The Found Gen

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Have You Built Your 2025 Marketing Strategy Yet? If Not, You’re Behind. 

If you’re not looking ahead, you’re already behind. And spoiler alert – if you haven’t started developing your 2025 marketing calendar yet, you’re dangerously close to falling behind. 

So, stop thinking about pumpkin spice lattes and all the feels of fall. It’s time to snap out of it and get to work on the road ahead.

Why Build Your Marketing Strategy Now?

Success in marketing relies on a thought-out plan that builds upon itself to deliver long-term results. This is especially true for content marketing. Blogs can grow into long-form posts, be leveraged in newsletters, and turn into infographics or fun social reels. But if you want to do this, you can’t wing it. You need a strategy – and one that aligns with your goals to fuel your pipeline. 

Although 2025 might feel far off, we’ll be turning the page on the new year before we know it. Dedicate time now to reviewing key data, revisiting your goals and objectives, and mapping out your content for the next 12 months. 

What is a Content Calendar?

A content marketing calendar helps you organize your strategy, maintain consistency and ensure your messaging aligns with your goals. A little upfront effort now also makes things waaay easier down the road.

Before you start filling in your calendar, get clear on what you want to achieve in 2025. Are you aiming to increase website traffic, build brand awareness or generate leads? Your content calendar should directly support these goals. Defining your objectives will help you decide on the type of content you need and how frequently you should post.

Next, you’ll hone in on some of the basics:

  • Who’s your audience? 
  • What answers are they looking for?
  • Which channels will you use for marketing?
  • What posting frequency makes sense for your channels and goals?

Then, it’s brainstorming time. As you generate your content calendar, go for a mix of evergreen content (stuff that will stand the test of time), timely goodness, promotional posts and engaging content. Consider how your content can build off itself (linking for the win!) and be used across channels.

Get Organized but Remain Flexible

A content calendar helps you map out your year, but like any road trip, you need to be prepared to pull over if you see something shiny out the window. Allow some flexibility for last-minute opportunities or adjustments. Keep an eye on your data and don’t be afraid to pivot if your strategy isn’t working. Still have questions? Give our team at The Found Gen a call today.

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How Can I Speed Up My Marketing?

We get it – you want results, and you want them now! For all the Veruca Salts of the world, waiting for your marketing efforts to take effect can put you on the verge of a chocolate meltdown – and who are we kidding, don’t we all want a little instant gratification from our hard-earned efforts? Before Tantrum Town sets in, take a breath and know there are ways to accelerate marketing results when applied strategically and as part of your overall marketing plan. 

Stop, Wait a Minute

But first, we must qualify this post by saying that marketing is truly about the long game. When played well, consistent content marketing and SEO efforts will start delivering results in a few months, but the true power comes from the compounding value it delivers for years to come. Moreover, you can measure success in any number of ways, but without a goal to tie those results to, the numbers will be, well, just numbers.

As you attempt to speed up your marketing, it’s critical to step back and review the big picture. What are your short- and long-term goals? How will your marketing efforts help you achieve them? Once you have some answers, then you can dive in.

Smart Strategies to Speed Up Your Marketing

Marketing is about communicating and delivering value. Do more of this to the right people and you will see results. The challenge is connecting with those right people at the right time. To speed up results, you need to meet them where they’re at. This means having answers to what they’re looking for and providing them when and where they’re looking for them.

For faster results, do this:

  • Focus on high-impact channels – Review your marketing data. If you want to know if your marketing is working, look at key data points. Pay attention to your most effective areas. Is your website data trending positively? How about your emails or social engagement? If one channel (or topic) is pulling more favorably than others, double down your efforts there rather than spreading yourself thin on things that don’t have as much impact. 
  • Optimize for SEO – You can shore up some quick wins by focusing on long-tail keywords that have less competition. This is one way to move up the ranks in search engine results faster. Another is to jeuje up old content to keep things fresh and garner new attention by the internet bots.
  • Consider paid opportunities – Spending money can often (but not always) accelerate marketing results. You could start by taking a bite-sized chunk out of your marketing budget and try something like pay-per-click advertising to ensure your content gets in front of your target audience. 
  • Outsource your efforts – If you need to move the needle on your marketing, it may be time to turn to a team of experts rather than manage the task yourself. Not only will you gain immediate headcounts (including writers, designers and strategists), but you’ll also be tapping into their expertise. This can help speed up your marketing as they’ll be able to execute strategies more efficiently and effectively. 

Speeding up your marketing efforts doesn’t mean cutting corners—it’s about working smarter, leveraging the right tools and optimizing what’s already working. If you want help, give us a ring. That’s what we’re here for.

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How to Measure Success in Marketing

It’s easy to become hyper-focused on the numbers. Numbers pay the bills. Numbers keep your doors open. But what numbers really matter when you’re trying to assess the success (or failure) of your marketing efforts?  

Here are some things to consider when you’re trying to identify measurable marketing outcomes. 

Success is Relative, So Know Your Goals 

Before going down the road of measuring performance, you need to know exactly what you’re measuring and why. Define success based on the goals you’re trying to achieve. Are you looking to generate more leads, convert more leads, increase revenue or improve email marketing performance? 

You can measure just about anything. The point is that without understanding the goals and strategy behind your efforts, the data you pull will be nothing more than numbers. Make the data meaningful by tying them to strategic benchmarks. Then, once you’ve identified your priorities, you can then begin tracking data.  

Marketing KPIs to Track 

The key performance indicators (KPIs) you choose to track will be tailored to your goals, but below are several general metrics many marketing pros find helpful. 

  • Email marketing performance – Email is one of the most effective lead-generation strategies, and it can be even more effective when done well. Tracking things like open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates and unsubscribes can tell you how helpful (or not) your content is. 
  • Website traffic and performance – Another important place prospects learn about your business is your website. Paying attention to which pages people are landing on and how long they’re staying is insightful in and of itself. Tracking conversation rates is even better. 
  • Cost per lead (CPL) – Spend enough money and you can have just about any customer in the world, but that’s not a very cost-wise strategy. On the whole, you want to keep your CPL low. That means a lot of leads for not a lot of money. 
  • Lead-to-customer conversion – How many leads are turning into customers? An understanding of this data point will help your team know if you need additional support, better leads or a larger volume of leads to meet your targets.  
  • Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) – MQLs are those leads the marketing team hands off to sales. A lead is classified as “marketing qualified” if the person filled out a web form or took some other step toward conversion that was based on the marketing team’s efforts. 
  • Sales qualified leads (SQLs) – This is the number of customers who become sales opportunities. The data point helps you understand how well your sales team is doing overall, as well as assess the effectiveness of the tools and resources they have at their disposal.  

And the list goes on. As you look to measure success in marketing, consider how the data points you’re tracking are meaningful to your overall strategy. If your marketing efforts are not meeting the mark, refine them and remeasure. It may take time to see results, but a consistent, strategic approach will yield the results you’re after. To learn more about building a successful marketing program, give our team at The Found Gen a call today.

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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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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.

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Let’s Stop Confusing Sales and Marketing. Here’s Why This is Important.

Have you ever had a friend who you spent so much time with that people would get confused and call you by each other’s name? That’s what it’s like with marketing and sales. They’re together so much that people see marketing, but they think of sales. It’s important because if you don’t understand what marketing is, you’re probably doing it wrong. Let’s fix that.

Same Book, Different Page

The thing is that marketing and sales do go hand in hand. Sales couldn’t do its job without marketing, and for marketing to stay relevant sales has to succeed. Marketing’s job is to introduce your brand to a lot of people – to create brand awareness. It’s not designed to appeal to everyone, only to the people who are most likely to be interested in the product. The trick, the part that seems like magic, is a lot of research, some data analysis, and understanding your ideal customer.

As marketers we introduce you to those customers like we’re all old friends. The content we create for you is useful to them, and it’s interesting. Now that they’ve been introduced, and they feel comfortable they find more and more interesting and informative content on your site.

When Does Sales Come In?

When we pass the customers off to sales because they’ve realized they need your company – your product, your services. We didn’t talk them into something they didn’t want or need. We just found the people who were looking for you but didn’t know it yet. Now sales just has to make the product easily available and make sure the customer leaves happy.

This partnership doesn’t work if marketing tries to sell. Which is the reason the difference is so important.

We do this because we love it, so if you’d like to talk to us about outsourcing we’re here to help. Give us a call.