April 2024

copywriting

How to Build a High-Performance Content Team

Leave a Comment / Content Strategy, Marketing Leadership /

Strategic, goal-driven and impactful content propels your brand forward — amplifying brand awareness, generating a trail of leads and ultimately elevating your revenue to the peak of success. It serves as the compass and map that guides your audiences through the buyer’s journey.

The linchpin? A marketing team that navigates the terrain with the precision of a cartographer and the creativity of an explorer. 

There is an art and science to transforming your internal marketing team into a content powerhouse. Here’s an overview of how to get started:

Define Clear Content Goals

We’ve all been there: marketing teams churning out content without a clear direction. Don’t let your marketing team get lost in tactics without a compass. It’s all too common for marketing teams to focus on tactics without ensuring each idea links back to the organization’s goals. 

Start by ensuring your content team has a clear understanding of the organization’s objectives, which may be to:

  • Increase revenue by driving lead generation and sales
  • Expand into new markets
  • Enhance brand awareness or demonstrate thought leadership
  • Improve customer loyalty, satisfaction or engagement
  • Promote social responsibility

The team should anchor every initiative to your organization’s core objectives, as well as your content strategy. Encourage your team to rigorously vet ideas, ensuring every effort is purposeful and aligned.

Conduct a Content Audit

Sometimes content creators are trapped on an endless treadmill — cranking out new pieces of content and fulfilling every request from across the organization. 

Pause and conduct a thorough inventory of your existing content. Assess and identify opportunities to refine and repurpose what you already have. 

A comprehensive content audit should catalog:

  • Title: What’s the content called? This may be a title of a white paper or an internal title, such as “Product Overview PDF”
  • Location: Where is it stored or linked?
  • Date: When was it published or last refreshed?
  • Type: What type of content is it  (one-page informational PDF, guide, white paper, infographic, etc)?
  • Audience: Who is it for? 
  • Funnel Stage: Where does it fit in the buyer’s journey?

Consider expanding your audit to encompass use cases, performance analytics or other insightful metrics. 

Following the audit, you can take a critical look to see where you have gaps. You may be missing a critical piece of content for a certain audience or have significantly out-of-date content that needs to be retired or updated. 

You also may want to explore ways to repurpose existing high-performing pieces into different formats. For example, an infographic may play well as a social media video or a recorded panel might be a treasure trove for future blog posts. 

Forge a Streamlined Process

Creativity thrives within a structured process. It may seem counterintuitive, but a well-defined workflow provides the framework necessary for creativity to flourish, ensuring predictability and stability in your content creation.

Start by mapping out the current process and pinpointing bottlenecks. Then, streamline the workflow from conception to completion.

Address common hurdles, such as:

  • Idea capture and organization: Implement tools like an intake form in Asana for seamless idea intake.
  • Workflow bottlenecks: Eliminate unnecessary review stages and enforce deadline adherence.
  • Content distribution: Enhance collaboration with social media and sales teams to maximize content reach.

Implement Robust Measurement

By implementing a robust measurement system and fostering a culture of data-driven decision making, your content team can continuously refine its approach and ensure your content remains a powerful force driving brand awareness, lead generation and business growth.

Whether it’s through sophisticated dashboards managed by analytics experts or simply tracking interactions via UTM parameters using Google Analytics, measurement is key to understanding and enhancing your content’s performance. Data you might consider looking at includes:

  • Leads generated
  • Customer acquisition cost
  • Unique website visitors, page views, bounce rate and average time on site
  • Social media shares and engagement
  • Email open and click-through rates

Encourage your team to build practices of regularly evaluating content performance to ensure they focus on high-impact ideas and steer clear of low-visibility efforts.

Hire the Right Writers

While it’s true that anyone can write, not every content creator has the same skillset and experience. There are writers with specialized skills, giving them the muscle memory to create stronger content that will perform — often at a faster pace due to years of experience and knowledge. 

For example, if you’re taking a brand journalism approach to your marketing strategy, a former journalist may be a great fit. They will bring extensive storytelling experience and a nose for news to the table. A content marketer often brings an innate ability to write email subject lines and calls to action that drive engagement and a skilled copywriter can write impressive digital ads in under 125 characters. If web content is your most important driver of success, you’ll need a writer who has a strong understanding of SEO with a flawless ability to weave keywords into their copy. 

In an ideal scenario, you would have specialists to support specific types of content. However, it’s common for smaller content teams to be expected to wear multiple hats and you may not have the budget to hire specialists in each type of content or channel. In that case, you will need to invest in a talented content generalist — a Swiss Army knife of writing talent — or prioritize hiring based on what content is most critical to the success of your organization. Alternatively, you might need outside support in the form of a consultant.

Embrace Progress Over Perfection 

Content creation is an iterative process and your team should embrace a culture of curiosity, learning and continuous improvement. Here are a few ways to ensure your content is on the cutting edge:

  • Actively solicit feedback from your audience through surveys, comments and social media engagement. 
  • Experiment with new content formats — like podcasts, interactive infographics or video explainers. 
  • Test edgy ideas with a small audience segment and see how they perform before potentially scaling up. 
  • A/B test different headlines, calls to action and content formats to see what resonates best. 
  • Break down large projects into smaller, manageable pieces — allowing your team to adapt future, iterative pieces based on feedback and data from your customers.
  • Acknowledge and celebrate your team’s successes, but don’t shy away from analyzing content that underperforms. Host brainstorming sessions to identify areas for improvement and strategize how to optimize future content based on learnings.

By following these practices, your content team will transform from a crew simply taking orders off the marketing menu into a team of curious explorers, constantly seeking ways to improve and optimize their content strategy. This ensures your content stays relevant, engaging, and drives real results for your brand.

Interested in learning more about marketing leadership?

Share your email to be the first to hear about our new “Leadership & Management in Marketing & Communications” course, which will help new marketing and communications leaders learn how to set goals, balance workloads for others, hold team members accountable and manage conflict. This on-demand course, which includes downloadable exercises and templates you can put into action immediately, will be released in Summer 2024.

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green desk

How Marketing Leaders Should Balance High-Low Work

Leave a Comment / Marketing Leadership, Stories /

Imagine this: You’re in the middle of building a groundbreaking multichannel marketing campaign for a new product launch. Suddenly, your phone buzzes with an urgent message. One of your flagship events in California is going to be cancelled due to severe weather and you need to draft an email and social media post immediately to update participants. Welcome to the world of a marketing leader, where strategic vision often collides with the daily fire drills.

Marketing leaders navigate a unique work environment. We have to be experts at balancing high-low work. We need to be both strategic architects, crafting long-term plans and innovative campaigns (working high), and also hands-on executors, managing teams, editing copy and tackling daily tasks (working low).

Here’s the tl;dr about this concept:
Some people lean toward working low. They are the doers you can rely on to get work done. The downside is they might not spend enough time thinking about the future and placing bets on new ideas. Some people lean toward working high. They often have big ideas and vision, but they might not get to execution. Someone who can combine the styles to be a high-low leader is most valuable — but it makes their job tough due to bandwidth and context switching.

In marketing, leaders must excel at working high-low. In a single workweek, you may need to develop a social media strategy for the coming fiscal year, compile a slide deck to update the team on a new initiative that has been in the works for a few months, edit Facebook ad copy and proofread an email.

It’s easy to fall into the weeds, solely focusing on the individual tasks in front of you. It’s also possible to spend too much time up high — bringing big, overwhelming ideas to the team and creating plans for new initiatives.

As a marketing leader, you need to find the right balance for high-low work. Here are five questions for every marketing leader to ask themselves:

  1. How can you better reserve time for high work if you find yourself constantly focused on low work? Consider blocking dedicated time in your calendar for uninterrupted high-level thinking. For me, this time is usually between the hours of 7-10 a.m.
  2. What work isn’t a good use of your time right now? Become comfortable politely declining requests that pull you away from strategic priorities. If you get pushback, communicate how prioritizing a project or task that is unlikely to make a strong, long-term impact will take time and energy away from more critical initiatives.
  3. How you can delegate some of your low work to your team to ensure you have time and space for high work? Consider delegating tasks that are well-defined and can be completed by your team members. With clear instructions, you can equip them with the information and resources they need to succeed.
  4. How can you coach up the emerging leaders on your team to begin to think about the high-work perspective to help ensure they’re making the best decisions for long-term impact? Schedule regular team meetings to discuss long-term plans and the “why” behind your marketing initiatives. This will help them make stronger decisions and produce better work — allowing you to spend less time working low while building the skills they need to lead initiatives in the future.

If you are struggling to balance high-low work, consider working with Venturesome Strategies for team and one-on-one coaching.

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Rachel standing at a podium in front of a display that says "Keynote Address"

Keynote: People, Passion and Pathways

Leave a Comment / Speaking /

Below is my keynote from the May 2023 Central Michigan University PRSSA banquet.

Welcome PRSSA students. Today we celebrate your achievements this school year and your bright future in public relations.

As you prepare to launch your career, I want to help you build on the foundation you constructed here at Central Michigan University.

And parents … I bet you came here today to get two answers:

One, what is public relations?

And two, will my child make enough money so they don’t have to move back in?

I’m sure you have big plans for their bedroom. And I’m here to assure you that you can move forward with boxing up their stuff and building that home gym, craft room, or reading nook.

There is so much you can do with a solid foundation in public relations. Reflecting on my years at CMU, my time in PRSSA and the trajectory of my career, I can assure you that you made a wise choice in pursuing this degree and becoming involved in PRSSA. I earned my bachelor’s in integrative public relations with minors in journalism and communications in 2010. And I was a PRSSA member for all four years of college.

Since then, I’ve interviewed, hired and mentored students from universities across the U.S. I’m a national PRSSA awards and scholarship judge, an adviser for the MSU PRSSA chapter and a mentor through the Association of National Advertisers. I’ve coached, advised and mentored hundreds of students and young professionals. And of 30+ interns I’ve hired over the years, I can count on one hand how many came from a university other than CMU.

That’s because CMU students stand out. They are a step ahead because of the three Ps: People. Passion. And pathways.

First, the people are truly exceptional at CMU. From the faculty who will guide your education to the alumni who will support your career, you will be surrounded by some of the brightest and most talented PR professionals in the country. They will guide your education and support your aspirations. And, they will open doors for you, connecting you to professionals and jobs.

Second, the passion of the PRSSA students and CMU faculty is infectious. When you immerse yourself in the world of PR at CMU, you will find that everyone around you is driven by a deep love for this field. This passion is what fuels the creativity and innovation that are essential for success in PR. A few weeks ago, we hosted a town hall for IPR alumni, where we discussed the curriculum and the future of this program. There are over 10 pages of notes from this one-hour meeting. That’s because our alumni are so passionate about helping each of you in this room succeed.

Finally, the pathways that are available to you with a degree in public relations are virtually limitless. While the market right now is uncertain in many industries, let me assure you that the outlook for a PR career is strong.

Here are a few examples of jobs held by some of our alumni:
PR specialist at Amazon
Brand Partnerships Manager at TikTok
VP of Communications at Planned Parenthood of Michigan
Brand Communications Manager at McDonalds
PR Manager at Visit California
Director of Communications at Big Machine Label Group

Our alumni work at PR agencies, big brands, small businesses and nonprofits. And, if you decide to pivot in another direction, there is so much flexibility in how you can use your degree. We’ve had alums go on to leverage their degrees as entrepreneurs, corporate recruiters, philanthropy leaders and more. The skills you learn in this program — from communications and critical thinking to strategic planning and execution — are transferable to virtually any industry.

Beyond the practical benefits of a PR degree, I want to emphasize the importance of this field in today’s world. PR professionals are the ones who help organizations navigate the complex and ever-changing landscape of media and public opinion.

We are the ones who tell the stories that shape our understanding of the world. We bring brands to life with creative ideas and we help organizations develop strategies to make a lasting impact.

Whether we are up at 4 a.m. to be on the morning news or in the boardroom helping executives communicate the impact of layoffs, our jobs play a big role in the success of corporations, nonprofits, government entities and more.

Fifteen years ago, I was in your shoes — listening to another CMU alum share what PR was and how I could succeed in my career. I want you to have confidence that you’re already equipped with the foundational skills you need to start your career.

But there are a few things you don’t learn in the classroom.

And that’s what I’ll leave you with today. After you graduate, your life is no longer punctuated by semesters. You will not be given a syllabus for your career, a rubric to set expectations for each project or a grade to measure your success. You have to learn to ask the right questions to get feedback and embrace the excitement of uncertainty. This is the time to choose your own adventure.

There’s no wrong choice here, so take a leap — whether you choose to take a post-grad internship at a PR agency, backpack through Europe for the summer or start climbing the corporate ladder. Each experience gives you unique lenses to view communications and will help you build your career – no matter where you end up.

Second, your relationships — with your friends, colleagues, professors and bosses — should be your top priority. Trusted relationships and your reputation among your peers and leaders will help you succeed throughout your career. I can’t tell you how many times a CMU faculty member like Jim Wojcik has opened a door for me or how many times I’ve messaged a college classmate to ask about a job opening.

Quite honestly, I think this is the main benefit to group projects. Those experiences in class allow other people to see the quality of your work so they can vouch for you. The relationships you’ve developed these past few years will carry you forward.

But your work isn’t done yet. You should now start to build a personal board of directors. You need:

  • Managers who will challenge your skills and help you grow.
  • Mentors who will give you sage advice — sometimes the feedback you don’t want to hear.
  • Peers who will serve as your sounding boards. They’ll cheer you on when you succeed and pick you up when you fall…
  • And lastly sponsors, who will put their professional name on the line to help you get ahead.

If you’re not sure where to start, write my name at the top of your list. You can email, call, text or message me on social media at any point in your career for advice.

Third, be flexible. When I graduated from college, I wanted to run a PR agency. Since then, I’ve led communications for a foundation, overseen social media and PR at universities, launched a fashion brand, advocated for policies that protect the environment, managed major crises for cities and corporations , built a marketing team at a software company and I’m about to begin the next chapter of my career as the vice president of content strategy at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

I’m not doing what I thought I would be when I walked across the stage at commencement and I couldn’t be happier about that. As you build a career in PR, you’ll find yourself off the beaten path or moving in directions you never expected. Sometimes you’ll take a stepping stone role to build your skills or move laterally to find a better work culture.

Ultimately, choose to do what’s best for you at that point in your life and career – not what your 21-year-old self thought you would be doing or what your peers said you should do.

Lastly, remember your ABCs as you build your career:

  • A: Ambition: As an ambitious young professional, always shoot your shot. Job descriptions are just a wish list and you should apply if you can make a case as to why they should hire you. As a manager, I always choose to hire the less experienced person with a bit of fire over the more experienced candidate who thinks they know everything.
  • B. Bravery: Take calculated risks and embrace the possibility of failure. Learn from every experience. Ask for feedback. And own up to your mistakes. Some of the best experiences for growth in my career came to fruition because I was OK with the possibility of rejection and failure.
  • C. Curiosity: Ask good questions. Learn not just the “how,” but the “why. Never stop learning. The great thing about PR is the field is constantly evolving. I always like to remind students that I met my college roommates on MySpace. The way we communicate is constantly changing and the PR professional who stays on top of the latest trends will always have job security.

Students, I hope this gives you confidence as you launch your careers.

And parents, I hope this helped you finally get the answer to the question every parent asks: What can you do with a degree in PR?

Thank you and enjoy this night with your friends and family.

I’d now like to invite up one of the IPR program’s dearest professors, Will Anderson, to present the winner of this year’s IPR scholarships.

Interested in having me speak at your conference or banquet? Learn more.

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Quiraing Mountain Pass in Scotland

Forge Your Own Path Where Others See None

Leave a Comment / Stories /

“Did you make a mistake?”

As my friend and I carefully scaled our way down the steep gravely trail in the Quiraing Mountain Pass in Scotland, we assured the woman we were just coming down the trail.

It was too steep to walk down, especially as our hiking boots slipped in the gravel and sand. Instead, we crab-walked, holding on to the larger stones as we scooted down.

Once we were safely at the bottom, the woman continued down her own much easier path while a local with a white German Shepherd — who had been watching us from a rock — walked the opposite way, likely staying until the end to see if he had to call Mountain Rescue to save us.

Because we had taken a detour ascending the breathtaking mountain on the Isle of Skye, we had to backtrack a bit. Most of the trails were steep and narrow and we didn’t question this challenging path.
At the bottom, we looked back up to see there had been no trail at all.

We had seen a path where no one else had and scrambled our way down through sheer determination and maybe a bit of luck.

In life and your career, the way forward is a bit like hiking through the Scottish mountains.

As we started out, there were a lot of people. Many turned around as they experienced more intimidating terrain with large boulders and small footholds. It was mentally and physically challenging.

Sometimes the narrow trails were long and steep, with nothing more than a few inches of grass to the side before a steep drop down the edge of a sharp cliff. At times, we weren’t sure we were heading the right way.

Hiking through the mountains — real ones and those you experience in your life — takes a bit of bravery and boldness. Sometimes the path is well-worn. Other times it detours to a lesser known, more stunning view. Occasionally you get to the end of a path to discover the only way up is a steep scramble.
And sometimes you forge your own path where others see none.

Republished from May 2022

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