The BrightEdge platform provides unparalleled insight into the natural search competitive landscape for your clients. BrightEdge gives you the information you need to wow your clients while empowering you to make data driven strategic decisions. Talk with your CSM for more recommendations on driving strategic competitive insights!

• Share of Voice (SOV): Differentiate your reporting to compare against both “perceived” (tracked) competitors and “actual” (SOV full landscape) competitors. Paint a picture to clients on how they’re performing against most important core competitors and actual market share against all competing sites. 

• Data Cube: Identify content gaps and opportunities for expansion for your clients. Explore Data Cube results for any keyword or competitor (including full domain, sub-folder or individual URL). Build a case for developing new content by uncovering new terms that are driving qualified visitors to competitor sites. 

• Content Analysis: Compare how competitors are leveraging keywords and marketing copy in the most important on-page elements (including: page title, description, heading tags, body copy). Mirror commonalities such as the primary keyword listed first in the page title and communicate your differentiators within the meta-description. 

• ‘Likelihood to Rank’ Analysis: Determine how difficult it will be to improve upon current rank based on offsite factors such as inbound links, anchor text and social media activity. Prioritize low hanging fruit for quick wins while building a long-term strategy for highly competitive keywords. 

As discussed in our recent post on email marketing performance metrics, this “traditional” channel is increasingly providing an impressive return on investment and playing a central role in achieving business goals for marketers the world over. In this post we’ll go over three key tactics to realize the most ROI and better conversions from your email marketing efforts: lead nurturing, content repurposing and content personalization or dynamic content.

Tactic 1: Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing can be an elusive concept. Simply defined, lead nurturing is offering prospects a consistent stream of content that is helpful, useful, entertaining or otherwise engaging to encourage them to move forward in the sales funnel. By “warming” potential customers who have supplied their contact information (namely, their email addresses), lead nurturing lays the groundwork for facilitating actual sales conversations and conversions down the road. It’s a smart strategy to start off light with emails containing smaller bits of non-sales content, so subscribers aren’t overwhelmed or otherwise put off. Examples include a brief blog post or a short video clip on a relevant, trending topic.

As the nurturing program matures and leads become more engaged, the content shared can be more involved and graduate to including a call to action (CTA). In the meantime, however, the goals of lead nurturing are to establish rapport with prospects and build their trust in your brand by demonstrating its credibility and authority. As lead nurturing campaigns are ultimately intended to support business goals, the frequency of emails should be determined by the speed of your brand’s sales cycle. For instance, for relatively long sales cycles such as a consumer car purchase or a manufacturing equipment investment, the lead nurturing process may take up to a year or more. In this case, a monthly email may be the most appropriate. On the other end of the spectrum, if your offer is time-sensitive and the sales cycle is relatively fast, a bi-weekly email cadence may be in order.

Tactic 2: Content Repurposing

Closely related to lead nurturing is content repurposing. As the term implies, content repurposing means recycling significant, information-rich content, such as white papers, case studies, videos and presentations into email materials for lead nurturing programs. By repurposing time- and cost-intensive content assets, breaking them out into smaller bits of more “digestible” information for lead nurturing, brands can extend their longevity and realize a greater return on the initial investment. You can employ this cost-effective strategy using most any substantive content asset.

For instance, do you have a lengthy white paper? Slicing it up into several interesting factoids or translating them into an infographic will provide you with resources to share with prospects in your lead nurturing campaign. The same applies to longer videos; rather than email the entire video, consider chopping it into brief clips that can be consumed in under a minute. Given the relatively short attention span of consumers and the need to not tax their time and patience, abbreviating and repurposing content is a win-win solution for both your brand’s overall content ROI and email marketing performance.

Tactic 3: Content Personalization

Referred to as “dynamic content,” this email strategy allows for personalized, targeted emails based on user behavior, location and other key demographic data as well as the customer’s sales stage. This is a type of email marketing automation and greatly improves on traditional, generic email “blasts.” By sending targeted communications informed by essential subscriber data, your message become more relevant and will likely realize more engagement and higher conversions. Salesforce.com is a popular provider of this functionality. Keep in mind though that there are several software applications available on the market for developing and implementing dynamic content email campaigns depending on your needs, budget and capabilities. A simple Google or Bing search will display several options from which to choose. In an example of well-honed dynamic content, Salesforce (cited above) shows how an email message from Northern Trail Outfitters targeted towards women and featuring a time-sensitive sale appears:

 

Clearly, this email content would prove far more relevant and compelling than a generalized “blast” to all subscribers, regardless of gender. The more parameters specified in a dynamic content software application, the more targeted and effective the email message. By leveraging these three email marketing strategies, your business can achieve greater efficiency and better conversions. It’s a relatively small investment yielding superior results and clearly worth your while.

There are an estimated 30 million small businesses on Facebook. You face stiff competition when it comes to engaging your potential customers with your company. You want to optimize your content to improve your visibility and prove your expertise. When you share your social content by using the Open Graph protocol you give your site the tools it needs to take that engagement to the next level.  

What exactly does the Open Graph protocol offer?

When you run the Open Graph protocol on your website, you turn it into a rich ‘graph’ object, giving you better control over how your material appears on sites like Facebook. When you do not use Open Graph, you leave the appearance of your shared content to the mercy of the automated content generators of the social site. Using the protocol allows you to optimize your content for clicks within these networks, which can then in turn impact your traffic, brand reputation and even your search engine rankings. When your content gets noticed and regularly shared, it will increase the links to your website, the number of visitors to your website and the engagement of your brand online.  

Social Site Audit and Open Graph

Having content-sharing posts show up incorrectly on social media sites is a common problem. Social site audits, such as this sample from BrightEdge's ContentIQ, can help show companies their own most frequent errors, which can often be corrected by using the Open Graph protocol. You can leverage ContentIQ to perform a social site audit or dive deeper with a full site audit.   

How to use the Open Graph protocol

To take advantage of the Open Graph protocol, you should produce tags for the following areas:

Step 1. og:title

This Open Graph tag will title your content. You want this title to be between 60 and 90 characters but not longer than 100. If your title goes beyond 100 characters, it will be automatically shortened to 88.

This portion of the code will look something like:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”An Engaging Title Here”/>

Step 2. og:url

This Open Graph tag is particularly useful if you have more than one URL for the same content and want to designate one for all your social shares. This tag will dictate the canonical URL for your page.

This portion of the code will look something like:

<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.yourwonderfulsite.com”/>

Step 3. og:type

This Open Graph tag will describe the type of content you are sharing. There are a number of different types of content that can be shared using this system. For example, you can share:

• Web-based content
  • articles
  • websites
• entertainment-oriented content
  • books
  • movies
• people
  • actors
  • politicians

To see the full list of available types you can visit this site.

If you do not indicate a specific type of content, ‘website’ is generally assumed by default. This particular Open Graph protocol tag can be important if the content represents something in real-life. For example, if you are sharing a book and a user ‘likes’ your content on Facebook, then the book will then appear in her Interest section on Facebook.

This portion of the code will look something like:

<meta property=”og:type” content=”website” />

Step 4. og:description

This description controls how the link will be described when it shows up in someone’s feed. You do not have to worry about keywords since it does not impact SEO, but you should focus on engaging copy. It is best to use about 200 characters.

This portion of the code will look something like:

<meta property=”og:type” content=”An engaging, entertaining website description.” />

Step 5. og:image

Pictures offer so much value for boosting engagement with your readers. When you do not use Open Graph tags, then when you content is displayed, any image on the page can be selected. This could even be an ad image or no image at all! You can use images up to 5MB and the resolution of 1200 pixels x 627 pixels tends to do the best job of attracting attention without exceeding Facebook limits. A well-used image can produce an eye-catching status like this one:

As your image gets smaller, particularly below 400 pixels, it looks more like a thumbnail, which will not attract as much attention. When you create the Open Graph tags for this portion of the protocol, you will be linking to a URL where the image is located.

This portion of the code will look something like:

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://www.yourwonderfulsite.com/image-name.jpg” />

When you put all of these different tags together, you will see something that looks like this example produced by the Google Developers:

<html prefix="g: http://ogp.me/ns#"> <head> <meta property="og:title" content="Enjoy Fireworks"> <meta property="og:description" content="Fireworks are beautiful. This article explains how beautiful fireworks are."> <meta property="og:image" content= "https://developers.google.com/web/imgs/fireworks.jpg"> <meta property="og:url" content= "discovery-and-distribution/optimizations-for-crawlers/social-sites.html"> <meta property="og:type" content="website">

In addition to these basic tags, there are also different types of optional metadata you can use to enhance your postings even further. These would include tags such as:

Step 6.  og:audio

This will allow you to add a URL to an audio file.

Step 7. og:locale

This Open Graph tag allows you to set the location and language territory. When you do not use this tag, the default will be set to the United States and English.

Step 8. og:site_name

This will allow you to display the name of the overall site if your content is part of something larger.

Step 9. og:video

This will allow you to use a video file that is supposed to go along with your content.

Don’t leave your social appearance to the algorithms. Using the Open Graph protocol will give you the tools you need to improve your social engagement on social sites, like Facebook. With an estimated 1.393 billion active users, however, it is worth the effort. Take advantage of these meta tags to capture the attention of more readers, helping to spread your brand and company message.