Kuno Creative

Please describe your organization. What is your role and responsibilities?

Our company is BASIC Engineering, and our primary product is BasicSafe, which is a safety management software that's available on the cloud for corporations small and large to manage their regulatory and safety information. I'm the director of software products and services.

What was your goal for working with Kuno Creative?

There is a lot of competition on the Web. We wanted a way for people to find us better. We were running Google AdWords campaigns and other typical SEO [search engine optimization] work. There are lots of changes always going on in SEO, and it's hard to keep up. We were spending a lot of paid search. We wanted to find an alternative to get people tied to our business.

Please describe the scope of their work.

Kuno Creative started small with improvements to our own website, and then we moved to HubSpot. We did well there, but we're not marketing or salespeople. Kuno has been doing content development for us on our website, blogs, and emails. This has bound a lot of people to our company and made them regular visitors and brought them on to our business once they feel comfortable that we're a secure company and trust us.

What was your process for selecting Kuno Creative?

They came highly recommended by HubSpot as one of their partners. 

Can you give a sense of the size of the initiative?

On an annual basis, our spend with Kuno Creative is somewhere between $10,000 - $50,000.

When was the work completed?

It's ongoing. We've been with Kuno for two years.

Do you have any statistics or metrics on the project? Are you satisfied with their performance?

We're very pleased with Kuno. Our biggest result is search traffic, which used to be through AdWords. With their help, we've been able to back down on AdWords and focus on our organic search. Our direct search now far exceeds what our paid search does. That's what we were going for. People are coming organically to our site.

Is there anything unique or special about Kuno Creative that really makes them stand out?

Early on, Kuno Creative felt very similar to other companies in the fact that they brought a gang of people to pull in our business. After we joined, the sales team dropped off and we got to work with the people who manage our account. The people they've assigned to our account are people we really like to work with. Our journalist is fabulous.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

From a technical standpoint, there were a couple of hiccups during our transition to HubSpot. It wasn't anything major, but I think they could have been on top of it a little better than they were. 

Please describe your company. What is your role and responsibilities?

I’m the CEO of a cardiology and primary care provider. We have 11 clinical sites in the greater Cleveland area. We have about 50 providers in total, which includes more that 20 primary care doctors, more than 20 cardiologists, and about another eight or so nurse practitioners.

What was your goal for working with Kuno Creative?

Years ago, we realized that times were changing, and we needed to find a partner that would really be on the forefront of these changing times. At that point, we were with a marketing firm that was doing a lot of print marketing and that was it.

Please describe the scope of their work.

Our partnership with Kuno Creative began with implementing an SEO [search engine optimization] strategy, which started many years ago. In addition, they’ve done content marketing for us. They’ve been wonderful. They help engage our staff with pieces of content in addition to our patients. They’ve created videos promoting our physicians that help engage patients on our websites. The videos have been fabulously popular with our patients and non-patients alike.

What was your process for selecting Kuno Creative with which to work?

We interviewed three or four digital marketing firms at the time. We had each firm come in and do presentations on how they would approach our services, and how they would communicate that to the public. Kuno Creative quickly rose to the top of the list. We liked their approach, we liked their tech first thinking, and we liked the folks that were involved.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

Our relationship is ongoing, and we spend a sizable amount with Kuno Creative on an annual basis.

Do you have any statistics, metrics, or general feedback from the project?

I’m amazed at the value I get for the small percentage of our budget that we spend with Kuno Creative. Their CEO [and founder, Chris Knipper,] always brings up new ideas, thoughts, blogs, and content to improve our campaign at our biweekly meetings. The content they deliver is just phenomenal. They’ve taken the little things and really learned how to multiply them and make them much bigger. So, for the investment we make in them, I feel pretty darn good.

Every month, we receive our stats from Kuno. Numbers are important in this kind of business – not just real numbers of patients seen, but new patients. Without new patients coming in to the practice every month, we would certainly perish at some point. New patient attraction is key, and we see 600 to 800 new patients on average each and every month. Those numbers are constant or growing a little bit, a couple percent each year, so we know we’re doing something right. We measure patient satisfaction, certainly physician satisfaction as well, we have good providers, good staff, and all of that.

I’m also not a very technical person, and they’re good at explaining things at the layman level. Kuno has brought so much expertise and talent to our organization through the services they provide.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

It’s their communication with me as the CEO of my organization, the fact that we meet every two weeks for updates, current information, and any changes is great. We have a lot of moving parts in our organization. When we hire a new doctor, we meet with Kuno to determine how we can promote them. There’s always something going on, and the communication piece has really been important. They frequently ask me what else they should be doing, and whether I have any special emphasis in a particular month.

The other thing Kuno Creative has done really well is document the success, whether it’s the number of new emails that they grabbed this month through HubSpot, the content marketing piece, the number of contacts that we’ve had on Facebook and Twitter. They’re measuring all of the social media and reporting to me monthly. We set goals at the beginning of the year and then extrapolate that across 12 months, and then we watch how things work throughout the year. That’s the accountability piece, which I’ve found a lot of marketing firms do not have and Kuno has brought that to the table.

Kuno has been state of the art from day one, and they’re constantly coming up with new ideas. When we moved to the smart phone app, they were on top of that and that’s been great for our patients. They’ve been on top of all the social media-related topics, inbound marketing, and well beyond that. That’s really made a difference for our practice. We don’t do anything in print anymore. We have brochures in the offices to give out to patients, but we don’t do any print in papers, billboards, or any of that stuff anymore.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or something that you might do differently?

Honestly, I don’t think so.