Content Strategy Leadership

Driven by my editorial background, I am passionate about putting the user at the center of our content strategy: How will this content impact our relationship with the reader? What is the experience of interacting with this content like?

At the same time, a lot of thought should go into everything that happens before the content reaches the reader: Are our workflows optimized to help combat burnout for content creators? Are we asking the hard questions about the way we do things? Is our content strategy team learning and growing?

My Approach In Action

Content Planning Is A Collaborative Process

The more talking about the content before work begins, the better!

I created a library of resources to help editors learn how to use the SERP (search engine results page) to understand the reader. They study the SERP and bring questions about it to me as a first step.

This goes both ways: editors have taught me to bring questions to them about bandwidth and feasibility before I get too deep in the research, and at their request, I plan certain types of posts many months in advance. I've also incorporated our DE&I specialist into the process, so editors have the information they need to consider diverse-owned businesses in their posts from the beginning.

UX At The Center

Traffic and commerce should never come at the expense of the user experience. After learning that a feature on our page was confusing readers into thinking that the story ended much earlier than it did, I ran an experiment to see if this feature – which was created for SEO and commerce – was really necessary after all. I worked with our commerce team to identify which posts would be best to try removing or replacing this feature, and we monitored the results. We concluded that the feature was only necessary on some posts. Now our product team is running an A/B test to determine if there is an iteration of the feature which won't confuse the user.

Data-Backed Experimentation

For Black Friday, I led one of my sites in an experiment to try five different URL-changing strategies. I signed on during the event and took dozens of screenshots to understand what our competitors were doing and what was getting news module placement and which were ranking above news modules. I also created a spreadsheet tracking revenue from search for every post we created – since our Looker dashboards weren't set up to account for so many different strategies – and I came away with a strong conviction that two of the strategies we tried worked better than the others.

DE&I Work Is Never Done

Thanks to extensive, ongoing training, I am always looking for ways to improve our work in a way that helps us be inclusive of all readers. Whether I am suggesting an expansion of religious holidays coverage to incorporate more Islamic holidays, or asking that we tweak language on a CTA button so as to not exclude those using a screen reader, I take DE&I into consideration in every part of the process.

Workflows Can Always Be Improved

One of my site's leadership teams was tasked with improving the completion rate of suggested posts on our SEO doc, at a time when it was barely 50%. When I learned that the organization of the doc could be contributing to this low output, I redesigned our doc from scratch. I treated it like a UX project, surveying and interviewing different kinds of users. The doc's completion rate is now at or close to 100% every month.

Empowering my team

As a manager, the most important thing I can do is help employees understand how their goals can align with business needs. One of the ways I make this happen is to offer employees a chance to chat through their most nascent ideas in our 1:1s. From one of these conversations, we decided to overhaul our timing strategy for our commerce tentpole coverage, and this change helped drive +43% YoY growth to our Prime Day content.