The Role of Authenticity in Organic Social Media Marketing

One hundred and forty-three minutes. That’s how much time the average person worldwide spends on social media consumption every single day. For many users, those minutes tick up even higher on a regular basis.

But what do these 16-plus hours of weekly scrolling mean for brands and companies on social media platforms?

First, it means that platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn are vital avenues for most companies to share information and connect with their target audiences. An organic social media strategy is key to this.

But all that scrolling also means that users have become highly attuned and sophisticated consumers of content—especially in a world where ads and promotions are mixed in right along with the fun videos and friends’ updates. They are discerning, can sense inauthenticity miles away, and will likely immediately tune it out.

That’s why authenticity in organic social media marketing is so vital to building trust and loyalty among followers.

We’re going to look at some simple ways for how your company can connect authentically in organic social media marketing, but first let’s review the benefits of organic social media.

Benefits of Organic Social Media

There are many reasons why having an organic social media presence is essential — no matter the size of your company:

It is an opportunity to share your brand and engage with current and new customers.
It provides a place to build and amplify your brand’s personality, goals, and values.
It offers a resource to support customers with questions or concerns.
It cultivates a community around your brand.

The Importance of Brand Authenticity in Organic Social Media

When a brand is honest, transparent, and true to its values, promises, and identity, it creates an authentic connection with its audience. People crave this genuine connection to companies — so much so that 88% of consumers say that authenticity is crucial when deciding what brands they will support.

Organic social media is an ideal way to build authenticity. Through organic social, you can:

Build consumer trust.
Foster real engagement and connection.
Humanize your company.
Celebrate your unique brand personality, values, and voice.
Stand out in a saturated digital market.
Create community.
Deepen emotional connections with your audience.
Increase long-term consumer loyalty and advocacy.

5 Simple Ways to Build Brand Authenticity via Organic Social Media

Building trust on social media can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Here are a few simple strategies for amplifying how you authentically show up for your followers.

1. Tell Your Story

Storytelling has always been an integral part of the human experience, and that hasn’t changed in our tech-forward world. Narratives that reflect our emotions and values make an impact. So, by establishing and telling your brand story via organic social media — while still ensuring it’s relevant and compelling — you’re creating strong connections with your audiences.

Here are just a few ideas for how you can tell your story:

Share the mission behind your company.
Showcase employees — the people behind your products or services.
Talk about your CRM initiatives.
Take consumers behind the scenes of your brand.
Get vulnerable about mistakes and challenges your company has overcome.

2. Tell Others’ Stories

While it’s important to tell your brand story, you can also implement content that shows and tells real stories about your consumers — and how your brand has positively impacted them.

This is where UGC (user-generated content) can be very beneficial in addition to testimonials and reviews.

When your followers see the social proof of others’ experiences with your company, it adds credibility and authenticity to your content.

3. Engage with Your Followers

Another huge benefit of organic social media is that it gives you an easy way to engage immediately and directly with your audiences. While it’s tempting to implement automated responses and generic comments to save time, meaningful engagement is what will truly help bolster your authenticity and show your commitment to your community.

That means you should engage in conversations on social media, respond thoughtfully and humanly to comments and messages, and show real interest in your customers’ feedback and opinions.

A bonus? You’re getting valuable insight and feedback that you can maximize for your company’s long-term growth and improvement.

4. Stay Relevant

Organic social media content doesn’t only have to solely be about your company and brand. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be!

There are many interesting and entertaining ways you can introduce additional layers of relevance into your content to further heighten your company’s relatability.

Here are a few to consider:

Integrate national and global events — i.e. the Olympics and the Super Bowl — into your content strategy.
Amplify collective seasons and experiences, such as summer travel, New Year’s resolutions, and more.
Celebrate brand-appropriate holidays and campaigns, like Valentine’s Day, PRIDE Month, Halloween, Christmas, and many more.

Remember that companies that cleverly and compellingly capitalize on these ideas don’t just post a generic message; they fully integrate the event, experience, or holiday into their brand voice, personality, and values to make it their own.

5. Activate Influencers Wisely

Brands often like engaging with and working with influencers and content creators because many of these individuals have built their platforms on the foundation of authenticity — and their millions of followers trust what they have to say.

Working with the right influencer for your company can introduce your products or services to new audiences while adding another layer of legitimacy to your brand.

Support for Your Organic Social Media Strategy

Building and maintaining authenticity is a long game. It’s about investing in organic content that’s informative, interesting, and entertaining; it’s about telling stories; it’s about engaging and connecting with your community meaningfully.

This commitment to organic social media can be invaluable to your brand strategy and positively impact key performance indicators like target audience acquisition, consumer retention and loyalty, and product sales and conversion.

If you’re looking for support and expertise in this category, Denver Post Media is here to develop a powerful and authentic social media presence. We provide social media services in Colorado and beyond, working with brands to achieve all their content and marketing goals across many channels. If you’d like to explore how we can help you build or enhance your organic social media, learn more here.

SEO Terms & Definitions Guide

SEO is an acronym that is often used in digital marketing. But sometimes, there’s confusion surrounding those three little letters. SEO can be a complex concept that requires lots of technical jargon.

So, it can be helpful to start with a list of SEO terms for beginners to establish a baseline for understanding.

With that in mind, here’s your cheat sheet of common SEO terms to know:

SEO

We’ve established that SEO stands for search engine optimization, but let’s dive a little deeper into what that actually means. SEO encompasses all the actions you can take to have your website rank higher in search engine results.

The goal of SEO is to increase the quantity of organic (non-paid) traffic your website content receives from those search engines. On-page SEO factors like page titles and descriptions, content (a blog), tags, internal links, and even site architecture can help improve search visibility and increase traffic.

SERPs

SERP is just a shorthand way to say Search Engine Results Page. This is the list of pages that populates when a consumer is searching for something in Google or another search engine. This is where you want your website’s “position” — where you rank in the SERPs — to be as close to the top as possible.

Organic Traffic

When you see the term “organic” in marketing, it basically means “unpaid.” So unpaid search results often generate organic traffic to your website — and this desirable organic traffic is one of the main goals of optimizing your site so you can drive as much free traffic as possible.

Keywords

Keywords are KEY to how your website ranks on Google. That’s because keywords are essentially the short words and phrases that users search for. Identifying and then implementing the best keywords for your website is critical to amplify organic traffic. Once you’ve established which keywords to use, you can create high-quality, relevant, and authoritative content based on those words and phrases.

There are keyword research tools, like SEMrush, that can help you find keyword suggestions for your SEO. You can also check your web page’s keyword ranking — its organic ranking position in search results for any given keyword — to see how it stacks up to others.

Long-Tail Keywords

In addition to the standard-issue keywords (see above), there are also long-tail keywords. These are precise search queries — generally four or more words — that are used to describe something.

While long-tail keywords are used less often, they can still be a competitive part of your SEO strategy. That’s because they are generally less competitive and have lower search volumes while helping to reach a more defined audience — all of which can help improve site ranking and conversion.

Keyword Cannibalization

When keywords “eat other” — cue the Pacman visual — you have keyword cannibalization. This occurs when the content on different pages of your site is ranking for the same keywords with similar search intent. Not surprisingly, this cannibalization can impede performance and real results because your keywords basically cancel each other out.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword cannibalization can often be a result of keyword stuffing — which is loading up a webpage with too many keywords to try and quickly boost your site’s ranking in Google search results. To achieve this, keywords are often used unnaturally in content or appear out of context. Not only does it look bad for your users, but it’s also an unsuccessful strategy that will harm your site’s ranking.

Backlinks

A backlink is a link on another website that points to your content — and it’s surprisingly effective in helping your search ranking. That’s because search engines use several off-page signals to determine whether your site can be trusted — one of the leading signals is backlinks.

Backlinks legitimize your site to search engines.

Link Building

To get more high-quality backlinks to your page, you work on link building. There are several strategies you can implement for link building, including:

Creating link-worthy content: High-quality content will naturally attract links. This could be anything from infographics to free quizzes, downloadable assets, and other interactive pages.
Engaging in guest blogging: Getting the word out about your content and writing for other sites is a great way to extend your reach and get some backlinks in the mix.
Auditing broken links: Identifying links that no longer work on other sites and suggesting links to your pages as replacements can be a lot of work, but it will pay dividends.
Adding links: By adding your own set of relevant external links to your content, you’re also improving authority and credibility.

Authority Links

When you’re working on backlinks and link building, you’ll want to keep authority links in mind. Authority links are high-quality backlinks from sites that are considered the most trustworthy and credible in their respective industries. Major news outlets, top industry sites, and educational institutions are considered authority links. When a high-authority site links to another site, it shares that credibility and power.

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While this SEO terms glossary is not comprehensive, it does provide a helpful guide to knowing more about the world of search optimization. But what these SEO key terms don’t tell you is that SEO is a long game. It requires a long-term SEO strategy — and results don’t often appear immediately. You’re also never finished with SEO; it’s a continuous process that requires constant attention and improvement.

For all those reasons and more, SEO may seem overwhelming. At Denver Post Media, we act as your experts who know the full SEO terms glossary — and so much more. We’re leaders in helping brands and companies achieve their marketing and advertising goals, including SEO and website ranking.

Testimonials: How to Include Them in Marketing Emails and Why They Matter

Consumers buy what they trust — and what other people trust. Such is the power of WOM — Word of Mouth. But how do you harness and multiply this game-changing organic marketing tactic to spread the word to more consumers?

This is where customer testimonials come into play. They are a form of social proof that can be incredibly valuable in your marketing strategy.

While customer testimonials and product reviews are frequently celebrated on websites, a meaningful way to maximize them entirely is to integrate them into email marketing.

The way you integrate customer testimonials in email marketing is important, but first, let’s dive into why testimonials are so powerful.

Why Customer Testimonials Work

Customer testimonials are a form of social proof in marketing. This psychological principle basically refers to the phenomenon that people are more likely to do something when they see others doing it. Customers want to feel assured that purchasing a product or service is the right decision, and they gain that assurance from others.

In marketing, social proof, such as testimonials and reviews, can help companies validate and simplify their customers’ buying decisions, build consumer trust, and increase credibility.

In fact, consistent use of customer testimonials has been shown to help generate 62% more revenue from every customer — and not just one time, either. In another study, Hubspot showed that 57% of customers visit a business’s website after encountering positive testimonials.

How to Use Testimonials in Email Marketing

When you use testimonials in email marketing, your email subscribers get to see your product in action — and how it’s working for others — without feeling like they are being sold to. Check out these ideas for how to harness the power of email marketing testimonials.

Engage in Product Storytelling

You’ll often hear the phrase “show, don’t tell” in social proof — and content marketing fueled by testimonials is a perfect way to do just that. Sharing meaningful product stories through the lens of customers is powerful. Consumers might see themselves in these stories and shared experiences. What’s more, you’re offering the literal proof that your products or services are worth purchasing.

Consider Video

Written testimonials are influential, of course, but with the prevalence of video in today’s marketing landscape, video testimonials in an email take that persuasiveness one step further. Consumers get to truly put a face to the name of the person behind the testimonial as they witness a firsthand account.

Amplify Case Studies

The results speak for themselves. Whether it’s “before and after” photos or an in-depth overview of problems solved, case studies are convincing to consumers across a range of businesses and their products and services. Email provides a way to succinctly summarize the top takeaways and results of case studies — while offering a call-to-action to link to the entire downloadable case study. However, make sure to include at least one testimonial in your case study email to make for an even more compelling CTA.

Highlight Real Customer Reviews

Customer reviews may seem relatively basic, but the research shows that they work — and they work well. In fact, 94% of people say that positive reviews make them more likely to use a business — 91% of individuals aged 18 to 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. While five-star reviews are different from testimonials, it’s good to highlight some of the direct feedback that customers provide in their reviews in a promotional email. With this version of customer feedback, you can tip the scales in your favor when consumers are evaluating your business or product offering.

How to Collect Customer Testimonials for Email Marketing

Now that we’ve reviewed some examples of email marketing testimonials, you may be wondering how to obtain these customer testimonials.

The simple rule of thumb? Just ask! Here are some ideas to do just that:

Email Request

Send your list an email thank-you that includes a request for feedback after they’ve purchased your product or service. Provide concise instructions for how to leave a review — and then consider connecting directly with key customers who might be well-suited to a more in-depth testimonial, like a video or a personal story.

Social Media

Whether your company spends the most time on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, or another social platform, all these outlets are excellent places to speak to your consumers and ask them to share their stories and experiences about your products and services.

Website Integration

You may want to consider a dedicated section on your website where customers can leave a review or submit a testimonial. Whether it’s a form that’s embedded directly on your site or a user-friendly portal, having this integrated option amplifies the traffic you’re already driving to your site.

Customer Surveys

Surveys aren’t just a great way to get testimonials; they can help you learn more about how your customers are using your products or services — and what else you might be able to provide or change to elevate their experience even more. Customer platforms like Hubspot have built-in survey form capabilities — or you can use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to ask for feedback. You may even consider incentivizing consumers to fill out a survey by offering a discount code upon completion or a raffle prize. In the survey, it’s a good idea to ensure that you ask for permission to use their feedback as a testimonial.

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At Denver Post Media, we specialize in activating content marketing strategies that effectively integrate social proof — like testimonials. But we don’t expect you to take our word for it!

“Since the Denver Post took over management of our digital marketing, we have double-digit revenue growth.”
-Anthony Nicosia, EVP, Doctor Fix It

(See what we did there?!)

Check out more testimonials from our clients here.

7 Steps to Creating a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is about sharing your brand or company’s story in a way that feels more authentic and useful to the consumer.

For a good content marketing definition, consider the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) version, which references it as a “strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

A successful content strategy is important because it can help you accomplish key objectives and goals for your business, including:

Increased brand awareness, retention, and loyalty.
Lead generation.
Connection with your audience.
Higher traffic, sales, and intended consumer action.
Thought leadership to build credibility and influence.
Introduction of corporate social responsibility goals.
Amplification of other marketing tactics, including SEO, PR, and social media.

7 Steps to Content Marketing Strategy Success

The seven steps below provide a guide to creating a successful business content marketing strategy.

1. Set Your Goals

Before you even pass go, the first step in developing a content marketing strategy is to clarify your goals. Defining the purpose behind your content marketing strategy will help establish your roadmap for moving forward.

Examples of goals include:

Establish thought leadership.
Increase traffic to your website from search engines.
Improve customer retention.
Generate an increase in product sales.
Drive more lead generation to a free downloadable asset.

It’s helpful to be as specific as possible with goals and include measurable targets so you can assess the effectiveness of your content strategy and make any necessary changes.

2. Define Your Audience

After you establish the goal you want to achieve, it’s time to define your target audience. Knowing who you want to reach is imperative to an effective content marketing strategy — the best content in the world will mean nothing if it’s not relevant and actionable for the consumer.

It’s helpful to create brand personas—or personas—for your best-fit prospects and customers. These personas should include standard demographic data like age, gender, location, income, and more.

You may also want to consider qualifications like:

What are their key motivators, beliefs, and values?
What are their pain points or challenges?
How can your products or services help solve those challenges?
How and where do they consume content?
What types of content do they enjoy most?

3. Do Your Research

There are several types of research you’ll want to consider for an effective content marketing strategy.

First, look at what your competition in the marketplace is doing. Explore the types of content they’re producing and how it is performing with consumers. You might be able to get some ideas to make your own as you think about what will resonate best with your goals and your target audiences.

You’ll also want to investigate what your audience is already searching for online. Keyword research through a tool like Semrush can be helpful in compiling the most popular keywords that people are searching for on Google and other search engines. These results will help guide your content strategy and perhaps even give you some new ideas.

Finally, you might consider researching and reviewing any existing content you’ve already generated. What has generated the most interest? What hasn’t performed well? Use this information to inform your content strategy, too.

4. Choose Your Content Types and Content Pillars

Using your goals, target audience, and research findings, you’ll now want to select the types of content that will be most effective.

Popular content marketing examples to consider include:

Short-form videos
Static images
Tutorials
Blogs
Podcasts
White papers and e-books
Infographics

From here, you can establish some overarching content pillars or themes to guide your strategy. For example, you may choose to focus on a different topic every month while integrating special promotions and acknowledging more general-interest content like national holidays.

5. Create a Content Calendar

Once you have created your content pillars and topics, it’s time to make a plan.

A content marketing strategy template or a content calendar helps you organize, coordinate, execute, and track your content strategy. Otherwise, it’s very easy to lose track of your publishing schedule.

There are many ways you can create a content calendar — from basic programs to more advanced solutions. You can use something as straightforward (and free) as Google Sheets or WordPress Editorial Calendar — or more advanced tools like Trello, Asana, or Basecamp.

All content calendars will likely include details like topic and title, type, graphics, owner, status, due date, and publish date. This helps keep everyone involved in your content strategy informed and on track.

6. Publish and Promote Your Content

With your content calendar in hand, it’s time to go “live” and begin publishing your content. But it doesn’t end there.

It’s essential to make sure your content reaches as many people as possible in your target audience. Therefore, your content marketing strategy should include a plan for amplification, too.

Here are a few ways you can promote your content after you’ve published it:

Social Media: Share your content on your social media platforms. Consider boosting your posts to reach more people.
Email Marketing: Message your email lists with engaging calls to action.
Paid Advertising: From PPC to Google ads, Meta advertising solutions, and more, paid ads are often an investment worth making.
Influencer Partnerships: Consider building relationships with relevant influencers to reach new audiences that are appropriate for your brand.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Make sure your content is optimized effectively to rank higher in search results.

7. Monitor Performance

An effective content marketing strategy is constantly being monitored, tracked, and evaluated. It also will likely evolve over time as you learn what types of content are making the biggest impact toward your goals.

The specific metrics you track may differ depending on your goals. Google Analytics is a widely used platform to measure website traffic and engagement. Social media analytics tools — like Meta for Business — are also effective for measuring social media reach and engagement.

Bonus Step: Plan Your Resources

Developing a content marketing strategy — and executing it — requires significant time and expertise. You may feel like you don’t have the adequate resources or time to make it happen. Many companies look to outside resources to support their content marketing.

Denver Post Media’s award-winning solutions in the content space allow us to serve your needs for all things content. Whether you’re looking for placement and promotion or development and strategy, we’re here to help connect your brand to engaged audiences through the unique format of storytelling. We can help you tell your story. Learn more here.

6 Key Metrics Every Business Should Track

Key Marketing Metrics Every Business Should Track

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” – Peter Drucker

Management consultant Peter Drucker’s frequently referenced business principle reinforces the importance of measuring data points to manage and improve business processes.

Tracking quantifiable metrics helps reflect the successes — or challenges — of marketing tactics to achieve KPIs for business.

While it can be easy to interchange KPIs (key performance indicators) and metrics, the distinction is that KPIs are tied to specific business goals and objectives. Metrics are neutral data points that, in context, can be used to evaluate progress toward those goals and objectives.

Benefits of Tracking Marketing Metrics

We’d be willing to guess that at least one of your business goals is generating more revenue or increasing value in some form or fashion. Your marketing campaigns and sales efforts should have a positive impact on your company’s KPIs and bottom line. But, without tracking marketing metrics, there’s no way to tangibly quantify your results.

Here are just a few benefits of marketing metrics:

Assess your company’s performance.
Compare your performance against industry benchmarks and your company’s prior performance.
Identify any challenges to course-correct.
Pinpoint campaign pain points.
Evaluate KPIs and set future goals.
Provide your stakeholders with important insights.

6 Metrics Marketing Teams Should Track

With a sea of available data points available, you may be wondering what to track — especially for online businesses. After all, there are so many ways for companies to market and advertise their product or service — from online advertising to email, direct mail, email, social media, and more — it’s essential to know what is performing well and what marketing mix is most effective.

Start with these six essential metrics, many of which can be built into your Google Analytics KPIs dashboard:

1. Users and Sessions

While it may seem quite rudimentary to track users and sessions in Google Analytics in addition to the percentage of new users versus returning users, this data can paint an important baseline picture of how many people are visiting your site and any of your relevant landing pages—and, in turn, tell you how your SEO and marketing KPIs are performing.

2. User Acquisition

Although not technically a metric, another report you’ll want to pay attention to is how your visitors found your site or landing page. That’s precisely what user acquisition will tell you. This is especially vital if you’re using a range of different marketing platforms and campaigns and you want to know what’s performing the best — or, conversely, what seems to be driving the least traffic. Google Analytics’s report shows metrics like new users, engaged users, and event counts.

3. Key Event Rate

Google Analytics tracks all actions as “events,” and then you get to decide what is a “key event,” which you can use to get an idea of your customer conversion rate. Conversion rate measures the percentage of your audience who convert by completing your desired action, such as downloading a white paper, purchasing a product, or starting a free trial.

You can manually calculate key events like conversion rates using the following formulas:

Conversion Rate = Conversions / Sessions
User Conversion Rate = Users Who Converted / Total Users

4. Customer Acquisition

Do you know how much it costs to turn a prospect into a customer? Customer acquisition cost (CAC) can tell you. It’s essential to know your CAC because if your investment in acquiring new customers continually exceeds your revenue, your business will be upside-down.

To calculate your CAC, a formula you can use is:

CAC = total marketing and sales spend / number of new customers

5. Customer Lifetime Value

While it’s important to know your CAC, it’s even more critical to know what a customer is worth to your business. That’s where Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) comes in, as it shows how much revenue a customer generates during the relationship with your company. The best way to calculate this metric is not by individual customers, but by an average of all typical customers.

To calculate your CLV, a formula you can use is:

CLV = (Average transaction value x Average number of transactions in a year x Average customer retention in years) x Profit margin

6. Return on Marketing Investment

In addition to CLV and CAC, there’s one more acronym that can help give you a clear vantage point on your marketing’s effectiveness as it relates to your bottom line. ROMI (return on marketing investment) measures how much revenue your marketing campaign is generating compared to the cost of running that campaign.

Basically, ROMI can tell you if your marketing efforts are paying off — or not.

To calculate your ROMI, a formula you can use is:

ROMI = (sales growth – marketing cost) / marketing cost

Your Partner to Help You Manage and Measure

At Denver Post Media, we know it can be overwhelming to measure and track these metrics and to understand how and when to pull the appropriate levers to create successful improvement in your marketing strategies and campaigns.

That’s why we do it for you — from content marketing to paid search, email, display, social, mobile, video, and more — all with a customized approach that includes advanced reporting.

How to Build a Strong Brand Presence on Social Media

With social media’s highly saturated, ever-evolving, and competitive landscape today, building an impactful brand presence on any given platform may feel overwhelming.

And you’re not wrong!

Social media strategy requires effort and intention. There’s a constantly changing algorithm to navigate, and there are subtle yet impactful differences between the platforms, including LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and more. Each has its own demographic and vibe and requires a distinct content methodology.

But, with an estimated 4.89 billion social media users worldwide in 2023, there’s no question that social media is a compelling — and necessary — investment to reach your target audiences and get your brand noticed.

Here are eight tips to learn from brands with strong social media presence.

Identify Your Audience to Identify Your Platform(s)

Before you even press play on social media, it’s critical to identify who you’re trying to reach. Your intended audience will also help dictate which platform (or platforms) make the most sense for your brand to invest in — and the type of content you’ll generate.

Social media is all about segmentation. You want to message the right audience while amplifying your best strengths. It’s often not worth it to dilute your time and energy across too many platforms when you can put forth intentional effort on one or two.

For example, if your target group is Gen Z, TikTok should probably be part of your plan. Trying to reach an older B2B audience? LinkedIn — and even YouTube — will likely be good places to start. Have a more visually driven business? You may be missing out by not being on Instagram and Pinterest.

Create a Content Calendar

A social media calendar is vital to managing and organizing your content. It will help you keep tabs on your posting schedule, track content themes and campaigns, and navigate the nuances of each platform.

While you can grid it out yourself, social media planning and scheduling tools are available to streamline the process.

Stay Consistent and Active

A content calendar isn’t just helpful for tracking purposes; it can also ensure consistency with a regular posting schedule. This is important because brands that regularly post and engage on their platforms experience a much stronger and more successful brand presence than those with a more erratic approach.

While you can test out different posting frequencies and times, you can also consult some best practices for how often to post to each platform.

But it’s not just about posting. Brands should also reply to comments and direct messages to build relationships and trust with their followers. This engagement will also help you stay attuned to consumer sentiment, address any customer service issues, and spot any potential problems.

Social listening tools can help you engage quickly and effectively with your audience, track responses, and identify trends.

Deliver Value

If you need help determining what type of content to produce, err on the side of helping rather than hard selling. In fact, a 2024 survey conducted by Hootsuite found that audiences want to be entertained and want less self-promotion from companies.

After all, people follow brands that offer them some type of value or benefit — whether it be tutorials and advice, relevant educational information, cool inspiration, or just plain fun.

That said, feel free to experiment with different types of high-quality content to see what sticks with your audience and creates the most engagement. Giveaways can be a great way to reward your followers, too.

Celebrate User-Generated Content

Highlighting user-generated content—whether created by influencers or simply happy customers—is another way to demonstrate your value and relevance to your audience while building credibility and trustworthiness.

It also provides a nice and engaging change of pace for your followers, who will likely enjoy seeing and hearing what others have to say about your brand.

Stay Authentic to Your Brand

Focusing on intentionality and relevance in your content is important, but so is packaging that content. It’s important to develop your brand identity on social media and then always stay true to it.

For example, having a consistent voice, visual aesthetic, and messaging that’s unique to your brand and maintained across each social channel will pay dividends in amplifying your professional brand presence.

Remember to Be Human

People connect with people — so it’s essential to make sure your brand feels approachable, authentic, and human on social media.

When you ditch industry jargon and formal language and instead engage with your followers directly and honestly through your posts, comments, and messages, you give them a chance to develop a stronger connection, which ultimately creates brand affinity and loyalty.

Invest When Necessary

Sometimes, building a strong social presence means investing in paid advertising. From boosting posts so more of your targeted audience sees them to strategic ad campaigns delivering a specific message, it’s all part of a comprehensive social plan.

Brands with the best social media presence enlist help where needed. Many companies don’t have the time, expertise, or resources to build and manage their social media presence effectively. So, they bring in a dedicated team to take it on.

How to Get Brand Social Media Presence Help

Denver Post Media knows that social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to increase recognition, brand loyalty, conversions, customer base, and ultimately, ROI. With a team of social media and content experts, we take a customized approach to each and every brand we partner with.

Learn more about how we can help you build your brand presence here.

Key Metrics That Indicate Email Marketing Success

Email marketing campaigns can be highly advantageous to your business. But just as important as creating and sending those emails is analyzing their results to see what’s performing well — and what’s not.

Fortunately, email marketing metrics are easy to measure. Most email marketing services — from Mailchimp to Hubspot, Klaviyo, and more — include a robust set of reporting and analytics tools to track email performance and inform any adjustments or improvements you may need to make.

Here are five key email marketing metrics to track and assess, which will help you evaluate if your email campaigns are working.

Open Rate

Start with your email marketing campaign’s open rate. This is simply the percentage of people who opened your email.

Open rates tell you several things. First, they let you know if your subject lines are working for you, enticing your subscribers to open the email.

They can also provide information about the time of day that works best for your audience to receive an email — and the frequency at which to message them. For some audiences, twice a week might work. For others, once a week — or once every two weeks, might be better.

Open rates can also tell you about the quality of your email list. For example, if you have 20,000 people on your list but only 200 are consistently opening your emails, then you may need to consider your list strategy and whether you’re talking to the right target audience.

So, what kind of open rate should you aim for? While it can vary by industry, a good email marketing metrics benchmark is an average open rate of around 34%.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is another highly prioritized metric for email marketing. This statistic shows the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a hyperlink — often referred to as a Call to Action (CTA) in your email.

CTR helps you gauge the effectiveness of your email campaign because it indicates the engagement and interest level of your audience for a given product or promotion. Evaluated over time, CTR can also point to trends in how relevant or useful your emails are and which content your audience cares about most.

An optimal industry average CTR is 2.66%. However, depending on the industry, it may range from 1% to 5%.

Conversion Rate

One step beyond both open rate and CTR is conversion rate. This metric indicates the percentage of your subscribers who completed the intended action. However, what counts as a “conversion” may be different from business to business — and from email to email.

For example, if an email campaign was celebrating your latest white paper and the CTA linked to a landing page for the download, the conversion rate would tell you how many people completed that download. Successful email conversions can also involve completing an interest form, participating in a giveaway, making a purchase, and more.

For many marketers, the conversion rate is the most valuable metric because it provides a tangible return on investment for your email campaigns.

Generally, average conversion rates range from 2% to 5%, but this can vary dramatically based on the intended action. Some product sales may take longer to convert, whereas downloading an infographic or entering a contest is far easier for the consumer.

Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of your email subscribers who ask to be removed from your email list after receiving any given email.

However, it’s far easier for recipients to just press “delete” or ignore emails than to formally “unsubscribe,” so this metric will not tell you the whole picture.

That said, it’s still important to track, as it will help you establish a baseline for your business’s normal behavior and monitor any changes in that percentage. Sudden spikes in unsubscribes may provide vital information about the type of email content, layout, or offers that people do not want to see.

The average email unsubscribe rate is about 0.1%.

List Growth Rate

Email attrition is a given. In fact, email lists degrade by an average of about 25% annually.

So, it’s critical to replace those unsubscribes with new people and continue building a quality email list with your business’s most engaged audiences.

Keeping tabs on your growth rate will help you determine whether your email lead generation strategy is working or if you need to double down on expanding your audience.

Optimizing Email Marketing for Success

Equipped with these email marketing metrics, you can track and assess how well your campaigns are performing over time. However, be sure to evaluate opportunities to grow your target audience list while improving your email content and strategy.

Whether you’re a small business looking to make an impact or an established powerhouse seeking next-level strategic ideas and advanced reporting, Denver Post Media customizes its approach to each and every partner organization.

While sends, opens, and clicks are all important for email marketing, we can also amplify your results by retargeting your list with display and video ads, plus unique email solutions. Learn more here.

How Your Business Can Keep Pace with Google Algorithm Updates

Maintaining current best practices for an online business presence can be a full-time job. Google’s search algorithm is a primary driver for determining who sees your content and how much traffic your site gets daily. When the Google algorithm changes, your business should be ready to adapt its online content to reflect the newest priorities in digital information.

Navigating Google Algorithm Updates as a Business

What Is the Google Algorithm?

Google’s algorithm is complex and multifaceted, but for most users and content creators, the search algorithm that determines what results to return for a given query is the most important to understand. Google’s process involves several steps.

Google constantly crawls pages; this means it seeks out sites across the internet and gathers information from its metadata (backend details) and page content.
Google then indexes some of these sites. I won’t include pages that don’t meet enough quality and content standards. Indexed pages retain information about their content and other measurement factors.
When a user starts a search, Google returns results based on its search algorithm, pulling results from indexed pages, not the entirety of the internet.

Factors That Go into Google’s Search Algorithm

Google’s exact algorithm to produce SERPs (search engine results pages) is proprietary. Even if content creators don’t know the algorithm’s inner workings, several general categories describe essential factors Google considers for rankings.

User history and context: Your search history, location, and user settings help drive the results you’ll see.
Page quality and authority: Pages that show strong signs of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are prioritized, as is longer-form content. The number and quality of backlinks (other pages that link to the content) are a factor here.
User interface: Mobile-friendly sites, pages that load quickly, limited obtrusive ads, and security settings all improve a page ranking.
Relevance: Google returns sites that match your search terms, in part using data to show whether previous users have found the matches relevant. User time spent on a page helps drive this category.
Meaning: Pages that match your exact search terms rank high on the list, but so do synonyms, related terms, and pages that reflect what the algorithm can infer you’re looking for. Subheadings, bulleted lists, and image alt text help specify meaning on a page.

Quality Control for Algorithm Effectiveness

With every major update, Google contracts with search quality raters to manually assess the algorithm’s performance. The search quality rater guidelines show that a page’s quality score during this screening process relies heavily on the E-E-A-T components: experience, expertise, authority, and trust. Even if these metrics don’t explicitly factor into the automated rankings, Google clearly outlines its preference for pages demonstrating these qualities. Additionally, Google’s webspam team periodically assesses sites and issues manual penalties if the page doesn’t adhere to quality content guidelines. If your page receives a penalty, the algorithm will drop its rank. You can resolve the penalty and apply for review to improve your algorithm performance.

When Are Google Algorithm Updates?

Google updates its algorithm in small ways almost daily, but significant updates (core updates) that noticeably affect the search engine results happen once or twice a year. You can review a list of previous core updates through the end of 2022 to explore the trends you can expect with future changes. Google does not always announce what changes come with each core update, so staying connected with other content creators and marketing experts can help alert you when updates have dropped.

The Most Recent Algorithm Update

As of this article’s publication, the most recent core update was in March 2024. According to many experts in the field, this core update had largely unexpected results. The helpfulness and quality of pages drive this update far more than other search algorithm categories. Rather than simply adjusting some of the factors that go into rankings, Google’s most recent update has partially deindexed a large swath of pages altogether. In other words, pages aren’t just moving down the results list.

They’re missing entirely. A shift in how the algorithm views content quality to reduce spam may explain much of this change. This March update primarily aims to reduce unoriginal and unhelpful spam content by up to 40%, including sites that rely on AI-generated content in ways that could leave outdated and error-prone information.

A Business Response to Google Algorithm Updates

In light of recent updates, it’s more apparent than ever that businesses must constantly adapt to the changing dynamics of an online presence. As a matter of routine, content creators and executive teams should take advantage of Google’s Search Documentation, which outlines best practices for developers. Google’s stated priority is creating a website that is optimized for users rather than rankings; any SEO techniques that advance that goal are an added bonus for your company’s online presence.

Monitor Your Site Statistics

Although many Google algorithm updates have been announced, with some details explained, some of the core updates have been flying under the radar; the most recent March 2024 update is a prime example. Monitoring your site’s web traffic daily or weekly is crucial if you want to stay abreast of algorithm changes that might impact your pages. If you see static ranking results but limited click-throughs, partnering with a team like Denver Post Media to develop a paid search strategy might be an effective jumpstart.

Create a Web Presence for the Long Game

It’s tempting to produce a plethora of online content, but the most recent algorithm update shows Google’s increasingly prominent insistence on longevity, quality, and depth. Rather than just penalizing sites with thin content, a long domain presence with few updates, or a recent influx of overflowing content, Google rewards sites that avoid all of these pitfalls in favor of playing the long game. Invest time and money in your site’s depth (over breadth) and consistency. Don’t be tempted to play catch-up with every new update and lose sight of the overall picture; updates you produce now will reap benefits in the future.

Focus Efforts on Authority

The most recent algorithm update places even more emphasis on Google’s E-E-A-T directive. As more AI-generated material floods the internet, human analysis during the testing phases of upcoming updates may carry even more weight. Invest time and money now in building your site’s authority and trustworthiness. Include author bios and notes about relevant experience with every piece, current and future.

Build Connections Online and In Person

One of the biggest takeaways from the most recent Google algorithm update is that real-world connections will help drive page rankings as we move forward in an AI-rich landscape. Establishing authority and trust relies partly on the backlinks your page includes, so getting the attention of other prominent websites is critical. Similarly, making in-person connections with other companies or experts who can help add expertise to your site will be crucial for maintaining quality content over the long run.

These connections are not always easy to build. Working with an expert local organization like the team at Denver Post Media can give your business a leg up in digital marketing. Every time Google unveils an algorithm update, an expert team can help you focus your resources in the right places, balance immediate needs with long-term growth, and facilitate the real-world relationships that will be crucial to your success moving forward.

Which Metrics Matter for Content Marketing ROI?

How do you track the success of content marketing? It can take multiple forms, including blog posts, email campaigns, newsletters, and case studies. Understanding the relevant B2B content marketing metrics for your campaign is essential to ensuring and measuring the success of your content marketing efforts.

Content marketing is broad, and understanding all the content marketing metrics that matter can be challenging. However, failing to employ the proper metric-measuring strategies may hinder your content marketing efforts and limit your return on investment (ROI) success.

In this article, we will discuss the importance of measuring content marketing metrics and what factors to monitor to gauge the performance of your content.

What Is Content Marketing ROI?

Return on investment refers to the revenue generated from a campaign compared to the money spent. Since ROI represents the amount of money a campaign yields, it is one of the most important measures of successful content.

Fortunately, you can determine your content marketing ROI with four simple steps:

Step 1: Calculate the Cost of Content Production

Producing content costs money, whether a staff member creates it or you outsource it from a content provider. Total content production costs include the creator’s salary or fee and additional asset expenses such as photos, videos, graphics, or audio clips.

Step 2: Calculate the Cost of Content Distribution

For content to generate leads or revenue, you must distribute it to potential customers. Distribution costs include social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, other media promotions, and specific tools or software used to create or distribute the content.

Add the entire expense list for Step 1 and Step 2 to calculate total content production costs.

Step 3: Calculate the Exact Revenue Generated by the Content Campaign

The goal for any piece of content is to generate leads that eventually become sales. It’s easy to determine how much money a blog post makes, for example, if a customer clicks on a CTA link and buys a product or service.

A well-performing piece of content typically generates strong sales. To calculate the total revenue a particular piece of content’s campaign pulls in, tally all its historical sales.

Step 4: Calculate Content Marketing ROI with This Formula

“Return minus investment, divided by investment, expressed as a percentage.”

For instance, if your company spends $700 to produce (investment) a piece of content and it generates $2,000 in sales (return), the content’s ROI is ($2000-$700)/$700 x 100 = 185% ROI.

What Metrics Matter for Measuring Success?

Successful content marketing campaigns help B2B and B2C companies attract and earn subscribers, develop leads, increase revenue, and foster customer loyalty. It’s no wonder it’s a popular digital marketing strategy.

While 91% of B2B respondents embrace content marketing, 43% don’t measure its success metrics. Understanding which essential metrics measure content marketing ROI identifies which pieces of content perform well and which don’t.

Let’s explore which metrics to track to determine your ROI.

Website Traffic

Examining the traffic volume for each webpage identifies the content your online audience prefers. Analytics software, such as Google Analytics, measures overall web traffic and other important traffic data, including:

Traffic source (email, social media platforms, organic search, paid traffic)
Page views
Average time on page
Unique sessions
Popular landing pages

Promote content on communication channels and platforms that attract the most visitors to boost site traffic. Remember that factors like holidays, SEO trends, and website updates can cause traffic to vary.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

Click-through rates (CTR) identify the number of visitors who click on specific links as compared to all site visitors, email recipients, and social media users.

So, if an ad has 3,000 impressions and 600 clicks, calculate CTR as 3,000/600 = 5. The ad’s CTR is 5%. The higher the CTR, the more successful the advertising campaign.

Qualified Leads

B2B companies primarily implement content marketing strategies to attract prospects — especially those likely to buy from them.

Qualified leads are prospects who show interest in purchasing something. The more qualified leads a content marketing campaign generates, the more successful it is.

To measure ROI, measure qualified leads. To do this, monitor the number of prospects that act on CTAs, track content download numbers, and review completed purchases.

Sales Volume

Successful content boosts sales volume as it turns prospects into customers. To measure ROI with sales volume metrics, use analytics software to assess the following sales-related data:

Page value — Which website pages generate the most revenue
Conversion rates — Captures the percentage of site visitors who purchase something
Transactions – Number of purchases visitors complete at any given time
Time to purchase – Number of days site visitors take to buy something

High sales volume can potentially yield a more significant ROI.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

To measure content marketing ROI with SEO, keep an eye on the following:

Keyword ranking — Tailor your content marketing strategy to convert specific keywords, phrases, and brand keywords to boost SEO performance. You can also find keywords for your website to optimize SEO results with tools like Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner.
Site authority — Metrics that reinforce your website’s domain authority include people linking to it, improved page scores, and extended visits to the site.
Backlinks — You can use SEO tracking to see when people link to your site on their platforms or in their content.

Social Shares

Social media users often share content that resonates with them on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fortunately, social shares broaden your content audience.

You can monitor follower increases, likes, comments, and video views to measure how content impacts social media engagement.

Onsite Engagement

The more engaged your audience is with your content, the better. To measure how visitors interact with your content, look at the bounce rate and time on the page.

Bounce rate shows how long visitors stay on your site, and time on page measures the time visitors spend on individual pages.

Content that promotes lower bounce rates and longer page durations is more likely to generate sales.

Using these metrics to measure content marketing ROI enables you to create and tailor content that generates qualified leads, improves conversion rates, establishes your online authority, and boosts sales revenue.

Using Analytics to Understand the Customer’s Path to Conversion

Using Analytics to Understand the Customer's Conversion Path

Harnessing the power of storytelling in marketing is a compelling way to engage with consumers and prospective customers. It’s important to tell your story through the awareness phase and the rest of the customer journey — including conversion, retention, and loyalty.

However, an awareness-driving marketing campaign or even an organic social media strategy is only the first step to driving people to your website or landing page.

The next step is conversion.

Conversion examines whether your site visitors are taking the intended actions — purchasing a product, signing up for a free consultation, opting in for a newsletter, downloading a white paper, or something else entirely.

Reviewing the customer’s path to conversion through an advanced analysis platform like GA4 offers essential data critical for crafting future marketing strategies that will resonate with the intended audiences. It also provides insight into the entire customer journey so you can know how to optimize touchpoints like landing pages and more.

Types of GA4 Conversion Reports

Google Analytics has several types of readily available conversion reports.

Conversion Paths Report

According to Google, this report helps you understand your customers’ conversion paths. You’ll see which channels initiate, assist, and close conversions and how different attribution models assign credit to the conversions.

Conversion Lag Report

The lag report helps you see how quickly and effectively your ads are driving conversions, which will provide insight into the length of your online sales cycle and whether your marketing campaign and organic social media marketing are working optimally.

For example, if your ads have an urgent call to action, you’ll want to see a shorter lag time — meaning fewer days to conversion. If you’re running an awareness campaign or something more evergreen, longer lag times might be expected and appropriate.

Conversion Path Length Report

The path length report shows how many clicks users take to complete conversions, which can help analyze website touchpoints.

Insights Available Through Conversion Path Analysis

By analyzing conversion path reports, you can glean many helpful insights, including:

Channel Performance

Discover which marketing channels (i.e., paid search, organic social media marketing, email, and more) are the most effective in creating audience engagement.

Conversion Path Length

Understand how consumers commonly engage with your content — whether it’s a fast, direct path or a longer, more informative process.

Customer Behavior

Identify patterns for how consumers navigate your site — and compare mobile versus desktop behaviors. The first step to conversion rate optimization is identifying where visitors are leaving your site. The next step is understanding why they are going.

Drop-off Identification

See the points where consumers fail to convert to work on optimizations to minimize the drop-off.

Time Lag Review

Review the average time it takes from the first touchpoint to the final engagement, which provides information about the consumer decision-making process on the path to conversion.

Tactics to Improve Your Conversion Rate

While GA4 will provide the analytics data to help you know which webpages and calls to action convert well among consumers — and which are underperforming — what GA4 cannot expressly do is tell you exactly “why.”

But there are a few ways you can use GA4 data to learn why and improve your conversion rate.

Mobile Optimization

If you notice that mobile could perform better on conversions, you may need to ensure your site is responsive and optimized across all devices.

Landing Page Enhancements

Landing pages can be critical to the conversion path because consumers turn their initial interest into action there. There are several ways to enhance a landing page that’s not converting, including:

A/B Testing: Try two landing page versions to evaluate what works best with the intended audiences.
Content Updates: Sometimes, a simple change in copy or call to action can amplify a consumer’s experience and improve conversion rates. Other times, a content overhaul may be necessary to repackage the message to be more relevant.
U/X Optimization: User experience is critical to successful conversions, as slow site loading times, clunky navigation, and poor layout can immediately drive audiences away and escalate bounce rates.

Heatmaps

A site heatmap shows where users click the most and least, how far they scroll, and what they focus on (and ignore). As such, they’re a powerful tool in partnership with analytics to understand the customer journey and the path to conversion. Many heatmap solutions are available; the most comprehensive options include click maps, scroll maps, move maps, engagement zone maps, and rage-click maps.

Session Replays

Session replay software allows you to be a fly on the wall, so to speak, and see how a user is navigating and interacting with your site or landing page. The software records and visually plays back a user’s session, giving you direct visibility and awareness about their experience. It’s also a great way to spot potential bugs, errors, or points of confusion.

Surveys

When in doubt, consider asking your audience! Setting up an onsite survey that triggers when a user begins to navigate away from your site or landing page can help you learn what’s causing consumers to leave without converting.

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Using analytics to understand your audience’s path to conversion is instrumental for informing data-backed optimizations and content and campaign strategies.

If you’re looking to improve your conversion rate but aren’t sure where to begin, Denver Post Media can help. We’re committed to the success of each of our partners — whether you’re a small business looking to make a name for yourself or an established powerhouse seeking next-level strategic ideas and advanced reporting.

We take a customized approach to every partner. Check out some of our success stories here.