Boston Content
Finding your next marketing role during a ...

Job hunting can be a stressful time, especially if the loss of your job or client-base was unexpected. To make matters worse, 75% of resumes are rejected before they even reach the hiring manager. As content marketers, we spend our days trying to stand out above the noise in the work we do and stories we create. So how do you carry that into the job hunt process? Especially with unemployment at historical highs as the economy navigates through COVID-19.

Finding your next marketing role during a pandemic

Brianne Miers: How to Build a Non-Profit Freelance Career as a Writer and Consultant

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Brianne Miers is a senior communications professional with more than 15 years of experience in brand marketing, public relations, donor communications, and content strategy. Nearly five years ago, she started her own consulting practice, Kind Communications, which focuses on helping small and mid-sized non-profit organizations.

In this podcast you will learn:

  • How Brianne built a career in non-profit work and how to beat big firm competitors to great clients and great projects

  • How Brianne navigated a tricky situation where a client owed her a few months of backpay and were in bad financial situation and what she learned from this stressful situation

  • Why networking is essential in launching your freelance career and how to get started in the non-profit sector

Brianne Miers on freelancing

  • How Brianne freed up her schedule with freelancing and used it to power her love of travel

  • How she uses a side project to support her love for photography and learn new skills

  • How Brianne built her Instagram account to over 10K followers with consistently high engagement 

  • Why Brianne left her public relations role in Boston and chose to be her own boss

  • How Brianne navigated a non-compete contract while launching a freelance career

  • The experimentation Brianne made in the beginning of her freelance business with speaking and training before landing on project work, and how she used networking to power the start of her own business

  • How Brianne built a career in non-profit work and why being more affordable than big firm retainers helped her land great clients and great projects

  • Why pricing is tough for non-profit organizations and how they differ greatly in how much they can pay a consultant

  • How Brianne wrestles with her workload and structures her day

  • How Brianne navigated a tricky situation where a client owed her a few months of backpay and were in bad financial situation and what she learned from this stressful situation

  • Brianne’s advice for new freelancers and her shock on the kind of work that doesn’t make you money

Brianne Miers on writing

  • How Brianne writes daily and what she spends her time on to increase her craft

  • Brianne’s writing habits and why she needs to remove clutter

  • How Brianne has shifted her writing for evenings and the effect that has on her work

  • Why Brianne loves writing humorous content and why she believes it’s her speciality

  • Why Brianne is consistently taking notes by hand and why it’s her go-to productivity tool

  • Brianne loves white noise to accompany her writing but can’t work with direct music through headphones

  • Brianne has been a writer her whole life and spent time penning anything from short stories, to poems, to notes in her notebook 

  • Brianne’s views on writer’s block, why she experiences friction, and the systems she uses to get past it

Tools, people, and resources

About our guest, Brianne Miers

Brianne Miers is a senior communications professional with more than 15 years of experience in brand marketing, public relations, donor communications, and content strategy. Nearly five years ago, she started her own consulting practice, Kind Communications, focused on helping small and mid-sized non-profit organizations, social enterprises and small businesses get the most out of their limited communications budgets. More than two years ago, she launched a travel blog, A Traveling Life, and has since partnered with numerous brands and destinations in the U.S. and around the world.

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About our host, Adam Rogers

Adam Rogers is the host and producer of the Boston Content Podcast. By day, he is a content marketer at Shopify, the ecommerce platform. By night, he is still Adam Rogers but it's nighttime. He loves writing, but he's sure it hates him. He's a lover of books, music, guitars, and his wife Lacey.

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Are You Ready? On-Demand Content Experiences Aren’t Just for B2C

By Elle Woulfe, Vice President of Marketing at PathFactory

Today’s consumers live in an on-demand world. We want groceries on our doorstep in two hours or less, taxis in just minutes, and our favorite TV series where we want it, when we want it, all with a quick swipe or tap. 

A few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine any other company matching the kind of service that Amazon or Netflix delivered. However, from rideshare companies to restaurants, the on-demand economy has grown by 159 percent over the past three years, changing the way consumers buy — in both their personal and work lives.

 

“B2B consumers expect that the brand experiences they encounter in their professional lives will have the same sophistication and consistency as those they experience in their personal lives,” writes Forrester Analyst Steven Casey.

 

But what exactly does the on-demand experience look like in B2B? It’s all about using content to the deliver the journey that buyers expect. And that means anticipating what people want, and then giving it to them in the moment they need it.

 

Introducing the B2B consumer

 

Think about the last time you turned on Netflix. Rather than having to flick through each channel and decide whether or not you wanted to watch a show, you were immediately presented with your favorites, and you didn’t have to do a thing, other than watch.

Netflix uses AI to gather data about everything you watch, and then uses that data to recommend other shows you might also like. In fact, 80% of their views are driven by their recommendation engine. They make it easy to consume the content you love.

Now think about the experience your customers currently have when they consume your content. Can they effortlessly access that content like they can their favorite TV show? For many B2B marketers, the answer is no. Stuck in the old norms of gated content and email nurture campaigns, many brands make it hard for buyers to follow their own personal journey, which is something they really expect to do.

According to Forrester, more than two-thirds of buyers want to design their own journeys. 

Just like Netflix knows when we’re ready to binge on five episodes of Orange Is The New Black, B2B buyers want vendors to know what content they want to consume next, and then serve it up for them, ready to consume.

 

Fueling the customer journey through content

B2B buyers consume a lot of content. They have to. In order to be confident that they’re making the right investment, they need to back their decisions with data.

Google’s Zero Moment of Truth study puts the number at 10.4 pieces of content consumed per big-ticket purchase. Not only that, but since purchases are typically made by committee, 10 buyers have to review that content (and many of them may need different content). Much of this happens before they even talk to a sales person.

Even though buyers consume so much content, it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to keep making more of it. There’s been a 300% increase in content creation over the past several years. More blog posts. More whitepapers. More of anything we hope a customer will stumble across. The problem is, only 5% of the content created drives 90% of customer engagement. This means buyers are only finding and consuming a tiny portion of the mountains of content we create.

With so much content, it’s almost impossible for people to know which pieces are most valuable for them at which stage of the buying process. It’s not always obvious when it’s buried at the bottom of a resource center, under a pile of other blog posts, or in the middle of a nurture stream.

That’s why it’s important to understand how buyers are interacting with your content, and the quality of those interactions. This could include: how long they watched a video, read your eBook, or how many minutes they spent on your latest infographic. Not only that, but also which content they liked best, which topics are of most interest, what you should serve up next time, and which action you should take at that very moment to help them along their journey.

It may seem like a tall order, but once you start collecting some of this data, and using it to generate recommendations for your buyers and insight for your marketing organization, everything you’re already doing just gets better.

Get started with data-driven content experiences

 

Passing on better information about accounts and prospects is the number one challenge facing sales and marketing teams, so you need to be ready. But you have to know who your customers are first, and how they behave.

Keep your customers engaged with the journeys they expect. Know where they are in their journey so you know where to take them next. Make it easy for them to discover and consume content. And respond in real-time with recommendations to suit their behaviors and needs.

By giving your customers what they want, when they want it, they won’t need to go anywhere else. 

 

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Elle Woulfe is a revenue-focused marketer with expertise in digital marketing and demand generation. As the VP of Marketing for Toronto-based martech company PathFactory, Elle is responsible for cultivating awareness and turning interest into pipeline. A veteran in the marketing technology industry, she previously held senior demand generation roles at Lattice Engines and Eloqua.

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