Coming up with fresh content marketing ideas can feel like pulling teeth. Sometimes you’re burnt out. Sometimes you’re blocked. Sometimes you’re just tired of coming up with ideas all by yourself. This is a common feeling, as the majority of B2B content marketers have less than 5 people on their team (according to the Content Marketing Institute). But when it comes to finding those A+ ideas, you can lean on more people than you think. In fact, you have a whole company of people you can turn into content marketing creators. You just need to know how to tap into their creative energy. Luckily, we’re here to help you do just that. 

How to Turn Your Coworkers Into Content Marketing Creators

When it comes to content brainstorming, we often have blinders on. We get used to doing the same things, or we get tunnel vision and can’t see any fresh ways to try something new. Bringing others into the fold can help expand and re-energize your entire content operation, whether they’re in the marketing department or not. That’s why we’ve rounded up some of the easiest ways your coworkers can generate ideas—or create the content for you. 

1) Tap your experts.

Whether it’s your accounts team or your head of engineering, the people on the frontlines—those who interface with customers directly or those who shape your products or services—are a wealth of ideas and inspiration. 

• Schedule a Q&A to talk to your sales team about the customer issues they’ve been encountering lately. Customer pain points or sales’ unique insight can help you come up with a variety of content (e.g., handy checklists, tutorials, or articles). 
• Film a video, or host an Instagram/FB live chat with a company thought leader (e.g., Director of Product Development). You can ask them about the issues facing the industry, or ask them about their failures/lessons learned. You can also pair them with a copywriter who can turn their ideas into a cohesive article.
• Have a one-on-one with your data analysts to look for ways to uncover unique stories in your data.

You’d be surprised what gems you can come up with after these types of conversations. 

Example: We’ve had employees share their biggest creative lessons learned, the biggest mistakes made in video production, as well as helpful resources like our own company’s creative brief.

2) Employee-Generated Content

It’s great when your fellow employees give you their ideas, but it’s awesome when they become content marketing creators themselves. Some companies encourage people to contribute articles or article ideas (even incentivizing people with gift cards or other perks). That may not be in your budget, but there are all sorts of ways you can mobilize people to create content to share. This can include things like….

• Have a company-wide contest, and share the submissions.
• Ask an employee to document a day-in-the-life story for social media. You could also have members of a whole department do it.
• Create employee spotlights for social media. You might have them answer a few questions, share a favorite tip, etc. This type of content is especially great because it’s easy to templatize. 
• Find out if anyone is interested in contributing guest columns/posts.

Tip: Get more ideas to showcase your employees and brand culture on social media. 

Example: To blow off steam and let loose creatively, our design department hosts occasional design challenges. They’ve redesigned flags and given their own creative twist to the letters of the alphabet. Showcasing these pieces lets us show off our team’s skill and celebrate their creativity. 

3) Trainings, Presentations, and Education

A good organization is always growing, learning, and investing in its people. When your team gains valuable knowledge, sharing it with others through content is a great way to extend that value. Whether your sales team picked up some new tips from a recent training or your company adopted a new practice that’s increased productivity, turning these tidbits into content is an easy way to give people a behind-the-scenes look at how you work and fill your content calendar. In practice that might look like…

• A presentation deck turned into a slideshare
• A series of articles on a particular topic
• A tweet thread of top tips
• A handy guide or checklist

Tip: Things like hacks, tweets, or data stats can be especially good microcontent for social. Find out more about how to make microcontent work for you. 

Example: We’ve summed up the lessons we learned at marketing conferences, written about the way that AgencyAgile trainings transformed our agency, shared our best brainstorming tips, etc. All of these ideas came from the knowledge we’ve gained and shared with each other. 

 4) Slack Channels

Yep, that’s right. Some great content ideas might be hiding in your Slack channels. We have channels for everything from pets, to parenting, to marketing strategy, and combing through these channels has given us a ton of content inspiration over the years. When you’re hunting for inspiration, look for…

• Unique conversations/perspectives/debates your team is having about industry-related subjects
• Resources, articles, projects that you might share on social or combine for a roundup (e.g., “Our Top 9 Fave Books on Branding”)
• Discussions of upcoming trends
• Exciting work or company-related news that may be relevant/interesting to your audience

Tip: Another easy way to make more content is to repurpose content you already have. For example, you might turn highlights from an ebook into an infographic. You can also use a divisible content strategy to get the max amount of content from one single cornerstone piece (e.g., a lead-generating ebook). 

Example: We’ve shared our best tips for working parents from our #parenting channel. We’ve turned great design examples in our #inspiration channel into roundups of B2B content marketing examples, infographics, explainer videos, etc. We also share the best of our #inspiration channel in our newsletter each week.

5) Your Company Culture 

Your culture is one of the best sources for inspiration, and it is becoming more and more important to spotlight, as both your customers and potential employees want to know who you really are. Luckily, this content is often more lighthearted and enjoyable to brainstorm, and you can find inspiration all around you. Think of how you might give people a behind-the-scenes look at the people and fun stuff that makes your brand unique, including things like…

• Traditions
• Celebrations
• Hack days
• Employee talents
• Playlists

Tip: Showcasing your company values can be especially powerful. See how these brands put their values front and center, and see our culture marketing 101 guide for more ways to spotlight your company.

How to Mobilize Your Content Marketing Creators

If you want your team to be more active in your marketing, look for ways to bring them into the fold. 

• Host regular brainstorms. You may not want to invite everyone, but curating smaller groups of people from different departments can be helpful. 
• Set up an easy way to submit ideas. If you make it known you’re looking for ideas, you may be surprised at the response you’ll get. If people don’t have time for brainstorms, give them a method to submit their ideas (e.g., a specific email address or dedicated Slack channel).

But if you’re still struggling to come up with the ideas you need—or execute the ideas you have—you may want to bring in some extra support. Find out how to find a B2B agency with the right expertise, find out what it’s like to work with us on a content strategy, or hit us up directly. We’re happy to help you keep your calendar filled with great ideas. 

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Content marketing isn’t about creating content. It’s about creating the right type of content—content that grabs attention, connects with people, and keeps them coming back for more. To be successful, you need to serve quality content consistently and give people what they need at every stage of the customer journey. In short, you need to produce the right content marketing mix. But how do you figure out what that is? Good thing you’ve come to the right place.

Good Content Marketing = Good Content Strategy

As much as we wish there were one single formula for the right marketing mix, it really depends on a specific brand’s needs. The problem is that many brands don’t have a solid content marketing plan—or even goals—and so they struggle to create content that is truly effective.

This is evident in the Content Marketing Institute’s 2021 B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, where marketers cited the top two biggest challenges that hindered their success:

1. Content creation challenges
2. Strategy challenges

Without the right strategy, creating the right content is incredibly difficult. Hence, we take a strategy-first approach to creating the right content mix.

How to Curate the Right Marketing Mix

The steps we’ve outlined here will help you craft an editorial plan to reach the right audience across all channels—and avoid some of the common pitfalls in content creation. Naturally, the ideas you come up with will be unique to your brand, but following these steps will ensure you’re creating a well-rounded editorial calendar from the jump.

1) Understand what content your audience needs at each stage of the customer journey.

Look, a long-time brand loyalist doesn’t need to hear the same messaging that someone who’s never encountered your brand before does. Take a look at your content operation as a whole, and make sure you’re addressing customers across the journey: awareness, consideration, analysis, purchase, and loyalty. For example, you may be putting all your energy toward awareness content when you should create a little more consideration or analysis content. Look for the content gaps in your journey, and brainstorm ideas to fill them. 

Tip: Use our free template to craft marketing personas that outline who your audience is, what they need, and how you solve their pain points. Then use our guide to map your customer journey at each stage. With this insight, you can brainstorm a better variety of ideas that will truly fit your audience’s needs and wants.

2) Experiment with different formats.

The marketing world is constantly evolving. Trends change, distribution platforms change, and consumer tastes change. This is especially true when it comes to content formats. You probably know firsthand that just because one type of content was popular a few years ago doesn’t mean it will be popular forever (hi, BuzzFeed quizzes!). If you want to be successful in content marketing, you need to deliver the right message via the right package.

There are so many formats that can help you engage your audience, from infographics and ebooks to motion graphics and videos. As you brainstorm ideas, think critically about the most effective way to present them. (This is especially important depending on the distribution channels you’re using. Things like video are better for certain platforms over others.)

This is by no means a comprehensive list, and some formats can fit well into other stages, but here is a general example of how different formats can help you connect at different stages of the customer journey:

• Awareness: Infographics, whitepapers, e-books
• Consideration: Blog posts, social posts, online articles
• Analysis: Webinars, demos, explainer videos
• Purchase: Case studies, testimonials, free trials
• Loyalty: Newsletters, special offers, follow-up consultations

Tip: For more ideas, find out how to create different campaigns for your customer journey.

3) Choose a sustainable publishing cadence.

To publish the right content marketing mix, you need to serve the right content consistently. This is where editorial planning, resource management, and project coordinating come in. The keys to making this happen: 

• Publishing frequency: This is where many brands get tripped up. If you’re overscheduling content but undersupported in creating that content, your publishing presence will be inconsistent. It’s better to start with a sustainable cadence, then scale from there. What would the sweet spot be for publishing on your blog? Newsletter? Social media? What kinds of posts do people expect to see regularly, semi-regularly, and just every once in a while? This should inform your marketing mix. 
• Scheduling: According to the CMI B2B report, 30% of marketers don’t even use an editorial calendar—yikes. The more organized you are, the easier it will be to publish content consistently, establish a presence, and cultivate the right audience. Use our free editorial calendar template to start. And make sure you’ve built a comprehensive timeline to ensure you move smoothly through each page of production. 

Tip: Find out how a divisible content strategy can help you get more mileage from every piece of content you create.

4) Establish a production process to maximize content creation efficiency.

You may have grand plant to create a documentary series, custom whitepapers, or a comprehensive how-to guide for your service. But if you don’t have the time, funds, or people power to produce it, it doesn’t belong in your marketing mix. If you want to create good content, you have three options:

• In-house: To do this, you need to cultivate a solid infrastructure and process to create content—no matter the medium. Every member of your team should have the knowledge and resources to produce that type of content. For more tips, see our guide to master content creation effectively. 
• Freelancer: They are often easy to get on board, but they make lack the expertise and ability to scale.
• Agency: Successful agencies have expert teams on hand to produce a wide range of content. They are most helpful if you’re looking to create and execute a large content strategy. Find out more about the benefits of working with an agency.

Tip: See our guide to figure out if you should use a freelancer, agency, or your own team. 

5) Measure and study what worked.

Guesswork has no place in content marketing. Knowing your goal and choosing the metrics to measure your success is crucial. Whereas many brands focus on pushing out more and more content, understanding what content is worth putting out is much more important.

For example, for our own marketing, we’ve sunk weeks of work into interactive content that is beautiful and thorough yet less successful than our simple template toolkits. If we didn’t take an analytical look at the results—or were too stubborn to acknowledge that it didn’t resonate the way we hoped it would—we would continue to sink time, energy, and resources into projects that don’t give us the ROI we want. Instead, we’ve chosen to work smarter, not harder on the content we create.

Tip: Find out how to choose the right metrics for your content strategy to track your success effectively, and hold regular post-mortems to review the content you’ve created. Ask yourself:

• What pieces of content were most successful?
• What platforms did they live on, and where were they promoted?
• On what day and time were they published?
• What made them work?
• What can you learn from this?

Once you start to deconstruct what does work, it will be easier to brainstorm your best ideas.

Always Put Strategy First

Finding the perfect content marketing mix is both an art and a science. Ultimately, it takes both critical thinking and courage to try something new. If you’re not sure what your next move should be, focus on the basics:

• What are your goals?
• What does your audience need?
• What content would best deliver what they need?

But if you’re overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, consider turning to the pros. Here are 12 things to look for in a content marketing agency. You can also holler at us. We’d love to help you bring your content strategy to life.

In solidarity with Black Lives Matter, we aren’t publishing our regularly scheduled content this week. But because we know how powerful content can be, we’re using this space to amplify Black voices and support anti-racism work.

Here are 43 resources personally recommended by our team. These people, organizations, and works of art have moved us, educated us, inspired us, or changed our view of the Black experience and how we can show up for the community. We hope they inspire you too.

43 Resources to Work Toward Anti-Racism

1. Red Line Art Series by Greg Edwards: A stunning visual art series highlighting the practice of Redlining in America’s cities, which has created economic disparity that affects communities today. —Katy French, Managing Editor
2. #8cantwait: A list of police policies you can start calling your mayor or sheriff about immediately. —Adam Chung, Designer
3. Blacks Who Design: A Twitter directory of accomplished Black designers. —Abheeth Salgado, Art Director
4. Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley: The Institute brings together researchers, organizers, stakeholders, communicators, and policymakers to identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive, just, and sustainable society in order to create transformative change. —Jason Lankow, Cofounder
5. Who Belongs?: A podcast by the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley that addresses the question of who belongs and explore a range of policies, movements, scholarship, and narratives that get us closer to the goal we seek: a society where all belong. —Andrea Bravo-Campbell, Director of Creative Operations
6. HotBoxin’ Podcast with Mike Tyson ft. Van Jones: Van Jones is like the Van Gogh of fighting for justice and human rights. But Van Gogh never helped pass bi-partisan criminal justice reform. —Andrew Effendy, Designer
7. Hey, Jason!: A podcast about masculinity and the Black male experience. —Asher Rumack, Director of Strategy
8. Project Nia: As of 2015, Black youth are 5X more likely to be detained or committed (incarcerated) compared to white youth. Project Nia is a grassroots organization that works to end the arrest, detention, and incarceration of children and young adults by promoting restorative and transformative justice practices. —Daniella Hughes, Finance + Operations Manager
9. All Star Code: An organization that creates economic opportunity by developing a new generation of boys and young men of color with an entrepreneurial mindset who have the tools they need to succeed in a technological world. —Daniel Pickering, Developer
10. Narrative 4 Field Exchange Program: Narrative 4 is a global network of educators, students, and artists that uses art and storytelling to build empathy between young people while equipping them to improve their communities and the world. Their exchange program is an immersive experience designed for students from different backgrounds, cultures, and communities to explore one another’s homes and histories. —Desiree DeLattre, Account Director
11. Stranger Fruit photo series by Jon Henry: Per the artist: Stranger Fruit was created in response to the senseless murders of Black men across the nation by police violence. Lost in the furor of media coverage, lawsuits, and protests is the plight of the mother who, regardless of the legal outcome, must carry on without her child. These photographs depict mothers with their sons in their environment, reenacting what it must feel like to endure this pain. —Elise Kaufmann, Strategist
12. Justice in June: A schedule of what to do each day to become more informed—step one to become an active ally to the Black community. —François Matus, Art Director
13. The Public Health Approach: A framework recommended by Minneapolis City Councilmember Phillipe Cunningham for building alternative systems of public safety, outside of policing, that are rooted in community and justice. —Jenny Famularcano, Designer
14. Selma (directed by Ava DuVernay): A powerful film based on the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches. —Jay Kim, Designer
15. Color of Change: An organization that leads campaigns to move decision-makers in corporations and government to create a more human and less hostile world for Black people in America. —Jonathan Sweet, Senior Producer
16. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela: A powerful autobiography that chronicles Mandela’s early life, coming of age, education, and 27 years in prison fighting apartheid. —Josh Ritchie, Cofounder
17. Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon: A powerful and provocative memoir in which Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a Black body, a Black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse. —Kaede Holland, Director of CRM
18. Hale County This Morning This Evening (directed by RaMell Ross): A film capturing intimate and personal moments from the lives of the Black community of Hale County, Alabama, forming an emotive impression of the historic South and consequences of racism while upholding the beauty of life. —Katie Raney, Art Director
19. Monique Melton: A Black anti-racist educator, podcast host (Shine Brighter Together), author, and speaker. —Kellyn Kawaguchi, Media Manager
20. Mona Chalabi: A data journalist, artist, and public speaker who addresses the most pressing social injustices through accessible and engaging writing and illustrations. —Lauren Breen, Marketing Manager
21. The 1619 Project: A multimedia piece by the New York Times that explores the legacy of slavery in the U.S. and how the Black American experiece has been shaped since the arrival of the first African slave ship 400 years ago. —Megan Lieberman, Strategist
22. Rachel Ricketts: A racial justice educator providing online spiritual activism courses and other resources. —Michelle Kirk, Producer
23. Campaign Zero: A police reform campaign proposed by activists associated with Black Lives Matter. —Nate Butler, Creative Director
24. GirlTrek: An organization that encourages African-American women and girls to use walking as a practical first step to inspire healthy living, families, and communities. —Phuong Dinh, Designer
25. Black Girls Trekkin’: A Los Angeles-based community empowering women of color to spend time outdoors, enjoy nature, and protect it. —Rendell Ascueta, Designer
26. The Conscious Kid: A research and policy organization dedicated to reducing bias and promoting positive identity development in youth. —Ryan Shoe, Senior Video Producer
27. The Loveland Foundation: A foundation focused on providing mental health and wellness support for Black women and women of color. —Shea Costales, Associate Producer
28. Why Not the Right Thing the First Time by poet Nikki Giovanni: Enjoy this powerful 2017 TEDx talk. —Tamara Hlava, VP of People and Culture
29. Lisa Fields: The founder of Jude3project, an organization poised to help members of the Black community navigate questions of their faith and culture. —Travis Keith, Account Director
30. 13TH (directed by Ava DuVernay): A documentary featuring scholars, activists, and politicians who analyze the criminalization of African-Americans and the U.S. prison boom. —Brenna Haragan, Producer
31. Ta-Nehisi Coates: He is one of the best writers in America. Read his books! Or, an easy and powerful introduction is his interview on the OnBeing podcast: “Imagining a New America.” —Matthew Deakin, Producer
32. L.A. artist Calida Garcia Rawles: The photo-realistic paintings use water as a visual language to address racial and gender politics. —Erika Imberti, Editor
33. National Society of Black Engineers, Jr.: This organization helps young Black students envision themselves in STEM careers (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) by providing students in grades 6–12 with fun, educational STEM activities and events. They also offer NSBE and corporate-sponsored scholarships to students entering college to major in STEM fields. —Tommy Buzelli, Developer
34. National Church Adopt-a-School Initiative: Founded by Dr. Tony Evans, the inititative influences positive social change in urban youth and families through the public school system and areas such as economic development, education, housing, health revitalization, family renewal, and racial reconciliation. —Brian Wolford, Senior Producer
35. Code2040: A nonprofit activating, connecting, and mobilizing the largest racial equity community in tech to dismantle the structural barriers that prevent Black and Latinx technologists from fully participating in the tech industry. —Chad Giacopelli, Director of Interactive
36. The Last Artful, Dodgr, Ural Thomas & the Pain, Chanti Darling: I want to amplify the voices of some local (PDX) Black musicians who give so much of themselves to their art and to our community. —Jeremy Fetters, Director, Client Services
37. Anti-Racism Resources: A roundup of ways that white people and parents can deepen their anti-racism work, compiled by Sarah Sophie Flicker and Alyssa Klein. —Kelsey Cox, Director, Client Services
38. Roxane Gay: A wonderfully talented writer with a thoughtful perspective on many social issues. This essay helped me better understand how I need to show up. —Ross Crooks, Cofounder
39. People of Craft: A showcase of Black and POC in design, advertising, tech, illustration, lettering, art, and more. —Walter Olivares, Junior Art Director
40. CBC PAC: I believe that if you want to affect positive change in your community you have to vote for people who represent your community. Change can happen, and your rights to vote will never be taken away. Vote local, vote state, vote national, vote in the primaries, vote in the generals. The CBC PAC aims to increase African-American representation and Non-Black Allies in Congress. —Cale Dunlap, Senior Developer
41. Black Game Developers: A Twitter account that promotes the work of Black game developers. —Charlie Noard, Designer
42. 3 Ways to Speak English: In her powerful spoken-word essay “Broken English,” Jamila Lyiscott, Ph.D  celebrates—and challenges—the three distinct flavors of English she speaks with her friends, in the classroom, and with her parents. —Elizabeth Spurbeck, Producer
43. Moonlight (written and directed by Barry Jenkins): A coming-of-age film that tells the story of a black man’s life in Florida in three stages. It explores the difficulties he faces with his sexuality and identity, including the physical and emotional abuse he endures growing up. —Garner Dumas, Motion Designer

We know we have a lot of work to do, and we hope this list is a helpful start for others, too. (BTW, here are 10 reasons why supporting BLM is so important.) We’re also always looking for more ways to learn, grow, and challenge ourselves. If you have resources that can help us in this journey,  feel free to drop them in the comments. In the meantime, the good fight continues…

Peace & Love,

Column Five

Running an agency is no joke. There are pressures on all sides. Keeping track of everything (while keeping the lights on) can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re just trying to deal with the deadline in front of you. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last decade of running Column Five, it’s that there’s always a way to work smarter. This year, we decided to drastically change our entire work process by seeking team-wide training from outside our walls, inspired by those who’ve been in the game and walked in our shoes before. Here’s why we enlisted AgencyAgile, and why we’re glad it paid off. 

Why We Decided to Change the Way We Work

Until this year, we thought we were working efficiently. Overall, we were doing pretty well: pushing projects along, managing timelines, and creating work we were proud of. Our clients were happy, so we were happy—well, mostly. Behind the scenes we were still dealing with the sometimes inevitable (but often avoidable) chaos of agency work—client demands, back-to-back meetings, and dozens of concurrent projects across multi-disciplinary teams—all while trying to carve out time and space to develop world-class work. 

Unfortunately, the more we tried to find solutions for these pain points, the more we realized our ways of working were largely holdovers from our early days as a scrappy but quickly growing agency. Although we’d grown and our work had matured, our systems of working together were still pretty DIY, a mishmash of practices fused together over the years. This caused all sorts of issues, from miscommunication to inconsistency between teams. Our creative output was the same, but our path was too varied. We wanted to realign ourselves, but we needed outside help to do it. Enter AgencyAgile.   

The Solution: AgencyAgile

AgencyAgile is an agency consultancy we learned about through SoDA, a digital network of agency founders.

AgencyAgile describes its work as “a purpose-built transformation and training program for complex and chaotic organizations.” Basically, they’re agency whisperers, a team of pros who created an Agile-based work system meant to solve an agency’s biggest challenges, from scoping and budgeting to workflow and client communication. 

Their core approach is all about: 

• Detailed planning
• Accountability
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Clarity 
• Efficiency

We knew of a few agencies who’d done their training and experienced serious transformation, so we were intrigued. 

The more we looked into AgencyAgile’s methods, the more we became convinced of the benefits. In addition to helping our work, AgencyAgile’s solutions aligned with our five core values.  

1. Do Good Work. We’re proud of the work we do, but revamping our process would help us do the same good work with fewer roadblocks and frustrations. 
2. Value Our Partners. AgencyAgile’s techniques could help us improve our communication, helping us be more transparent about how we work. This would make things easier and clearer for our clients.  
3. Be Good to Each Other. If we aren’t collaborating optimally, communicating effectively, or using our skills and resources efficiently, we aren’t helping each other out. We felt that AgencyAgile’s project management approach would help us support each other more effectively. 
4. Experiment Often. We’d tried our approach, and it worked to a point, but we knew others had experienced what we were facing before and found better solutions. AgencyAgile felt like something we should push ourselves to explore—no matter how foreign it seemed. 
5. Be Humble. Learning new things isn’t always easy, but we didn’t want our ego or fear to get in the way of doing better work. 

Our leadership team was on board, but if our whole team was going to undergo training, we wanted it to be a communal decision. To pitch the idea, we had AgencyAgile come in for a presentation, followed by a healthy team debate, and ultimately, a company-wide vote on Slack. (Spoiler: They said yes.)

When it came time to do it, we decided to shut down shop for a week and fly our whole team into C5’s California HQ for a four-day AgencyAgile training. (The training doesn’t require you to shut down shop, but we wanted to give our team the distraction-free time to focus.)  

The AgencyAgile Experience

Sure enough, the four-day training was a unique experience. Trying new things is one thing; ditching your known practices and processes is another. But at the end of that week, we had undergone a deeply transformative experience, and the techniques we learned were practical solutions to some of our biggest pain points. 

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Learning methods that stick ?

A post shared by Column Five | Creative Agency (@columnfive) on Mar 6, 2019 at 3:36pm PST

In the months since, these practices and behaviors have been hugely beneficial at every level of our agency, helping us serve our clients and collaborate with each other more effectively. Specifically, AgencyAgile’s methodology has helped us: 

• Visualize all elements of a project from the start (aka roadmap). This helps us identify moving parts, spot roadblocks, gauge risks, and address anything else that might impact the success of a project down the line. (That means no more being blindsided or derailed last minute.) This has been tremendously valuable for our larger accounts and more complicated campaigns, where multiple deliverables can make it a complicated ecosystem. We also feel a lot saner. 
• Get teams totally aligned (faster). Now, we can identify who owns what, ensure everyone is on the same page, and address any issues that might have caused frustration in the past. BTW, one great thing about the roadmapping technique is that it works for all types of learners (e.g., visual, auditory, tactile), helping everyone get aligned much quicker. 
• Communicate more efficiently with our clients. Roadmapping our projects helps us co-own a project’s success with our client. This sets expectations, gets us aligned, and eliminates any subjectivity about what a project will look like when done.
• Anticipate and allocate resources more effectively. Since we create a roadmap for every project, we can get a bird’s eye view of every part, helping us ensure we have the resources we need. This has drastically cut down on budget creep, which everyone is thrilled about. 

Above all, it has really revived our commitment to each other, empowering our teams to take ownership of their work and really trust each other throughout the process. (In fact, we’re so impressed, we’re preparing for the next level of training, focused on increasing productivity.) 

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Brainstorming ?

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What We’ve Learned From Making This Change

Change is scary, of course, but often necessary. There were a few challenges we anticipated, and a few we didn’t. But overall, we’re happy we went all-in on this new system. 

Not every organization undertakes something this drastic, but if you’ve been considering making any sort of significant change to your own work process, there are a few things to keep in mind before you dive in. 

1. Expect a learning curve. Doing something new doesn’t always come naturally. Things might not snap into place immediately, so you need to anticipate some buffer time. For us, it’s taken patience and practice to learn to implement AgencyAgile correctly. But because we’re learning to do it more quickly and efficiently, we know things will only get exponentially better. 
2. Let challenges bring you closer together. Trying something new means you might mess up, fail, or falter. For us, going through this process was at times frustrating and painful. But because we were committed to doing this work, we came out of the experience even more bonded. Since training, we’ve been more communicative, more engaged, and more eager to share tips and knowledge. 
3. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Learning something new takes a lot of brainpower and emotional energy. Not only do you need team buy-in but you need to support your team through the process. For us, that meant shutting down for a week to carve out the space to complete training. We did this intentionally to alleviate work pressure and make sure everyone had the bandwidth to participate. Of course, this also meant we had to notify our clients and address any concerns or issues beforehand, which took a fair amount of coordination and planning. 

Taking such a big step isn’t always feasible for every company or team, but we’re glad our team was up to the task. We’re especially grateful for their continued commitment, ongoing feedback, and willingness to try something new. It’s their spirit, energy, and enthusiasm that remind us why we do this work. 

We Believe You Should Always Be Open to Change

This isn’t the only time we’ve tried something new or changed the way we do things. We’re always looking for ways to improve what we do—and build a better future for our partners and our team in the process. If you’re curious to find out more about our behind-the-scenes work:

• Find out why we pay employees to explore their personal passions. 
• Learn about why we simplified our office space—and wish we’d done it sooner.
• Take a deep dive into our rigorous hiring process.

And if you’re interested in seeing our AgencyAgile techniques at work, hit us up about any future projects.  

Watching Column Five grow has been a delight over the last decade, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that many of our personal families began to grow, too. As many of us have transitioned into parenthood, small talk has shifted from happy hours to changing tables, and we’ve bonded over navigating life as working parents.

We’ve been lucky enough to cultivate a strong, supportive community (of both parents and child-free C5ers), which has been tremendously helpful. But we know there are plenty of working parents (or soon-to-be working parents) who could use some support or guidance. That’s why we decided to ask our C5 parents for their insights, tips, and advice on everything from daycare to the best desk to work at with a baby. 

THE THINGS WE WISH WE’D KNOWN AS WORKING PARENTS

You can read all the books, but there are plenty of things (both big and small) you’ll wish you’d known. Here’s what we wish we knew from the jump.

• “Find a daycare option early—like early, early. Like when you’re still in your first trimester. Daycare for infants is hard to come by, and if you plan on going back to work when they are still little, you’ll need to be on a waiting list starting long before you give birth.”
  —Kaede Holland, Director of CRM and Stepmom to 9-year-old Lucy and a new baby on the way (coming 2019)
• “Don’t worry so much. Kids aren’t as fragile as people might think. I think the infant and toddler bodies are meant to handle the bumps, scrapes, bonks, and owies that come with growing so rapidly. My son falls like a champ and gets over it so quickly it’s impressive.” —Cale Dunlap, Senior Developer and Dad to 17-month-old Mason
• “If you don’t have an FSA, get one.” —Chad Giacopelli, Director of Interactive and Dad to 2 1/2-year-old Cody
• “Trust your gut. Just like over-analysis paralysis can happen in project work, it can definitely happen in parenting. If it feels right, if it makes sense, if it’s with love, if it suits you and your family, be confident that you’re doing enough right.” —Matt Deakin, Producer and Dad to 4-year-old Eve
• “I wish I’d known about nap time. To be the best parent and worker, you need to nap during the day when the baby is also napping. It’s hard to deal with the reality of constant middle-of-the-night wake ups for feedings, crankiness, etc., and then work a normal day’s schedule—you need those naps!” —Tamara Hlava, VP of People and Culture and Mom to 11-year-old Adeline
• “Use your time off well. After my two-week paternity leave with our daughter, I took the third week and worked from home half days so I could gradually get back into the swing of things. I plan on doing this again when our son is born.” —Brian Wolford, Senior Producer and Dad to 2-year-old Nora and a new baby on the way (Spring 2019)
• “Utilizing more of my PTO when the kids were smaller would’ve been a better decision. The first 3 months were the toughest as it relates to balancing work and home.” —Travis Keith, Account Director and Dad to 3-year-old Jack and 1-year-old Teddy
• “Be honest with as many people at work as you can about how you are doing. That doesn’t mean TMI, but share your life. Stay whole, be authentic.” —Tamara
• “I wish I’d handed off more responsibility and delegated better in the lead-up and aftermath of becoming a dad. Trying to figure out how to navigate challenges in work and personal life, while not realizing how much more difficult I was making things for myself (and everyone who had to work with me) until it was too late left me feeling stretched thin, depleted, and pretty humbled. Thankfully, I feel like I learned a thing or two in the process and grew a bit as well. I’m hoping that I can apply some of that to navigating what life is going to be like with kiddo number 2.” —Josh Ritchie, Cofounder and Dad to 2-year-old River and 1-week-old Finn

TIPS FOR MOMS

Transitioning back to work can be uniquely stressful for moms, who may be physically recovering. Don’t beat yourself up, and keep these things in mind.

• “Start figuring out your leave as early as you are comfortable with your work knowing you are pregnant. We all know the U.S. sucks for maternity leave, but some states have better laws than others. See if you can figure out how to stay at your full salary by supplementing your leave with saved up vacation and sick time.” —Kaede
• “Buy great (bigger) bras, and spend a little extra on transition clothes. Most of us don’t go back to the size we were exactly—everything shifts! Breastfeeding while working also sucks. Unless you are a pro at the pump, it’s gonna have real challenges, like swollen boobs and getting someone to deliver the baby to you midday some days.” —Tamara
• “It’s OK to focus on you, too. It can be so hard to go back to work after having a baby. But, if I can be fulfilled in my career, regularly challenged to grow and learn, and help people do good work, then I feel like I’m being a good role model to my son.” Andrea Bravo-Campbell, Director of Creative Operations and Mom to 2-year-old Oscar
• “If you have any birthing or pregnancy trauma, it can take a toll and take a lot of emotional energy. Talk to a professional, do the work to be present and whole for yourself, your marriage, and your child.” —Tamara

TIPS FOR THRIVING AS WORKING PARENTS

Managing work and life can be a roller coaster. Here are a few ways to survive without losing your mind.

• “Standing desk plus MOBY wrap has been a huge help. The ability to hold your baby, but keep your hands free has helped a lot in finding more time to work during the day. Also, my singing has improved immensely.” —Charlie Noard, Designer and Dad to 4-month-old Elora
• “Live and die by your calendar. I put everything in my calendar now. Whether it’s work-related or personal, everything has a time slot.” —Travis
• “Eat healthy—it’s more important than ever! Sweat and get exercise, even just 15 minutes. Put down social media and electronics for part of the day.”
  —Tamara
• “Find your community. Several of us have started families in recent years, so our #parentbods (formerly #dadbods) Slack channel is a great place for questions (e.g., Got a babysitter rec? Is this normal?), adorable photo/video sharing, and sleep-deprived solidarity.” —Andrea
• “Talk to other parents. I’ve learned a lot from other parents at C5 who have experience with things like sleep-training their kids or knowing which tricycle to buy a toddler.” —Brian
• “Have a routine. Routine is crucial for scheduling, and nap-time is valuable for hyper-focused work. My wife and I both work remote from home, so we’re fortunate to be working parents together. We have a shared understanding that when one parent is on a client call, the other is ‘on duty’ and vice versa.” —Jeremy Fetters, Director of Client Services and Dad to 2-year-old Emery.
• “Consider how you spend your time. My goal each weekday is to spend time with my family in the morning, then go to work for a good amount of time (usually about 8-9 hours) to do what needs to be done. When I’m done at work, I try to truly be done, so I can be present and engaged with my family at home. Aubrey Marcus’ book Own the Day, Own Your Life helped me develop some perspective on thinking about work-life balance in terms of the daily or atomic unit. I’m a fan.” —Josh

Our team also agrees it’s important to communicate with your employer about your needs, specifically ways to make your work schedule more accommodating. While not every parent may have the luxury, working remote or having a flexible work schedule can be a huge help. 

• “Consider changing your hours. Ever since my daughter Nora was born two years ago, C5 has supported spreading my 40 hours across each week in a way that gives me most Mondays off so I can watch her. This time with my daughter is something I’ll never get back, and I’ve created so many special daddy-daughter memories on those days.” —Brian
• “Think about your needs. Trying to be in the office all day, every day on top of daycare drop-offs/pick-ups and daily routines ran me ragged. Working remote some mornings, afternoons, or whole days allows me to manage both my C5 work life and my home life with more intention and balance.” —Andrea
• “Do what works for you. A flexible work schedule has been the greatest perk of all time. That said, working from home with small kids doesn’t work (for me).” —Travis

WHAT PARENTHOOD TEACHES YOU ABOUT WORK

In addition to learning how to change a diaper and make it to your morning meeting, there are a few unexpected lessons that come with being a working parent. These insights have been eye-opening and, surprisingly, made work life a little easier.

• “I tend to stay pretty cool during the work day now. That’s because I am carrying the secret knowledge that I am probably the only one in the office who has touched someone else’s poop already that day.” —Ross Crooks, Column Five Cofounder and Dad to 3-year-old Jules and almost 2-year-old Frances
• “You don’t have control of who your baby is or whether they like kale or not; likewise, you don’t have control of the people at work. They are individuals playing out their own path and developing at their own pace. We may not all be special, but we are all unique! :)” —Tamara
• “While it might sound a bit crude, parenting has taught me how unimportant a lot of things at work really are. I think we tend to blow things out of proportion. Having a kid helped put things in perspective and has also given me much more drive to be successful and someone who my kids can look up to.” —Travis
• “I’ve always believed—and at least tried to operate in such a way that reflects my belief—that you get the best out of the people you work with if you’re encouraging, supportive, humble, and so forth. I am trying to take this into my role as a dad. Thankfully, I don’t work with 45 toddlers who do exactly what I say not to do just to get a reaction out of me. On that note, I think I’m learning a lot about patience and how to better manage my emotions because of my son, and for that I am grateful.” —Josh
• “Parenting has taught me just how much your mood/attitude can project onto others. If you are calm and happy, then more often than not that is how people will feel around you. If you are stressed and upset, then expect people to respond in kind.” —Charlie
• “Being a parent puts the world into a whole new perspective that makes you appreciate time a lot more—and not sweat the small stuff as much. I’ve learned how to be much more patient and manage my time better. I’ve also learned just how remarkable the human body and brain really are. Whenever my son teaches himself something new, no matter how simple it may be to us adults, it absolutely amazes me.” —Cale
• “My biggest surprise as a working parent is how much being Eve’s dad has started to feel like my ‘real job.’ Things like my career path, daily tasks, work fulfillment, company culture, career ambition—these things definitely still matter a great deal to me. But compared to the purpose, fulfillment, and ambition of raising and guiding this little human, C5 feels more like what I do on-the-side. I never really expected to feel this way, or that I would enjoy feeling like this, but it kind of takes over.” —Matt
• “Every once in a while my daughter will barge into my office when I’m on a client call. I thought it would be disruptive and unprofessional, but when it’s happened the client loves it, and it reinforces that we’re all humans trying to do business together.” —Jeremy

MOST OF ALL, TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF

Being a working parent isn’t easy, and sometimes you need to put your personal priorities first, whether that includes work or not.

• “I stopped working for a year when my daughter was age 1-2. That was the time I focused on doing lots of classes and outings with my child, so we could sync up and focus on early childhood development, pre-literacy, and neurological pathway development—plus, just pure play time for us to bond and grow to understand each other more. It was such a blast, and I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. But I’m also a worker, and having a baby at 40 didn’t change that part of my personality. I like to work, and I only work at great companies that deliver on my values, so I feel a great sense of connection to my work. It was nice I could honor both parts of me.” —Tamara

Remember that communication is key in any relationship, personal or professional. Be open and honest about your transition, reach out to the people around you, and take the steps you need to stay sane. If you’re curious about what those steps might be, here are a few other things we’ve done to make life easier for our working parents. These may be ideas you can implement at your workplace, too.

Letting people work remotely has always been a part of our culture ever since our founders Jason, Josh, and Ross were working out of Buon Giorno Coffee in Costa Mesa (RIP)—way back before they had a “real” office.

Since those early days, we’ve expanded to two offices (in California and New York), and as our team grows, moves, or explores new chapters of their lives, we’ve always remained fairly flexible about remote work. Hence, we have C5ers working all over the country, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Portland to Boise, Reno to NYC. We’ve even had C5ers clock in from Mexico, Thailand, and Sweden.

Thus, we know all about the pros and cons of getting to work remotely—and we’ve learned a thing or two about how to navigate the lifestyle, whether managing a team around the country or trying to get a project wrapped between two timezones.

Now that we’re hitting our 10-year anniversary, we’ve been reflecting on the things we’ve learned along the way and how we might share that knowledge to help improve other people’s work lives. That’s why we thought we’d ask our team for their best tips on how to work remotely. From collaboration tactics to personal practices, here’s what they had to say.

Tips to Manage a Team Remotely

It isn’t always easy to keep tabs on everyone when they aren’t in the office with you. Still, there are a few things you can do to make it easier when you work remotely. 

Keep one open channel. When you’re a manager, it’s important to be open and accessible to your team—especially when they can’t easily knock on your door. For that reason, it’s helpful to identify the best way for people to reach you, whether it’s via Slack, email, cell, etc.

Our Director of Interactive Chad Giacopelli (who manages the California team from Boise, Idaho) keeps an open Google Hangout window, so that anyone can “drop in” with a question. (The hangout link is also pinned in the developers’ Slack channel.)

“Everything can be solved through a Google Hangout,” Chad says.

Some managers don’t want constant interruption, which is understandable, so let people know what kind of communication is expected through which channels (e.g., text for emergencies, Slack for major project questions, email for low-priority communication).

Use the right tools. Take advantage of tools that offer you transparency so you can see the status of projects or tasks without having to micromanage or check in constantly. For example, Chad is a big fan of Team Week, a project planning/timeline tool that lets you see deadlines, status tracking, team progress, etc. This isn’t just for managers; any tool that keeps everyone on the same page is invaluable to avoid miscommunication, redundancies, or delays.

Take advantage of your timezone. Yes, it can be a pain in the ass to work in different timezones, but it can also work to your advantage. Chad is usually up and at ’em an hour before the CA office, which gives him uninterrupted quiet time to knock out projects that require focus and concentration. 

Tips to Collaborate Remotely

Communication is the key to collaboration, but it can be challenging when you aren’t in close proximity to each other. Here are a few ways we work through it.

Focus on effective communication vs. constant communication. You’d think a major challenge of doing work remotely would be a lack of communication, but as Chad points out, you often get drowned in over-communication to make up for the lack of face time. This can be disruptive for everyone.

To avoid this, schedule weekly meetings or other designated talk times to discuss status reports, issues, questions, or other general things that don’t need to be immediately resolved. If one meeting can save 20 emails a week, everyone will be happier.

Use video chat. Like Chad, Director of Strategy Asher Rumack says he’s a big fan of video conferences, “especially if you can screen share to replicate being next to each other.” Yes, you might have to change out of your pajamas, but seeing each other’s faces and reading body language are crucial to communicate well.

Set expectations from the get-go. Specifying how and when you’re available to your team is crucial for several reasons. It keeps you accountable, helps you and your team plan around your schedule, and reduces miscommunication. It also mitigates a more subtle issue, as our Portland-based VP of Client Services Jake Burkett points out. “There’s a feeling of anxiety that remote workers may deal with: the perception that because they’re not appearing ‘online,’ they must not be working,” Jake says. “But setting availability expectations can help diminish it.”

Tips to Make You Feel Connected

When you aren’t at the office everyday, it’s sometimes hard to feel like you’re really a part of the team, contributing to the culture, or enjoying the “fun” of the office. But you don’t have to live in isolation.

Keep the jokes alive. One of the biggest setbacks of getting to work remotely is not having regular interaction with coworkers, whether it’s break room chatter, walks to grab a quick coffee, or a Monday morning catch-up in the parking lot. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still connect. Whether you have shared interests or inside jokes, you can still incorporate that into your working relationship.

Slack is where our team communicates the most. We have a ton of channels where C5ers chat about all kinds of things like music, inspiration, bloopers, the Dodgers, movies, office quotes, puppy talk, travel, volunteering, wellness, and conspiracies (don’t ask). Some of it is ridiculous, but it’s a simple way to connect outside of the projects we’re working on.

Think of remote group activities you can do. Technology helps us work together when we’re apart, so it can help us hang together, too. For example, when the whole dev team worked in one office, they’d do a gaming night every now and again. Even though they’re remote, they’ve been talking about organizing a remote game night (and, damn it, they will finally do it in 2019).

Try to get together sometimes. It might not be feasible to get into the office every few months, but it’s important to have some interaction IRL. Once a year, we have a Team Week. This is a time when all employees fly in from all over the country. It’s a week of hanging, socializing, eating, games, town halls, and other activities that help us strengthen our culture and community.  

Tips to Stay Sane When You Work Remotely

Being able to work remotely is a luxury, but it can also take some getting used to. From isolation to work habits, you have to prepare yourself for the transition.

Set up a comfortable work space. Invest in the equipment and space you need to make remote working successful (e.g., an extra monitor, quiet work space, standing desk, etc.). “Don’t get stuck in a habit of working on the couch or being in a place that distracts you from doing your best work,” says LA-based Strategist Megan Lieberman.

Take a damn break. Without coworkers to distract you or invite you to a quick lunch, it’s easy to get sucked into a black hole of work. “Take advantage of points during the day where you can break things up (e.g., go for a walk, yoga class, grab a coffee),” says Portland-based Director of Client Services Kelsey Cox. “You’d be surprised how refreshed your brain and work will be if you make this a habit.”

Create an atmosphere for specific work-types. This is another thing Kelsey has found to be a huge help. “If you know you need to buckle down and either do a lot of reading or writing, light a candle, burn some incense, or change locations. It helps your brain transition between different tasks, especially if they are different than your typical/everyday tasks or require a different type of focus,” she says.  

Above all, don’t over-isolate. Head to a library, coffee shop, or other public space if you feel yourself getting a little too stir crazy.

Look for Ways to Put Your Remote Workers Front and Center

We’re lucky enough to live in an age where we can work from all corners of the globe—or homes—and that’s something that should be celebrated. Actively engage and acknowledge your remote workers, and look for ways to bring them to the forefront. No matter your industry, peeling back the curtain and giving people a glimpse of who you are and how you work is a great way to connect with people and personalize your brand. (For more on how to generate interesting culture-based content, check out our culture marketing 101 guide.)

We hope you’ve found these tips helpful—and we’d love to hear any of your own if you’ve been a remote warrior for a while. If you want a little more insight into how we work (plus more helpful tips): 

• Check out our origin story to see how it all started.
• Go behind the scenes of our hiring process.
• Find out why we ditched project debriefs.

And if you want to get to know us, check out more of our work or holler at us.

Do you remember that one time you had a meeting where everyone was prepared, knew the objective of the meeting, and truly valued one another’s unique contributions? Sure, these meetings happen—about as frequently as Halley’s Comet. Assuming that you work with good people who care, why is it so hard to create the right conditions for fruitful creative collaboration? Often, it’s because you have insight into the project, but not each other. Different creative types work differently, and it’s only by understanding both yourself and your colleagues that you can get to the root of the challenge. Here, we’ll dive into the different creative types, their strengths, and the different ways you can use their powers to boost your team’s success.

HOW CREATIVE TYPES THINK

Your team’s success relies on the individual psychology of your team members: how much each of you slept, how things are going on the homefront, whether you drank too much or too little coffee, and the specific world you work in each day.

The best you can hope for is perfection in imperfection, but how can you get to a place where you’re all fulfilled in your creative work, respecting individual contributions and getting work completed? (As cofounder of Visage and Column Five, this has been my biggest challenge.)

Rather than the previous assumptions about left-brained and right-brained people, neuroscientists now believe that each creative choice involves complex circuitry across both sides of the brain, as well as combinations of processing modes (spontaneous and/or deliberate) and information structures (emotional and/or analytical). These factors shape how your team members work individually and with others.

While individuals are not entirely deliberate, spontaneous, emotional, or analytical (or any single combination), it’s important to understand where each teammate lands on the quadrant, without judgment about which type is best/worst. Don’t look down on someone who is emotional as lacking logic, or think of someone who is analytical as being bureaucratic. Each has a unique power.

Once you understand what dynamics are at play, you can coordinate more effective meetings by building smart bridges between the processing types on your team.

THE 3 KEYS TO SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATION

The creative process is messy within an individual brain, and it’s made even more complex when you add a bunch of creative types (and egos) in one room. When looking to optimize your team’s creative collaboration, be aware of the three key variables that influence all important creative choices to be made as a team.

1. Time horizon: Are you planning for next week, next year, or the rest of eternity? Before you dive into ideation, everyone should understand the time horizon you’re talking about. Make sure everyone is on the same page.
2. Level of detail: Are you talking about high-level ideas or a 17-point action plan? One of my colleagues often tells me to zoom in and then later to zoom out within a single conversation, which can be frustrating and derailing. Hence, establishing zoom level at the beginning of the conversation is important.
3. Type of processing: The best chance at the best idea comes from having a well-curated team with a variety of skills needed to solve the problem at hand. Understanding how your teammates process information and make creative choices is the key to curating this mix and collaborating successfully.

THE 4 CREATIVE TYPES 

However, to truly understand the creative types you’re working with (and which type you are), you need a deeper understanding of the unique strengths and traits of the four creative types:

1. Considerate Visionary
2. Agile Strategist
3. Experimental Maximizer
4. Resourceful Builder

Let’s take a deep dive into the strengths and challenges of each and how to work most effectively with them.

1. CONSIDERATE VISIONARY (DELIBERATE/EMOTIONAL)

The Considerate Visionary (CV) cares a lot about the future and sees loose connections between ideas. If you’ve sat through more than a few meetings with this person, you might feel like the CV completely derailed the group.

It’s a challenging balance. As a team, you need to allow room for spontaneous ideation and improvement of the current course. However, you also need to get things done. If you spend all your time imagining, nothing will get built and tested.

So, the best way a CV can be a team player is to be considerate. Rather than coming in like a bull in a china shop and assuming no one else has thought about the future, this person can help improve team dynamics by asking questions before making assertions.

This simple tweak, to ask a question and truly listen, has helped me a lot with our team. I generally thrive in this mode of creativity, and I used to come in pretty hot (as more of an Inconsiderate Visionary) after reading a few articles and declare that we were moving too slowly or not focusing on big enough challenges.

Unsurprisingly, this alienated me from the other smart people on the team at times. It’s easy to see why this didn’t work in retrospect; no one likes it when someone comes over, opens the hood, and starts critiquing work without taking time to gather context.

PROS:

• Thrives in pursuit of the unknown/leap of faith.
• Stays attuned how the world is evolving.
• Connects the dots between their ideas and the thought processes of the larger team.

TIME HORIZON:

A CV generally trusts the team with the near-future execution and strives to anticipate where the world is headed over the next year and beyond.

CHALLENGES:

The CV’s pursuit of the unknown and belief in something impossible can be maddening to a team that wants better blueprints. Even with an accurate crystal ball (which the CV admittedly doesn’t have), the way the world might look in 3 years doesn’t necessarily help the business do what it needs to do today.

HOW TO COMMUNICATE WITH A CONSIDERATE VISIONARY:

Work together to keep conversations grounded in the present without discouraging bigger-picture thinking. We created a Slack channel called “Big Ideas” for anyone to safely post ideas for 6-12+ months down the road.

Context is crucial (again, framing the level of detail and time horizon for consideration at the beginning of the meeting helps everyone stay in the same space/time coordinates). Is this a meeting to discuss what the team is doing this week? The CV needs to respect the time and preparation that went into mapping out these near-term tasks. Is this a casual walk-and-talk about what’s possible in the future with one other person? Let the weird ideas fly.

2. AGILE STRATEGIST (DELIBERATE/ANALYTICAL)

The Agile Strategist (AS) can be mistaken for a pessimist because of their one-track focus on identifying problems. It’s tempting to want to avoid this critical thinker at the early stages of ideas so that you can nurture an idea to life before smashing it to pieces. However, that’s a mistake.

If you are, say, a Considerate Visionary, and can separate critical feedback on an idea from an attack on who you are, then it can be really powerful to bring an AS into the earliest stage of an idea.

An AS thrives when they have room to critique without being labeled as a Gloomy Gus. If you’re not this person, try to empathize and imagine how you might feel if one of your greatest strengths and your natural creative process was consistently labeled as negative. That dynamic can spiral, in fact, and I’ve seen it.

You have a strong critical thinker who is dismissed as pessimistic, and then the next time around, you don’t loop that person into the early stages of the creative process. When the AS is eventually looped in as a key stakeholder, they still see the missing pieces and holes in the execution. The problem is now they must give that feedback at a later stage when changes are more costly.

This can lead to major tension in the creative relationship. At worst, it causes a complete breakdown and people leave the company—all because a different type of creativity wasn’t embraced for its unique value to the team, labeled a negative trait instead of a gift.

PROS:

• Uncovers blind spots.
• Distills a challenge to its essence.
• Connects the big-picture vision and the near-term tactical needs.
• Sets key building blocks for the larger team to take action.

TIME HORIZON:

The AS is always looking at impending challenges: How is this approach going to complicate things for future users of the product? What does the next month look like in detail? They will also have a sequence of initiatives in mind for the next 6-12 months.

CHALLENGES:

An AS must ensure they are not coming from a place of ego and belief that their way of doing things is superior. The important thing to focus on is the solution itself, honoring the value and work it has taken the team to get to this point.

HOW TO COMMUNICATE WITH AN AGILE STRATEGIST:

Assume a person who fits this creative type has positive intentions—even when you haven’t always experienced that before. In the process, value the critical thinking and questions the AS is throwing at you rather than getting defensive.

Anticipate their critical thinking. You know it’s coming your way, so rather than coming in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (or as a friend once labeled me, a prissy-ass optimist) only to get slaughtered by questions about the holes in your idea, be proactive by asking for feedback.

Present your seed of an idea, along with a request that demonstrates respect for strategic thinkers. Ask something like, “What questions do you need answered in order to get clarity on how/whether to proceed?” to mitigate the AS’ concerns.

Another thing that can help: Ensure there are clear, complete handoffs between team members. This ensures there are no loose ends or outstanding issues as the project moves to the next phase.

3. RESOURCEFUL BUILDER (SPONTANEOUS ANALYTICAL)

If you’ve ever found yourself saying, “I had that idea 4 years ago” or “I’ve been saying we should do this for years,” then you’ve likely suffered from a lack of Resourceful Builders on your team. A Resourceful Builder (RB) will critique any flaws in the logic of the plans and will experience tension (whether they express it immediately or not) if involved too late in the game to bring their (mostly) constructive criticism.

It’s one thing to go off on a leadership offsite and get super inspired about your plans for being the most loving people ever to pursue world domination. But aspirations dissolve into the ether without the right people to carry out the execution. RBs are fueled by a desire to see things through.

This isn’t about surrounding Creative Visionaries and Agile Strategists with Yes People who are afraid of criticizing a supposedly omniscient set of plans. It’s about getting things done enthusiastically. Even if a lot of the doers in your organization are relatively junior members of the team, including a strong RB in the early stage of the creative process early increases a sense of ownership of the final work product.

PROS:

• Refines details when provided with a strong plan foundation.
• Wants to get in the trenches and actually create and execute according to the blueprint.
• Makes critical judgment calls on the fly.

TIME HORIZON:

RBs are good at planning and scheduling the details of activities required for each day of the week. They want to plan a few weeks down the road but are often pulled into a reactive mode to put out fires and keep each day’s tactical activities in motion.

CHALLENGES:

Sometimes this person isn’t involved early enough in the process and can’t bring more creative firepower to the solution. In some cases, an RB takes on too much at once and starts to resent the tight deadlines, feeling like they aren’t afforded the time to do top-quality work. If you look at an RB as a worker bee rather than a creative individual, you’ll miss their full potential and reduce the amount of ownership and passion they feel for their work.

HOW TO WORK WITH A RESOURCEFUL BUILDER:

Rather than stifling an RB’s bigger ideas or criticism in the name of getting an issue resolved immediately, indulge in the RB’s active ownership and allow them to leverage their interest in digging deeper to ultimately find a more elegant solution to the problem.

4. EXPERIMENTAL MAXIMIZER (SPONTANEOUS/EMOTIONAL)

The Experimental Maximizer (EM) is, perhaps, the most rogue member of your team. This type of creative thinker likely drives the Resourceful Builders crazy on a weekly basis. But, when understood properly, the EM’s introduction of creative tension can be a source of originality and, though seemingly less structured than the Agile Strategist’s methodical arguments, is an important form of critical thinking about the way forward.

The courage to try something new without having all of the details figured out is necessary to take creative leaps as a group. When you allow this freedom, you just might pull an all-nighter or two, blackout in a blur of synesthesia, experience some brief infighting that leads to a healthy reconciliation and considerations of future processes, and wake up in innovative territory having accidentally uncovered a new line of business.

PROS:

• Loves to try new things.
• Comfortable with failing and learning.
• Good at connecting dots between loosely connected ideas.

TIME HORIZON:

An EM is a time traveler. Actions and ideas are spontaneous in the moment but correspond to gut feelings about how they will impact the organization for years to come.

CHALLENGE:

The EM’s experiments without hypotheses can lead to waste. Bringing in wild ideas late in the game can make other players on the team feel like their work up to that point is undervalued or disrespected.

HOW TO WORK WITH AN EXPERIMENTAL MAXIMIZER:

Involve the EM in early discussions and make the creative objectives very clear. Focused priorities provide clean boundaries within which to run wild—without firing in random directions.

For example, if you are an Agile Strategist and have created a framework that distills several possible paths into a key question or choice to be made, you might run the paths and thinking by an EM.

Warning: If you don’t make the time horizon and overall focus clear, you could have a very tense discussion as the EM goes into free-thinking mode and starts firing off possibilities that are disruptive and deemed to be off-topic.

However, with the right boundaries in place and clearly stated objectives, the EM has the context and guidance to bring relevant yet still unconventional (and potentially radical and disruptive) ideas—without derailing the group.

HOW TO PUT THIS KNOWLEDGE INTO ACTION

All this theory is well and good, but what does it mean on a practical, day-to-day level? And, more importantly, how can you use this information to collaborate with your teammates and significantly boost your creative output?

These four steps will help you put a process in place for creative problem-solving and ideation that allows each creative type to be fulfilled. Each is framed as a meeting to help break down the challenge at hand and get each creative type’s input.

1. First Meeting: As you are thinking through a problem that requires many creative brains to solve, work together to generate a list of mutually exclusive, possible paths and ideas worthy of consideration. Ignore the urge to shoot these ideas the moment they are born, as the seemingly impossible ideas could later prove to be your path to survival as an organization. Keep them all alive for now.

This initial approach creates a safe environment for the emotional/spontaneous Experimental Maximizers to get weird and experiment with wild ideas without necessarily having a 17-point plan in place for execution.

2. Second Meeting: Ask what conditions must hold true for each respective idea (or possibility) to succeed.

At this stage, you have some baby ideas that still need some nurturing. Don’t trample them yet. Perhaps one of you can be William Wallace and say “hold” every time someone is ready to go to battle against a “ridiculous” idea. Instead, by listing what would be required for each idea to succeed, you are still giving unconventional, bold ideas a fighting chance to be considered.

By getting the team to put together a complete list of what is required to bring an idea to life, you unlock the power of varied thinking and perspectives from the creative types.

This gives space for your critical-thinking Agile Strategists to convert the holes or flaws in the idea into a constructive statement by articulating it as a requirement (a condition that must hold true) for the idea to succeed (and get the buy-in of the Resourceful Builders who are so crucial as the winning ideas move towards execution).

3. Third Meeting: Think critically and test your options.

Soon enough, it’s time to start arguing. Yay! Our emotional/spontaneous Experimental Maximizers need to embrace the creative gifts of their deliberate/analytical Agile Strategist counterparts here by receiving the logic-based critique of each baby idea—not as a personal attack, but as their colleagues’ bringing their own creative superpower to the process.

This may require patience as fine details are debated, scientific tests are constructed, and processes are considered. Agile Strategists might even find some breathing room by breaking out into duos or trios to spec out and debate these specs so the “blue sky” folks (Considerate Visionaries) don’t get impatient and cause a communication breakdown. (And now I know why I was left off that calendar invite last week!)

4. Fourth Meeting: Make a choice.

Now that we’ve asked the right questions and gathered data to test, we reach our aha moment. It’s important to establish the agenda ahead of this meeting, and let everyone know that the purpose of this meeting is to make a choice.

In fact, at one such meeting, one of my cofounders actually wrote on the whiteboard: “Now, we make a f$@%ing choice.” Never mind that we made the wrong choice that day and ended up going a different direction 6 months later. (But that’s a topic for a separate diary entry.)

Usually, because the group has had room to bring individual contributions that are truly valued in this framework, getting consensus on the path forward is smooth and, in some cases, truly a special and original path toward building an effective brand.

NOW, LET’S WRAP THIS UP

What do you need to remember?

• Embrace the mess; creative breakthroughs can be chaotic at times. Not that much is wrong with you.
• It’s normal to feel anxious, but know that it’s possible to cut through the clutter to find a positive creative path.
• It’ll never be a perfect process, but it can get easier to deal with when you understand—and use—the four types of creative people.
• When you legitimately value the other creative types on your team and their special brain powers (surprise!), they tend to value your contributions more frequently in return.
• The result: You’ll reduce the tension between colleagues and boost your creative output significantly.

Over to you now.

• What creative types do you have on your team?
• Does your team have a balanced blend of all four creative types?
• What time horizon is important to consider (the next month, year, or decade)?

BTW, don’t stop here. Learn what the latest research says about how introverts and extroverts exhibit creativity, find out how to gain creative confidence, and try this problem-solving exercise to tap into your team’s ideas. 

For a lot of marketing folks, the past year has been tough. So many rapid advancements happening in parallel to budget cuts means marketers are stretched too thin and asked to do more with less. Big-picture thinking and long-term strategy planning have flown out the window as marketers scramble for immediate results. 

We get it. A long-term strategy is important to keep your team aligned, and we’ve spent the last decade fine-tuning our framework to build lasting brands. But we know that in this climate, it’s hard to justify a lengthy, comprehensive effort to reimagine everything if your business is struggling to grow—or simply survive. Right now, you need to move quickly, invest intentionally, and focus on what’s working. 

But you also need to adapt and evolve. So, how do you test your ideas effectively, and step towards a larger vision? You need a flexible framework to run lean experiments, get real answers from the market, and even uncover new opportunities to explore in the future. That framework is what we call Agile Content Marketing, a test-and-learn approach that combines first principles thinking, the scientific method, and strategic marketing to answer your biggest questions and guide your next step, one experiment at a time. 

If you’re looking for a way to get something new in front of your market (or test a new market), this is the exact framework we use to help our clients get intelligent insights—without a massive investment. 

So, grab a seat and your favorite adaptogen-rich beverage as we break down everything you need to know about Agile Content Marketing: what it is, why it’s different, and how to do it. (Or just paste this article into your favorite LLM for a TL;DR summary.)

Let’s dive in. 

TOC

• The Biggest Problem Marketers Face
• What Is Agile Content Marketing?
• What Is the Difference Between Agile and Traditional Content Marketing?
• Benefits of Agile Content Marketing
• How to Conduct an Agile Content Marketing Experiment
  • Formulate Your Hypothesis
  • Design a Small-Scale Experimental Campaign
  • Launch the Campaign and Observe
  • Analyze Collected Data 
  • Iterate a New Experimental Campaign
• How to Improve Going Forward

The Biggest Problem Marketers Face

Why do so many marketers struggle, misfire, and make the same mistakes over and over? Because they don’t have the information they need to make smart decisions. 

A strong marketing strategy is built on a foundation of essential truths, including:

• Who your audience is
• What issues they face
• How your product/service/solution addresses those problems
• Why people can believe and trust you’re best suited to solve those problems

To get to these truths, you need to ask the right questions and make decisions based on those answers.

It takes discipline and rigor to question everything. So, say you’ve asked your essential questions and feel confident you have reliable and truthful answers (based on recent results). You know you’ve achieved product/market fit, but you still need to grow. What is the next thing you need to know? Once that question is answered, what is the next thing you need to know? As your marketing organization matures, this series of questions will become more granular and you will inevitably hit a wall with a question you can’t answer. At some point, you need a reliable experiment to get the real answer.

It’s painful and tedious to question fundamental assumptions about your business and marketing, but it’s necessary to understand whether the truths you believe are indeed based on current evidence, or perhaps based on wishful thinking or what was previously true. Here’s the problem: often these questions are “answered” through internal debate and discussion with very little validation from the outside world.

To mitigate risk and adhere to the illusion of “the perfect plan,” marketing teams tend to deploy whatever strategy satisfies the majority of internal stakeholders. Devoid of solid research or hard evidence, these plans often fail because they aren’t informed by deep understanding of market needs and pain points—instead, they’re the lowest common denominator distillation of what the internal team thinks they should do. 

What you think works in a conference room often doesn’t work out in the wild.

When you’re catering to opinions, you’re not making decisions grounded in truth. (This isn’t to say there’s no place for instincts; sometimes good instincts can be overshadowed by internal debate, killing off potential winners before they’ve seen the light of day.) But without a reliable testing method, opinions are all we have to work with.

So, what if you could get to validation (or invalidation) of your ideas? What if you could test your hypothesis and use those insights to make smarter decisions about your business? Agile Content Marketing allows you to do exactly that. It lets you build a culture that says, “OK, that’s worth a try,” rather than presuming something works before actually trying it.

So, What Is Agile Content Marketing?

Agile Content Marketing is a way to get quick answers from low-effort experiments. Using the scientific method, you start by identifying a single question you want answered (e.g., is there an audience for this new service? What types of content does my audience prefer? Which creative messaging resonates more?), then deploy a rapid-fire campaign to test the market and gather information in real time.

Experiment. Execute. Optimize.
That is Agile Content Marketing.

These contained experiments help you test your hypotheses and generate timely insights, which you can use to iterate and optimize going forward. This flexible approach eliminates “guessing your way to consensus” and opens the door to building consensus and validating a stronger strategy one test at a time.

Greg Isenberg of Late Checkout is a master of this approach. He’s often assessed whether or not to launch a new company based on engagement with a single tweet about the idea. (I highly recommend checking out their Community Empire, where they show you how to work through their Audience-Community-Product framework for identifying and validating niche business ideas.)

Now, many people smile and nod when we talk about testing and validation: 100% of people agree it’s a good thing, yet only about 4% of people actually do it (based on super unscientific, imaginary data). Why? Because failure is painful, and getting a split-testing tool subscription approved and a pixel added to the website takes 17 years at some companies.

Agile Content Marketing is not for the faint of heart—you go down this road by prioritizing results over being right.

You will have to create in public, test, and iterate your way through evolving hypotheses… and this means intentionally creating space for failure. For many marketers, it feels safer to craft a perfect, meticulous plan behind closed doors, then launch it into the world. It’s the modern content marketing version of “no one gets fired for hiring IBM.” In some ways, it’s a safe approach.

• If that perfect plan actually works (although it so rarely does), you walk away a genius.
• If that perfect plan doesn’t work, there’s always some other factor to blame. (If you’re charismatic, you might even score more budget if you can prove it only failed because you didn’t spend enough money or put enough people on it.)

With Agile Content Marketing, it’s not about making assumptions or trying to achieve a specific result; it’s about testing a specific hypothesis and making decisions based on the answer. Although it can be frustrating, testing is the only way to make your marketing stronger. 

Agile Content Marketing is for those who want to marry the everlasting joy of being vision-oriented with the practical benefits of getting started before the vision is perfect. 

That’s not to say that Agile Content Marketing is the only way to do successful marketing, but it is a path to get unblocked and figure out what doesn’t work so you can figure out what does. 

What Is the Difference Between Agile and Traditional Content Marketing?

Let’s connect this back to what you already know. Is Agile Content Marketing that different from traditional content marketing (i.e. waterfall marketing)? Yes, and no. Both seek to grow brand awareness and market share, but they go about them in different ways—and on different timelines.

• Agile Content Marketing allows for low-risk, scrappy experiments to gather information and adapt strategy. 
• Waterfall approaches can be better (or simply necessary) for organizations with large suites of products, who require a complex strategy with more segmentation, coordination, deployment, and oversight. 

Ultimately, Agile Content Marketing is about getting quick, definitive answers and iterating strategy from there. 

Both can be effective in their own ways, but Agile Content Marketing is particularly useful for smaller marketing organizations or innovative teams within large companies that need answers quickly before shifting into scale mode.

The Benefits of Agile Content Marketing

Back to the issue at hand—you need testing because you need specific information to overcome the most common problems in marketing. In the last year, I’m guessing you’ve struggled with at least one (if not all) of these issues:

• Underperforming results
• Stagnation
• Lack of budget
• Lack of resources
• Lack of strategy
• Undifferentiated content
• Inconsistent messaging
• Inaccurate measurement 
• Marketplace uncertainty 

Agile marketing helps you navigate or overcome all of these pain points in one way or another. 

• Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness: By investing in smaller, targeted experiments, you get quicker insights about what is resonating with your market. This lets you optimize messaging and maximize spend.
• Scale and Impact: Once you prove a successful strategy through a controlled experiment, you can scale confidently to make the most impact.
• Effective Feedback Loops: This approach is designed to create a dynamic feedback loop where each cycle of experimentation brings you closer to an optimal market fit. By continuously running experiments and adapting based on the results, you’re not just learning — you’re actively evolving your brand conversation to meet the market (aka your audience) where it’s at. 
• Business Evolution: Beyond immediate market fit, Agile Content Marketing serves as a catalyst for your broader business evolution, as you can use content and marketing innovations as tools for identifying new opportunities and directions.

Ultimately, this is a strategy that embraces change and innovation through experimentation. With an agile and flexible approach, you can unlock the full potential of your marketing efforts and drive your business forward in a way that’s both measured and dynamic.

Agile Content Marketing turns insights into action, and curiosity into competitive advantage.

How to Conduct an Agile Content Marketing Experiment

Now, let’s dive into this roadmap. Our Agile Content Marketing approach spans a 90-day cycle to test each hypothesis. 

1) Formulate your hypothesis.

Time required: <15 days

Every experiment seeks to answer a specific question, so start by choosing a single hypothesis that you want to test. This is an opportunity to test your guesses or hunches—assuming they’re grounded in strong research, such as:

• Data Analysis: Review historical data, market trends, and customer behavior analytics to identify patterns and opportunities.
• Customer Insights: Analyze feedback, surveys, and engagement metrics to understand customer needs, preferences, and pain points.
• Competitive Landscape: Evaluate competitors’ strategies and performance to identify gaps and opportunities in the market.
• Innovation Benchmarks: Look at innovations outside your industry that could be adapted to your context, offering fresh angles or solutions.

Your hypothesis should also be:

• Specific: Define what you are testing and expect to change.
• Measurable: Include quantifiable metrics to evaluate success.
• Relevant: Align with broader business goals and customer needs.
• Innovative: Challenge existing assumptions or introduce new concepts.

Based on these inputs, craft a hypothesis that articulates a clear, testable prediction about your experiment (e.g., “Implementing personalized content based on user behavior will increase engagement by X%”).

For example, we used this same process to determine whether or not we should expand our agency services and create a net new AI marketing venture called Copper Key. After diving into market research, customer research, our competitive landscape, etc., we identified key opportunities for this new venture. But we needed a proper test for market demand, so we started with one hypothesis: “Implementing a paid campaign that promotes the benefits of AI to our existing personas will provoke leads.” 

2) Design a small-scale experimental campaign.

Time required: 15 days

With your hypothesis in place, you can now design an experiment that isolates the variables in question. 

Start by downloading our free Agile Marketing brief to outline your experiment. This should include inputs such as:

• Goal
• Hypothesis
• Audience
• Messaging
• Formats
• Channel
• Measurement
• Budget
• Timeline

Next, create content. Conceive and create lightweight minimum viable products (MVPs) to start, with a focus on enhancing personalized journeys for each individual in your audience. You’ll also want to produce content variations to test your hypotheses across key stages of the buyer journey. These content experiences should speak to your audience’s known pain points and growth opportunities.

To test our theory for Copper Key, we decided to deploy three campaign sprints across LinkedIn, which ran for two weeks each. For each sprint, we decided to A/B test different messaging paired with different visuals to determine which versions emotionally resonated with our audiences. 

3) Launch the campaign and observe its performance.

Time required: 60 days

Now it’s time to execute and observe. Implement the experiment thoughtfully, ensuring all systems are in place for accurate data collection. (Make sure your measurement tools are working!)

Monitor the results closely to gather real-time insights and adjust tactics as necessary for clarity and effectiveness. These don’t have to be big changes that impact the flow of your test-and-learn approach but rather small adjustments common to actively managed campaigns.

For our Copper Key campaign sprints, we built check-in points to monitor performance, refine audiences, and adjust spend as relevant.  

4) Analyze collected data for optimization opportunities.

Post-experiment, rigorously analyze your collected data against your defined metrics. This will reveal whether your hypothesis was correct and identify areas for improvement or scaling. Then you can bring evidence of what works (and what doesn’t) to cross-functional working groups to spark ideas and get internal buy-in on approaches that are working. 

For Copper Key, we intentionally designed a three-phase experiment so that we could use insights to optimize messaging, visuals, and audience.

5) Iterate a new experimental campaign.

Once your first campaign is over, the work has just begun. 

In Agile Content Marketing, experimentation unlocks evolution.

Now you can feed insights back into a new hypothesis and continue to iterate and evolve. 

• Optimize based on the KPI metrics you defined in your hypothesis. (Any qualitative community feedback is also valuable.)
• Track leads and pipeline by campaign experiment.
• Make better strategic decisions and mitigate long-term risk.

For Copper Key, having optimized each experiment based on learned insights, each campaign sprint outperformed the previous one, and all three campaigns outperformed the industry average of 0.68%* CTR.

• 1st run: 3.54% CTR 
• 2nd run: 4.06% CTR
• 3rd run: 5.45% CTR

*Industry Average CTR for Awareness Ad Campaigns on LinkedIn industry (per The Verdict 2.0 Report by Directive) 

This low-risk, high-reward experiment gave us valuable insights to guide our larger business decisions—now and in the future.  

• We learned what type of messaging and creative drives stronger CTR with the right audience.
• We further refined our audience to identify our specific market.
• Although the response was not enough to warrant a full build-out of a parallel brand, we determined we could successfully merge our AI services into our core business to maximize our offerings.

All in all, this simple experiment saved us significant time, money, and energy, as well as a few internal arguments. Most importantly, the insights we learned from this campaign gave us a deeper understanding of our audience, which will inform future campaigns. 

How to Improve Going Forward

Like anything, Agile Content Marketing takes practice, but it will continue to produce better results as you apply insights from previous campaigns to your future campaigns. Still, it’s important to remember that Agile Content Marketing is about agility. 

• Don’t get tied to one idea. Not every campaign will be a success. If you hit a dead end, restart with a new hypothesis, or try a dramatically different experiment while keeping the same hypothesis.
• Share your findings. The insights you’re getting can be valuable to both the marketing team, as well as the sales teams. (If you want more ideas to bridge sales and marketing in your buyer journey, try these tips to align your teams.)
• Scale your experiments. If you’re finding success, double down with bigger experiments through expanded content production and promotion. 

Above all, remember that fear of failure will always be in the room. And that’s ok. Greet it by name, thank it for trying to protect you from everlasting shame, and move forward knowing you will not die if your idea for reaching a new market with a new message doesn’t work the first time.

P.S. Sometimes it’s a little too scary to face that failure alone. If you need a partner to back you up, see our tips for finding an agency with the right expertise, or find out more about how we work. We’d be happy to help you turn your ship around. 

Motion graphics are awesome and highly versatile storytelling tools, which makes them a great addition to your brand’s content marketing mix if you’re looking to tell an interesting story in a succinct format, engage people on social media, or explain your product.

Why Motion Graphics Are Great For Brands

Online video has been on the rise now that mobile is pervasive and social platforms are more video-friendly. And while there are many types of content that can engage people, motion graphic videos are particularly suited to help brands tell their stories.

• They’re emotionally captivating. With VO, music, beautiful animations, and powerful narratives, they can make you laugh, cry, and learn.
• They make content easier to comprehend. Motion graphics are a fantastic tool to explain processes, products, or dense subjects—in a short amount of time. (Here are some great examples of explainer videos if you want to see them at work.)
• They don’t require much from the viewer. People can sit back and watch, without having to spend much energy.
• They’re easy to repurpose. You can cut one motion graphic into several 30-second promotional vids, update VO, or turn your existing motion graphics into static infographics.

For brands looking to make a connection with their viewers, motion is a no-brainer. But not all motion graphics are created equal. Truly great motion graphic examples make the most of every tool to tell a captivating story that engages people on all levels.

The Best Motion Graphic Examples

If you’re just starting to explore motion graphics or looking for a little inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. Here, we’ve rounded up 100 great motion graphic examples to show you how diverse, creative, and entertaining the medium can be.

This collection (listed, not ranked) shows a variety of styles, stories, and subjects, both branded and editorial, from all sorts of industries. Whether you work in tech or nonprofit, there’s a little something for everyone, plus a few tips to help you get started making your own.

100 Great Motion Graphic Examples

We hope you find this roundup helpful—and we hope you’ll let us know if you’ve seen any motion graphic examples we should add. Enjoy!

1) Anatomy of a Computer Virus by Patrick Clair

This animation was created for Australian TV program HungryBeast and provides a breakdown of the world’s first weapon constructed entirely out of code: Stuxnet.

2) Luibelle by Toondra Animation Studios

Great motion graphic examples of branded content make us very happy. Luibelle used motion in this great explainer video.

3) Bananas by Xander Marritt and Elias Freiberger

Some of these motion graphic examples get a little weird, which we like. In this, bananas are used to symbolize life and the subconscious and conscious in this strange and quirky motion graphic.

4) 29 Ways to Stay Creative by TO-FU

The inspiring minds at TO-FU give tips to stay creatively productive with this animation, which is sure to help anyone in need of a little advice.

5) Journey Alpha by Weltenwandler Design

This beautiful motion graphic has the look of a video game, creating a feeling of submersion, but it is completely non-interactive.

6) Haïkus in Motion by Sébastien Girard

This animation series brings poetry to life with expressive imagery.

7) The ABC’s of Architecture by Andrea Stinga and Federico Gonzalez

This delightful animated rendition shows buildings associated with the world’s best architects.

8) Blackbaud Explainer Video by Column Five

Learn about the benefits of Blackbaud via sleek animations and transitions.

9) Hummingbird Automations by Column Five

A beautiful color palette, kinetic text, and exciting illustration bring you into the world of Humminbird’s tech.

10) Bitcoin Explained by Duncan Elms

Curious about Bitcoin? This motion graphic breaks down the important information about the electronic currency in three minutes.

11) I <3 Camping by Monologue and George Zestanakis

Animations are a perfect way to introduce consumers to products and services, such as mobile apps like the one featured in this eye-catching video.

12) Cinematics by Pier Paolo

This adorable animation illustrates the timeline of classic films and characters, bringing historic cinematic characters to life in a whole new way.

13) How to Bloody Mary by Matteo Inchingolo

Great motion graphic examples use the medium to teach something quickly. This one shows viewers how to make a classic brunch beverage.

14) How to Feed the World by Denis Van Waerebeke

Captivating animations are a perfect way to educate young adults and children about important issues, such as world hunger.

15) Coffee in 200 Frames by Dum!Dum!

No matter the length, animations can still bring to life everyday tasks in a stimulating manner, such as this short, which illustrates the steps for brewing a cup of coffee.

16) Be Sexy, Be Smart by PlusOne

This motion graphic, made for Soa Aids Nederland, delivers a powerful message in an accessible manner through colorful and engaging imagery.

17) A Dash of That by J-Scott

Animations are a perfect way to promote blogs and other social media outlets. This cute and colorfully designed animation promoting the Tumblr account A Dash of That is an excellent example of that use.

18) Hummingbird Brand Explainer by Column Five

This collage-style animation is a different aesthetic approach than one might typically see in tech explainers, which is why we dig it so much.

19) Subprime by Beeple

Many of these motion graphic examples help people understand difficult concepts, much like this video, which illustrates the housing market crash in the U.S.

20) Chemistry and Energy Efficient Buildings by Diemo Barz

This animation, created to illustrate the results made by BASF, is a comprehensive and accessible way of conveying the information to its audience (conference attendees).

21) Inspiration by Rafa Galeano

A colorful animation is a great way to tell a story or illustrate a conceptual thought.

22) Unbabel Explainer by Column Five

How do you translate what a translation software does? With a bright and cheery explainer.

23) Social Media and You by Binalogue

This was made for The British Council to help them launch their brand new social media strategy pack.

24) Stanley Kubrick by Hyejin June Hong

Motion graphics are a great way to illustrate the history of a product or person, like this animation about filmographer Stanley Kubrick.

25) A History of the Title Sequence by From Form

This animation provides beautiful imagery illustrating the history of another art form: title sequencing.

26) Dropbox: Building the Future By Column Five

To recruit top talent, Dropbox needed to tell a compelling employer brand story. With this video campaign, they welcomed recruits to answer the call to the build the future. 

27) Be Work Happy by WeAreFormation

This informative animation was made to explain the services provided by Krow, a company that analyzes CVs to help users find the perfect job.

28) Gettysburg Address by Adam Gault

Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech is brought to life in this powerful motion graphic.

29) How Nuru Works by Nuru Media

Learn how Nuru helps the world.

30) Follow Your Dream by Joe Donaldson, Jay Quercia, and Gloss Creative

Motion graphics are a great way to inspire and motivate your audience, like this great example from Seneca College.

31) A Guide to American Football by Cub Studio

This entertaining animation explains American football in a way that is fun and easy to understand.

32) Academy of Business by Perception7

This great little explainer video promotes the Virtual Academy of Business.

33) Why Mozilla by Column Five

The Mozilla Foundation’s mission is to give everyone more power online. That message is perfectly brought to life by a human-centric narrative that inspires and invites.  

34) The Consumer in the Tesseract by Binalogue

This explainer video was crafted to accompany the script for Publicis “Trends 2016” online platform.

35) What Is Github by Github

This awesome mix of live action, 2D, and 3D animation shows you just what a powerful storytelling tool motion graphics can be.

36) Long Live New York by Y&R

This excellent animated short film delivers a poignant message about organ donations.

37) Understanding Social Tech by Tomer Gerbi

This a great short infographic animation that quickly explains social tech in a way that is easy to understand—and engaging.

38) Silent by Creative Artists Agency

Celebrate cinema magic with this great piece.

39) How Are Samurai Films Responsible For Star Wars?!? by Whalerock Industries

This clever animation explains the connection between samurai and the popular sci-fi epic Star Wars.

40) Chipotle’s Back to the Start by Creative Artists Agency

This touching animation was made to demonstrate Chipotle’s endeavor to provide great products while using local and sustainable techniques.

41) Social Media Trends 2014 by 2Factory

This highlight of the social media trends of 2014 is perfectly presented in a motion graphic.

42) Jaffa–Posters by PostPanic

This wonderful motion graphic commercial uses a retro feel for Finnish drink brand JAFFA.

43) 18 Things You Should Know About Genetics by David Murawsky

This animation gives some fundamental knowledge about genetics, as well as some unusual and interesting facts about DNA, educating viewers like the best motion graphic examples should.

44) New York Times Magazine by Vallée Duhamel

The New York Times logo is brought to life with this clever motion graphic.

45) How Your Money Works by MuscleBeaver

This great little explainer video made into a story that explains how your money works for you.

46) Nike Genealogy of Innovation by Golden Wolf

This fantastic motion graphic takes you through the history of Nike, from their humble beginnings through their game-changing eras.

47) #Einstein–General Relativity by Eoin Duffy

Want to sound smart at a dinner party? Check out this great animated short that celebrates Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

48) Reader by Marcus Eckert

Watch an explainer video covering the updates made to Zino’s iPad reader app.

49) Success in the New Economy by Brian Y. Marsh

This informative motion graphic was sponsored by Citrus College to help people understand and prepare for tomorrow’s labor market realities.

50) BBC Knowledge by WeAre17

This beautiful motion graphic made for BBC Knowledge is chock full of interesting facts and information.

51) A Better Blockchain by Tezos

Sometimes it’s challenging to communicate ideas without being on the nose. This motion graphic does a fantastic job of turning the abstract into a clear story.

52) Japan Help PSA by IAMSTATIC

This powerful motion graphic PSA highlights the devastation throughout Japan following a powerful earthquake.

53) 100 Years–Armenian Genocide by 2viente

This moving animation was made to commemorate the Armenian Genocide Centenary in 2015.

54) Animation for a Cause by Animation for a Cause

This colorful explainer video highlights the services provided by the non-profit Animation for a Cause.

55) Life in Hi-Fi by Motion Authors

A great motion graphic describing a new social network built around the hashtag language.

56) Do The World A Favour by Tendril Design+Animation Inc.

This bright-colored motion graphic was made to promote the electronic recycling program in Ontario, Canada.

57) The Apple Timeline by 24 Motion Design

See the history of Apple condensed into an illuminating three-minute motion graphic.

58) AXN Spin–Magnet by Binalogue

This piece was created to help with Central Europe TV channel AXN’s rebrand.

59) A Proud History of Canadian Whisky by Ryan Paterson and Chris DeCastro

Learn about the history of Canadian whiskey in this animated short, sponsored by Canadian Club.

60) Earth Week 2014: Lights Off. Screens On. by Column Five

Learn how little actions can be helpful to the environment with this informative motion graphic.

61) Zombie Survival Guide by Chris Meyer and Bettina Gericke

This zombie survival guide animation will help you get through the zombie apocalypse—a survival tip you will not get from any of these other motion graphic examples.

62) Logic Monitor Cloud Awareness by Column Five

Sometimes you don’t need VO to tell a great story. This piece uses kinetic text to deliver the narrative in a simple, succinct way.

63) Financial Life by Transvideo Studios

A visually compelling narrative made for Mint.com, this video details the financial services provided by the company.

64) Termites by Blacklist

Warning: This animated commercial made for Terminix features creepy bugs.

65) On Type with Erik Spiekermann by Adobe

This beautiful rumination on typography is brought to life through beautiful illustration and animation.

66) FanDanz App Promo by Zenzuke

This colorful promotional video for the dancing app FanDanz is a delight.

67) Password Manager by Google

This motion graphic is a perfect example of interesting visuals (a la 3D animations) with clear branding (Google’s color palette) to tell a story in a unique way.

68) Skype Logo Animation by Monica Eunji Kim

This animated version of Skype’s logo highlights key aspects of the company’s service.

69) History of Royal Enfield by Ram Singh

This stunning animation commissioned by Three Four Design is about Royal Enfield.

70) This Is Nouns by Ordinary Folk

Let’s just say 8-bit animation never looked so good.

71) The Facts About Bottled Water by Natasha Murray

This animated infographic delivers important information about bottled water and its impact on the environment.

72) Works With Nest by Oddfellows

This great motion graphic details the usefulness of Nest, a product that turns your home into a smart house.

73) The Right Blend by Bent

The cut-out animation technique featured in this motion graphic perfectly highlights Scott Naturals’ paper products.

74) Welcome to the Age of No-Code by Ordinary Folk

We love when color becomes a main character to communicate a story in a more powerful way.

75) The Future of Money by Ripple

This fantastic explainer video about Ripple explains the service that grants people the ability to transfer currency to anyone in the world.

76) Measuring Corruption by Column Five

This motion graphic highlights the importance of cooperation between the government, police, and media to prevent, detect, and deal with corruption.

77) Just Gentle Cooking by Aggressive

A perfect integration of animation and live imagery brings the product to life in this motion graphic for Beech Nuts.

78) We Need To Talk About Alice by Plenty

This animated short, based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was made to promote the non-profit organization Good Books, an online charity bookstore.

79) Jack Daniel’s Label Story: “Old No. 7” by Brand New School

The story behind the creation of Jack Daniel’s iconic label is pretty cool.

80) Customer Data by Amperity

Beautiful 3D animations help them tell a story outside the box—er, cube.

81) Gaian by Steffen Knoesgaard, Fredrik Ekholm, Linus Lundin, and Simon Holmdal

This motion graphic highlights aspects of the Gaian Project, a program celebrating aspects of nature.

82) The Economy of Coca-Cola by Jot Reyes

This animation accompanies information revealed on the Bloomberg Television special Inside Coca-Cola.

83) Nike Air Max by ManvsMachine

This short animation to celebrate Nike’s iconic footwear, the Air Max, is a sneakerhead’s dream.

84) Think Blue by Sehsucht

This is a simply designed animated narrative for the Volkswagen initiative ThinkBlue.

85) Business by Motion Authors

A great explainer video for Verta Media highlights keywords about the company’s services.

86) Excellence at the Controls by Emanuele Colombo

This motion graphic for Alitalia promotes the company’s strong points through charming imagery and an informative narrative.

Alitalia – Excellence at the controls from Emanuele Colombo on Vimeo.

87) The Kraken by Dead As We Know It

Enjoy this beautifully illustrated animation for Kraken Rum.

88) T3 Player App by Motion Pixels

Here’s a great introduction video to the T3 Player App and the many features offered by the app.

89) El Ciclo del Agua by Binologue

This is a great motion graphic video for Canal Isabel II, the company in charge of Madrid’s water supply.

90) Flex Alert Program by Brainchild Creative

A short educational animation about the importance of saving energy in Southern California is a great way to educate the public.

91) What is Belicious? by Korbant

This motion graphic commercial features information about Belicious, a burger dealer in Munich, Germany.

92) Royal Mail–How We Can Help Your Business Grow by Hugo & Cat

Learn about the many ways Royal Mail can help your business.

93) Future, Imagine That by BITO

This co-branded commercial spot for Shell and the Syfy channel makes the most of motion.

94) Introducing the Reddit Mobile App by Identity Visuals

We’d upvote this brightly colored motion graphic introducing users to a new mobile app for Reddit.

95) Frutto–Product Animation Video by Mark Stota

This animation video showcases the product made by Honoa, Frutto juices.

96) Curiosity by Dan Palmer

This piece is an excellent study in kinetic text.

97) The Planets by Andy Martin

See what life might be like on the planets in our solar system in this beautiful motion graphic series.

98) Bauer Radio by WeAreSeventeen

This animation highlights the important facts about Bauer Radio.

99) Eneco Toon by PlusOne

Learn about Toon, a thermostat that monitors energy consumption, in this adorable motion graphic.

100) Fermi Paradox by Alex Verlan

Inspired by Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series, this animation explains the Great Filter and the Fermi Paradox.

How to Make Better Motion Graphics

Motion graphics are great communication tools—when they’re well produced. If you’re creating your own, follow best practices to make sure you’re successful. Luckily, we’ve learned a lot about making motion graphics over the last decade, so we have a few resources that can help:

• Find out the 7 secrets to making an awesome motion graphic.
• Follow our simple process to make motion graphics in 4 steps.
• Learn how to write a better motion graphic script.
• Try these 27 tips to improve your motion graphics, from brainstorming to design.
• Use our guide to figure out how long your motion graphic should be.
• Learn about the best distribution tactics to get the most eyes on your motion graphics.

If you still need a little help—at any stage of the process—hit us up and we can chat about how to get you through it.

Can AI help your marketing? Absolutely. From content creation to conversion rates, there are plenty of ways AI can transform your entire operation and help you get stellar results. If you’re not sure what tools are available, or what it looks like when you apply them, take a seat. We’ve rounded up some fantastic AI case studies to show you what’s possible.

10 AI Case Studies Across All Industries

Whether you’re a B2B SaaS platform or a local business, these case studies show you how much you can accomplish by implementing simple AI-powered tools and solutions across your marketing organization. 

1) Crabtree & Evelyn Sees a +30% Improvement in ROAS with Albert AI’s Insights

It’s tough to know how to break out of a rut, especially when your campaigns are seeing decent success but could be so much better. 

Luxury bath brand Crabtree & Evelyn knew their targeting and retargeting campaigns were seeing moderate success, but the brand was looking to break through stagnation to drive growth and improve ROI by reaching new audiences. 

To address this, they enlisted Albert AI, a self-learning digital marketing platform, to manage their Facebook paid social program, aiming to ramp up testing, improve cost efficiency, and gain more audience and creative insights. By analyzing performance and optimizing audiences, ad sets, and lookalikes, Albert used a multivariate test-and-learn approach to improve campaign results and maximize spend in major ways.

In less than two months, Crabtree & Evelyn saw notable results, including a 30% increase in return on ad spend (while keeping media spend flat). With the AI-powered platform, they can now easily manage prospecting, retargeting, and retention, creating a customer-led process for developing products, creative content, and branding.

Takeaway: Sometimes it’s important to mix things up when you’re stuck. (This is why we’ve always held “experiment often” as a creative philosophy.) Although AI tech can seem intimidating, small and specific experiments can yield big results. 

2) TheCultt Raises Conversion by 37% Using Chatfuel’s Chatbot

How do you grow your brand without losing that personal touch? That’s exactly what TheCultt, a resale platform, was struggling with. 

With a small team, they were hitting a wall in two key areas:

1. They wanted to engage customers with personal communication at key touchpoints, but crafting that communication ate up a lot of time. 
2. They had a lot of ideas for new ways to engage with customers—but no bandwidth to follow through. 

To free up time, they experimented with a Chatfuel chatbot to handle communication for welcome messages and auto-replies, as well as auto-responses for an experimental online Instagram contest.

Over three months, these two simple experiments generated huge results. 

• Response time decreased by 2 hours, helping improve customer experience/loyalty. 
• The social contest attracted 300 participants, who became a part of a larger retargeting campaign that resulted in a 37% increase in conversions (with a client cost of less than $2).

Despite initial concerns about losing that personal touch, TheCultt’s use of automation not only improved efficiency but also engaged more customers and increased sales, helping the team focus on the most effective ideas and ways to use their time.

Takeaway: It’s important to cultivate an emotional connection with your customer, but you don’t have to spend hours and hours doing it. With AI tech, you can improve your relationship by creating an easy and stress-free experience for the customer. 

3) Bloomreach Increases Traffic 40% With Jasper’s AI-Assisted Content

One of the biggest benefits of AI is its ability to reduce menial labor and tackle cumbersome tasks. 

With a 4-person content team, e-commerce platform Bloomreach struggled to keep up with internal content demands. The team was responsible for creating everything from long-form content and ads to emails and web copy, which took away focus from the team’s larger SEO strategy, so they needed a solution to handle various content needs. 

Jasper’s AI-assisted content feature allowed them to address those needs without a heavy lift, empowering their own team (as well as other teams) to produce on-brand, copyedited content to serve a variety of marketing needs. This reduced workload helped the team scale their content strategy without sacrificing quality, ultimately increasing blog output by 113% and traffic by 40%.

Takeaway: It’s always helpful to audit your department’s responsibilities to spot opportunities to streamline or reduce workload. We also recommend auditing your tech stack at least once every 6 months to make sure you’re equipped with the right tools to work effectively. 

4) Stick Shift Driving Academy Increases Traffic 72% and Inbound Calls 120% with Market Muse

It can be tough to reach a niche audience, especially when they only need your product/service at specific times. 

That was the case for Stick Shift Driving Academy, a school that teaches people how to drive manual transmission. They rely on inbound marketing to reach their niche audience, but identifying the right subjects to write about and producing a high volume of quality content to grow search rankings was incredibly time-intensive. 

To reduce time and improve their strategy, they used MarketMuse to get content ideas, generate briefs for writers, and eliminate subjective decision-making in content creation. By utilizing MarketMuse’s algorithm-driven recommendations, they saw a 72% increase in organic traffic, a 110% increase in form completions, and a 120% increase in inbound calls.

Takeaway: AI can be a huge help for SEO, especially if you’re not sure which keywords to target. If this is something you struggle with, see our guide to choose the best keywords to build an AI-driven content strategy.

5) Itson Sees 2,000% ROI with Recombee’s Email Personalization

How do you provide personalized emails and product recommendations when your product list is increasingly overwhelming? Itison, a popular Scottish events and deals website, struggled to sort through their constantly changing (and growing) product and event lineup to parse out the right things to promote, based on their audience’s interests.

To solve this, they used Recombee’s AI-powered machine-learning solution to synthesize, sort, and send weekly personalized emails that offered each audience member unique coupons and discounts based on their preferences. This level of personalization ensured that Itson’s recommendations were always relevant, leading to a 25% increase in e-commerce conversion rate and a 20% increase in traffic, with a total 2,000% return on investment. 

Takeaway: Email is one of the most valuable channels, but you need to deliver the right content. Use AI-powered tools to test subject lines and email copy to optimize your content. 

6) Novo Nordisk Gets a 24% Increase in Open Rate With Phrasee

Email marketing is challenging for all brands, but Novo Nordisk faced a particularly unique challenge, as they needed to educate their audience about diabetes risks while ensuring their email campaigns were tone-sensitive, compliant, timely, and effective.

To scale their messaging and compel people to open and engage with their emails, they implemented Phrasee’s AI-optimized content solution, which helped generate high-performing email subject lines through natural language generation and deep learning models. 

Novo Nordisk also used the platform to ensure rapid and seamless delivery, which allowed them to consistently interface with their audience while meeting FDA regulations and legal requirements in the pharmaceutical industry. This simple strategy increased click rates by 14% and open rates by 24%, helping Novo Nordisk reach more customers with life-saving information.

Takeaway: From audience segmentation to send time, there are more ways to improve your email marketing than you might realize. Try these science-backed tips to do email better. 

7) Influencer Marketing Factory Uses Reply to Score News Coverage

Earned media is one of the best ways to build your authority and credibility in an industry, but the outreach required to get news coverage can be time-intensive. 

Influencer Marketing Factory helps brands and companies with influencer marketing in a variety of industries. But to build brand awareness for their own company, they use Reply (a platform that helps you automate and scale multichannel outreach) to get media coverage. 

The team set up a Google Alert to find out when journalists write about topics relevant to their business. Then they use Reply to find and validate journalists’ email addresses, offer their expertise on any relevant topic for future articles, and even schedule follow-up emails. With this strategy, they’ve garnered 70 mentions in major publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Adweek, Ad Age, and more. 

Takeaway: So many AI tools have a built-in use-case, but you can get creative with how you use them. For example, we use AI to synthesize research and briefs, outline meeting agendas, etc. 

8) Ivanti Builds a $263.2 Million Pipeline with 6Sense

Data is the secret to great marketing, but when your data is incomplete or fragmented, it doesn’t do you much good. 

Ivanti, a leader in IT software with 40,000 customers and 80 products, faced challenges merging customer data after several business acquisitions. With no cohesive customer data or single source of truth, it was difficult to track metrics or make data-driven decisions about sales and marketing. 

To fix this, they implemented 6Sense’s customer data platform to consolidate data and identify priority accounts. With this tech, they could identify customer interests based on past purchase history, intent keywords, competitor research, and profile-fit data. These insights helped them optimize sales outreach and craft smarter paid media campaigns (with varying messaging and assets), helping them maximize their efficacy with a 71% increase in opps created (a $263.2 million pipeline) and a 94% increase in opps won (generating $18.4 million in revenue). 

Takeaway: Data is the key to everything, but only if you know what to do with it. Look for tools to integrate your platforms and make the most of your insights. 

9) Bidwells Sees a 93% Increase in Customer Sessions with Optimizely

If you want to attract and convert the right audience, you need to create an intuitive buyer journey to move people to the next step—and a strong UX website is a huge part of that. 

Bidwells, a leading UK property consultancy, realized that its website needed a revamp, as it didn’t reflect the brand’s energetic culture and delivered diluted messaging that didn’t direct clients to the solution they needed (or frame the company’s value effectively). To turn things around, they used Optimizely to create a more intuitive user journey, including content recommendations based on visitor interests, compelling messaging, and a more secure, optimized website that led to a 93% increase in customer sessions and a 300% increase in leads.

Takeaway: Creating a cohesive customer journey is one of the biggest challenges in marketing. If you need to rehab yours, use our free template to map your customer journey and identify ways AI tools can help you deliver the right message at the right time.

10) Buzet Uses Scalenut to Increase Organic Traffic by 25%

SEO content is its own challenge, as it needs to be written by experts, deliver value to readers, and be appropriately optimized for search engines. But not everyone has the time or expertise to do it all. 

Buzet, a marketing agency focusing on B2B, edutech, and e-commerce industries, struggled to research and scale their content marketing. It required a ton of time-consuming research, which prevented them from increasing their publishing volume or coming up with new ideas.

Scalenut’s SEO and content marketing platform helped the team overcome these challenges by performing a competitor analysis, automating SEO-related research,  providing content templates and outlines, producing long-form content, and offering additional suggestions to improve quality. 

By leveraging these features, Buzet quickly mastered scalability and research, garnering a 25% increase in organic traffic with less effort and shorter timelines.

Takeaway: Like Buzet, many brands struggle to generate quality SEO content that will actually rank. But don’t rely exclusively on AI to generate your content. While AI can help you tackle the more menial parts of content creation, you still need to use research and expertise to deliver value. For more tips on that, find out how to manage SEO in the age of AI.

How to Use AI in Your Marketing

No matter what your biggest marketing challenges are, there are plenty of ways AI can help you work more effectively. If you haven’t experimented with it before (or are overwhelmed by all things AI), here are some easy ways to start. 

• Choose the right tools. See our roundup of 50 handy marketing tools to experiment with options that might help your marketing. 
• Learn about AI marketing applications. We know AI can be intimidating, so we created a handy guide for everything you need to know about AI marketing that answers all your burning questions, from use cases and risks to tips and tricks. 
• Experiment with prompts. If you want AI to work for you, you need to tell it what to do. Download our roundup of 75 AI prompts to help you build a better marketing strategy. 

And if you need a helping hand to craft an AI-supported strategy (or someone to run the robots), let’s chat. We’ve been experimenting with new test-and-learn approaches that have helped our own marketing, and we’d love to share them with you. (Hey, we’d love to make you one of our next AI case studies, too.) 

Either way, know that you need to master AI if you want long-term success, so plan measured experiments, test, tinker, and tweak. It’s the only way to learn, grow, and win.

If you’re a content marketer, you have one job: to create content that wins people’s hearts and minds—and turns them into lifelong supporters of your brand. It isn’t easy, especially when you need to create quality content consistently (and within budget), but it’s a whole lot easier if you have a blueprint to keep you aligned with your long-term goals. This is why all good content marketing starts with a good content strategy. It’s also why so many content marketers struggle. 

56% of marketers do NOT have a documented content strategy.
—Content Marketing Institute’s 2023 Enterprise Marketing Report

That means the majority of marketers are working off of some vague strategy—or winging it entirely. Either way, this lack of planning shows in brands whose content isn’t cohesive, whose ideas don’t resonate, and who struggle to gain footing. Why, then, do so many marketers keep flying blind? Because creating a content strategy can be intimidating—and there are plenty of excuses to keep you from doing it. 

• You’re too busy shipping this week’s content. 
• You’re too focused on next month’s product launch. 
• It’s too late in the quarter. 
• You just don’t have the resources or knowledge to do it correctly. 

We get it. But, ultimately, crafting a content strategy is some of—if not the—most important work you can do, no matter how big or small your brand is. And, hey, you don’t have to do it alone.

We’ve helped brands of all sizes, across all industries, craft the content strategies they need to connect with their audiences and move people along the path to purchase. Along the way, we’ve learned what makes a bad content strategy, what makes a good one, and what makes a freaking great one. And now, we’re ready to pass that knowledge on to you. 

Here, you’ll find a step-by-step guide containing our best tips, tricks, tools, and templates to create a strong content strategy that will set you up for success. If you’re undertaking this work for the first time (or looking to revise your current strategy), we hope this guide will give you the confidence you need to get your content on the right track. Ready? Let’s go.

Table Of Contents

INTRO

• What Is a Content Strategy?
• Why Do You Need a Content Strategy?
• What Makes a Good Content Strategy?
• What Does a Content Strategy Include?
• How to Create a Content Strategy

PHASE 1: DISCOVERY

• Review Your Business Goals
• Do a Content Audit
• Review Your Tech Stack

PHASE 2: PLANNING

• Document Your Content Strategy Goals
• Identify Your Personas
• Map Your Customer Journey
• Determine Your Measurement Approach
• Choose Your Channel Mix
• Create Your Content Pipeline
• Assign Workflow & Governance
• Know Your Tools

PHASE 3: CREATIVE 

• Brainstorm Campaigns
• Build Your Editorial Calendar
• How to Put Your Content Strategy to Use

Of course, before you can create a good content strategy, you need to know exactly what it is you’re creating, why it matters, and how to approach it the right way. So, let’s start with the basics. 

What Is a Content Strategy?

It’s pretty simple. A content strategy is a documented plan that outlines your content marketing goals and helps you identify the stories and experiences that will help you achieve them.

Why Do You Need a Content Strategy? 

That’s pretty simple too. Without a content strategy, you’re basically taking shots in the dark, creating piecemeal content that isn’t as effective as it should be, and working off of hunches instead of solid data. At the end of your campaign, quarter, and annual cycles, you can’t even evaluate your success because you never had a strategy to begin with. 

Conversely, with a well-crafted strategy you can…

• Make better decisions. Being able to actually “see” your strategy lets you spot potential issues, trim the fat, and visualize your entire content ecosystem. It also allows you to record hypotheses and assess them once you have your results.
• Keep everyone on the same page. Communication is more efficient with a documented content strategy. It helps everyone working on your content—both internally and externally—know exactly what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, how they’re doing it, and why it matters. This empowers your team to take more ownership, contribute better ideas, hesitate less, and produce better work.
• Stay accountable. With a content strategy, you can test your ideas, plan and schedule deliverables, measure and monitor results, and maintain momentum in a tangible way.
• Improve your resource and budget allocation. This is one of the biggest benefits of a documented content strategy. You can plan well ahead of time and determine the best way to get the most value from your resources. It can also help you keep a handle on your budget—or justify the need for more budget. 

In short, with a content strategy, you can work with more clarity and less craziness. 

What Makes a Good Content Strategy?

Just because you have a content strategy on paper doesn’t mean it will help your brand. There are plenty of content marketers who have a content strategy yet struggle to a) bring it to fruition or b) see actual results. 

If you want your content strategy to succeed, make sure it’s…

• Tailored to your goals. The only thing worse than having no content strategy is having one that isn’t aligned to your larger goals. When that happens, your strategy will be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. The best strategies use every element of content marketing in service of the larger goal.
• Comprehensive. The whole point of content marketing is to create a relationship with people through consistent, quality content. But it takes a lot of moving parts to make good content happen on a regular basis. A good strategy is built to keep your editorial calendar full of fresh, interesting ideas—with the infrastructure in place to bring them to life.
• Flexible. Your strategy is a blueprint, but it isn’t set in stone. If something unexpected happens, or you realize things aren’t working the way they should, you should be able to adapt as necessary.

Remember: The best content strategy is built for your brand, crafted around your capabilities, and designed to help you tell the best stories possible.

What Does a Content Strategy Include?

We break the content strategy process into three main phases: Discovery, Planning, and Creative, with specific tasks assigned to each.

Tackling your strategy in this order lets you build a totally aligned strategy, from your high-level goals to your final execution.

How to Create a Content Strategy

It takes time, focus, and energy to document your strategy, but don’t get overwhelmed. It’s a little effort with a huge reward. Again, we’ve seen brands make every content strategy mistake in the book (and made a few ourselves), so we know what works and what to avoid. 

What we’ve outlined here are the basic steps that any brand can follow to create a solid but flexible content strategy. This process will guide you through three distinct phases, covering both the high-level thinking and practical/tactical elements to consider for each. At the end, you should have a strong and actionable plan you can hit the ground running with.

That said, we know that each brand has unique needs, so you can adapt this framework accordingly. You may even have some of these components documented already, which is fine if they are up to date, but it’s still important to follow the process in sequential order. This ensures that every aspect of your strategy is aligned and optimized to get you the best results possible.  

Before you start, download our free Content Strategy toolkit, which includes the templates you need to work through this process.

Note: Make sure you have the right stakeholders involved from the beginning—and that you get their approval at every phase. Keep in mind that there are many other people involved in the execution of your content strategy as well, including your sales team, technical wizards (Web & CRM), designers, copywriters, etc. While not everyone may need to be involved in every meeting for content strategy, consider how your strategy decisions will affect your team.  

Phase 1: Discovery

Before you start planning for the future, you need to hit the pause button, take a step back, and reassess what you’re currently doing and why.

Step 1: Review Your Business Goals

Purpose: Review your high-level goals to ensure you create a content strategy that helps you achieve them. 

When a content strategy doesn’t work, it’s usually because it’s misaligned to a company’s larger goals. Thus, step one is going back to the basics: who you are, where you play, how you compete, and what you’re trying to achieve. You may think you already know this information, but it’s always helpful to revisit it with fresh eyes. 

How to Do It

Review any documentation related to your business strategy.

• What are your business goals? 
• What’s your position in the marketplace? 
• Who is your competition? 

Note: Understanding your competition is especially important to help you differentiate through content. When you can identify messaging gaps in your industry, and then fill those gaps (or communicate more effectively than your competition), you’ll create the strongest connections with your target personas. (Find out how to complete a competitive analysis if you need to refine your competitive landscape.)

At this stage, you will also want to review the core elements of your brand strategy, which includes your:

• Brand Heart (purpose, vision, mission, values)
• Brand Messaging (tagline, value prop, messaging pillars, etc.)
• Visual Identity (logo, colors, typography, etc.)

All three elements must be reflected in your content strategy if you want to tell stories that effectively communicate who you are. (If you haven’t documented these elements, follow our Guide to Create a Brand Strategy.)

Step 2: Do a Content Audit

Purpose: Identify what your content ecosystem currently looks like, what’s missing, and how you can improve.

A good content strategy is comprehensive, cohesive, and intentional. That means every piece is made for a specific reason and tied to a specific goal. The problem is that most teams worry about quantity over quality, focusing on hitting their day-to-day deadlines more than making a real impact.

This tunnel vision results in content marketing that’s inconsistent, imbalanced, and ultimately ineffective. The first step to remedy this is to take a holistic look at your content with a proper content audit. By looking at the type of content you’re creating, what messages you are or aren’t sending, what’s working, and what isn’t, you get the insights you need to build a cohesive strategy and tell stories that really connect with people. 

How to Do It

To conduct a proper audit, you’ll be reviewing a sample of the content you (and your competitors) put out into the world. In general, that content tends to fall into five main categories. 

To complete this step, use the Content Audit Template and see our Guide to Conduct a Content Audit. 

Step 3: Review Your Tech Stack

Purpose: Get a snapshot of the tools, technology, and resources you currently use.

Your content marketing operation can be complex, requiring many tools and a solid digital infrastructure. These tools can be very helpful, but they can also be redundant. It’s important to audit your existing tech stack before you build your new strategy for several reasons. 

1. You may find opportunities to cut costs or consolidate (e.g., you’re paying for something you’re not using, or using one thing for a task that can be performed by something else).  
2. You can identify ownership, track subscription status, etc. to ensure your team always has what it needs. 
3. You can identify things you will need (e.g., if you plan to create more videos in the future, you’ll need editing software). 

Additionally, now that AI has arrived on the scene, there are more and more tools to help you tackle just about every part of marketing, including:

• Customer Segmentation and Targeting
  
• Personalization
  
• Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
  
• Predictive Analytics
• Marketing Research
• Brainstorming
• Content Creation and Optimization
  
• Design
• Email Marketing Automation
• Social Media Management
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Ad Targeting and Optimization
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Voice Search Optimization
• A/B Testing and Optimization 
• Fraud Detection and Security
• Competitor Analysis
• Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)

You may want to consider adopting new tools—or research the new AI capabilities your existing tools may have integrated (as many are constantly updating their offerings). This doesn’t mean that these tools have to replace you, but they can help drastically improve your productivity, reduce menial labor, and help your team work more efficiently.

37% of marketers say they aren’t using their technology to its full potential.
—Content Marketing Institute’s 2023 Enterprise Marketing Report

How to Do It

Use the Tool & Tech Stack Template to list the technologies and tools you use to create, host, and distribute your content across channels. This includes things like your…

• Website and web analytics
• Content scheduling and publishing platforms
• Blog
• Social media platforms and tools
• Content Management System
• Proprietary data collection and storage
• Social listening tools
• Audience profiling tools
• SEO tools
• Design and charting tools
• Marketing automation
• Email marketing
• Customer relationship management software
• Paid media platforms and software
• Landing page builder

Note: Depending on the tools you use, some of these may overlap. 

Questions to Ask

• Do your tools cover your needs?
• Do you have duplicative tools that can be consolidated?
• Does everything function properly? (Look out for zombie subscription charges from past employees, vendors, etc.)
• Do you have a good user experience? 
• Is automation working correctly?
• Do all the people who need access to platforms have it, and not more than necessary?
• Does every platform have someone in the organization who’s proficient in using it?

Remember: Supporting your team’s needs is vital to executing your content strategy. That said, although some tools can help you work more efficiently, we know it can be overwhelming to adopt multiple at once. In that case, we recommend having specific people or teams test and experiment with new tools, then share their findings to see if they can benefit the whole team.

Phase 2: Planning

Now is the time for you to examine your content marketing ecosystem and document how you will approach each element. You’ll be detailing the who, what, when, where, and how of your content operation. This will ensure you’re equipped to execute the content strategy and use your resources as efficiently as possible.

Not only will this work make your content more successful but it will make it easier to collaborate with content creators outside your organization, such as a content agency.

Step 4: Document Your Content Strategy Goals

Purpose: Define measurable goals that keep your team accountable.

Your entire content strategy exists to help you achieve your goals. Naturally, you need to clearly articulate what those are—and make sure everyone on your team understands what they are too. This is especially important; every decision your team makes about content, from copywriting, to design, to distribution, will be influenced by these goals.

We often find that weak strategies can be traced back to weak goals that are either too vague or too broad. To be successful, you need clear goals that you can measure. 

How to Do It

In this step, you’ll document three things:

• Content strategy statement to explain the big picture of what you’re trying to do. 
• Objectives that clearly define your content strategy goals.
• Key Results that help you measure your objectives. 

To work through these exercises, use our Content Strategy Goals Template. This document will help you summarize your entire strategy succinctly so that everyone understands what you’re trying to do. (You cannot proceed until you have these goals articulated and agreed upon.) It will also act as your North Star, guiding your decisions and keeping your team aligned in every way. For more details, see our guide to document your marketing goals. 

Questions to Ask

• What discrete task do you want content to accomplish? How does that break down into objectives and key results?
• Which objectives take priority?
• What other important considerations will influence how you approach your goals/solutions?
• How will you define vital elements, such as a lead?
• How do your content marketing goals support your larger business goals?

Your goals are truly the foundation of your entire content strategy. Take the time to get them right.

Step 5: Identify Your Personas

Purpose: Understand who your audience is, what they’re interested in, and how you can serve their needs. 

To create compelling content, you need to know who you’re trying to connect with, and how your content can best serve them.

• What do they care about?
• What motivates them?
• What problems do they need solved?
• What would make their lives easier? 

By identifying your audience’s demographic/psychographic traits and distilling them into unique personas, you can better understand each group’s unique needs and come up with content ideas that will really resonate with them. 

How to Do It

It’s smart to start with 3-5 distinct and detailed personas. Use the Personas Template, and follow the step-by-step details in our Guide to Create Personas. 

Step 6: Map Your Customer Journey

Purpose: Identify what people need to hear at each stage to make sure your messaging is consistent and effective. 

You need to deliver the right message, in the right place, at the right time so that you can move people along the customer journey. Thus, it’s important to map your customer journey from start to finish. 

Having completed your content audit, you will probably already have spotted some gaps in your messaging. But revisiting your journey will help you ensure that you are telling people what they want to hear at every stage. 

62% of marketers struggle to create content that appeals to different stages of the buyer’s journey.
—Content Marketing Institute’s 2023 Enterprise Marketing Report

How to Do It

Use our Customer Journey Template, and follow our Guide to Map Your Customer Journey.

Questions to Ask

• How will prospects and customers be nudged along the journey?
• What signals help identify someone in a particular stage of the journey?
• Where in the journey will your strategy focus?
• At what point will you bring in the sales team to close the deal?

The more seamless your customer journey is, the more effective you’ll be.

Step 7: Determine Your Measurement Approach 

Purpose: Identify the Key Performance Indicators that will help you quantitatively measure your success. 

Your content strategy is worthless without a way to measure your success. The better you measure, the more you can test, tweak, and readjust your approach. Thus, knowing your success metrics for each stage of the customer journey is crucial. 

How to Do It

You want to get a strong sense of how your content strategy is performing, but you don’t have to track and measure every single metric. To figure out what to measure, refer to your OKRs. Which available metrics are relevant to your key results? Those are the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that will help you identify if you are moving the needle on your objectives. Additional metrics can also provide helpful insight, but KPI matter most. 

Questions to Ask

• Which available metrics are your KPI?
• How are they mapped to your objectives and key results?
• What does each KPI say about the success of your campaign or strategy?
• What are the benchmarks for your industry? 
• Should you be comparing your KPI to those, or should you focus on historical data from your company’s performance? 

For more tips, see our Guide to Use Metrics in Your Content Strategy.

Step 8: Choose Your Channel Mix 

Purpose: Identify what channels will help you reach your personas.

Your content can only work if it gets in front of the right people, but with so many options it’s hard to know what will help you make the most impact. There’s a lot that goes into your decision-making here, which is why having very clear goals is so important. 

How to Do It

To choose the best channel mix for your content strategy goals…

• Think about your personas. Think about where they spend the most time, which publications they read, which social platforms they use, what times they’re most active, etc. 
• Remember your OKRs. You’ve set your objectives and key results as a form of guidance throughout your strategy work. If your primary objective is around building a pipeline of leads, what channels are best suited to help you do that?
• Think about your content formats. Different types of content are better suited for different channels. If video tutorials are a big part of your content mix, consider how that may influence the channels you target. 
• Prepare your media buys. How will you distribute across your earned, owned, and paid channels? This may include anything from internal emails, to out-of-home buys, to influencer outreach. These are important to budget in terms of cost and lead time.

Questions to Ask

• How are you going to reach people (owned, earned, paid)?
• What channels will help you meet your determined OKRs? 
• What media mix will be most effective? 
• How can you leverage new channels, more channels, or use your existing channels differently? 

For more tips to help your content get maximum exposure, see our Guide to Choosing Your Distribution Channels, and see our steps to build a solid distribution strategy. 

Step 9: Create Your Content Pipeline

Purpose: Get a high-level view of your content priorities and opportunities.  

Now that you know what you’re trying to do, who you’re trying to reach, and how you’re going to reach them, it’s time to bring your strategy to life. However, before you plan what exact content you’ll make, you need to identify the major goals, milestones, and events you will need to build content around for your next year, based on your OKRs. This helps you plan ahead, anticipate your needs, allocate resources, and work more effectively. 

How to Do It

Remember: A good content strategy is solid enough to guide you but flexible enough to adapt if things change. Use our Content Pipeline Template to build out a year-long view, with important elements broken down by quarter, such as: 

• Business Milestones
• Product Launches
• Priorities
• Major events/relevant holidays (e.g., annual tradeshow or Hanukkah)

This way you know your biggest priorities are accounted for as you plan your upcoming content, but you can still shift things around if you need to. 

Step 10: Assign Workflow & Governance

Purpose: Clarify roles and responsibilities to make sure your team functions as efficiently as possible.

If you’re working with a large budget, you may have a department full of people to help execute your content strategy. If you’re working for a scrappy startup, it might be you and a few freelancers. The good news is the size of your team doesn’t matter. 

To create good content, you just need a team that is aligned, organized, and focused on the same goal. (This is especially true if you’re working with outside vendors.) Everyone needs to understand the workflow and who’s responsible for what. As long as you’re covering all the right content marketing roles, you’ll be surprised by how much you can get done with a little coordination up top. 

How to Do It

At this stage, you want to assign roles and responsibilities to your team to both empower people to have ownership over their work—and make sure that everyone is working together effectively. For example, if your PR team wants to be involved in brainstorms to steer you toward the most promotable content ideas, you’ll want to make sure they’re in the loop from the jump.

Use the Workflow & Governance Template to identify who will be involved at every stage of content creation and what role they’ll play. This includes both your internal team and external (if you’re working with a freelancer or content agency). 

Questions to Ask

• Who is involved in these efforts?
• What responsibilities does each person have?
• How are people meant to work together?
• Who owns the project?
• Who decides who handles new initiatives?
• What stakeholders need to approve/review initiatives?

Naturally, the more people who are involved, the more likely things will slip through the cracks—especially if you’re working with an outside team. To make sure that doesn’t happen, here are 7 tips to keep everyone inside and outside your company aligned. 

Step 11: Know Your Tools

Purpose: Equip your team with the tools they need to do their job—and get the most out of those tools.

Content marketing takes work, but it can be a whole lot easier if you have the right tools. If you’ve done a thorough discovery, you probably already have an idea of what tools you want to ditch or what tools you want to experiment with. Remember that different types of content may require different types of tools. If you plan to experiment with something new—say, interactive infographics—you need the capability to execute it. 

How to Do It 

Luckily, there are so many resources to make marketers’ lives easier, and more are coming out each year. Use our Tech Stack & Tools Template to identify what you’ll be using. And if you want more resources to help you work smarter, check out our tool roundups for:

• Brand Identity
• Content Strategy
• Content Creation 
• Content Marketing
• Copywriting 
• E-Book Design
• Employer Brand
• Infographics

Going forward, review your tools quarterly to make sure you’re using everything you’re actually paying for.

Phase 3: Creative 

By this point in the process, you should have a clear picture of your goals and your infrastructure. Now it’s time to identify the creative that will help you bring this strategy to life. 

Step 12: Brainstorm Campaigns

Purpose: Create content that tells a cohesive story in support of a specific goal. 

Publishing content is not the same as implementing an effective content strategy. (And if you’ve been getting lackluster results, you know this firsthand.) Naturally, you don’t want to sink your time, energy, and resources into things that don’t really help move the needle. But with the work you’ve done, you now have the information you need to come up with effective creative campaigns that support your goals. 

During this step, you’ll craft campaigns mapped to the content planning work you’ve done so far. While you may prioritize one type of content category over the other (e.b., Educational content vs.Talent content), you need to know how each will play a role in your strategy. 

How to Do It

Use our Marketing Campaign Template to craft campaigns that support your larger goals. A few things to keep in mind as you work through the template:

• Brainstorm the right concepts. Good content marketing isn’t about creating content; it’s about providing value. Focus on your personas and give them what they want, whether it’s education, entertainment, or inspiration. (Here are 7 ways to know if your ideas provide true value.) If you’re hitting a creative wall, try these 9 content marketing prompts to get your creative wheels turning.
• Know your messaging. Identify your key talking points to ensure you’re telling a consistent story across all content. (Use our messaging framework if you need to do some work there.)
• Choose the right format. The medium is just as important as the message. Check out our Guide to Visual Content Marketing to learn more about the benefits of each type of content format. 
• Identify your keywords. What are your top keyword opportunities? How will you optimize content around keywords? Are your publishing platforms optimized for SEO? For more, see our Guide to Find the Right Keywords for your content strategy. 
• Identify your budget. To determine how much programs will cost, we typically work with one of two numbers: quarterly or annual budget, or a quantified marketing goal such as “2,000 leads this year.” You can use logic and formulas to work backward from a marketing goal and create an estimated budget.
• Don’t come on too strong in your content! Know the difference between content marketing and sales material, and make sure you’re sending the right message at the right stage of the customer journey.

For more tips, see our Guide to Run a Successful Marketing Campaign, and find out how to make the most of your content by using a divisible content strategy. 

Step 13: Build Your Editorial Calendar 

Purpose: Maintain a steady publishing cadence.

Publishing consistency is one of the keys to a successful content strategy, so it’s important to keep your team on track with an organized editorial calendar. Whereas your content pipeline is a larger overview, an editorial calendar is a granular view of your content. Whether you publish daily, weekly, or monthly, using a calendar will ensure you can budget in the right amount of time and, most importantly, stick to your deadlines. 

How to Do It

There are all sorts of tools you can use to create your editorial calendar: Google Sheets, CoSchedule, etc. If you’re just starting, use our Editorial Calendar Template to start scheduling your content. 

• Identify your publishing cadence. Will you publish daily, weekly, or monthly? We find it helpful to schedule content by month. You don’t have to be overly prescriptive. (Again, a good content strategy is flexible and adaptable based on a brand’s changing needs.) But it helps to understand what your volume and cadence will look like.
• Include holidays and social events. These are important to note ahead of time as well, as they can interrupt publishing (e.g., Christmas) or inspire content ideas or brand tie-ins (e.g., the Oscars). Bookmark a tool like Forekast, an online calendar that compiles every major holiday and event that may be relevant to your content calendar. If your industry experiences seasonal trends (e.g., retail), make sure those changes are accounted for too.

You always want to brainstorm ideas far ahead of time so you don’t get stuck in reactive mode throughout the year.   

Questions to Ask

• How often will you publish?
• How much content will you publish?
• How will you organize content for campaigns? 
• How will you determine how to publish and promote each piece of content?
• Who will own each kind of content?
• What formats will you create? 
• Is your calendar aligned to the “life calendar” of your target personas? 

Once you’re ready to start creating your content, use the Content Brief Template to kick every project off. For more tips, see our guide to create an editorial calendar. 

How to Put Your Content Strategy to Work 

Congrats. Thanks to all the work you’ve done, you can proceed confidently into content creation and do it better than ever. As you put this content strategy to work, there are a few more ways to make sure you succeed from the jump. 

• Optimize your content creation process. There are a ton of moving parts when it comes to creating stellar content, and it can get more complicated depending on the type of content you’re creating. Follow our Guide to Master Content Creation, which features our best tips on brainstorming, copywriting, designing, publishing, and more.
• Follow best practices. There’s good content, and then there’s great content. No matter what you’re creating, there are plenty of small things you can do to enhance your viewer’s experience. See our tips to improve your copywriting, design, infographics, and data visualization.
• Create appropriate timelines. Sticking to your deadlines is crucial to keep your content calendar full. Give yourself enough time, especially if you’re undertaking more labor-intensive content like interactives or video. Most importantly, get approvals at every stage of content production. This prevents you from having to make last-minute edits that will throw things off.
• Craft an effective distribution strategy. To maximize your reach, follow our Guide to Craft a Distribution Strategy That Works.
• Find the right vendors. You may need to outsource some work or bring in an extra hand to complete a project. If so, do your due diligence to bring in the right creative partners. Start with our tips to find the right creative agency.

You can also check out our tips to decide whether you should create content in-house or outsource it. 

Above all, remember that content strategy is part art, part science. The more effectively you track your results and gather insights from your data, the better you can refine your strategy. Even if you’re not as successful as you hope to be off the bat, you’ll learn more, get better, and adapt quicker, improving your results over time. 

The truth is your strategy isn’t set in stone. A good strategy is a blueprint, not a permanent document. Your brand’s goals will shift and change over time, and your content strategy will evolve accordingly. For this reason, we recommend revisiting your strategy quarterly—or when significant events or changes occur that may affect it. 

We know, of course, that everyone gets stuck from time to time. If you don’t have the resources, patience, or energy to tackle content strategy on your own, we’re happy to chat about how we can help you dig deep, uncover your most interesting stories, and turn them into a smart content strategy that works.  

SEO marketing is as important as ever—and more competitive than ever. As AI-generated content floods search engines, brands have to fight harder for visibility online. That’s why you need to build a smart SEO strategy driven by your goals and your audience’s needs. But in the ever-changing world of SEO, it can be challenging to keep up with the latest best practices. That’s why we did the work for you, diving into the latest algorithm updates and data-based tips to give you the cheat sheet you need to master SEO. 

TOC

• What Is SEO?
• What Are the Different Types of SEO?
• What Type of Content Ranks for SEO?
• What Is the Best Strategy to Build SEO? 
• How to Create an SEO Strategy
  • Choose the Right Keywords
  • Create Quality Content
  • Optimize Your Content
• How to Maintain Your Rankings

Now before we dive in, let’s take a little refresher. 

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website and content to increase visibility for search engines. The higher you rank in search engines, the more people can find your brand, and the more organic traffic you’ll get. In essence, SEO is a strategy for getting people to your website—and, ultimately, getting them to convert. 

What Are the Different Types of SEO?

There are three general categories of SEO: 

1. On-page: The things you do to optimize a single page, such as keyword, titling, etc.  
2. Off-page: The ways you improve rankings outside of your website, such as sourcing backlinks.
3. Technical: The ways you optimize your website from a technical perspective, such as improving load time, image compression, etc. 

For this article, we’ll mainly be talking about on-page SEO. (If you want to increase your off-page SEO, find out how to promote your content like an agency would.)

What Type of Content Ranks for SEO?

In SEO marketing, if you want to rank well, you need to create high-quality content. This has been Google’s mantra for years as it aims to serve only the best, most relevant search results to their audience. But what exactly does that mean?  

Several factors affect Google rankings, but in general, Google will always favor quality content that demonstrates EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). 

1) Experience

This refers to the author’s first-hand experience with the topic. 

For example, let’s say you want to buy a new vacuum. You might start your Google search and see an article titled “Top 10 Vacuums of the Year,” which details the technical features of each vacuum. That seems pretty straightforward. But if you see an article titled “I Tried Every Top 10 Amazon Vacuum to Clean My Apartment” with a detailed explanation of personal pros and cons, you’d probably click on the personal experience one to get the “real” truth.

As AI-generated content and generic “thought leadership” have flooded the Internet, people are thirstier to hear from real people about real experiences. Injecting your experience is one of the biggest things that will set you apart.

2) Expertise

This refers to the author’s expertise on a topic they are writing about. This differs from experience, as a non-expert can write about their experience with something. However, the most effective content blends expertise and experience. 

For example, using the previous example, an article titled “A Pro House Cleaner Breaks Down Their Favorite Vacuums of the Year” perfectly blends expertise and experience. 

3) Authoritativeness

This refers to your brand’s reputation in your industry (compared to other websites/sources). Getting backlinks from other reputable sites contributes to your site authoritativeness. 

4) Trustworthiness

This refers to your overall trustworthiness, including the accuracy of your content, your brand credibility, sources, transparency, etc. 

For example, because people only want to interact with sites they trust, having a secure site, an about page, and a clear way to contact you helps increase your trustworthiness. 

As you build your SEO strategy, any content you create should be written through an EEAT lens to ensure you’re delivering quality, value, and transparency to your audience. 

What Is the Best Strategy to Build SEO?

SEO marketing has undergone several evolutions in the last decade, but as quality content has become the North Star for ranking, the best SEO strategies are built to deliver quality and value to your audience. The smartest way to do this is to create topic clusters, wherein you create a series of interlinking pages crafted around a specific topic in your area of expertise. Each cluster includes a pillar page, which provides a comprehensive overview of the topic, as well as associated pages that dive into subtopics. 

These pages link to and from the pillar page, helping to increase visibility and create a strong, comprehensive ecosystem of content. 

Topic clusters are important because they help establish your area of expertise. They create a variety of “entry points” for your audience to find you as they search for information. And they allow you to create rich, quality content that search engines love. 

However, topics should not be arbitrarily chosen. They should be informed by thorough research to identify the keywords your audience is most interested in. 

How to Create an SEO Strategy

Now that we’ve covered the foundations, let’s dive into how you can craft a winning SEO strategy from scratch—and keep it going. 

Step 1: Choose the right keywords.

In general, there are four categories of keywords: 

• Informational: People are looking for information about a subject.
• Navigational: People are looking for a specific website.
• Commercial: People are searching for information about brands, products, services, etc.
• Transactional: People are looking to purchase or take an action (e.g., buy or subscribe). 

To build a smart SEO strategy, you should focus on two key categories of keywords:

1. Informational keywords: These keywords relate to the evergreen topics and questions that your audience will always want to know about. These are the best keywords for your topic clusters. 
2. Commercial/transactional keywords: These are the specific keywords people are searching for when they want to buy a product/service. 

Targeting these categories ensures you’ll be able to reach people at the top of the funnel and further down the buyer journey. 

One note: It is crucial to build an SEO strategy around the topics/keywords that your audience is actually searching for. (Too often marketers only think about what they want to target.) 

To determine the best keywords, you want to look at the words you currently rank for and those you want to rank for. 

1) Look at commercial/transactional intent keywords. These keywords tend to have lower search volume, but the people who use them are more likely to convert. Targeting commercial/transactional keywords can help you find the low-hanging, easy-to-rank-for keywords that align with your goals.

2) Look at words your competitors rank for. Your competitors can be your greatest source of inspiration, as you can target the words they rank for—and target the words they’re not ranking for. 

3) Research the topics your audience wants to know about. These are the topics to turn into clusters. There are multiple ways to find out what people are interested in.

• Customer data and feedback: Look at the terms people are currently using to get to your site. 
• Google Search Console: Look at search results/search queries to find out what people are searching. 
• Answer the Public: Type a subject into this tool and it will generate related questions around a certain topic. 

Regardless, as you’re searching these keywords, consider:

• Which topics are relevant and important to your brand? 
• Which topics have worked well in the past?
• What content do you already have, and what content are you missing?
• Which topics matter most to your target audience?
• Which topics do your competitors talk about?

Note: Your own SEO tool likely has a feature to serve you keyword ideas too. 

4) Curate your list. Once you have your list of desired keywords, assess each keyword to determine search volume, difficulty, and relevancy. With this data, you can curate the right list for your audience and your brand goals. 

For more step-by-step details on how to find the right keywords, see our guide to creating a strong keyword strategy. 

Step 2: Create quality content. 

Once you have your keyword list, it’s time to build your editorial calendar and start creating that content. As you embark on content creation, ensure you’re creating EEAT-centric content that will rank. 

1) Analyze content that has already been created around the keyword you want to rank for. You may be inclined to just start writing, but it’s important to understand what content already exists on the subject. Take a look at the page 1 articles that are currently ranking, and think about what you can expand on or ways to add your unique spin to the conversation. Look at the headlines, tone of voice, article length, formatting, longtail keywords, etc. to see how you can stand out. 

2) Build out your content, one keyword at a time. As you approach each keyword, brainstorm the most relevant angle. Per SEMRush research, these are the highest-ranking post types: 

• “Everything You Need To Know About _____” posts rank highest. It is the least common post type because it needs to be comprehensive, but these are exactly the types of topic cluster pillar pages you want to create. 
• “Mistakes To Avoid” posts get the most shares.
• How-to, guides, and comparison posts attract the most backlinks. 
• Listicles are enticing and always clickable. 

Some topics are more conducive to certain formats than others, but it’s important to know your angle before you start writing.

3) Add more EEAT. 

Many marketers mistakenly believe that any content they create is good thought leadership. Oftentimes, it isn’t all that good or true thought leadership. (Spoiler: If AI can write it, it isn’t true thought leadership.) So, if you want to make your content more enticing, think about ways to increase the EEAT. 

• Experience: Add real-life examples, case studies, proprietary data, lessons learned, etc.
• Expertise: Share your unique perspective, credentials, etc. 
• Authoritativeness: Think about trending topics or hot takes that other people and publications would be interested in linking to. 
• Trustworthiness: Make sure your site is secure, be clear about who is writing your content, what their credentials are, etc. 

Remember, too, that your tone of voice and writing style also influence the way people experience your content.

Step 3: Optimize your content per best practices.

Your SEO tool should help you optimize your content effectively, but there are plenty of other things to consider to improve the way your content ranks. 

• Length: Word count is not the single most defining factor, but it does contribute to perceived quality. Analyze the top-ranking articles for your keyword to determine the best length. Otherwise, the general guidelines are:
  • Regular articles: 1500-2,500 words. 
  • Pillar pages: 3,000+ words generate the most traffic. 
• Readability: Use headers, short paragraphs, and tight sentences to allow for more white space. You want to make it easy to skim. 
  • Open articles with a strong hook, stat, or attention-grabbing statement. 
  • Use bulleted lists to break things up, condense content, etc. Articles with 3-4 bullet lists rank better.
  • Add a clickable TOC list for longer posts. 
  • Include a variety of headings (H2s, H3s, H4s) and include your keyword in them.
  • As you structure your article, think about the questions you are answering for the audience, the subjects you are addressing, and the logical order for that information. This can help you create your header structure. 
• Headlines: Use an emotional hook, controversial perspective, surprising statistic, or newsworthy hook. 
  • Include your keyword. 
  • Make it 60 characters or less (consider how it will display on desktop vs. mobile).
  • Include data or numbers. Data, as well as the words “research” and “study,” are more likely to be clicked on (e.g., “New Research Shows a 125% Increase in AI Use”).
  • Use Coschedule’s free headline analyzer tool.
• Visuals: Add visuals where you can, as posts with images and video tend to perform better. 
  • Add at least 3 images per post. Articles with 7+ images get the most backlinks. 
  • Optimize images.
    • Name the image file with hyphens, keywords, and appropriate description (e.g., black-dog-red-collar). 
    • Compress images (plugins like Resize Image After Upload are helpful).
    • Add alt tags using 125 characters or less. Naturally describe the image with relevant keywords.
      • Good: “black dog wearing a red collar”
      • Bad: “dog canine red collar leather collar small collar leash”
• Internal links: Add at least 5 internal links to additional content on your website per post. 
• URL length: Use shorter URLs for posts. They perform better. 
• Publishing frequency: The algorithm wants you to publish a steady volume of fresh content. (Research shows publishing one article a day gives you the best chance at ranking.) But quality matters most. In general, 2-4 articles a week is likely the sweet spot. 

Note: Optimizing a post is its own artform. That’s why we recommend writing a first draft, then taking an “optimization” pass just to ensure you’re meeting the right criteria. 

Step 4: Maintain your rankings.

You can’t just publish an article and wait for it to reach number one. Your SEO content is like a garden. It constantly needs to be fed, tended to, refreshed, pruned, etc. 

1) Set up reports to monitor keyword success. Create a custom report with your SEO tool and review it monthly to see how your content is trending. 

2) Try to bump up borderline posts. You want to keep an eye on posts that are close to falling off of page 1 or 2. They may need to be reoptimized to maintain your rankings. 

Tip: Screaming Frog’s Spider Analyzer will analyze 500 of your posts for free to identify good candidates.

3) Update/reoptimize older posts. Review/update popular content every 6-12 months to ensure content is fresh and reflects your current perspective. There are quite a few ways to update posts:

• Refresh headlines.
• Add additional content.
• Update or add images.
• Add internal links.

Once updated, make sure to update the publish date in WordPress. This tells Google it’s new. That said, don’t update the publish date more than once every 6-12 months. 

Above all, be patient and stay up-to-date on best practices. SEO is a never-ending game, and things will continue to change as Google updates its algorithm. What matters most is tenacity and an eye on the long-term prize.

But if you need a little help along the way, consider bringing in a helpful partner. If you’re on the hunt, hit us up. We’d be happy to give your SEO the boost it deserves.