How 3 Companies Use Contently Talent to Engage Their Key Stakeholders

The life of a content marketer is a series of uphill battles. It’s hard enough to secure budget for content. Then comes the task of devising and implementing a content strategy that has clear goals and a business impact. By the time brands get to the part of their journey where they actually get to create content, they’ve often exhausted a ton of energy and resources.

But outlining a great content strategy is only the first step in a content marketing journey. This may seem intuitive, but time and again brands come to us because they need help executing. Their thoughtful strategies haven’t lived up to expectations because the content didn’t resonate with its intended audience.

At Contently, we take a lot of pride in our talent network of award-winning journalists, videographers, designers, photographers, and a host of other creatives who help our clients tell their stories. Below are three examples of enterprise companies that used Contently talent to create original content that engaged their most important stakeholders.

Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH)

Stakeholders: Women with a net worth over $10 million

For Brown Brothers Harriman, finding a better way to engage women of high net worth wasn’t only a matter of pushing for gender equality in wealth management—it was a way to target an untapped market. While women’s wealth was often the topic of conversation in financial advisory meetings, BBH found that, in many cases, women were overlooked when there was a man in the room (even in the case they were discussing that woman’s wealth).

The oldest private bank in the country then did something untraditional: It launched a Center for Women & Wealth and created a print magazine to engage directly with women worth over $10 million. Part of the magazine initiative was to use visuals to inspire confidence among these women to not only seek more financial information, but also better communicate their existing financial knowledge in advisory meetings.

BBH turned to Contently to publish a series of infographics that would bring these women-focused stories to life. One infographic, “Bridging the Funding Gap,” laid out statistics that demonstrated the discrepancy between profits generated by women-owned businesses and the amount of early-stage funding that goes to females.

Representatives at BBH worked closely with a designer from Contently’s freelance network to develop the concept, gather statistics, and generate the design.

According to Adrienne Penta, executive director of BBH’s Center for Women & Wealth: “Contently added a lot of value when we started thinking about how to visualize the story that we were trying to tell, and how to tell it in a compelling way.”

BlackRock

Stakeholders: People aged 50+

Historically, investment banks do not have a reputation for creating warm and fuzzy human interest stories. But for BlackRock, going in a new direction with its content marketing was a great opportunity. After mining BlackRock’s analytics for trends about the company blog, Ann Hynek, the VP of content and innovation, realized that stories about people outperformed those that focused solely on investment figures.

With a new initiative to reach people nearing retirement, Hynek and her team published a report that profiled six retired couples in different countries around the world. BlackRock worked with Contently’s global talent network to produce “How the World Retires,” a report that featured interactive maps, photography, a retirement calculator, and longform journalism.

“That’s why we leveraged Contently,” Hynek explained. “The [talent] manager basically said, ‘Give me the list of the countries that you want to explore, and I’ll see if we have freelancers.’ And sure enough, she [had] freelancers in those six countries.”

athenahealth

Stakeholders: Health care providers

athenahealth set out with an ambitious goal: “Make health care work as it should.”

Sitting on more than 90 million patient records, the company, which provides electronic health records and other cloud-based services to medical groups, had access to troves of data that could improve the patient experience. Leaders at athenahealth quickly realized that the data could also explain the network of patient records to its medical stakeholders.

The challenge was turning this data into stories that busy health care professionals would take the time to read. The first step was to hire a small team of experienced journalists and videographers to launch athenahealth’s digital publication, athenaInsight. Then, athenahealth worked with Contently to access a team of freelance writers who could interpret the network’s data and write engaging stories on complex medical topics.

“We need great storytelling,” said John Fox, executive director of content at athenahealth. “That’s pretty much all it is.”