My goal as content leader was obvious: craft exceptionally valuable, insightful, and relevant content that captivates the target audience over their buying journey and delivers extraordinary marketing results. Achieving breakthrough impact demands a bold, meticulously designed strategy tailored to the unique landscape of your business and audience.

That’s just where I started – by diving deep into audience needs and pain points to define foundational content pillars, a compelling content mission, razor-sharp editorial focuses, and distribution and promotional plans engineered to reach and resonate powerfully with the audience. I then organized a content marketing center of excellence, uniting regional marketers to amplify the content strategy globally and produce high-caliber content at scale. To supercharge global content distribution, I onboarded technology and mission-critical resources to help. 

The Journey: Igniting a Content Ecosystem

My vision for the content strategy was nothing short of becoming the undisputed, trusted voice in payments and commerce. To achieve this ambitious goal, we needed to build a content foundation so compelling that visitors would eagerly return again and again for insightful and educational content that empowered them to grow their businesses with advanced payment and commerce strategies. I conceptualized and launched:

• A flagship digital publication

• A fully immersive content hub experience for the digital publication

• A must-read digital newsletter

• Activated social media  

Once the foundation was set, we needed pillar content that delivered unrivaled value and leading-edge insights to the audience, positioning us as indispensable thought leaders so we could consistently drive marketing leads for the business. I conceived and orchestrated an annual industry trends content campaign, supported by a multi-channel, integrated go-to-market strategy designed for maximum impact. For years running, this campaign stood as the single largest generator of marketing leads for the business.

Amplifying Impact

The most brilliant content remains powerless if unseen. I subscribe to the principle that breakthrough content creation is just the beginning – a mere 20%. The other crucial 80% is strategic amplification – mastering tactics like SEO, SEM, social media, paid ads, email marketing, and content syndication to ensure our message dominated the conversation.

My team expertly leveraged each one of these amplification approaches to shatter our goals. Some were deployed for sustained, always-on dominance with evergreen content, such as SEO, email marketing, and organic social media. For others, like paid ads, SEM, and content syndication, we employed for flagship campaigns and top-tier evergreen content.

Day-to-Day Leadership

A world-class content strategy demands inspired, creative leadership and a dedicated team relentlessly pursuing opportunities and solving problems day in and day out.

I led a team of eilte content marketing professionals to develop and iterate groundbreaking approaches to fuel deeper audience relationships, including:

• High-impact content creation such as articles, whitepapers, ebooks, infographics, product and sales enablement, case studies, and compelling marketing campaigns

• Strategic SEO content refreshes 

• Rigorous A/B testing

• Transformative brand tone of voice training 

• Impactful website refreshes

• Sophisticated personalization strategies

  
  

I’ve learned throughout my career how important it is to bring others along the journey with you so they clearly see your vision and understand why you do what you do. To make sure everyone was on the same page, I established a community of practice with colleagues from regional markets and lines of business. We discussed audience needs and pain points, best-practice approaches, identified content opportunities, and shared results that could be reproduced in other markets and deployed globally. 

Operationally, I architected a content marketing center of excellence to seamlessly scale the strategy globally and govern messaging, tone of voice, style, and content processes with unwavering consistency.

Measurement Matters

Like any other marketing strategy, content effectiveness must be rigorously measured. I didn’t just want mediocre results; I wanted great results!

We established critical content KPIs to measure our effectiveness across each phase of the marketing funnel. Each month, we found areas to optimize and made strategic adjustments, filled content holes, and amplified high-performing content to create record-breaking growth year over year:

• 41% increase in traffic to digital publication

• 42% increase in digital publication-assisted leads

• 46% increase in newsletter subscriptions

• 102% increase in social-assisted leads

• 62% increase in social engagements

Content Marketing Is a Strategic Function

An organization without a visionary content leader guiding strategy won’t generate the results it desires. A growth-oriented content leader looks holistically across all phases of the buying journey to connect the dots and ensures the potential buyer gets the right content at precisely the right time to make a confident buying decision – while also keeping your brand at the forefront of impactful conversations that make the audience sit up, pay attention, and take decisive action.