WORKWEEK

I work on enterprise content strategy. I’m responsible for performance content (SEO) and campaign content for our SMB audience and our brand team. And I work closely with global counterparts to determine our approach, including translations into French and German. 

It’s a complicated mess on the best of days. There are just so many moving parts at large organizations. So many great ideas, so many great people, so many opinions, so many ways to approach a topic, measure impact, and so much more. 

It’s easy, then, for things to get lost, and even for our own voices to get lost, in the shuffle. But remember, small things really do make a huge difference. 

Here’s are the things making a huge difference for me right now:

• Mapping our strategic narrative and product architecture back to content category pillars: Then, visualizing search volume for those categories. This helps us to see where the demand is, and how we should be allocating resources to specific categories to gain more visibility and drive more revenue. 
• Building a pillar and spoke strategy alongside our product roadmap and campaign strategy: These pillars and spokes map back to the demand categories, but are timed based on product roadmap updates and in alignment with campaign launches so that all content can be used across the funnel to drive SEO traffic, convert leads, and then nurture those leads to MQLs and beyond. 
• Reorganizing, well, everything: Content categories and definitions, tracking volume of funnel stage content and seeing what is actually converting based on expectations for those funnel stages, launching new content brief processes (this time, getting rid of AI, shocking!) to help our writers produce better pieces, and checking in regularly with folks to see what is working, what isn’t, and how we can continue to tweak. This is always on, but feels like we’ve been doing more of it lately in an attempt to make our lives easier and more logical. Sometimes you have to focus on other priorities, and this organization side of things goes by the wayside. It’s never a bad idea to revisit it. 

These practices are things I’ve done at every organization, but it’s easy to get distracted by other priorities and forget, well, the basics. 

The basics work. They align teams. They build trust within an organization. And they help you pave a strategic path forward that you can measure and even strategically tweak in the future. 

It’s never too late, or too early, to refocus on the basics and create small changes that make a world of impact.