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How a Social Media Audit Can Improve Your Content Strategy

July 18, 2021 by Alek Irvin Leave a Comment

It’s hard to deny the potential business benefits of an actively engaged brand social media community.

The Sprout Social Index XVII found that 89% of consumers will buy from a brand if they follow it on social media, and 75% will increase their spending with that brand. Hootsuite’s 2021 Social Trends report reinforced this point, finding that the No. 1 social media marketing goal is to increase new customer acquisition.

This transactional mindset—attract new followers to increase your reach and potentially drive sales—is common for brands. But for social media teams to unlock the full potential of their channels, they must consistently provide actual value to their online communities.

We recommend conducting a social media channel audit to understand if your social media strategy drives its intended results and continues to delight your communities. Here’s why.

What Is A Social Media Audit?

A social media channel audit is a systematic process in which you review all of your company’s social media channels, as well as your competitor or coopetition’s social media channels. This involves any online presence for your brand, whether active or not, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Clubhouse, or Reddit (among many others).

If your team invests in thought leadership activities with designated brand spokespeople, you will also review those online presences during the audit.

Your audit can take any variety of formats or styles. Use a Google or Word document, spreadsheet, or whatever tool you prefer, as long as your team can effectively document key information about your channels, filter and sort your data to find trends, and organize next steps to act on these findings.

We recommend conducting at least an annual social media channel audit. However, a twice-annual or quarterly audit could help your team adjust its course mid-year as needed. Keep in mind that a thorough audit will typically last at least six hours over a business week, if not longer, so weekly or monthly audits are simply an inefficient use of your team resources.

Why Do You Need to Conduct A Social Media Channel Audit?

A social media audit helps you understand whether your social media strategy drives the intended business results. An effective social media audit will help your team better understand:

How your social media channels are performing
Whether you have a cohesive brand identity across social media channels
Which channels have duplicate, inactive, or unsanctioned accounts
If there are new trending post styles that your team can leverage
Ways to improve your social media content strategy

Social media marketers are often so deeply enmeshed in the day-to-day management of their channels that they forget to stop and ask whether they should be doing something differently or if the experience they provide is on par with or better than their competition’s.

Simply put, a social media audit is the most effective way to improve the quality of your online communities.

What Should Your Audit Include?

A social media audit is an incredibly valuable process for teams, and it is easier to conduct than you may think.

An audit will gather various key performance indicators (KPIs) for your channels and help you measure these KPIs over time. Generally, an audit will benchmark the following for your brand and your closest sales and content competitors:

The number of people in your online communities/follower count
Content cadence or posting frequency by channel
Engagement on your content
Which type(s) of posts garner the highest engagement

Your team’s defined social media goals should influence the additional KPIs you measure during the audit.

After you collect your initial data, spend the bulk of your audit time reviewing individual posts and assessing what type of content (format, tone, channel, or time of post) garners the most engagement. This will help you uncover if there are new post styles and topics you should explore.

Refine Your Social Audit Over Time

Your first few social media channel audits may feel challenging or confusing, or you may be surprised by how long the process takes. Be patient with yourself, and remember that you will become more efficient with each audit you conduct.

If you are looking for best practices for conducting a social media audit, the #ContentChat community of content marketers shared their advice to help you throughout your social media audit.

If you plan to attend Content Marketing World 2021, which is a hybrid event from September 28 – October 1, don’t miss our consultancy founder Erika Heald’s session on How To Conduct A Social Media Audit That Helps Your Community Thrive. Get $100 off your registration with code HEALD100 if you haven’t already grabbed your tickets!

How to Succeed in Your First 90 Days As a New Content Marketing Leader

June 23, 2021 by Erika Heald 2 Comments

Congratulations! You’ve just been hired as the leader of a content marketing team. Now what?

It can be intimidating to step into any new position, regardless of if you are new to the company or just to the role after a long tenure. Then there’s the fact that marketing roles in particular have an increased importance to help teams recover from the initial shock of the pandemic and deliver sustained value for customers.

But don’t take that as meaning you have to overhaul your team’s content strategy right after you walk in the door. There is a misconception that the first 90 days for new leaders is a make-or-break period where they need to immediately generate value or risk losing their position. The truth is that they’ll need at least six months to achieve real impact.

Use these first 90 days to get acquainted with the team, digest the full scope of duties under your new role, assess your team’s shortcomings and opportunities, and then chart a path for success. Here is an overview of how to make the most of your first quarter as a new content marketing leader, based on my own successful in-house and external 90-day plans.

What To Do In The First Week As A New Content Marketing Leader

The first week as a content marketing lead or equivalent role should primarily focus on onboarding, with only light involvement in the strategy and planning elements of the position.

Day One Onboarding Schedule For A New Content Marketing Leader

In general, Day 1 will involve paperwork and familiarizing oneself with their new workspace. Your human resources or similar team will have a few required documents and protocols for you to review and sign on the first day.

We recommend the following schedule for day one as a new marketing leader. If you see any of these areas missing from your team’s planned schedule, introduce these elements into any free time during the first day or week:

Office Tour: If your team primarily works in-person at a company office, start with an office tour. Note where important rooms are, including the break room and bathrooms, and where to find printers, copiers, and medical supplies. If you plan to work remotely for a company with a physical address, ask for a video tour of the office so you can better picture where your team works. If your company does not have a physical office, you can instead start the day with an extended chat with a team member to get to know them and the company better.
Introductions: End the tour at your new desk or office location, and ensure you can log into your work computer or access other required equipment. Familiarize yourself with the workspace, greet any nearby colleagues, and get ready to say hello to the entire team. Send a new hire announcement via your team’s preferred communication channel(s). Include your background, the responsibilities and goals that come with your new role, and any other details you think the team should know. Consider recording a video introduction to further showcase your personality.
HR Paperwork: Your HR team will need you to sign a variety of documents related to their new role and conditions with the company. Ensure you save a copy of all paperwork, both digital and physical, for future reference.
Setup Accounts/Login: Learn how to use your new work equipment, access all necessary accounts, and how to use your video conferencing platform. Review the processes for booking conference rooms, and bookmark any guides or how-to documents that your team shares.
Update Social Media Channels: Update your social media channels to reflect your new role. Be sure to update any channel where you may have a presence, even if you no longer prioritize that channel. Consider deactivating any irrelevant accounts to streamline your efforts and easier maintain your social footprint.
Lunch With Team: Coordinate a casual lunch with your new team, a leadership colleague, or a member of the HR team. This is a chance to genuinely get to know your colleagues in both a personal and professional capacity. If your team is hybrid or remote, consider hosting a virtual lunch hour, and send out delivery service gift cards everyone can use to have lunch on their new boss.
Company Culture Overview: The company culture is possibly one of the most important things for any new hire to quickly learn inside and out. How does the team operate? What motivates them? How do they celebrate with one another? Ask a member of your HR or executive team to discuss the company’s mission and values, and how these translate into the day-to-day operations.
Supervisor 1:1: Connect with your new supervisor to learn more about what is expected of you in your role, how you fit into the team’s overall strategy, and where you should focus your attention in the coming weeks. Ask them what success will look like at your 90-day check-in.

A Typical First Week As A New Content Marketing Leader

Your first day will go by quickly. Anything you are unable to address should carry over to the rest of the first week.

Spend the next days, in part, reviewing any existing marketing plans, materials, and documentation. Get a clear understanding of upcoming campaigns or launches, as well as any hurdles that the team is facing. What opportunities for success can you see over the next six months, and what challenges will they need to overcome? How does the team track its activities?

Specifically, ask to review the following materials (if they exist):

Brand style guide
Marketing plans for both the previous and current year
Quarterly, annual, and monthly marketing dashboards or KPI reporting
Team roles and responsibilities document or job descriptions
Marketing SWOT analysis
Company blog, social media, and other channel-specific guides or audits
Buyer personas and customer buyer’s journey maps

In addition to reviewing existing materials, schedule 1:1 meetings with each of your direct reports, your peers, and content marketing stakeholders across the organization. The goal of these meetings is to gain an understanding of content marketing’s role in your organization and start building relationships that will help the team be successful. Align on how to best work and communicate with your stakeholders inside and outside of the marketing team, and seek to understand their top priorities.

By the end of your first week, you should be able to answer (or know where to find the answer to):

Who are my direct reports, what are their roles, and how do they support the marketing team’s goals
What tools and technology does my team use for marketing, and how do I access those tools
When is the marketing team’s next big campaign or launch, and how is the content marketing program supporting it
What challenges does the content marketing team currently face

A 90-Day Plan For New Content Marketing Leaders

The first week will likely pose more questions than it answers, and that’s to be expected. The goal is to get a high level view of everything you influence, and the following weeks will dive into specifics—what are your team’s goals, and what will they actually do to accomplish these?

During the first month, become familiar with the nuts and bolts of your Martech stack and how your team conducts its work. Explore how your team creates content and how content distribution strategies vary (or not) across different types of content.

Months two and three will involve activating your team’s plans. As you start working on essential marketing activities, like content creation, social media management, and other forms of stakeholder communications, you can compare those initial conversations with the realities of how your team gets things done.

Observe how the team works when there is a task at hand, and identify any potential internal struggles that your team encounters. The goal is to simply observe how the team operates and note some areas you want to follow up on. Wait until you have a full reading of the team before attempting to introduce new processes or revamp how the team works (if that is even necessary). While you may be tempted to immediately change up the way the team works, absolutely no one wants to hear “this is how I’ve always done it” from a new leader who hasn’t yet given the team the opportunity to show you their working style in action.

The 3-Month Content Marketing Strategy

As a new content marketing leader—in addition to lots of relationship building, watching and learning how the team works together and what their existing processes look like—it’s a good time to review existing content strategy documentation and audit your content marketing channels.

Here are the strategy elements I always review and update or create documentation for in my first 90-days on the job:

Content Inventory and Audit

Audit the team’s blog and any other external content hubs. This helps you become familiar with your team’s content strategy and identify pieces of content that should be refreshed. We explain how to complete this audit step-by-step and provide a free content audit template in this post. At a high level, capture the title, date, and key KPIs for the past year of content on your blog. KPIs can include pageviews, comments, social shares, and clickthrough rate.

Blog Channel Plan

Once you have an idea of your most successful blog content, review the team’s plan for the next six months of blog content. Apply any learnings from your audit that the team may have previously overlooked when developing its plan. Review the priority topics, planned posting cadence, and key details about your blog creation process.

Blog Editorial Guidelines and Guest Posting

One final company blog-related onboarding element is your team’s editorial guidelines and guest post solicitation strategy. Seek to understand the ideal guest authors for your company blog, the preferred format of their content—including word count, topic areas, formatting considerations—and your plan to build a relationship with them. It can help to develop a blog post planning and submissions template for both guest bloggers and your internal team members, incorporating your best practices and blog strategy.

Contributed Content Strategy

What are the key media outlets and industry websites your team hopes to place its content in? What is the goal of these activities, and what is your team’s approach? Document this strategy, if it is not already written.

Social Media Channel Audit

Review the success of the team’s social media activities, and assess how the team can refine its approach. We share a free template to get you started and plenty of tips from other marketers in this #ContentChat recap. For this audit, you will document all of the brand’s social media channels, review engagement levels on the content, and assess your competition’s social strategy.

Social Influencer Strategy Review and Documentation

Social media influencers are increasingly powerful as a marketing avenue. Does your team have a social media influencer strategy? If not, ask them to begin researching potential influencers that your team can work to engage with on social. If a plan is currently in place, what has its measurable impact been? How much traffic has it driven to your website, and has any of it turned into sales?

Conference and Events Strategy

Discuss the team’s conferences and events strategy. What events will the team attend, and what does the engagement look like (i.e., will you exhibit, speak, or attend)? How is success defined for these engagements?

(Re)Branding.

Once you’ve internalized your company mission and values, review your team’s website, social media channels, and other content properties to see if they align with your company’s intended branding. Should the team update its company descriptions, profile or header images, or other ways that the company is positioned? Have you defined and consistently used a unique brand voice that differentiates your content from that created by the rest of your industry and competitors?

Get Your Content Marketing Leadership Role Off on the Right Foot

If you address all the foundational elements of your new role in the first 90 days, you are better prepared to activate your team and launch content that will drive actual results. You are also ready to revise—or draft for the first time—core documentation of the content marketing team’s mission, vision, and values, and how that will be put into action in your content marketing program. This core content marketing documentation includes:

Style guide. What is your brand voice and personality, and how do these carry through in your communications? What branding elements should the team be aware of? Ensure you can access your team style guide, and connect with a member of your design team to answer any questions.
Content strategy. Building on your blog channel plan, how does the team coordinate its entire content ecosystem and related workflows? What templates or documents does the team use to submit requests or draft works?
Integrated editorial calendar. Where can you get a cross-functional look at your team’s editorial plan? A shared document is essential to discourage departmental silos that cause duplicate efforts and wasted team resources. The calendar should detail the key editorial topics, planned pieces of content by channel, and upcoming subject matter expert, customer, or other interviews that will inform the content.

It’s important, as you develop this documentation, that it comes from a place of trust and understanding. Collaborate with the content marketing team members on this documentation, and solicit their feedback for process improvements. Show that you’re here to work with them and find solutions to their challenges, not to overhaul everything they know for no reason. Meet with your supervisor and colleagues at least once every-other week to ask about how they are doing, how you are performing, and any ways that they can better support the team in your role.

To help get you started on the right foot, use our 90-day planning grid for new content marketing leaders. It discusses the main activities for day, week, and month one, as well as 31-90 days into your role.

12 Virtual and Hybrid Marketing Industry Events To Close Out 2021

May 31, 2021 by Alek Irvin Leave a Comment

While many marketing industry events this Summer will stay all-virtual, an increasing number of Fall events are taking a hybrid approach as some parts of the world begin to ease social distancing protocols.

This presents an exciting opportunity for marketers to return to their dearly missed in-person conferences—hugs for everyone who’s comfortable!—while also enabling those who prefer to stay distanced to enjoy the event experience, regardless of where they’re based.

To help you plan your marketing conference strategy through the end of 2021, we’ve collected the must-attend marketing events for the second half of 2021. And if you’re using this post to help build your company’s event strategy, check out these posts to learn what type of event participation type you should pursue and how to make the digital event experience engaging for your audience.

Our Must-Attend Marketing Events for the Second Half of 2021

June

B2B Next-Level ABM (June 7-10, Virtual)

Although Demand Gen Report canceled its annual B2B Marketing Exchange live event, the team will host #B2BMX: Next-Level ABM. The event will provide a playbook for breaking through to your customers across channels. Those new to account-based marketing and seasoned pros alike will learn hot takes, tips, and case study examples to help them finetune their strategy.

Advanced Search Summit (June 9-11, Napa, CA, In-Person Only)

This two-day event in beautiful Napa Valley is an educational conference that will give you the skills, tools, and techniques needed to be a successful digital marketer. Topics span from how to set up and scale your SEO organization, link building best practices, how to dominate e-commerce in 2021, and more.

Podfest (June 10-13, Orlando, FL, In-Person Only)

This event is geared toward content creators interested in audio, video, and new media technologies. The conference spans everything from podcast or video series creation and launches to ways that you can monetize this content and navigate the leading social platforms with video and audio in mind.

July

MozCon (July 12-14, Virtual)

“Not your typical marketing conference,” MozCon is hosted by, you guessed it, Moz, the popular SEO toolset provider. MozCon tackles everything dealing with SEO, mobile, conversion optimization, local search, and more, and you don’t have to be a Moz customer to attend.

ANA Digital and Social Media Conference (July 19-21, Carlsbad, CA, Hybrid)

This annual event hosted by the ANA focuses on digital and social media strategies. Leaders from top brands will explain how the pandemic and various social justice topics from 2020 have changed consumer expectations. Marketers will learn how channel optimization, influencer marketing, digital transformation, and more can be used to develop a successful marketing strategy to meet these evolving customer needs.

September

Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON) (September 13-14, Virtual)

Artificial intelligence is (and has remained) a hot topic across industries, and this event is designed to help marketing leaders understand AI, educate their teams, and begin implementing AI into their campaigns.

The Social Shake-Up (September 22-23, Atlanta, GA, Hybrid)

This event is all about how you can use social media to “shake up” your brand and drive engagement with employees and customers. Speakers will share out-of-the-ordinary examples of how they achieved social media success, with topics ranging from integrated communications and customer experience to channel-specific guidance and video and audio content.

Content Marketing World (Sept. 28-Oct. 1, Cleveland, OH, Hybrid)

We’re huge fans of Content Marketing Institute and its incredible set of resources for marketers (which means we’re biased), but Content Marketing World is widely regarded as the marketing industry event to attend each year. Our agency founder Erika Heald will be at the conference to present a session on how to conduct a social media audit that helps your community thrive. Hear more about her session and book your ticket today. Will we see you in Cleveland?

October

HubSpot INBOUND (October 12-14, Virtual)

HubSpot’s annual INBOUND will virtually gather thousands of marketing, sales, and service industry pros to discuss the latest marketing best practices and trade tips on how to better reach audiences. You’ll learn everything from how to navigate the latest social media platform updates, how to boost your SEO strategy, ways to create better content, and more.

Strategic Marketing 2021 (October 12-13, Virtual)

Reuters’ Strategic Marketing 2021 virtual event will discuss the impact that brands have on society and ways that marketers can create real communities. Topics will include the impact of marketing on human perception, how to create a full-funnel strategy, how to optimize your MarTech stack, and a range of social media-focused sessions to set your team up for success.

MarketingProfs B2B Forum (October 13-14, Virtual)

Each year, MarketingProfs hosts an impressive conference that covers everything B2B marketers need to know to succeed today, and well into the future. You can get an idea of what to expect from this past event agenda. Erika will be at this event, too, sharing how to craft B2B customer case studies that put your customer’s voice front and center.

LavaCon 2021 (October 24-27, Virtual)

Content professionals join LavaCon to share best practices, network with peers, and learn how to generate revenue using state-of-the-art content technologies. This year’s program will focus on how content can be created and shared across the enterprise, including sessions on how to create content at scale, trends in learning design, and the importance of inclusive language in content.

Join the Community

Are you looking for more professional development resources, delivered right to your inbox? Subscribe to The Content Chat Bulletin to learn about the must-attend events, curated content from industry thought leaders and previews of upcoming #ContentChat conversations that you don’t want to miss. Know of another great marketing event we should check out? Leave a comment.

14+ Best Email Newsletters For Marketers and Content Creators

May 17, 2021 by Alek Irvin Leave a Comment

Brands consistently use email newsletters to support their content marketing goals, and email newsletters may be essential for companies to futureproof their communities following this pandemic.

Email newsletters are the third most commonly used content type for B2B marketers, surpassed only by blog posts and social media content. One in three B2B marketers also says that email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads, meaning that email newsletters can drive significant results for your business if approached from an audience-first perspective.

To demonstrate how you can delight your community through email newsletters, we’ve partnered with the #ContentChat community to explore how to provide value through your email newsletters and share our favorite email newsletters for content marketers.

How To Provide Value Through Email Newsletters

As many marketers can agree, we are a tricky audience to target. We often have a high standard of what we expect from marketing communications that target us. And this especially stands for email newsletters, where marketers require personalization and clear value to keep their subscription.

When building and refining your team’s email newsletter strategy, consider these seven essential value-add elements:

Before-and-after examples/case studies: Showcase any before-and-after examples, with specific details on what the initial goal was, how the team developed its plan, and the achieved results. Provide as many behind-the-scenes details as possible, including the main hurdles you overcame. The goal is to explain how your community can accomplish similar results or how you can partner with them to conduct similar work.
Checklists: Distill key topics or a process into clear steps or elements to consider as a checklist. These are incredibly easy to make and should directly guide your ideal reader through completing a process or ensuring they don’t forget any key details when completing specific recurring tasks.
Goodies and freebies: Email newsletter subscribers appreciate being rewarded for their loyalty. Provide high-value content, discount codes, event invitations, or other exclusive content or opportunities.
Personality: One of the most challenging things to develop in an email newsletter is a personality and voice that matches your audience’s expectations. This will, in part, rely on your team documenting its ideal brand voice. However, it also challenges the email newsletter writer to cut the jargon, sprinkle in personality when possible, and truly understanding what your community wants.
Relevant links: The average click-through rate for email is 2.62%, meaning there is an excellent opportunity for brands to focus on providing high-value and relevant links. For every link you include, explain why that resource or asset is important and how it will benefit the reader. If your email newsletter serves more as a blog subscription or news aggregator, it may be difficult to achieve a strong click-through rate.
Templates: Include free-to-download templates that help make your communitys’ work easier. These can include any range of templates that complement your priority topics, including social media content planning grids, annual blog content audits, thought leadership development worksheets, and more.
Visuals: Provide visuals that back up a key point of your email newsletter. Not only do visuals help improve the reading experience and reinforce your key points, but these visuals are also perfect for sharing on social media.

Examples of Great Email Newsletters For Marketers and Communicators

SEO Basics for Content Marketing

May 3, 2021 by Alek Irvin Leave a Comment

Creating high-quality, useful content is a complete waste of time and money if no one reads it.

Given that nearly half of internet users start their browsing session on a search engine, all content creators need to follow basic search engine optimization (SEO) principles to get their content in front of its intended audience.

But successful SEO is more than stuffing in keywords or appeasing Google’s ever-changing algorithm. For SEO to benefit your content marketing goals, you must consciously blend audience insights and structural elements to improve your content’s audience value and set it above the competition on search rankings.

Let’s explore the basic elements of SEO and the top SEO tools to explain how you can boost your content marketing results.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization is a practice where you create content in a way that increases its likelihood of appearing higher in search engine results, thus reaching more of its ideal readers.

At a basic level, SEO is about knowing your target audience, the terms and phrases they use, and how search engines deliver content based on your audience’s search queries. Ask yourself: how would my target buyer seek solutions to their problems? What do they search for? What topics are they interested in?

There are SEO considerations for every aspect of your content, including your headline, body copy, alt descriptions, and behind-the-scenes elements like meta descriptions. We’ll cover just a few top considerations for SEO in this article, but you can learn more about SEO in this piece from Semrush.

Create Content Optimized for Audience Value, Not Just SEO

One important thing to remember: Write content for people, not to benefit SEO.

Any content you create should pique your audience’s interest, answer their questions, provide resources, and otherwise be valuable in some way. This should always be your content focus.

Do not write content with the primary lens of SEO. Not only will you likely come across as robotic or simply uninteresting, but you may also actually hurt your SEO rankings (see our section on “backlinks” below).

5 Essential SEO Elements for Content Marketing

There are a few core SEO elements that all content creators should be aware of. Create your new content with these ideals in mind, and audit your existing blog content to optimize your posts.

SEO Keywords

Keywords are the words, phrases, and language that your audience uses to discuss and conduct searches around their topics of interest. Keywords are a foundational element of SEO that all brands should document and consistently review.

As a broad example, a marketing technology provider could have keywords like “marketing automation,” “audience insights,” or “customer personas.” There are long-tail keywords, too, which drill further into a clear audience need. In the above example, long-tail keywords would include “best marketing automation technology” or “top marketing tool for identifying audience personas.”

There are plenty of tools to accelerate your keyword search (see our section on top SEO tools below). Or, you can use manual means like social listening and conversations with your customers to understand the right keywords to reach them.

Where you use keywords is as important as how many times you use the keywords. For a blog post, you should include a keyword in the URL, headline, meta description, and a subhead, all in addition to your body copy, to make an impact.

SEO Headlines

Primarily related to blog posts, your headline should compel your ideal reader to click on your post.

Headlines are often used interchangeably with titles. However, there are specific SEO considerations for your page title that you should be aware of once you’ve established your SEO strategy.

Headlines should be short (no longer than 70 characters), include at least one keyword, and clearly communicate the value of the content. Common headline structures include number-based lists, questions, and “how-to” style guides. Some headlines include terms like “workbook,” “checklist,” or “template” to call out the value-add of the piece directly.

The CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is perfect for experimenting with different headlines. The team scores your draft headline out of 100 and offers advice on how to strengthen it. You can learn more about what makes for a great headline from their team.

SEO Content Structure

Your content structure is relatively self-explanatory—it is how your content flows and elements that enhance its skimmability. Great content includes clear headings, subheads, bullet points, and other visual elements that guide the reader through the piece.

Google recommends that you write a blog post as though you’re writing an outline. Create a hierarchical structure for your content, including headlines, subheads, and bullet points/lists.

Well-structured content is more likely to be read and shared by your ideal reader. Experiment with different content structures to find a format that resonates best with your audience.

SEO Meta Descriptions

A meta description is a short blurb about your content that will appear alongside it on search engines and social media channels. The description should be no more than 260 characters and address what’s in it for me for the audience.

When writing a meta description, ask yourself: If I saw this description returned as a Google search result, would I click on it? If so, would I be satisfied with the content based on the meta description positioning?

SEO Backlinks & Link Building

Backlinks and link-building strategies involve the piece(s) of content that you link to and the various sites that link back to your content.

All content you create should link back to other resources on your site or articles from external sites. The purpose is to build a content ecosystem that guides your reader through various interrelated resources and pieces of content.

From an audience standpoint, links provide a straightforward content journey that allows your reader to continue exploring a topic. Backlinks in your content, especially to high-authority domains, will also signal to search engines that your content is well-researched and can get it to rank higher in search results.

The ultimate goal for link building for SEO is to get high-authority websites to link back to your content. This is not a simple task. There are many strategies to strengthen your link building, but I believe that the best way to get links back to your content is to write content for audience value. By providing value-rich content that is SEO optimized, other content creators can more easily find your assets and link to them in their own content.

Top Free and Paid SEO Tools for Content Marketing

With practice, most content marketing pros can easily address the above SEO elements without needing any tools or resources. But just because content creators can do something manually doesn’t mean they should do it without help.

There are multiple incredibly powerful SEO tools that can automatically identify issues with your content and proactively suggest ways to improve your approach. Additionally, there are tools to streamline your initial SEO planning, such as keywords or what makes a successful headline.

Check out these SEO tools the #ContentChat community recommends for content marketing:

Alexa.com: Amazon’s Alexa.com offers SEO and competitive analysis software. The tool is great for competitive research to identify content gaps for your keywords and your competitor’s keywords. The team also offers a free browser extension for you to see any website’s Alexa traffic rank and the number of backlinks.
AnswerThePublic: This tool is a goldmine for content ideas and understanding what people are searching for on a range of topics and brands. This is perfect for refining your keywords and finding new content ideas.
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer: Many marketers (including me!) love CoSchedule’s headline analyzer. The free tool helps you workshop your headlines by assigning a score to your drafts and helping dissect the headline elements for editing.
Moz: Moz is an all-in-one SEO toolset with keyword research, backlink research, rank tracking, and other capabilities. The team offers a few free SEO tools along with their paid offerings.
Semrush: Semrush is a SaaS platform that covers every SEO need, from keyword research and competitor analysis to rank tracking and link building. You can use Semrush for free with limited functionality or choose from their paid packages for more capabilities.

These are just a few of our favorite SEO tools. You can also check out these recommendations for a core set of other content marketing tools to make your life easier.

Boost Your Content Marketing Results Through SEO

Getting started with SEO is much easier than you may think. By optimizing your content headline, keywords, structure, meta description, and backlinks, your team can effectively reach new readers and build authority in your space.

It is best to incorporate your SEO elements into the earliest stages of your content creation. To streamline this process, we’ve created a planning document that bakes all the essential SEO elements into your planning processes.

Download our free content planning template today to start driving more value with your content.

How to Refresh Content to Boost its Value in New Channels and Formats

April 19, 2021 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

As a marketer, it’s important that you have at least three different uses planned for any single piece of content you create.

This mindset is necessary to drive the most value from your work and ensure you provide your audience a variety of formats for learning more about their topics of interest. Think about it: If your ideal buyers are interested in a topic, it makes sense to repackage or reapproach your ideas in a few different ways, through various formats and channels, to best reach these buyers.

However, it is often difficult to go back and give a piece of content a full set of derivative content when you already have a lot on your plate. There is always another deadline right around the corner. And this only further complicates in heavily siloed organizations.

The best way to optimize your content creation is to think through the various forms for your content from your earliest planning phases. I’ll show you how to bake this type of thinking into your day-to-day work and showcase the range of ways that you can repurpose content for new channels and formats.

Plan Your PESO Model 2.0 Content Ecosystem

All content you create should fit within your greater content ecosystem. To say this another way: all content should tie to a priority topic for your audience, and your team should provide value through your audience’s preferred channels and formats.

To start, you must first define and document your priority content topics. Andy Crestodina, the co-founder of Orbit Media Studios and author of Content Chemistry, refers to this as your Content Hub. This enables you to build authority on a topic and break through the noise in your given space.

With your primary content topics defined, the best way to visualize your content’s full potential is to follow the PESO Model created by Gini Dietrich, founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich and author of Spin Sucks.