News360 Blog Content Marketing All-Stars Q&A: Anu Verma of Care/of

Care/of truly gets content.The innovative health and wellness brand consistently creates beautiful, compelling pieces that engage audiences and further the mission of the brand.Recently we chatted with Anu Verma, Head of Marketing for Care/of, to learn more about how the company tackles content strategy and development.Check out the Q&A below:Q. What is your professional background and role at Care/of?A. I have had a few different roles in my career. I started out as a management consultant for a couple of years at BCG. While there, I was fascinated by consumer and luxury brands and I wanted to get a flavor for working in retail, so I took a role at Tiffany & Co.After Tiffany, I went to business school at Wharton and transitioned to e-commerce brands, and after I graduated I spent two years in e-commerce marketing at Jet.com. I joined Care/of in 2016, several months before we launched our brand, and have been focused here on building the brand and growing the business.Q. For anyone who might not know, what is Care/of?A. We are a direct-to-consumer wellness brand, offering vitamins and supplements. We launched in November 2016 and our aim has been to innovate the experience of finding vitamins and supplements. We have a detailed quiz on our website where customers answer questions about their health and lifestyle. From that we recommend the right vitamins and right supplements for each person. Our aim ultimately is to help people be healthier, whether it's through taking vitamins, learning about how they should be adapting their nutrition, or even building healthy habits. We just launched an app designed to make the vitamin-taking habit easier, too. Q. What role does digital content play for Care/of? A. It plays a tremendous role.Content is part of all of our marketing efforts, from what's on our site to what we post on social media. We also create a lot of content for our email newsletters, which are sent both to our active customers and to potential customers.In all those cases we are thinking about the ways that digital content can help tell our story and help people find the answers to health questions that they have, as well as questions about our products.We know that people don't want long advertisements. So, we focus a lot on ensuring that our content is a useful resource, and in some cases, even entertaining.Q. One of the things we really like is the library of health-related content on your website. Can you talk a bit about what that is and how it came about?We know that people have tons of questions about vitamins and supplements: specifically, they want to take vitamins but they don't know what to take. We realized that creating a library of articles was a valuable way to both get people the information they seek and to give them exposure to our brand.It's quite an effort to get the pieces written. We spent a lot of time determining what topics to cover, what the tone and substance of our pieces should be, and how we can present information in engaging ways. We see a lot of potential to keep investing in our articles and find new ways to have a conversation with our readers about personal health.Q. How do you measure the success of a piece of content? Which metrics do you pay close attention to?A. For the library pieces specifically, one way we measure success is by how discoverable they are within Google. Are they ranking well? Are they getting traffic? Are they showing up in response to certain searches?We are also measuring how useful and engaging they are. So, how much time are people spending with each article? Are they staying on our site?For the newsletter content it's a little bit different because that's going to a list of people who are already in some way familiar with our brand. So, we look more at metrics like click rate to paint a picture of how engaged our users are with the content. Q. Do you have any favorite examples of Care/of content? What showcases what you guys do well?A. One is an analog, not digital, example. Each month when someone receives a Care/of box, there's a theme around it, complete with a notecard that often has a little game. It's content that's purely meant to put a smile on someone's face, nothing more (and they're games I would want to play, that remind me of games I played as a kid). Each month we see a pretty substantial number of our customers take part, and I'm really proud we're able to create content that might create a little fun moment for our customers. That's special.On the digital side, I'm proud of all the research and thoughtfulness that goes into our library pieces. I sincerely believe we are helping people who are looking for answers to these sorts of questions.An example, and of my favorite pieces, is an article on the best vitamins and supplements to take if you are a vegetarian. It highlights how you need to be mindful about the specific vitamins you take because not everyone's diet is the same, reflecting one of the core values of our brand - that health is personal. .Q. Finally, any advice from your fellow marketers? Any learnings from your recent efforts?A. One is that patience is a virtue when it comes to SEO. We've been working on our library content for over a year and there have been moments where we have just had to sit back and wait to see if our strategies were working. It is a tactic that inherently takes time.Another learning around search is the importance of tagging structures. The articles you wrte can be magnificent, but if you're not investing time in the technical aspect, they may never really become meaningful traffic drivers.