Curatti Best Articles of 2020 (And Happy New Year 2021!)
2020 is finally over! How long did it last? Until now, every year of our lives went faster than any before it. Not this one! Goodbye annus horribilis! You’ll never be forgotten!
A Quick Summary of 2020
Life changed.
The end!
Our 2020 Authors
This year, we published over 130 articles, some written by old friends, and others by new friends. Plus, there were a lot of guest authors!
Every year, we want to publish a snippet of one article by every author who contributed 2 or more original articles. We’ll top it off with a thank you mention for every one of our one-time and guest authors.
Here they are, in alphabetical order:
Shane Barker
6 Questions to Ask Before Working with Any Influencer
Want to know what drives people to buy a product?
Brand trust is a top-ranked factor that affects the purchase decisions of consumers. 81% of customers consider low brand trust as a dealbreaker. Also, 67% of buyers might engage with a reputable brand but will eventually stop buying if their trust in the brand is not maintained.
That’s huge, isn’t it?
We don’t mean to discourage you, but the fact is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to garner trust from consumers.
Celebrity endorsements and paid advertisements are low on credibility and high on cost. Customers loathe blatant self-promotion. Plus, small business owners just can’t afford these pricey marketing tactics.
The solution?
…….
Before you start interviewing influencers, you need to have clarity about the goals you hope to fulfill by leveraging influencer marketing.
The top goals include improved brand awareness, website traffic, customer trust, sales conversions, customer engagement, and finding high-quality leads.
Once you’ve determined the metrics that matter to you, you can ask your shortlisted influencers the following questions:
To find out the questions, and more, click here.
Andy Capaloff
The Best Possible Answer To An Imperfect Question Is Still Wrong!
No beating around the bush here. I don’t care who you are, or how good you are at asking incisive questions, you simply cannot ask the best possible questions. At least not without help.
Why, you ask?
Easy answer!
We are all limited by our own life experiences. Sure, we might typically ask better questions than anyone around us. But does that make those questions perfect?
Want proof?
You may also want to read: Don’t Just Question Answers. Question Questions
You know those conversations when you butt heads – in the best possible way – with someone who you really respect? You run an idea by them. They zing one back at you. Then you’re off to the races. It’s exciting! Your back and forth goes to places you could never have thought of alone. Tell me you don’t get a buzz from that!
Finding the perfect question may not sound as sexy as brainstorming ideas. Not close. But look at the following two questions:
- How best can we use our website data to improve our company performance?
- Based on our metrics, what are our areas of concern, and where are the bright spots?
Is one better than the other? I think so. Is either as good as it could possibly be? Not even close!
What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?
42
Douglas Adams
To improve your questions, ask a marketer, a data person, a salesperson, a computer geek, and an angel investor. Bring in people from the supply chain and from related businesses.
They’ll all frame the question from their own experience and needs…
Click here for the full article.
Simki Dutta
5 Ways to Create a Data-Driven Content Strategy and Boost Growth?
If you talk about data-driven content marketing, it’s likely to cause most people’s eyes to glaze over.
One of the biggest mistakes content marketers make is assuming that creativity is enough to create great content. What they often overlook is a huge aspect of the equation — Data.
The content you create needs to deliver real results for your business and that can only happen if you leverage data to ideate and produce content that resonates with your audience.
From creating a survey for customers and analyzing website behavior, to keeping track of ongoing trends and doing competitive analysis — there are various ways to obtain data and use it to create awareness, attract traffic, drive conversions and build reputation and trust.
Let’s take a look at five smart ways to create a data-driven content strategy that boosts growth.
Develop User Personas
The first step towards implementing a data-driven approach begins with getting an in-depth understanding of who your ideal consumer is.
No, it’s not enough to know that your business caters to parents between the ages of 25 and 60. You need to go beyond that and create detailed representations of your target audience. This is where user personas come into the picture.
Developing user personas involves understanding your audience’s goals, motivations, needs, pain points, behavior and demographics, and segmenting this information into individual persona types.
Doing this exercise enables you to create more targeted content that caters to your audiences’ needs and suited for every stage of the sales funnel.
How do you obtain this data? By surveying your customers, conducting focus groups, uncovering website behavior patterns, and leveraging third-party networks.
You can use mind maps to map content and journeys for each of the personas, helping you organize and visualize the process better.
Click here to read the entire article.
Paolo Fabrizio
Is Your Customer Service Addicted to KPI?
‘Metrics, metrics, metrics’. That’s one of the most common refrains when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of customer service. This golden rush towards the the best one(s) has even increased with the spread of support thru digital channels. What shall we measure? How often? What can we do to improve results? That’s causing a constant state of anxiety amongst many managers because they’ve become customer service KPI addicted. Let me show you a seriously bad consequence and how to prevent it.
Don’t Lose Focus From Strategic Goals
What do you want to achieve from your customer service activities? Here are some examples broken down into two categories:
| Metrics-related goals |
| Increasing Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) |
| Improving Net Promoter Score (NPS) |
| Reducing first response time / handling time |
And
| Business-related goals |
| Increasing customer retention |
| Reducing churn |
| Strengthen loyalty / more customers staying longer with you |
Click here to read the entire article.
Anna Fox
5 Great Social Media Management Tools for Businesses
Social media management may be quite intimidating and overwhelming for business owners.
There are so many pieces and micro-tasks that it is hard to see the bigger picture. And it is even harder to monitor and evaluate the team’s progress.
Here are the tools discussed in the article:
- KnowEm
- Agorapulse
- Text Optimizer
- Buzzsumo
- Cyfe
Click here to read the entire article.
Susan Gilbert
3 Ways To Increase Your Sales Using Instagram
Instagram remains one of the fastest growing social networks for mobile business sales. According to an article on Hootsuite, there are 1 billion active users each month. 500 million people use the Stories feature each day. The potential to reach people through advertising is especially high at 849.3 million users.
While people come to Facebook to connect with friends and discover things from people they know, people turn to Instagram for visual inspiration and to discover brands and ideas through visual content. This provides businesses the opportunity to connect with people where they’re open to learning about new things.
By taking advantage of both platforms, you can increase your exposure and improve conversions. You will have the potential to be seen by a growing number of mobile users. This huge audience searches and makes purchases from their devices. Certainly, most at least begin their buying journey online.
3 Stats
- 62% of people made a purchase using their mobile device in the last 6 months
- 10% of eCommerce retail value comes from mobile
- 80% of people will use their mobile device to find information on a product or service rather than visiting a store
Click here to find out how to improve your Instagram sales.
Jan Gordon
Introducing The All-New Curatti Store
In celebration of our 7 year anniversary, we are sharing our top recommended products. And full disclosure here, we’re adding some items that are on the team’s wishlist. So here we go! Introducing the Curatti Store and the first few shopping categories.
The aim here is to make your life a little easier (because let’s face it, we can all do with a little less stress right now). From remote work challenges to backyard bliss all the way to gift ideas, we’ve got you covered.
Right now, we have 4 categories. They are:
Most of our offerings are on our Amazon Influencer page. So, if you want to go directly to that, here’s the link.
To read the rest of the article, Click here
David Gutierrez
How To Use Instagram Hashtags To Improve B2B Customer Engagement
B2B marketers often overlook Instagram, judging it to be purely consumer-oriented. With its predominantly visual nature, it is easy to see why one would think so.
It is certainly easier to persuade an individual to buy new shoes by showing how awesome they look than to convince a company representative to sign a large-scale contract via visual imagery. Nevertheless, some studies (like TrackMaven’s research) show that it is nothing more than a stereotype. In truth, B2B companies get their highest engagement ratios on Instagram compared to other social media platforms. This means that neglecting Instagram means discounting at least a billion people who consistently use it every month. An impressive 200 million of them visit at least one business profile every day.
However, what should one pay attention to when organizing an Instagram campaign? The answer is simple: hashtags. While they are not your only concern, using them correctly is of paramount importance. In this article, we will cover some of the most important things you should know about Instagram hashtags.
Click here to read 8 tips on how Instagram Hashtags can improve your B2B Customer Engagement.
Shaurya Jain
5 Elements Your Agency Website Must Have
Trying to make your agency stand out from the crowd is incredibly hard. As your website is often the first impression potential clients will have, it’s worth the investment of time and money to make sure it’s up to scratch. Competition is increasing (both from other agencies, but also from internal departments and management consultancies as well).
This article explores 5 essential elements every agency website must have, to help you stand out from the crowd and make the most of your online presence.
The 5 elements described at some length are:
- Case Studies
- Videos
- Blogging
- Customer Reviews
- Call To Action
Click here to see why these 5 elements are so important
Kayla Matthews
6 Trust Factors That Strengthen Brand Loyalty
Before any savvy customer decides to work with you, they’ll need some evidence that your business can be trusted.
When potential clients scan your website, they quickly form thoughts about your brand and whether it’s worth trusting. Current research shows that within 50 milliseconds, a visitor has already developed a partial opinion about your site.
As this happens, these visitors are looking for trust factors — signals that demonstrate your credibility to customers and encourage them to feel good about your brand. If your website is designed to show how your company is credible, they will likely trust it a little more.
Automated search ranking systems — like Google’s TrustRank — also use trust factors to determine how highly sites rank in searches and influence the kind of searches they will be included in.
For these reasons, you’ll want to include trust factors in all your business communications — especially your web presence.
To read about the six ways that prove your company is credible and help you strengthen brand loyalty, click here.
Qhubekani Nyathi
How To Increase Landing Page Conversions (13 Pro Tips)
If you are like most marketers, your landing page conversion rates are dismal.
Want proof?
Studies show the average landing page conversion rate across industries is a mere 2% to 5%.
Yes, at best only 5 out of 100 prospects that visit a landing page convert.
That’s disappointing because landing pages play a crucial role in a successful inbound marketing strategy. Without optimized high converting landing pages, prospects and customers are stuck on one stage of the buyer journey.
So the sooner you learn how to increase landing page conversions, the better your marketing campaigns will perform. You will turn more prospects into customers, customers into repeat buyers, repeat buyers into brand advocates who rave about your brand everywhere.
To read this near 3,000 word article, click here
Mitt Ray
5 Rules to Follow When Using Infographics in Your Content Marketing
Infographics have become a very popular component of content marketing as many businesses have realized their ability to generate more shares than other types of content.
You will find that most blogs these days publish infographics, especially since there are several tools that make it easy to design them.
They are everywhere! This is why if you want to get the most out of infographics, just creating one randomly and publishing won’t work anymore. This worked in the past, but there is too much competition now.
To gain the same benefits that businesses did in the past, you need to follow a proper plan and create infographics that will drive results.
This is why to help you get the most out of your infographics I have put together this list of rules to follow while incorporating infographics into your content marketing…
Click here to read the entire article.
Our One-Time Authors
Here’s the lengthy list of one-time contributors for the year. It includes some returning friends, who I’ve marked with an asterisk, and Moss Clement, a long-time supporter:
Christopher Heer and Dominic Cerilli
Travis Jamison
And Ann Smarty updated a couple of her old articles.
Thank You!
We truly appreciate all of our writers, and all of you are welcome to write again.
To anybody contacting us to contribute for the first time, please accept this advance apology. We have little time and simply don’t get to all of the emails. And then, with so few discretionary articles left in any given month, we must apply really high standards for the few we are able to publish.
Before you email us though, please read the guidelines you see in the top menu.
Last, but never least, if not for our readers, nobody would want to write for us! So the biggest thank you goes to you.
Happy New Year! Roll on 2021! You’ve been a long time coming!
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Jan Gordon
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