So, you’ve committed to content. You’ve allocated the time and resources to make content production a key strategy in your marketing. The hard part’s over, right? Not so fast. You need account managers to save the day!
As soon as you’ve answered the question of why content creation is important for your business’s marketing strategy, you’re confronted with a million more questions.
- There are infinite things to write about, how do I go about creating topics for content?
- There are entire companies dedicated to SEO strategy. How do I get the biggest SEO boost from my content without having to become an expert (or pay one)?
- How often should I publish? How long should my content pieces be?
Additionally, while crowdsourcing content as a solution from a platform like Verblio grants all sort of benefits, like flexibility, ease of scale, and breadth of voices and perspectives, it also raises a whole new set of questions that may have you wondering:
- How do I communicate my voice to, not only one, but several writers?
- Will I be able to keep my content in line stylistically with the rest of my website and larger social media presence?
Verblio Complete Account Managers
Our managed service, Verblio Complete, answers all of these questions (and more!). Verblio Complete is our answer to the desire for end-to-end content creation service.
With Verblio Complete, customers are paired with personal account managers who helps them create a content strategy, build relationships with top-notch writers, choose and edit submissions for consistent tone and voice, and SEO optimize and publish all content.
From content strategy to SEO optimization, our account managers handle it all. And that’s why we recruit our Verblio Complete Account Managers from our own writer pool. Why?
- They’re great at content. We know from experience that they are excellent writers. We’ve reviewed their work, we’ve seen multitudes of customers prefer their work and request that they write on their topics, and we often ask them to write for our own blog. Being HubSpot Inbound-certified, they excel at creating targeted content strategies. And all of our account managers are skilled editors. So, when it comes to content, be it creating a strategy, writing, or editing it, they’re pros in every sense.
- They understand crowdsourcing. The fact that they’ve participated in our system as writers means they can leverage Verblio’s crowdsourcing design. They understand intimately what information and feedback are needed to communicate your tone and goals to writers. And they also know when to use your tried-and-true writers and when to tap a new writer with special expertise. They’re all Verblio power users.
So today, we want to highlight three of our account managers. Each of them has used their professional background along with their experience as a Verblio writer to customize Verblio Complete to solve our customer’s top challenges in content marketing.
Alexa: Ensuring Consistency of Your Voice
Alexa has been a writer for Verblio for two years. Like many of our writers, her professional background is rich with varied experiences. After majoring in English Literature and Music at the University of Miami, Alexa went on to work in a variety of creative roles, from a dance teacher to a freelance writer and editor, and even a corporate team-building facilitator.
So many of these roles required her to be a gifted communicator, able to understand the goals and preferences of her clients. She says that this background was crucial for Verblio Complete as it enabled her to “adapt my style of problem-solving to each customer’s needs.”
Alexa put this skill to use with her Verblio Complete client, Jennifer, who was looking for a very specific voice in her content. Jennifer runs a social media marketing company that helps clients create a social strategy. They are using Verblio for one of their biggest clients in order to create core content based on two main themes: “workforce readiness” and “STEM advocacy.”
The Challenge
Alexa recognized the key challenge for this client would be finding writers who had deep knowledge of these niche topics but who could also hit the right tone—informative and educational without being dry. She says:
The reason this content was so tricky came down to whether any of our writers could create content that would blend into the established personality of the site AND deliver information that demonstrated some knowledge of STEM.
The Solution
In the first week with Verblio, Alexa received a submission from a writer who possessed solid knowledge of the field, but her client felt that the tone made the piece look alien among the client’s existing content.
To me, this was a signal that voice and style should be the top priority. Fixing facts and dropping in data is a simple edit, but if the writing style needs to be re-worked, you’re looking at a complete rewrite.
Alexa turned all of her focus to finding the right writer and communicating the client’s voice. She spent time with the client’s content, pulling out the common goals and messages from piece to piece. She updated all of the customer’s Verblio topics to emphasize this information and a focus on style. Next up was finding the right writer.
What I needed to find was a research-oriented writer who was a good match in voice and style (or at least a writer that had demonstrated proficiency in adapting their writing style to different industries).
Alexa poured over old posts from numerous dependable writers. From there, she put a list together of 10 possible writers. She sent out emails to five of them explaining the background of her client and what she was looking for. But all these writers were already booked up with assignments. The days crept by. Alexa reached out to the next five writers. Finally, two expressed interest and one started a draft the same day.
And like that, Alexa had found her writer. His style and voice were perfectly aligned with what Alexa had highlighted in the customer’s account. And while he didn’t have deep expertise in the industry, he was a skilled researcher who could take his learnings and infuse them with a story.
And his timing couldn’t have been better. After three weeks of searching for the perfect post, Jennifer, Alexa’s client, was ready to give up on the crowdsourced solution completely. “Moral of the story?” Alexa jokes. “Good things come to those who wait!”
Char: Increasing Traffic & Leads from Your Content
The Challenge
Char faced a much less qualitative challenge with her client Walt Taylor of GWT2Energy, an energy consultancy for restaurants. Like most who begin the content creation process, GWT2Energy was looking for Verblio Complete to help them increase traffic and bolster their lead generation.
And Char was just the gal to do this. With over nine years of experience in the digital marketing field, she’s an expert in blogging, social media, email, video, and affiliate marketing.
Using my experience in digital marketing, I’m familiar with what it takes for a blog post to stand out and get noticed by its intended audience. From creating a great headline, to proper formatting, to providing tactical steps and tips that readers can actively use to solve their problem, I use these practices as a writer and editor for Verblio to ensure our customers get the best blog to deliver to their audience.
The Solution
Driving traffic and increasing leads all starts with the topics. That question about what in the world a business should write about all comes down to who that business wants reading its content.
Content should be based around your customer—who they are, what their problems are, what questions they’re asking. Char began by clearly identifying who GWT2Energy’s ideal customer was. She spent a lot of time with Walt getting a better sense of what role their customers played in the business, what their top pain-points were, and how GWT2Energy answered these challenges.
From there, she could do some light keyword research to find out how these customers talked about their problems and what terms they searched for. And with this foundation, she was able to create topics that resonated with this audience. She also added SEO optimization to all of their published posts, ensuring proper use of their keyword, formatting the content, and adding a compelling call-to-action. This process improved the user-experience and helped search engines find Walt’s content.
Char’s strategy for GWT2Energy has already seen huge results. Within two months, Walt saw a 50% increase in LinkedIn views, their primary marketing platform. As well, content that actually delivered value to their audience has boosted email engagement and driven significantly more traffic to their website. Additionally, now that this company has a regular blogging cadence, they can start analyzing data to parse out which types of topics performed better. This will allow Char to further build out their content strategy and focus her efforts on lead generation.
Katy: An Extension of Your Content Team
The Challenge
With a background in film production and screenwriting, Katy is an expert at coordinating the telling of compelling stories with multiple participants and departments.
This skill came especially in handy for one of her clients. They produce custom manufactured products focused in the agricultural, mining, industrial, and urban markets across Western Australia. As HubSpot users, they’ve built a content strategy focused around pillar content. HubSpot’s pillar methodology emphasizes how important it is for blog content to be aligned with web content in order to most successfully direct readers to a site’s pillar pages and give them various outlets to research the site’s products.
This client’s web content focuses on seasonal and topical advertising campaigns. This means that Katy is responsible for ensuring that their blog content closely follows this advertising schedule and is aligned with each associated social media campaign. To ensure that her client’s blog strategy is developing in perfect harmony with the rest of their content, from web content to social posts, Katy has had to become a seamless extension of their internal content team.
The Solution
Katy has helped them build out a detailed content calendar oriented around their advertising campaigns. This is a shared document that bridges across all of their content team so that each piece of content is united with the larger strategy.
Most of our content strategy planning happens behind the scenes and Verblio writers only see the detailed blog topics available for them on the platform. As the consultant between the company and the writers, one of my goals is to streamline communications so expectations for everyone involved are as clear as possible.
This clear and concise communication is especially important as Australia is 14 hours ahead of Colorado, putting a little more strain on communication between Katy and her Australian content team.
Additionally, Katy can also make sure that her client’s content goals are also the foundation of the blog content she helps create.
Their overall content strategy is to aggressively increase their SEO ranking, deliver informative niche posts, and create an integrated marketing approach with their blog. In other words, they want to get found online, teach their audience how best to use their products, and make sure their blog content follows their advertising schedule.
Like we saw with Alexa, Katy has the advantage of being able to comb through our crowd of writers to find ones who can write interesting and informative pieces for this niche. And in line with HubSpot’s methodology, she can communicate to writers to create posts focused on the specific buyer personas she’s outlined with her client. This gives their content the most SEO punch, as it’s focused on targeted keywords that their buyer types are using to talk about their challenges and find solutions.
This strategy has been so effective for them that they doubled the number of posts they receive through Verblio. This allows them to target their different buyer personas more effectively and gives them more data to analyze which blog efforts prove most powerful.
Now That’s What I Call a Managed Service by Our Account Managers
From content calendars to SEO optimization, Verblio Complete account managers do it all. Alexa, Char, and Katy serve as three excellent examples of what our account managers can do for their clients. As Verblio writers, they know the system inside and out as well as understand how to best communicate a customer’s preferences, voice, and goals. As Inbound-certified strategists, they understand inbound marketing and how to help your content actually get significant marketing results.
Whether they’re simply an extension of your larger content team or make up the whole of it, our Verblio Complete account managers leverage a crowdsourced platform to its most powerful while ensuring your voice permeates your content for compelling and effective storytelling.
Interested in learning more on how an account manager can help augment your Verblio experience? Book a 15-minute call with our team of content expert specialists.
