The Found Gen

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A Viking Funeral for Outdated Marketing Strategies

When it comes to marketing, you always need to be a few steps ahead. You need to plan ahead, write ahead, strategize ahead. As a marketing agency, we live at least two full quarters ahead of the rest of the world (which truly becomes problematic when we’re rushing to buy holiday gifts for friends and family in July). 

So, in the wide world of marketing – when you are implementing strategies from years past, well, you are living in a whole different historical era than your counterparts. 

So, what to do? Simple: bury that noise. Send it off with a ceremonial Viking funeral, if you will. 

Out With the Old SEO, In With The New

It is simply no longer possible to get good search traffic to your site with old school SEO tactics. In the past, SEO keyword stuffing and Alt Tag optimization was effective because search engines were not very sophisticated – they did not have the ability to detect and penalize websites that were using manipulative SEO techniques. 

Now, things are a bit more advanced. Machine learning has helped make Google Search become much cleverer and is now able to detect and penalize websites that use outdated SEO techniques. 

Good Content is the New SEO 

When it comes to successful SEO tactics, Google spells out what they are looking for – good content. 

You see, they make money from selling ads. Their ads are worth more if their organic search results are more accurate. So, Google wants your website to have relevant content that answers the questions your audience is searching for. 

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing high quality content to attract and engage an audience. Content marketing is much more effective than outdated SEO tactics – it is an honest and transparent way to attract and engage an audience through storytelling and genuine content. It’s also the best way to build relationships with an audience, which makes them more likely to trust and become loyal to your brand or business. 

Instead of over-optimizing for keywords no one actually searches for, try answering the questions you always get from people each and every day. 

The content must be relevant to the audience and offer something of value, such as insights, tips, or entertainment. We’ll admit, it takes quite a bit of time – but the results are well worth it.

If you’re still using old-school SEO tactics, it may be time to try something new – and if you need help, we’re just a phone call away. Get in touch anytime. 

Social Media: What is it Good For (in Marketing)?

Way back in 2010, most business owners had no urge to be on social media – that’s where their kids wasted their time, not where you obtained new clients. 

Then, once they realized that social media was the new town square and clients were accessible on it, things started to change, and every business owner wanted to spend all their marketing time dedicated to getting new leads on social.

These days – for the most part – people go on social for entertainment. Yes, the CEO of that company you want to land is on Instagram – but they use it to look at cat videos, not new CRMs. 

In 2022, the most successful social media marketing campaigns center around building a network of people that can refer business to you regularly. Sure, viral posts are still great and get you a lot of awareness – but getting a post to go viral is the goal of most people on social these days. And the truth is Twitter has a different main character everyday. You don’t want to be that main character.

If you’re looking at how to make social media drive leads for your business, we are more than happy to schedule a consultation.  

All in all, we could wax poetic here for hours about what marketing strategies deserve the poshest of send-offs, but truly there may be too many to count and you may be asking for your own funeral procession at the end of our long, long list.

Our best advice? Look to a professional marketing team to assist you in staying top-of-mind, engaging, and ahead of the curve when it comes to your business. And hey, we’re just a phone call, email or DM away. 

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Which Data Points Are Worth Tracking and Which Are Not?

We hear it all the time from businesses embarking on their social media marketing journey, “how can we get more followers?” And while large follower counts might look impressive, they’re all but irrelevant if they’re the wrong audience or not engaged. It can be easy to get lost in the appearance of big numbers, but what really matters is data that tracks your impact with impressions, clicks and click-through rates

There’s a ton of KPIs out there, but here’s the ones we recommend looking closely at:

  • Impressions
  • Email Engagement
  • Spend
  • Clicks
  • Social Media Engagement
  • Webpage Views
  • Sales (unit/dollar volume)
  • Cost per Client
  • Cost per Lead
  • Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS)
  • Return on Investment (ROI)

Analyzing these metrics will tell you how successful your strategy is, and they’ll help you craft even better content for even better results. They can help you understand your traffic performance, readership engagement, and lead generation.  After all, the more you know, the better you can target and reach the people that really matter to your business needs.

Despite how overwhelming it can feel to track, manage, and interpret, data can guide some pretty big and important decisions when it comes to who you target, how you target them, and the most effective ways to continue to engage them.

If you’re ready, we can help ensure that your metrics and marketing stay perfectly aligned for growing your business. Take the next step today by getting in touch with us at The Found Gen.

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How to Get Your Business Less Reliant on Facebook

Let’s not mince words – Facebook built the world’s largest social media platform, a digital town square with billions of users. Then they built the most powerful ad platform on top of it. Then they broke it. 

Over the years, we’ve seen the dramatic rise of Facebook and what now may be its fall. Back in 2011, business owners thought it was a crazy idea to promote your business on Facebook. In 2015, organic reach started to plummet and ads became vital to maintain a presence on the platform – and it worked. 

Now, after Apple’s privacy updates (and Google’s that are coming soon to Android), Facebook as that a crossroads. Many businesses that were buying $20,000+ a month in ads have seen revenue plummet. So when it comes to sustaining your business’ lead flow, now may be the time to start seeking out alternatives to Facebook. Here’s our advice:

Build a Brand, Not a Presence

Building a presence on a social media platform creates more value for the platform than it does for your business – at least over the long run. 

Instead, focus on using a platform to connect with individuals – build a network of actual human beings instead of a following. 

When you connect with people and build a brand, your presence can move platform to platform relatively easily. 

Start Blogging

There are only two parts of your online presence that you fully control – your website and your email list. For long term success without platform risk, those are the two components that should get the majority of your resources. 

Blogging is an essential component of your website – it gives potential clients immediate access to your expertise and represents your brand, company, and style in exactly the way you want it to. And did we mention it is the crucial component to supporting and driving great SEO?

By having a robust blog strategy, you are able to cultivate a strong presence online where you (bonus!) provide great information to potential clients who are more ready to buy or hire you from the start. If you think you have an SEO strategy in place but aren’t blogging, you don’t have an SEO strategy. 

The best part about blogging? You write one post and it lives on forever, continually driving traffic to you for years whereas a Facebook post stops creating impressions (at best) a day or two after you write it. 

Consider Hiring Content Marketers

Content marketing often becomes a full-time job that few small businesses can handle on their own. It requires a high level of planning and creating new innovative ideas and ways to share content. If you feel like handling your own content marketing could put a strain on the other work you have to take care of, hiring a content marketing team may be a good idea.

At the end of the day, the decision to reduce your business’ reliance on Facebook is up to you. There are plenty of alternatives to Facebook available, and every social media site has a solid demographic core. Find the site for your best customers and stake a claim there – odds are it’s the one you already have.

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What is The MetaVerse and Why Zuckerberg Has Gone Off the Deep End

Ah, Zuckerberg. 

It’s hard to believe that nearly 20 years have passed since a college kid with a bankrolled pivot on “Hot or Not” became a household name. A name that has since created such a reverberation across pop culture. 

Let’s face it (pun intended), the man shifted social media onto its current course. And, he got a movie out of it. 

Zuck is back in the news (did he ever leave?) but this time for re-positioning and re-branding his Facebook empire to something entirely different. 

So, what the heck is this MetaVerse?

At this point, not much. Let us explain:

The Internet Brought to Life

The term, coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” refers to a virtual world that coexists and overlaps with the physical one, with people interacting as avatars. Zuckerberg has described it as an extensive “virtual environment” you can go inside of, instead of just looking at a screen. That world doesn’t exist today on anywhere near the scale Zuckerberg envisions, but a small version can be found in gaming, especially with virtual-reality (VR) headsets like Facebook’s – or, Meta’s — Occulus.

There are “multi-billion revenue opportunities,” Bank of America analysts wrote. “For example, 50-yard line seats for the Superbowl, taking a hitting class with [Major League baseball player] Buster Posey or shopping for sunglasses with virtual try-on may all be possible in the metaverse,” they said. 

Zuckerberg is going all in on what he sees as the next generation of the internet because he thinks it’s going to open up a large new digital economy that sometimes runs in parallel with the tangible world and other times far surpasses it. “Ads are going to continue being an important part of the strategy across the social media parts of what we do, and it will probably be a meaningful part of the metaverse, too,” Zuckerberg said in a recent company earnings call.

But will it though?

Our Thoughts

Ironically enough, one maxim we’ve always shared with our clients is to think about the internet as if it were the real world. Building a web presence is synonymous with real estate development. In that analogy, social media is akin to high-end retail space – high foot traffic, but also high rent and most importantly real estate you don’t own.

When you approach it that way, you don’t overinvest in your Facebook (or Instagram, or TikTok, etc) presence because the owner of the real estate can change the rent on you with a snap of their fingers (in this case, by limiting organic reach and requiring you to buy ads). 

It’s always best to invest in the real estate you own – your website and your email list, the two things that no one can take away from you.  

Zuckerberg did a great job building extremely valuable real estate and got a ton of users – but they also built their ad platform on data they got from people’s phones. So when Apple (and now Google) change the privacy settings, all of a sudden it looks like he built his empire on someone else’s real estate. 

The Metaverse is his shot to change that. Will Facebook –er, Meta – succeed? Only time will tell. Until then, we remain skeptical and wouldn’t recommend anyone to invest heavily in building a presence on a platform they don’t fully control. 

In short: keep an eye on it, but don’t go all-in. Zuckerberg is investing in visions of life-changing technologies, while he can’t even sort his main (and only successful) business out. Creating the metaverse will also be arduous and expensive, and the financial payoff is uncertain – so if it fails, it will likely be the biggest failure in the history of the internet.

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What Data Should You Be Looking at When Analyzing Your Marketing

If you’re sending out a bunch of content without measuring its effects, you’re going to be missing out on A LOT of important insights. For a successful marketing strategy, you need to know what’s hitting the target, what’s missing, and why. Metrics will tell you how successful your strategy is, and they’ll help you craft even better content for even better results. Learning how to analyze marketing data is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of running a successful marketing campaign.

Analytics can help you track your impact with impressions, clicks and click-through rates. They can help you understand your traffic performance, readership engagement, and lead generation. So, with all that being said, what data should you be tracking? There’s a ton of KPIs out there, but here’s the ones we recommend looking closely at:

  • Impressions
  • Email Engagement
  • Spend
  • Clicks
  • Social Media Engagement
  • Webpage Views
  • Sales (unit/dollar volume)
  • Cost per Client
  • Cost per Lead
  • Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS)
  • Return on Investment (ROI)

There isn’t a right answer for which tool is best to measure or track your analytics – the reality is just stick with one. Much akin to tracking your weight loss on a scale – you want to use the same measuring tool if you are going to accurately track the data. Switching scales can affect your numbers and result in a lot of frustration. The same rule applies to tracking your marketing data. 

Here are some of the tools that are available: 

  • Google Analytics
  • Tableau
  • Momently
  • HubSpot Marketing Hub
  • SEMrush
  • Google Search Console
  • Visitor Analytics
  • Clicky Analytics
  • Bitly

We know sifting through data can be a drag – if the numbers get too overwhelming, we can help!

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Why Blogging Should Be the Focal Point of Your 2022 Marketing Plan

You’ve heard the saying, “a blog a day keeps the SEO Ninjas away.” Okay, so maybe it’s not quite like that but blogging is the healthiest thing you can do for your business’s marketing strategy.  

Over ten years ago when we formed The Found Gen, it was commonplace to have to explain to businesses why a blog was an important factor in their overall marketing strategy. Most people simply thought of a blog as a daily diary for bored adults who liked to overshare. 

Today, blogs have become more widely accepted and used on most business websites across the globe. And yet… businesses are still not taking the practice seriously as a main driver of potential new clients and revenue.

In fact, many businesses will spend more money (and we mean boat loads more) on social media management and ad buys than they will in original blog content. 

The genuine misinformation campaign on behalf of social platforms as to their effectiveness for businesses, along with the immediacy of a live feed, causes businesses to mis-align their marketing budget and priorities year after year. 

The Skinny on Blogging

When it comes to the digital landscape there are only two things your business can control: your website and your email list. That’s why both are the most valuable parcels you have online. 

Every time you publish a new, original blog post you are essentially adding a new page to your website. Ideally, your blogs are rife with pertinent information that your potential customers are looking for – or better yet – Googling. Every 28 days or so, Google crawls the entire internet. All of it. In that time period, if you have added more original content and pages to your website, Google logs it. They note that you have an active site that is providing valuable information. If you continue to provide answers that people are typing into Google’s search bar – then Google will start to note that it can turn to your site as a place to provide its users with valuable information. The longer readers are on your site, the more blogs they read – Google notices. And Google rewards. 

The Real SEO

Blogging is the best SEO you can do for your website. You control it. You manage it. You own it. You are also not paying some “SEO Ninja” or company thousands of dollars to do something to your site that they can’t explain transparently – and eventually hold your site hostage. 

Editor’s Note: This is really a sad story we hear regularly. If you are paying a company to manage your SEO but they have full control of your site and aren’t being direct in answering what they are up to – give us a call today. Friends don’t let friends spend money for nothing. 

By having a robust blog strategy, you are able to cultivate a strong presence online where you (bonus!) provide great information to potential clients who are more ready to buy or hire you from the start. If you have an SEO strategy in place but aren’t blogging, you don’t have an SEO strategy. 

How to Blog in 2022 

This year, when you’re developing your marketing strategy be sure to add blogging. We always recommend starting with four blogs a month, or one a week. If you’re already blogging that much – great! – now up your game, try six or eight blogs each month.

If blogging is too time-consuming and not something you are able to handle on your own – consider outsourcing to experienced professional content writers. This is key. Don’t just hire someone on Fiver or your best friend’s cousin’s nephew. Content writing is an art form. Content writing for business is a whole different ball of wax. 

Find a team of professional writers and marketers who research your company, your industry, your tone, your audience, your information and more. And honestly, spoiler alert: you’ve just found one. Get in touch with our team today if you’re ready to start blogging for your business.