When Right-Brains Want to Left Brain Better: A Case Study of a Content Marketing Firm

The data team at REACH was looking for consulting assistance to help them provide insights to the content team. This extra help would alleviate the pressure of the content team also to have to do the reports to find their own insights, which isn’t as productive as them producing content!

GWD met with REACH leadership for Step 2: Discover & Align session to identify where we could help REACH be most successful at getting them to their desired future state. This session led the leadership team to the following conclusions:

• Content Managers were reaching context switching overload when asked to write content, input data into reports, analyze the results, and determine insights to help improve campaign performance.
• The data team had reached over-capacity due to the heavy-lift needed for regular performance reporting and finding insights to help improve campaign performance.
• REACH is now at the size of clients and teams where growth will create more bottlenecks and decrease employee satisfaction (and potentially tarnish the customer experience) enough that it warranted having us come in and assess the processes and offer recommendations for improvement.

We interviewed the Content Managers and Data Team in Step 3: Collaborative Process Mapping to create Step 4: Solutions & Systems Roadmap. We identified the current workflow and data processes, determined the optimized future state, and recommended process evolutions and software upgrades to facilitate their needs for the foreseeable future. We also identified the data points needed to measure the success of the team’s alignment with their mission objective to ensure that in the future state, potential automation would stage the data correctly to be able to report.

We created a document that walked REACH through our recommendations for quality improvement, throughput optimization, culture shifts, and content manager performance management. Most of these recommendations were low and no-cost solutions that REACH could implement in baby steps to create a better system and culture. We also recommended software and automation adjustments to help streamline the data entry and reporting processes.

“We certainly benefited from all our meetings, the comb through and the deep scrubbing on our process and fully made us aware of the steps we’d need to take to ease the burden of report building on the Content Managers,” said Kelly Trace, owner of REACH. “Reporting to clients is a significant deliverable that shows clients the hard work we’re doing for them and how we are meeting their goals, so this will continue to be an ongoing evolution in how we operate. Thank you, Grounded With Data, for your help thus far!”

To learn more about our Getting Grounded With Data Method, click here!