Welcome to the latest installment of this column, where C4D puts our customers, partners and fellow content marketers in the spotlight to broaden conversations about B2B marketing, get to know industry influencers and share tips, best practices and fun facts.
This month, we’re proud to introduce you to Christine Elliott, Content Strategy & Operations Executive for one of our customers, Crowe Horwath LLP. Besides being a savvy content marketer, she’s great fun to have in your gondola with a glass of champagne.
Work
What’s your role at Crowe Horwath? I lead the integrated content strategy and operations team at Crowe, which brings together the disciplines of publishing services (thought leadership), media relations, marketing content development and the new disciplines of content strategy, brand integration/messaging and campaign strategy.
What’s the most important or interesting thing you’ve learned about content marketing? It’s not enough to make incremental changes to continue to improve your content marketing efforts. The discipline is evolving so quickly that you need to focus on creating a culture of transformation. Everything you know today may be irrelevant tomorrow. If you do not adopt an approach based on innovation, agility and questioning the status quo, you will likely be left behind.
What B2B marketing mistake makes you cringe? Not taking a strategic approach to emails. It kills me when a writer puts the title of a piece of content in an email — what a waste of space! You only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention — you should use those words to describe in a compelling way what the reader will learn from the content.
What’s one of your favorite projects or campaigns you’ve worked on, and why? This year, we decided to embark on a huge journey – to do an enterprise content audit. We have just finished the pilot project, where we reviewed almost 300 pieces of content geared toward our largest industry vertical, financial services. It is great to have actual data to share to point out trends/concerns we intuitively all knew. Two highlights:
- Since much of our content is based on regulatory issues, it ages quickly. Not having a system and strategy to address aging content can hurt our reputation in the market. The audit uncovered that 36% of our content needs to be addressed for age issues.
- We have too much early stage content (62%) — and consequently have a gap in mid- and late-stage content. For those who know they have a particular issue, we are missing the opportunity to continue the conversation and demonstrate approaches to solving the issue (mid-stage content) and even more importantly, demonstrating why Crowe has the exact solution to help them solve the problem (late-stage content).
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What city do you live in, and what’s great about it? I live in New Lenox, Illinois, which is about 40 miles outside of Chicago — in fact, there are 17 train stops to get to Chicago. Sadly, there is nothing great about New Lenox. It consistently receives the award for being the “most boring town in Illinois.” And it is a well-deserved title. I can’t wait to move closer to the city next year after my youngest graduates from high school.
What’s your favorite movie? My favorite movie of all time is “Hairspray” (the version with John Travolta as Tracy’s mom and Christopher Walken as Tracy’s dad). The movie makes me laugh in 100 different places — I especially love watching John Travolta and Christopher Walken dance. My kids know that if I’m ever in a coma, put “Hairspray” on and I’ll be sure to wake up!
Share something fun about your life! My daughters (Amanda, 20 and Emily, 17) are obsessed with Disney princesses. In fact, as soon as the movie “Frozen” was released, Amanda made costumes for them and they started doing birthday parties as Anna and Elsa. How many teenagers do you know who make $150/hour doing something legal and moral? So proud of them!
Follow Christine at @Im_Christine44.
Holly Celeste Fisk
Holly Celeste Fisk is an accomplished marketing pro with 20+ years of experience in B2B and B2C. She’s responsible for Content4Demand’s internal marketing efforts, managing everything from content creation and email marketing to events and sponsorships, blog publishing, website management and social media presence. When she’s not working, you’ll find her sliding into third at softball, buried in a book or practicing her Italian.