Situation
As a freelancer, I worked with a company to improve engagement, attract more visitors, and convert more leads using their successful blog. They saw content marketing as a way to gain a competitive advantage and establish themselves as thought leaders in the industry. To achieve this, they decided to turbocharge their content marketing efforts, but first had to address organizational and technological challenges.
Key challenges:
- Expensive process. Creating good content was not a problem, but it was often expensive and time-consuming due to the lack of a common content creation, distribution, and marketing process.
- Outdated CMS. The content management system (CMS) was custom-built and almost a decade old, making it cumbersome and nuanced.
Business impact:
- High content creation costs. The cost of creating content was higher than necessary due to a disjointed workflow that included unnecessary steps, making it unsustainable.
- Limited focus on content promotion. Teams focused on content creation rather than content marketing, resulting in multiple pieces of content being published with little time devoted to promotion.
- Weak content performance. Some of the content underperformed due to a lack of adequate content strategy, editorial standards, and content optimization .
Actions
I performed the following activities:
- Conducted current state analysis to understand state of existing people, process, technology and design.
- Created and evangelized foundational tools/ guidance documents including: content principles, content style guide, templates, etc.
- Revamped content creation, publishing, marketing, and optimization processes.
- Reimagined experience design to support desired user experience and create consistency across content.
- Updated content management system to support new workflow, authoring needs, and user experience changes.
Results
With a streamlined process and supporting technologies, the organization found that:
- It needed less people to manage the routine parts of the routine parts of content creation
- Less people needed to be involved in the process, and people that were only involved at the appropriate times
- The performance and effectiveness of content increased, generating better engagement and higher conversions
- Teams could refocus their time and budget savings into content promotion and optimization