Strategic Communications, LLC

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO and founder of a health care consulting firm. We help hospitals and health systems throughout the US to improve customer service and the patient experience. We have a consulting division and a mystery shopping division.

What challenge were you trying to address with Strategic Communications?

I was looking to Strategic Communications to help position me as a thought leader in an evolving space. As a small company that was an early adopter in this space, I really needed to have somebody that could help me lay out the strategy and then execute it.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started with strategic planning where we mapped out what it would take to be a thought leader, what image I would want to develop, what types of social media and kinds of publications to use. They led the strategic planning two different times. One was just with my company and one was with a group of advisors. Then they helped execute the strategic plan with all of the communications, marketing, and social media strategies that we set forth. That included writing and helping keep up with my social media.

What is the team composition?

I work primarily with their CEO/founder, Linda Pophal.

How did you come to work with Strategic Communications?

I had known her through a professional communications and marketing group. I sought her out when I found out she went on her own. I wanted to find out more because I knew that she had a good handle on this kind of thing.

How much have you invested with them?

I want to say $180,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in October 2009 and its ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Every month she produces all the metrics for me that I've asked her to produce. She does the analytics and then reports back to me how she's progressed toward our goals.

How did Strategic Communications perform from a project management standpoint?

Very efficiently. When I give them something, they tend to grasp it fairly quickly and get the job done efficiently. I rarely have to make any kind of changes to anything they submit.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I would say their broader knowledge about setting strategy and strategic plans. Also, their ability to not only think on a high level but get down into the weeds and get the job done with attention to detail.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not that I can think of. I haven’t had any cause for complaint or anything where I was dissatisfied.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Take advantage of the ability that they can bring to the table to foster the strategic planning piece. Then do your part by giving them a strong foundation of adequate information about the business and about the goals that you want to achieve.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the president of Hitchcock Marketing & Communications, a boutique healthcare marketing and communications firm in Woodstock, Maryland.

What challenge were you trying to address with Strategic Communications?

As an opinion leader in healthcare, building upon 30 years in the field, I needed a national presence. I wanted a blog to complement my LinkedIn profile, and to enhance my website and digital marketing to improve our position in search results.

What was the scope of their involvement?

I work with Strategic Communications on a weekly basis. They write blogs and posts for LinkedIn and our website, or anywhere I need a blog entry.

What is the team dynamic?

Linda Pophal [Owner/CEO, Strategic Communications] is our principal writer.

How did you come to work with Strategic Communications?

An acquaintance of mine worked with them and recommended Linda. Her postings have always impressed me, and we became friends. I've always used her. We’ve never worked with another agency.

How much have you invested with them?

Over three years we’ve spent about $25,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in October of 2014. Linda writes blogs for us on a weekly basis and our engagement is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We monitor our analytics online, including viewers and resultant customers for each post. Our results are similar to what we hoped to achieve.

How did Strategic Communications perform from a project management standpoint?

We email or have personal conversations. Each week, she sends the content she completed, and I sign off on it. She handles everything, including questions or requests from LinkedIn. She posts my responses, and makes the whole process beyond easy.

What did you find most impressive about them?

People assume that it’s too hard to copy voice, but she makes a cogent argument from my viewpoint. She is a phenomenal writer, and I rarely edit anything she's written. Among all the vendors and sub-contractors I work with, she is by far the best.

My participation is effortless; we come up with ideas and slant though our discussions. There have never been any issues with timeliness or quality of work, and she makes our company look really good.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

AccessDirect provides telecommunications services to small businesses across the country that are looking for a better way to answer and route phone calls. Our website is MessagingService.com. I am the president and founder.

What challenge were you trying to address with Strategic Communications?

The goal is to improve our website and overall quality of content. We have SEO and digital marketing and have used 3–4 firms, as well as a few writing entities, over the past 5–6 years, with limited success.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They've rewritten landing pages and created blog posts for us. We identify which page we need rewritten and send it to Linda [Owner/CEO, Strategic Communications], along with a few comments on its focus and the keywords we want to target. We have follow-up discussions with our own sales team to provide Strategic with tips on why people call for this type of service, what they’re looking for, and examples of how the service would work.

What is the team dynamic?

We directly communicate with Linda, who acts as my account manager. She is the person I email and is also the point of delivery. I assume she has staff that help with the writing and other parts of the projects.

How did you come to work with Strategic?

I posted a job on a freelancing site, and Linda was among those who replied. I asked her a few questions and had her do a few writing projects. We grew our relationship from there.

How much have you invested with them?

The total cost of their work since the beginning has been around $15,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Strategic Communications in January 2015. We work on a project-by-project basis. Linda initially created 2 blog posts and other content per month, which went on for around a year. We transitioned to an SEO firm that took on the blog writing, along with analysis and strategic planning. Linda transitioned to just writing projects.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’re publishing their most recent writing and waiting to see how quickly it will impact our organic search rankings and clicks for those pages. We'll get a substantial return from their work if we can get the page to perform with Google and Bing search. A 10X return on investment would be my ideal target.

How did Strategic perform from a project management standpoint?

Linda is communicative and lets us know what her timeline is. Based on her workload, she estimates how long it will take to deliver a set number of pieces. As a result, we can queue more projects instead of just throwing them at her. I'm more proactive in giving her tasks so we can have regular deliveries.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Being a small business themselves, Strategic Communications understands how to communicate benefits and small business needs, including that of our own service, which is a black box for many people: a virtual, cloud-based telephone service with toll-free and local numbers. I worked with other writers for a year and realized they still didn’t understand the field. Linda is quick on the uptake, intelligent, and the best writer I’ve dealt with in terms of being able to take a topic and turn it into high-quality content, with little instruction. She will send me project outlines ahead of time, at my request, and then deliver the writing. The best writers on our team have been impressed with her content, as we can take it and publish it with very few edits.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We are transitioning to landing pages, and I want to focus more on conversion, communicating the benefits above the fold and making it less research oriented. It’s a matter of us working together to refocus the tone.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our Corporate Life works with corporations as an external partner to help them deal with the drama of dysfunctional teams. I’m the founder.

What challenge were you trying to address with Strategic Communications?

We didn’t have much of a social media profile. We needed someone to help us maintain a consistent presence and build the right kind of follower base and connections to help us with our position as thought leaders. We have a lot of content but we didn’t have the expertise or time to sort through and figure out what the best things were to highlight.

What was the scope of their involvement?

First, they did an assessment. They analyzed our site to see what backlinks and content we had, and to find out if they were serving the purpose we needed them to serve. They then gave us recommendations for moving forward. They looked at the different social media channels, prioritized them, and told us where we should focus our attention and what they could do for us.

What is the team dynamic? 

My main contact is Linda [Owner and CEO, Strategic Communications] and she has different people who work with her. Working with her is seamless. 

How did you come to work with Strategic Communications?

I had worked with PR and social media agencies before and found that a lot don’t know what they think they know. They don't take time to understand our business so they couldn’t be as successful as we needed them to be. They replicate what has worked with one client, rather than customizing it for other companies and that wasn’t what we needed.

Strategic Communications, however, was recommended by a colleague. Talking to Linda, it was clear she knew what she was talking about. She was very open to crafting a proposal that would work for us and was flexible in being able to ramp up when needed.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $40,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in May 2014 and the engagement is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They always meet their yearly goals. Month to month the results vary, but that’s the way a marketplace is. Our Twitter presence grew from 400 to 13,500, and they’re 13,500 of the right kind of followers. They helped us get rid of the wrong types of businesses that were following us and that we were following. They pick the right kind of content for the people that we’re talking to. We get a lot of retweets and likes on our content.

How did Strategic Communications perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re really good. I’ve never had them not respond unless there was a technical problem. They provide us monthly analytics which are always on time. They highlight things that are problematic when they see them. I don’t feel that I need to double check everything or chase them to do their job. Whenever I have questions, Linda addresses them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re honest. When I ask for specific things, they give me options tailored to my request. When they don’t know something, they tell me that and then research it. They don’t just tell us what we want to hear. I would rather hear the truth than having someone try to act like they know more than they do. No one can know everything, especially when things move so fast.

Overall, they care about quality and they do a great job. Good client service isn’t as common as it should be.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything.

Do you have any advice for potential clients?

Be clear on what you want to achieve so you don’t have any misunderstandings. If you don’t know what you want, be clear about that up front so they can help you figure it out. 

You can trust them. They’re not out to overcharge or build their business through bad practices.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the CEO, founder, and owner of InclusionINC, a global learning and consulting organization that works with Fortune 500 companies to create a culture of inclusion. We do strategic work to ensure that the differences in the workplace drive innovation, retention, engagement, and productivity.

What challenge were you trying to address with Strategic Communications?

Back in 2011, our company was a great little secret; people didn’t know who we were, and we needed to spread the word because being seen as a thought leader legitimizes our brand. Our previous PR company provided a ghostwriter, but he wasn’t good. I wanted someone who could capture my specific voice, who could be edgy, sassy, and maybe even slightly irreverent. I needed a ghostwriter whose content would tell our clients, “Hello, inclusion initiatives are about business!”

What was the scope of their involvement?

From 2012 to 2014, I was working with a formal PR company as well as Linda [Pophal, CEO, Strategic Communicaitons], but I let the PR company go because Linda was making more traction. She captured my voice much better, and now she writes weekly blogs and manages several groups as me on LinkedIn. She also leads inclusive leader groups, runs my Twitter, and finds PR opportunities. I give her a comment or my opinion on something and she writes a whole post about it, including editing.

She’s incredible at linking everything back to InclusionINC’s core message: inclusion as a business strategy. Right now, we’re focusing on helping clients develop inclusive leader competencies, and nearly all her content is related to that. She understands that our company is about HR; not just checking off boxes for diversity’s sake, but using inclusion as a business-centric model.

What is the team dynamic?

Linda is always my contact, but I know she has a number of people working for her.

How did you come to work with Strategic Communications?

I found them through our previous PR company. Linda was the ghost writer for both my books, and then Strategic Communications became my social media team right after.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $175,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with them in spring of 2011, and it's still ongoing. I'll work with her forever, if I can.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Every month I get a report and analysis of how we did against last month, including followers, web site visits, etc. We have a brief dialogue about it to clarify why some things increased or decreased, and she always initiates those meetings.

Just to give some examples of some of the metrics achieved are:

• Web traffic has increased by nearly 2000% since the beginning.
• Bounce rate has decreased from around 60% to between 10% and 30%.
• New website visitors are consistently at 90% or above.
• 58% of the referral traffic is from shortened social media links.
• Our LinkedIn group has grown from 548 members to 1625, an increase of 196%.
• Our Twitter followers have grown by more than 2700% since the beginning and 37% since January.

What’s really telling, though, is that we’ve gotten more calls for business in the last 12 months than we did in the other 15 years of being open.

How did Strategic Communications perform from a project management standpoint?

They're spectacular. Linda always does what's supposed to be done, so I don't have to manage anything.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The team expertly captures my voice, and they’re completely self-sufficient. Working with them is a totally different experience from what I had in the past. One ghostwriter was arrogant and rude; he made me feel like I didn’t know anything. I started working with Linda on the same exact content and it was a night-and-day difference. She creates high-quality work and needs minimal oversight to do it. Her self-management makes all our work stronger, and it’s created a stellar relationship. She’s also lightning fast. It’ll take her 30 minutes to do what might take me three hours.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, it’s exceeded my expectations in all areas.

Do you have any advice for potential clients of Strategic Communications?

This kind of project is a long-term engagement. Go in with a plan, be ready to work hard, and Strategic Communications will help with the rest. We’re just now bearing the fruit from six years of intense work, and it’s been a great investment.