Why is building a brand image so important? It’s because this is how your customers/clients will remember you. And if there is no brand consistency, there will be only chaos and confusion. Nobody wants to deal with more chaos and uncertainty. Especially now.
Why do we remember brands like Coca Cola, Google, Apple? It’s because they invest in developing and promoting their brand identity. You cannot piece together a brand like a patchwork quilt from a dozen different sources just because it was the cheapest. This isn’t how you create brand loyalty.
Why do people pay more for a MacBook Air when they could get basically the same no-name brand for less than half the price? It’s because of Apple’s carefully constructed branding and image. Their message and their branding is not ONLY carefully constructed, but it’s consistent. It’s not about saving a few pennies or dollars here and there. It’s about an investment in a potentially amazing future.
There is a probably a LOT of competition in your area. What do you want to do to make your business stand out? What is important about YOUR image? What is the image you want to present to the world? You might think that, say, business cards are just a small, meaningless detail, but they are part of a foundation that is building your brand and even something as small as a business card is part and parcel of a consistent message: and part of that message is that YOU pay attention to EVERY detail: not only in your products or services, but your office setting, your website, your branding, your everything. Your image is what is working for you.
Spend the time, discipline and dollars now to perfect the image. Every single thing you put out there is representing YOU. This is the area where you can outshine every other mediocre and same-o same-o-business in your industry. Your business has a lot of potential to be unique and amazing with the right plan. This can be an exciting and creative time, getting your business off the ground or getting it to grow further by putting together a great brand with a good creative and marketing plan! So get out there, form a great team to elevate your brand, and create something amazing.
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Sandra Mui shines in her role as the Creative Director at Webtage. With over 15 years of experience in creative writing and visual arts, she gets the pulse of the consumer and creates content that strikes a chord.
Having previously worked for advertising agencies, such as Leo Burnett and other boutique creative houses, she has successfully launched Fortune 500 ad campaigns, including those for Procter & Gamble, Kodak Professional Division, Phillip Morris, FILA, Aki Italia & Champion Sportswear.
Sandra has a passion for reading, writing and researching. Her love of words and art gives her a unique vision and ability to put things together in ways that will make your brand pop!
In 2018 Google unveiled its “medic update” which had strong implications for businesses in the YMYL (short for ‘Your Money or Your Life’ or in other words websites that provide any information that affects people’s health, wellness, or money). Since more than 40% of websites affected due to this update were health related sites, this came to be known as the “medic update.” There have been further Core Quality Updates in 2019 that continue to have deep implications for search visibility of healthcare organizations.
So what do these updates mean if you are a healthcare provider? Put simply, it means that Google does not want to recommend “uneducated advice, opinions, or potentially fraudulent websites.” Google wants to be certain that the sites that they recommend display a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
So how do you signal your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to Google?
Expertise
Build expertise by creating frequent content that is informative, useful and engaging for your audience.
Remove poor quality, dated content from your website that would signal half-baked, incorrect, or worse, harmful information to your audience.
Keep in mind that it is not only important to build E.A.T. for your website, but also work on building E.A.T. for your content creators. How?
You may be a wonderful and experienced doctor, but if you haven’t built your online profile then there is nothing in the digital world to back up your expertise. So strengthen your online expertise by writing guest articles for niche publications in your field and contribute to industry publications and forums.
Add by-lines expert to website content. This will signal that the author is an expert in the profession or niche and the information provided in that blog is trustworthy.
Link content creator’s profile to other online profiles, especially on authority sites.
Use structured data to markup the author’s profile that will allow for a connection to be made with other online profiles for the author.
Cite credible research, statistics, and data in the content that you create.
Authority
Build authority by developing valuable backlinks from relevant & authoritative sites.
Gain backlinks from high authoritative sites naturally by guest blogging for niche high DA (domain authority) sites. Most health-related guest blogging sites have clear guidelines on the types of content they will consider for publication. Identify sites that are the best fit for your specialty.
Create outbound links to high quality health sites & industry publications. Try to include links to research studies or academic journal. Outbound links to .edu or .gov or .org sites are especially useful.
Quality over quantity! Take your time to build good quality links. Building links through automated citation submissions may not be enough anymore.
A good social media strategy will help you market your content and get your content shared – another great way to build authority.
Trustworthiness
Build trustworthiness by building positive reviews. Positive client reviews help in increasing the E.A.T. score, so encourage all the satisfied patients to write testimonials on Google My Business, social media, and review sites.
Many healthcare provider websites allow for email subscriptions, online appointment scheduling, online portal sign-ins etc – all considered to be Protected Health Information (PHI) under HIPPA. This patient data is vulnerable to being stolen unless your site is secured with an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate is not only necessary for you to be HIPPA compliant, it also signals trustworthiness of your website. Google takes privacy of user data very seriously and provides a boost to those websites that signal their intent to protect their user’s information. So make sure your website is secure with an SSL certificate!
Have a clear way for your visitors to contact you with a clearly accessible Contact page.
Include a Privacy Page to let your patients know how you gather, use, disclose, and manage their data.
If you allow for online transactions through your website, ensure that clearly outline your refunds & returns policy.
E.A.T. is not the only update that has had an impact on Google search rankings of healthcare businesses. The 2019 B.E.R.T. is another update that has hit some healthcare sites hard and is about incorporating Natural Language Processing (NLP) into Google searches. And if pages on your website don’t provide information on topics that users are keying into search bars, then your website is likely to be overlooked.
A digital marketing campaign needs a strategic approach and careful planning. Advance preparation can help both clients and vendors develop a common understanding of marketing objectives & constraints.
This questionnaire will help you understand your vision for your organization’s growth goals and plan the overall effort required for a confusion- and conflict-free digital campaign. It will help your vendor understand your constraints and will also lower your risk for running into a time and cost overrun.
So whether you are considering improvements to your existing campaign or an extensive omnichannel marketing launch, use this questionnaire to start your digital strategy on the right footing.
About the Author
A believer in hype-free and performance driven digital strategies, Snigdha’s endeavor is to get your brand established and your business grow. She is passionate about research, design and analytics and works non-stop and meticulously to make sure that your brand stands out from the rest.
Snigdha’s background is in research design, industry research, content creation, and qualitative and quantitative research (including web-based and phone survey methods and focus group discussions). She is a highly qualified professional in the areas of digital marketing strategy design, SEO, content creation, and social media marketing. Most recently she has grown a client’s online presence from zero to 25% online leads within 3-6 months; moved client website to the #1 & #2 spots on Google, Bing, and Yahoo for all major keywords; and generated online leads accounting for 25% – 30% of all leads for that client.
It’s good business practice for organizations to redesign website content at regular intervals to better reflect shifts in customers needs, changes in business direction, design sensibilities and SEO needs. Website content redesign requires a highly strategic approach that requires multiple levels of expertise, including business & brand strategy, search marketing, experience design, lead generation strategy, conversion rate optimization, copywriting and graphic design. So how should you go about redesigning website content and what are some of the pitfalls you must avoid?
Strategy Before Implementation – At Webtage, we work through the content redesign strategy backwards. We start with the pain point – what is the pain point that content redesign is attempting to redress? Use the following steps to correctly identify the pain points and develop a top-level content strategy.
A website redesign questionnaire is a great way to start the conversation with the stakeholders. We use this easy-to-use and comprehensive questionnaire to kickstart content redesign projects.
Second, do a competitive analysis to see what others in the industry are doing. SWOT analysis is a great way to get ideas and discover opportunities.
Next, do a top-level, page specific analysis. We like to use a spreadsheet to map out top-level current pages and include stakeholder information about them. This is not a full-fledged content inventory of the website, but rather a strategic overview of the site pages and an organized way to gather stakeholder inputs. At this stage include information about pages that will most efficiently help you define a content strategy.
Finally, with the information gathered from the above, list the primary KPI and secondary KPIs for the website as a whole, and individual pages as much as possible. For instance, if lead generation is a key objective, then website conversions & goal completion should be your primary KPI.
Content Inventory – After having established clear KPIs based on a content strategic overview, move to a complete site content inventory audit. The content inventory should allow you to pull a sitemap of the site with self-populated content fields. There are 2 types of content inventory audit that should be conducted:
SEO inventory – You should crawl every indexed URL on the site to include fields such as SEO tags, internal link structure, backlinks, traffic, content uniqueness, page speed and more. The reason for detailed SEO indexing is that you should maintain all trust worthiness that is already built into your website. For instance, maintain URLs that have a built-in, rich link structure, recreate content to better target keyword and semantic search patterns, and maintain favorable SEO technical parameters. If URL structure cannot be maintained, have a strategy in place to assign a 301 redirect to every page that exists on the current site. Screaming Frog and Moz are great resources to for SEO content audit tools and best practices including strategies for very large site content audits, mobile site audits and more.
Content inventory – Content inventory should include all forms of content that exists on the website, including html, pdfs, images, videos, and other rich media files. In addition to content that exists on website, gather all pieces of content that may exist on other digital channels and offline.
SiteMap creation – Now comes the interesting part. Once you have a clear site content inventory, create new sitemap aligned to strategic goals of the content redesign project and user needs. A good navigation strategy takes its cues from expected user navigation patterns and allows for intuitive, self-segmentation of users. When creating the sitemap, add not just the linked pages; add content sections (topics, rich media, lead generation calls-to-actions) as well. Pages and content sections together provide a comprehensive view of how new site. Finally, assign URL structure to pages at this stage. Make sure you retain URLs with significant link juice and assign 301 redirects to every existing URLs to not loose the trustworthiness built into the pages.
We use Slickplan for sitemap creation as it offers very useful features that come handy when seeking sign off from multiple stakeholders and team members. Features include addition of link structure, mockups and notes (URL structure & other relevant details) to pages, as well as collaborations with team members and client shares at the click of the mouse.
Now that you have the sitemap aligned to the primary & secondary KPIs, map each page to the content inventory and make a list of content pieces that need recreation or reworking per page.
High Fidelity Wireframe/Mockup Creation – After creation of the sitemap, it’s time to put it all in a visual, hi-fidelity framework. This is where organization of content happens and the layout is finalized. Keep user experience at the top of your priorities when designing the layout.
There are many interactive design & prototyping tools that are very useful as they turn still wireframes and mockups into prototypes by bringing a level of interactivity. This is especially useful for clients and stakeholders as they can “interact” with the mockups to get a feel for the final site. UXPin, Sketch, InVision and proto.io are some great interactive design & prototyping tools available.
Copy Creation – The final stage is the actual meat of the project and involves creation of copy well aligned to the KPIs, SEO needs and most importantly user needs. In addition to creating verbiage, here are some tips and tricks which will make the implementation of the content redesign smoother and faster:
Assign site-wide CSS formatting rules to each page. Add font rules (including for H1-H6, body copy, button CTA text , testimonials and other verbiage elements), add font colors, and css formatting for other design elements as required. Here is a snapshot of the font rules we have created for a site content redesign project that we are currently working on:
Create a PDF of the page mockup and add instructions, such as hyperlink URLs for internal and external links, IT functionalities (how a certain content block is expected to function) and any other special instructions that you would want a web developer to be aware of as they upload your content to the website.
Finally, create an art folder that includes all sized, high resolution rich-media files that the web developer can then easily add to the webpages.
Looking to redesign your website content? Contact us at Webtage where we are laser focused on creating the best digital experience to improve your top line. Our content development strategy is viewed critically with a UX, brand and SEO lens before implementation. Learn more about our content development & marketing philosophy.
If you are like most businesses you need a solid content strategy to fuel your inbound marketing. However, it is a struggle for busy professionals to come up with great content ideas and turn it into a professional product. Here are tips and tools that will be helpful you in pulling together a content strategy:
Start with a goal – Have a clear view of what you want your content marketing to achieve. For instance, do you wish to build a community around your service or product, generate traffic for your website, establish thought leadership & develop your brand, create quality leads, or something else? Your content strategy will vary greatly depending on your goal. If you are looking to establish thought leadership, your content should be informative and engaging and the output should be in the form of ebooks, newsletters, infographics etc.
Listen to your customers! Successful content creators will tell you that the best content created around questions your consumers ask and the feedback they provide. Take commonly asked question and turn your answers into a blog topic.
Build an organized content repository –Next time you find an article or post that you find engaging or useful, “clip” it using tools such as Evernote Web Clipper or Pocket. Make sure that your repository is organized so that you can find and view it later. This repository will be very useful when you are brainstorming content topics.
The 40-40-20 Rule – Not all content that you use in your inbound marketing needs to be self-created. A “40-40-20 rule” is a good place to start your social strategy where about 40% of all content should be self-created, 40% is curated from third party sources, and 20% is user generated or contributed. Just make sure the content is top quality and is engaging and/or informative.
Do content mapping – For content creation activities, take into account your user persona(s) and purchase lifecycle stages to map out your content. Have a different content output in mind to target users in different purchase cycles. Include informative material and visually attractive infographics if you want to spread awareness among targeted buyers with displayed interest in your area of expertise. Once prospectives are in the “Consideration” phase, target them with specific content on your value proposition, such as, price & feature comparison infographics. If they in the “Decision” phase, lead them to a landing page with automated quote generation capabilities and follow up with customized emails.
Content Type – Be cautious in the type of content you share on social channels. Make sure it’s not all self-promotion! Another good rule of thumb in social content strategy is the one-third rule – one-third is self-promotion, one-third is informative, and one-third should be general, fun shares and posts.
Be Consistent– This one is obvious.The more consistent you are, the more results you will see. Whether it is building your brand, achieving visibility by targeting influencers, or getting quality leads, you will see best results if you are socially active.
Use Social Management Tools – There aremany useful social content management, curation, marketing, and analytical tools thatcan makehelp you streamline the content creation and dissemination process. From comprehensive social marketing management and analytic tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite to specific B2B marketing tools, such as eGrabber to content curation tools like Swayy and Compfight, there is a plethora of tools that can make social marketing effective and precise.
Develop Metrics – Assign metrics to track your goal conversions. If you are looking to build thought leadership and manage your online reputation, make sure you use social tracking and monitoring tools like SocialMention, Mention, and Radian6 to track social mentions of your brand and respond to concerns and opportunities.
Validate – Set up A/B tests for all content marketing strategies. Track and analyze your campaign and make sure you track at least these basic metrics (and do it for each social channel so that you know which channel is most effective for you):
Reach & Engagement – Be sure to track your audience growth rate as well as whether they are engaged with your content.
Channel Reports – How many visits is each channel generating? What is the return visit rate? What is the bounce rate?
Conversions – Set up conversion metrics and track how many conversions is each channel generating.
Influence – How influential are you on social media? Track it with the help of social social tracking and mention tools.
Response Rate – Ho many interactions are you having with your prospects and leads? How many mentions of your company are you responding to?
What are you favorite tricks and tips for content generation & marketing? Feel free to comment below or drop us a line at snigdha@webtage.com
