Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
This story may sound familiar to you.
A small team writes and publishes content for a company blog. The company doesn't know what effect, if any, the content has on visitors. The team just keeps creating and publishing content, and no one knows if and how it ultimately leads to action.
At Ally Financial, this was the beginning of an innovative story that ultimately led to a win in the Best Content-Driven Website and Best Use of Interactive Content categories at the 2024 Content Marketing Awards. Additionally, Jim Bentubo was named B2B Content Marketer of the Year 2024.
The story got its first new chapter in 2021. Jim, who served as Ally's Director of Social Content, realized that the blog was disconnected from the brand both literally (it was on a different platform than the main website) and figuratively (it published an article about the best bumper stickers).
“I want to accept this. It is a big challenge,” says the former journalist.
So he and the team at Ally did. Jim became senior director of content production and that “blog” became Conversationally, a data-driven content hub.
First-party data reveals opportunities
“We’re in a unique situation where (our clients) literally tell us what they’re saving for and what life goals they’re pursuing,” Jim explains.
This is done through a feature of Ally's savings and spending accounts. Customers can create areas such as vacation, home ownership, higher education, etc. and set an overall goal. They can then automatically or manually save a portion of their income toward that area.
Jim wanted to use this and other data to develop a personalized “blog” strategy that connected all the threads under the Ally.com umbrella.
He and another Ally employee looked at first-party data to find out what people were spending their money on, what they were saving for, etc. They overlaid search trends, social conversations, and third-party research to create a lens through which to think about content.
“Our leadership gave us a lot of freedom and said, 'We agree with your direction. You are the experts, build it,'” he says, pointing out that initial planning took 18 months.
The audience thinks about the application, not the products
Many financial sites explain what a mortgage is, but the team at Conversationally sees their role differently. “People don't say, 'Oh man, I can't wait to get a mortgage,'” says Jim. “They say, 'I'm saving for a house.'”
Ally views customer goals as savings for a home, wedding, travel, etc. They also work as general themes for Conversationally. “Personalization and the ability to place content closer to our products is very powerful,” says Jim.
The personalization he's referring to doesn't just apply to homeownership content aimed at people looking for a mortgage. Instead, Ally tailors content to each customer journey.
For example, if a person is saving for a wedding, they'll see related content. So when the person is close to the goal, Ally knows the wedding is likely happening soon and delivers content about tipping vendors.
Someone with a deep pocket of savings for their home will want to know how to choose the right real estate agent at the beginning, but won't worry about closing costs until the end of the journey.
While this flow works well for personalizing wedding and home improvement content, the Ally team has found that audiences with travel savings plans take a different approach. Most people take a vacation before they've saved 100% of their goal. Because the path isn't linear, Ally offers a mix of content that might resonate at any point in their travel savings plans.
Ally calls this the “nurturing nature of content” – Conversationally nurtures its readers to become customers. Someone who reads an article on the data-driven content hub and visits an Ally product page is twice as likely to become a customer than someone who only visits a product page.
In its first year, Conversationally had nearly 4 million page views.
Publishing partners help Ally find an audience
But to achieve this goal, the team needed to develop a strategy to reach the target audience. Potential visitors aren't just waiting impatiently for an update on the company blog, so the Conversationally team needed a strong distribution plan to reach people when they might be thinking about money and important life events.
Ally went where those audiences were already consuming relevant content through partnerships with media brands. The team worked with Condé Nast's Traveler to reach the audience searching for travel prices and Architectural Digest to reach the audience searching for property prices. It turned to Dotdash Meredith to reach the Brides audience searching for wedding prices and Parents Property to connect with growing families.
In these co-branded distribution partnerships, Ally relied on the publisher's expertise and credibility to create the relevant content, which Ally then published on the Conversationally site. The publisher promoted the content on its social media channels and directed the audience to the Conversationally site. After visitors read that article, Ally was able to provide them with content about how its savings products could help them achieve the relevant goal.
Jim says this co-branding idea isn't common. Many publishers rejected his idea. They wanted their social media followers to land on their pages, not Ally's.
But Jim knew that the best outcome for Ally required publishers' social media audiences to visit the Conversationally site and immerse themselves in the Ally content ecosystem.
Ally builds a cross-brand Conversationally team
Conversationally was launched by a team of two with the support of an agency partner who designed the wireframes and conceptual elements of the site. An in-house engineering team handled the site development work and ensured Conversationally was connected to the Ally site.
The content hub had a soft launch in 2022 and the fully integrated website debuted in 2023. The team now consists of seven people – mostly content strategists and editors with specialties such as deposits and investments, home and brand, and distribution channels such as meta, Pinterest and Reddit. They brief and work with an external agency that creates the content.
The Conversationally team looks at content from the perspective of the end-to-end customer journey. “We're more concerned about how the content is presented. Will people see it? And if they do see it, will it lead to something that's beneficial for both the consumer and Ally? The team is focused on making sure every element has a logical path to one of our products.”
Although the majority of the content is created by an outside agency, an internal team member is dedicated to writing brand messaging and telling the money stories related to the company's partnerships, such as with Major League Soccer team Charlotte and NASCAR driver Alex Bowman.
Although the Conversationally team is small, many people from across the Ally team are involved in the content and advertising.
The Conversationally editorial team meets quarterly. Department heads, technical managers, and marketing managers learn about the data-driven editorial plans and give their opinions. This continuous content adoption means that the Conversationally team does not receive requests for individual pieces of content from the different departments.
In addition, a two-day content planning meeting is planned. The research team will present the trends they are seeing in consumer mindsets, spending habits and other topics. The search team will go over what's trending and what people are talking about. Social listening will also be included in the conversation.
With all this data, the team is better informed and can plan the content.
For example, one time during these planning sessions, they learned that cruises were one of the main reasons for using the credit card. Although Ally published a lot about travel, it had not looked at the cruise sector in depth. However, the next quarter, it did.
The Conversationally team also looks at the bigger picture, looking for overlap between what's happening now and where people are today, as well as anticipated events like the US election, to create a content plan that resonates with audiences.
Conversationally hunting for a better North Star
Conversationally uses a data-driven, executive-backed editorial plan that shows how corporate blogs can evolve into a dynamic and engaging site.
“Too often, brands chase SEO terms that ultimately don't align with what they want, what's beneficial to a consumer, or what they offer as a service,” says Jim. “Our guiding light is always to provide personalization whenever we can so it's relevant to the audience. But ultimately, it gets someone on the path to the right product or solution, so it's beneficial to both of us as well.”
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Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
