client 101s

This February, we’ve added some seriously powerful content services to our Content Shop repertoire. All of our continual changes and updates are based on specific needs from our clients, and a strict adherence we personally have to always maintain the edge of the curve in our industry. Here’s a shortlist / TL;DR of February’s new updates (scroll down to read about each): Storytelling Images & Custom Blog Headers. Our design team has been creating these for our own brand with great results in more brand awareness and content traction, so we decided it was time to launch custom image solutions, including beautiful storytelling variations and custom blog images, for our clients! Social Media Plans Update: Revamped social media plans to new standards, including content curation using BuzzSumo. Editing (Copy and Developmental). At both copy editing levels. Professional Interviewing. In this service, based on one simple interview fee, we now have staff Project Managers who are experts at interviewing subjects and obtaining key information that leads to a wonderful interview. Project Management. This new service takes care of a lot of “monkey work” that goes into organizing and maintaining content marketing. Client 101s. These are completely free for our clients, and are being written and designed as we speak! The first one, a Process/Content Order Lifecycle 101, is live! We’re working on a Meet the Team 101 next, where we explain how everyone’s staff role fits into an order and how clients can contact each of us, a Writing Levels 101, and several others. What’s New at Express Writers for February: Everything You Needed to Know on 5 New/Revamped Products & a New, Free Client Resource 1. New Custom Images: Storytelling Imagery, Blog Header Sets, & More Ever thought to yourself… “I wish I had a REALLY cool branded header for my blog and a variation to share on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook…” “I wish I could visualize a step in my customer journey/buying process with a cool, engaging illustration…” “It would be awesome to boost engagement with a cartoon strip for this industry controversial blog…” We’ve got you covered on all of those visual needs in our re-launched Custom Imagery service, live in the Content Shop. Clients can choose from a custom, beautiful, blog image set put together by our design team in Adobe InDesign, complete with a full-sized header and an inset to share on social media, or a storytelling graphic that would fit nicely in a process for your customers to visualize their journey/how it works page (example: our process). Want to see how cool these get (read: how amazing our design team is)? Here are a few: Killer, right?? We’ve literally designed thousands of these images for our own brand by now – the samples above are a brief preview of what we can do – and we thought it was high time to allow clients to buy it as a product. With custom imagery, we’ve seen massive results… We a huge CTR boost with a cartoon strip on our SEO post – a 25% boost in actual reads. Influencers picked up our content and shared it on Twitter WITH the image attached, boosting views to our content by another 25%. Never leave your images last on your to-do list again. Let us help you create better-than-average custom imagery to accompany your content! 2. Social Media Plans During this month, we also did some heavy updates and restructuring, much-needed, to our social media plans. I sat down and created new guidelines for our Social Media Experts, which condenses down to these three key, important changes: We now create and post 3/images per week at the minimum level (3 IG posts) instead of 1. Images, and Instagram, are hot! You can’t miss out on either, so we’ve increasing the volume at all levels on all plans. Our SMEs are now trained on how to use BuzzSumo to curate industry influencer content, and position your brand as an authority by sharing content that your fans will love and identify with. Choose whichever social media platform you’d like us to manage, now straight from the product itself! Our Social Media Plans have also been renamed to Level 1, 2, and 3 instead of Basic/Guru/Enterprise. 3. Copy Editing Our revamped Copy Editing service in the Content Shop now includes two levels to cover every need, developmental and copy editing services, starting at one hour (up to 3,000 words). We have senior, expert editors at both levels ready to take orders! See a guide to knowing the two differences of copy vs. developmental editing from our Content Development Specialist, Tara, on the Write Blog. 4. Professional Interviewing For one simple interview fee you can now have an incredible interview organized and done (check that off your list!) by our professional interviewing team. We now have staff Project Managers who have background expertise in interviewing and journalism, and have seen amazing results from the interviews done so far. See a post co-created by our Project Manager Hannah and Content Development Specialist, Hannah, on why interviews matter to content marketing. 5. Project Management Just launched last week, our new project management service offers a wonderful solution for a lot of our marketer clients who are continually overwhelmed, swamped, and lost beneath the work they have to do on their content marketing get-done list. Did you know that only 30% of marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing? An actual decrease of 8% from the previous year.(source: Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 Benchmarks) Even less have a strong, documented content marketing strategy. Yet budgets, goals, and creation itself in content marketing actually increased by a large percentage during the same year. Our solution in offering project management is to help a real need we see that our clients have. Project management is a serious drain on them, yet a vastly crucial part of content marketing not to be overlooked. Scenarios Where Project Management Fits In Just a few of the problems our clients have given us that we can now solve with our project management service include: “We’re thinking about hiring a part-time staff member to handle all of these content needs and work with you, but it may not be in the budget, or we don’t know … Read more