Blogs & SEO
”Andrew’s work as a content marketer successfully drove website traffic and new logo and revenue growth. He consistently delivered a wide range of high-quality content.”
—Jonathan Hevenstone, SVP, Sales & Marketing, Atypon; CRO, Boclips
Copywriting challenge: Develop high-quality blog posts that make complex technology easy to understand while hitting the keyword scores and maintaining the content structure for successful SEO.
GrowthLoop is an AI-driven composable customer data platform (CDP) used for generative marketing. While the technology is relatively new, the market space is already crowded. GrowthLoop University is a way to educate prospects and customers while increasing organic site traffic through informative blog posts rather than SEO blather.
Generative AI
Generative AI is technology that relies on machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), to produce—or “generate”—many different types of written, visual, audio, and video content. The technology can also be used to answer questions, interpret data and draw conclusions, and even write computer code or solve complex real-world problems.
Generative AI uses data on which it has been “trained” to generate new content. The source and scope of that data affects the type of content it can generate. Read more >>
Generative AI in marketing
Generative AI is revolutionizing the way people work in nearly every industry. It’s providing new tools that can take on the kind of creative, analytical, and organizational work that in the past was strictly the domain of humans.
This is especially true for marketers—and content marketers in particular. Content marketing involves content creation and design as well as personalization, targeting, and cadence planning. These are all tasks at which generative AI excels. Read more >>
Identity resolution
Successful marketing requires a thorough understanding of each customer and prospect. Marketers gather this information from many different sources—through social media interactions, ecommerce, point-of-sales and in-store payments, customer service queries, emails and texts, and so on. These data sources create a comprehensive view of each customer or prospect.
Among the tools marketers use to gather this information is technology that aggregates data gathered from these different sources into a single database record. This process is called identity resolution. The result is a unified, 360-degree view of each customer. Read more >>
Customer personas
A customer persona is a detailed profile of a fictionalized version of your ideal customer: the person your marketing efforts target. It’s sometimes called a “buyer persona,” “prospect persona,” or “consumer persona.”
To create a customer persona, marketers build a composite sketch of specific characteristics, attitudes, motivations, and concerns related to the product or service they’re marketing.
Read more >>
Customer acquisition cost
A company’s customer acquisition cost, or CAC, represents everything a company spends on attracting new customers or convincing a prospect to make a purchase. At the most basic level, it is the total cost of all its sales and marketing expenses divided by the number of new customers acquired.
There are three broad categories of sales and marketing expenses included in CAC:
• Sales and marketing staff includes salaries, benefits, commissions, and bonuses of the people involved in bringing in new business.
• Hardware and software includes subscription fees for SaaS platforms such as customer relationship management platforms, customer data platforms, website hosting platforms, and analytics tools used to report website metrics.
• Advertising and marketing campaigns include both paid advertising and the cost of internal marketing activities such as a design agency, SEO agency, the production of printed materials or promotional videos, and expenses related to trade shows and account-based marketing. Read more >>
More blog posts about marketing technology
Copywriting challenge: Rewrite SEO blog posts whose first draft was created by ChatGPT.
RedStag, an order fulfillment company with a SaaS platform, relies heavily on SEO to drive website traffic. To maintain the adequate blog volume and cadence, they use generative AI to create initial drafts of each post. Using the SEO editor Surfer, I then edited for language, context, accuracy, relevance, and voice, and improved its SEO score as well.
Dead Stock & How to Avoid It
Dead stock is inventory that you’re unable to sell. Sometimes known as excess stock, it‘s unlikely to ever move out of your warehouse and generate revenue.
Be careful not to confuse dead stock with returned stock, which is product purchased and then sent back by the consumer. It also differs from safety stock, which is the extra product you might store to hedge against an unexpectedly large demand.
What makes dead stock bad is that it grows unintentionally, becoming a stagnant investment that takes up valuable inventory space and incurring additional holding costs. As you accumulate dead stock, you also tie up more of your resources in products that are unlikely to ever give a return on your investment. Read more >>
Copywriting challenge: Repurpose webinar content as reportage that celebrates the customer and creates an easy-to-follow case study involving complex technology.
These blog posts, derived from content produced for GrowthLoop Live!, the company’s online user conference, were ghostwritten as interviews by the GrowthLoop team member who anchored each webinar. The customer is the hero of the story, which is energized by each interviewee’s obvious passion for his work.
Activating unified data: The team effort behind marketing a Major League Baseball team
Brian Himstedt likes to think of baseball as the soundtrack of summer, and for 2.8 million fans across six Midwestern states, the Kansas City Royals are the featured artist on that soundtrack.
“We play 162 games between April and September,” said Brian, the CIO and VP of Technology and Business Analytics for the Royals, “...and from mid-June through August, we’re the only game in town,” because pro football, basketball, and hockey are all on hiatus.
But the Royals’ fan base extends beyond the 1.6 million people who buy tickets to the Royals’ home games at Missouri’s Kauffman Stadium: another 4.4 million nationwide count themselves as Royals fans.
“They watch us on TV, they follow us on social media, they stream our games online, they visit our website, and of course, they listen to our games on the radio, which provides that summertime soundtrack on 50 stations,” Brian shared. “Our goal is to give each and every fan the greatest experience possible.”
While having a winning team always helps boost fan morale, that great experience is aided by knowing what makes those fans tick and how to keep them engaged between games and throughout the offseason as well. The customer data on Royals fans comes through the many touchpoints fans have with the team, as well as from Major League Baseball (MLB), which helps collect and distribute data for each of its clubs. Read more >>
Fast cars, fast marketers: How NASCAR builds rapid, targeted campaigns
12 premier racetracks in 11 states from coast to coast. 100+ races and events per year. 30+ drivers per race. 100,000+ fans at many events and millions more watching on TV. An ever-growing number of marketing partners and affiliated brands. Thousands of items of merchandise. Dozens and dozens of marketing channels.
Damian Arbuckle’s mission was to get all those numbers to add up to 360—or rather, a 360-degree view of each NASCAR fan.
“There’s always something new to communicate to our fans, whether it’s a discount for college students or a message from their favorite race car driver,” said Damian, NASCAR’s senior director of consumer intelligence, “and we want to target audiences quickly to capitalize on fan excitement.”
But implementing that kind of rapid, targeted marketing can be a long drive when each race track has a different way of capturing data about ticketing, merchandising, fan demographics, and race-day information. Read more >>
Copywriting challenge: Split the difference between a blog post and a product marketing slick.
Boclips, an ed tech video platform, needed a thought leadership blog post that could also be used to introduce their product’s newest AI capabilities. I created a general piece on the uses of AI in education that then tapered into the benefits of an AI-driven curated video platform.
The Role of AI in Personalizing Video-Based Learning
Personalization: A better way to learn
The benefits of personalized learning—instruction individualized for the preferences, needs, and objectives of each student—have been well understood for more than a decade. Providing relevant, engaging content adapted to a student’s knowledge level and preferred learning modalities yields a more satisfying learning experience that increases motivation and improves outcomes.
To provide personalized learning, educators have had to master new tactics. Among them are delivery options beyond the classroom and course materials beyond textbooks and lecture notes.
Today’s learners, whether they’re in high school, seeking university degrees, or pursuing continuing education or professional development, benefit from choices among how courses are delivered—synchronously or asynchronously, in-person or online. And they expect learning materials in a variety of formats that accommodate accessibility challenges and support their own preferences in learning, assessment, and feedback. Read more >>
Copywriting challenge: Turn the transcript of a freewheeling panel discussion into a coherent product story that balanced the input of each participant.
Veeva, whose SaaS pharma and life sciences platform has broad functionality, wanted a story about the technology’s content management capabilities through the eyes—and quotations—of four clients. I reassembled the transcript of a webinar and cleaned up the quotations to create a Q&A-based narrative for their blog that also showcased each client’s know-how.
Creating Effective Content:
An Agency Perspective
Stacy Payne: What best practices should companies adopt to ensure content is relevant and impactful?
Adam Hirsch: The more you personalize your content, the more likely it will capture your customers’ attention. A lot of the work we do is specific to healthcare providers. So we put aside theories about typical digital content journeys and put ourselves into the shoes—or the lab coat—of an HCP. What do they know about us already? What would they want to learn about or discuss in our next conversation? What’s the best format to present that information in? Answering these questions helps us understand how to adjust content for different specialties or varying levels of expertise.
Vikki Ward: The Medical, Legal & Regulatory team should be your marketing team’s best friend. MLR teams don‘t want to be difficult. They don‘t go to work in the morning thinking, “How can I ruin someone‘s day by telling them that their work is no good and they have to start all over again.” And nobody wants something to take six months from beginning to end. So, bring MLR into the content creation process at the beginning of the campaign so they understand what you’re trying to achieve. Read more >>