✦ CONTENT STRATEGY PORTFOLIO ✦
I. “Top Spots: Mexican Wedding Venues”
The over-arching strategy that I introduced as Editorial Director at Carats & Cake was that every piece of content had to have a purpose in order to justify the investment of both staff and financial resources:
SEO: It could drive brand awareness, site traffic, and audience acquisition via SEO
Partners: It could satisfy our contractual obligation to feature certain venue partners
Social Media: It could drive brand awareness and audience acquisition/engagement via a social play
Because of our lean content team, most content needed to accomplish more than one of the above goals simultaneously, and this article is a perfect example of that. I came up with the franchise “Top Spots” as a series of destination-specific venue articles that would be:
Built around an SEO keyword with high search volume, but a difficulty rating that we could realistically achieve, and be SEO-optimized (URL, Header Tags, keyword frequency, links and word count)
Inclusive of a significant number of partner properties from the sales team’s needs list, their wish list of venues that were not yet partners, as well as venues the editorial team genuinely loved
Written and edited by our editorial team featuring the exceptional imagery from our library of wedding galleries, educating and genuinely capturing the attention and trust of our audience of engaged couples
The strategy was data-driven, and each article was data-based, yet true to our editorial style and voice. Within 48 hours, one of the new properties became a paying partner, in the first week we ranked in the top 10 for multiple keywords, and the article became one of our most traffic-driving articles, continuing to grow our audience,
II. Wedding Venues Landing Page
CaratsandCake.com/Wedding-Venues
This landing page features several examples of data-based decisions and content strategy that I implemented as part of the Carats & Cake site rebuild and relaunch. It’s also another example of the massive undertaking of crafting and implementing the rigorous SEO-strategy that led to a 10x increase in site traffic in just 10 months.
We used GA and Rank Ranger data to identify the SEO keywords with the highest traffic potential, and determined which pages to use to target those keywords based on the business’s priorities. The wedding venues landing page was a priority for our paying venue properties.
The wording used in the site navigation and the search filter categories (as well as subsequent search result pages) were chosen based on SEO data that I researched as part of my collaboration with the CMO on the site rebuild.
At the bottom of the page there is a 2,000+ word SEO-optimized article for which I wrote a detailed brief, assigned to a writer whom I trained in our editorial voice, and which I top-edited for publication.
I was also involved in the geographic organization and categorization of our massive library of 10,000+ weddings and 4,500+ venues for the new site architecture.
III. “The Truth About 2022 Weddings”
As a business evolves, its content marketing needs to as well. This article is an example of my ability to pivot and come up with innovative ideas in reaction to business needs, while still serving our customer first and foremost.
Carats & Cake had just launched a Buy Now, Pay Later product for weddings, and it was a business priority and directive from the CEO to authentically weave financial planning into our wedding content.
This was the first ever official survey of our audience and vendor communities, and we knew that the insights and data would be enormously—and mutually—beneficial to our business partners as well as engaged couples, not only for pandemic wedding planning but with annual surveys in the future.
While the subject matter is pretty dry, the tone exemplifies the editorial voice that I established for Carats & Cake, which is conversational and approachable, and makes just about any information digestible, especially with the help of infographics.
The article is SEO-optimized
Given the chance to revise this article, I’d want to do an even bigger survey with more information and surprising facts that even better-serves the audience of engaged couples.
III. “Watch This Ballerina Remove All Her Stage Makeup”
This video for MarieClaire.com was created as a result of an RFP from Clinique, who wanted to promote awareness and sales of their makeup removed collection.
I knew the data showed makeup videos performed better on social media than skincare, so I pitched the idea of a video that would capture our audience’s attention by showing a ballet dancer (our audience was particularly into ballet content at the time) removing her makeup.
I partnered with the marketing team on how the concept was presented to Clinique
Once Clinique decided to move forward, I was involved at every touchpoint: I participated in external kickoff calls with the client, partnered with teams across marketing and the Hearst Content Studio in the planning of the shoot, attended the shoot to ensure that the product was up to Marie Claire’s standards and style, partnered with the video team in the editing of the video, assigned the writer for the article page and edited her work.
The video resonated with Marie Claire’s audience (it has 16K views on YouTube), and the client was delighted with how their products were featured.