It was hard to know what to do in those early days. Even harder to know what to say, which is why so many “Our brand is here for you in these unprecedented times” emails flooded our inboxes.

But in that sea of platitudes, one message stood out: a video from then-Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson getting choked up talking about how the pandemic would impact associates through no fault of their own. (Sorenson tragically lost his battle with pancreatic cancer in February, and has been replaced by new CEO Tony Capuano). The video was viewed millions of times, and it may have just been the first time a Fortune 500 CEO received so many overwhelmingly positive Twitter responses and YouTube comments.

But then Marriott had to figure out next steps. Communication about safety protocols and points flexibility was crucial, but the brand’s marketing team also knew that their audience wanted more than memos.

A pivot to “armchair travel”

For years, Marriott had been inspiring travelers through its flagship publication, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler, which started by covering 3 destinations in 2014. Today, Traveler spans 87 local editions across the globe. And just because there was a pandemic didn’t mean that wanderlust suddenly disappeared. Marriott just had to approach it differently.

(Disclosure: Marriott Bonvoy Traveler has been a Contently customer since its launch in 2014.)

“We pivoted our storytelling to focus on armchair travel,” explained Robin Bennefield, Marriott International’s editorial director of Marriott creative and content marketing.

Robin Bennefield, Marriott International’s editorial director of Marriott creative and content marketing.

In 2020, the team scrapped an editorial calendar previously focused on beach vacations. Instead, with the help of its team of trusted freelance Contently writers, Marriott quickly published stories that would fuel its audience’s day dreams about travel. It showed them how to go on a virtual world tour, what trips to add to your travel vision board, and how to make their home feel like a luxury hotel.

These stories went out in Marriott Bonvoy Traveler’s April 2020 newsletter—just after the editorial team went on furlough, reaching nearly 12 million people. The newsletter averaged a healthy open rate of 15 percent. This one got a 28 percent open rate.

“The newsletter did gangbusters,” Bennefield said. “I think that was a lightbulb moment for a lot of people. They started to realize that telling these stories was more important than ever to keep people in the mindset to dream about travel.”

Local travel for a global audience

The success of that newsletter prompted Marriott to bring part of the editorial team off furlough. “People realized we need to keep these stories flowing,” Bennefield said.

Marriott Bonvoy Traveler has long had a powerful business impact across the customer journey. Traveler stories inspire people to consider new destinations. The smart design of the site makes it easy for Marriott’s audience to browse hotels and relevant activities when they’re researching a destination. After people book, the site’s stories—as well as its companion print magazine—help them make the most of their trip. Then, once the trip is over, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler sparks inspiration for the next adventure.

Despite the pandemic, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler’s role in the customer journey didn’t change. The publication just needed to focus on different topics. With the help of M Live—the jaw-dropping control room Marriott built in 2015 to track its audience’s needs—the brand realized that while people weren’t traveling far, they were interested in staycations, especially as the summer arrived and lockdown restrictions loosened across the globe.

“They were willing to explore their neighborhoods and cities again in ways that they hadn’t before,” Bennefield said.

M Live Studio

Instead of inspiring the American traveler to explore Barcelona, for instance, Marriott pivoted to help Catalans explore the gothic quarter in a way they hadn’t before, while still emphasizing safety. This is where having such a global content marketing program (Marriott Bonvoy Traveler will soon be available in 11 languages) and the ability to scale content production through Contently’s platform paid off.

“It has been hugely helpful to have Contently as a partner,” Bennefield said.

Road trip stories became a staple as well, as infection rates dropped and people felt safe traveling by car.

All along, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler’s performance climbed. Newsletter open rates remained above 20 percent—a 33 percent increase on pre-pandemic benchmarks. It generated $777,000 of search traffic value, nearly 4 million minutes of attention time, and a whopping 80 percent engagement rate, as measured by Contently Analytics.

“We rely heavily on Contently’s engagement metrics,” Bennefield said. “It’s a really strong way to measure how deeply people are staying with us and engaging with that content.”

The content is also driving a very significant amount of booking conversions—so much so that the content program pays for itself and is even “doing a little better than that,” said Bennefield happily. “That’s what everyone wants to see.”

Heading into the latter half of 2021 and 2022, Bennefield and the team are eager to continue to expand its content ambitions through a trio of engaging podcasts:

• About the Journey, which explores the inspiring stops and stories along Marriott Bonvoy Traveler’s favorite routes.
• Let’s Talk Points, a podcast for points aficionados.
• Behind The Design, which interviews top hotel designers on the latest trends and innovations.

“We really want to grow this audio form of storytelling,” said Bennefield. “We know that more and more people are consuming podcasts.”

Bennefield is also eager to return to a global lens. That means inspiring travelers to explore destinations they maybe haven’t considered before, via stories like Ghana Rising—a long-form piece of parallax storytelling that feels like it was produced by The New York Times.

“We’re excited about being at the table when we’re talking about the broader customer journey and infusing that traveler ethos into more of our experiences—to lend our expertise in the storytelling,” said Bennefield. “I’m really excited about the different formats that we’re embarking upon.”

The post “A Lightbulb Moment”: Inside the Content Program That Helped Marriott Weather the Pandemic appeared first on Contently.

On March 11, the content team at MD Financial was finalizing their Q2 content plan, built around themes like spring cleaning your finances and home-buying season. Then Prime Minster Trudeau announced Canada’s response to the COVID-19 situation.

“Our world flipped,” said Shawna Dennis, who leads all of marketing for the physician-focused financial services company.

By March 13, the entire marketing team was mobilized around an entirely new content strategy. Within a week, they had launched a hub of COVID-19 resource content. The results have been astounding: 200 percent audience growth, a 38 percent increase in logins by its customers, and a 30 percent uptick in messages to financial advisors.

The story of how they got there is a masterclass in how to adapt an enterprise content strategy on the fly—one that marketers across industries can learn from.

The COVID content strategy

MD Financial’s content strategy shift was led by its director of content, Rachel Kenworthy, but it was supported by the entire organization.

Kenworthy and Dennis set out to fully understand the impact COVID-19 would have on its audience of 130,000 physicians and medical learners in Canada. They tapped into the subject matter experts (SMEs) at the company—from asset management, wealth and financial planning, and field teams—to understand client needs. Some physicians were seeing an 80 percent drop in income; others were working overtime on the frontlines.

MD Financial discovered three core needs: peace of mind about their portfolios during volatility, how MD was going to address their unique financial needs during the pandemic, and an understanding of what government programs were available to them.

The results have been astounding: 200 percent audience growth, a 38 percent increase in logins by its customers, and a 30 percent uptick in messages to financial advisors.

Within six weeks, the content team created 16 fact sheets, 15 articles, 10 market thought leadership blog posts, and 8 videos. They’ve attracted over 53,000 visits to the new COVID content—an impressive feat given that its total addressable audience is only 130,000 people. They also launched the “MD Market Watch” podcast, which was downloaded over 1300 times in those first 6 weeks.

Perhaps most impactful, though, was an interactive tool that gave physicians personalized information on which government assistance programs available to them. Its audience visited the tool over 15,000 times.

“We were flat out saying, ‘We understand that these are the challenges you’re facing right now,'” explained Dennis. “Here are some pieces of content that are going to help you. We’re always here.”

MD Financial’s 3 keys to success

A successful content strategy pivot doesn’t just happen by force of will. It was made possible by years of groundwork and an audience-first approach to marketing. Dennis walked me through the three keys that set them up for success.

1. Establish buy-in from the top

As a former journalist, Dennis believes in the power of content. But the team needed more than her buy-in to execute this content strategy to its full potential. The entire marketing team had to rally to get its COVID content up and running in less than 10 days. The company’s internal SMEs had to be willing to help, and the rest of the senior leadership needed to support the content-first focus.

That collaboration was the result of two years of effort developing the content program. “The strategy help that Contently has provided in getting our content strategy documented, getting the technology in place, all of that has been really valuable for the team,” Dennis said.

Dennis and Kenworthy have also gotten buy-in by setting clear goals and KPIs that demonstrate content’s impact. MD Financial measures content success in three buckets that map to the stages of the funnel:

Site Traffic and Engagement (top): visits, views, and time spent with content, with an emphasis on organic traffic.

Deeper consideration (mid): Driving from content to tools/calculators, newsletter sign-ups, and product pages.

Sales and loyalty (bottom): Leads, sign-ins, customer engagement, and advisor messages.

Showing how top-of-funnel engagement maps to sales and revenue makes it easy for others in the org to see why the entire marketing team needs to throw its weight behind a content strategy shift like this.

“A lot of people get hung up on the vanity metrics because they’re easy to get,” Dennis said, “but it’s very difficult to prove the ROI to the rest of the org when you’re talking about pageviews and engagement rate because they don’t see how that ties into sales.”

2. Pivot quickly and put your audience first

When COVID-19 hit, MD Financial had a full-fledged Q2 content strategy mapped out and ready to go. But when the world changed, they didn’t hesitate. They threw that plan out the window and started from scratch.

“We were running along ready to go with our normal stuff we had planned for Q2 and overnight had to do a 180 and change what our plan was,” Dennis said.

If they’d delayed even a week or two, they not only wouldn’t have seen the same content success, but also wouldn’t have been there for clients in the same way.

“I will always clear the way for content,” Dennis said. “If I have to move budget there to make it happen, if I have to clear things off people’s plates and make content a priority, then that’s what we do.”

3. Involve SMEs early in the process

Collaborating quickly and effectively with SMEs throughout the company had two big benefits. First, it helped them understand what their audience needed quickly.

“We used our SMEs as real partners,” Dennis said. “We worked hand-in-hand with them to create content that was super specific to our clients and what they needed.”

Second, working this way helped MD Financial expedite approvals and publish content quickly. “A lot of times the SME is the last person who reviews, but we found that by engaging them early in the planning process, the whole thing went smoother than it normally would. And from a compliance and legal perspective, the reviews we had to go through took way less time.”

Research backs this up. In our recent state of financial services content research report, we found that including SME and compliance teams early was one of the biggest keys to content success.

“Everything that we do, all of our acquisition campaigns, our advertising, our social activity, everything that we do from a digital perspective, is driven by content,” Dennis said. “It’s the underlying force behind what we’re doing.”

The post Inside MD Financial Management’s Successful COVID-19 Content Strategy appeared first on Contently.

But outlining a great content strategy is only the first step in a content marketing journey. This may seem intuitive, but time and again brands come to us because they need help executing. Their thoughtful strategies haven’t lived up to expectations because the content didn’t resonate with its intended audience.

At Contently, we take a lot of pride in our talent network of award-winning journalists, videographers, designers, photographers, and a host of other creatives who help our clients tell their stories. Below are three examples of enterprise companies that used Contently talent to create original content that engaged their most important stakeholders.

Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH)

Stakeholders: Women with a net worth over $10 million

For Brown Brothers Harriman, finding a better way to engage women of high net worth wasn’t only a matter of pushing for gender equality in wealth management—it was a way to target an untapped market. While women’s wealth was often the topic of conversation in financial advisory meetings, BBH found that, in many cases, women were overlooked when there was a man in the room (even in the case they were discussing that woman’s wealth).

The oldest private bank in the country then did something untraditional: It launched a Center for Women & Wealth and created a print magazine to engage directly with women worth over $10 million. Part of the magazine initiative was to use visuals to inspire confidence among these women to not only seek more financial information, but also better communicate their existing financial knowledge in advisory meetings.

BBH turned to Contently to publish a series of infographics that would bring these women-focused stories to life. One infographic, “Bridging the Funding Gap,” laid out statistics that demonstrated the discrepancy between profits generated by women-owned businesses and the amount of early-stage funding that goes to females.

Representatives at BBH worked closely with a designer from Contently’s freelance network to develop the concept, gather statistics, and generate the design.

According to Adrienne Penta, executive director of BBH’s Center for Women & Wealth: “Contently added a lot of value when we started thinking about how to visualize the story that we were trying to tell, and how to tell it in a compelling way.”

BlackRock

Stakeholders: People aged 50+

Historically, investment banks do not have a reputation for creating warm and fuzzy human interest stories. But for BlackRock, going in a new direction with its content marketing was a great opportunity. After mining BlackRock’s analytics for trends about the company blog, Ann Hynek, the VP of content and innovation, realized that stories about people outperformed those that focused solely on investment figures.

With a new initiative to reach people nearing retirement, Hynek and her team published a report that profiled six retired couples in different countries around the world. BlackRock worked with Contently’s global talent network to produce “How the World Retires,” a report that featured interactive maps, photography, a retirement calculator, and longform journalism.

“That’s why we leveraged Contently,” Hynek explained. “The [talent] manager basically said, ‘Give me the list of the countries that you want to explore, and I’ll see if we have freelancers.’ And sure enough, she [had] freelancers in those six countries.”

athenahealth

Stakeholders: Health care providers

athenahealth set out with an ambitious goal: “Make health care work as it should.”

Sitting on more than 90 million patient records, the company, which provides electronic health records and other cloud-based services to medical groups, had access to troves of data that could improve the patient experience. Leaders at athenahealth quickly realized that the data could also explain the network of patient records to its medical stakeholders.

The challenge was turning this data into stories that busy health care professionals would take the time to read. The first step was to hire a small team of experienced journalists and videographers to launch athenahealth’s digital publication, athenaInsight. Then, athenahealth worked with Contently to access a team of freelance writers who could interpret the network’s data and write engaging stories on complex medical topics.

“We need great storytelling,” said John Fox, executive director of content at athenahealth. “That’s pretty much all it is.”

The post How 3 Companies Use Contently Talent to Engage Their Key Stakeholders appeared first on Contently.