Posts in category: Blog

When you think of a landing page, what comes to mind? Most likely you think of your company homepage or a product sales page. In truth, a landing page can be anything, but its purpose is the same: to steer visitors towards a sale, subscription, or future contact. A good landing page is not judged by its appearance (although sleek and smooth designs do help), but rather by its conversion rate. So how do you boost your conversion rate?

While it would be nice if there was an amazing formula or template that you could use to create a high-converting landing page, it’s just not that simple. Every landing page needs to be carefully customized to meet the needs of its audience and its specific call to action (CTA). That means you have to approach the process with an open mind, a clear vision, and a lot of flexibility and creativity. The good news is that there are a few recurring elements that can help provide a basic framework to guide the process.

Determine Your Goal

Remember a landing page can be anything; it doesn’t have to be your homepage. Before creating your landing page you need to clearly define your goal. Do you want it to encourage people to browse products on your website? Check out a specific new product? Join your email list? Sign up for your newsletter? Define your goal and then make sure every single person that ends up on your landing page knows it too.

Put It In Your Headline

Your headline is easily the most important part of your landing page. Conversion rates can grow and die by the headline. The headline is your chance to make a first impression. No pressure, but you need to use your headline to grab the interest of your target audience, offer them something worthwhile, and compel them to stick around for your CTA. Oh yeah, and you need to accomplish this in about ten words. Short and sweet almost always wins when it comes to landing pages.

Reiterate it In Your Subheadings

Now that you have the visitor’s attention, you need to act on it. Subheadings should be persuasive, detailed, and add depth to your goal. You have a few more words to work with now, so use them wisely to sell visitors on your goal.

Support Your CTA with Powerful Imagery

Visitors have a habit of skipping text. Sadly, a large majority of visitors won’t read more than your headline and possibly first subhead, so you need to make sure you appeal to all of their senses. Creating a visually captivating landing page is one way to keep them focused on what you are offering. Support your final CTA with powerful imagery that grabs their attention and makes it impossible to click away.

Bring it Home

A lot of businesses spend so much time on their landing page design that the CTA becomes an afterthought. Your CTA is not just a sentence you pop on at the bottom of the page; it is the very heart of your landing page. Every single thing on your page should lead the visitor towards it. This is your chance to close the deal. Make sure your CTA is very clear and easily accessible on the landing page. Create an easily identifiable button, limit redirects, and make it as simple as possible to convert.

Think of your visitors like water: water will always take the path of least resistance. Offer this path to your visitors and your conversion rates will rise naturally.

Need some help building a high-converting landing page? We’re always happy to chat.

When it comes to writing engaging, interesting, and worthwhile content, our copywriters and social media specialists here at Curve are always on the lookout for new online resources to strengthen their copywriting skills.

We understand that copywriting can mean a bunch of different things, depending on your business, brand, and offerings. This means that sometimes we’re writing short and sweet social media posts and sometimes we’re writing long-form numbers-based case studies and in-depth blog posts on niche topics.

To help our future selves, and our readers, we gathered our top five resources that every copywriter should be using, no matter what kind of content they’re producing.

Grammarly

Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a beginner copywriter, checking your grammar is a must. It can really make or break your content! That’s why, like many other people, we love Grammarly. It’s the easiest way to stay on top of your grammar, punctuation, and tenses – something that can go unnoticed when you’re writing longer-form content. Plus, it’s a great alternative to re-reading your content which often leads us to miss a couple of errors. Grammarly offers a free and a paid version, so you can choose what plan will work best for you and your team.

Answer the Public

We understand that coming up with SEO-friendly blog content can be tough, so we turn to search listening tools like Answer the Public to get those creative juices flowing. By analyzing keywords and utilizing search listening capabilities, Answer the Public helps you take the guesswork out of writing content by showing you the most current trends for your specific topic or niche. When we’re struggling to write content-rich blogs and social media posts for our clients, or if we’re struggling to find the best blog title, we turn to Answer the Public to get a better understanding of what’s hot.

Headline Analyzer

Headline Analyzer is another great tool for copywriters. It helps you come up with headlines that drive traffic, shares, and search results directly to your content. By taking into consideration things like the optimal character count and word count, sentiment, word balance, and skimmability, Headline Analyzer is a great tool to help you make your content more eye-catching and SEO-friendly.

HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator

Struggling to come up with fresh and exciting blog content and titles? Hubspot’s Blog Ideas Generator is an amazing free tool. It works by gathering up to five nouns of your choice and auto-generating catchy titles for your blogs. This is a great tool if you’re stumped on your title and the structure of your blog. So, if you have a general understanding of what you’d like to write about, why not plug your keywords into HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator for help with a title and format that works for your content?

Hemingway App

For those of you who are writing longer-form content-rich pieces, Hemingway App might be your new favourite online tool. By identifying common errors that reduce the readability and quality of your writing, Hemingway App easily highlights these errors using their colour-coded system. It also offers tips on restructuring hard-to-read sentences, using simple alternative synonyms, and minimizing your use of passive voice.

Conclusion

For many of us, copywriting can be a doomed task, but it doesn’t have to be! With these five resources under your belt, you’ll find that your copywriting skills will improve, and you’ll get into a rhythm where writing content comes naturally to you.

Interested in working with the Curve team for content creation and copywriting? Shoot us a message here to book an appointment with our team.

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.

Digital marketing has exploded over the last decade, and there are now dozens of ways to reach out to customers. However, there is still one technique that rises above the others. Believe it or not, email marketing still has the best ROI, even beating out social media marketing.

Why email marketing?

Probably because people tend to pay more attention to their email. You can scroll through a newsfeed aimlessly, but email needs more direct attention since it can contain important information. Catching your target audience when they are paying attention is the key to successful marketing.

Of course, that is easier said than done. You want to evade spam filters and give customers something useful, all while managing your own successful company.

Let’s face it, you don’t have the time to manage personalized email marketing campaigns for each customer, which is where managed email sequencing comes into play. Building a strong email sequence is the foundation that will lead to strong sales leads in the future.

Work smart with email marketing automation

You DO have time to create a winning email sequencing strategy.

So how do you make the magic happen for you and boost your ROI? It’s this simple, focus on your consumer and your brand. It’s a time-tested formula that never fails.

The best email marketing campaigns are multi-faceted so that you take advantage of every potential lead. Set up multiple email sequences and watch your digital marketing returns skyrocket.

Trigger-based email sequences

These are more customized because they capitalize on the real-time movement and behaviour of browsers and/or potential customers. These emails are pre-set to be sent whenever a user browses your website, abandons a shopping cart, purchases a product, or downloads content. The purpose of these highly effective email sequences is to show the consumer your brand cares about them and is always just a click away.

For instance, a shopper leaves their cart behind and a day passes. The sale may seem gone, that is until an email pops up the next day reminding the shopper to finish their purchase. A cute little tagline and photo of their car works wonders. Maybe they got interrupted or didn’t feel like grabbing their purse, but now your email is giving them second thoughts and they click back to finish the purchase.

Sophisticated CRM management software can make trigger-based email sequences an automatic process so you don’t have to lift a finger, but your customers feel like you gave them individualized attention. It’s a win-win situation.

Time-Based Email Sequences

The second type of email sequence is time-based. Sometimes referred to as automatic emails, these emails can also be scheduled ahead of time to email customers in a predetermined fashion.

For instance, every new customer that opts-in to your website or downloads content will receive a welcome email, and then thirty days after they sign up will receive a second email. Maybe you send out weekly emails that highlight your weekly specials and offer a piece of informative content. Set up the sequence once and let your email marketing campaign do the work for you so you can focus your efforts elsewhere without losing any leads.

If you want to talk about your email marketing, your CRM or marketing automation in general, book a call today or send us a quick note.

Creating eye-catching social media posts when you’re not an Adobe Photoshop or InDesign pro can be challenging. But gone is the era of stern and boring images for your social media pages.

If you lack the time or the desire to learn the Adobe suite to create stunning images and videos, Canva is the tool you need. This user-friendly online platform turns all of us Adobe suite foreigners into graphic designers, and for free (premium memberships available).

In short, Canva combines a myriad of publishing and editing tools into one online design platform, plus it gives you access to thousands of templates, images, fonts, stickers, and much more!

Follow this quick guide to learn how to create stunning images using Canva, easily and in no time at all.

1) Choose your format

Whether you’re looking to create an image for a social media post, a brochure, a blog banner, or even a logo, you’ll find templates that fit the exact dimensions for the platform or design of your choice.

Upon login, click on the purple ‘Create a design’ button at the top right-hand corner and either select a custom size or choose a design from the suggested ones (i.e.: Facebook post). This will open a new window with a blank white page in the requested dimensions.

2) Start designing

You have a blank canvas in front of you. Now it’s time to make the magic happen. Choose from the hundreds of templates available for your specific dimensions or start creating your image from scratch.

i. Starting with a template

On the menu bar on the left side of your screen, you will find a ‘Templates’ tab. Scroll through the hundreds of them available to you and choose the one you prefer.

Once you’ve selected a template that works for the purpose of your post, swap out images for one of the thousands available under the ‘Images’ tab or upload your own through the ‘Upload’ tab.

ii. Starting from scratch

From the menu bar, choose to add images, text, or stickers to your creative. Canva offers thousands of elements to bring your vision to life, and makes it easy for you to search through their extensive library of elements with a search bar.

With access to hundreds of fonts, as well as elements such as frames, stickers, lines, shapes and even charts, Canva enables you to let your creative juices flow in the easiest way possible.

3) Save your image or video

While Canva automatically saves your designs every minute or so, it is always safer to take the time to click the ‘save’ button once in a while for good measure. To do so, click the ‘file’ menu tab in the top left-hand corner, then click ‘save.’

Once you are satisfied with your design, and the status bar you see at the top of the screen says ‘All changes saved,’ it is time to download your design. Simply click on the ‘download’ button and choose which format you want your design to be saved in, and click ‘download.’ Your design will automatically be saved in your download folder.

You now know how easy it is to create fun and eye-catching designs to supplement your social media posts and boost engagement on your pages. Take your time learning about the platform and experiment with everything it has to offer!

The term digital marketing gets thrown around a lot these days. People know they need a well-designed website or a couple of posts on Instagram a week, but anything further than that seems a little intimidating. Pixels? Retargeting ads? 2% lookalike audiences for people aged 20-35?!

We know, it seems like a lot! Don’t worry though — digital marketing can be as simple or complicated as you make it. You don’t need big bucks to get some benefit, and a lot of the work is in laying a good initial foundation for your business.

Check these steps off your list, and you’re on your way to a digital marketing strategy that gets your amazing product in front of all the right people.

Know Your Customer

This one’s true for all marketing, but particularly useful in the digital space. Customers these days are drowning in choices. They can visit any e-shop in the world, all from the comfort of their couch.

With all that competition, you want to make sure your business gets seen by the right people. And to do that, you have to know who those right people are!

Answer these basic questions:

• Who is my customer? Age, gender, geographic area, spending power, other interests.
• Where do they spend their time online? Social media, reading blogs, watching videos, nonstop Netflix marathons.
• Why did they go looking for your product? This is called a pain point, if you want to get jargon-y.

These are just starting points. The best way of figuring out the answers to these questions is by asking a real customer! Maybe you’re a rock star, and you understand every little detail about your customers, but it doesn’t hurt to double check with the real deal.

Create a Social Media Presence

On average, people spend 2.5 hours a day on social media. Let’s make the most of that time.

Since you now know where your customers spend all their time, you should know what social media they use the most! Make sure you set up social media accounts for your business. Even if you don’t post at all, it’s good to at least prevent other people from taking your name.

You SHOULD be posting though, since regular posts and interactions on social media boost your brand awareness and familiarity. On top of getting the word out about your great products, social media lets you interact with customers and your niche community in totally unique ways.

Some quick tips for building your social media presence:

• Figure out your voice early. Some brands are relaxed and friendly, others are more formal. Whatever tone you decide to use, make sure it stays consistent. Your decision should align with what you just found out about your customers!
• Find your industry hashtags. Every industry has its own subculture on social media. Try a quick Google of your industry + social media platform, to get an idea of what hashtags, groups, and trends you should be watching.
• Stay visual. Use as many images and videos as you can. Posts that have accompanying media do better in terms of reach and engagement. Also, it’s just more fun.
• Engage with your audience. Every now and then, ask a question to your followers. Try and get some dialogue going. People love to be listened to, so when appropriate, tag or reply to other accounts on the platform.

All of this work builds your credibility in the industry, with the added bonus of building a community of loyal customers around your brand.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Have you ever wondered how Google decides what search results to give you? Basically, Google has a complicated algorithm that decides if your site is relevant, easy-to-read, and trustworthy. The better you score on these three categories, the higher up on the page you’ll rank.

Of course, you want to be as close to the top of the search results as possible. Most people don’t bother scrolling to the bottom of page one, much less glimpse page two. To climb to the top of rankings, you’ll need good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on your site.

To improve your SEO, you first have to think about what sorts of things your customer searches for. These search terms are called “keywords.” The more keywords you have in your website content, the better your SEO is. While your content should already have a bunch of important keywords, it doesn’t hurt to have a quick skim through, and make sure that you’re writing about what your customers are looking for.

SEO is a pretty deep topic, and we promised a “quick” guide. So here’s a snapshot of what you need to know.

• Keywords – You know your customer pretty well by now, right? Think about what they’re Googling, and make sure you’re answering that on your website.
• Blogs – Google likes sites that are regularly updating with interesting content. For most sites, this means a blog. That’s why you see blogs on everyone’s site nowadays. They help with rankings, and they allow you to put different keywords into your site.
• Yoast – We could list all the little technical things that go into SEO, (H1 tags, alt text, meta descriptions, etc.) or we could give you the handy dandy tool that spells it out for you. Yoast plugs into websites seamlessly and gives you a foolproof checklist for your pages and posts. Find it in your web host plugin section or right here.

Unlike most things in the digital landscape, SEO takes awhile to show results. Think of it as Google taking a bit of time to get to know your site. Keep at it though, and you’ll see your site climb the rankings soon enough.

Digital Marketing Foundations, Easy After All

That’s it for our quick guide on digital marketing. If you tick off everything on this list, you’re off to a great start in your digital marketing journey.

However, there’s always more you can learn and do to promote your business. Read our Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Tracking, if you want to dive into the wonderful world of digital advertising.

Still got questions? Let’s chat! We’re happy to help.

Pia Lim is a Content and Digital Marketing Specialist at Curve Communications. She’s got a passion for communication. Online or traditional, spoken or written, she’s interested in everything to do with sharing ideas and stories.

When it comes to creating your social media content strategy, it’s good to have a strong understanding of what you want to achieve before you dive in. That’s why we’ve curated our top four questions to ask yourself before creating your social media content strategy. By considering these four questions, you’ll find creating your monthly content will be much easier than you thought! Let’s get started.

1) Do I understand my audience, and do I know where they “hang out” online?

This is the first question you should be asking yourself when it comes to creating your social media content strategy. Knowing who your audience is, and where you can find them online is a crucial aspect in creating meaningful, engaging, and worthwhile content. Here at Curve, we suggest that each of our prospective clients conduct a “discovery,” which is a deep dive into their company, their current marketing initiatives, and how they can better reach their target audience through our customer persona exercise.

Whether you’re a small local business or a large corporation, conducting a discovery analysis should be your first step. Understanding your brand as a whole will help you better understand what you want to work on, and how you should prioritize your time. The end result of a discovery not only answers the above question, but it gives you a crystal-clear roadmap of your marketing steps and who your target audience is.

2) Do I have a concrete plan for execution?

It’s great to have a better understanding of who you’re marketing to and how to execute your marketing, but without a concrete plan, what’s the point? We suggest assessing your current social media content strategy in what we call a social media audit and setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based (S.M.A.R.T.) goals that you can achieve on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. In doing so, you’ll find it easier to gauge your strategy’s success. And when it comes to creating your monthly content calendar, you’ll be able to execute with ease!

3) Do I have access to a social media scheduler that will work for me?

Scheduling your social media content across all platforms is one of the best things you can do. It saves time, allows you to create a month’s worth of content at once, and gives you peace of mind when you’re busy with other tasks.

Here at Curve, we’ve worked with a variety of social media scheduling software including Hootsuite, Planable, and Facebook’s Publishing Tools, all of which cater to the different needs of our clients. There are so many scheduling platforms out there at different price ranges, you’ll be able to find one that fits your needs and your budget accordingly.

4) Do I have the right content creation tools?

When it comes to creating content, it doesn’t have to be groundbreaking, but it does need to get your point across to your audience. If you’re just starting out with content creation, you’ll need access to the right tools to get the job done. Whether you’re looking for user-friendly graphic design platforms, digital writing assistance tools, or the best free stock images online, there are hundreds of places to find them. We’ve made it easy and rounded up our top three online tools here:

Canva is an online graphic design platform with thousands of templates, a great selection of fonts, and other graphic design elements that will come in handy. Canva offers a free version that includes access to a majority of their features, and the upgraded Canva Pro version costs you less than $20 a month. It’s a great investment that our team uses on a daily basis for organic social posts, Facebook and Instagram ads, branded presentations, and monthly reports.

Unsplash is an online library of more than two million FREE stock images. We use Unsplash on a daily basis for almost all of our clients. Unlike the traditional stock image websites like iStock and Adobe Stock, Unsplash allows the use of images for commercial purposes without needing to credit the artist or pay per image.

Grammarly is an online writing assistance tool that can be used virtually everywhere! We love Grammarly because it offers both free and paid versions, so you can choose a plan that best suits your work style. It’s an awesome tool to use if you spend a lot of time writing, even if it’s not directly for social content. Grammarly is great at catching the little things that we often look past, especially after a couple of rounds of editing!

Conclusion

Once you’ve answered all four questions, you’ll be off to the races! We’re sure you’ll have more than four questions when it comes to starting your content strategy, especially if you’re starting from scratch, and that’s totally okay! If anything, these questions will act as a basis for you to build from.

Interested in learning more about how Curve Communications works with our clients to build top-tier and engaging content? Book an appointment with our team here.