PeakActivity BlogContent Strategy • Marketing • Technical Writing

Constraints & Goals

PeakActivity is a small general software company with a variety of departments and projects. They offer expertise and services in social media management, a/b website testing and eCommerce platform expertise. At PeakActivity our core strategy was to convince our target audience to reach out to us for a demo of our products and services by reaching them when they Google questions we have the answers to. To do this, we researched the most researched questions related to topics decided on the team, and I wrote articles to specifically answer those questions. I leveraged each of the departments for my research asking each what their main goals are and how their service could most benefit potential customers. We decided on a constraint of a 500-word maximum and a weekly deadline. I worked to create quality content that answered SEO questions.

Process and Scholarship

In Kristina Halvorsen’s book Content Strategy for the Web, Halvorson introduces the idea of creating a core strategy and then defining the substance, workflow, structure, and governance of the strategy. At PeakActivity our core strategy was to convince our target audience to reach out to us for a demo of our products and services by reaching them when they Google questions we have the answers to.

Halvorson next mentions creating substance and structure to continue through the “content quad.” Creating a substance involves audience analysis and refining messaging. As mentioned, our audience was very specific: Google users are in positions of decision-making in companies who are looking to re-platform or overhaul their social media presence. Our primary message was to answer the question they asked, but the secondary message was to convince them to request a demo of our services. Our main goal was to inform. Our voice and tone were under much debate inside my team. While I thought as informative articles, our tone was to be purely informative, near the end of the blog series, we decided it that the tone should be more “whimsical” and “funny.” We spent time in meetings brainstorming witty titles and changing sentences to be shorter and more sarcastic. Reading through each article you will see the shift.

Structurally, we had a very specific workflow to move through. In line with Halvorson’s ideas of analysis began internally by each week interviewing a PeakActivity employee who was most knowledgeable on the topic. To get the best results I narrowed my questions to:

• What is {topic}?
• What is the process that goes into doing {topic}?
• How does {topic} benefit PeakActivity clients?
• How is PeakActivity a leader {topic}?

I asked as many follow-up questions as I could, although I quickly realized that some technical details that these questions introduced went over my head. After the first few interviews, I tried my best to research content related to the topic before each interview. From there I could ask more pointed questions to get to the explanation I would need. Once I was finished with the blog it was sent through 4 editors, one of whom was the CEO of the company. The blog often came back to me multiple times before they approved it to be posted. We also decided on the structure of each blog. The blogs were kept to three sections:

• Introduction of topic
• Trends and why the customer needs the topic
• How PeakActivity is a leader in the area

This often naturally led to a 500-word blog, although after the first few the 500-word goal was written into our structural guidelines more officially.

Halvorson’s next topic is workflow. Our workflow began with one of my college’s researching SEO keywords surrounding our company services. He would pass the SEO keywords, most of which were direct questions, to me to answer in blog form. After researching and interviewing internal experts, I would sit down to write the blog post consulting the expert again if I needed more information. I wrote quickly the blogs, in the same format each week. As soon as I was complete with the blog it went to our copyeditor and back to the expert who would review and refine. Once finished there, it went through our president of marketing who would either approve or review before sending it on to the CEO of the company who would approve, review, or occasionally entirely reject the article for various reasons.

The final step of Halvorson’s quad was governance. The marketing committee of the company who had to volunteer for the job governed my blog writing. The company had until we began posting blogs, done nothing to market other than word-of-mouth acquisition of customers. Our committee had many expectations on what the end products could do for the company. We met once every 6-8 weeks to discuss the project and how it was going. Near our second meeting, we analyzed the analytics of the blog posts to find that they had made little of a difference in our page views. The committee paused the blog writing near the end of November 2019 to reflect on the problems and bring in a new team of writers.

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