We spoke with Larry Gurreri, an expert in search marketing, social media, and entrepreneurship and the co-founder of Sosemo, a strategic partner of Compass Marketing. Larry started Sosemo to provide brands with better services and expertise in areas where most agencies lack strong skills. Larry’s expertise in Search marketing (SEM/SEO), social media, programmatic, management, and entrepreneurship has built Sosemo into an award-winning digital marketing agency. He offers insights on how brands can use digital marketing and provides tips for brands to succeed, even with limited budgets.
What inspired you to start Sosemo? Why did you choose to focus on the Health and Wellness markets?
People always think that ‘big’ agencies are disruptors. However, from what I observed while working at one of the largest, they provide the safest and most formulaic strategies and approaches. I recognized an industry-wide gap between traditional marketing and its latest innovations.
I founded Sosemo to offer brands superior services and expertise in areas where traditional agencies-of-record usually have little depth. Sosemo stands for Social, Search and Mobile. The bracket around our logo implies better integration across channels, which we strive for through nimbleness.
Health has always been an area of interest for me. I started my career working as a systems analyst for the world’s first animal cloning company, where I designed and developed the laboratory management system. From there, I launched and led the search marketing capability across Digitas Health globally. Highlights of my career at Digitas Health included incorporating SEO into all website design and development workflows, identifying technical issues with Bristol Myers Squibb’s enterprise-wide CMS and proposing a solution, managing SEM/SEO for all brands across AstraZeneca, and building out the search marketing capability across all offices in the U.S. and abroad. My success at Digitas Health, inspired me to launch Sosemo.
Having spent much of my career working within the health and wellness sector, I understand the passion that healthcare marketers have for facilitating conversations between patients and healthcare professionals to improve outcomes, and I share that passion.
To succeed in building brands with digital marketing, what aspect should marketers in the health and wellness spaces pay particular attention to?
Establishing trust is paramount. Whether products are highly regulated and require specialized certifications for marketing and adherence to strict guidelines, as is the case with pharmaceuticals, or are more lightly regulated as with the food and beverage industry, addressing consumer hesitancy is necessary. However, experienced health and wellness marketers have a refined playbook for overcoming this hurdle.
A core formula for success involves leveraging unbranded or lightly branded experiences that serve as public health resources, informed by keyword research insights, to build trust and drive consumers through the marketing funnel. For example, with one of our pharmaceutical brands which was a treatment for Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS), awareness media drove to an unbranded informational website called Living With LGS. Living With LGS then drove visitors to the brand site once trust had been established.
Are there areas many of your clients overlook that inhibit success?
Running campaigns that don’t have enough breadth to be effective due to limited budgets is perhaps the greatest inhibitor to success. This ties back to the advertising law of seven, which essentially states that consumers need to encounter a brand’s marketing messages at least seven times before making a purchase decision.
The root cause of the issue is that brand managers often don’t know what budget is appropriate when planning. Furthermore, many media managers will work with a given budget regardless, instead of addressing the issue.
During planning, we review competitor spend levels, and also recommend a comprehensive inventory assessment for each channel. We then typically provide three budget allocation options. The budget allocation options are comprised of different share-of-voice levels, different audience segments, and perhaps different geo-targeting. This provides for a more strategic approach to media buying and identifies budgeting issues.
For brands with more limited budgets, what advice do you have for them as they think about their digital marketing programs?
The simplest way to address performance issues related to limited budgets is to geo-target. Geo-targeted campaigns with sufficient share-of-voice and ad frequency are more effective than nationwide or global campaigns that lack these attributes. If geo-targeting is not an option, were commend more budget when forecasts show that an appropriate level of share-of-voice and ad frequency will not be reached. As a rule of thumb, the minimum budget for media is $5,000 monthly. However, depending on the category, even $10,000 - $20,000 monthly can be too restrictive.
Ad frequency across channels is ultimately the driver for success. That includes organic channels. Therefore, if brands can build up their organic search and social visibility, that leads to more effective paid campaigns because the overall frequency is higher. Therefore, if budgets are too limited for paid media, we often recommend starting with organic search and SEO. SEO and content marketing can be highly effective and drive significant visibility. However, SEO alone is not typically enough to build a brand. SEO takes time to gain traction. Therefore, starting with SEO when budgets are limited is a good strategy because the cost is lower, and it helps lay a good foundation for paid media to be layered on top when budget becomes available. The cost of SEO is determined based on many factors including the amount of content, technical issues, competition and reporting frequency. However, the cost of a robust SEO campaign is generally comparable to a minimum sized paid media campaign.
As you look at a rapidly changing technology landscape, what should marketers be prepared for in the next 3 years?
I believe that we’ve barely scratched the surface with regards to AI. As part of our agency’s roadmap, we set the goal of delivering work output that is 25% faster and 40% better in terms of opportunity identification and clarity by leveraging AI. We aren’t using generative AI for clients that are in regulated industries yet. However, we have begun testing generative AI content strategies for other clients with great success. The cost is lower and therefore significant ROI is much easier to obtain. We are also leveraging AI for more and more internal workflows. Moreover, search will likely become more and more intertwined with AI, and Sosemo is well positioned to be at the forefront of that.
Lynda is a consumer marketing expert with a track record of successful U.S. and global product launches. She has created new product innovations across consumer wellness, from personal care to digital health. She is a founding partner of Compass Marketing.
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