Category: Content Marketing

How to Build a Strong Wellness Marketing Strategy: Establish the right tools

Posted on by admin

The establishment of tools and process is the next step to have a successful digital marketing presence. Define the tools and roles of your team to help your content marketing to flow timely and consistently.

To help your content flow timely, establish a calendar for your team. Your team needs to know your upcoming goals and plans for the practice. Calendars can also help measure your successes.

To create effective content consistently, a content management system is a necessity. This is the software that organizes your content and publishes it online.

An example of a content management system is HubSpot. It is used by thousands of businesses and they love it. “Since implementing HubSpot’s software and inbound marketing methodology, we have grown organic traffic by 450%. We’ve been able to optimize the business that comes from those visits, too; our inbound lead-to-win conversion rate continues to increase.” –LevelEleven.

Defining team roles is an important step in establishing a strong digital marketing presence. There are six roles to establish for your team.

  1. The leader: This person’s main goal is to lead and guide others on the team and keep the schedule moving.
  2. The researcher: This team member needs to have a strong understanding of Search Engine Optimization. They also keep the practice up-to-date on search algorithms, requirements for faster ranking, and ad bid managements.
  3. The writer: In order for the business to be successful, content must be written. Having a writer on your team is necessary to keep content across all platforms- website, blog, social media, etc.
  4. The coder: It is important for content to link back to your website. The website coder is responsible for this step.
  5. The data miner: A team member that is designated to this task helps manage and drive your strategy solution and provide analytics and reporting for the time
  6. The bonus:The last person is a “bonus” for the team. The 6th team member is responsible for creativity with design ideas.

It is the leader’s responsibility to keep the team on track. “Websites that are packed with good quality content have long enjoyed benefits of high search engine positions and good conversion rates (Inbound Now).” Questions to keep in mind when generating content are:

  • • Who is the target market?
  • • What is the purpose of the content?
  • • How does this attract our patients?
  • • How is the content being measured?

Have a guide in place for your team. This will help them streamline production and keep the practice consistent.

Time For A Check-Up: 5 Elements All Sites Need

Posted on by admin

A business website is often overlooked or forgotten about. Most businesses forget to update them and the website is put on the back burner. It’s very important that your website be updated regularly and reflect your business’s current state and brand image. Here are 5 Elements your site needs – and if it doesn’t meet these 5 elements  it may be time to renew your website and bring it up-to-speed.

  1. Strong Brand– Having a consistent brand can set you apart from your competitors. Sending the same message to your clients will increase memorability and make sure your company is always your company. Your website is like an extension of your business. Think of it as your virtual office. When a visitor ‘stops by’ will they know they are at your business or does your website look like an outdated version of your business? Look at your site and make sure your colors, fonts, and imagery match the message you want to send.
  2. Content– Like we said above, this is your virtual office. Is your potential customer going to find the information they need while visiting your site? Furthermore, is the content relevant? The customer is looking for information and the information needs to answer the question “How does this apply to me?” Having the content up front is great but having them move deeper into your site is better. Strike a balance that gives them enough information but keeps them moving.
  3. Navigation– Your site’s navigation (also known as a nav bar) is usually at the top of your site. This is how your customers will navigate through your site and it should be simple and easy to use. It’s tempting to place all your pages in the top level of the navigation bar but this causes issues of a content overload and mobile responsive nightmares. It’s a good idea to group like-topic pages in drop downs to help the user identify where they want to go and then dive deeper.
  4. Call to Action– Call to Actions (also known as CTAs) are the buttons or links that grab attention and moves the customer deeper into the site. An example of this would be the button under the home page’s About section urging the customer to “Learn More.” Not having these in crucial locations can leave the customer stranded and ditch your site. Remember – it’s all about keeping them moving.
  5. Mobile Responsive– Not having a mobile responsive site is a website-killer. This is important because 55% of web traffic is from mobile devices and tablets.  Google now ranks websites based on whether they are mobile responsive or not [LINK TO MOBILE FIRST POST].

So, how does your website stack up against the 5 elements needed? Does your website need improvement? Acting now instead of waiting can help boost your site visits and increase customer conversions. This might be a big undertaking for most businesses but we are here to help. We are one of the area’s leading marketing and digital design firms and are experts on these subjects. Contact us today to see how we can help grow your website into the powerful resource is should be for your business.

Curiosity Becomes a Silver HubSpot Certified Agency Partner

Posted on by admin

We are happy to announce that we are now a Silver Level HubSpot Certified Agency Partner. HubSpot, the world’s leading inbound marketing and sales platform, works hand-in-hand with Agency Partners to grow their clients’ businesses through inbound software, services, automation, and support.

Our Channel Rep was nice enough to give us a testimonial as well. Oscar Zamorano said, “We have been thrilled to work with Curiosity as a HubSpot Partner. Their savvy, sophisticated, and innovative approach to inbound makes them a company that businesses everywhere can learn from. Watching them transform their agency and their clients with inbound has been a rewarding experience!”

Over the past 2 years, we have grown businesses by incorporating inbound strategies to attract, engage, and delight customers. Our mission is to continue helping companies and people harness technology for effective marketing, to collaborate and ask insightful questions, to create excellent stories that connect brands with the world, and to improve ourselves and our clients through continual learning, exploration, and teaching.

If you would like to learn more about Inbound Marketing and the approach we use. Schedule a free consultation. We would love to explain the process that works for us and our clients.

What’s the Deal with Buyer Personas?

Posted on by admin

With every new campaign we start, we always start with buyer personas. But what is a buyer persona?!

Buyer personas (sometimes referred to as marketing personas) are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.  Personas help us and our clients fully understand why we go through the efforts we do. In marketing, sales, product and services, understanding your ideal customer and being relatable to them is very important in optimizing your marketing efforts. Having this deep understanding of your persona(s) is critical to steer your content creation, product messaging, sales process and really anything that helps support your product and how it relates to your customer.

At this point you are thinking, “Ok this sounds great, but how do we come up with these fictional customers?”

Every new client asks this. But don’t worry, it is quite simple actually.  You just need to ask the right questions to the right people and present that information in a helpful way so the people in your business can get to know your persona(s) better than the backs of their hands.

The strongest personas are produced by market research and interviewing / surveying your existing client base. We always recommend businesses form at least 2 personas when we start a campaign, however some of our clients end up with 10 or 15 by the time they get used to the process. But like anything, start small. Trying to nail down 15 personas before starting a campaign only delays the efforts. You can always add, modify or expand personas as needed.

Should we build a “negative” persona?

In the beginning, no. Remember, start small. Build your two positive personas and over time add in a negative one. The negative persona should be your non-ideal client. I know… I know…. We want every client we can get right?  Answer is no. As your business grows, avoiding these negative personas will help your business grow by turning their business away.

But, keep in mind a negative persona is not always a grumpy high maintenance account.  These can be companies that do not see you as a partner or are just not a good fit for your business style.  Don’t feel like you only have poor client types in this bucket.

So how do we start the process?

As mentioned, buyer personas can be created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. That includes a mix of customers, prospects and those outside your contacts database who might align with your target audience.

 

Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:

  • Look through your existing client database to uncover trends about certain markets or verticals that fit who you have been targeting.
  • When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. For example, if all of your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms.
  • Take into consideration your sales team’s feedback on the leads they’re interacting with most. What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?
  • Interview customers and prospects, either in person or over the phone, to discover what they like about your product or service. This my friends is the most important step. We cannot stress this enough.

You’ve done the research, now what?

Once you have gone through the research, interviews and analysis, you should have some good “meat” to work with. Looking over this data, start to recognize trends.  Do you see consistent business sizes? Certain types of businesses? These are the trends we want to leverage in our fictional clients.

Using the worksheet,  begin to take this data and fill in each of the areas of the Persona Worksheet. Fill in the: Who? What? Why? How? sections as you see fit based off the data you collected. Keep in mind there is no wrong answer. These are best guesses off the data you collected.

Once you have all areas filled in, pass this worksheet around to team members, upper level management and your sales team. Get their feedback and see if it aligns with the views they see as well.

Finally the fun part. Give your persona a fun name. You have done the work and you should feel like you know this person like a brother or sister.  So give them a nickname like “Finance Timmy” or “ Doctor Sherry”.  This will help segment the leads as you start to see them come in and will give your team something to track against.

In closing, the persona process, although it can be daunting and time consuming, is one of the vital parts of optimizing your campaigns. Putting the time in at the start of the process is well worth the amount of time it will save in the long run.  Be sure to grab a copy of the worksheet and give it a try.

Top 3 Current Email Marketing Trends

Posted on by admin

1.  Email automation

From the outside looking in, it would seem that email automation is a lazy man’s way to email marketing, which in actuality it has been shown statistically that – automated email messages average 70.5% higher open rates than “business as usual” email marketing efforts.

By using email marketing automation workflows you can create personalized, automated email works that can be triggered in a number of different ways – when a contact gets added to a list, when a contact submits a form on your website and click a call-to-action in your email – to name a few. These email marketing automations also help in other ways by making you think a little harder on what should happen in various situation with your email and help eliminate human error, such as forgetting to send a follow up email.

2. More like a friend

The ‘less is more’ motto is becoming increasingly apparent, especially in 2017 when everyone is running full speed and does not have the time to sift through a cluttered email. At a quick glance, your customer should be able to quickly tell what your email is about.

Reducing clutter and giving your customers a more personalized experience is key here, include some interactivity to keep them engaged. Try using a call-to-action to offers that really speak to them or quizzes to get a better understanding of what they are looking for.

3. Optimization for mobile

Optimizing your emails to be mobile friendly is a must have or you run the risk of being deleted. There is no way of knowing really when your customer will decide to open your email but since  consumers now spend 5 hours per day on mobile devices there’s a huge chance they will be opening your email on their mobile device.

Want to learn more about these current email marketing trends, check out our page that is dedicated specifically to email marketing or fill out the short form below to receive a FREE consultation on your current email marketing efforts and how we can help to make them more effective and efficient.