Author: headstartAdmin

Interview with Marketers: Melissa Romo

Melissa leads global social media, content marketing and customer advocacy for the $2billion software firm, Sage, which provides cloud software in accounting, payments, people and enterprise to customers in 23 countries.

Her team’s multilingual content hub, Sage Advice, was recently named the “Best Business & Tech Blog in the UK” by the UK Blog Awards and their work across social media and content has won “Best Use of Social” by the Advocate Marketing Academy, a “Killer Content Award” by the B2B Marketing Exchange, and “Best B2B Content” by the Content Marketing Association.

Melissa has twenty-five years of experience leading marketing and advertising teams around the world for companies such as SAP Concur, The American Express Company and Grey Global Group. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and holds an MBA from Yale.

1. What are your tips for building a great marketing team and why is it so important?

Marketing teams are fascinating to build because they require people with so many diverse talents and perspectives. Marketers help create a company’s brand character, its personality, and when the discipline of marketing is taken as a whole, marketers write the ‘contract’ between the company and its current and future customers. 

That’s a big responsibility and it takes talented people with a knack for knowing how to communicate, through which channels, and how to motivate an audience to sit up and take notice, then take action, then feel great about it. That has never been an easy task since marketing began, but in the 21st century, with so much content competing for our attention and working to motivate us to take action, every move a marketer makes must be a smart one. So how do you build a team that is up to such a demanding task? 

In my career there have probably been three tactics that have helped me most to do this:
 
A) Recruit for diversity, the traditional kind of course, but also diversity of thought, professional background, career vision and personal life experience. Marketing is a creative endeavor so you need people whose diverse experiences create a great creative blend, one that will help them inspire each other.  
 
B) Look for and feed your team’s insatiable curiosity for just about everything! Marketers must understand how societal, business and demographic shifts impact tactics and campaigns; they must be curious about the customer’s needs and wants, and tireless about even learning the word choices and speech patterns of customers because even a single word, used well and authentically, can do wonders to connect a company to its audience. You can feed curiosity by encouraging discussion and debate, make sure you budget time for team-building and informal idea sharing. You can even do this in virtual settings if you set up a team chat in Slack or Microsoft Teams.
 
C) The third tip I’d recommend is to measure everything and play back success to individuals and your team as a whole – sometimes this is as important (or more) as communicate your team’s results externally. Grab those exciting headlines – like ‘Wow, did you realize you got a 50% open rate?’ — and celebrate them with your teams. Sometimes our teams are so busy with their heads down that they don’t see the wins going right by them. Make it part of your role as the leader to shine a light on those. It helps the team feel like real progress is being made and that they are contributing in an important way to that success.

2. How have you transformed content into a customer journey?

Content by itself isn’t really a journey. You have to create content that hooks the audience and makes them want more! So the first thing we have done is ensure we are tapping into themes and topics that are truly on the minds of business owners.
 
This year, when the coronavirus began to have profound effects on businesses, we worked with our own customers to have them tell their stories of resilience right from the frontlines. This theme was topical and timely and hugely authentic because only the customer could ever tell that story. This series of content led to two consecutive months of our strongest new blog subscriptions ever, which was proof that we were publishing content that customers wanted to see more of.
 
We included these stories in our monthly blog newsletter and shared snippets of them on social media. Aside from being authentic and topical, we also build our content platforms to be ‘binge-able’ – just like Netflix or Amazon, we prompt you with a recommended next read when you are halfway done with an article, feature trending content in a sidebar and articles recommended for you based on what you have read before. These are standard tools of the content trade now and we use all of them to keep our customers on the content journey we have built for them.
 
So, you need two things to transform content into a journey – great content that truly catches interest, and a digital publishing infrastructure that is built with binge-ability in mind.

3. Why do brand, communications and campaigns need to be interconnected?

Brand, communications and campaigns really do need to reinforce each other – and the best way to do that is to ensure they have a common narrative thread that connects them together. Anyone who sees any piece of communication from your company should instantly know what company it is, which that commonality can help achieve. 

What’s even more interesting to me though is that the commonality can be even a graphic element, piece of music, common voiceover, or the more typical slogan or strapline. You can think creatively about how to interconnect your marketing assets; it doesn’t mean they all have to say the same thing. They just have to have a stamp of commonality that makes it easy for your audience to spot them and identify them with your company. 

4. What is your MarTech stack?

We have a CRM and use WordPress for our multi-national/multi-lingual corporate blog, as well as Skyword to support content creation. We also have a social media management platform, employee engagement platform, and customer advocacy platform that automates our social publishing and advocacy activities around content.

Does your cybersecurity content measure up?

When you look at the stats worldwide, cybersecurity market revenue grew 9.7% year over year in Q1 2020, and 18% since Q1 2018. COVID-19 and the shift to remote work have only highlighted the need to have systems and processes in place that will keep organizations’ data – and their employees – safe. In a crowded field, how can you be sure your organization will stand out?

Get the most out of your cybersecurity content marketing with our checklist for 2020 and beyond:

  • Produce content that customers trust. Has your organization observed changes in the threat landscape? Turn data about what you’re seeing into a short research paper or infographic, and use case studies to show how your customers benefit.
  • Get the newest cyber data and stats into your content. Cyber threats are always changing! If you have “evergreen” content, take the time to keep it up-to-date with new data and stats, and do this on a regular basis. You should also include links to case studies or customer testimonials that highlight recent wins or successes.
  • Update your keywords. Search terms change over time, and if you haven’t updated yours (don’t forget to check meta descriptions and alt text as well), your content won’t get the results you’re looking for. In 2020, hot topics in cyber include making remote work safe, securing the cloud, and cybersecurity automation: update your older posts with keywords that reflect these trends.
  • Talk to the experts. Find people who are knowledgeable in your organization and get their opinions about critical issues in your industry. What issues are your hands-on IT staff dealing with regularly? A conversation with your tech experts not only makes cybersecurity more comprehensible, it highlights the skills your organization brings to the table. You can also enlist your experts to help generate thought leadership pieces, or even just quotes you can highlight in a blog post or shorter social media post.
  • Make content easy to access. Effective content marketing needs to convince the decision‑makers, and these people aren’t always tech-savvy. If you have a content library with e-books or long videos, break them up into shorter sections with clear titles. Also, group these shorter sections together so that your audience can easily navigate to the next topic.
  • Get the most out of your content. If you have existing content in one format, look for ways to repurpose it for use on other platforms. Consider new avenues: infographics about cyber threats work especially well on Twitter and Instagram, for example, and may reach a previously untapped audience.
  • Use CTAs effectively. Each piece of content marketing should have a CTA that makes sense and is focused on cyber even if it is a free trial or a demo. And don’t forget: in addition to an invitation to speak with an expert, including links to relevant case studies or white papers will give customers the cyber knowledge they need to make an informed buying decision.

Is your executive team avoiding content marketing?

Content marketing is especially valuable in highly technical industries. Informed customers who understand how your product will best work with their needs are more likely to pull the trigger on a purchase, and content marketing gives you a chance to engage with your audience while also passing on essential information.

Consider these statistics:

  • Worldwide, 91% of organizations rely on content marketing
  • 77% of content marketers have a defined content marketing strategy
  • 60% of marketing professionals say that their target audiences trust research and case studies more than any other form of content marketing.

What are you writing about lately in cybersecurity?

P.S. We have been helping companies and technical experts write about cybersecurity, risk and compliance topics since 2012. Want to ramp up your content marketing in cyber? Contact us.

P.P.S. We offer unlimited writing and editing (as a subscription service) for consistency, high quality, faster turnaround times and easy budget planning.

photo credit: Ken Mattison Vintage Trunk Latch via photopin (license)

Our Top 8 Newsletter Tips

Reaching people by email is not going away. So here are our top eight newsletter tips you can incorporate in your campaigns. As always, it’s about reaching people on a human level in this busy world.

  1. Put mobile first. People are more likely to use their phones to read what you have to say, so be sure your content is optimized for mobile.
  2. Add a human touch. Be sure email messages come from people in your company, not your company. This will help subscribers to recognize who is sending them great content on a monthly or weekly basis to build a relationship or at a minimum, rapport and familiarity with the sender.
  3. Make it exclusive. Content for subscribers only gives people a reason to stay subscribed. Treat them like VIPs. Otherwise, why bother subscribing at all? That said, use quality content as teasers in your blogs and social media to draw subscribers in. Show them what they’re missing.
  4. Show more faces. People want to see faces, so personalize your content and be sure image sizes are optimized for mobile. Hire a photographer for events or other campaigns so you can use high-quality images. Caption the images so people know who they are looking at.
  5. Use links at the top and bottom. Create links at the top and bottom of pages for easy forwarding and sharing to other channels. This means creating a subscribe link or button (as well as the unsubscribe link). Encourage your recipients to share the email you send them and ask them to subscribe.
  6. Use one CTA. Have one main call to action with a link. Too many links and decisions will result in no click-throughs. So, “show don’t tell.” Let good content be your primary call to action.
  7. Don’t worry about unsubscribers. Embrace them – because unsubscribers tell you two important things: 1) either that person is not part of your target audience and so not a tragic loss or 2) your content is not appealing and you need to rethink it. In all likelihood, the ones who leave are not part of your target/ideal audience.
  8. Be a subscriber. Subscribe to other newsletters yourself, to get a sense of what makes an impact on you. This is free intel and valuable access to novelty and innovation. So, get out there and click “subscribe.”

Above all, aim to make a personal connection with your target audience and to make their lives a little happier. Many of us are looking for a break from the world, so try to be the break that people want. It may take time to build your audience – and build enough trust – so they reach out to you when the timing is right.

P.S. You can also subscribe to our newsletter; we have tips and interviews with marketing leaders monthly.

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B2B Content Tips for Stealth ABM

Consider these tips when planning your next B2B content campaign or account-based marketing campaign. Use them to connect with people at the companies you are targeting and to inspire what kind of content you develop.

B2B Content Tips:

  1. For newsletters and email drip campaigns, add a subscribe button or link (unsubscribe links are certainly easy to find). Encourage the recipient to forward it to others on their team. Now they can subscribe to your content more easily.
  2. Find (or ask for) your target company’s top three competitors. Build a one-page competitive report. Send it without expecting anything in return. If you want to be bold, tweak it, and send it to their competitors too.
  3. Create a unique LinkedIn hashtag and post multiple trends/article/insights with that hashtag over a period of time. Then ask your contacts at your target company to type in that unique hashtag into the LinkedIn search. Their own, personalized newsfeed of content, curated by you, will display for them.
  4. In Google search, use the “Tools, Past 24 hours” option to get ideas from the latest trends and topics relevant to your target segment’s interests:
  5. Do a book Google search based on the top priorities or your target company and sort the titles by date. Send it to them. As a new release, it is unlikely they will have it in their collection.
  6. Use the events search in LinkedIn to see what popular event topics you could turn into content. Type in the phrase or keyword in the search and click on the events option.
  7. Create a library of older company content to reshare. Pick one item per week to turn into a LinkedIn post, ebook, or update it to make it more relevant for a new campaign.

ABM Tips

  1. Get to the source: Ask people from your target accounts to *participate* in the content you want to use. It’s often a win-win situation that has the dual functionality of making your content more relevant for the accounts you’re targeting, and building relationships with people in your target accounts – directly contributing to your ABM program’s engagement metrics.

  2. Find the hot topics: If you can’t talk directly with your customers or target audience, speaking to your sales team (who are more likely to be talking directly to your target accounts) can be a way to gain insights on topics that are relevant & interesting to your target accounts.

  3. Research – it’s key! When you’re focused on 1:1 ABM especially (targeting 5-30 top-priority accounts), having plenty of correct, relevant insights are key to engagement. Make sure you have someone (usually in marketing and/or sales) doing the work to find the right information on the account.                                 

  4. Scale 1:1 ABM Content: Using the 80-20 rule for personalization can be helpful when building content. There are some exceptions, but often you don’t need to tailor an entire piece of content for an account. You can create a template that speaks to an industry or persona relevant to an account segment, and tailor just 20% of the content to make it relevant, helping save you time.

  5. Re-purpose old content for ABM: If resources are scarce to create new content, dig through older content that might be relevant to the needs of your accounts or account segments, and customize the content to be more targeted.

  6. Tailor engagement steps to the account: Customize different calls to action to your target accounts. Whether it’s to read another piece of content, fill out a form, or engage with your sales team – making the next step more relevant will increase engagement to the next step in their journey

  7. Be dynamic: Dynamically changing your web pages to be more relevant to your target accounts can be a powerful way to increase conversion and make your web content more engaging. This is most often done using ABM tech or custom web development. 

Questions for our event breakout rooms:

  1. What is your number 1 content tip for a B2B audience?
  2. How do you scale personalized content for ABM?  
  3. What’s one myth in B2B content that should be “busted”?

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Interview with goTenna: A HeadStart Case Study

Gina Orlando is a content marketer at goTenna based in New York. We asked her about her experience working with HeadStart Copywriting.

Why did you decide to sign on with HeadStart?

The constant challenge for any tech startup is learning how to scale with limited resources. At the time, we were a small marketing team with a lot of content ideas that we didn’t have enough time to write or publish on a regular basis.

We started our search looking for freelancers online, but had trouble finding quality writers with our specific industry expertise. We also considered a few content marketing agencies, but many offered more services than we needed and as a result, were far outside of our budget.

In the end, we decided to sign with HeadStart because Sue and her team offer an agency-like relationship with experienced technical writers, as well as a flexible contract model for cost-conscious startups.

How has HeadStart’s subscription model changed the way you work?

Before HeadStart, I typically worked with individual freelance writers on a per project basis. This approach can be incredibly time-intensive — we’d spend so much time vetting potential writers and getting necessary finance and contract approvals before the content writing could even start!

When you have a steady drumbeat of projects, HeadStart’s subscription model provides substantial peace of mind. Copy-as-a-service is a single line item in our budget, which makes spending and forecasting more predictable. And most importantly, that cost includes a full “bench” of writers we would have spent a lot of time and resources to build anyways.

What do you consider the top benefit of working with HeadStart and why?

The three-day turnaround is pretty incredible. (And, in my experience HeadStart writers are usually faster than three days!) Lots of marketing requests happen at the last minute, especially at a tech startup, so it’s great to have a reliable writing partner to make sure we can hit every deadline.

What would you tell others about the client experience with HeadStart?

In addition to speedy and quality work, the HeadStart team really takes the time to learn about our technology, our customers, and our goals. This kind of model could end up being transactional, but the team always checks in with us weekly to see if our priorities have shifted or changed. Even something as small as sharing a recent news clip from our industry goes a long way in showing how HeadStart cares about the bigger picture, too.

photo credit: Al Case Nine Inch Nails @ 2018 Roskilde Festival on Arena Stage via photopin (license)

Susan’s Required Reading List

I read a lot – and business books are my go-to as an entrepreneur. I wanted to publish my favourites here for reference and I thought others may enjoy the list as well.

All links lead to Amazon.com.

What have you read lately that I should add to the list? Contact me. Enjoy!

Marketing:
Sales:
Finance, HR and Ops:
Leadership:

photo credit: Scouse Smurf Books via photopin (license)

How to Capture Brand Voice

Consistent, distinctive brand voice is key to reaching and expanding your target audience, and that voice needs to evolve with your company. You can’t simply “set it and forget it,” because people change, your business changes, and language is always changing.

That’s why HeadStart is the best long-term solution:

  • Copy-as-a-Service. Our subscription model allows us to learn and adapt to your changing needs. That’s something freelancers can’t do, because “one-and-done” writing lacks consistency. When you work with us, the strength and reach of your brand voice grow each month, as our relationship grows, so you don’t have to keep training and retraining short-term writers. That means less money wasted on one-off work that gets it wrong and a sharper, more consistent voice from working with us.

  • Seamless Revision. Revision is the best-kept secret of successful writing and it’s included in our services, so we can work on honing your message. Over time, as we come to know each other, the content gets better and better and the revisions, fewer and fewer. That means less hassle for you and more time to focus on bigger questions.

  • Your Own Writer. When you sign on with HeadStart, a long-term writer is assigned to your account. You then work closely and regularly with that writer, who learns your personal values and vision for the company. Your life gets easier and that relationship – having an informed, professional writer at your fingertips – gives you an incredible edge over the competition, most of whom struggle with consistency in content delivery. What’s more, to ensure we capture the right language every time, we record selected calls to pull phrases directly from our conversations to include in the content.

A strong, distinctive tone of voice is critical to the health and growth of your company, and we can help you develop and maintain it, consistently. Better still, working with us makes your life easier, and you will regain the time and energy you didn’t know you’d lost in the mountain of work on your desk.

There is a better way and starts here with a simple email: HeadStart Copywriting.

Photo credit: Pexels.com.

Sending Your First Request

If you’ve just signed on with HeadStart, thank you for your business! We look forward to receiving your first request, and we created this checklist to help you get started.

If you have a list of items for us, please contact us to arrange a call so we can help prioritize your list.

Here’s how to request your first piece:

    1. Determine what type of content you need – is it a blog, social media snippet, press release, bio, webpage, etc.?
    2. Log in to our client portal, Nectar, and fill out the form for the type of content you need. Our forms make it easy for you to create a brief. Once submitted, it notifies us automatically and provides you with a copy of what you sent. You can always email us your request – especially if you don’t see the form you need – but Nectar helps streamline the process.
    3. Nectar will prompt you to include any files or links for reference. If your first piece is an editing request, be sure to send us the copy in a Word document file. HeadStart Copywriting delivers all content in Word (not Google Docs).
    4. In Nectar, you will be asked if there is an interview with a Subject Matter Expert (SME) required to complete the piece. If yes, we will start the writing process after the interview takes place. You have three SME interviews with a dedicated writer per month, and each interview is 30 minutes, with one SME. Calls are recorded to help capture content and tone of voice for reference and we can help coordinate the call. Please let your SMEs know that we need 24 hours’ notice to avoid rescheduling fees.
    5. Later on, log in to Nectar and you can see the delivery date and status of your requested piece.

photo credit: wuestenigel Red envelope for the letter via photopin (license)

Interview with Moves: A HeadStart Case Study

Megan Wheeler is VP of Marketing at Moves. Backed by The Open Application Network, with their blockchain technology, she is proud to have launched Moves for rideshare drivers and food couriers during the pandemic in 2020. We asked Megan to share her experience working with us.

Why did you decide to sign on with HeadStart?

I chose HeadStart because they didn’t come after me with a big sales pitch. There was a great level of integrity in the approach and I knew based on those interactions that HeadStart would provide a valuable, reliable service and partnership. Hiring takes a while so I thought this would be a great interim solution.

I knew from experience that great content gets eyeballs on your website and social channels and can often generate press coverage. Great content is also an ideal way to position company CEOs as thought leaders, while establishing trust and credibility with key audiences.

So I needed content for all of those reasons.

How has HeadStart’s subscription model changed the way you work?

I really like the monthly flat fee model – it’s not per word or per minute or so many dollars for a blog. It was just such an easy model to understand. Three months was not a huge investment, so that convinced me to sign on and get me over the hump before I hired my own full time writer in-house.

After hiring, I decided to renew because the subscription model makes certain things easier to help us focus on our own goals. There is no worry about revisions, or overages. The model makes it easy for me to budget and easy for my finance leadership team to say yes and sign on the dotted line.

HeadStart’s “creative brief” tool Nectar also makes it easy for us. And I like that we are outsourcing work to dedicated writers who are also partners. They are not just a vendor, but a partner. Having a dedicated writer was a refreshing thing, and it feels good to support a local business.

What do you consider the top benefit of working with HeadStart and why?

Reliability. I know if we input a request into the “Nectar” system we will get our dedicated writer assigned right away, with outreach from them in less than 24 hours and a full piece turned around within three days. The onboarding process helped to ensure the work is consistently of great quality and aligned to our brand messaging. And the writer knows what we want to say about our company. I can count on that.

What would you tell others about the client experience with HeadStart?

With HeadStart you feel listened to, you feel taken care of, you feel reassured, and you know experienced professionals who care about you are managing the work. That has really shone through in all aspects of our interactions. HeadStart is a true business partner, helping us grow our business.

photo credit: Stefan-Mueller.pics (Thanks for 3.5Mio views) Nic Endo & Alec Empire | Atari Teenage Riot via photopin (license)

Interview with Fiix: A HeadStart Case Study

Marc Cousineau is a Content Marketing Manager at Fiix Software. We asked Marc to share his experience working with us.

Why did you decide to sign on with HeadStart?

We wanted to free up time to focus on higher-level strategies. We also wanted to avoid creating content for content’s sake and ensure that we were bringing informative content to our audiences.

The learning curve attached to our industry is steep. Maintenance, manufacturing, operations – these are niche areas and very specialized even though it’s a big part of our society. The HeadStart team took the time to understand our business and had the background in this industry, so we didn’t have to spend the time coaching or outlining. They got our business and what we were trying to do. That really helped speed things up – and it was a very efficient process.

How has HeadStart’s subscription model changed the way you work?

Before HeadStart, we frequently had to push bigger projects to the back burner. Things like promotion or optimizing our content were impossible because we constantly had to prioritize content creation.

The subscription model allowed us to focus on hitting home runs. Choosing between urgent work and strategic work was no longer an issue. We were finally free to focus on business-critical strategies while the HeadStart team kept the content coming.

They produced really high quality pieces and it was great to focus on strategy and optimization. This helped us scale and amplify the content we had.

What do you consider the top benefit of working with HeadStart and why?

The top benefit for us was being able to focus on delivering high quality content to our customers in the best way possible. We were able to increase our capacity to create content but also to magnify its impact.

This year, we needed to turn around a huge number of emails that would resonate with very specific customer segments. HeadStart produced the content in a fraction of the time that it would have taken us to complete the work. They went the extra mile to help us meet our goals. It was a big win.

What would you tell others about the client experience with HeadStart?

First, the work is top notch. They deliver on promises, taking feedback very well, to deliver valuable content, efficiently.

They go above-and-beyond by sharing content creation best practices, and are proactive about learning as much as they can about our audiences and customers.

What really separates HeadStart from the rest of the pack is how they treat clients as partners, as if they are part of your own team. They actually care, making us a better partner in content creation and helping us to operate in new ways, to grow and innovate.

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