Taking the Fuzziness out of Content Strategy

Rough estimates hold that a new website is created every single second. But effective websites that engage customers and produce a solid ROI? Those are a little harder to come by. That’s where Recurve comes in.

“We all had this idea together, and from there, it seemed foolish not to pursue it,” Bradley Robb says of the Richmond-based content strategy shop. Since incorporating in August, Robb and co-founders Edward Baldwin and George Perry have been helping businesses large and small establish goals and work backward to develop the presence of communication-both online and off-that yields results.

In a sense, the how and the why behind Recurve are one and the same. Dissatisfied with the entrenched environments they were working in, the three strategists-experienced writers with complementary skills in design, marketing, and SEO-set out to take a data-driven approach, regardless of where it led them. Their knowledge of SEO was an added advantage, as other companies usually hire agencies like SERP Co (an seo chicago company) to handle website optimization work.

Employing an agency to do your SEO work can be a daunting task at times, so you need to hire the right fit that is very familiar with the technical nitty-gritty of digital marketing. Effective strategies by such a company providing SEO services (like an SEO Auckland company, if you are in New Zealand) could help a website in many ways, such as on-page and off-page optimization. And agencies who help with this want to make sure that they are doing what they can to provide a good service for the businesses they work for. And this can include using white label seo to help with niche development and keeping up with the work. Recurve would be having this, as well as similar ideas, in mind at all times. However, it would always be advisable for your business to go one step ahead and perform an SEO audit in order to assess and optimize your existing SEO framework and strategies, to monitor the progress, identify which keywords bring in traffic, and make changes accordingly. To know more about how SEO auditing can help improve your website’s performance, check out this post.

“From day one,” Baldwin shares, “our goal was to build a process to accommodate what we see as a new dynamic between brands and people, which meant essentially starting from scratch.”

“We really have nothing that we hold sacred,” Robb adds. “We don’t like to make assumptions. We like to take assumptions, turn them into hypotheses, and test them.”

Perry agrees, “We’re not tied to anything we do. We see the numbers, and if they say ‘Hey, you need to go this direction,’ that’s the direction we’re going to go. We’re not going to let our feelings get in the way.”

But there’s more to Recurve’s innovative approach than diving into data. It may not be sexy, but process plays a major role.

“We all have enough familiarity with traditional brand work and the agency Wizard of Oz effect of ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,'” Robb notes, “and we wanted to take it the other way. Our process is very modular. It’s broken down into inputs and outputs, almost like a piece of software.”

As clear as day, Recurve’s website lists their five-step approach to successful content-Plan, Analyze, Design, Develop, Review-bringing a refreshing level of transparency to a field that can seem frustratingly opaque.

“We’re taking the fuzziness out,” Perry says. “When a lot of people think of content strategy, they think of empathy and ‘How do you feel about this?’, and we’re much more driven by ‘How can we quantify this?’ We’re trying to take the guessing work out of it.

Just…don’t call them copywriters.

“A lot of people think we’re super-copywriters,” Perry jokes. “I don’t want to downplay copywriting, but it’s a lot more than that.”

The misconception can be a hurdle, but Baldwin affirms that it’s about more than just writing. “We see content strategy as a way of thinking that has the potential to unify all fields of communication toward the common purpose of delivering value to consumers.”

As for their archery-inspired name? Robb tells it this way: “The recurve bow packs an extreme amount of potential energy that is quickly liberated into kinetic.”

So what kind of punch does your website pack?

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