In this case study, you are going to learn the power that Alivecor brings to the market by enabling value-based healthcare that will immediately alter the way cardiac patients manage their disease state and potentially add years to their lives.

This case study also includes details on:

• How Alivecor enables consumers to monitor their disease state in real-time, use data to enhance the disease state’s treatment and management, and coordinate care with their healthcare provider(s).
• Alivecor grew its website to 200,000 organic traffic since January 2020 [with a 75% bounce rate] with minimal promotional spending using clinical studies and PR.
• How Alivecor can differentiate themselves, presently, in a remote monitoring space that is indistinguishable, not just in feature-set but also in value-prop. The remote monitoring space is crowded, and difficult to distinguish companies from each other.
• How Alivecor can incorporate content marketing, promoted content, an effective ad strategy (and retargeting ads), email, and event marketing, along with community building to increase website traffic and drive customer retention.

Let’s dive right in. First, some background information:

Alivecor has an FDA clearance for the detection of atrial fibrillation, bradycardia [slower than normal heart rate], and tachycardia [the heart produces rapid electrical signals that quicken the heart rate] on a personal ECG [EKG] device.

For this case study, I am going to focus on atrial fibrillation [afib].

The Advent of Connected Care

Connected care uses readily available consumer technologies to deliver patient care outside of the hospital or doctor’s office. It is the real-time, electronic communication between a patient and medical provider. Examples of connected care include telehealth, remote patient monitoring, and secure email communication between clinicians and their patients.

The full use of patient data — the power of data flowing — decreases patient care costs and cuts down on duplicated services, such as unnecessary lab testing, and leverages information to deliver a higher quality of patient care. It can ideally engage the consumer in their healthcare and healthcare decisions.

Connected care allows a patient to incorporate data and event reminders into the management of their healthcare.

Remote Patient Monitoring

Remote patient monitoring uses intelligent devices and systems that help ensure patients receive proper treatment and detect when patients are stable or in a state of distress, especially with chronic disease management and for seniors aging in place, in their own homes.

Remote patient monitoring is a coordinated system that uses one or more home-based or mobile monitoring devices to transmit vital-sign data or information and be reviewed by a health care professional at a distant site, such as their office. CMS sees the value of remote patient monitoring services in the same way it values other physician services.

The consumers who will benefit the most from digital health may have limited mobility, technology, or understanding of its benefits. As a result, connectivity, data analytics, and patient education are critical. In essence, these vital aspects need to incorporate to benefit the consumer without asking them to become technology experts.

What is Afib:

An irregular and [often] rapid heart rate occurs when your heart’s two upper chambers experience chaotic electrical signals atrial fibrillation. The result is an irregular heart rhythm and fast heartbeat. The heart rate in atrial fibrillation can vary from 100 to 175 beats per minute. Considering that a healthy range for a heart rate is 60 to 100 beats a minute, atrial fibrillation is not always felt by the patient, and many are asymptomatic. Symptoms of atrial fibrillation often include shortness of breath, weakness, and heart palpitations.

This irregular and often rapid heart rate with Atrial fibrillation can increase this risk of blood clots, heart failure, strokes, and other heart complications.

Episodes of atrial fibrillation may be transient or chronic that don’t go away and may require treatment. Although atrial fibrillation itself usually isn’t life-threatening, it is a severe medical condition that sometimes requires emergency treatment.

A significant concern with atrial fibrillation is the potential to develop blood clots in the upper chambers of the heart. These clots forming in the heart may circulate to other organs and lead to blocked blood flow (ischemia) and increase the risk of a stroke by a multiplicity of 5.

Approximately 50% of afib patients are asymptomatic and are unaware of their condition until it’s found during a physical examination or until they develop a stroke or heart failure, which can be devastating.

The ability to assess afib before the development of complications can have a material impact on the lives of affected patients and their families. The goal is to prevent adverse consequences from anticoagulation therapy (blood thinners), prevent strokes, and improve the overall quality of life for afib patients.

Afib increases the risk of ischemic stroke (IS) 5-fold due to the high risk of clotting associated with the disease state. Patients with afib have a heightened risk of stroke severity that leads to increased healthcare costs. The cost of severe stroke has been documented to be 11% to 71% higher when compared with minor stroke.

Additionally, anticoagulation therapy (blood thinners) to prevent IS can increase hemorrhagic stroke risk (HS) in Afib patients. Total direct costs attributable to afib are estimated at $6.65 billion annually in the United States, with approximately 350,000 hospitalizations and 5 million office visits per year.

The societal burden of stroke in the United States (i.e., direct and indirect costs for all stroke types) is estimated at $34.3 billion annually. Depending on the type of stroke, costs can vary between stroke types. A recent analysis estimated the 4-year medical expenditures for IS and HS to be $39,396 and $48,327, just among Medicare beneficiaries.

The CDC data shows that the median age for men with atrial fibrillation is 66.8 years, and for women, 74.6 years. According to PubMed, over 5 million Americans have afib today, and the US population with afib is expected to grow to over 12 million by 2030. Worldwide over 33.5 million people [20.9 million men] have afib with an anticipated market growth of over 50 million by 2050, according to the WHO.,

Your risk of developing afib, a common heart rhythm disorder, increases as you become older. However, atrial fibrillation can occur at any age. When it develops in younger people, it’s usually associated with other heart conditions.

With proper treatment, individuals with atrial fibrillation can live healthy and active lives. Although afib is not considered life-threatening, it can lead to complications such as blood clots, stroke, and heart failure if left untreated.

With increased prevention, coupled with effective care management and patient engagement efforts, Alivecor has taken a value-based care approach and delivers better outcomes for patients — helping keep them out of hospitals and emergency rooms while improving quality of life.

Alivecor

Few companies have developed products that can impact lives as readily as Alivecor.

Launched in 2012, Alivecor has enabled physicians and patients to share real-time health information. Data isn’t just important information; it is the foundation for better health.

This data can be analyzed and shared between doctors and patients. Using the Alivecor Kardiamobile device and app, a patient in as little as 30 seconds can take an EKG and send the results to their physician in real-time.

Data helps physicians identify patients who may be at risk for costly ER visits or frequent hospital readmission. Data allows for coordination of care and treatment — when patients have multiple specialists treating chronic conditions — data allows for proactive alerts to physicians to schedule wellness appointments and advanced preventive screenings.

Physicians’ real-time access to medical health insights helps save money and reduce patients’ pain, suffering and anxiety.

Presently, most of our health care system relies on a fee-for-service model — doctors are paid based on the volume of services they provide — not how much your health improves.

Alivecor offers a value-based solution that aids in delivering real-time health outcomes and the ability to prevent the devastating progression of cardiac events leading to strokes and death.

Imagine going to your doctor’s office and knowing every aspect of your health and well-being is taken into account, with a personalized plan of action.

Imagine that your doctor helps you make personalized decisions about not just your care but issues not usually discussed in a doctor’s office — like how to access healthy food to improve your health and manage a disease state.

Alivecor truly is a model for value-based healthcare.

By delivering more preventive screenings and helping patients adhere to their medication better, the Alivecor product offering improves Afib patient’s health and lowers medical costs.

Alivecor uses data to get ahead of chronic conditions (afib, bradycardia, tachycardia) and prevent these cardiac conditions from worsening.

Considering that roughly two-thirds of Americans are prescribed at least one prescription medicine, 50 percent do not take their medication, resulting in 125,000 premature deaths every year. Neglecting to take prescription medicines presents a considerable problem to public health and the associated costs of end-of-life worsening care.

An engaged and educated consumer has an incentive to adhere to their prescription drug regime.

They understand the consequences and are seeing the effect of compliance or non-compliance in real-time.

Taking a value-based care approach and extending the doctor-patient relationship using a collaborative process where physicians and patients work together instead of in silos ensures that patients manage their condition and comply with their medication.

Hospital and ER visits are expensive — the average cost of a three-day hospital stay is approximately $30,000.

In less than eight years, AliveCor has acquired over 50,000 users and has a post-money valuation in the range of $100M to $500M (USD) as of 23 October 2019, according to PrivCo after recently closing $5.8 million toward its $9.2 million goal.

In total, Alivecor has successfully raised over $65 million, including a sizable investment from Mayo Ventures.

According to SensorTower, Alivecor had 20,000 downloads of Kardia, the cloud-based premium offer last month, and under 5,000 downloads of KardiaStation. KardiaPro presents data in a simple, intuitive format designed to conform to medical providers’ CPT reimbursement code requirements.

Veterinary AliveECG is specifically designed for veterinary professionals and their pet owner customers, allowing vets to take accurate recordings and improve the quality of care offered.

As Alivecor products are considered wearable, this raises the inherent issue of privacy and HIPAA.

Wearables fall into a healthcare “gray area” when it comes to HIPAA compliance.

HIPAA would likely apply when a healthcare provider asks consumers to supply it with the health data collected by their wearables.

As Pamela Greenstone, program director for the online health information management program at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Allied Health, points out, “All wearables, once they are interfacing with your healthcare organization’s information, your physician practice EHR, that’s where HIPAA applies.” Reading through the Alivecor Privacy Policy, it is not possible to tell if they are HIPAA compliant. At no point do they mention HIPAA compliance.

So, what sent Alivecor into rapid growth?

Undoubtedly, their product played a considerable role. There was nothing like it at the time.

But like any product, Alivecor needed to make sure people knew about them and knew what the product did.

That’s where marketing comes in.

In 2011, one of the co-founders — David Albert, MD — Albert worked because on handheld EKGs (ECGs) since 1990 when the first Palm handheld was released. In 1998, he received a patent with Bruce Satchwell and Kim Barnett for wireless transmission of EKGs in handheld devices.

At the time, EKGs were too overpowered, expensive, and complicated for most consumers to use.

Dr. Albert was in search of a better way for cardiac patients to monitor their heart health.

In December 2010, Albert uploaded a video to Youtube that got over 100,000 views in 48 hours. By attending the 2011 CES show, a venture capital raise of $3 million in seed funding resulted.

Knowing that this was a potential starving market, Albert set out to create Alivecor, which now has multiple products in its pipeline, including a KardiaBand with clinical studies at Columbia University and the Mayo Clinic. These studies demonstrated that KardiaBand could detect elevated potassium levels (hyperkalemia) in the blood without a blood test.

One of the many things that make Alivecor unique from its competition is it uses a neural network to train its products to detect heart problems. According to the patent filings, the network uses four convolutional layers, with two tied to 300,000 parameters and takes about seven minutes to train on a new user.

After about 30 days of product use, the software builds a user’s heart profile — a data-driven model, including how the heart’s electrical system is firing.

In this growth study, we’ll dive into how Alivecor acquires users by analyzing:

• What they do to acquire traffic and how to improve both organic and paid traffic
• How they turn that traffic into customers
• How they can improve their interactions with consumers
• How they can drive retention

Behind the strategy

Alivecor’s customer acquisition strategy relies on two distinct pillars:

1. A starving crowd: people desiring a better way to manage their disease state and relief from the fear that afib symptoms can be evaluated and delivered in real-time.
2. Their company vision: to save lives and transform cardiology by delivering intelligent, highly-personalized information about the heart to clinicians and patients anytime, anywhere.

The Alivecor vision aligns perfectly with the needs of that starving crowd. Based on the concept that your customers are trying to accomplish something, solve a problem with your product — that’s the “Job” that needs to be done.

These jobs could be something like:

I can feel my heart racing. Am I having an afib episode? If so, am I at serious risk for an MI or stroke?

Or we can dive deeper:

The Alivecor reading says I’m in afib, and my heart rate is now at 140 bpm, I checked my heart rate 30 minutes ago, and my heart rate is more elevated; I should head to the ER.

As I analyze and dissect Alivecor’s marketing and growth strategy, you’ll notice that almost everything Alivecor does or is recommended lines up with the needs of the starving crowd by showing them how Alivecor can achieve the goals that they’re trying to accomplish — being able to complete an EKG in 30 seconds in the comfort of your own home or on the go.

Behind the strategy

Website

Home page

Product Page

Clinician Page

Target Audience

Paid Search

Social Media Ads

Organic Search and SEO

Content Marketing

Content Distribution

Email marketing

Website

After analyzing the site, I concluded that the following pages are the highest priority for user and customer acquisition.

1. The Home Page — page goal: converting highly-motivated traffic into purchasers and retain premium protection plan users.
2. Product page — page goal: convert cold and warm traffic into purchasers and premium protection plan users.
3. Clinicians Page — page goal: entice medical providers to recommend KardiaMobile to patients using the potential for telemedicine reimbursement

Home page

Simplicity is the first thing you notice about the home page. It’s not a very common strategy for most businesses. With Alivecor being so intuitive, powerful, and quick to use, they lead with the product rather than spend a lot of time explaining with volumes of text.

Alivecor keeps it simple by letting the desktop and mobile app video provide context about the product and its ease of use.

A homepage with a lot of information steals attention away from what’s most important to Alivecor’s business goals: product sales and product usage.

In my opinion, the homepage header text lacks an emotional connection; it fails to address or relieve most cardiac patient’s number one emotion — anxiety. People diagnosed with a cardiac condition are scared and afraid; they want knowledge and solutions. The header text sells features, not the benefit of the product offering.

People don’t buy things just to buy them; people buy things to solve a specific problem. Just as nobody uses a product or service for its own sake, but because a product or service helps them solve a particular problem.

For this reason, Alivecor should always be positioned as a helping hand that helps the real hero of the story — their customer — overcome their fears and offers a real-time solution to be proactive with their disease state and improve their overall health and ideally health outcome.

Valuable content centers on the story your audience already inhabits, entering it not as the hero but as a helping hand.

There are two principal reasons this approach is so practical.

First, you want your audience to visualize themselves as the champion of the product. If you can’t or won’t stop talking about how great your product or company is, this is very difficult to accomplish. Secondly, adopting a more humble tone can help increase your credibility in the mind of the reader.

I would suggest that Alivecor do two things: first, make it easy and straightforward to purchase, and secondly, use a better call to action (CTA) in place of “View Details.”

An actionable CTA requires a verb. Verbs are action words. In a CTA, a verb lets the audience know exactly what you want them to do.

Without a verb, the CTA lacks direction.

For example, using a CTA consists of “Learn More Now” or “Be The Captain of Your Heart Health — Buy Now.”

Focus on FOMO (fear of missing out); the text should lead the potential customer to conclude that by doing [X], I’ll improve my health, quality of life, happiness, etc.

Alivecor needs to take away the product’s risks on the home page; this allows the ability to minimize the risk of trying the product and add reassurance to increase conversions.

You want to reassure new customers that they have nothing to lose. Alivecor could focus its call to action because potential and new customers can try the product for 30 days and contact support for a return authorization with no strings attached.

For example, the CTA and homepage text could reflect:

Subheadline 1: Try Alivecor for 30 days and if you’re not convinced, return it with no strings attached

Subheadline 2: We’ll email you five days before your 30-day trial expires

Graphic: Highlight the 5-day reminder, so you don’t forget to cancel if you are not seeing the benefits of using the Alivecor product.

And to encourage product purchase and usage, they show two rows of bullet points and text to confirm the efficacy of the product offering:

I’ve always remembered author Laura Busche’s words: A brand is a unique story that consumers recall when they think of you.

Following Busche’s thinking, a positioning model will help you locate the place your brand should occupy in a consumer’s mind:

First, answer these three questions about your company:

• What is it? Be descriptive.
• What are the customer benefits? How does it improve customers’ lives?
• What is its personality? If your product, company, or service was human and you met at a cocktail party, how would you describe him/her?

“For the consumer, the answer who you are, how you’ll improve my life, and what it’s like to work with you, respectively.” But it takes a few more steps to deeply anchor your brand in a consumer’s mind. That brings you to the branding pyramid:

As Busche so sufficiently stated: “Emotional benefits relate to how I, as your customer, can gain confident control of my life by using you. The ‘something bigger’ speaks to what you aim to deliver to your customers, but also to the world in ten years. Like a company’s mission or vision, this brand promise or ‘something bigger’ should be inspirational and help define ‘true north’ for the brand and the product you’re building.”

“The pyramid model is a way to ‘level up’ from the attributes that define your product to the benefits it delivers. Then you can step into the emotional realm that makes a brand memorable.’

Emotions are how you will be remembered.

Emotion is the link between how the product will benefit the consumer and how it will benefit the world. The right emotion is powerful and memorable enough to tie them together.

Sell the benefits, not features:

People buy benefits, not features.

• Features are factual statements about the product or service, like what it can do, its specs and dimensions, etc.
• Benefits tell the result of what a product can do for the customer.

Compelling emotional imagery and common-sense messages are critical for successful branding. Recall when Steve Jobs launched the iPod, Apple sold the benefit of having “1,000 songs in your pocket,” not the feature of ‘1 GB of storage”.

By focusing on the benefit combined with an emotional connection, you increase clicks and conversions.

Consumers, and more so health consumers, don’t care about product features; they care far more about benefits.

Alivecor needs to focus on the “why” the customer should want to purchase, rather than “what” the product is.

The CTA and aligning text need to focus on the problem it solves (benefits) for customers.

Alivecor’s main product page has similar text and a twist on the homepage message.

The look is different, but the overall strategy and messaging are the same.

The product pages provide very little information about the product. In essence, the only information you can find on the company is from vague, jargon-filled statements like “Take a medical-grade EKG anytime, anywhere. In just 30 seconds, detect Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia or Normal heart rhythm” and “KardiaMobile is the most clinically-validated personal EKG in the world, Now a medical-grade EKG can become part of your daily routine. Enjoy the peace of mind.“

All are grand statements — when there’s enough context — but they are almost meaningless by themselves.

Why?

Because there’s no more relevant information on the page, suggesting that the user needs to have context about and understand the medical terms of the product BEFORE they get to this page (otherwise, no one will purchase or enroll in the premium service).

This is likely considering the means potential customers take to get to the page:

• Direct and branded traffic — these people know what Alivecor is and what you can do with the product(s). They either want to learn more about the product or disease state (in which case they’ll navigate the correct page) or purchase.

Due to these factors, there’s no immediate need to go in-depth with a sales pitch.

Yet, what about the millions of potential cardiac patient consumers who find themselves on the Alivecor website without prior knowledge of the product offering?

Here’s where Alivecor needs to focus on the instant reward. For potential customers and new customers, you want to deliver value as soon as possible to provide a rewarding customer experience.

Offering an ebook, infographic, or similar information on the disease state, reading an EKG, or equivalent, builds customer trust and adds to the customer experience.

Instant gratification goes a long way in creating goodwill, and humans love it. When we, the consumer, decide we want something, we want it now — this is why over 100 million Americans pay for Amazon Prime to have their orders delivered in 24 hours or less.

This is why copy matters, and the copy chosen for the CTA sets expectations on when the consumer will see a reward for taking action on your website.

Product Page

The few ads and retargeting ads that Alivecor runs go to a product page that targets cold traffic:

Value proposition (headline)

The value proposition is arguably the most critical part of any page. It’s the first thing potential customers see immediately upon landing on a page, and it provides the context you need to instantly understand if the product does what you need it to do.

This Alivecor product page has no value proposition:

Source

It isn’t until you scroll past the hero image that you see the Alivor value proposition, and it is represented as bullet points of text and pull-down menus:

The page fails to answer the 3 critical questions that someone first asks themselves when they visit a page:

1. What is this? FDA-cleared, clinical grade personal EKG monitor. Okay, so what?
2. How does it help me? Detect Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia, or Normal heart rhythm.
3. What makes it better than the alternatives? KardiaMobile has been used by the world’s leading cardiac care medical professionals and patients, with more than 60 Million EKGs recorded.

It’s short, value-focused, and demonstrates a tangible outcome, which the customer is looking for. This also uses a few direct response marketing principles to create a compelling hook:

• A primary promise:
• A perceived differentiator: Used by the world’s leading cardiac care medical professionals and patients
• An interesting element: Add Premium Protection Plan that includes Device Replacement, Cloud Storage & Security, Personalized Heart Health Report, and Medication Tracking.
• Crush objections: No commitment required. I would add — Cancel anytime.

There can be improvements to this value proposition (like adding in an emotional component). Still, combining the four elements above makes it captivating and engaging enough for you to want to continue reading.

A significant problem with the Alivecor product pages is the consumer is now distracted and starts looking at things other than purchase intent.

It’s easy to get distracted, reading through reviews, technical specs, and more.

This opens up the genuine possibility that the consumer leaves the page without ever purchasing.

Alivecor would be far better using a dedicated landing page for each ad group.

This can easily be accomplished with the aid of a graphics designer and copywriter.

Unbounce today offers the ability to template landing pages quickly and easily. These can be set up in advance with relevant copy to reflect the ad, which engages the consumer and eliminates the current on-page distractions.

Messaging framework:

A web page is part of the customer journey and should present a story about why the visitor should take the action you want them to take, allowing people to rationalize their behavior.

The outline of this story is your messaging framework, which consists of 3 key elements: what you say (message), when to say it (hierarchy or order), and where you say it on the page (layout). Solely after you know your hierarchy should you focus on how you say it (images and text).

The Alivecor pages lack this straightforward messaging hierarchy. Using the Geico tagline as an example, the consumer quickly understands the value proposition:

Section 1: Value proposition: — 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.

Alivecor would be better off with the value proposition on the homepage from the main product page with an enhancement: 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life: Take an EKG, anytime, anywhere.

Section 2: Alivecor’s advantages, benefits, and how it works — Take a medical-grade EKG in 30 seconds. Simply open the Kardia app on your smartphone, put your fingers on the electrodes, and see results instantly.

Section 3: Pricing — Choose the Kardiamobile product that best suits your needs and try for 30 days; if you’re not satisfied, call for a return authorization and full credit.

Section 4: Critical features you may enjoy — Add even greater peace of mind with a Premium Protection Plan for a low monthly price and try for free for 30 days. Here, I would sell the benefits of longitude data, alerts, and cloud storage. The ability to enhance medication compliance, determine potential triggers of afib saves lives, and it could be your own.

Section 5: Social proof (testimonials and social proof)

Section 6: FAQs

Section 7: Social proof (who else is using Alivecor)

I would suggest that Alivecor show the logos of the various hospitals that are using the products, from the Mayo Clinic to Cedars-Sinai

Here are 4 other ideas Alivecor could try:

• A more precise and visual story arc for the page (Value prop > social proof > significant competitive advantage > how you see effectiveness and success in the product > features & benefits > social proof > CTA > FAQ)
• Precisely laddering out how you’d see success in the product, with visuals for each step (example: 1. Choose a product. 2. Take your EKG in the comfort of your home, office, or even the car. 3. Send your EKG to you physician from anywhere)

As a general rule, be careful about having several columns or elements visible on the page at once.

For example, a 3-column section could be similar to having 3-people trying to speak to you at once — it’s distracting and hard to choose who to focus on.

Combine that distraction with the four exceptionally visually captivating images in this section, and you could end up with a reader who has no idea what to look at or read first.

With no clear message per section, you risk there being too much friction — it’s distracting, not scannable, steals focus away from the words, and somewhat fails at getting you to want to read the copy.

That being said, I believe the images reflect the copy very strongly and, with Kardiamobile being a tool that allows you to take an EKG literally with your fingertips, I think it works for the brand.

Alivecor has taken a chance on not following best practices, and, in my opinion, it’s turned out well.

• Showcasing the relevant features underneath each of the steps outlined above
• Adding a link to a series of pages that provide a simple explanation of each cardiac disease state Kardiamobile works on as a row on the page to push people into the product. This reinforces the diversity of the product offering.
• Offer both gated and ungated content. Alivecor needs to build an email list and then use this list to engage its target audience.
• I signed up for the Alivecor email list and received nothing in return, not even a simple welcome email.

These changes would likely not make the homepage longer, but they will create a much clearer showcase for its value and engage the Alivecor target audience.

Clinician Page

I have a serious problem with the copy on this page:

In particular this copy:

This verbiage raises serious concerns from consumer perception and potential legal ramifications.

As two physicians — one at a leading New England teaching hospital and a Dean at the University of Michigan Medical School — stated to me when I ran this by them, “Healthcare has a lot of issues, this page is suggesting that medical providers are only doing this for monetary reasons and creates a situation for unscrupulous providers looking for a quick buck to game the system, hurting the entire profession.”

Legally, telemedicine is under the Federal Government’s microscope for fraud and abuse. As noted in the Pocket ECG settlement when Acting U.S. Attorney William E. Fitzpatrick for the District of New Jersey stated, “Sophisticated medical technology can be used to help doctors dramatically improve the lives of their patients, but it can also be misused to increase medical bills fraudulently,”

A simple Google search illustrates the ongoing issues with telemedicine fraud under the Federal Government’s microscope.

Paid Search

As Nik Shamra texted me: “it’s crazy how many brands believe paid is the main way to launch a brand. You have to create the narrative, and the story (the WHY) first and paid is just a TOOL to amplify it.”

“Paid media shouldn’t be looked at as a main form of acquisition, but rather an extension of the narrative created organically through content marketing, word of mouth, reviews, press, and the mission of the company itself. You can’t just spend money to create a narrative. Well, you can, but you’ll just waste a ton of it upfront.”

That stated, let’s dig into the Alivecor paid media.

Alivecor takes a substandard approach to Google Ads. Which I question the effectiveness of.

Below are the Google ads that Alivecor is presently running with the number of keywords each ad targets. This includes an ad for Amazon, which I find slightly amazing as it sends traffic away from their website.

Each of the text ads uses one branded keyword for a total of 18 keywords. Examples of the keywords are: “alive core,” “mobile EKG monitor”, “kardiomobil”, “kardia heart monitor,”“alivecor kardiamobile”, “kardia”, “alivecor kardia mobile”, “kardia ecg”, “alivecor heart monitor”, “kardia mobile ekg monitor”.

Target Audience

I have a serious concern as to who the target audience is that Alivecor has identified.

Based on the Google ad targeting, see the[chart below], it appears that a clearly defined target audience has not been established, and it skews toward younger males.

Numerous studies have and continue to document that women are the buyers of household healthcare. As Oliver Wyman’s new Women in Healthcare Leadership Initiative and Women in Healthcare Leadership 2019 report recently documented: “Healthcare is an industry where women make 80 percent of buying and usage decisions and 65 percent of the workforce.”

A few other relevant stats:

• Women make 90% of household healthcare decisions. (Source: Yankelovich Monitor, M2W Conference)
• Women account for 93% of OTC pharmaceutical purchases. (Source: Tom Peters, in the forward to “Marketing to Women,” by Marti Barletta)
• More than the family doctor, the internet is the primary source for healthcare information, and women more than men seek such information online. (Source: Natural Marketing Institute, 2009)
• More than three-quarters of those 65 years and older say they go online for health information (Source: Burst Media Survey, 2007)
• 9 of 10 women online seek health information via the web. The Internet — more than the family doctor — is the primary source for healthcare information, and women seek such information online more than men. (Source: National Marketing Institute)

Source: The Purchasing Power of Women: Statistics

Additionally, women are also the ones who push their reluctant spouses into the doctor’s office, adding years and quality to their lives.

My strong suggestion is for Alivecor to test targeting ads and promoted content to women; after all, they are the ones making the healthcare purchasing decision and are deeply engaged with researching health issues.

Through SEMRush, I identified that Alivecor uses1 of 3 main keyword targeting strategies:

1. Branded keywords (details above)
2. Not Utilized; Goal keywords
3. Not Utilized: Solution keywords

Goal campaigns

A big part of the Alivecor targeting strategy should include goal-related keywords — this type of ad [and content] addresses a more narrow and specific search term and audience. In reviewing goal-related keywords on SEMrush, there are easily at least 200 goal-related keywords Aliveor should be targeting with content marketing and ads. Here is an example using the keyword “ECG”:

Each of these keywords blueprints a job that you can accomplish using the Alivecor products.

Like what does ECG measure:

The ad that Alivecor I would recommend they use should be straightforward.

Headline 1 — What Does an ECG Measure

A close variation of the search query to ensure that I know this result is relevant to my search intention, which helps it stand out and provide the CTR is high, and the CPC is low.

Headline 2 — DIY your ECG in 4 easy steps

Outlines how easy I can take my own ECG in 4 steps. Cool. The headline also mentions Do it yourself [DIY], which speaks to an accurate, quick, and cheap solution. Just the kind of value-based healthcare Alivecor was made for.

Description — Try an EKG or 6 Lead EKG, take an instant ECG, get instant results. Try it for 30 days and if not satisfied, a full refund!

This expands on the four steps mentioned in headline 2 (buy, download the app, take an instant EKG, Instant Results). It also reframes Alivecor as a product you have to pay for. In essence, this should weed out tire kickers and people only interested in a free product and pre-qualify those ready to pay for an excellent product and service.

Where they can improve:

Sitelinks

This feels like a lost opportunity for Alivecor; they link out to pages that aren’t relevant to user search intentions. Alivecor should create an ad group or campaign site links customized towards the ability to quickly and easily take an EKG. This can be easily accomplished by either linking to a dedicated landing page or one of their other relevant pages, like a dedicated product page or an advertorial that aligns with the ad( or ad group).

I would strongly recommend the use of a landing page.

As Professor Galloway has stated, “rookie marketers mistake thinking choice is a good thing. Choice is a tax on your time and attention. Consumers don’t want more choices, but more confidence in choices presented.”

Cut all unnecessary elements from your sales pages; this is precisely what a good landing page does. The consumer’s ability to not get caught up reading numerous reviews or clicking on a pull-down menu of items or the main menu and reading other pages increases the likelihood of a conversion.

Message matching

The ad’s messaging needs to be tightly aligned and relevant to the messaging on the landing page. It needs to show that I can take an EKG in 4 easy steps, with the critical message from the ad: “30 Seconds Could Save Your Life: Take an EKG, anytime, anywhere in 4 easy steps”.

By clicking on the ad, you expect a page that has you imagining yourself taking an EKG in 4 steps and why one would use an EKG, not a page that only talks about a product and its features.

A mismatched ad/landing page messaging can decrease your ads quality scores — driving up the cost per click — and will likely increase visitor bounce rates.

Why create a goal campaign?

This strategy is perfect for Alivecor. It positions the product as an effective and efficient way to reduce customers’ fears and anxiety, fundamental to every product or service’s purchase decision.

Targeting top-of-the-funnel keywords and keyword phrases is a great way to lower cost per click [CPC] costs.

Goal-related campaigns require a more comprehensive funnel. This requires more resources to build the funnel. These campaigns are too high up in the funnel for a lot of businesses to target using Google Ads. These campaigns are very effective.

For example, when a search is done for a term like “What Does an ECG Measure,” this says that they haven’t found a lot of quality content that answers their search query. The target audience is actively looking for information about how to relieve their anxiety. Alivecor should capitalize on this opportunity taking consumers through the buyer’s journey; this is an active research process by the consumer. Educational content builds trust and establishes the company as a credible source of information — as an expert. A multitude of assets that can be created for this journey range from ad -> lead-magnet -> email sequence; advertorial (a blend between an ad and an editorial) -> landing page, or ad -> long-form sales page, that tells why an EKG is essential and what it tells the consumer; shows how to take an ECG/EKG using KardiaMobile, the benefits of longitudinal data and similar.

Yet, Alivecor doesn’t take this approach.

Solution campaigns

Alivecor should target high-intent users with their solution campaigns. This type of campaign focuses on people who know what they want to accomplish and have a firm idea of how they will achieve it: with medical-grade technology.

High-value campaigns focus on keywords related to a specific solution — often by adding nouns such as afib, EKG, watch, false-positive readings.

For instance: ECG, apple watch, false-positive readings, Alivecor

Since Alivecor is not running any solution campaigns presently, I’m going to use what is available via a simple Google search using the same search intent for this example.

If Alivecor were running a solution campaign, I would suggest Alivecor lead with content in the ad. It would be straightforward to create a compelling piece of content that uses the Beckers Hospital Review article as a cite and include recent data that the Apple watch is not practical with a heart rate above 120 beats per minute (BPM).

Headline 1 — Which has clinically correct EKGs for afib — Apple Watch or Kardiomobile

This ad explicitly mentions my core search terms to ensure it’s relevant to me. They note that “Likely to be tons of false positives, which will drive anxiety and some overtreatment.” Apple said its app accurately detects atrial fibrillation 99 percent of the time when it gets a good reading. However, Dr. Yazdi is concerned that accuracy may be compromised in younger patients, for whom atrial fibrillation is rare.”

“Dr. Yazdi’s analysis found that in people under the age of 55, the Apple Watch correctly diagnoses atrial fibrillation 19.6 percent of the time. This compares to 76 percent accuracy among users between the ages of 60 and 64, 91 percent among those aged 70 to 74, and 96 percent for those older than 85.”

This tells me that the Apple Watch may not be the best portable EKG monitor for me — through clinical and scientific-based data — and calms any concerns I may have regarding the Alivecor product offering vs. the Apple Watch.

Headline 2 — Apple Watch and False Positive Afib Readings

This is great because it focuses on the fact that I can expect false-positive readings using the Apple Watch vs. Alivecor products. The key benefit here is alieving consumer anxiety while aligning itself to the company vision.

Description — Pick An ECG Monitor, Download the App & Instant Results. Try It Risk-Free For 30 Days!

The description walks me through the three easy steps to take an EKG in the comfort of my own home, office, or on the go (purchase, download, instant results). This messaging appears throughout the Alivecor website and should be utilized on their ads for other campaigns.

Once you click on the ad, you should be taken to a straightforward landing page that showcases the products and ease of use with a buy now button.

A landing page is a dedicated resource that is good for the purpose it should serve — giving potential customers helpful information directly related to the ad they clicked on, in this example, demonstrating the ease of use and accuracy of the Alivecor product offering.

It’s critical that the message from the ad is matched on the landing page.

Key takeaway: Alivecor will benefit by using paid search at two different stages of the funnel very well. The ad copy needs to do a great job of speaking to the search term and the unique benefits that the product and service brings. The landing pages need to have the page copy match and align with the ad copy.

Social media ads

Facebook and YouTube should be two of Alivecor’s biggest channels, according to Pew Research, 69% of adults use Facebook (74% visit the site daily), and 73% use YouTube. Three-quarters of women in the US use Facebook versus 63% of men.

The share of older Americans on Facebook has more than doubled since 2012. Of the aged 65 and older demographic, 46% use Facebook, and 38% use YouTube.

I want to take some time and dissect the creative, copy, and overall messaging behind Alivecor’s social ads.

Ad teardown

The team at Alivecor is not testing many different angles — and it’s not limited to the copy, brand message, or images. But also how Alivecor communicates the overarching story, they’re trying to convey.

The Alivecor ads lack great, eye-catching visuals and copy for their ads.

Facebook ad 1:

Portable FDA-Cleared EKG Device. Record & SaveEKGs on Your Phone. Try it Risk-Free for 30 Days. Free Shipping.

Offering a 30-day risk-free offer demonstrates the value of taking the risk out of purchasing for their potential customers; the brand message lacks an emotional connection and does little to relieve the anxiety that cardiac patients have with their disease state. Let’s dive deeper into that.

Facebook ads: On-brand designs

Facebook ad 2:

Image:

Ad imagery is possibly the most critical aspect of social media ads. An ad has to stimulate the visual senses with elements to get people’s attention mindlessly scrolling through their news feed.

When looking through Alivecor ads, I noticed that many of their images in their ads follow a noticeable pattern. The ads lack any customer testimonials, or customer using the product, or user-generated content — every ad has a product image, and that’s it.

And they lack a clear description of the product or benefit. They lack a snappy value proposition that narrows in on the singular job that a user is trying to accomplish — — relieve their anxiety.

I would suggest something like, although before I commit to this copy, I would want to complete additional research:

— 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life: Take an EKG, Anytime, Anywhere

By adding engaging copy to the image, you make the ad more eye-catching, allowing the reader to understand your core message by explicitly stating it immediately.

This ad contains a screenshot of the product to showcase an EKG, and it lacks the definition of WHY, or any emotional connection or benefit such as easy to use( the product and service) [The people I showed the ad to thought it was for a video game or day trading]

There’s more to the marketing imagery than having a nice image while explicitly showing your product and how it helps you. You need to consider the messages you are communicating.

Copy

You need an emotional connection in your ads; an excellent copy will do this for you; Alivecor needs to up its game in this area. The copy should be concise. Most importantly, communicate that you can take an EKG in 30 seconds in 4 easy steps and potentially save your life, or at minimum prevent an adverse event, relieving any anxiety you may have.

If we break it down further, Alivecor’s current ad copy needs to focus on variations of the following core messages:

• The job you’re trying to do: Take an EKG in 30 seconds
• The benefit/advantage it gives you: Reduces anxiety of the unknown and the potential of an adverse event (e.g., stroke, afib episode, etc.)
• How you do it: Put your fingertips on the electrodes for 30 seconds, and you’re done. Send the EKG to your medical professional

Image:

The use of warm colors and the product in use is designed to draw your attention while implicitly communicating ease of use — a message designed to appeal to the target audience or the healthcare purchaser in the household and those who are frustrated or anxious about their cardiac health. This helps reduce the frustration level WITHOUT stating it:

An ad that contains an example — or screenshot of the product and app in use — to showcase how you can rapidly take an EKG to see your heart function and pulse in real-time, and how simplistic it is to use, although this ad image can be improved by showing the actual person taking the EKG and facing the camera:

Copy:

I’m a big fan of direct yet straightforward copy in ads. Ad copy should be concise, spaced out, easily readable. Below is an example [that is not based on research that would be needed to verify the copy] 3 different goals that you can accomplish with Alivecor:

• 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life
• Take an EKG, Anytime, Anywhere
• Save and Share Your EKG with Your Medical Doctor

If you’re an afib [or cardiac patient], this information is highly desirable to you — no one wants to wait days for results from their doctor or end up in the ER needlessly. An ad like this is targeted at existing consumers with knowledge of the product offering to close them, and the key selling points would be different compared to the ads targeting cold traffic.

Facebook and YouTube Video ads:

Video should be a big part of the Alivecor ad strategy, and it makes sense why; Alivecor is a medical device where it’s the most significant advantage comes from the ease of use and speed.

An image makes it difficult to convey how fast and how easily you can take a medical-grade EKG and send it to your healthcare provider — but a video will do this easily.

Video: I would suggest that Alivecor use a few video formats; walkthroughs, case studies, and product overviews. I would also use video to tell real success and patient stories with their ads.

Using video with a real person, just like you and me, shows how easily they solved their anxiety, improved their care and coordinated with their medical professional to make someone else’s problem feel like your problem.

Emphasize the power Alivecor brings to managing the disease state.

This is a classic and very effective marketing tactic that’s great for targeting audiences who have yet to realize they have a problem [or that a solution is available for their problem] that needs to be solved.

Copy:

KardiaMobile enables YOU to monitor your heart health. 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life: Take an EKG, Anytime, Anywhere

The ad is well written and focuses on two psychological triggers: empowerment and ease of use by personalizing the copy and connecting with the readers on a deeper, more emotional level.

For example, tapping into ease of use with the message: Take an EKG, Anywhere, Anytime you let the reader know they’ll reduce their anxiety while receiving results equivalent to a medical doctor’s office.

By stating that KardiaMobile enables YOU to monitor your heart health. 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life shows that Alivecor empowers you by elevating your ability to manage your healthcare without hesitation or obstacles and on-demand.

Regarding the copy structure, it becomes evident that I’m also using a similar structure to the ad we tore down above. Here’s how it goes:

• The job you’re trying to do: Take an EKG, Anywhere, Anytime
• The benefit/advantage it gives you: 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life
• How you do it: KardiaMobile enables YOU to monitor your heart health

Retargeting Ads:

97% of people who visit your site for the first time leave without buying anything, and then they’re lost forever. Unless you can bring them back, that is where retargeting ads come in.

Retargeting builds visibility for your brand, allowing you to reach an audience that has already expressed interest in your products. It allows you the opportunity to show ads to a perfectly primed audience — people who have previously been on your site — and nurture them to convert or come back to make a purchase.

On average, retargeting ads are 76% more likely to be clicked on than display ads.

Your retargeting audience is aware of who you are; it makes no sense to show them generic, introductory ads. This audience was on your website, and they didn’t make a purchase. Retargeting is an opportunity to address their concerns and convince them to come back and convert.

This is not how Alivecor is using its retargeting opportunity.

Below are several of the retargeting ads I was hit with over the last week. As you’ll see, most are image-only ads that lack an emotional connection, a reason to purchase (much less click on the ad), lack context, a sense of urgency, offer no social proof or testimonials of satisfied customers:

This ad, in particular, I question, using a logo in place of a brand name makes sense once one has established themselves as a market leader with instant logo recognition. Alivecor is not at this stage yet, and spending money on ads like this is throwing money away.

A question and concern that immediately comes to mind when seeing this ad is how many consumers know what a “KardiaMobile 6L Portable 6-lead…” is, or the purpose of the product, much less than an EKG is or for?

Key takeaway: Alivecor’s social media ads, accounts, and posts need work and need to be visually brilliant to build an engaged audience and community. Every piece of content created should be repurposed and matched with a visual element for social media [see content distribution for details]. The ad structure outlined above works well to convey the Alivecor value proposition when combined with experimenting with multiple messages and ad types to ensure Alivecor is always optimizing for the best results.

Organic Search and SEO

SEO should be a massive channel for Alivecor from smart onsite strategies and building an entirely new database of disease state and lifestyle information and a lot of link building (there are other options than just straight link building, I would initially invest in content marketing and promotion). Alivecor needs to invest heavily in Organic Search and SEO.

It’s a big operation — and it will pay off. Today, all healthcare starts online. SEMrush estimates that Alivecor presently gets a little over 76,000 people visiting their website a month from organic search, or 36% of all of their website traffic:

The direct traffic exceeds both paid and search to the Alivecor website, and social media is nonexistent.

An effective SEO strategy is based on two high-level functions: Off-site SEO and technical SEO. (Content also plays a huge part, especially in healthcare, but I’ve given that its own section).

Offsite SEO

Alivecor gets more than 50% of its traffic from branded terms.

(USA traffic only. Branded search terms account for over 50% of their traffic)

This may indicate that many people who land on their website have heard about Alivecor from external sources like their doctor, clinical studies, public relations, or other medical blogs.

That becomes apparent when diving into Alivecor.com’s backlinks — Alivecor spent a lot of resources acquiring external links to their website, over 50% of them to their home page.

These 12 websites represent 24,723, or 47.3% of Alivecor backlinks, and all reference a clinical study or a physician’s viewpoint of the product offering.

This aligns with the use of PR, clinical studies, and industry news sites.

Alivecor launched its blog with the website and has zero guest post articles up on the web.

What stands out from most businesses that want rapid growth — guest posts act as a significant catalyst for growth — Alivecor is missing a big opportunity — Alivecor should have saturated the internet with guest posts from the day they launch the website.

Guest posts give a sudden influx of authority websites speaking about Alivecor and would have exploded their website traffic, brand awareness, and domain authority.

Technical SEO

Most technical SEO analysis looks at elements like meta tags, heading tags, URL structure, and other factors for search visibility — these are all standard details.

In the Alivecor blog, several URLs break Google’s best practices and use dashes and not hyphens in the URL. This impacts search rankings adversely.

Source

What makes a good technical SEO strategy shine are the organic funnels created through keyword targeting and a Google-approved website structure.

Regarding keyword targeting, I would suggest that Alivecor takes a similar approach to their Paid Search Strategy :

• Branded terms: Ranking for phrases that contain Kariamobile and Alivecor
• Solution Terms: Ranking for phrases that describe the product and functions of their product like Home EKG Monitor or Afib Monitor and similar.
• Goal-related terms: Ranking for terms that describe what you can do with their product like “In 30 seconds, you could save your life.”

An integral part of the Alivecor overarching growth strategy should be helping the average person see success in all related cardiac and lifestyle modifications that the products apply to. I’ll go into more detail in the content marketing section.

By diving into their search rankings and website structure, it’s crystal clear that Alivecor has not invested in the structure. I would suggest that Alivecor consider splitting up their blog into four core categories that center around helping people successfully manage their disease state — these target goal-related keywords:

• Disease States [Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia or Normal heart rhythm]
• Management of Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia or Normal heart rhythm
• Lifestyle
• Management of Afib, etc. with Data

Rather than use individual blog posts that will get lost as Alivecor builds a content library, I would suggest Alivecor use a main page and subpages for evergreen content of the categories listed above. This allows Alivecor to feature evergreen articles and significant user acquisition drivers.

Think of these as categories, and the structure ensures that a customer or potential customer can easily find high-quality content they are searching for.

A question asked a lot is, what makes these pages rank in search?

A high ranking on Google search results from extraordinary relevant, clear, and extremely valuable experiences for the user. Many factors contribute to your rankings, but they all distill down to one thing: do users react well to the page?

Alivecor pages need to contain well-thought-out content and a structure designed to walk the user by accomplishing their goal.

And the page follows SEO best practices.

The H1 headline needs to communicate the benefit of using Alivecor products to manage Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia, or Normal heart rhythm, not just state the medical jargon.

From there, the content needs to walk you through a well-thought-out structure that answers basic questions, is easy to read, inserts relevant keywords contextually, and is broken up into basic thematic subsections.

How do these pages convert users?

Traffic that doesn’t convert is not contributing to your bottom line.

So how does Alivecor convert this traffic? To answer that, let’s walk in the shoes of potential customers looking for a way to manage afib.

I’ll begin my search with a query:

How to manage afib

And I’d end up at this search engine page result or what is commonly known as a SERP:

Creating high-quality content with a good meta tag tied to an effective landing page with additional information and a video; for example, this content in an ebook format is a very effective lead generation product.

Promoting this content and building high domain authority [DA] backlinks should lead to the ability to have this content come up as the 1st three search results after Youtube videos and featured snippets — so naturally, the consumers are going to read the description to see if it’s for me:

How to manage afib? Yes, that’s what I’m looking for.

A low-fat diet combined with walking? Excellent — now I know where to start and look. There’s a short video of a cardiologist and nutritionist offering additional information and tips.

And it’s rated 4.7 stars by 491 people? It must be excellent.

There’s no singular best practice for writing meta tags, but this search query result is appealing and matches my need, so it stands to reason that I’m going to click on it.

I end up on a landing page that takes me through how I can use diet, exercise, and KardiaMobile to monitor and track my heart health and afib episodes. I also see a short video on using the KardiaMobile Premium features to track data from my weight, medicine compliance, stress, personal notes to see what may be potentially triggering an episode of afib.

Now I click on the Call To Action [CTA]: KardiaMobile enables YOU to monitor your heart health; I’ll be taken to the signup page.

And after a short registration process, Alivecor redirects me to the screen where I can create a premium account, walks me through how to download the app and has a short introduction video on how to use KardiaMobile and maximize the value of the data, and asks me to follow them on social media or sign up for their e-newsletter.

In 2 minutes (at most), Alivecor has helped me sign up and achieve success (self-activate) using the product.

These pages should follow SEO best practices — Keyword in the H1, keyword in the introduction, and provide a transparent user experience that makes it easy for someone to purchase KardiaMobile, and understand the power and value of the total offering.

Key takeaway: Alivecor has not implemented a very successful SEO strategy, both technically and through links. Alivecor should have started pushing for backlinks from the first day that their blog went live and should have created pages and articles that not only rank well for terms high up the funnel but push visitors through the funnel and turns them into users.

Content marketing

There’s no doubt in my mind that high-quality content will drive a lot of user growth and retention for Alivecor. It’s the 3rd pillar of every good SEO strategy but deserves its own section.

A reasonable content marketing effort emphasizes depth and quality over-breadth and volume. It is well planned out and executed — even after 100’s of blog posts, infographics, tutorials, and videos.

Alivecor needs to focus on developing high-quality content that goes deep on the subject matter vs. breath and helps people succeed with their disease state. This aids the majority of site visitors who are seeking out specific content to solve their specific problems.

A hub and spoke methodology with content allow Alivecor to create content on specific topics. The main piece of content is the hub and targets top-level keywords and links to relevant long-tail-related topics. This will allow Alivecor to cover topics for readers at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. This will enable Alivecor to build depth in its content marketing strategy.

Basic content marketing rules apply and need to be addressed as Alivecor builds its content marketing strategy:

Do not create content for content’s sake.

Make organic content for the audience, not the product

Good content is focused on topics relating to customers’ needs and issues.

Good customer issues overlap with your brand’s positioning.

Good brand positioning starts with researching your clients.

I continuously remind folks that once a visitor is on your site, your marketing has won — now you need to make it easy for them to research or purchase.

Recall: All healthcare starts online today.

Every minute users are completing over 70,000 search queries related to health on Google. As David Feinberg, head of Google Health, has stated, health-related search queries account for about 7 percent of all daily searches.

Consumers proactively turn to Google to learn about their medical conditions, symptoms, and medications. It shows that users are interested in learning more about their health. While it is a step in the right direction, it can be a double-edged sword.

The internet is full of dubious websites that may not always have accurate or clinically safe information. When people are trying to self-diagnose, it’s not likely that they will be able to tell quality, genuine resources from “garbage” and dangerous sites.

If reputable medical devices, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and hospitals develop quality content that is informative and educational, this problem can be solved. That’s one of the reasons why healthcare content marketing is desperately needed. There is a high demand for articles on medicine, disease states, health technology, and healthcare overall, but very few quality resources.

In addition to building brand and product awareness, healthcare content marketing is a great way to generate quality leads. It can help medical devices, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and healthcare organizations build their reputations as experts in the long run. It provides an excellent opportunity to grow your business.

David Feinberg, MD head of Google Health, said at a speech he gave at a technology conference in Austin:

“People are asking us about conditions, medications, symptoms, and insurance questions. In this case, we are organizing the world’s health information and making it accessible to everyone.”

Before you begin to define your healthcare content marketing strategy, you need to identify your area of focus and the main problems consumers face in your niche.

Once you have identified your niche and anxiety points, talk with an expert. You need to understand the problems, solutions, and everything related to the particular topic.

You need to be mindful of your target audience while writing content. It’s most likely that it will be laymen who are not familiar with the medical or technical jargon. The average American reads at a 4th-grade level, and you need to use language appropriate for your target audience to understand easily.

A blog is a great way to build an audience for your product or service offering and build an email list of dedicated consumers who want to hear from you.

I was aghast to see a blog post on the Alivecor website where they send the reader to external sites for disease state and lifestyle information.

Opening the post with the sentence: “The Internet is massive, and a quick search will turn up hundreds of pages of results on atrial fibrillation. But if you’re serious about finding high-quality information on AFib management or a positive, active support group, you might have to put in some research time.”

This sentence says to the reader, we, Alivecor are not interested in helping you manage your disease state.

This is a tremendous missed opportunity, along with sending a wrong signal to potential and current customers.

I’m going to keep saying this until I’m dead. Today, all healthcare starts online, and consumers actively seek quality, accurate information on their disease-state, the management of, and lifestyle advice to minimize the disease’s impact state.

Consumers are actively seeking out content that quickly and thoroughly answers their questions or concerns.

Healthcare is no different than other types of marketing. It is essential to connect with people through stories in healthcare content marketing as well.

High-Growth firms are finding new content channels and formats to make their expertise more appealing, too. Research shows they invested 28% more marketing effort towards publishing primary research and 21% more toward case stories.

Take the time to check out the New York-Presbyterian Hospital patient stories campaign.

Their Patient Stories campaign shines a spotlight on the success stories of patients. Not only does it give a chance for patients to share their uplifting stories, but some of the comments also double as testimonials.

While their website shows patients’ comments, their YouTube channel has video stories. It’s a great way to showcase the work that you’re doing and garner additional social proof.

It is essential to point out that Alivecor doesn’t have any consideration-stage or gated content on their website. If consumers are engaging with your freely available content, they will want your gated content.

When looking at companies with effective and results-driven content efforts, we can break their success down to 3 areas; I would recommend Alivecor consider four areas:

1. Blog structure
2. Article structure
3. Cardiac school
4. Content Distribution

Cardiac school would be a new addition to the Alivecor website, utilizing YouTube. It would be an educational offering of MDs videos talking about different aspects of the disease state and management of, or nutritionist educating on diet, weight loss, and similar.

Blog structure

The Alivecor blog structure must be obvious and immediately state the purpose, for Alivecor, my suggestion would be to establish pillar categories.

Dedicate specific pillar categories on the blog homepage to showcase four high-level use cases of the main product: KardiaMobile.

• Disease State
• Management of Afib
• Lifestyle
• Data, Collaboration, and Management of Afib

The majority of Alivecor’s articles are awareness stage content, like How AFib can Affect Your Risk For Dementia. There is a significant opportunity to take it a step further and showcase how easily you can use the product to manage the disease state, track your EKGs to see what triggers an Afib episode, how losing weight substantially reduced afib by taking the article Weight loss and exercise may ease atrial fibrillation. Tailoring an article similar to this and working the benefits of KardiaMobile into the article instantly becomes a decision stage content piece.

When taking this approach with content marketing, you need to select relevant content topics aligned with each pillar and the user’s interests — this is a fundamental strategy — for example, Coping with heart disease or Coping with Afib.

Other potential article series can be written around: What caused this?” (cause) “How will this affect my life?” (consequences), and “What can be done about it?”(control).

Identifying a cause of the illness provides patients with a direction for action plans to control the disease. Patients who have afib want to know the factors that caused their afib and what will promote its progression, and recommendations for modifying factors that might trigger afib and foster persistence of their afib.

Patients need to understand the limitations of drug or ablation therapy not to be distressed if they have afib episodes even though they are being treated with medications or have undergone cardiac ablation.

With afib, pulse taking is an essential strategy in monitoring response to treatment, whether the goal is rate control or maintenance of sinus rhythm, and KardiaMobile does this without the need for a patient to learn how to palpate their pulse, count its rate, and monitor the pattern for irregularity.

Sleep apnea is a common contributor to fatigue in patients with afib; this is another series of potential articles that bring high value to patients.

An afib patient’s inability to identify a modifiable cause for their afib can be emotionally distressing. Most will make efforts to exert control of the disease by seeking to find a cause or trigger for recurrent afib episodes, and this is where the value of the KardiaMobile data comes in. It also is a topic for articles on managing depression and negative emotions from afib.

Stress-induced afib and the inability to identify a modifiable cause for the afib can be emotionally distressing to patients, and some will make efforts to exert control by seeking to find a cause or trigger for recurrent afib episodes. This ties right into the KardiaMobile Premium offer and the ability to make personal notes, monitor pharmaceutical compliance, weight, and other potential triggers.

Patients’ need and want to know about their illness varies individually by their health care encounter and their belief that they can manage the disease. Afib patients wish to understand treatment options, with a rationale for each.

Patients’ beliefs about their illness influence their coping responses to their condition, which, in turn, influence the outcomes of care, such as adherence to the treatment regimen, ability to function, and psychological adjustment to the illness. This is an opportunity for Alivecor to create relevant, high-interest content for its customers and potential customers.

Notwithstanding the topic, or if the article is for the awareness stage or conversion stage, one thing is certain — the content should always be more relevant to using the product rather than the general topic being discussed.

Article structure

From the content topics, Alivecor writes, the content team’s goal needs to be focused on results. That means paid purchases and upgrades to the premium offer.

This results-first attitude can be accomplished in every article — every page should have two constant elements:

• A Call To Action on the sidebar
• Add a call to action in the article footer

These are elements commonly found on a blog that’s optimized for conversions.

A way for Alivecor to stand out is the constant use of advertorials.

An advertorial is a sales-oriented informational piece. It’s often an article that heavily promotes a product to turn readers into customers.

Most of the Alivecor articles should be advertorials.

Each article, when purposely structured, and written, so that’s not only has a high educational value and is informative (high quality) but must be structured in a way that gives specific reasons to add call-to-actions within the posts.

Every piece of content and the related topics should help you do something, for example, dealing with depression after diagnosis, how weight loss and exercise aid with the management and control of afib, how to find your afib triggers — essentially, they all help readers accomplish specific goals.

Take it one step further, and suggest:

Our product/service also helps you accomplish [goal], check out this [product/service], and see for yourself.

Many businesses would find this “salesy,” but Alivecor deals with a target audience that is actively looking for quality information and solutions. It’s a great way to push the readers to take that next step while still being contextually relevant to their interests.

Key takeaway: Alivecor needs to create content that is not only search friendly but provides a ton of invaluable information to potential and existing customers. Alivecor should not shy away from using its blog/content to drive new users at every possible opportunity.

Content Distribution

You can create great content that would resonate with your target audience; however, just posting it on your website is a guarantee for failure.

Repurposing Content:

You can increase your site sessions and contacts without spending money on ads, all by repurposing your long-form content.

Video repurposing:

Video performs best on social media, so turning your long-form content into video memes is excellent. Facebook videos alone get 135% more organic reach than photos.

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine. It processes over 3 billion, yes billion searches each month, and 100 million videos are uploaded every minute, so you want to post your videos here. Another hack is to upload a .vtt file of your transcriptions with the video, making every single word-searchable, which helps significantly with SEO.

Square videos are better to post on social feeds than landscape videos as they take up 78% more real estate on someone’s phone. In a study by Buffer, it was also found that square videos have led up to an 80–100% increase in engagement over landscape ones.

Vertical videos are optimized and sized specifically for Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories. Over 500 million users per day use Instagram Stories alone. It’s a great place to be and get seen, so posting content optimized for that platform is great.

Image Quotes:

Image quotes are still necessary as Facebook posts with photos still get 3x more engagement than those without them. These are also great to add variety to your feeds amongst the video.

When it comes to your image quotes: Images with people in them can have up to a 95% increase in conversions alone.

Thumbnails:

Thumbnails are crucial for both YouTube and Facebook but in different ways.

Facebook thumbnails are crucial for advertising your video memes. These thumbnails are always run through the Facebook Text Overlay Tool to ensure they have 20% or less text so that your ad runs like a dream and isn’t stopped for having too much text.

YouTube thumbnails that are consistent and have big, bold titles tell your audience what they’re about to watch before they even press play.

When posting these assets created from your long-form content, a few things to remember:

• Square assets are meant for social feeds, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• Vertical assets are intended for stories (Instagram and Facebook stories)
• Landscape assets are meant for YouTube.

Where To Post These Assets:

• Shuffle your repurposed assets across all platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
• Place different assets on each platform on the same day. For instance, post a quote on Instagram but a video meme on Facebook. Don’t post the exact same content on all platforms at once.
• They use Hubspot or a similar tool to share and track your social efforts. The important thing is to track it.
• Post to Facebook & LinkedIn groups with the right audience. Groups are an excellent opportunity to connect with potential leads and partners.
• Create and post on your own Facebook & LinkedIn groups.
• Tag and mention as many guests and/or customers as possible. This puts you in front of their audience and encourages them to share the content as well.
• Always include variation in terms of copy/text when posting on social media. Some statuses need to be longer and more engaging than others.
• Post image quotes both in terms of albums and separately. This makes sure they get seen everywhere.
• Post to IGTV. This is significant additional exposure for your video content.
• Add YouTube embedded videos to your blog for SEO with a summary of the video.

Forums:

Every product and disease state has a forum on the internet; it’s just a matter of searching for them. There will be people looking for helpful educational content to answer their questions and concerns from Quora to Reddit.

Engaging with your target audience in forums and Facebook groups helps spread your content in a non-intrusive manner while bringing value to these consumers. This also drives traffic to your website and increases the interaction on your content.

When you engage in these forums, your role is not to sell your product, and your purpose is to engage with your target audience. You want to ask and answer relevant questions and answer their questions.

Now you’re thinking, okay, so how do you do this?

For example, these two questions from the Facebook Group “Atrial Fibrillation Support Forum” could be quickly answered by showing empathy and adding a relevant introduction paragraph and link to a blog article.

By doing this, you are engaging directly with your target audience and adding value.

You are not selling.

Suppose you do this successfully and earn the community trust. In that case, they will respond with product sales, word of mouth marketing [WOM], and user-generated content [UGC] and are a built-in pool of customers you can refer directly to for surveys and feedback.

You can then build your own community of super fans who are your best advocates.

Paid Promoted Content:

If you’ve been hesitant to start promoting content with paid ads, it’s far more straightforward than you may believe. Many advertising platforms allow you to promote your content to a highly specific audience, drive qualified traffic and leads, and grow your customer base.

These include:

• Facebook Ads
• BuySellAds
• Outbrain and Taboola
• Reddit Ads
• YouTube Ads
• Google Ads
• Quora Ads
• Facebook Groups
• Medium
• Email
• Forums
• Pinterest Ads

Regardless of who your target customers are, you have an excellent chance of attracting them to your content.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a highly-personal method to speak directly to your audience. It allows you to leverage your brand voice consistently. Email marketing is easily the least expensive form of marketing. Not only is it economical, but it is also highly effective, for every $1 spent on email marketing will have an ROI of $40.

Email allows you to reach people who may not even know you are in the market. Not all your target audience are avid blog readers or use social media, but everyone reads their email.

Email marketing provides the ability to deliver a customized message to your subscribers, and it is relationship-focused.

An effective e-newsletter strategy is very content-driven and may include humorous content, an advice column from the point-of-view of a fictional character representing the brand, and boosting brand awareness. This increases the likelihood that subscribers will open the company’s emails.

An engaged, growing email list is one of the greatest marketing assets for any company; email keeps the brand front of mind with your target audience and customers. People who have opted to receive email updates and relevant content from a business directly to their email account create a high bar and competitive moat.

To grow the Alivecor email list without spending budget monies on ads, this can be accomplished through numerous means ranging from lead generation — consumers subscribe via the company’s website — by leaning on the company’s content strategy or by developing a quiz or contest and promoting these to their target audience.

Event Marketing

Attending consumer-based trade shows where the Alivecor target audience is predominant is a great way to directly put the product in your audience’s hands and increase brand visibility.

For instance, the AARP Life@50+, Tampa Bay Senior Expo, or the Tulsa World Senior Living Expo offer free health screenings and seminars on health and wellness that Alivecor can easily tap into these captive audiences.

Another suggestion is to hire several retired nurses in Florida and put on a cardiac wellness seminar at local HOA communities. These communities are very active and have well-run community centers. For a nominal cost, including a per diem for the nurses, Alivecor can easily reach thousands of target audiences and create word-of-mouth marketing.

These events give Alivecor social media marketing materials that drive engagement when used appropriately, and when tagging the attendees in the posts, it drives viral shares.

Event marketing allows Alivecor to interact with potential customers and market to them directly. This gives potential customers the chance to see KardiaMobile and the premium service first hand and meet the people behind the business, creating a memorable impression and establishing a relationship you can’t buy or garner through any other marketing form.

Summary

An exceptional product, an under-served market, combined with a vision that anyone with afib can actively manage the disease state.

By doing a deeper dive and understanding their target audience’s needs, and then using each digital channel to attract and convert those users, Alivecor can expect rapid growth.

This forms the foundation of a world-class marketing and growth strategy.

Alivecor has grown significantly during the last seven years, and they aren’t showing signs of slowing down.

DISCLAIMER: I have no association with Alivecor or its management or founders. This case study was done using publicly available information on the Internet. If you would like to discuss how I can help you with your marketing and marketing strategy, contact me on Linkedin

The US health care system is under enormous pressure as the county’s population ages and chronic conditions become commonplace.

The traditional fee-for-service model, based on incentives for the volume of treatment over the “right” treatment, is increasingly unsustainable.

Value-based care, linking processes, structures, and reimbursement to patient outcome, is viewed as an improved and sustainable healthcare model for the 21st century.

Rebuilding health care systems

Rebuilding healthcare systems by giving patients a better quality of life is what value-based care is all about. Prioritizing the quality of treatment over quantity, eliminating waste and duplication, and delivering more care for less spend.

A transition to value-based care brings tangible, widespread benefits to payor and health care organizations and patients, including improved clinical outcomes and a reduction in costly, care-related complications. Including reduced patient readmission rates and emergency care episodes decreased, in addition to eliminating unnecessary surgeries.

For value-based health care to be effective, it requires realigning incentives and changing payment structures, focusing on giving patients quality treatment that improves health outcomes, instead of doing as many treatments as possible to make more money.

Form Partnerships

The payor community needs to form partnerships with the health care organizations, the provider community and offer sustainable, long-term value-based care contracts and value-based payment models. Both providers and payors need to develop an approach to integrate better social factors that are determinants of health and reevaluate healthcare spending are vital steps to drive value-based care.

It’s possible to create value-based care models to deliver high-value care with all stakeholders engaged that reduce the overall costs of care while improving the quality of care. Care coordination is paramount and driven by patient outcomes. Primary care physicians need to be engaged and care based on coordination of care and outcomes.

Adapt Payment Models

Payors need to reimburse and pay the clinicians and health systems adequately for doing those services and hold providers accountable for the things they shouldn’t have been doing.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation explained that strategies to ensure that payers take on insurance risk and health care providers take on performance risk include risk adjustment or risk stratification and risk corridors. Value-based health care payment systems should ensure that payers retain the insurance risk (the risk of patients’ health problems or more severe health problems) and that providers accept performance risk (the risk of delivering care for a particular health problem is delivered efficiently and effectively).

New value-based payment arrangements and benefits designs need to be developed and agreed to aligned for health systems, physicians, clinicians, and their patients to have easily accessible and affordable services. The evidence shows will make them healthier and improve their quality of life. The cost of care needs to be reflected in the outcome.

Obstacles to adoption

Fee-for-service payment structures and regulations are significant obstacles preventing the adoption of value-based health care. Then layer on care unit alignment and pricing structures.

Today, reimbursement is tied to pieces of care delivered. Health care providers are incentivized to create more complex care to make more money vs. improved outcomes.

Health care needs to be organized around the patient, embracing the right technology and data access to improve the overall patient experience.

The Learning Curve

Health care providers at every step of the delivery system must have a clear strategy to drive implementation. The strategy needs to involve the mundane, from patient wait times and the obvious, unnecessary treatment to managing rising costs.

Organize Health Care Delivery Around Patients

Fee-for-service healthcare is organized around a fee structure, whereas value-based health care requires that care and the health care system be organized around the patient. This means shifting an organization’s culture and overall perspective.

As with the medical home, integrated practice units in hospitals encompass the full cycle of care and all patients with similar needs. It means moving away from generalists to more specialized care based on the patient.

The goal moves from treating the parts to treating the whole patient and improving the patient’s quality of life. This is a real culture shift for payors, providers, and the patient. The patient focuses care delivers benefits that the patient can see.

Embrace Technology

Embrace technology, the rapid advancement of health care technology offers the ability to reduce costs and improve health outcomes. From artificial intelligence (AI) to machine learning (MI), enhancing human readings of imaging to telehealth allows for greater efficiency and insights in health care delivery.

Technology offers the ability to improve communication, enhancing the relay of information instantaneously and accurately.

Break The Data Silos

Data in electronic medical records / electronic health records (EMR/EHR) is siloed and often lacking.

Break the data silos and give full access to data to enhance the insight into patient populations.

Integrated care requires datasets to be available to all health care providers to reduce the cost of care. By breaking the data silos, emergency departments, clinics, hospitals, and local health care providers have access to unseen connections to offer a more targeted level of care.

Develop strong data standards. Garbage in is still garbage out. Instilling strong data standards reassures patients and health care providers that the level of care they are delivering is warranted.

Sustainable Health Care Is Possible

Value-based- care is sustainable and can lower the cost of care while improving outcomes and quality of life if the health care systems culture is ready to adopt change and embrace new service models.

Primary care practices and health systems as a whole must be engaged and willing to adapt to the needs to address the social, economic, personal, and environmental factors that influence health status are or determinants of the health of their patients.

Value-based health care can address access to health care services and the quality of health services that can impact overall health.

Yesterday discussed the basics of search engine optimization, covering in detail what SEO is and how it works.

If you browse through forums or the Reddit SEO topic, you’ll often see people asking what the difference is between on-page and off-page SEO and which one has a more significant impact on website rankings.

The thing with SEO is one size never fits all, every situation is different and is dependent on the website.

On-page and off-page SEO are not the same things, let’s define what each is with a few examples and how to optimize each.

On-page and off-page SEO, whats the difference?

SEO consists of two main categories — on-page and off-page.

Think of them as the two branches of a Y. They are each unique and both critical to running a successful SEO campaign

What is On-page search engine optimization (SEO)

On-page SEO deals with the pages on a website, both in regards to content and the backend structure of a site.

On-page optimization goal is to improve individual web pages to rank higher in search engines results driving qualified organic and targeted traffic to your website.

On-page SEO gives you control over the factors that influence rankings. Below is a list of the most critical on-page SEO factors:

1. Title tags

Title tags tell visitors and search engines what the given page is about and establish relevance. Title tags are one of the most important on-page factors for SEO. There are best practices you can follow to enhance the effectiveness of your title tags.

2. Meta descriptions

A meta description is a short paragraph of text that tells search engines and website visitors what the page is about.

Meta descriptions were an essential factor for search engines in the past, however today, Google algorithm (AI) can determine the content and meaning of the page. As a result, their significance has somewhat declined.

Google will create a meta description if one is missing.

That stated, catching searchers’ attention and get them to click on your link still depends on the meta description and its best to create highly relevant meta descriptions yourself.

Meta descriptions are unique to each page, contain the focus keyword, includes between 135 and 160 characters and are written in actionable voice.

3. Keywords and phrases

Keywords are one of the leading characteristics of on-page SEO.

As with the other signals, keywords assist search engines to identify what a given page is about. Although, today, Google algorithm can determine what a page is about without specifying keywords today.

Researching and building a list of keywords to target is one of the most critical first steps in any SEO campaign, is an ongoing and ever-changing process.

One of the most critical aspects of SEO is developing the initial list of keywords; this can be a harsh task, read more about some of the best practices.

4. Search engine friendly (SEF) URL

Below are two examples of search engine URLs, which one do you think is the search and user-friendly one?

If you said the second one, you are correct. Google loves user-friendly elements. Most CMSs can generate SEF URLs. Pay close attention to ensure that your URLs are optimized.

5. Heading tags (H1, H2, H3)

Every website needs to focus on the user experience, and heading tags are no exception.

The H1 tag (headline) is one of the first elements that site visitors see when landing on a page. Headings serve to reassure visitors that they are in the right place and have found what they’re searching for unless you are practicing click bait. Click bait is when the headline is used to draw in the reader. However, the article has little reference. Click bait drives clicks and not much else.

With the Google Hummingbird update, Google got much better at answering specific user questions.

Optimizing H1 tags for specific search intent and search query affords you the opportunity for the page to be a featured snippet at the top of the search results page.

Below is an example of Google featured snippet:

The H1 for this page includes the phrase “What is Rich SMS?” and answers the search query straight in the SERP.

6. Internal linking and anchor text

Anchor text is the text in a hyperlink that you click on. You see anchored links regularly, but you probably did not know what they represent regarding SEO.

Anchor text links to web pages internally, within a website. The descriptive keywords in your anchored text are essential elements to establish a site architecture and help spread link juice.

Linking internally to your website is one of the quickest ways to give your content a little boost and experience an SEO uptick.

7. Robots.txt

The robots exclusion protocol (REP), or robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct search engine robots the pages to crawl and which pages not to crawl. Robot text is found on every website at www.website.com/robots.txt, and it looks like this:

Each bot has something called ‘crawl budget’ (this is the number of pages Google will crawl on a site on any given day).

The size of the crawl budget is dependent on the size of the website, the number of inbound links to the site and the number of errors the bot encounters. If the bot doesn’t have enough budget to crawl your newly submitted or optimized pages, this will delay your SEO efforts.

That’s why it’s important to ensure that archived pages — pages with thin, low-quality content and duplicate content pages are not indexed allowing the crawl budget for the pages that matter.

8. XML sitemap

An XML sitemap lists the URLs for your website and acts as a roadmap to the critical pages. A sitemap aids Google to find the pages you deem critical for your website and allows search engines to crawl the site intelligently.

9. Website performance

SEO is very much dependent on website performance; Google wants to rank websites that provide an exceptional user experience higher. Page speed, a mobile responsive design are crucial factors in your website’s performance an impact your search rankings.

Google announced in 2010 that site speed was officially a ranking factor in their algorithm. A slow website kills the user experience, negatively impacts SEO and will dramatically impact your bottom line.

Numerous studies have shown that 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Every second that passes before a page loads increases the abandonment rate.

Google also announced in 2016 that they were experimenting with mobile-first indexing. In 2018, they are making the hard shift to a mobile-first index. This means that search engines will look at the mobile version of a page’s content to evaluate if it’s relevant to the user search query.

This means that a responsive mobile website is more critical than ever.

On-page SEO covers a lot of ground. However, you want to spend your time and effort where it matters most. Below is the anatomy of a correctly optimized page, courtesy of Moz:

Off-page Search Engine Optimization

Off-page SEO is the actions taken outside your website that impact search engine rankings. You have less control over these.

Off-page consists of link-building. Link building can be accomplished through various means, from guest blogging, outreach, participating in forums and leaving comments on blogs.

Off-site SEO also includes social amplifications, reviews, and brand mentions. These all play a critical role in off-page SEO signals.

The number and quality of links pointing to your website are still one of the top three signals taken into account when Google ranks a site.

Google considers backlinks to be a vote for your website. Backlinks are a vote of confidence demonstrating that someone outside your site trusts your content finds it’s valuable enough to link to it.

Below are some of the most common off-page SEO techniques:

1. Manual link-building

Manually reaching out and asking for the link is what manual link building is. These are not naturally occurring links. A good example is when you ask a customer to link back to your website.

Another conventional technique is involving influencers in content creation, mentioning them in your content piece or expanding on a topic they discussed and asking them to share it or link back to you in their next section.

2. Self-created links

Website submission to directories, commenting on blogs, participating in forums and commenting while adding the URL of your website of a page on your site as part of your online signature, are all examples of self-created links.

Doing this excessively may earn you a significant penalty from Google, they may consider some of these activities as black hat SEO.

You need to make sure that your comments and input in online communities and forums are providing value. They should not be spam or self-promotional with the sole purpose to earn a backlink.

Only submit your websites to trustworthy directories with high domain authority.

3. Social sharing

Social media doesn’t have the SEO clout as many people may think it does.

Google confirmed that social signals aren’t a direct ranking factor. Google doesn’t care how many Twitter followers, Facebook likes or content shares on social media when ranking a website.

Social media does provide indirect SEO benefits from:

• Increased inbound links and brand mentions from online visibility
• Improved brand awareness from increased brand exposure to a bigger audience
• Social Media helps you build an audience for your website

Although social media may not play a direct role in website rankings, don’t discount it. Social media enables you to build an audience for your site, and social selling does drive revenue.

Social media can make a content piece go viral. A viral loop results in people naturally link back to you and mentioning your brand.

4. Guest posting

Guest posting adds benefits to SEO and your brand in general.

It’s a win-win. Guest posting takes a lot of time and effort. However, the ROI is excellent. Guest posting should be a key role in your digital strategy. Below are some aspects to consider:

• Sets your brand as an authority on your subject
• Expands your exposure and reach new audiences
• Guest blogging drives serious referral traffic
• Builds relationships with valuable influencers and other notable figures in your industry.

Guest posting can drive SEO and increases brand mentions and backlinks to your website. The key is to create valuable content that people want to read.

Most guest posts allow a short bio box, usually at the bottom of the blog post. Its a brief description giving you the opportunity to introduce yourself, adding a link to your social profiles or website. Here’s an example where the author has included a link to their site:

5. Brand mentions

Brand mentions and locating unlinked brand mentions is a powerful link-building technique, and it’s an essential exercise for new websites to monitor brand mentions while trying to build the first 50 backlinks.

The easiest way to monitor brand mentions is by using third-party solutions like Mention or deploying advanced Google search commands.

Once you’ve uncovered websites that mention your brand, employees or founders, you can email them and politely ask them to include a link along with the brand mention.

This will not only get new backlinks, but these mentions can bring tons of referral traffic.

On-page SEO vs. Off-page SEO: Which is More Important?

Both are equally important.

Both needed to garner good ranking on search engines.

There are some instances where it would be better to focus on one more than the other. Below are three situations along with how you should allocate resources and time:

1. An aged domain with an active link profile

A website which has been around for a while has evolved organically and managed to get a good number of backlinks over the years.

The content has been neglected and web pages which have never been optimized, many are no longer relevant or have thin low-quality content.

This type of websites is an SEO goldmine.

These websites tend to have an abundance of technical and on-page SEO issues ranging from duplicate pages, old, out of date keyword research, non-SEF URLs, and more.

In this case, focus your resources on on-page optimization. By optimizing and refreshing old out of date content, you’re likely to see a decent boost in SEO rankings.

2. A brand new domain

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The debate on if you should focus on content or link-building with a new domain causes quite the discussion in the SEO community, and this debate will never be settled.

I’m in the ‘content comes first’ community.

With a brand new website, there is no content. Why would an established site with a high domain authority want to link back to you?

The new website wouldn’t have anything worth linking to.

A website selling a disruptive product or service may have an easier time to get people talking about it and cultivate backlinks to the website. In a saturated market, chances are you’ll need 10x content to get people talking about your product(s).

Content is the backbone of every successful website and marketing campaign; the web runs on content, so start with content.

3. A website with few backlinks, no distribution strategy with valuable content

Just producing great content and waiting for it to get discovered is a dead zone today. Maybe it never really did get found.

Ever notice how many blogs there are out there that have valuable content that nobody reads.

Regardless of how good your content is, it wouldn’t get the attention it deserves without a distribution or amplification strategy. Most businesses fail to realize this fact.

In this case, the best action plan to shortlist the best articles, give them an update and put a thorough distribution and outreach strategy in place.

A distribution and outreach strategy should be multifaceted, consisting of action items as contacting influencers in your niche, sponsor the content on other websites, run a paid social media campaign utilize native advertising.

There are so many options available on how to distribute content. This should win you enough backlinks to get you started.

Also, use your existing content to run a broken link building campaign.

Want to Stay Ahead Of Your Marketing Strategy?

Ideally, this article gives some insight into on-page and off-page SEO.

If you are interested in updating your marketing strategy by implementing an SEO strategy, contact us, to talk about how Outsell Digital can help.

This was originally published at: https://outselldigital.com/on-page-vs-off-page-seo/

Developing exciting content keeps your existing customers and visitors engaged and attracts new potential customers.

The primary goal for every piece of content is to be read and appreciated by as many people as possible.

You can achieve this by creating relevant content for your target audience.

If you find that you are getting stuck on coming up with contetn ideas, take a look at this article for assistence: 6 Tools to Help You Come up with Fresh Content Ideas

Does content need to be relevant to your audience?

Luckily, this can become rather easy if you follow these basic tips and tricks:

1. Know your audience

To start any successful marketing activity, you need to get the basics right.

Defining who your target audience is, is critical not only to content marketing but also to any other aspect of your marketing campaign.

Marketing has many facets, including social media, email marketing, PPC, SEM, SMM, native advertising and so forth, you need to know who you are talking to create a message that appeals to the target audience.

For your marketing to be successful, you need to create a buyer persona.

In short, a buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer(s) that is based on quantifiable market research and real data about your existing customers.

A buyer persona is a robust document that covers the attributes and demographics, background, motivations and goals, identifiers, hobbies and interests, challenges and everyday objections among others of your target customer.

Obviously, you don’t have to have all of these details, but the more detailed your customer persona is, and the more you know about your audience, the better.

Here is an example of a buyer persona:

A buyer persona description is very a very detailed document that dives into every element of your target audience. Often the most valuable information is in the smallest details.

For example, one of the leading challenges of Diane is the fact that she has too many responsibilities and is extremely busy with a high-stress job.

Based on her profile, we would offer content that gives tips on time management, multi-tasking or maybe an article reviewing the best solutions and software solutions to help save time, cut costs and increase the use of best practices would be of interest to this persona.

Identifying the right buyer persona is the essential step to producing relevant content for your target audience.

Take the time to develop relevant buyer personas for a complete target audience identity. This will aid you in any other marketing activities.

2. Address their questions and concerns

After you have identified your target audience is and their persona, now you need to address their questions and concerns.

An excellent place to start is doing research, including taking the time to create a detailed list of keywords that are applicable and appeal to each buyer persona.

After you have identified the main topics, do further research through using a keyword research tool (SEMRush if one of my preferred goes to tools).

Keywords analysis is critical, and you would be wise to dive into niche markets for the most significant impact and to drive rankings. Backlinko has written one of the best guides on how to do keyword research that will make an impact.

The Customer Service department, Service, and Business Development department should be some of your first stops when looking for customer insights. These are the people who are speaking to your existing and potential customers every day.

A quick way to interact with internal department and not impede in their work day to put together a survey or questionnaire for each department asking for their input including what the common questions customers have or what the pain points that you can address.

You should discover that 10% of all customer service inquiries could be answered in the form of written content, short video or infographic.

To stay relevant with your content schedule and to increase customer satisfaction, content has to be timely and relevant.

Other places that are often overlooked but hold valuable information on trending topics that are relative to your audience are forums such as Reddit or Quora along with automotive forums. Also, talk with your sales, service and customer service departments.

Forums are a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its users according to topics. Below is a screenshot from Quora:

Quora is a way to great find questions which you can turn into a substantial content piece by simply answering them.

3. Show, not tell

The future of content marketing is video, and it will dominate marketing strategies in the very near future.

According to Cisco, 69% of all consumer internet traffic by the end of 2018 will be video.

In addition to video, other visual contents such as infographics, slideshares, and branded images are among the most preferred types of content. People are visual by nature.

Studies have shown that 65% of people are visual learners and 90% of the information coming to the human brain is visual.

As our attention span has become shorter and shorter and we expect content to be designed and structured to be skimmed through and not read.

The goal of content marketing is to ensure that your content is diverse and that your written material has visuals to refer to making the content engaging.

It is essential to show people verses telling or explaining how to do something. This is where the art of storytelling comes into play.

People relate to and love stories.

If you browse the web, you will find a countless number of articles explain what to do but not how to do it.

Readers and visitors of your content will vary from experts to beginners, and you want to ideally appeal to both (the amateurs will one day become the experts, and you want them to have a favorable impression of your brand.

Always try to give practical examples, explain everything down to the tiniest detail or even share personal details if it can help us get the point across. You are storytelling.

4. Trends, trends, and more trends

To stay relevant and current, it is critical to also keep up with your industry trends.

You don’t want to be producing out of date content nobody will be interested in reading.

For example, of you are in the telephone market and a new type of phone systems was released, the first thing you may want to write would be discussing the benefits, advantages and disadvantages, best features or any other aspects of the system.

You need to stay up on industry trends if you don’t rest assured, your competition will, and that’s where the forward-thinking customers will go.

A good content marketer knows that staying on top of industry trends is essential, but keeping up with other trends related to your industry essential.

The goal of content marketing is to engage your target audience and to be known as a thought leader in the market.

Everyone needs a content strategy, but are lost on where to start, where to please contact us. We would be honored to help with a few points to get you started or to take on a more significant role.

Our goal is to see your business become a success.

This was originally posted on: https://outselldigital.com/to-engage-your-target-market-your-content-needs-to-be-relevant-to-your-audience/

One of the best ways to do so is to influence how your target market perceives your company, and publishing quality content online is a great place to start.

Research shows that 78% of consumers believe that companies providing custom content want to build long-term relationships. That goes a long way for brands trying to find new and keep customers, especially when the purchase is a big ticket item like a new car or auto service.

Content that is informative solves a problem and educates, that earns trust positions you as one of the leading authorities in the industry.

Content that is continuously sales based to push your product is a turnoff and depletes trust.

Every business needs to position themselves a partner with their target audience, you are in this for the long haul and want to foster in-depth, long-term relationships. Your target audience wants to trust you and build a relationship that stands the test of time.

Today, more than ever brands need to establish an online presence to stand out from the crowd.

Facebook ads, PPC ads, TV ads are all great and serve their collective purpose to ‘brand’ your company; however, they do not drive user engagement.

The consequences of not being innovative or finding engaging ways to stand out in today’s increasingly competitive online world may result in your brand and message being overlooked and lost in the crowd.

Today, search engines reward websites who continually update their website content with fresh, in-depth articles that answer the search intent with higher rankings and push down sites which are stagnant.

There are many different types of content from blog posts, to eBooks, white papers and even videos the ability to communicate with your target market, to generate new interest and grow your audience is virtually limitless.

53% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority (HubSpot, 2017).’

You may be thinking that content isn’t right for your business if you are still on the fence about content marketing or need some reassurance to continue to invest in content marketing, below is a list of long-term benefits to consider.

7 Long-Term Benefits of Content Marketing

#1: Improved SEO Results

If your sole outcome for producing content is to improve search engine rankings you to change your mindset.

Content should be utilized to add Avalue to your audience, if you are solving your target audience problem, educating them and answering their questions, your customers will love your content, and we expect the search engines will too.

Quality content marketing can significantly improve your search engine visibility. However, you need to think like your customer and how they search with intent. People don’t search for “Honda,” they search for long tail phrases such as, “what Honda holds its value over five years,” or “what Honda model has the best crash results.”

The SEO benefits are that each new content piece you add to your blog or resources page is another page Google is going to index.

More pages may not necessarily lead to more search traffic; the more quality content you have on pages that answers the searchers intent you have indexed, the more opportunities you get to rank for in these search queries.

As you produce quality content, you’ll likely to get people linking to the content, sharing your content on other forums and blogs.

Adding graphics to your articles helps you rank in Google’s image search.

The best thing about image search is that it’s much less competitive and can be a significant source of traffic. According to Moz, the number of visits resulting from image search accounts for 20% to 60% of all visits.

Think of a spoke and wheel; you need to establish a base piece of content that is the hub of a subject matter. Then link other pieces of content to this piece of content and continue to build the spokes. This is internal linking.

Internal links are links that link content from one page on a website to a different page on the same website. Your goal is to build strong internal links throughout your site and content allows you to do this.

Pages of content on related topics build good internal linking architecture. This will help important pages and cornerstone content rank better. Below is an example of internal linking:

Source: Neil Patel

#2: Increase traffic to your website

Providing valuable content to your audience to quickly access drives traffic to your site. Over time, with improved search visibility, the traffic to your website will increase.

Guest posts, native advertising using content on your website and syndication where appropriate are all ways to build backlinks to your site. You prompt the reader to click-through to your website and read internally linked articles. This improves the user experience providing more content that educates on the topic of interest.

Adding a short, informative bio at the end of a guest post is a quick way to drive more traffic to your website you can leverage this description by mentioning your products, services or company.

Below is an example of how the author has anchored her services and linked back to her website. If Ann had mentioned her social media profiles, she would have grown her social media following.

An example of an author bio

#3: Establish your brand as the authority

Producing educational and informative content influences how people think of your brand and what emotional appeal they associate it with trustworthy or dishonesty, expert or novice, educational or salesey and so on.

Your goal is to position yourself through your content as the go-to resource for any solutions to problems or questions your target audience may have.

Today, 94% of buyers conduct online research at some point in the buying process. Establishing yourself as the “go-to source” in the awareness and consideration stages of the sales funnel puts you in strong contention to be the “go-to” website as they are considering and are ready to make a purchase.

Then layering in guest posting or content syndication to help establish you as a thought leader. Guest posting and syndicating content on authoritative websites your target audience visits drives additional credibility.

#4: Improve your brand awareness and recognition

Strong content shows your target customers who your company is and what your brand stands for.

If you want your content to have the most significant impact and reach as many people as possible in your market, your brand awareness strategy should be geared toward mainstream topics that appeal to high-authority news sites with large followings.

Examples of this are suggested articles such as:

• 12 Things to Consider Before Buying a Used Honda
• Why You Should Purchase A Certified Former Lease Vehicle
• How to Save $14,000 on your Next Car Purchase
• What SUV is Right For Your Family
• 9 Things To Consider When Selecting an SUV or Crossover Vehicle
• What to look for in a used car
• How to extend the life of your new car
• These are the best vehicle for your growing families needs
• How to Select a Dealership That Meets Your Immediate and Long-Term Needs

The consumer’s ability to recognize, recall and associate your brand with critical qualities they are looking when starting down the car purchase path and as they move through the sales funnel is essential into deciding which dealership they choose to ultimately purchase from.

Content helps establish your brand’s identity by using brand-specific language and tone of voice, content marketing also aids in delivering important messages about your products or services.

#5: Content Marketing Generates Qualified Leads

The number one marketing challenge today for marketers is generating traffic and leads (63%). Content marketing is a great way to do this.

Source: HubSpot

One of the most impactful benefits of content marketing is the ability to attract new leads.

Research continues to find that companies that blog generate 67% more leads than companies without content (blogs/articles/videos, etc.) or content-rich websites.

Gating some content or adding downloadable PDFs of checklists, ebooks or infographics that accent or summarize an article where the reader is required to fill out a form to access it is an easy way to generate leads and build your email list.

Once you’ve have the readers contact details, you can nurture them with more relevant content through a bi-monthly newsletter that incorporates educational content and special offers or coupons. This aids in moving the prospect through the sales funnel and ideally into sold customers.

Content marketing continues to deliver an ROI even after its published. Old blog posts and articles continue to generate leads over time, content stays searchable, and it’s a good practice to update older pieces of content every once in a while to keep it fresh and add in market changes that have occurred since ht initial publication. Evergreen content is an asset to your business and offers a compounding return on investment (ROI).

#6: Cost-effectiveness & loyalty

While the initial investment may seem significant, the amount of time needed for planning and executing a strong content marketing strategy are well worth the investment.

When compared to other outbound marketing strategies, content marketing still proves more cost-effective in delivering results.

In fact, content marketing costs up to 62% less than traditional marketing, and considering that 615 million devices have installed ad blocker technology and it’s across all generations, fewer people today are seeing your ads.

Then when you look at ad spend:

91% of total ad spend is viewed for less than a second; as a result, $38 billion in digital ad spend was wasted in 2017.

84% of consumers expect brands to create content; consumers want content from brands.

Brand loyalty is built when you provide consistent, engaging and riveting content. Loyalty can last for years, creating a steady flow of people who are ready to engage with you when they are ready to make a purchase.

Brand loyalty is influenced by updated and relevant content, resulting in your consumers returning to buy more of your product or service. From new cars to auto service.

The community that results from content marketing provides a consistent source of revenue for your company, reducing the pressure to continuously seek new customers.

#7: The Type of Content Car Dealers & Brands Should Be Creating Matters

Buying a car is stressful for most people, it’s a big ticket item that warrants time and research before a buying decision is made.

Car buyers want to be as educated as possible before stepping onto the lot for a test drive, and most have narrowed their decision down to 3 vehicles long before they showed up on the dealership lot.

Car brands and dealers can help buyers with this process by developing and syndicating educational and helpful content.

Below are three types of content marketing auto dealerships can create to bring buyers back to their sites again and again.

Tips

Cars are a significant purchase, and it can be an intimidating process for buyers today. If anything the car selection has increased as has features, the move to add additional technology into cars, including and the connected vehicle add to consumers need for education.

Articles and blog posts that include topics similar to:

• “How The Connected Car Will Make Your Life Easier”
• “Do You Need A Connected Car”
• How to Maintain Your Car today to Extend Its Lifespan.”
• “What is the Best Vehicle for Your Needs”

All offer educational aspects for car buyers.

These types of articles, ease the car buyers concerns by giving them information and downloadable tip lists that can quickly build confidence in your brand and help develop a relationship where there may not have been one previously or to enhance the relationship, building additional trust in your dealership.

Common Questions

Giving auto buyers a place to find answers to common questions, or even ask questions of their own, is another excellent way to build deep relationships. This aids your ability to assert authority and knowledge on the subject matter, giving car buyers and drivers a go-to resource that they trust and can turn to as needed.

Checklists

Checklists are evergreen material that stands the test of time. They can be used over and over again without the need to update them.

For example, create a downloadable checklist that car buyers can print out and take with them to the dealership lot gives buyers a boost of confidence, and help improve the relationship you’re fostering.

This was originally published on: https://outselldigital.com/7-long-term-benefits-of-content-marketing/

When you have been running a blog or website on a topic for a while, it can get difficult to generate new and original ideas without repeating existing content.

The option of recycling or repurposing existing content is there, but it’s a short-term fix since you still have to produce new relevant content to keep your audience interested.

Below are a few tools that we use to help us when developing new content ideas.

Content marketing tools to help you come up with fresh content ideas

Keyword Planners

Answer the Public

Google Trends

Quora

Feedly & other news feeds

Content Idea Generators

Google’s Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is quite an obvious one, but it strongly deserves to hold the first position on our list. The keyword planner is mainly meant to help you build new Adwords search campaigns or expand existing ones, but it is also very useful regarding providing you with useful content ideas based on searches related to your keyword.

To use Google’s Keyword Planner you first need to set up a free Adwords account in case, you don’t have one. Google will ask you for your billing details, but you can skip this step if you’re only planning to use it for the keyword search without running any campaigns.

The keyword planner will provide you with information on the volume of monthly searches, the competition and suggested bid price for particular keywords related to your query. The best way to search for content ideas is to make sure that you don’t limit yourself to only concepts closely related to your search terms; make sure that you have selected to also search broadly associated ideas to your search term in the customize your search section.

After you enter your query, the keyword planner will generate a long list of different ideas based on the relevance to the keyword. We suggest that you cover both trending topics with high competition for the particular query and less popular and common long-tail keywords which are likely to bring you traffic over the long run. Here is an example using unified communications:

The keywords I have chosen and circled are cloud-based unified communications and benefits of unified communications with average monthly searches ranging between 10 and 100. These are only two amongst the hundreds of options you can choose from, so as you can see the keyword planner gives you a good starting point for your next content piece.

A similar tool to Google’s Keyword Planner is Moz’s Keyword Explorer. Moz’s tool provides you with data on the volume of searches, difficulty, opportunity, and potential to rank for the particular keyword. The keyword explorer also provides you with keyword suggestions, SERP analysis, and mentions.

Answer the Public

This is one of my very favorite tools to use when looking for fresh content ideas, hence the second position on the list. Answer the Public helps you identify potential topics by fetching Google search query suggestions and presenting them in different categories in a very visually attractive way, also allowing you to save the generated images for future use.

You merely need to enter a keyword and select a country on the right-hand side and Answer The Public will suggest hundreds of content ideas in seconds. Here is a screenshot of my query for cybersecurity:

As you can see, there are hundreds of suggestions that the tool fetched in seconds and which are divided into two main categories — questions and prepositions — and then also separated into subcategories to make it even more comprehensive.

Google Trends

Another great tool from Google is Google Trends, as most of you are probably familiar with already. Google Trends is quite a useful tool if you are unclear about your starting points and want to see what is trending. For instance, if there is something relevant to your business activity you can research more details on the trending subject along with the trend for some increased short-term traffic. It is also helpful for comparing a few different topics when you are unsure which one to focus on.

Quora

Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its users. When you register for a Quora account you select your interests which can range from very generic topics (such as Marketing) to very niche ones (such as discussions around the email marketing software MailChimp); this process helps create your personalized feed of questions relevant to your interests.

In my feed, I can see all kinds of questions from How does social media affect SEO? to In MailChimp, how do I set up split automation, so that one email opens and the other doesn’t?.

Quora is a great tool not only to identify questions and get new content ideas by merely answering and expanding on them but also to promote your existing content if you have already produced some relevant to the question at hand.

Feedly & other news feeds

Feedly, as most of you may already know, is a news aggregator that compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user. Feedly is handy and saves you a lot of valuable time as you can quickly read all the news that interest you in a single place, instead of checking out dozens of news sites and blogs separately.

As Feedly is very popular, most blogs and websites have RSS readers so you can quickly add them to your Feedly feed and follow them from there. Feedly also enables you to organize all topics of interest in different categories. For example, I have separate tabs for marketing, sales, and technology where I can quickly scan through the latest updates on the subjects.

You can also filter and organize the way you view the stories by most popular, popular + latest, latest, and oldest. Here is a quick preview of Feedly’s dashboard:

Flipboard is another news and social network aggregator that brings together news, popular stories and conversations around any interest. Similarly to Feedly, you pick your favorite topics and sub-topics to help Flipboard personalize your feed for you. The main difference between Flipboard and Feedly is that Flipboard is a lot more visual, it’s like having a board with all the digital magazines that you like in one place, as you can see on the screenshot below.

Content Idea Generators

Portent Content Idea Generator, as its name suggests, is a tool which generates content ideas for you. You merely have to enter your topic or subject, and it will create a title suggestion for you. However, the downside of Portent is that it only generates one idea at a time (unlike Answer the Public which gives you hundreds of suggestions to choose from). Additionally, the ideas are not as relevant as with other tools, and important will only be used for a somewhat informal and conversational type of content and writing style.

Another similar tool to Portent is HubSpot’s Blog Idea Generator. Hubspot’s tool asks you to enter three nouns, and it suggests five content titles based on these nouns. However, the ideas are quite repetitive, and again the style is more informal and conversational.

We hope this article has been of interest. If you want to improve your content strategy but you don’t know where to start, shot us an email and we are happy to help!

This was originally posted on: https://outselldigital.com/6-tools-to-develop-fresh-content-ideas/

Social media when utilized correctly and with a purpose builds a community.

Brands that take on a mentoring role, providing the tools, techniques, and strategies for their customers to become more effective marketers in achieving their own goals, creating a win-win for all.

In today’s social business marketplace, brands that hope to build a loyal and growing community do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow a community to develop and engage around these values.

How To Build A Community On Social Media

So does a brand use social media to build a community and what should they be posting on social media to achieve these goals?

The last thing that I would advise any brand to do is to join communities on social media, add no value and think that you have accomplished something. You have not.

You have to engage with the target audience!

This is where vulnerability comes in. A community is about engagement, with honest, open communication around a common purpose.

The purpose can be anything from clean water to skydiving to food. However, you have to engage and become part of the community.

Dedicate a few minutes a day, hop onto any social media platform of your choice and respond to questions, comments, memes.

Share your perspective and opinions, offer solutions, discuss common problems.

The only way to get to know your target audience is if you share yourself, your thoughts and insights and values.

Follow up

Here’s the next step.

Once you’ve engaged with people online, select a few that you felt you made a deeper connection with and send a DM.

No. Don’t ask them out.

Send them a resource such as a link to a blog post that will help them with a problem they are dealing with, or a funny meme to lighten up the day.

Ask for clarification on something they posted that you are genuinely interested in learning more about, ask for their input on product benefits. Bring them into your internal community.

The key is to start building a personal relationship with them.

Continue this process and start the process with others and over time you will have built an active community.

As the community develops, people will have a natural inclination to ask what it is that you do, what do you represent, what products or services do you offer and how the overall purpose fo the group can be deployed to drive the brand.

What To Post On Social Media

There is a significant disconnect on what brands social media versus what consumers what to see.

According to the recent Sprout Social report: So what is social’s real impact?

In the long-term relationships it creates between brands and consumers. Social marketers across the board list awareness as their primary goal. Consumers are looking for more of this content from brands.

Marketers’ priorities aren’t aligned with what consumers want. Marketers are focused on posts that teach (61%), tell a story (58%) and inspire (53%), while consumers are looking for discounts and sales (73%), posts that showcase new products and services (60%) and posts that teach them something (59%). The only overlap between top marketing priorities and consumer preferences is educational content.

Digging deeper, Sprout Social looked at what consumers share on social versus brands content. Consumers and brands believe that social is the primary hub for customer service and employee advocacy, yet few are doing this well.

Many brands talk about purpose, yet for most its lip service.

To be committed it means integrating mission and purpose into your business model through a long-term commitment to the cause that is aligned with your company’s core values and that of the community.

The brand has to become the architect of the community with corporate executives who have responsibilities that include the interest of all the stakeholders from the community, not just shareholders, but employees.

Brands have to empower the community to be the change agents in their own right.

Again, brands that take on a mentoring role, providing the tools, techniques, and strategies for their customers to become more effective in achieving their own goals, creating a win-win for all.

To do this, a brand needs to reach out and speak directly to consumers, to honor their values and to form meaningful relationships.

This is where social media brings the most power to a brand.

The brand takes on the role of the architect of the community, consistently demonstrating the values that their customers and community expect in exchange for their loyalty and purchases.

The other big disconnect you see with brands is the brand thinks they are the celebrity of the community. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The brand is the chief celebrant of the community, not the celebrity. Rather than lip service, this is where a simple shift in thinking and taking on the community role of the chief celebrant, unlocks the transformative potential for the brand.

A CEO that is genuinely engaged with the community of a brand willfully embraces the role of serving as the public face of the company to the community and the overall marketplace. This unlocks value.

What are Brands Posting?

The infographic below gives you a broad overview of what you see many brand posting, which as the Sprout Social report demonstrated, is not what consumers what to see.

Need more assistance on how to use social media effectively?

If you’re not sure about where to start or how to implement this into your digital strategy, or merely struggle for time, why not contact us and we can discuss with you how we can help with your content and social media management.

This post was originally posted on: https://outselldigital.com/how-to-build-a-brand-community-using-social-media/

The consumer journey itself has changed dramatically over the past few years. The route to purchase still revolves around some key stages.

Today, consumers use numerous devices to compare, share, learn and consumer information make purchasing decisions. The journey crosses some touchpoints, ranging from websites to online review sites, large e-commerce sites like Amazon to social media, with every single experience impacting a consumer’s purchasing decision.

As the journey becomes more fragmented, consumers continue to demand consistency

Consumers regardless of where or how the interaction takes place, they expect companies to know who they are and what information they need. As a result, marketers need to be investing in consumer journey mapping.

Customer journey maps are a detailed overview of the customer experience. They detail how consumers interact with a brand at every touchpoint. But how do they help brands in real terms? We’ve highlighted six ways…

This leads to the questions:

Do they assist brands in practical terms?

Below are six ways that mapping the customer journey drives the brand experience…

1. Consumers are requesting a more tailored brand experience

Mapping the customer journey and all potential interactions with a brand, marketers can develop more efficient and customized brand experiences. This allows the brand to have an improved measurement of campaign effectiveness.

Mapping reduces the potential risk of overlooking niche audiences and individual customers, who have not taken the next step in the current map to purchase.

Consumer journey maps that are based on reliable data are critical to paint an accurate picture of your consumers and create an experience that reflects the data

Customer journey maps allow for improved planning to better understand your target audience.

2. Customer Journey Maps Focus on Building Empathy

Marketers develop brand personas filled with traditional demographics and enhanced with rich behavioral, attitudinal and perceptions data. These detailed personas are the core of consumer maps.

Customer journey maps when efficiently done can assist marketers to build empathy with their Brand teams can use the journey maps to help in understanding the buyer’s mindset, perceptions, and motivations to predict future behavior.

If I had to pick one example of a brand that reinforces the focus on and the need for empathy, it would be Airbnb. Putting the customer first is the heart of the Airbnb customer and brand strategy. Using storytelling and storyboarding, Joe Gebbia, Co-Founder explains how the team use storyboarding to get employees inside their customers’ heads.

“Bringing words to life, storyboards show you things that words can’t,” he said. We embarked on an ambitious project to map the entire guest and host terrain of Airbnb, and we did it through illustration”, he says.

“We embarked on an ambitious project to map the entire guest and host terrain of Airbnb and we did it through illustration. We looked at key emotional moments of the journey and we drew them. We visualized them. And what it’s done for us, it’s allowed our entire company to achieve a whole new level of empathy with our customers. “

3. Mapping the Customer Journey Guides Consumers Towards Purchase

The role of marketing in any company is to drive brand awareness and move the customer from considering a product to purchase. Every consumer is different and requires a different approach and every stage of the purchase funnel.

Someone not familiar with your brand or technology will need more information than someone who is. Customer journey maps need to be developed for where and at what stage the customer enters the funnel with content that aligns with their step in the process.

This allows marketers to have a much deeper understanding of where and which stage each unique buyer is at, and what their needs are as they move towards conversion.

Customer Journey maps guide marketing and other aspects of a business to ensure the right message is always delivered to the right person, at the right time.

4. Customer Journey Mapping Identifies Critical Touchpoints

Walking in your customer’s’ shoes aids in your understanding of the customer on a more personal level. This exercise, allows a brand to align its communication plan to the customer’s needs.

The ability to identify which touchpoints are needed to help achieve consumer-centric goals, and where they are necessary, be it, in-store, on the phone, via a website or a brand’s social media channel, for example.

Customer touchpoint an opportunity to interact with and engage with the customer. The ability to expand these touchpoints give you ‘moments of truth’ that are critical milestones on any customer journey. In-depth audience data provides the opportunity reveal these moments of truth such as pain points, problems they are looking to solve and more.

Real life customer audience data brings a new level of understanding and insights that bring value to an entire business, from marketing to production.

5. Some Steps in the Customer Journey Need More Attention

Real customer data allows marketers to monitor their target audience and analyze behavior; this is the foundation of all customer journey maps. By using actual data points, customer journey maps can be validated, and each length of the stage of the buying cycle established to determine successful mapping.

By using real data, analysis can be done that looks for pain points in the mapping. Marketers can look for points where certain stages are causing irritation for custoemrs and where they are dropping out of the funnel.

Analysis of audience insight data illustrates areas that need improvement. This gives brand teams the ability to focus and deliver the content at the right time and stage to enhance the customer experience.

6. Customer Journey Mapping Keeps Business Objectives Moving in the Right Direction

When executed correctly, a customer journey map involves every department in a company. The map creates a framework for departments to work together to improve overall company performance. Gaps that emerge in the customer journey from the start of the sales funnel to the end can assist business decisions and corporate investments.

Priorities are established by mapping the customer journey and allows for open communication as to why select actions are of a higher priority than others. Another benefit is organizational silos are broken down as the entire company focuses on the needs and expectations of their target audience. In essence, a customer journey map makes organizations customer-centric.

A customer journey map makes organizations customer-centric.

There is no one size fits all customer journey maps, each is unique to the company and as varied as their target audience. The one commonality is the all customer journey maps are based on reliable data that reflects real consumers.

Creating a customer journey map takes time, data and commitment. However, the exercise can and will improve company revenue and focus. When implemented with senior management commitment, the impact throughout the organization and results in a customer-centric commitment to the marketplace.

Ready to Get Started?

Originally published at carolforden.com on October 5, 2017.

They fail because of bad assumptions, poor execution, and the failure to validate an idea or hypothesis early.

Despite, the fact that many articles have written about how to develop a Minimal Viable Product (MVP), you may be asking do we need ANOTHER post from someone else who has lived through a startup and may know something about startups?

I believe that answer is, YES.

MVP’s are one of the rare topics that enough can be written about.

The MVP thought process and mentality is one that I believe every entrepreneur should focus on mastering — and inherently it’s challenging to master simply because it’s human nature to complicate things.

Over the last year, I’ve had the privilege of talking with hundreds of entrepreneurs who have built many different types of new products.

Physical products, digital products, big products, small products, green products, products launched via Kickstarter and similar…

Founders in every vertical mentally create artificial barriers that prevent them from finding traction and real market validation. For many, this is not a conscious thought process or decision. It’s more driven by fear.

Fear of failure and rejection than anything else.

These obstacles are usually most profound in the early days of a startup simply because this is when available time and resources are the most limited. They are also almost always born out of an unnecessary assumption.

“I think that to do X to get to Y or for people to be interested in our product and company we must have X, Y, AND Z.

These are significant assumptions, with little to non-existent data to back them up.

The truth is that the hardest part of starting a business isn’t building something that people will buy — it’s winning this epic battle that we wage against ourselves.

Staying focused. Staying minimal.

Founders need to think and act like a cockroach: Instead of trying to solve all problems, you must focus your effort on solving the right problems for the right audience if you want your startup to live to see another day.

So how do you ensure that you are always focusing your time and energy on the right things and not getting trapped behind self-induced barriers?

This is where first time entrepreneurs and successful veterans typically diverge in their approach.

After hearing a pitch for a new product, I often ask “What’s preventing you from launching this tomorrow?”.

90% of the time there are one or two features that still need to be finished and “a few weeks away from launching.”

However “a few weeks away” turns into a month which turns into three months and so on.

The search for perfection kills many startups.

The danger in making too many assumptions is that your MVP quickly loses its minimalism and its viability. So you’re left with a product that was difficult to create or develop into what your customers want.

I think the root of the problem is less about assumptions and really because many people have a misconception of what an MVP is.

Which brings me back to the reason I’m writing yet ANOTHER post about minimal viable products.

Instead of thinking about an MVP as a first version of the final product, I like to think of an MVP as the experiment required to test and validate a hypothesis.

What’s surprising about this approach is you quickly realize that although it’s a bit of a misnomer, you may not even need a product to achieve this.

An MVP can be as simple as an email list that results from spending $100 on Facebook ads to test your hypothesis.

So take a minute and ask yourself one simple question.

What’s preventing you from launching tomorrow? Probably less than you think.

Once you’ve tested your hypothesis, now it’s time to start moving forward with your business concept.

My suggestion is that you bootstrap your business for as long as possible. Investors can add a layer of bureaucracy that you may not have the bandwidth to deal with. Also, not all investors have the best interest of the company at heart.

Some investors do not have the patience required for a startup and begin looking for an ROI long before the company is profitable and resort to disastrous methods attempting to force their will on founders.

Hypothesis tested, now what?

Now that you have tested your hypothesis and ideally have the beginnings of an email list it’s time to create your company.

I’m not going to spend any time on the legal requirements to form a business in this article; I want to focus on the actual mechanics required to bring a product to market.

You’ve validated your idea, show that there was a market demand, now you need to develop the actual product and go to market plan.

If you have a digital product offering, you need to write your or create your video series and build the platform that will hold the offering. This can be as simple as a WordPress website with a subscription plugin.

If it’s a hard good product, now is the time to locate a manufacturer. This can be done domestically or via websites such as Alibaba. You need to contact several manufacturers and ask for samples or have them take your design and fabricate samples. Quality matters, this product will carry your brand name.

Once you have market ready samples, it’s time to contact the people on your mailing list and ask for pre-orders. These pre-orders are when things get very real. Many people may say they are interested; now the rubber hits the road. The email sequence needs to raise awareness and create the marketing funnel.

Using a simple Google search, you can find many examples of email sequences that you can use as a model and customize for your product offering and re-engage your target list.

If you booked pre-orders, I would strongly suggest that you reconfirm the orders and then proceed with placing the first order from the manufacturer. No one wants to receive a product they forgot they ordered and you do not want excessive inventory that ties up cash.

Driving Web Traffic

Every business depends on traffic to drive sales and revenue.

Without traffic to your business or website you are a hobby at best and not a business.

Taking the ad that you ran on Facebook to test your hypothesis, you need to develop a complete marketing plan to attract an audience to your website, or if you are using Amazon for your platform, you need to drive traffic to your sales page.

What’s your brand story? Every brand needs a story, consumers want to know whom they are dealing with and the “why.”

Creativity and authenticity are important here; you need to define your target audience personas, the KPI’s and a content marketing strategy.

How will you build an emotional connection with your target market persons? People buy from brands they connect with, and many brands miss the mark or discount this aspect. Take the time and invest in developing your brand story and how you will connect with your consumer.

This effort will pay off handsomely.

What is social selling?

Next up is to develop a social selling plan. Social media needs to be a critical aspect of your marketing plan. Sales is about relationship building, establishing rapport and credibility, and providing the right solution to the right prospect at the right time.

Social selling doesn’t change that.

Social selling is the art of using social networks to find, connect with, understand, and nurture sales prospects. It’s the modern way to develop meaningful relationships with potential customers that keep you — and your brand — front of mind, so you’re the natural first point of contact when a prospect is ready to buy.

At its core, social selling is about finding and connecting with your target audience and prospects on social media to build relationships and increase sales.

B2B Companies Need to Incorporate Social Selling

We live in a digital world today. As a result, 74% of B2B buyers conduct more than half of their research online before contacting the business, and three out of four B2B buyers rely on social media to engage with potential companies before making a purchase decision. Social listening and sharing valuable content is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must have.

Step 1: How To Establish a Professional Brand

I strongly suggest that you begin with an audit of your social media channels. Most business professionals use Twitter and LinkedIn for business purposes, and consumers use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, depending on your product offering.

You will need to decide which of these social media channels you should focus on and will bring the most success.

What should you consider when conducting an audit?

Presence: Set up your social media profiles with the customer in mind. Take a hard look at your profile and ask yourself: Is your brand you easy to find on social? Is your profile picture, profile description, company information, and handle consistently across all channels? Do you link out to your company’s website or to valuable content?

Personality: What you do on these social media channels is just one aspect of who you are. Don’t be afraid to show your personality (within reason, of course); people like to know whom they are dealing with.

Have a passion for football and music? Add it to your Twitter profile, what to give a shout out to your home state? Give it a shout-out and geotag your location.

The more information you share about yourself, the more likely you are to form a genuine connection with others who share similar interests. This allows you to start conversations with prospects who are not as likely to respond to posts about your product.

Step 2: Listen with Social Media

Now that you’ve optimized your social profiles, you need to start listening to conversations and connecting with your target personas. There are several tools that can facilitate social listening, however, before you choose one, you need to do some legwork first.

Follow + Connect: Invest time locating and following your target market personas and influencers on social media with every channel you are using. This allows you to develop a better sense of what they care about as buyers and who they are as people. Specifically, on LinkedIn, when sending out an request to join their network, you need to customize the request. If you don’t know the individual, giving a few details about why you want to connect with this person is more personable than having no context to the request.

Read + Analyze: In addition to following individual people, following key brands and subscribing to their emails and newsletters is critical. This gives you an overall sense of their personality or brand, if this is a B2B sales process, you will garner critical information on their current marketing efforts, and target audience. The more background information and insights you have, the better prepared you are.

Identify + React: Social Media gives you the ability to listen for buying signals from prospects. Is your prospect posting or asking for purchasing advice? Active social listening allows you the opportunity to jump into the conversation.

90% of all B2B buying decisions are influenced by peer recommendations, listening carefully to the conversations on social can identify when your target audience is ready to buy.

Once you have done the manual work in making connections and joining relevant groups, it’s time to choose a social listening tool.

Most of these tools offer free functionality; there’s no need to break the bank adding yet another tool to your marketing stack. I recommend to cover all of your social networks or Buffer for robust, customizable listening capabilities on Twitter.

Step 3: Engage on Social Media

The final step is perhaps the most critical in social selling: engaging with influencers industry leaders, and prospects on social. Not only will sharing content that you created to educate your audience or to share their content will help you connect with your target audience and grow your personal brand as well.

Share Content that Counts: Let’s be honest, there is a lot of horrible content on the web and in social media today.

You do not want to be adding to the noise. You want to be sharing, and retweet content that educates entertains and brings value to others. You want to be a problem solver.

Curating and sharing content other than just what your brand produces and publishes gives a sense of balance.

Being a resource gives you a softer sales approach and sharing third-party content is essential to building your brand and demonstrating an unbiased and honest point of view.

When someone publishes, or shares thought leadership content from you make sure to show your support and thank them. Thanking people for the consideration goes a long way towards building a long term relationship.

Reach Out to Influencers:

One of the quickest ways to jump start your brand is to reach out to influencers in your target market. Use the direct messaging function of most socail media platforms and offer them your product for free. Yes, you heard me, free. No strings attached.

If they like the product, they should reciprocate with a shout out about the product. You now have the basis to develop a relationship with them. Make a list of influencers with 50,000 or fewer followers and start reaching out to them.

Plan Ahead: Today, with the tools mentioned above, it is easy to schedule a week’s worth of social media posts on just about every channel.

Engage with your Audience: The more interactive you are with your target audience, the better. Social media is being engaged and demonstrated by this by liking, sharing, retweet, and commenting on their posts.

Engaging with influencers, you position yourself as an expert in your field. This will help cultivate critical relationships with potential buyers.

This also allows you to develop and cultivate key relationships with your target audience. By starting a conversation on social media, you have an improved chance of moving to email with a significantly better chance than reaching out cold and blasting a brand message to an audience who has no relationship with you.

The ROI of Social Selling

There is a high potential for ROI with a minimum spend with social selling.

Social selling takes a mind shift and needs planning.

How to get started:

30 Minutes: At the start of the week, spend half an hour to schedule social media posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn about your market area. This can be original ideas; custom created content that educates or entertains your target audience (content marketing) links to branded content or third-party content about what interests you the most.

20 Minutes: On Wednesday or Thursday invest 20 minutes for engagement and active listening. Participating and reading Facebook and LinkedIn group discussions, following hashtag conversations on Twitter, your follower’s pages, Instagram posts and jumping in where relevant. Sharing posts drives engagement with fans, thought leaders, and influencers.

10 Minutes: Every day, check all social channels you are using for notifications, friend requests, new followers and direct messages. When you start engaging and contributing more, you’ll notice an influx of inbound requests.

Content Marketing

“Content marketing is 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.”

Content Marketing is providing truly relevant and useful content to your target audience to help them solve their problems verse pitching your products or services.

Content that is not relevant and valuable is informational garbage. The web and social media is full of companies trying to sell you “stuff,” it’s most of the time it’s not relevant or valuable.

It’s spam.

No marketing is possible without great content

Content marketing should be part of your marketing tactics, not a separate part.

Marketing regardless of the tactics used depends on quality content:

• Social media marketing: No social media strategy can or will be successful without a content marketing strategy.
• SEO: Google and other search engines reward businesses that publish quality, relevant content consistently.
• PR: Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not your business.
• PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
• Inbound marketing: Driving inbound traffic and leads requires content marketing.
• Content strategy: Content strategy is part of most content marketing strategies.

That’s what makes content marketing so important in today’s environment of consumers being bombarded with thousands of marketing messages each and every day.

Email Marketing

With very limited marketing dollars in your budget, you want to make sure you’re spending your money and time effectively.

Email makes money. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $38.

Social selling combined with content marketing can and will drive email marketing. Every piece of content created needs to have a call to action coupled with a lead generation offer that drives email capture. There are several great examples of email campaigns that you can review and customize for your product offering.

Best practices for email marketing subject line is as follows:

When it comes to subject lines, boring works best. When you write your subject line, don’t sell what’s inside — tell what’s inside.

How effective is email marketing, the stats tell all…..

Wrapping it Up:

Bootstrapping a business is not that difficult, it takes forethought and planning.

The tools outlined here are all relatively inexpensive, it takes effort and some hard work coupled with dedication. As your business grows, then look into adding in social media marketing (SMM) and pay per click (PPC) ads.

Your biggest opportunities are in growing your audience, by using content marketing coupled with social selling to educate and/or entertain your target audience.

This drives web traffic and turns your website into a lead generation machine.

Using lead generation tools you can easily build an email list of prospects that are interested in your content and products.

People are looking to have their problems solved; that is where your products come in.

Building relationships and trust drive sales. People buy from whom they trust

Always under promise and over deliver.

Lastly, take care of the customer, and they will take care of you.

Originally published at carolforden.com on August 27, 2017.

Poor and mediocre content marketing is more often built on questionable assumptions and generalities of your target audience.

Investing the time, effort and research to create detailed personas that reflect the actual buyer journey will pay off handsomely.

While it may seem easier to skip these steps and dive straight into writing the typical generic blog posts. This results in poor targeting and poor results. You would be better off finding something else to invest your marketing dollars into.

If you are not willing to commit to spending the time to develop personas, customer journey maps and attribution date, your content marketing you will fail and fail miserably.

Content marketing is about building a firm base from which to work

They are continually dialing them in and expanding them as they learn more about their target audiences.

Content marketers measure their impact on the business and serve up personalized content; they set KPI’s for content that includes traffic statistics, social shares and more.

It’s more than visibility

Content’s relationship to the bottom line is invisible many times due to weak and lackluster content.

A marketing automation system that is deployed with ineffective content that is not targeted to the customer persona and journey is just a fancy email tool. Marketing automation requires sound data, ongoing profiling, and personalized lead nurturing.

If you find that your content is failing to deliver results, stop. Take the time to invest in better data, continuous profiling, and personalized lead nurturing.

Content Marketing, when done correctly, can and will deliver impressive results. Many companies that dipped their toes in the water and found lackluster results need to step back and invest in a renewed effort.

It takes a mindset of demand generation, not as part of a branding or marketing campaign.

Many corporations and startups recognize that marketing as a function that takes and investment. The ones that are looking to engage and educate their target audience realize that marketing is more than ads. That content that engages and educates has been neglected. They acknowledge that this needs serious attention and commitment.

Marketing and content marketing in particular, can be quantified into the contributions to revenue, demonstrating that when marketing is involved the wins are larger and the win rate is enhanced.

Even more so, with content planning and a strategy in place, the performance of each piece of how content performs can be tracked and analyzed. This includes the ability to monitor what types of content and subject matter drives leads over the finish line resulting in a purchase and which distribution channels achieve the best results.

Turning raw MQLs into meaningful and useful metrics requires investing into serious strategic work, long before you start to create content. You must know your target audience and what motivates them, what are they searching for, what problem are they trying to solve.

How do you learn about real customers?

The low hanging fruit….start by interviewing your top sales representatives, account managers and business development executives. The knowledge they have on customer and target personas is invaluable. They have a deeper customer knowledge that can be documented by simply interviewing them. Interview the top performers in the different audience segments of the company and ask:

• Whom do you target at a new account or prospect?
• Why do you target them?
• What attributes do you look for?
• Whom do you communicate with?
• Is there a team approach?
• Who are the champions?
• Where are objections coming from?
• What are the objections?
• How much time do you spend educating them on the overall market or competitors?

From these conversations interviews, you should be able to identify a handful of customers to interview.

This information will be utilized to develop personas and learn more about the buyer journey. This step will be the hardest. Working around schedules will limit your ability to complete all of the interviews. However, six to nine interviews per target market persona will be adequate, assuming that you have targeted interview questions to uncover the customer persona and journey.

Use this data to refine three to four distinct conversion tracks, focusing in on the two most valuable personas. Adding to a third persona can wait, right now you need to concentrate on the best potential target personas.

Targeted customer journey mapping

A customer journey maps should be established around three general phases: engage, nurture, and convert.

This is one of the most powerful aspects of persona development — understanding the types of questions commonly in your target audience heads during each buyer stage and establishing customer journey maps for each step.

Be prepared that the questions you ask at each stage of the customer journey map will be different based on whom you are interviewing. A decision-maker persona has a more business-driven concern that they are seeking an answer to, and practitioners want to make their life easier.

Even then, questions will converge when it comes to picking a vendor or solution.

Having this knowledge, allows the ability to reuse and repurpose content in the later stages of the sales funnel across multiple personas, which is a big time and money saver. Repurposed content adds the ability to drive conversions.

Developing personas and customer journey maps are a significant investment of both time and resources. The last thing you want to do is file them away to collect dust. These need to be utilized as a reference for all content, the overall strategy and align with the stages of the customer journey.

Over time as you see results, do not let fear of drilling down into deeper niches stop you. This allows you to provide customized content to a smaller segment of their audience, who are actively searching for an answer to a problem and are usually easier and faster to convert.

Building personas and customer journey maps for current clients can assist in client outreach and improve customer retention.

Content marketing is work in progress…

A business that is built based on target market personas and customer journey maps has the ability to see exponential growth quarter over quarter if you are willing to commit in content, to invest the time.

Keep in mind, that the real value is a result of the work and up-front research. Then be patient, it takes some time for this for your optimizations to take hold, to garner the hard sought results. It will happen.

Originally published at carolforden.com on August 24, 2017.