Monthly Archives: March 2021

Have you incorporated video content into your social media? Over the past year, we’ve seen the social media landscape continue to evolve with new apps and platforms such as TikTok and Instagram Reels taking over – and it’s not just the funny videos and memes that are at the forefront of it all.

If you haven’t thought about integrating video and animation into your social media calendar, now’s your chance! We’ve rounded up our top four creative ways to easily incorporate video and animation into your social media feed, and you most certainly don’t need to be a highly skilled videographer to do so.

1) Utilize Canva’s animated elements and templates for quick content creation

 As you may know, the Curve team loves to work with Canva. It’s a great online resource, especially when it comes to creating Facebook ads, organic social posts, and even branded content like monthly reports, email headers, and rack cards. Over the past couple of years, Canva has upped their animation and GIF game by adding hundreds of animated templates and elements that can easily be added to your posts to spruce things up. Whether you’re posting about an upcoming holiday or an employee’s work anniversary, these quick and easy drag and drop templates are a great resource, especially if you aren’t trained in video editing and/or animation. The best part is that almost all elements are completely customizable, so you can make sure your content is branded with your colours and fonts.

 2) Incorporate longer-form videos into your organic social media posts

 You can share video content virtually anywhere if you host your videos through Vimeo or YouTube, and with in-app options like IGTV on Instagram, you can share your content directly to the app.

 We understand that bite-sized content is great, but when you have a really informative piece of content, there’s no reason to cut it down. That doesn’t mean you should post your entire 45-minute webinar to your Instagram and Facebook pages, but you can post a shortened five- to seven-minute roundup of the event. This not only acts as a valuable piece of content, but it acts as promotional material for your next virtual event.

3) Create user-generated content like testimonial videos

User-generated content is one of the easiest pieces of content to ask for. If you have a really great relationship with a client, they’ll likely be more than willing to offer a short testimonial about your team, your services, and their experience working with you.

Much like repurposing written testimonials from Google Reviews, video-based testimonials offer social proof and can be a great way to break up your social media feed. On top of that, video testimonials can always be transcribed and used as written testimonials on your website or in other marketing materials.

4) Don’t overthink it. Let your content speak for itself!

 We’ve all seen the beautifully designed branded videos across social media, but don’t worry – you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on your video content. With access to low-cost online video editing software, you can produce content pretty easily, and it’s often quite fun!

For your organic social posts, you don’t necessarily need high-tech lighting and fancy transitions between slides. All you need is strong content, visible branding, and engaging copy to accompany your videos.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of ways to incorporate visuals into your day-to-day social media posts, but in reality, you should only focus on the ones that are feasible for you and that add value to your content. Incorporating videos and animation into your social media shouldn’t be overthought, and with these four tips, we’re sure you’ll find your groove when it comes to content creation.

Here at Curve Communications, we work with our clients to create engaging content that is true to your brand. It’s all about communicating the right message on the right platforms to the right audience. Interested in working with our team for all your social media needs? Contact us today!

While B2B marketing and sales teams are divided by title, they need to work together to create measurable success. The best marketing plans are executed by an attentive marketing team and an involved sales team. The tasks of both overlap quite a bit, so as a B2B sales agent you can’t expect to tip back your office chair and wait for the sales to magically appear in your lap. However, if you sit up straight and jump headfirst into the marketing place, there’s a good chance you will see your B2B sales skyrocket. Ready to learn more about how you can bag those sales? The following are six things a B2B marketing manager would say to a sales manager if given the chance.

1. Marketing is not magic.

Marketing involves creativity, data analysis, market research, digital content, and a lot of communication in order to be successful. Effective marketing looks like magic, but it is a team effort with so much done on the backend. Top marketing campaigns are a lot of work, but that work pays off when brand awareness soars and sales follow. As a sales manager who wants to improve your sales, your first step should be reaching out to the marketing team to see how you can help, and to find out the most effective way to close sales following their strategy.

2. Are you sure about who your perfect customer is? (PS – It’s not everyone.)

One common misconception in sales is that everyone is a potential customer. They aren’t. If you are trying to sell your product to everyone, you are wasting their time and yours. Refocusing your marketing, advertising, and sales efforts onto your target customer will offer a much better ROI than continuing to market into what is effectively empty space. You wouldn’t try to sell cat food to a dog owner, so stop trying to sell your product to an audience with no interest.

3. Have you logged into the CRM yet … or ever? (AKA – Is that a Rolodex on your desk?)

As a B2B sales agent do you feel disconnected from your company’s advertising and marketing efforts? Maybe that is because you haven’t taken the time to log in or thoroughly navigate the CRM yet. The same way marketing companies need to look past Facebook and jump into new social media markets, it’s time to adopt new technology and truly learn what an effective communication and goal-orientated tool the CRM software can be.

4. No, automation tools are not robots (well, maybe a little).

One major reservation that people have about automation tools is that they feel robotic. Perhaps the most archaic automation tools are, but if automation is working correctly it is anything but. Automated emails and customer tracking tools should feel highly personalized and relevant. If your B2B sales tools feel robotic, there is a good chance you need to revise the way you approach them.

5. Yes, advertising does work. But you need to nurture warm leads.

Effective advertising is only half the battle. The goal of advertising is to bring customers to the sales team, but it is up to the sales team to close the sale. A lot of potential customers will click through to look at a product, but then don’t complete the sale. The internet is distracting; it’s very easy to click away and never return. It’s your turn now. Grab the attention of browsing customers and close the sale. Reach out to those with incomplete carts and offer them personalized offers that make checkout desirable.

6. Did I mention? Marketing is NOT magic.

Finally, in case you didn’t hear us before, marketing is NOT magic. We put in a lot of work on our end, so make sure you are up to the task of completing the sale. We can send customers your way, but only you can close the deal. Personal attention, open communication, and shared goals are what make B2B advertising and sales compatible and effective.

Interested in learning about how we can help your B2B Marketing Manager AND Sales Manager? Drop us a note, we’re always ready to chat. 

Want to strengthen your CRM response and boost the ROI of your digital marketing efforts? It sounds like you are ready to adopt an account-based marketing strategy.

Account-based marketing is a strategic digital marketing approach that depends on customized marketing tools to reach out to customers, individuals, or client accounts on a personal level. On a small level, this may mean target emails instead of mass emails, on a larger level it could mean personalized responses based on browsing habits, interests, etc.

Add a Personal Touch for Measurable Results

While intimidating at first, account-based marketing is an extremely effective digital marketing tool with the potential for a large ROI. Customers like personalized service and this service essentially recreates the personal attention of a clerk in the store and places it in your customers’ inboxes.

How Do I Launch an Account-Based Marketing Campaign?

Getting started however is usually the hardest part for CRM or B2B teams that are new to account-based marketing. A simple process known as the Curve TEAM Process simplifies the journey. TEAM stands for Target. Engage. Acquire. Measure. Each essential step leads to measurable results that make the journey worthwhile.

TARGET Your Base

Before you can launch an account-based marketing campaign, you need to launch a targeted discovery effort. During this part of the Curve TEAM process, you will zero in on your niche customer persona and create a unique sales proposition that addresses both their interests and pain points. Using the information you find during the discovery process, you will create brand messaging that speaks directly to them and allows you to move onto the next step, creating an engagement strategy.

ENGAGE Your Target Customers

Now that you know your target customer base, you have to actually create tools that will catch their attention and make them pay attention to your products and/or services. Similar to the sales clerk in the opening paragraph, it is now your turn to reach out and grab the attention of your base. You may not be able to physically strike up a conversation, but you can create brand messaging, a website, and CMS integration that replicates the conversations they want to have. There are dozens of ways to engage your target customer base including but not limited to sales scripts, webinars, brochures, targeted digital ad campaigns, social media content, and case studies.

ADVOCATE for your Service or Product

If your target discovery is accurate and your engagement strategy is effective, your customer will be teetering on the edge of completing the sale. Your job at this point is to close the deal. Connect with them and give them plenty of ways to buy. Reach out on email, text, social media, or create microsites for a niche within your niche. Your customer is probably ready to buy, but you have to put the opportunity in front of them. The average customer won’t search out a chance to spend money, but if you make it as simple as a click they will probably bite.

MEASURE and Re-evaluate Your ROI

A truly effective account-based marketing plan is never complete. The last step of the Curve TEAM process is measure for a reason. At the end of a month or other pre-designated period of time, evaluated your current digital marketing program and measure your ROI. If it is not as high as you like, it’s time to go back to the first step and look at how you can fine-tune your efforts to get it higher. Each time you reevaluate your process and build on it your ROI will strengthen leading you towards better, more powerful results.

Interested to hear more about account-based marketing? Let’s chat!

Newsrooms the world over seem to change week to week. Not only are there fewer and fewer people working in them, but there are less of them in general, thanks to a drop in consumption of traditional media formats.

This means it can be difficult to get organic coverage of your business or your story in a newsroom where resources are scarce, and where timelines are ALL the time (rather than working to the older deadlines of broadcast and print) as reporters file stories and updates online and via social media, and where assignment editors are having to incentivise teams to cover more each day than the one-story-per-reporter-per-day of old.

How does a newsroom work, anyway?

Here’s how things generally work in newsrooms though, regardless of the sands of time stripping out elements such as morning meetings, midday check-ins, and filing to deadline.

Many newsrooms have two areas of focus – the day-of news, which is exactly what it sounds like; and feature items, which usually take longer to cultivate and have a timeless element when it comes to when they run. Unfortunately most PR pitches are feature items which are, nowadays, at the mercy of the day-of news resources. This means a pitch you’ve been working on for weeks or sometimes longer, can be cancelled or postponed at a moment’s notice because a big day-of story happened, and all the newsroom resources were reassigned to cover it.

One example of that is a pitch Curve worked on a couple of years back, where we had a specific week we had scheduled the CEO of a busy new cannabis business to be available for media interviews. We had several of them lined up, plus we were going to do week-of and day-of repeat pitching just to make sure we had any last-minute reporter or camera availability sewn up.

Our pitch week turned out to be the same week as a horrible news story where two teens from Vancouver Island went on a terrible shooting spree, which then turned into a cross-Canada manhunt. Understandably, all the newsrooms in the country were suddenly focused on this huge story, as the search for the two continued. Also understandably, our booked segments and interviews were mostly cancelled.

You can’t help what happens in the world of news, and that’s why we always tell our clients that PR is the coverage you pray for, and advertising is the coverage you pay for. You can have every single media outlet in the world lined up for an interview, but if there’s a big news story that week, you can end up losing every one of them.

So how do I get my story to the newsroom?

For the most part, newsrooms will connect with their assignment desk in the morning – whether that’s for a full online or in-person meeting, or more usually nowadays, reporters are individually assigned a story remotely and they either work from home, or they meet a camera at an interview location.

1) Find a specific person to contact

Reporters, producers and assignment teams do get to pitch story ideas to their editors – and if you have a specific day you want a story to go out (say for example a press conference or the day something is opening or launching), the best thing to do is to find a specific person who has covered that type of story before at their outlet, and reach out directly to them with lots of lead time.

They will always tell you they’ll try their best, and that they can’t guarantee anything if news happens, but at least if you’ve connected with them personally, it’s harder for them to say no, and it gives you a chance to repitch it on a day when nothing is happening.

2) Be flexible with your schedule

A better idea is to give a reporter a range of days when you are available, so it gives them more options if something happens on one of those days. In the case of the Canada-wide manhunt, it lasted the entire time the CEO was available. Luckily he was very understanding about the difficult situation, and he was pleased we were still able to get him an interview on a national radio show.

Probably the best option of all is to work one-on-one with a reporter for a “timeless” story for which you are able to be interviewed at any time, and which can run at any time, giving the reporter flexibility when it comes to setting something up.

The downside is that you can’t offer the pitch to multiple news outlets, as some don’t like to run a story if their rival has already done it; plus you never really have a “launch” date that coincides with the piece running. If that isn’t a big deal, then this is the ideal scenario.

3) Make your story as compelling as possible

If you do have a story that MUST run on a certain date, you have to make it as compelling as possible to ensure as much day-of coverage as you can. Think of your story as that big day-of news event. What is the absolute number one thing people need to know about it?

If you’ve heard the expression “burying the lead,” this is where it comes from. You DON’T want to hide the main point of the story when you’re pitching it – so make sure your press release, or your call to the newsroom, or your direct email or social media pitch to the reporter gives ALL the details, in as FEW words as possible, in the FIRST sentence. Reporters are busy – they won’t read past that first line – I guarantee it – so you have to make every word count.

If your first pitch didn’t stick, it’s worth following up just to check they got the email and that it didn’t get caught in their spam. But make it friendly and quick – don’t become a thorn in their side. You don’t want to be “that person” who is constantly bothering the writers or editors, because if you are, they will ignore all future pitches.

Also, don’t call every phone extension in the newsroom to make your pitch, one call after the other. Those phones are likely all within a 10 metre radius, and they will know what you’re doing, and OOPS, you become “that person” again.

One final thing when it comes to newsrooms in 2021 – and it’s actually a depressing one: check social media before you pitch, just to make sure the person or the outlet you are looking to reach out to is still there, that there haven’t just been layoffs, and that they are still doing local news.

It’s a really sad thing to say, but it happens so often these days, that being aware of what an outlet may be going through… or may have just been through, is just respectful, polite and shows you care. If bad stuff has happened, don’t pitch. If everything is fine, pitch away – because tomorrow or next week, more changes may be on the way.

If you want to chat more about PR, and how to navigate a newsroom, head over to our contact page. We’re happy to chat.