Value-Add Workshops for Our Clients
We believe in continuing education and sharing insights. Our workshops are designed to support and provide best practices to your marketing strategies. Below is a list of workshops available (outside of our many discovery/project workshops) for our strategy retainer clients.
Digital Media 101
What do all those words mean? Bounce rate, click-through rate, cost per click, unique visitors, organic, pageview, SERP, etc.
The terms used in digital marketing can seem like a different language but don’t worry! Once you understand the types of digital marketing and how those words apply it gets easier.
Digital marketing involves integrating various online media channels to reach your prospects and drive interaction with them. Digital marketing helps turn leads into customers.
Learn the basics of digital marketing, which types you pay for, and which are free but need to be optimized, how to use it to reach the right customers and make them act, what stats help you evaluate its effectiveness, and how to take the guesswork out of creating an effective digital media strategy.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) targets users who are looking for what you offer when searching on Google or other search engines. They are the people most likely to engage with your website and SEO takes them there.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is paid advertising to help your message appear at the top of a Google search and increase the opportunity for users to find and click on your ad.
- PPC (pay-per-click advertising), also called CPC (cost-per-click), is a cost-effective way to reach your qualified audience where they’re already looking on any website
- Social media marketing (think LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) can create brand loyalty and extend your brand’s reach when planned and used strategically.
How to Test PDFs for Accessibility
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a mature, stable form of content. Over time they’ve added up quickly and aren’t as reliable and flexible as you hoped. PDFs often overwhelm your website and overwhelm your users.
While PDFs are an uncomplicated way for internal staff to quickly add content to a site, they present a difficult and frustrating experience for visitors to your website. Here’s why:
- They aren’t designed for today’s mobile devices and are difficult to read.
- Many people don’t have printers, making the “print out and return” task unwieldy.
- Fillable forms are difficult to navigate, especially on mobile.
- PDFs don’t meet accessibility standards. Those with visual, cognitive, or other accessibility issues have trouble consuming your content.
- People won’t find what they need on your site due to poor search results.
- PDFs make it difficult to accurately track web traffic.
- It’s tough to catch all the outdated content in all your PDFs.
How can you fix your PDF problem?
Our workshop helps you evaluate if a pdf belongs on your site, should be turned into online content, or removed. We’ll show you how to measure a PDFs content value by metrics including information lifespan, web traffic, company strategy, and policy. We’ll work together to tackle the PDF issues on your website and make it a friendly, not frustrating, experience for your users.
Enewsletter Writing Best Practices
Email is highly popular and highly effective. It’s one of the most used (and underrated) distribution channels, and it’s a natural route to deliver unique, relevant news and stories directly to your digital audience.
Email keeps you at the top of your audience’s mind. Audiences can share your content within their personal networks, offering organic audience growth. In this comprehensive workshop, we’ll discuss content structure, conversion strategies, accessibility, compliance, and readability.
You’ll walk away with ideas to streamline your email messaging and increase your return on investment.
Writing Press Releases as Engaging News Stories
Minutes count when news happens. And instant updates are available to nearly everyone via push notifications, email, and Twitter. How can you be the first—and most accurate—source of information? The answer is to provide authoritative, timely content that brings calm and tells a story.
Even with a limited team, you can institute a Rapid News Response plan that delivers the news and information your audience needs—and the return on investment your stakeholders want. Make the best use of your valuable time by focusing on communicating key messages.
In this session, we’ll show your team how to distribute a single piece of content on a variety of different channels. For example, if you are developing a blog post, create social media posts and possibly a quick update to the website itself with the same messaging. Get ready to get newsy!
Call-to-Action Strategy: Intentional, Action-Driven Content
Creating and using a call-to-action (CTA) strategy can improve the user experience and simplify and improve conversion on your blog, landing page, or website. A more thoughtful CTA approach, driven by data and audience needs, can help you meet business goals.
Personalizing calls-to-action (CTAs) tailored to the user experience can increase conversion rates by more than 200% according to HubSpot. In this interactive session, you’ll learn the uses and benefits of several types of CTAs and how to implement your strategy simply and effectively in your content.
Creating effective CTAs is an art form, particularly in content marketing (blogs and social media). You don’t want to sound “salesy”, and you don’t want to be too vague. You must understand your audience and intuit their next steps to position your content and CTAs in relevant, proper pathways.
Here’s a sneak peek: The overall goal of a CTA strategy is to make it easy for your site visitors to access your services with as few action steps as possible. The best CTA strategies share six key traits:
- Audience-centric: Focus on what’s most important to your audience.
- Built on digital best practices: These include using color elements that are right for screen readers and using specific, action-oriented words.
- Data-driven: Use A/B testing to track what’s working and not working and adjust on the fly.
- Designed with relevant user journey story pathways: Consider what makes the most sense for the reader, from where their eyes should go on a page to what their next step should be when they leave the page.
- Educational and entertaining: You don’t have to be witty but use a friendly and personable tone.
- Infused with media and text elements: CTAs should stand out but align with the design and flow of the page.
Create CTA pathways that serve this give-and-take relationship and you will naturally increase your audience’s loyalty, transforming visitors into cheerleaders for your brand, resulting in increased brand recognition and sales.
How to Use Readable
Readable is a powerful yet intuitive online tool to help you spot-check your work and even test your edits in real-time. Once you fully understand how to harness its capabilities, you begin to learn not only what needs to be edited—but why and how.
There is a paid version available where you can test an entire website, but the free version is rather good to start with and allows you to test webpages and individual sections within a page.
There are lots of metrics available in Readable. Here are just a few examples:
- Readability grade levels (Fletch Kinkade Grade Level, Gunning Fog Index, and more).
- Readability scores (Flesch Reading Ease, IELTS Level, and more).
- Text statistics (word, sentence, and paragraph count, and more
- Language issues (spelling and grammar issues, and more).
- Readability issues (length of words and sentences, and more).
- Writing style issues (adverbs, cliches, and more).
- Timings (speaking time, reading time).
Readable also helps you objectively understand how your content comes across to your audience. This is important because you need to know if you are communicating in the manner you intend.
Content composition is presented in a range so you can see where you currently align:
- Is your tone formal or conversational?
- Is your personalism impersonal or personal?
- Is your sentiment positive or negative?
It also tells you the percentage of your audience you are reaching, provides keyword density metrics, and highlights text issues. So, what does all this mean and what data should I care about?
In our training, we help you unpack not only what all those data points are telling you, but what that means for you—what specific actions you can take to improve your current content and the content you write going forward. We’ll help you focus your attention on the most important data and provide actionable insights you can implement right away. In addition, we’ll supply a few samples of your current data and how it rates, and show you what a few minutes of rewriting can do.
If this sounds like a lot, that is ok because we are here to be your friendly guide, make complex concepts simple, and take your content to the next level of greatness. Hooray!
Favorite Sites and Browser Tips
The Stamats team will share their favorite free tools and tips for being productive in the digital world. We will share links and a quick demo on tools such as:
- How to inspect a website for font information.
- How to determine how many pages on a site.
- How to capture a full website screenshot.
- How to understand page speed.
- SEO tools.
- Accessibility reports.
Chatbot 101
Let’s Have a Chat…bot.
Chatbots are popping up on more websites. And, for good reasons. They can help your website visitors find information, resources, and products more quickly. They can help your organization turn website visitors into leads and learn more about them to inform your business strategies.
But there are several questions to consider before adding a chatbot to your site. In this workshop, we’ll address those questions so that you can decide if a chatbot is right for you, and if so, how to choose the best one.
- What could my website do better (improved lead capture, more intuitive navigation, etc.)?
- What information would help my sales team have stronger first conversations with prospective customers?
- Do I want a chatbot that improvises or that follows a script?
- What requirements will I have in terms of branding and voice/tone?
- How do I want the chatbot to pass data to my employees and/or CRM?
- What kinds of reporting and analytics would be most helpful and informative?
Using Lightcast to Support Website Content
NOTE: Assumes client has Lightcast license
Prospective students rate career outcomes very high when evaluating colleges to attend.
Compelling evidence on your major or program landing pages supplies proof that your program will lead to in-demand careers. Using Lightcast’s Analyst software tool, Stamats shows your team how to manipulate the tool to find and portray attractive career outcomes data.
Data gleaned is not only helpful for the marketing team, but for faculty and instructors who develop hands-on learning, write, or develop courses; and it builds bridges for internships and job placement.
Two approaches are undertaken:
- Academic program approach – using standard academic disciplines (i.e., BA/BS Biology).
- Skill-based approach (i.e., Digital marketing, or Project Management Professional certification).
Outcomes document the following levels of labor market information with robust data:
- What industries need this program or skill set the most?
- What occupations are most often associated with this program/skill set?
- What are the career outlook growth percentages associated with this program/skill set?
- What employers in your market are searching for talent with this program/ skill set?
- What are the job titles that employers use to describe this type of position? Note job posting data from actual employers use different terms than government sources.
- What skills or certifications are often included in job postings with this program or skill set?
- What are the salary levels associated with occupations in this program or with this skill set?
SEO 101
Do you wish your content could rank higher in Google searches or for your site to receive more organic leads? Provide clear, easy-to-find content for your website and improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? This workshop will help you learn the basics: What SEO is, why it is important, and how to implement best practices.
More people will see your website the higher it is listed in their Google search results. How does that happen? It involves many activities including:
- Adding relevant search keywords (what are people trying to find?)
- Optimizing your content for search engines and for users.
- Using links from other relevant websites in your content.
- Monitoring and measuring your website search results.
Storytelling 101
Storytelling is so much more than words on a page. Since the beginning of time, stories have made us human.
We tell our stories to:
- Nurture empathy and connection with one another.
- Make sense of our world and share that understanding with others.
- Entertain and engage.
In our storytelling workshop, we teach you to find your stories with a defined context, clear audience, focused purpose, on-brand keywords, and unique angle. Once you become comfortable with how to do this, your team can replicate this process in-house—on repeat.
We teach you the ins and outs of:
- Understanding the elements of what makes a “good story”.
- Writing compelling headlines and subheadings.
- Knowing where to find stories and who should “tell” them.
- Coming up with timely and evergreen blog topics.
- Understanding the difference between news stories versus blog stories—which is which, and how to crossover.
- Creating effective call-to-actions (CTAs).
- Setting streamlined story distribution strategies.
- Blogging best practices—including proven tips, metrics, and SEO tools to drive success.
- And more!
We intersperse our teaching with hands-on exercises so you can put our strategies into practice immediately.
It’s time for the world to hear your stories. We can help.
Inverted Pyramid Strategy: Storytelling Tips for PR & Content Marketing
Designed to guide PR, Comms, and content teams to work smarter together and provide better reach. We often see duplicate coverage (like a press release AND a blog story). Those stories could be told once, more strategically, to save your SMEs time and avoid competing in search results on Google — giving your content/PR pros more time to tell additional stories. This workshop is a great fit for content strategists, writers, and PR/Comms/media relations teams. It’s interactive and gives them a chance to voice their own ideas for working together.
SEO Dashboard Training
The terms people type or speak into search provide deep information that you can use to supercharge your website SEO. In the past, you had to use third-party tools with an ongoing and costly license to see these terms.
Not anymore! Stamats will demonstrate how we report more organic keywords in GA4 or Search Console using Google Looker Studio. In this session, we will show a live dashboard and demonstrate how to review the data in real time to make actionable content updates.
AI Workshops
- AI for Digital Marketing: Learn how to use AI to help plan and create tasks for marketing initiatives and plans.
- AI for Communication Plans: Did you know you can use AI to create personas, communication templates, and even collate audience research? Stamats will show you tips to build effective communication plans using popular AI tools.
- AI for Content Planning: Custom content is still the best approach to creating SEO content that converts. Stamats will show your team how to create and use custom prompts to enhance efficiency and impact in your content workflow.
- AI for Digital Advertising: AI can assist in creating ad headlines, ad copy, and analyzing campaign performance. See how AI can find the gaps in your landing page compared to your competitors.