Alicia Johnston

#general - August 22, 2023 at 11:19 PM

Thank you both!

#general - August 21, 2023 at 07:22 PM

Hey there! Is anyone familiar with any demographic surveys or datasets of professionals in content marketing?

I’m in a management course where we need to audit a talent pipeline for a specific role and compare it to the wider industry pool. So for example, I’d be looking at our pipeline for a past position to see if it skews more toward one gender identity, age bracket, etc, compared to the industry at large. I appreciate any tips or ideas for where to look!

#CJE3XC0H3-announcements - April 18, 2023 at 07:27 PM

@Eric Doty (Superpath) Yeah we have a great crew! Our team grew a ton coming out of 2021 as inbound marketing continues to play a huge role in our strategy…and we continue expanding the scope of what the Content Team drives and which goals we support. Happy to chat more on audience shift if you want to dm. Thanks for including us, @Cierra Loflin!

#general - March 15, 2023 at 06:22 PM

Hi Maggie, thanks for doing this AMA! I was reading through your LI profile and one thing that stood out is your approach to building a bench nonstop, as well as succession planning. I’d love to hear more about how you’ve approached this with teams of different sizes—what are a few things every leader should be doing or temp checking regularly? How do you think about zooming out to see the longer horizon?

#job-listings - September 16, 2021 at 10:35 PM

Feel free to DM me if you have any questions about this role!

#CJE3XC0H3-announcements - June 25, 2021 at 05:16 PM

One vote for Chicago!

#general - February 24, 2021 at 07:19 PM

Thanks @kristencraft! Excited to dig into this article.

#general - February 24, 2021 at 07:08 PM

I love a good spreadsheet too. How far up does that scale for you/your clients in terms of content volume/# of pieces you’re publishing at a given time?

#general - February 24, 2021 at 07:07 PM

@kristencraft I’d love to dig in to building high performance teams! How do you strike the right balance of providing direction and coaching, while also encouraging folks to step outside their comfort zone and take a more independent approach to problem-solving?

#general - February 24, 2021 at 07:03 PM

I’d love to hear what your personal favorite tools are for managing content planning/project management as well as editorial calendars.

#CJE3XC0H3-announcements - February 09, 2021 at 10:44 PM

Aww! Congrats Jimmy, how exciting!

#job-listings - January 27, 2021 at 05:23 PM

@Kas (V7) US-only, remote-friendly (see list of approved states on the app).

#job-listings - January 27, 2021 at 03:56 PM

Right back atcha @fio thank you for the vote of confidence! 😄

#job-listings - January 27, 2021 at 03:42 PM

Hi everyone! I’m hiring a Content Specialist to join our team at Sprout Social. We’re committed to building a world-class marketing team and this role will specifically focus on content that drives leads, trials and ultimately MQLs. The role is about 80% writing and 20% support for projects focused on optimizing content and increasing conversion. US-only, remote-friendly (see list of approved states on the app).

You’d be a good fit for this role if you enjoy:

• Developing educational and thought-provoking content that solves readers’ challenges and opens them to new ideas
• Breaking down complex concepts using compelling stories and engaging formats
• Digging into data to come up with ideas to optimize content performance
• Keeping up with the latest social media and marketing trends
• Seeing your content make real business impact
Please thread or DM if you have any questions! https://sproutsocial.com/careers/open-positions/#/2614085/content-specialist

#general - January 15, 2021 at 06:16 PM

Oh that’s so fun. I’d love to do more quizzes in the future! Was Typeform easy to work with?

#general - January 15, 2021 at 06:05 PM

I’d love to hear what your content highlight of 2020 was (favorite project, top campaign, whatever strikes your fancy) and what new or different approaches you’ve incorporated into your content strategy for 2021!

#job-listings - December 22, 2020 at 05:18 PM

Thanks @shayna hodkin you nailed it! There’s more context on location in that section as well

#job-listings - December 22, 2020 at 03:42 PM

Hey all! We’re hiring a managing editor to join the content team at Sprout Social. This person will lead editorial planning, content production and surfacing new opportunities for our content strategy. Happy to answer any questions. https://sproutsocial.com/careers/open-positions/#/2547520/managing-editor-

#intros - December 16, 2020 at 02:35 PM

Hurrah, welcome @Christie Huber! I hope you’ll find as much value here as I have!

#CJE3XC0H3-announcements - November 20, 2020 at 04:15 PM

Aw thank you @Jimmy Daly (Superpath)! And I love this prompt! I want to give a shoutout to @fio @Alli Tunell and @Derek Gleason who have shared thorough, detailed insight into their experiences, processes and team structures. I appreciate having this group to bounce ideas off of and learn from—everyone is so generous with their knowledge!

#intros - November 19, 2020 at 03:33 AM

Super belated but OH HEY @Bridgett Colling! So glad you’re here!

#general - September 24, 2020 at 02:31 PM

Hi @Colin Lalley, we have been discussing this with sales enablement but we have a few sections that focus on different types of performance. We have “oldies but goodies” (pieces that sales consistently uses and shares and that we know make a strong impact, often answering FAQs), a section for new/trending pieces we want to get in front of the team, a “picnic” section which is third-party content like industry thought leadership and…probably a few others I’m forgetting!

#general - September 19, 2020 at 02:20 PM

I’m so glad @Carmen Choi thanks for joining!

#general - September 18, 2020 at 06:06 PM

So glad it was helpful @Juan Ortega thank you!

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:57 PM

Hahaha, thanks @Jimmy Daly (Superpath)! This is more energizing than a vat of ☕.

I love this question because it is top of mind for me right now! I got into content via PR and communications, so my comfort zone is brand and awareness. The main skills I’m focused on now are on the content marketing side. I’m working more closely with our acquisition team to better understand our funnel, how each discipline is leveraging content and where we’re seeing success or challenges. I also want to continue testing how different types of content (formats, themes, levels of interaction, etc) perform for us.

In 3-5 years, I’m honestly terrible at thinking that far ahead. My career has been driven by a desire to learn constantly. As long as I’m learning, I’m thriving. My favorite parts of my job are people management and strategy, so continuing to grow my team, empower other leaders in content and really know what an impact we’re making on the business.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:47 PM

Hmm. Would it help to bring senior leadership into one of these conversations? My other thought is that if this back-and-forth is impeding your work, show them that. Bring them information about how much additional time it’s taking to review or publish content when you don’t have these shared guidelines. I’m assuming you’re at an agency or freelancing, from your question about clients, so if this is affecting billable hours it might enforce the urgency of investing in brand work.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:45 PM

It’s a content party and I’m LOVING IT! 😄

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:45 PM

Yes, a virtual coffee sounds perfect @Carmen Choi, just DM me and we can set it up after the AMA concludes.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:44 PM

For sure! This is something I’ve been working to build (having come from more of the PR side way back when, where I didn’t work with sales as much) so I’m also always open to hearing other people’s tips on what’s worked well!

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:43 PM

Thanks @Juan Ortega! I am loving these questions, giving me a lot to keep digesting and thinking about!

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:43 PM

Empowerment: I have so much to say on the topic of empowering social marketers as a whole. But in terms of seeing this via conversions, that’s an interesting question! We offer a free 30-day trial that doesn’t require a credit card--so there is really no barrier to entry. We have more than 20k customers, from a one-person small business to a global enterprise, so a lot of different folks are evaluating Sprout, downloading our content and starting free trials.

But when it comes to the decision-making process and actually buying, that can range from a single decision-maker to a global, enterprise-wide team. From a content standpoint, that means it’s important that we speak to the end user (typically a social media manager) as well as someone who will never need to open Sprout (like a CMO), but does need to have trust and confidence that we’re experts and we have the right solution for their team.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:41 PM

I love these questions. I’m going to answer as a two parter.

For marketing to marketers: There’s definitely a greater need for authenticity and subject matter expertise when you’re marketing to marketers. We know every trick in the book, so we can usually pick up on it when someone’s deploying them on us, and we can’t abide fluff. But one of the great things is that it also allows us to be perhaps a bit more conversational and use our content and voice to communicate, “Hey, we’re marketers too—we get it! We get you, and we’re in this together.” 

Generally B2B buyers are making a bigger investment than your average B2C purchase, so there’s a greater focus on ROI and cost efficiency from your software. The sales cycles are longer so you need to have more touchpoints, and more types of content that can speak to what a buyer needs at each phase of their journey.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:40 PM

Hey @Theresa Hebert this is a great question! I talked about this a bit in my response to @Nina P above. But our tech for this looks mostly like:
• Showpad: sales content platform
• Outreach: email outreach platform where you can create templates or snippets featuring content
• Bambu: Sprout makes this employee advocacy platform and we curate the best of the best content by, for, and about Sprout (e.g. marketing content, awards, customer tweets, media placements) with sample messages so it makes it easy for everyone on the team to share.
We also leverage our other internal comms tools to further promotion…lots of emails (though we try to focus them, e.g. we’ll send out a campaign roundup with all content created for a specific vertical), Slack messages and Wiki pages.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:38 PM

🙋 me too, me too! My fingers are going to fall off, but I’m truly having a grand time.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:38 PM

Hi @Nina P! We actually are not only for enterprise! We do serve many enterprise customers, but our customer base actually ranges all the way from those shops to solo SMBs or local businesses.

However, to your question, I do work fairly closely with the sales team, but my main partners there are demand gen and sales enablement. A few things we do:
• As part of content planning, we get feedback from the Sales and Customer Success teams. Either a couple people join our brainstorm or we send questions/prompts to them in advance.
• I am part of a monthly meeting that we informally call the “sales empowerment team”--demand gen, product marketing, sales enablement, content and solutions engineering. We share visibility into priorities and workshop challenges.
• I try to personally build relationships with sales managers so they know who to go to with ideas or interesting customers who’d be interested in a collaboration. I also have a workflow in Slack that sends a “content ideas form” to sales and success once a month.
There are a lot of other smaller touchpoints but I also can’t take credit for everything here--our demand gen team and sales enablement team handle a ton of things like regularly producing Content Digests for sales that include content, Outreach email templates and links to Showpad, our sales content platform. We try to make it as easy as possible for Sales to read, use and benefit from our content, and we report back on the results when they do!

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:34 PM

Right now we plan quarterly and lay out a three month editorial calendar. That includes some placeholders for timely content, supporting new projects that arise, etc. We try to fill the calendar to about 80% of what we expect our capacity to be in order to flex. We moved to a much higher volume of publishing this year and candidly, this has been an adjustment and constantly learning for me! I’m used to shooting for the max, e.g. if our strategy calls for 15-20 pieces, I want to plan 20 and we’ll add on top of that. I’ve had to adjust my mentality to ensure that my team collectively has the time and creative wherewithal to not just meet what’s on the calendar but to riff, adapt and follow great ideas where they lead.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:33 PM

Yes, I love these. And honestly the first question is a challenge I’m constantly presenting to myself, because when we’re doing a lot, it can be easy to just keep your head down and not make big experimental bets.

Generally, I try to bring opportunities to experiment into the day-to-day (e.g. if you don’t have time to create a huge piece of interactive content, what can you do to bring interactive elements into the blog posts you’re already writing?). That can create a proving ground, give an initial sense of performance by whatever dimension you need to measure, and lay the foundation for a bigger investment in the future. For larger projects, can you attach an experimental bet to a larger marketing campaign or project that will also receive “traditional” support? That way, you can pair it with content you know works for core metrics, while giving the team something exciting to rally behind. In terms of measuring success, it really depends on the goal of the effort but I’d want to have very clear goals and KPIs at the outset so we can assess progress as we go, iterate, and ultimately say whether this did what we thought it would.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:31 PM

Hi @Carmen Choi, yes absolutely! I have been lucky to have a manager who is a great mentor and a very thoughtful leader--I’d be remiss not to mention that she is a key factor in my growth over the years. ❤️

I started as a communications generalist; I had a couple years of nonprofit and freelance/blogging experience but it was an entry-level role doing some PR support, supporting speaking, award submissions, employer brand…and Sprout was small so I also helped the social team and wrote SEO blog posts. Really anything that came my way.

From there I moved into a role leading our PR and managing our agency. Then, Sprout kept growing and I added internal communications (so kind of a corp comms role). We hired someone else to take over PR, and I moved to internal comms and specifically thought leadership content. Then we hired an IC lead right before our IPO (thank goodness) and I moved to focus solely on content.

My main pivotal points/tips would be:
• Stay open to opportunities. I originally thought I wanted to stay in corporate comms and it was my boss who asked me to shift focus entirely to content. She saw something I didn’t, and she was right.
• Ask a ton of questions. There is no stupid question. I am constantly asking people on other teams how they pulled a certain report, how they made a decision, etc. These can help you grow, and help you improve your own reporting on performance in order to make a case for growth/new positions.
• Talk to other people in the industry. Truly, this group has been incredible this year. I have met so many smart people and I love reading perspective from this group. Thank you, @Jimmy Daly (Superpath)!
I feel like I should say more about the self-advocacy piece but I’m seeing a ton of q’s come in, so let me save this one and come back to you more later!

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:25 PM

These are my typical go-to’s for subject matter expertise:
1. Our marketing team: Because we market to marketers, our team has a lot of expertise and opinions we can incorporate...and most people love to be consulted and positioned as a thought leader!
2. Other departments at Sprout: Our customer success and sales teams in particular have a lot of vertical-specific expertise and insight into our customers; our creative team is a wealth of insight. 
3. Our Agency Partners: We have an Agency Partner Program where agencies that use Sprout can also access exclusive resources, educational content, templates and opportunities to collaborate on content. They work with so many different clients that this is a great pool to tap for expert quotes.
4. Our customers: Same deal here—I love to speak with our customers and listen to Gong calls to identify standout content collaborators to tap.
5. Our social community: Not surprisingly, there is a thriving community of marketers and social media managers on social. We work with our social and community teams to use features like Twitter and Instagram Polls to weigh in or get data points for content, to pose questions to our community and to source SMEs for quotes.
6. My network, specifically Twitter: I follow a ton of social media experts and try to intentionally cultivate relationships with a diverse group of marketers. I’m not above cold outreach when I think someone is incredible and I want to interview them!
7. HARO: HARO is a tool that I only use when I need really specific expertise outside of our core areas; for example, my team member used HARO to connect with a psychiatrist for a blog post about creating psychological safety at work.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:24 PM

YES! I made you a list for this one @Kal Dimitrov, here’s my toolkit.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:23 PM

Yes, thank you @Alison Baldyga (she/her)! My team leads content strategy for all of our owned content, working closely with our SEO team. That covers blog posts, guides, gated resources, case studies and working closely with social, PR and events, but those disciplines are also all creating content that’s tailored for their goals, too.

Our owned content is really focused on drawing people into, and through, the funnel. We create content ranging from the awareness stage down to decision stage, where we’re showing them exactly how to use Sprout to solve their social media challenges. Our PR team and agency lead earned content efforts like writing media bylines.

All content follows the same brand voice and tone, but content we’re writing for a media outlet would generally be an awareness piece where we’re introducing Sprout (who we are, what we believe) to our reader. So it presents more of our opinions, beliefs and values than some of the tactical or education we might focus more on in our blog.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:22 PM

Hahaha I got you Brendan. I’m sure you can tell I’m pretty verbose so I don’t mind! 😄

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:21 PM

Performance marketing: Well…the best way performance marketing can support us right now is joining us! 😂 We have an open role for a Director of Performance Marketing so if anyone is interested, hmu. https://sproutsocial.com/careers/open-positions/#/2318329/director-performance-marketing

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:21 PM

Biggest opportunities: Right now we’re in an interesting place; Sprout is 10 years old and we’re really in a phase where we know what works and are focused on optimizing. I think our biggest opportunity is to lean into our differentiators and go big on brand to start reaching more of our adjacent audiences (e.g. not focusing our content only on SMMs and marketing leaders but creating more for customer care leaders, communications teams, etc.)

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:18 PM

What I love about Sprout: I could go on forever but it boils down to constant learning, a team that cares deeply and people who are truly generous in spirit—always willing to share their expertise, not afraid to ask hard questions, and genuinely invested in the success of everyone on the team. I didn’t expect to stay at the same company for more than two years, but I lucked out!

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:18 PM

Building an employer brand: Employer brand is a really cool discipline, because to be an expert in employer brand, you need to have an understanding of all aspects of communication and branding—storytelling, building relationships, PR, content, social, copywriting—and be able to build a marketing strategy based on recruiting goals. It also requires a close partnership with the recruiting team and for us, our video and social teams as well.

I think some of the biggest wins are getting your employees involved. You’re never building an employer brand alone--actually, marketing is following on the coattails of what your employees are already out there saying to their friends and family. Our team members are constantly planning events, sharing photos of team outings (well, in pre-COVID days, now they are mostly screenshots of virtual events!) and mentioning Sprout in their social posts. All of that content can help you understand what your target audience (ideal candidates) see as your employer value prop and differentiators, and you can run with some really creative ideas from there.

Pitfalls--not starting with your recruiting strategy. Being too restrictive about what employees can share, or, on the flip side, not giving any guidance at all.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:16 PM

Hahaha, yes! Let’s go one by one

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:16 PM

Yes, absolutely. Our social presence is very meta in that way! But, a lot of what we do reflects the same best practices we’d recommend to other brands: focus on engagement, be creative, represent diverse perspectives, ensure your paid and organic efforts work together…but alwith the recognition that our community’s eyes are on us to demonstrate interesting, different and hopefully industry-leading social efforts.

I think the most important part of this is actually internal. Our social team members are marketers first, and social media experts second. They create and lead marketing-wide campaigns, they are brought in at the outset of planning for any major marketing effort, and they share their data back with the creative, content and demand gen teams so we can maximize our efforts.

One other thing that is incredible as a content marketing is their analyses--they use our social listening tool to evaluate things like brand messaging, content themes, audience trends, etc. and they report that back to the marketing and sales orgs. That’s another internal piece, but it reflects how deeply social is woven into our business as a whole.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:12 PM

Definitely! There are a lot of good questions to unpack here.

1. Content and PR balance: I’m not personally leading our PR efforts anymore, but I got into content via PR—when I was focused there, I would create a quarterly data report as thought leadership content to pitch, and I would write or edit media bylines as needed. When we went through a restructure in 2018, I moved into a content (and internal comms) role. Having that PR background helps me identify and advocate for ideas that will support both content + PR goals. From there, I err on the side of overcommunication and so does our PR lead, and that presents a lot of opportunities to maximize our resources. A lot of our content can serve two or more goals, so we try to ensure we have a healthy mix of content to support the awareness efforts of PR and social as well as our content marketing and acquisition goals.
2. Ideal team makeup: I love our makeup now, which is two separate but closely-collaborating teams under the overall “Buzz Team” (content, comms, PR, social, events)! If I were on a smaller team, it would depend on overall marketing goals and where the company was in terms of market share and brand awareness. I’d want to handle content in-house and have a second person in a more cross-functional comms role (PR, internal, speaking, etc), likely managing an external PR agency. This gives content the ability to build close ties with demand gen, sales, success and other internal teams with no gatekeepers; whereas a PR has a major external influence—media—and is often focused on telling your brand’s high level stories. Owning media relationships and keeping a pulse on that giant ecosystem is something a strong agency can do for you if you want your internal team to focus on PR strategy, working with exec stakeholders, etc. But, that team structure is also based on my strengths/interests so it might be the opposite for others!
3. Making the case for non-SEO content: I’m lucky here, for two reasons: 1, I sit on the “Buzz” team which is primarily focused on brand awareness and perception; 2, as a social media software company, we place a huge value on our social presence. So the metrics we look at aren’t solely acquisition-focused but also measured by things like supporting PR (media placements, target placements, impressions) and our social efforts (impressions, engagements, and so forth). Every piece of content has a specific goal and different dimensions of performance based on that—for example, I’m not expecting a 500-word op-ed to be an SEO slam dunk, but I am expecting it to drive social engagements and impressions because it gets people talking and sharing. I think it’s a combo of educating your stakeholders on different opportunities that content can contribute to, and constantly reporting back your results and learnings. Even positioning something as an experiment or a short-term test with an end date can help ease exec discomfort if you’re branching outside of business as usual.

#general - September 18, 2020 at 05:10 PM

From a responsibility standpoint, PMK and our tech comms writer create things like product launch announcements, all of the Help Center content, key messages, etc. Our team develops decision-stage content for our blog and case studies, then works with sales enablement to share those out with the sales team.