strategy

 
CHL-Cover-sept-oct-2018.jpg
ML-Cover-sept-oct-2018.jpg
 

long story, short

( research + plan + create + optimize + promote + analyze ) repeat

long story

I highlight below — in great detail — my content strategy for the digital counterparts of Colorado Homes & Lifestyles and Mountain Living magazines. I was the company’s first digital editor, right after both websites were completely redesigned and migrated to a new content management system, Revista.

Note: I must give kudos to my direct superior at the time of my onboarding, WiesnerMedia's VP of Audience Development and Digital Intelligence, Sarah Wright Frazier, who mentored me through many portions of this strategy.

problem

Devise and execute a content strategy for Colorado Homes & Lifestyles and Mountain Living’s new websites to bolster traffic, reach an optimal audience, continue brand engagement, and increase digital advertising revenue.

solution

An editorial calendar and a staggered print-content release plan to replace previous strategy of a “content dump” per print cycle. The editorial calendar will include a major increase in Web-exclusive content, both by creating content myself and acquiring a staff of regular contributors and influencers. E-newsletter and social media calendars will also be established to reach varying digital audiences and expand our users. A Table of Contents page in each print issue will promote Web-exclusive stories with easy-to-use vanity URLs.

process

USER PERSONA RESEARCH
I revisited our ever-changing audience personas and demographics, as the digital landscape evolves over time. I regularly collected demographics about our audiences — print readers, website readers, social media followers, and newsletter subscribers — so I could then tailor content that performs well with them all.

Example
“Julie,” the user persona for Colorado Homes & Lifestyles, has a particular set of traits, earns a certain annual household income, owns a range of homes, and enjoys certain hobbies in her spare time. 

DATA-DRIVEN CONTENT AUDIT
I studied each brand’s Google analytics to construct content guidelines on what our digital readers engage with on different platforms: organic search, newsletter, social media, and referral traffic sources. I devised Web-exclusive stories, as well as promotion strategies, that cater to these engagement trends. I also performed a deep content audit from previous “content dumps,” repurposing and optimizing stories for these audiences and their behaviors.

Example 1
Our audience, across the board, loves a celebrity angle — and these stories perform through the roof in organic search traffic, as well as in our e-newsletters and social media posts. Thus, I researched and wrote or aggregated multiple stories on celebrity homes or lifestyles in Colorado or the Rocky Mountain West. To name a few:

Example 2 
Due to the results of social media analytics, I tailored social media strategies to each brand’s audience behavior.

Facebook is the most active of all social media sources for Colorado Homes & Lifestyles. Facebook insights show that the more specific a post, the better it engages with our followers (resulting in a wider reach and thus, more followers over time). I tailored these Facebook posts to focus on the who, what, when and why of each story — tagging all relevant people/pages and employing copy that invites conversation. Because of this data-driven customized approach, Facebook is Colorado Homes & Lifestyles' number-one social media source, by a landslide.

Mountain Living’s Facebook insights show something different — the more general and conceptual the post, the better the engagement. This may be due to Mountain Living's national circulation and less of a preference for content in one specific region. I tailored Mountain Living’s Facebook posts to focus on the overall vision of the design story in question, still tagging relevant people/pages but not including it in the primary copy of the post. Because this approach is similar to the cataloguing found on Pinterest, it’s only natural to hypothesize that Mountain Living content would thrive on Pinterest, so in 2017 I prioritized building our Pinterest presence. The result? Traffic from Pinterest surpassed that of Facebook.

CONTENT CREATION & CONTRIBUTOR ACQUISITION
Using analytics as a skeleton, I devoted time each day to brainstorming and researching story ideas. I developed a network of contacts in varying industries to collaborate with. I also acquired regular content contributors, who bring their own digital audience to the sites and vice-versa — cross-promotion that significantly impacts Web traffic and brand awareness.

Example
The Heidi Guide on Mountain Living. Travel blogger Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer shares her expertise on what to do, where to go, and how to best enjoy Colorado and beyond on her blog, HeidiTown.com. She now expands her audience to Mountain Living once a week, and Mountain Living gains her valuable insight (and subsequent traffic).

PHOTO EDITING & OPTIMIZATION
Each story employs at least one photo — oftentimes many more than that, as home design and lifestyle content is wont to do. I use the Adobe Creative Suite, namely Photoshop, to crop and Web-optimize each photo. I also named photos with relevant keywords for Google image SEO.

CONTENT PRESENTATION & USER EXPERIENCE
As any good SEO manager knows, blocks of text are a big no-no. I ensured each story was broken up into an intuitive flow of images and copy, along with appropriately placed pull-quotes, lists, links, and references, for an optimum reader experience.

Examples

A seamless and clean user experience is imperative to any website — since content is these brands’ product, user experience is the lifeblood of their success. I was constantly putting on my “user hat,” exploring the site as if I’d never seen it before, testing navigation, site maps, and presentation of all options to improve user-friendliness, time spent on the site, and the likeliness a user will return to the site again.

TIME-ON-SITE STRATEGY
I used cross-linking, internal linking, custom-created “See also” sections at the end of stories, and aggregated stories that open to new tabs, to keep the reader engaged for as long as possible.

Examples

FREQUENT EXPERIMENTATION
The digital landscape changes rapidly, so my promotion strategies must also be quick to evolve. I am constantly testing new ideas and concepts to find the best current and relevant formula for success.

Example 1
Our editorial newsletters go out once a week per brand and include 3-4 stories. After a year of email subject lines that presented as Story 1 | Story 2 | Story 3, I experimented with shorter, more curiosity-inducing subject lines, that simply present as Story 1. Open rates improved. Subsequently, by experimenting with the amount of information I released in the story’s subtitle within the newsletter, click-to-open rates also improved. It seems that, for Colorado Homes & Lifestyles, curiosity works in newsletters (but not on Facebook). 

Example 2
Interested in other (free) ways to increase Web traffic, I did some research and decided to give StumbleUpon a try. Being a one-woman show, sharing stories on StumbleUpon seemed less time-intensive as other social media platforms not already employed, and appeared to be a good place to experiment. It’s now a strong driver of traffic to both sites, with one simple execution weekly.

PRINT PROMOTION
I hand-picked 3-4 stories for the Web Table of Contents page for each magazine. I carefully crafted headlines, deks, and vanity URLs for the print reader — an entirely different strategy with more poetic license that my SEO-driven strategies on the Web.

Examples

See the Web TOCs here.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT
At any given time, I was managing numerous projects at once: the print/Web-exclusive editorial content outlined above, as well as posting/scheduling social media promotion, working with dozens of advertisers to ghost-write and promote their sponsored content, executing marketing plans, creating event/sponsorship coverage, managing a staff of writers and editors, leading social media marketing workshops for home design industry professionals, testing new marketing campaigns, creating new sections and navigation for the websites, etc.

I used a combination of tracking and scheduling tools depending on the projects in question: Google Spreadsheets for newsletter content, Trello for sponsored content (so I can keep detailed notes on progress updates), and CoSchedule, along with a whiteboard in my office, to schedule Web Table of Contents stories in advance of the print production schedule. Also, counterintuitively for a "digital" editor, I am a huge proponent of by-hand to-do lists, brainstorming, and storyboarding.

skills employed

  • interpreting Google Analytics

  • studying and empathizing with personas

  • brainstorming creative story ideas

  • developing relationships with contacts and contributors to bring stories to life

  • planning editorial calendars and release plans (using Google spreadsheets and Trello)

  • copy writing and editing; content creation

  • editing and optimizing photos (Photoshop)

  • content optimization, presentation (InDesign, HTML, Revista)

  • writing for SEO (longtail keywords, headline optimization, meta descriptions, etc.)

  • strategic cross-linking, internal linking, and recommended links

  • informed social media marketing (Facebook paid and organic, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Tweetdeck, Hootsuite)

  • planning newsletter content and presentation (iContact)

  • seeing through the eyes of the reader — keeping user experience design/flow top of mind

  • managing multiple projects at once: editorial content, promotions, sponsored content, up to 5 weekly newsletter calendars (Google Spreadsheets, Trello, CoSchedule, whiteboard visuals)

results

In three-and-a-half years, I increased the number of CH&L’s average monthly unique visitors and page views by 69% and 59%, respectively, and ML’s by 56% and 47%.