

Just like with every other platform, content quality matters. Write content that solves problems and delivers value. Use strong calls to action to get conversions and craft eye-catching headlines that will make users want to click. Then optimize the copy, keywords, hashtags, and visual components of each post.

However, your activity shouldn’t be limited to written content. There are other avenues to explore:

  • A growing number of brands are using social media as a customer service channel thanks to chat features.
  • You can also interact with your audience by liking their comments or responding to them.
  • Visual content, like photos and infographics, can grab the attention of your audience and generate engagement.
  • Video is another interesting format to use. There were 2 billion video views on Twitter this year, a number that increased by 67% compared to the previous year.

social media engagement

Boost audience engagement

Social media optimization should extend to your follower outreach efforts. The more you know about your audience, the easier it will become to engage them on social media and inspire loyalty.

The first step is to get your content noticed. Brevity is important since users often scroll and skim on social media. Eye-catching visuals, clear formatting, strong headlines, emojis, and hashtags are things that can make a difference.

Speaking of hashtags, they’re important for three reasons:

  • They make your content discoverable for users who explore hashtags related to topics they’re interested in.
  • They allow you to spark conversations related to your brand and products by creating branded hashtags.
  • The existence of branded hashtags will encourage more people to create user-generated content (UGC), which can act as social proof for your online reputation. You can extend the scope of UGC by launching an employee advocacy program and having employees join the conversation on social media.

Hashtags will also help you get a feel for the trending topics your followers care about. Being timely is crucial on social media since there are plenty of opportunities to join existing conversations and bring something new to the table. Examples of trending topics on Facebook for 2021 include conversations about education, racial inequalities, sustainable living and gardening, banking, and self-care.

Audience engagement is often about small things that people will remember, whether it’s responding to a comment, creating shareable content, posting regularly, or adopting a voice that is human and relatable. You should also leverage word of mouth from your top fans and look into establishing partnerships with influencers.

The takeaway

Social media optimization makes your presence on this channel more purposeful. A social media management price is an expense you’re going to incur whether you decide to outsource or invest in in-house resources.

With optimization, you can get a better ROI thanks to the following benefits:

  • Increasing your outreach and brand awareness.
  • Building a community of loyal fans.
  • Getting more traffic for your blog or site.
  • Contributing to existing conversations and positioning yourself as a thought leader.
  • Supporting your SEO and content marketing efforts.
  • Having the resources in place to mitigate potential PR issues.

Do you need help with social media optimization?

Social media is one of the areas Tempesta Media can help you with as part of our managed service. From post-development to follower outreach, we can ensure you get better results with this channel. Contact us to learn more!

How to Create a Financial Services Content Marketing Strategy?

Posted on by Michael Marchese

Designing a financial services content marketing strategy comes with unique issues. Here we outline a repeatable strategy for creating content that solves problems to engage and attract new customers in this niche.

Creating a financial services content marketing strategy can be a challenge for marketing teams. This is because financial services firms exist in a unique niche. Exploring what makes them different is an important part of developing a sound content process and strategy.

Financial services is a unique ecosystem

Financial services firms are distinct from other firms that employ content marketing for several reasons:

  • They are highly regulated, and content must often meet compliance guidelines and receive clearance from compliance departments.
  • They are prone to disruption, primarily because they have been regulated so heavily.
  • Their subject matter can be dry, making engagement more challenging.
  • Their work can be especially lucrative, making competition levels high.

Below is a process that marketing teams can use to create financial services content marketing strategies that perform.

Consider the goal

This might seem obvious, but asking yourself exactly what you’re trying to accomplish is essential. When we answer this question, it serves several functions. Asking the question early helps to clarify goals and eliminate fluff. Content that does this well will stand out if our audience is mostly Generation Z and Millenials versus Boomers or Gen Xers. This is because what is important in the financial life cycles of each of these groups is different. Young people typically have more debt, less income and higher spending than their older counterparts, who often have more assets, more income and less debt. Tailor your messaging to each group, and your results will thank you.

be creative

Create unique, detailed personas

To create great content is to craft content so it informs the audience while getting them to engage with it. Drawing them in can mean different things, though. It can be helpful to develop detailed marketing personas for each of the types you wish to attract. In this process, marketing teams decide who their desired customer is and what their biggest pain points are. What are they trying to accomplish? What stands in their way?

Then, the team can create content that leads each persona step by step through each stage of the customer acquisition process. Doing this in a financial services context might involve going into much more detail in this step since finances tend to color and be colored by other aspects of our lives. For example, it could be important to know for marketing purposes that Zach Zoomer, your Gen Z persona, drinks highly caffeinated drinks every day (and thus budgets for it and views this purchase as essential). Make your marketing personas as detailed as is reasonable for your campaign.

Identify bottlenecks

Finding the bottlenecks that impede progress is the longest and most involved step when designing a financial services content marketing strategy. Process bottlenecks that appear on the surface frequently aren’t the actual bottlenecks.

Once you’ve set the goal and identified the composite personas and problems you’ll be helping them solve, many times you will identify apparent bottlenecks before arriving at the real ones. Problems that appear on the surface can be complex outcomes of other sub-processes. Compliance tends to be a recurring bottleneck in financial services, for example. Still, solutions to compliance constraints often come about by examining those processes and finding ways to work with compliance personnel to speed things up.

Create simple rules to swarm bottlenecks

Once you’ve found the bottlenecks that inhibit your process, you can begin to create simple rules that eliminate them. A marketing manager could, for example, meet with the client’s compliance director and come up with processes that speed up approval times. Batch processing, creating AI-based scanning scripts, or even training and certifying an editor to pre-approve content could all be possible solutions.

This entire process of “Goal, Bottleneck, Rules” can also be applied to each smaller issue. Helping the compliance team to identify their true goal could help to streamline their process, for example.

Get help with financial services content marketing

At Tempesta Media, financial services is one of three core industries that our managed service solution serves. We can help you build and capitalize on your content marketing strategy to connect with your target audience and grow your customer base. To find out more about how we can help you, contact us today.

What Are the Benefits of Content Development Outsourcing?

Posted on by Anastasiia Lavrinenko

Why do so many companies choose to invest in content development outsourcing? There are many benefits to take advantage of.

Today’s online landscape is incredibly competitive. To keep up, companies need to consistently strive to outshine others in their industry. Most companies, small and large, find they need to invest in content development if they want to compete. However, the key to success isn’t just to do your content marketing well. You need to do it better than your competitors, which may mean seeking the help of content development outsourcing services.

How do outsourced marketing services provide a solution for SMBs?

Small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) typically have limited budgets. Not to mention, they have little to no access to a robust marketing team. In response, it’s not unusual for SMBs to find content marketing cumbersome.

Their small teams are often too stretched. Or worse, employees perform double duty with other responsibilities and can never devote enough time or energy to any of their tasks to create quality work. As a result, desired results may not materialize. (In fact, undesirable results may surface.)

If you’re already doing content marketing, you know how challenging it can be to consistently create and publish new material. Outsourcing content marketing offers SMBs the solution by taking some of the time, money, and resource considerations off their plate.

How does content development outsourcing benefit large companies?

Outsourcing content development isn’t just a smart investment for SMBs. Large companies can benefit too. They don’t have to onboard full-time experts to handle content creation, which saves money on onboarding, training, and providing resources for more people.

A content marketing partner also offers a fresh perspective and new messaging ideas, both of which can effectively reach deeper into a targeted audience base. Furthermore, an expert partner can offer you a competitive advantage. For instance, they already know what works – and what doesn’t – for your competitors.

Content experts also tend to keep up with marketing trends. This doesn’t always happen in-house when there are a thousand other tasks to complete. Thus, with a dedicated partner, you’ll gain access to cutting-edge strategies as they emerge.

The Value of a Lede Oriented to Your Target Audience

Why does outsourcing content marketing work?

Regardless of a company’s size, outsourcing content marketing offers a multitude of benefits. So, it’s not surprising that 78% of companies have a content team of 1-3 people. However, this small size puts huge pressure on those select individuals.

Aside from removing internal pressures, consider these other tangible benefits that come with outsourcing your content marketing strategy:

  • Quick and easy start. Getting started is key. Simply share your goals with your partner, detail your target audience, and outline your style guide. Your partner will handle the rest and you can see ROI increase.
  • Gain expertise. Gaining access to a team of qualified, experienced, and knowledgeable writers can easily breathe new life into your strategy. Let your partner create industry-centric content.
  • Eliminate internal bias. With an external team to identify areas of improvement, you can make your content even more effective and boost your publishing abilities.
  • Create customer-friendly content. People actively working in an industry tend to speak jargon. This doesn’t always translate well to a customer base. Your partner will ensure that content is written for your target audience and that it solves their pain points in words they can easily understand.
  • Cost savings. With content development outsourcing, you empower your staff and bolster your budget. Freeing up these two assets allows you to focus on core competencies and growth, without pouring money down the drain on stagnant marketing strategies or costly employee resources.

Get help from an expert

Outsourcing content writing to an expert third party is a smart move for many businesses, large and small. If you need help with your content strategy, Tempesta Media’s managed solution offers you 360-degree service. Contact us today for a no-obligation consultation. We’re happy to answer any questions.

Benefit Your Business With a Social Media Management Company

Posted on by Anastasiia Lavrinenko

Social media has become a major part of marketing and networking for businesses. With millions of different corporate pages and profiles across all social media platforms, you need to make sure your company has a strong social media presence to capture potential customers. A social media management company that offers custom services can help you save time while successfully managing your social media networks.

Many entrepreneurs are overwhelmed by social media because it is time-consuming to maintain an active presence for their business across channels. Fortunately, there’s a solution that can help you stay on top of all the competition on social media. 

Social media management companies or social media managed service providers can handle all the processes connected with social media activity for you. It’s difficult to assess the numerous advantages that these kinds of services can bring to your company. Social media management companies can provide support starting in the early stages, such as account creation, and stick with you all the way through to setting up paid campaigns for lead generation.

Creating accounts on social media

A good social media management company can help you create and manage your social media accounts and ensure they stay up to date and relevant. But first, it’s necessary to identify the appropriate social media management channel. Professionals who help craft  your social media marketing strategy from scratch know the latest trends and data, which helps them make an appropriate decision.

Based on the latest statistics, Facebook is the most popular social media for B2C as well as B2B. When creating an account, you should consider a lot of factors. But the first questions a social media management company will ask you are:

Just starting with these two questions, an expert group of social media managers will be able to create accounts on the appropriate social media channels for your business and design an original, custom social media marketing strategy, by using the best social media practices.

social media platforms: where do consumers prefer to follow brands

Depending on the package option you choose with your social media managed service provider, a good social media management company may also train your internal employees on some social media services. The best part is that they’re always available to take care of any updates or changes needed in your account when necessary. 

Social media is an important part of your content marketing strategy. For that reason, you need to ensure your company maintains a strong presence on as many social channels as possible. Understanding how to develop an online presence and advertise on multiple social platforms has become a vital component of every business’s success, with billions of individuals on social media internationally.

Some benefits of having a social media presence

As a brand, you can reach out to millions of people in a matter of seconds through the power of social media. You don’t have to worry about the overhead costs because social media is your best friend when you’re trying to reach a large audience for a low cost. By using social media for even a small part of your marketing strategy, you can gain a lot of visibility for your brand. 

The beauty of social media is that it’s constantly evolving and offering new features and ways to interact with consumers. With a social media management company as your business partner, you will be able to see the latest social media best practices in action in the most effective way. 

Social media branding

Branding is crucial since it creates a lasting impression on customers and informs them about what to expect from your business. It’s a technique that helps you stand out from the crowd and state exactly what makes you the better option.

Social media is important to your branding efforts. As you design your social media pages, focus on information and images that strengthen your brand. By answering these kinds of questions, a social media company can create a powerful branding strategy to promote your company on social media: 

  • Who are you? 
  • What do you do? 
  • What’s special about you? 
  • Why should I care about you?

To build a strong brand, you need to have a solid social media presence. If you want people to use your products or services, they have to connect with your brand. 

However, building a brand on social media is not as easy as just creating a Facebook page (though you can learn to do it well). You need to understand the type of content people are interested in seeing. If you are just starting out on social media, It can be challenging for you to figure out and take into account all the small pieces, like the type of content you should be posting to pique your audience’s interest.

Branding is necessary to establish an identity and recognition for your products and services. Your followers and consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that they know and trust, and more likely to stay loyal to a brand they have already developed a relationship with. 

Social media SEO 

Social media optimization, or SMO, is about attracting visitors to your social media pages. It is very different from search engine optimization, but has the same goal of increasing traffic to your pages. 

SMO is considered one of the most important components of marketing today. One key difference between SMO and traditional SEO is the fact that unlike search engine results, social media crawling cannot be automated by software. It is updated almost in real time, making it very difficult for robots to determine when they have updated data.

Content creation for social media

Social media content creation is a more complex procedure than it looks. Your team may not be finding success on their own, as it can be time-consuming and difficult to manage. It also requires creativity and constant attention to social media trends.

Many companies struggle with this aspect of marketing for a few reasons. The most common stumbling blocks in social media content creation are:

  1. Not knowing your audience and their problems and interests.
  2. Not knowing the types of content that work best for social media.
  3. Not understanding the focus of a particular social network and how to identify the right type of content for each social media channel.
  4. Not having a social media editorial calendar in place.
  5. Lack of automation of the content planning and posting processes.
  6. Not using hashtags and other tricks to increase the visibility of published social media content.

Best types of social media content

It is important to know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to using the most popular social media platforms. And, since social media use has increased dramatically over the last few years, it’s crucial that your company’s social media content is top-notch. 

If you want your social media content to work for you, then you should create content that will generate interest and boost traffic to your business. Here are some of the best-performing content types for social media:

  • Written posts, articles and e-guides. These kinds of posts can help you gain credibility and improve your reputation by showing your knowledge within the industry.
  • Curated content. By presenting relevant articles and resources from other sources that you trust, you can share the latest industry updates and provide your audience with a piece of valuable information that you haven’t outlined yet in your own blog.
  • Reviews and testimonials. People value other people’s opinions and experiences over what a company claims, so testimonials and reviews are vital.
  • Announcements. Spreading the word about new goods, events, live streams and other significant events can help generate buzz and keep people informed about what’s going on with your company. Audiences adore getting behind-the-scenes information about their favorite stores and companies!
  • Images. Long-form blogs are far less digestible and compelling than visual content. Smartphone cameras can produce breathtaking images, and various applications make it easy to edit them.
  • Infographics. These are used to accompany explanations, data and other written concepts. Infographics are tops at communicating complex ideas.
  • Videos. It’s convenient to record videos, and they’re highly entertaining. How-to tutorials, video tours, and product updates and demos are all examples of fantastic video content that may improve website traffic and revenue.

The importance of hashtags for social media

Hashtags are words or phrases preceded by the pound sign. When you click on a hashtag, you can see all of the posts on that particular subject. Hashtags help connect content to the person seeking it without requiring them to search for it in a specific app. 

Hashtags can be used in a variety of ways. They can categorize a post to make it easier for others to search and find. They can be used to add a source or location to a post. For example, when posting from an event, you might add the name of the event to provide context. The above scenario wouldn’t necessarily be classified as a chat tool, but could be if the users add that functionality themselves.

An abundance of companies offer social media management services, but there are two main types. One service makes the most of the platforms by creating content and engaging with customers appropriately. The second service helps with your overall social media strategy, whether its focus is on selling or building a community.

Tempesta Media is the second type of company, with full service. As a part of Tempesta Media’s managed service, a team of professionals can create a comprehensive social media content marketing strategy for you, starting with analyzing your competitors’ environment by providing actionable insights and recommendations for their implementation. Our social media professionals can manage your social media production from the moment of account creation, through every step of production and improvement.

Publishing social media content

The internet is a fast-paced world where content is king. If you always want to be known as an industry leader, you will need to make sure you are publishing useful and evergreen content on your social media accounts. But who has the time to go through all of the information you find, make it interesting for your audience and also make sure it is shared in the right way?

Keeping up with content publishing on social media can be a full-time job. With so many posts to schedule and so much engagement to monitor, it can be completely overwhelming. A social media management company will essentially do all of this for you.

Maintain the right posting frequency

Posting frequency is only one part of the equation when you’re trying to get people to click on your posts, and it’s something you should look into when creating your publishing schedule. 

One of the most important steps a social media management company takes is to develop a posting strategy for social media. In other words, what social media channels will your company post to, and how frequently? It sounds easy enough, but it can actually be a bit tricky if it’s overlooked. 

To help you figure out your social media posting frequency, we’ve put together a list of the most popular social media platforms, along with the best recommendations for publishing frequency: 

  • Facebook: 1-2 posts per day.
  • Twitter: 1-2 times per day, but no more than 3-5 times per day. Be careful.
  • LinkedIn: 1 post per business day, which is 20 posts per month. Companies that post weekly on LinkedIn see a 2x higher engagement rate.

Don’t forget about the time

We all know there can never be just one formula for what works and what doesn’t when it comes to the best time to post on social media. It’s unique to each business and its specific audience. 

So, let’s take a look at some general rules of the best time to post on social media to get the greatest reach for your company’s social media accounts:

  • Facebook: Try to keep your post timing between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.
  • Twitter: Mornings and late evenings are the best times to post on Twitter. Try publishing between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. or between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.
  • LinkedIn: Monday and Tuesday from 8 a.m.–2 p.m. Post on Wednesday from 8–10 a.m. and at noon, on Thursday at 9 a.m. and 1–2 p.m., and on Friday at 9 a.m.

When posting times are used correctly, your social media can help you reach new customers and increase sales. Tempesta Media’s platform, along with its social media solutions, specifically its Simple Social Share™ feature, allow you to use one centralized dashboard to create, schedule, publish and optimize social media posts while getting higher ROI and ROT.

Analyzing your social media program performance

It is important to analyze your social media data to see if there are any ways you can improve your use of social media. If you don’t take the time to analyze the data, you will fail to optimize and scale your social media marketing program. 

The analysis should include data about your target audience, the type of content, the timeline and other factors that are important for your business. The social media management company will focus on finding out what works and what doesn’t, where improvement can be made and new ideas for social media marketing campaigns.

It will take time to analyze your social media program’s performance from all angles. This includes using analytics not only from your own websites, but also from the social media platforms where you are promoting your business. You can learn a lot about your customers by paying close attention to these statistics. For instance, through analytics, you may find that a certain social media platform is not providing you with nearly as much traffic as you think it should be.

Here are some social media program performance metrics that a social media management company will definitely pay attention to while performing the analysis:

  • Engagement (clicks, likes, shares and comments). The engagement rate is frequently used to determine how active your audience is with your social media content and how effective your brand efforts are. Consumers who are engaged interact with brands through behaviors like “likes,” comments and social sharing.
  • Awareness (impressions and reach). Impressions and reach are both critical metrics to evaluate, especially if your social goals are focused on brand awareness and perception.
  • Share of voice (volume and sentiment). Volume and sentiment are two factors that influence how much of a person’s voice is heard. A measure known as share of voice is frequently employed in public relations as well as in competitive research and paid advertising campaigns. It shows how much of the online world your company is involved in. If you’re a Chicago-based surgery clinic, for example, you can see how many people are talking about your business online in comparison to your competitors.
  • ROI (referrals and conversions). Both sales and marketing goals, as well as major business goals, are linked to social referral traffic and conversions.

Final thoughts

You can benefit your business now by hiring a social media management company. A social media management company can help you promote your business, increase your follower count and enhance your target customer base.​

A social media management company can cover everything from social media strategy and implementation to the daily operations needed to keep a profile running effectively. Most social media management operations take a considerable amount of time. This is time you can better spend focusing on increasing revenue and other important aspects of your business while still developing and maintaining your company’s online presence on various social media sites and reaching out to new and potential customers.

Enlisting the help of a social media management company is one of the best decisions you can make for your business. 

100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing, and Scaling Content Marketing Programs

Posted on by Michael Marchese

100 mistakes eBook – learn from the mistakes of others and get content marketing results today.

Our comprehensive eBook will guide you on the ways of quickly improving content marketing programs. This work is a result of analyzing business’ content marketing programs across financial services, business services, and healthcare industries and discovering common issues that companies typically do. With our recommendations, you will be able to scale up a content marketing program and detect potential issues along with guidance to solve it.

Get the right direction on how to:

Download eBook

Get more out of your existing content marketing program with recommendations in our e-book, “100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.” At nearly 70 pages, our e-book contains 100 different content marketing recommendations to help you implement a successful program and generate great results.

How to Optimize Content and Avoid Google Penalty?

Posted on by Anastasiia Lavrinenko

Undoubtedly every business has faced an issue with Google guidelines, which is why “How can you avoid being penalized by Google?” is such a common search.

When you work hard on SEO optimization to rank at the top of search results, you don’t want to be penalized for unclear reasons. To avoid this unappealing scenario, let’s explore the issue further and learn about some best practices to optimize content marketing that will help you avoid penalties.

Why do Google penalties happen, and what do they mean for you?

Google often penalizes a website due to viewing it as a low-quality site that is not trustworthy. Google also penalizes a site if it detects that it has violated any of the guidelines. For example, if your site is not mobile-friendly, then Google will penalize it. As a result, your site will never rank as high as it did before, and you’ll see a significant drop in traffic. These penalties can be brutal to overcome, depending on the severity of the violation. The issue may be temporary, but it can also lead to a permanent ban from the Google index. Follow the rules below in order to optimize content marketing and avoid Google restrictions.

1. Avoid duplicate content

One option to avoid duplicate content is to use supporting tools. For example, by using the duplicate content filter in the Google Search Console, you can identify content that appears more than once on your site to optimize content marketing. You can then choose to eliminate it or consolidate it with another page. If you remove the duplicate content, try to make sure the remaining content answers the user’s query and provides excellent value.

online presence

2. Be wary of keyword stuffing

The most common cause of penalties is keyword stuffing. In the past, if you typed in a keyword, it would show up in all of your content. For example, if you typed in the word “car,” it would show up in your article about cars, on your About Us page and on your Contact page. Google has been cracking down on this and has penalized websites for including excessive instances of keywords.

You can still include a few keywords without penalty to optimize content marketing, but you should avoid overuse. It’s better to use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords, which are conceptually related terms and are used by search engines to fully comprehend material on a webpage.

3. The most important step in good SEO practices for optimized content marketing

Nothing is more crucial than developing content that is optimized for the reader in the first place. And don’t forget to check the constant Google Algorithm updates.

There are a handful of ways to avoid Google penalties, and the best SEO practices are the ones you can keep up with. If you don’t know how to optimize your content marketing correctly to boost your ranking while navigating all the guidelines to avoid penalties, Tempesta Media’s managed solution will help. With our outstanding knowledge of best practices, we’ll help you create or expand your content strategy. Contact us today and start benefiting from expert SEO strategy. 

Optimize Content for SEO to Increase SERPs Rankings

Posted on by Michael Marchese

When you optimize content for SEO and for your readers, you increase your SERPs rankings and strengthen your audience engagement.

Content is a powerful marketing tool that companies can use to attract, educate and ultimately convert potential buyers of their services and products. Additionally, content plays an important supporting role in search engine optimization (SEO). Content that is optimized for both the reader and SEO allows your company to benefit in multiple ways.

What does it mean to optimize content for SEO?

Optimizing content for SEO involves employing a couple of techniques in and around your content to make it more visible to search engines. It also strengthens your site’s ranking for your specific focus through keyword phrases.

You can optimize content for SEO on many levels, including metadata such as:

  • Meta titles.
  • Meta descriptions.
  • Keywords.

Optimizing meta titles and meta descriptions plays a powerful role in your SEO.

The meta title and meta description

Most search engines no longer optimize based on the metric keyword tag. However, they heavily use the meta title and meta description tags.

Meta title, as the name implies, is the title of your article or piece of content that you want to be displayed within search engines. A meta description is a short sentence that describes the content of a page. Both the meta title and meta description appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).

For example, when someone searches “gold,” a list of results will be returned for that query. Each list item is the meta title and meta description of a web page.

Optimizing meta titles and meta descriptions play a powerful role in your SEO. Write these materials in a way that accurately represents the page, captures the searcher’s attention and draws clicks to your site.

Meta keywords

You can further optimize content for SEO within each web page by incorporating keyword phrases. These are common search terms that are visible to both the search engine and the site visitor. Keywords should be naturally incorporated into the page. To help you get started, ideal locations for keyword phrases include:

  1. The title of the article.
  2. At least one of the subheaders within the content.
  3. Within the body of the content.

What happens if you don’t optimize content for SEO?

If you’re not optimizing for both the reader and for search engines, then:

  • Your content will not show up in search engines when people search terms relevant to your material.
  • You’re essentially missing out on half your audience.

Losing that audience reduces your program ROI, and it prevents you from the opportunity to sell that prospect.

seo audit

What are the most effective SEO techniques?

SEO techniques change based on how search engine algorithms change, but a couple of principles remain consistent over the years.

When you’re writing content, make sure that you’re writing the content for the reader. It needs to have great readability. Only after you’ve accomplished readable content should you look to optimize content for SEO. The key areas of focus should be meta information, titles and sub-headers within the content.

In summary

Optimizing your content for SEO can have an outsized impact on your overall content and digital marketing program. When writing content, make a couple of tweaks to ensure that it is readable and effectively visible for SEO.

Need help?

If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our e-book 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.

This e-book will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.

Making Your Social Media Optimization Work For You

Posted on by Michael Marchese
  • Your social media networks play an important role in improving SEO and thought leadership development. They can also help you with prospect acquisition and customer nurturing.

Content marketing programs are intended to drive new customers to your site and maintain relationships with existing customers. They also establish your company’s authority as a thought leader. If you implement a content marketing program without any supporting social media network, it will negatively impact your program’s scalability and overall results.

Which platform should I use for my business?

There are many types of social media networks for different types of businesses. For most B2B companies, we have seen customers have success using Twitter to make announcements and to share snippets of their blog posts. They also use LinkedIn for customer acquisition and thought leadership, using deeply informative articles or position pieces.

For some companies that deal with small businesses, Facebook may be appropriate. However, for most B2B companies, Twitter and LinkedIn have garnered the best results for the money spent.

social media survey

How important is the role of social media in my marketing program?

Social media distributes and amplifies your content. Without those distribution channels, your blog’s exposure is limited.

Social media does a couple of things that can truly benefit content marketing programs:

  • Amplify and distribute snippets of your content with links back to your website.
  • Improve SEO results.

Social media can improve SEO because it generates positive algorithmic signals indicating that you are sharing valuable content. Therefore, it should rank higher within the search results. Examples of algorithmic signals would be likes, shares, retweets, etc.

How can I measure success with social media?

There a couple of metrics that can be used to gauge results. Here are simple steps you can follow:

Establish a baseline

You must establish a baseline of how many people are following you on social networks. You also need to determine what your current level of engagement is. Baseline metrics include:

  • Retweets
  • Likes
  • Shares

Determine program success using the baseline

Once you establish the baseline, you need to know the number of website visitors who came from your social media networks. You can now start to determine how well your program is doing. The success would be based on the delta between your baseline and where you’re at after a defined period (for example, monthly or every 3 months).

social media

Using experts

If you’re not seeing strong traction with your social media efforts, you may want to look at hiring experts in this area, such as Tempesta Media.
Our software solution has capabilities that ensure excellent curated and original social posts that can be published to your social networks. We can also track the resulting impact on your company.

In summary

You need to have social media accounts as part of a content marketing program. Without them, you’re losing a valuable channel for amplification of your content. More importantly, you’re losing the opportunity to help influence your SEO rankings.

Need help?

If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our ebook 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.

This ebook will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.

10 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Their Content Marketing Program

Posted on by Michael Marchese

Implementing your content marketing program is no easy feat – starting, optimizing and scaling it all come with their own set of barriers, and odds are you won’t craft a flawless program. However, you can prepare yourself to craft a successful one. 

Taken from our full e-guide, “100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs,” take a look at these 10 common mistakes to help you shape yours to be as effective and profitable as possible.

When starting your content marketing program

This can sometimes be the hardest step to initiate. Finding your team, organizing your resources, making a detailed plan – it requires time, money and dedication. However, if you commit to this process, you’ll yield many more benefits than your original sacrifices. When starting your program, be sure to avoid these three mistakes:

1. No clearly defined, measurable goals

Most companies appreciate that content is a great way to drive results with a good ROI. In their rush to get the program up and running, however, they fail to define clear and measurable goals. Without goals, the program will lack focus, which can lead to slow progress and cost overruns.

To ensure that your content marketing program has direction, establish at least one measurable goal before you start your program. For example, try to increase your leads by 50%.

social media

2. Non-existent or deactivated social media accounts

When companies focus their content marketing program solely on pieces for their website, they miss out on the reach and credibility that social media can offer. If you have not yet opened and activated social media accounts relevant to your target audience (whether on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or other platforms), then you’re placing an inordinate emphasis on organic search traffic. Especially if you’re a newer company, that traffic may not be coming your way for a while.

To sidestep this issue, open and activate social media accounts on platforms that your target demographic uses. Perform de facto A/B testing by publishing small pieces of content to your social media accounts and see how your audience reacts on each platform.

3. Giving your content marketing program less than a year to begin generating bottom-funnel results

It may take six months or longer for your program to yield significant top-funnel results. It may take at least 12 months for the program to generate customer conversions. The bottom line is it simply takes time for quality content – produced consistently – to attract and acquire new customers. A lack of patience can cause your company to quickly lose any progress made from the beginning.

If your company has C-suite executives, it’s imperative that you have at least one advocate to encourage patience if others become frustrated with results, or the lack thereof. As an alternative, be prepared to present your case for patience so that all of management’s fears are allayed.

When optimizing your content marketing program

Once you’ve begun your content marketing program, congratulations – the first step is complete! If you want to give your program the best chance at success, however, you can’t stop there. On the contrary, you need to optimize your content by tracking its progress and making improvements where necessary. Be sure to avoid these four mistakes so that your optimization initiatives don’t go amiss:

analytics dashboard

4. No regular performance reports

If you can’t measure it, then you can’t improve it. Many companies successfully start a content marketing program but then neglect to implement a policy of regular performance audits. Without periodic performance reports, you may be bleeding time and money without even realizing it.

Be sure to have a set schedule for compiling and analyzing performance reports. For example, regularly compare the performance of 300-1,000-word posts around the same topic to determine whether article length is a key factor in number of unique visitors or bounce rate.

5. No focused, attention-grabbing lede

Sometimes businesses focus all their content efforts on highlighting their services or summarizing an industry topic, and they forget to include their target audience in the mix. When your content strategy is solely based on sales or industry expertise, your target audience loses interest in your brand. They can’t find any personal value in that type of content.

Instead, your content should be focused on the needs and goals of your target audience. Create a lede that immediately shows your audience that you are addressing their needs. It will grab their attention and entice them to read the full article. Then towards the end, if needed, you can tie in a CTA to connect your services with their needs.

6. Inaccurate, nondescript meta descriptions

Meta descriptions, per Google, act as a “pitch” to your users to convince them that your page is what they are looking for. Unfortunately, many meta descriptions are bland, unreadable or, worst of all, misleading. A meta description that doesn’t match the actual content of the page will frustrate searchers and send them scrambling away from your site. Because bounce rate can be a key factor in Google’s ranking algorithm, misleading meta descriptions can also undermine the very foundations of your SEO strategy.

To create optimized meta descriptions, be sure that each one not only contains your focus keyword(s) but also provides a succinct and accurate description for its associated page.

Your website is your company’s digital foundation. From it, you can then build your company’s online presence.

7. Not making your website and your content mobile friendly

In 2019, mobile searches accounted for up to 60% of all organic search traffic in the United States. If your website is not responsive to mobile devices, or your content formats poorly on smaller screens, then you’re no doubt losing a large proportion of potential users.

For this reason, it’s important to ensure that both your website and your content are optimized for the mobile audience. Check all aspects of your site: menus, links, images, text sizes, screen formatting and more.

When scaling your content marketing program

Scaling a content marketing program is a third step that often goes unaddressed. After all, if your content is optimized to yield the best results, what else is there to do other than reap the benefits as they come?

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to wait for the content to do the work for you. You can boost your success rates and reach a broader audience by implementing a few extra measures. When scaling your program, avoid these three mistakes to increase your brand visibility and promote efficient internal processes:

8. No unified workflow dashboard for in-house and external content resources

Your editorial calendar may hold dozens of content pieces at one time. You may also have a handful of team members both in house and outsourced. If you don’t use a common workflow dashboard for both groups, you run the risk of miscommunication, which could very likely result in duplicate content, missed deadlines and inconsistent goals.

Make sure that everyone understands your program’s goals and content plan, and encourage open communication between all team members by implementing a workflow dashboard.

9. No internal links in your email signature

Audiences today value convenience. They want quick, simple solutions to their problems. If one of your prospects likes an email you send, but you don’t provide a link for them to learn more information (i.e., a link to another blog post or pillar page), they won’t go out of their way to find your website on their own.

Every single email needs a link to your site. This link makes it easy for your prospects to follow through with your call to action (which you should definitely include in the email). The easier you make it for them, the more likely it is that they’ll continue down the sales funnel. Maximize the potential reach your emails could have by adding an internal website link to your signatures.

10. Not regularly promoting older content that is still relevant and high-performing

If you have an evergreen piece of content out there that is still yielding a high share of organic traffic, then think about how to keep promoting it. If you fail to do so, you may be missing out on an opportunity to climb in Google’s SERP rankings. After all, by traffic share standards, one result that shows up on page one is better than five results that show up on page five.

Regularly audit your older content to see which pieces are both high performing and still relevant to today’s audience and industry issues. Then develop a strategy to further promote them – it’s a smart, reliable way to give your readers the content they want.

To learn more

Establishing a content marketing strategy for your business is easier said than done. While it won’t be perfect, it still can be successful if you invest the proper amount of time and resources into managing it. 

If you have a content marketing program, or are planning one, download our ebook:  100 mistakes businesses make when starting, optimizing and scaling content marketing programs.  Learn from the mistakes of hundreds of other companies.  100 mistakes walks you through common and uncommon challenges that they faced with their content marketing programs.

 

Content Marketing Requires More Project Management Time Than People Realize

Posted on by Michael Marchese

To reap the rewards of content marketing, companies must invest serious time, often without seeing significant return on investment (ROI) until the next fiscal year.

Still, the payoff is worth the wait, whether a company seeks to acquire new customers, increase brand awareness, improve its reputation, increase traffic to its website or achieve some combination of those goals.

A quality content marketing program requires time, resources and someone to manage it efficiently. Statistics are improving, but still only 42% of marketers say their company does content marketing well. Pushing content marketing management onto an employee who’s already got other full-time responsibilities won’t do.

A successful content marketing program requires talent and organization at every phase of creation and implementation. The tasks involved include:

Determining how you’ll create a content strategy

In order to be most prepared, figure out an estimated time and the positions that may be needed to successfully implement your content strategy. This includes what will be incorporated in the strategy, how much time the strategy will take to develop and who will need to be involved in the strategy development.

Positions that may be needed include content strategist, managing editor and data analyst.

Great content marketing programs aim to:

  • Give the audience information that helps accomplish their goals.
  • Help their audience solve problems.
  • Contribute meaningfully to the conversation.
  • Demonstrate they care about the audience.

Essentially, the company is creating the “why” behind its content. That requires good customer data about what they want, what makes them tick and what motivates them. The research required to answer those questions is ongoing, so the strategy can and should change quickly to accommodate audience needs. That requires at least one person consistently focused on strategy.

content marketing strategy

Implementing the strategy

Estimated time: At least two FTEs
Positions that may be needed: content writers/producers, SEO/SEM specialists, social media specialists, email marketing specialists and bloggers.
Implementing a content strategy involves:

  • Selecting the types of content to create.
  • Developing content.
  • Evaluating content for relevance and timeliness.
  • Reviewing and editing content for accuracy.
  • Distributing content via a website, social media, email, etc.

The average blog post takes about one to two hours to write. Every minute of video footage can take up to two hours to edit. Keyword research also takes significant time. Add in time for reviews, approvals and distribution, and the time for those tasks quickly adds up.

Coordinating creation and implementation of a content strategy requires stellar project management

With the right tools and people, a great content marketing program is within reach. But, it doesn’t require a big brand to make it happen. Follow these tips to make your content marketing strategy as successful as possible:

Automate as much as possible. Use a social media scheduling tool or content marketing platform that integrates with WordPress to save time and energy.

Develop a content marketing calendar. This serves as a home base for all content marketing efforts and helps the company distribute content more effectively.

Consider hiring a full-time content marketing position. At least one person dedicated to the cause full-time can help drive the strategy forward and get what’s needed from the team.

Consider outsourcing. Another economical choice is to outsource the job to a capable company that can help create and implement a content marketing strategy from start to finish. TempestaMedia provides an all-inclusive managed service that delivers quality content while helping customers save time. Contact us today to learn more.

Company
Managed services
MSP modules
Industry solutions
Resources
Content Creators
© Tempesta Media, LLC 2011-2023. All Rights Reserved. All marks are the properties of their respective owners.