When we first discussed launching “Shareables,” our blog series featuring insight from our favorite content marketing pros, Beth Politsch was at the top of our list. Her deep expertise in content strategy along with her passion and talent for storytelling make her a master of messaging – and an invaluable asset to UiPath, where she is a senior content marketing manager.
We sat down with Beth to get her take on campaign strategy and creation, audience targeting, and measuring success.
Q: Regardless of how valuable a singular asset is, a well-planned campaign is critical in order to get the right people to access it. You always come to the table with a clear vision of the pieces needed and how they’ll fit together. Can you share some insight into the process you follow when you’re mapping out a marketing campaign?
When it comes to campaign planning, I always think about foundational information first. I start by ensuring I have certain information documented. Strategic content planning to support business priorities identified by executives and business leaders is a given. There will also always be a stream of content requests from other people in the organization. No matter where the request is coming from, it’s important to nail down the answers to questions like:
- Is there a pain point for internal teams that led to this content ask, i.e. are business development reps missing something they need for follow-ups or is demand generation struggling to find updated content for a nurture?
- How does this request tie back to business priorities? Is the audience one that the business has identified as a strategic target? How does the content fit into identified company product and brand pillars?
- How is this content going to find its way to the intended audience? Is it needed for 1:1 customer conversations or are you hoping to start conversations on social media? Will it need support with paid social, ads, or content syndication?
- What do you want the target audience to think, feel, and do when they consume the content?
Having a simple conversation in person about the content ask, being a sounding board for ideas and feedback, and being collaborative about determining how to best fill the need of your stakeholders is crucial. We live in a time of Zoom meetings, Slack correspondence, and communications crafted by LLMs instead of humans. There’s a place for all of these tools, but none of them can replace building strong relationships across an organization – especially when it comes to content. Content is everywhere and everything. Everyone in your company will have an opinion, a need, or an idea about content at some point.
Once the content need is scoped out, I usually assess the documentation we already have about the topic, but I don’t just look at existing content assets. There might be valuable information in positioning documents, messaging briefs, enablement decks, or business strategy documents. That allows me to determine the foundation of educational information that already exists in the organization.
This is just one area where a generative AI tool can be really helpful. I like to use NotebookLM, a Google Labs-developed research tool. It allows you to upload your own sources, like the ones listed above. You can then enter specific prompts to get summaries of the information, ideas for how to construct pieces of content, starter drafts of content, and even a podcast version of the summarized content you could listen to while driving to a doctor’s appointment or while you’re on the treadmill. The important thing here is it only pulls from the body of content you put into the tool. Really strong, meaningful content going into the tool will result in better suggestions, summaries, and ideas in the end.
Q: Knowing your audience is crucial for success. You always have a very clear vision of your target audience, including their pain points and decision-making process. What approach do you take to identify and understand your target audience, and how do you ensure you stay on top of changes to their challenges and needs?
A: A special ability of content marketers is thinking about the story we need to tell from the point of view of the humans who benefit. Because a lot of times, the people within the organization who are coming to us and asking for content are looking at it very much from a perspective of “This is what we want to say, and this is how we want to sell our product.”
They’re not wrong. But what we can do as content marketers – and storytellers – is flip that narrative and humanize it. We realize the person on the other end of the content is a human being with a real life and real needs. We need to think about them first by taking messaging that says “Here’s why we’re great and what our product does” and flipping it so it focuses on how the humans on the other side can benefit from it.
Then I think our storyteller brains start going down a lot of different paths thinking about “Who are these people?” Buyer personas can be a great starting point, and your organization might have high-level personas mapped out. However, they’re often these stock images of smiling people and you’ve got a few bullet points that sum up: “This is what I do. This is my challenge.”
We don’t very often go beneath that top layer. There’s a quote by author Jacqueline Woodson that captures this sentiment:
“The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn’t resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.”
In other words, we often feel like we have to generalize, but what’s actually going to resonate is looking at your personas like characters in a story. Thinking about it as a storytelling exercise can lead to really interesting ideas that maybe you wouldn’t have come up with before.
Of course, it’s also important to do the research to back that up. Get answers to questions like:
- Where are these people hanging out online or in person? What events are they going to? What are examples of conversations they’re having?
- What are their favorite social media sites or industry trade publications?
- What are their frustrations and what are the implications of those frustrations past just the obvious pain points?
- What’s the status quo for this person as it relates to what you’re trying to communicate? What are the obvious ways they try to maintain the status quo?
- What would shift their overall thought process about what they need and why they need it? What would give them an undeniable lift in their perspective?
Once we’ve done that deep dive into who these folks are, where we can find them and engage with them the best, then we’re going to start to consider what’s the content that’s going to fit the objectives, the audiences, and the watering holes where they hang out.
Q: Metrics are the only concrete way to know how an asset is performing and how each step in a given campaign contributed to success. Additionally, every campaign – regardless of performance – is a chance to learn and adapt. What tools and metrics do you turn to most often to track performance? What lessons have you learned from past successes and failures that have shaped your current strategy around content creation and asset promotion?
A: Measuring content is so hard because it’s not just about one piece of content – it’s the entire roll out of that piece of content that matters. The objective of the campaign also matters.
For example, if you’re just looking at building awareness of a healthcare solution with chief medical officers then your metrics are going to be wildly different than if you want them to take a specific action and if you think they’re ready to convert and become customers. I truly think it’s a team sport when you get down to the level of measuring and activating content.
It’s really important to think about content marketers and strategists as the keepers of the stories, the storytellers who are doing the research and holding on to the storytelling principles. Then remember who your stakeholders are and who your collaborators are – the people who will help you build the data-centric plan that’s going to help track the KPIs.
Activating content can be done in a lot of different ways. Of course, we want to pull people in organically, and organic traffic and engagement is very important and can tell us how good of a job we’re doing in optimizing content for things like SEO or social media views. But a lot of times we’re also looking at syndicating content, pursuing pay-to-play tactics, and using tools that are quite sophisticated. Many organizations will have marketing ops and digital strategy folks who are experts in the use of these tactics and systems.
The great thing I will say about content marketers and content strategists is that a lot of people who come from a content or writing background are naturally curious, and we can figure out the answer to just about any question that you ask. We’re good researchers. So, again, it comes back to being a good collaborator and relationship builder. It’s knowing who and what your resources are so you can define your KPIs and metrics in a way that is meaningful and measurable within your organization.
Beth Politsch is a content marketing leader and master storyteller with 19 years of experience leading strategic, creative marketing for global brands and billion-dollar companies. You can contact Beth by connecting with her on LinkedIn.
