Welcome back to StumbleUpon Innovators, a weekly interview series with publishers, platforms, and digital media experts. Each week we’ll investigate strategies, new tools, and trends with some of the brightest minds in the business. Our aim is to provide you with actionable practices to improve your content choices, distribution, marketing, monetization, and more.
In case you missed last week’s interview with Dario Meli of Quietly, you can read it here.
StumbleUpon Innovators Q&A with Diana Santaguida, co-founder and CEO of SEOcial
Introduce yourself and your company
I’m Diana Santaguida, co-founder and CEO of SEOcial. We’re the marketing technologists every company who isn’t winning at search wants on their team.
What is SEOcial all about?
SEOcial’s an agile marketing incubator that functions as an internal marketing-technology department to companies. We build tools, systems and strategies that bring successful ventures to a more profitable future.
As a boutique firm, we take on about 10 dedicated clients per year. Our proprietary method known as the search mix helps us research and develop unorthodox strategies, giving our clients the upper hand.
Who is your audience and how do you reach them? How do you find new audiences?
Marketing departments and executive decision-makers bring us in to leverage emerging web technologies by building solutions. In most cases, we find ourselves institutionalizing best practices within organizations to build a solid digital foundation and add coherence to their endeavors on the web.
Referral orchestration is an important part of our strategy and it’s proven to be quite effective with generous endorsements our sphere of influence.
What’s your publishing and/or content marketing strategy?
Our content is the convergence of what we know and what our audience wants to know. We begin with search data and trend analysis and match it to topics we’re passionate about.
What are you biggest challenges and how are you tackling them?
Scaling without compromising quality is a challenge. We’ll be launching a powerful data visualization and search intelligence suite to help current clients take the wheel as well as help other SEO’s derive insight from clean, beautiful and succinct data.
What are your best tips and tricks for publishers and brands?
Having trouble writing the perfect meta-data for SEO?
Imagine a visually impaired person browsing the web with a text to speech program. This type of web user values brevity. Ask yourself, what would such a user want included in this page title, meta description, alternate text, etc.. Placing yourself in this hypothetical scenario is a powerful exercise that will enable you to extrapolate and prioritize the key elements of your content—this is perfect for on-page optimization.
When creating content, appeal to the reader’s sense of urgency. It’s fairly well-known by now that lists are highly effective in engaging readers, but why? When crafting your title and introduction hint at a finite quantity or time period.“Master X in 1 hour”, “The Three Minute Guide to X”, “8 Ways to X”.
Rapid fire with Diana Santaguida
What is your media diet?
I spend a significant amount of time on Reddit, StumbleUpon, Business Insider, Vice, ILoveMarketing.com, Moz and reading Craigslist ads (in search of great copy).
(I made this handy chart to better illustrate my media diet.)
Who do you admire?
Indra Nooyi (CEO of PepsiCo), Brian Tracy, Ariana Huffington, Maya Angelou, Sheryl Sandberg, Ann Handley.
Who’s your dream client?
Those we can partner with: Y Combinator, VaynerMedia, Because I am a Girl.
What’s the one thing that your co-workers don’t know about you?
I’m currently writing a book aimed at empowering female entrepreneurs.
How can people reach you?
LinkedIn is a great way to connect.
If you have suggestions for a future participants, please contact Andrew Levine at [email protected].
About StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is the leader in online content discovery, serving more than 500 million monthly recommendations and connecting millions of users to new and entertaining web pages. The platform generates personalized internet experiences based on user likes and interests and helps people discover the best of the web. Founded in 2002, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York. Don’t have the StumbleUpon app yet? No worries. It’s right here!