Copy and Code, Inc

01 Feb 2016

5 Reasons to Master the Art of Inbound Marketing

By Emily Owens

Your company likely dedicates a significant amount of time and resources to customer service. If helping your customers solve their biggest challenges is important to you, then shouldn’t your marketing strategy reflect that same focus?

Inbound marketing is a leading strategy that companies in every industry are using to create and leverage content that educates and delights customers. Here are the top five reasons to master the art of inbound marketing:

It saves you from getting buried in the noise. Hard-core sales and marketing tactics don’t work anymore. Your customers are inundated with sales messages from multiple channels throughout the day. Even though your ultimate goal is to sell, you can’t start by telling people how great your products and services are. They simply won’t care.
It keeps you focused on your customers. Inbound marketing motivates you to explore your ideal customers through buyer personas, and identify their position in the buyer’s journey. This helps you figure out who they are, what they care about and what they’re searching for.
It empowers you to create content with a purpose. Once you fully understand your customers, you can create content that speaks to their specific needs and problems. This will lend credibility to your company and help you build rapport with potential customers.
It enables you to optimize your content. Inbound marketing strategies help you identify your most relevant keywords and incorporate them within your content and website. These keywords are directly related to the kinds of questions that your customers are typing in their search engines.
It helps you promote and distribute your content. You can use landing pages, blog posts and social media channels to reach customers with your targeted content.

The Bottom Line: Education Leads to Sales

If you publish educational content that’s easy to locate online, then your customers will be more likely to find your company, trust your expertise and choose your product or service when they need it. And they’ll be more likely to return as a repeat customer and to recommend your company to other potential customers.

Free Inbound Marketing Class

To help you master the art of inbound marketing, HubSpot has created an online inbound marketing course. This free program features 12 classes designed to help marketers in any industry grow their business and expand their marketing skill set.

Our resident content developer, Emily Owens, recently became inbound certified. Armed with this training, she’s ready to help you create content that educates your customers and helps you succeed in today’s competitive market. To get started, contact [email protected].

17 Nov 2015

How to Create Compelling Content in 5 Steps

By Emily Owens

Current trends in inbound marketing demand that companies step up the quantity and quality of their online content. Keeping up with blog posts, articles and web content can be overwhelming. But don’t let the pressure to produce massive amounts of content lead you to publish ineffective, poorly written copy.

Once you have a topic in mind, you should employ a content strategy that will result in content that your customers actually want to read. The following five steps outline how to create compelling content that speaks to your customers:

Know the audience: Even if your content could be read by a broad audience, it’s vital to identify the ideal person you want to reach. Then, you can determine:
- What does the target truly care about?
- What are the target’s challenges/problems related to the topic?
Determine the goals
- Why do I want the target to read the content?
- Is the content designed to inform, educate or motivate?
- What’s the call to action? What do I want the target to do after reading it?
Prepare the questions for the subject matter expert (SME)
- Review background information and identify data gaps.
- Include strategic content questions that address Step 1 and 2 above, especially if the SME is driving the creation of the content and has insight on audience and goals.
- ALWAYS ask:
  - Why would the target want to learn more about the topic?
  - What’s the one thing you want the reader to take away from the content?
  - What are your personal feelings about the topic?
- Organize questions by section (background, strategy, details, conclusion/call to action, additional info, etc.).
Conduct the interview
- Write down as many details as possible (record interview, if permitted).
- Ask secondary questions that come to mind while the SME is answering the initial questions.
- Keep your ears open for quote-worthy details, including emotional expressions, vivid language and anecdotes.
Write the copy
- Use the introduction to grab the reader’s attention by linking the main goal of the content to the target audience’s primary interests and problems.
- Organize the content using concise subheadings.
- Enhance the copy with statistics and quotes. Online research may supplement information provided by the SME.
- End with a strong call to action.

At Copy and Code, we understand exactly what’s needed to create powerful, professional content. We know the right questions to ask and the precise words to use to reach your customers. Contact us today to talk about your next content project.

26 Oct 2015

4 Reasons to Choose Ruby on Rails for Your Next Project

By Jordan Owens

December 13, 2015, marks the 10-year anniversary of the Rails 1.0 release, and we are excited! The landscape of the web has changed quite a bit in that time, but Rails has kept pace and is still giving development teams a level of productivity and happiness that is second to none. With so many choices available, however, some may wonder if Rails is still relevant.

Here are the top four reasons why Ruby on Rails is still our favorite web framework:

1. Ruby

The Ruby language itself is the primary reason to use choose Rails for your next web project. Ruby is such a terse, yet expressive language that any developer will quickly fall in love. Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka “Matz”), the creator of Ruby, said that it was “designed to make programmers happy”—and that it does. In the introduction to his book Confident Ruby, Avdi Grimm used the following example to demonstrate the simplicity the language provides:

3.times do
  puts "Hello, Ruby world!"
end

Pretty cool syntax, right? Ruby version 2.2 provided major performance gains, and it will no doubt continue to improve with each release.

2. Maturity

Over the last 10 years, Ruby on Rails has gained serious traction and is in use by companies large and small. It may no longer be the “hip” new kid on the block, but it has proven itself to be a stable platform that focuses on convention, best practices and security. Instead of worrying if your framework is going to shift from beneath your feet, you can focus on building your own great product.

3. Community

Another awesome feature that comes with Ruby on Rails is the community. With an ever-growing pool of developers, Rails has an active community that is responsive to upcoming industry trends and any issues that arise. From very early on, the Rails community has spearheaded best practices in software development and has shown a great commitment to knowledge sharing through blogs, user groups and conferences.

4. Productivity

Developer productivity is another huge win with Ruby on Rails. Designed with the “convention over configuration” mindset, Rails doesn’t bog developers down with repetitive boilerplate setup work. Another great asset is the RubyGems package manager, which makes thousands of prebuilt libraries freely available. Typical libraries may include help with user authentication, credit card integration, file uploads and more.

At Copy and Code, we think Ruby on Rails is the perfect fit for many web applications. If you’re ready to get started with Ruby on Rails for your next project or if you need help with an existing one, don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more.

21 Jul 2015

Copy and Code Unveils Fresh Business Cards

By Emily Owens

In a digital world, most people are concerned with keeping up with their online personas and social media profiles. But what about when you have to meet with someone in person—whether it’s a new client or potential business partner? Sometimes it’s easy to forget the importance of professional hard-copy materials that represent you—the foremost example being your business card.

The creative team at Code and Code, a Cleveland-based digital marketing and web development company, recently decided to order some new business cards. The requirements? Something that had a fresh, clean appearance but with a professional flair.

In the old days, you would task a graphic artist with creating a business card design that would have to be sent to a printing company. This might require meeting with the designer or printer in person. Then, if you wanted to update the content of the card for additional print runs, you would have to update the graphic file yourself or have the artist update it for you.

To streamline this process, we decided to create our new business card design with the help of two companies: Creative Market and MOO.

We customized a business card design template from Creative Market, choosing the appropriate colors and font to coordinate with the Copy and Code logo and website. With only a minimal amount of work, you get a hip, unique design that’s yours to keep and update as needed.
The second step involved sending the business card file to MOO for printing. The company allows you to print business cards on premium paper with custom finishes. We chose to print our design with rounded corners and a matte finish for a sleek, contemporary look that resembles a small deck of playing cards.

business card

Amazing packaging from MOO:

business card holder

We highly recommend working with these vendors to produce high-quality print products and look forward to using our new cards to connect with new digital marketing and web development clients.

17 Feb 2015

Copy and Code: Where Technical Meets Creative in Cleveland

By Emily Owens

You’re stressed out by a fast-approaching deadline. Or maybe you’re tired of putting some internal projects on the back burner because you haven’t had time to deal with them. You’d like to ask your in-house team members for help, but they are swamped with other work.

Realistically, you can’t clone yourself. And you can’t afford to hire more full-time staff. So what’s the next logical option? Hire an outside partner who is qualified to jump right in and help you with some of your work—someone you can trust. That’s when you need Copy and Code, Inc.

Copy and Code is a digital marketing and application development company located in Cleveland, Ohio. With over two decades of combined professional experience, our qualified team provides a variety of technical, creative and support services. Check out our new website: http://www.copyandcode.com/.

Projects We Love

With a keen eye for detail, we write and edit ad copy, blog posts, web content, case studies, white papers and press releases. We also provide marketing services including managing ad schedules, building monthly reports and conducting research for infographics.

As a full-service web development shop, we build websites and custom applications. While Ruby on Rails is our web framework of choice, we are proficient in a number of technologies and will work with you to determine what is best for your project.

Strengths You Really Need

Our key strengths as a company include superb communication and expert problem solving. Why is communication so important? Because we want to ensure that we understand your needs and provide solutions that exceed your expectations. For example, if you need copy for a new brochure, we don’t just talk about the main ideas. We discuss the key strategy to engage the target audience and the overall desired outcome. If any questions come up, we immediately reach out to get the answers and keep the project moving forward.

Perhaps you need a new mobile or web application. We work with you to determine your specific business problem and figure out how to use technology to make your job easier. If one of your existing projects has run out of gas or your development team has hit the wall, we do project rescue work to get your application up and running…FAST.

To learn more, call 216-369-9060 or email [email protected].

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