The Found Gen

Marketing That Works.

data-driven marketing

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How to Tell if Your Marketing is Working?

When you dedicate a significant chunk of money per month to marketing, you want to know if it’s working – and at times, this can feel like a frustratingly futile exercise. Money is going out the door, but what are you getting in return? 

We get it. It can be hard to measure marketing’s effectiveness because of the tricky business of correlation versus causation. Are your leads increasing because of the email you sent out last week or because everyone suddenly needs their roofs replaced (thank you, hail storm)?

What’s more, marketing is about the long game, which can be particularly painful for new businesses looking to build their brands quickly. You need to know if your efforts are working, but how can you tell? Fortunately, there are ways you can successfully measure progress. Here are a few benchmarks you can track to tell if your marketing is working. 

  • Increased web traffic – What are your web analytics telling you? On the whole, if your website data is trending positively, you should feel confident that your marketing efforts are working. Google Analytics and other built-in web tools can illustrate month-over-month traffic increases and alert you to where your traffic is coming from so you can zero in on which channels are most effective. 
  • Increased number of leads – If your number of leads generated from marketing efforts is increasing and – even better – those leads are converting to customers, that’s another win for marketing.
  • Decreased cost-per-lead – Another way of looking at marketing success is to track whether your cost-per-lead is going down. Good marketing can help bring that number down either by saving you money on your marketing spend or increasing the number of leads you generate.
  • Increased engagement – More clicks on your emails or shares of your social media posts? This is a good sign that your content is resonating with your audience and your marketing strategy is working. 

Measuring marketing data is a key way to monitor its effectiveness, but even if you aren’t reviewing numbers as often as you’d like, you can often feel the steady boost marketing is having on your business – more calls, increased sales, that feeling of riding on a cloud…these are all good signs. 

If you’re unsure whether what you’re doing is working, give us a call at The Found Gen. We can take a fresh look at your marketing strategy to see how we can help further boost those numbers. 

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How to Build a Blog Strategy That Works for You

Have a website but no site visitors? It could be because your blog is lost in the Google wastelands, or worse, you don’t have a blog at all. If you want to improve traffic to your website and start converting prospects to customers, there’s a relatively simple and cost-effective way to do so. While it does not guarantee overnight success (slow and steady truly wins the race here), an effective blog strategy will in nearly all cases move the needle on your website’s performance. And when your website performs better, more customers will find you and more sales are sure to be had. Here’s where to start.

Building Out Your Blog Marketing Strategy

Step one in developing a blog strategy is to first have a blog. If you’re brand new to the blogging game, you may want to just ask for some help. It’s not hard, but there can be a learning curve depending on which web hosting provider you use.  

Once your main blog page is built, it’s time to get serious about strategy. Sure, you could just post random thoughts of the day but that takes the whole “strategy” component out of the equation. Your blog needs to be intentional if you want it to be effective. These are ways to focus those intentions.

  • Decide who will write and manage your blog – There are a few logistical things you’ll need to figure out as you launch your blog. One is deciding who will write your posts and manage their publication. You may have just one writer or a small team of writers, or you might decide to outsource this job to a marketing agency. Regardless of who does the writing, each post should have a similar tone and voice, so you showcase a consistent brand message to readers. Here are some other tips for whipping up a winning blog post.
  • Decide on cadence – How frequently do you want to publish content? To optimize your site for search engines like Google, we recommend publishing fresh content at least once a week. Internet bots index sites roughly once a month so offering new blogs for the bots to chomp on will help you score favorably on search engine results. 
  • Create a content calendar – This is where you will map out your blogging strategy. It can be useful to take a 12-month view so you can consider your full business cycle as you align content in your calendar to your business goals. If you still don’t know where to start, an easy place is always with the seasons. For example, a gratitude post in November always hits home. Another thing to think about is how your content can build off itself. Consider content themes that all tie together. This will help position you as an authority on certain topics and will give you a boost when it comes to all the backlinking you’ll be able to do.
  • Research keywords – As part of your content calendar development, you’ll also want to account for all those search terms your clients are looking for. Spend some time doing keyword research and incorporate those findings into your strategic plan. 
  • Promote your blog – Your blog does not live in a silo. It should be connected to all your other marketing efforts. While over time, site rankings on Google will improve as more pages on your site get indexed, this doesn’t happen overnight. You need another way for people to find your content. Promoting posts in your newsletter or on social media sites is an effective way to generate new traffic.
  • Track and analyze blogging metrics – Lastly, your blog strategy should continually be refined, and you do this by monitoring metrics. Which pages are getting the most views, how long are people staying on your site, where is your traffic coming from? All these indicators will help inform your content plan as you move ahead. 

When done right, your blog will transform your website’s performance and deliver new clients by the dozens. If you’re curious about how we can help you maximize your web presence and increase your conversions, give our team at The Found Gen a call today.

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What Constitutes a Good Blog Post

A good blog post is part art, part science. The art part has to do with how well you engage, inform and entertain your readers, while the science component has to do with how successfully you achieve back-end SEO objectives. 

A good blog post is in no way formulaic, but there are some elements that differentiate the best from the rest. Here are a few noteworthy features to keep in mind when writing your next blog post:

  • Tune in to your audience – We produce content for people. It can be easy to forget who’s on the other end of your post when sitting at your desk, but this is rule number one for creating captivating content. Your blog needs to meet a need – maybe it’s answering a specific question, offering new information, sharing tips, or just generally being useful. Don’t lose sight of who you are writing to when sitting down to draft a post.
  • Make it readable – Readers seek out your content because they are looking for information, and when you can provide that information in an engaging and fun way, you’ll be rewarded with loyal readers who may even convert to customers (that’s right, blogging for the win!). The key to a good post starts with a strong headline and captivating lead. Then, you can improve the readability (and scannability) of your blog by adding headers to break up large chunks of text, using bullet points, and including images or break-out boxes to add visual variety to your page.
  • Consider length – We’re often asked if there’s a perfect length for a blog post. In times like these, we can’t help but harken back to our high school English class days when our teachers would remind us that it’s not about word count but about answering the question effectively. Can you write a very good blog post in fewer than 300 words? Yes. Can you write a very good blog post in more than 1,000 words? Yes. The point is: take as long as you need to write the best post possible to achieve your objective (though 300-500 words will usually do). You’ll start to lose readers if the post gets too long just for the sake of word count. Side note: it can, however, be useful to sprinkle in an occasional longer post here and there to help the internet bots as they index your site. Google does love itself a good long-form post with lots of backlinks that demonstrate your credibility and know-how.
  • Don’t forget keywords – Don’t take this as permission to start keyword-stuffing your posts, but we can’t deny that keywords matter to SEO. Include keywords in your meta description, url and image alt text. A few relevant keyword placements in your post title, intro and conclusion don’t hurt either. 
  • End with a call to action (CTA) – Lastly, you want to end by telling your readers where to turn next. Maybe it’s another blog post with more information about the same topic or an ask to subscribe to your newsletter. Whatever it is, make sure it’s relevant to the content of your post and continues to guide them to a next step.

There’s no one way to write a perfect blog post – and you wouldn’t want them all to be the same anyway. Keeping content fresh, varied and personal is the best way to remain engaging with your readers and relevant to search engines. If you find yourself stuck as you get started with writing, just ask us for help.

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Why is Blogging So Vital for SEO Marketing?

Here’s the hard truth: When it comes to the World Wide Web, Google still reigns supreme, and if you are not a loyal servant to the Google gods, your site will plummet to the depths of the deepest crevasse and customers will never, ever find you.

Is that doomsday enough for you?

Fortunately, we have an easy solution to shake the dark and dreary clouds that have just descended upon you, and it starts with blogging. Even better is that it’s an inexpensive strategy that delivers a major return on investment.

What is SEO Marketing?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy that aims to improve a website’s ranking in search engine results so your site can land near the top of a user’s search. The effort includes writing content (i.e., blog posts), adding backlinks, using relevant keywords, adding meta descriptions, optimizing images and applying other backend configurations to optimize your website. 

How Does Blogging Help with SEO?

The primary reason blogging helps with search engine optimization has to do with crawlers (and not the creepy kind). Web crawlers are internet bots that systematically browse the internet for indexing. Indexing is basically Google reading your webpage to assess what content is on the page so that later it can use this information to determine how useful your site will be in a search result. 

Web crawlers comb through hundreds of billions of web pages every few days to roughly a month. As they crawl, these bots organize data, follow links and bring back all this collected information to Google’s servers. 

To remain relevant with Google, you need to demonstrate to the internet bots that your website is keeping fresh. You do this by blogging. When you add at least four new pages of content to your site every 28 days, the bots will keep chomping on your site, and you’ll be in the best position to boost your SEO ranking.

What’s Next?

At the end of the day, Google favors websites that are relevant and useful to a user’s search. A website that’s stagnant and old doesn’t have a lot to offer in terms of engaging with customers’ current conversations. Remain relevant and searchable by giving your blog a little boost. We can help. Contact our team at The Found Gen to get started.