She believes everyone has a story worth sharing, and has helped everyone from an 8-year-old who saw heaven, for real, to a 77-year old military nurse who served in World War II write beautiful memoirs. Originally a publishing executive and adjunct writing professor, her focus now is on coaching her clients through the process of digging into their past, arranging and organizing their story, and self-publishing for friends, family, and generations to come to read.
She has been able to sustain her success through referrals, word-of-mouth, and her active presence in various Facebook groups, but realized she needed to ramp up her online presence after reading a statistic that 90.4 percent of millennials, 77.5 percent of Gen X, and 48.2 percent of baby boomers use social media in the US.
She believes everyone has a story worth sharing, and has helped everyone from an 8-year-old who saw heaven, for real, to a 77-year old military nurse who served in World War II write beautiful memoirs. Originally a publishing executive and adjunct writing professor, her focus now is on coaching her clients through the process of digging into their past, arranging and organizing their story, and self-publishing for friends, family, and generations to come to read.
In recent years she’s pivoted from working with anyone to working specifically with female entrepreneurs who write poignant memoirs of their life’s journey, from childhood to career success. She knows that a memoir would benefit the client professionally by drawing attention to their company and services, but also serve as much-needed inspiration for the generation of ambitious young professionals emerging today.
She needs digital marketing help to reach her audience, but wants to learn a thing or two along the way in order to coach her clients on attracting that younger audience through social media marketing. As a middle-aged woman herself, she chose AP Marketing to help with digital marketing services in order to leverage her traditional teaching and publishing experience with a strong online presence to attract her ideal client and position herself as an expert in her field.
She has been able to sustain her success through referrals, word-of-mouth, and her active presence in various Facebook groups, but realized she needed to ramp up her online presence after reading a statistic that 90.4 percent of millennials, 77.5 percent of Gen X, and 48.2 percent of baby boomers use social media in the US.
In recent years she’s pivoted from working with anyone to working specifically with female entrepreneurs who write poignant memoirs of their life’s journey, from childhood to career success. She knows that a memoir would benefit the client professionally by drawing attention to their company and services, but also serve as much-needed inspiration for the generation of ambitious young professionals emerging today.
She needs digital marketing help to reach her audience, but wants to learn a thing or two along the way in order to coach her clients on attracting that younger audience through social media marketing. As a middle-aged woman herself, she chose AP Marketing to help with digital marketing services in order to leverage her traditional teaching and publishing experience with a strong online presence to attract her ideal client and position herself as an expert in her field.
Taking her brand values and audience information into account, we’d begin by auditing her social presence.
As mentioned, she has a strong presence in Facebook groups, and her website isn’t half bad- but it’s purely informational and missing a blog section, so we’ll want to add one. We’d want to consider LinkedIn if she’s establishing herself as an expert, as she can share articles and blog posts and drive traffic to her website. She has an email newsletter with 50 or so previous clients as subscribers, and sends out one newsletter a month to congratulate her new and old clients on publication and share life happenings. Naturally, she loves to write and does so beautifully, and has plenty of experience in corporate and academia, so she’s fully on board for more content creation.
What took some convincing for Deb was the addition of YouTube. She felt somewhat uncomfortable on camera. After we explained that she’s missing an awesome opportunity in informational searches and that over 62% of searches include video results, she agreed, though hesitantly, to at least “give it a shot.” That’s all we needed!
We also noticed that her Google My Business and Yelp pages were not yet claimed for her small office downtown with a gorgeous view- we’d claim those, add photos and content, and use SEO strategies to ensure her location would pop up in local SEO searches.
Because Deb’s current website is sparse on content, we would be eager to jump into the content creation process.
To get her started, we’d offer to help create a beautifully-designed ebook for her website which focuses on sharing her wisdom. The ebook would probably detail how to move from idea, to outline, to first draft of a self-publishing book with writing tips and stories about previous clients’ successes along the way. This would be her piece of pillar content, which we’d distill into Facebook and LinkedIn posts, Pinterest infographics, and weekly blog posts. Luckily we’re catching Deb early in the blogging game, and can SEOptimize each new piece on her website.
Though she was reluctant at first, Deb can now understand how this pillar piece- and her experiences and knowledge behind its creation- would fit perfectly into the YouTube space. Deb even offered a great idea for her channel- an interview series with clients who have published books, with questions and answers aimed at providing ambitious young professionals with inspiration and guidance at the start of their careers.
We’d work with Deb to create a content calendar of blogs which suits her schedule, maintains consistency and relevancy, and meets the needs of her target audience, and ensure that she includes these value-packed blogs in her monthly email newsletter.
We understand just how important SEO is, especially in an increasingly digital world. First thing’s first- Deb’s website. Her domain is currently https://www.debdelucawritingcoach.com, which tells us two things- her website is SSL certified (yay!), and her domain should probably be shortened. Including “writing coach” in her domain would likely fit the bill for older SEO standards, but in today’s world, we’d want to shorten it to just her name- debdeluca.com (which is, surprisingly, still available!)- to build authority. We would then ensure the speed of her website is up-to-date and make appropriate adjustments if necessary.
Next, we would pull out our phones and search Deb’s website. How’s the mobile experience? Given her website was self-created seven years ago, there are definitely adjustments to be made! We’d outsource a cleaner, more visually-appealing (and mobile- and tablet-optimized) website to our web development team.
We’d also search for Deb’s website name in Google, and see that Deb’s meta title and meta description for her pages are incohesive and inconsistent, pulling mainly from the text that’s already on the page. Luckily, we can fix that! We can edit her About page title, for example, from “About” to “About Deb | Deb Deluca Writing Coach,” and her home page from Home to “Writing Coach for Women Professionals | Deb Deluca” or “Your Writing Coach and Self-Publishing Mentor | Deb Deluca,” matching keywords that we predict will be most popular- self-publishing, writing coach, etc.
Lastly, we would claim her Google My Business and Yelp pages and add photos, services, posts, and reach out to past clients to leave 5-star reviews.
Now that her website is in tip-top shape and her content shines, we can work on a social strategy to spread the word about her expertise and services.
Because she’s looking to position herself as an expert in her field, we’d want to build her a profile on LinkedIn, where she can join groups, build her network, and regularly post her valuable blogs which drive traffic back to her website. We can also create a Pinterest account to share her blogs and website in the form of infographics and designs, keeping appropriate keywords in mind for the Pinterest search engine. She already has a strong presence on Facebook in groups and through her business page, but we’d want to post consistently on her page to maintain relevancy and connect with her audience. Customer service plays a vital role in social strategy and interaction with audiences across all media outlets, so we can share with Deb the importance of responding, genuinely and with excitement, to users who comment or private message on her social media outlets and her blog.
For paid advertising purposes, we would want to consult Deb’s Facebook business page. We can play with different PPC ad campaigns for different intended audiences to find which strategy sticks. If we’re looking to reach Deb’s target demographic of mid-senior level female entrepreneurs, we would likely target women nationally between the ages of 25 and 50. After some quick research, we found a study conducted by Northwestern Mutual which presented 4 personas for female entrepreneurs. As a starting point, we can create 4 different campaigns which appeal to women who match these personas individually, and target these women by inputting demographics, interests and behaviors that match the persona description.
While Deb is certainly interested in expanding and advertising nationally, she did mention that her greatest joy is working with clients one-on-one in her office. With this in mind, we can look to place PPC ads on Google to enhance her local SEO search, specifically concerning the “writing coach near me” or “local writing coach” keywords.
It’s our hope that Deb Deluca’s new domain and website, plethora of new content and strong social media presence will establish her as an expert in the self-publishing industry and generate more leads from her ideal audience of female entrepreneurs. We’d like to see an increase in social media engagement and followers, but most importantly, an increase in leads and conversations between Deb and potential clients. Deb seems open to expanding into the digital space with podcasting, hosting online webinars and even creating her own Facebook group for writers and entrepreneurs. The sky is truly the limit for this very special brand.
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