Optimizing Digital Communication to Help Small Businesses Succeed

Burst Consulting offers executive coaching and mentorship to medium-sized companies through one-day strategy sessions, leadership development and consulting, and quarterly planning sessions. After decades of success as a CEO of multiple companies, Rob Lynch founded Burst in 2012 because he wanted to help business leaders find their own success.

An Integrate client since 2015, Rob’s primary goal is to continue increasing his local visibility and name recognition in the Austin-area market. Historically, we’ve worked toward this goal by focusing our efforts on creating content that positions Rob as a thought leader and by actively pitching contributed articles and securing speaking engagements at local events.

This past year, we decided to refresh the approach of our digital communication tactics in tandem with our traditional PR efforts. We primarily focused on two mediums:

As a result of honing our skills in these two disciplines, we’ve driven excellent numbers that have put him on the track for success in 2018 and beyond.

We’ve created bi-monthly blog posts for Rob since 2016. The process has always been very straightforward – Rob provides a rough outline of what he’d like to cover, we use that to write a post, and then Rob provides edits, additional insights, and final approval.

In the past, these blogs were brief, to-the-point, and without any deep reflections from Rob’s success as a CEO and business leader. As a part of our initiative to refresh Rob’s digital communications, we wanted to revamp the blogs so they provided more value to the reader. We did this in two ways:

First, we developed monthly and quarterly thematic arcs, so that each post could dive deeper into a topic connected to the larger theme. The reasoning was two-fold: the reader gets more meat and substance with an in-depth post; and data indicates that developing an engaging series can effectively prompt your readership to come back for more.

We pushed Rob to provide more insights from his extensive experience as a CEO by providing specific examples and personal anecdotes. The addition of Rob’s personal stories and knowledge make the posts much more interesting and valuable to the reader, and they better pitch Rob’s unique skills as a CEO and coach to future clients.

These simple tactics have made an impressive impact on traffic to Rob’s blog. Within the first 7 months of 2018, we have seen a 92% increase in users compared to 2017.

With all of this improved content, we really needed to optimize his e-mail marketing strategy.

We sent out three newsletters each month – two promoted Rob’s newest blogs, and one promoted his “Ask Rob” video blog – but with Rob’s blog content improving, we needed to promote and market them more effectively. Our approach was three-pronged:

In the past, Rob’s newsletters included the entire blog content within the body; therefore, there was no reason for the reader to click through to his website. By updating the format of the e-mails to include more of a “sneak peak,” we increased click-through rates by 57%. We also focused on crafting punchier, attention-grabbing headlines to increase open rates.

Before:

After:

The ultimate goal was to create a series of e-mails that nurtured the subscriber base to lead to new clients. We created a personalized retargeting e-mail program that resulted in a 60% open rate (which is 200% higher than the consulting industry standard), a 3% click through rate (50% higher than the industry average), and three news business leads for Rob. All of this in the first 6 months of 2018!

Rob’s deliverability rate sat at lower-than-average levels because too many e-mails bounced back as undeliverable. To bring that rate up to par with industry standards, we removed contacts from his email subscriber list that were outdated or no longer in use. This instantly resulted in a 10% deliverability increase year-over-year, which ensures that future e-mails will reach the inboxes of subscribers, rather than getting filtered out by e-mail client algorithms.

Not every success story requires wholesale changes to your client’s marketing infrastructure. Sometimes, reformulating your digital communication strategy may be as simple as making a few small adjustments. Some things to ask yourself about the content you create and how you distribute it:

By answering these questions and making a few small but highly strategic tweaks to our overall digital communication strategy, we were able to breathe fresh life into Rob’s content, increase his subscriber engagement, and secure three new leads for his consulting business. Combined with our traditional PR efforts, taking an integrated approach has delivered measurable results to our client.

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