Contently Case Story: How Better Weekdays Upped Its Efficiency and Redefined Content ROI

Contently Case Stories is a series highlighting some of Contently’s most successful clients.

In the tech world, small teams run short on something all professionals wish they had more of: time.

At Better Weekdays, the career services startup that helps universities pair students with jobs, founder Chris Motley wanted to invest in content marketing. With a team of three, he just didn’t have the capacity to do it well. He needed a solution that would provide the technology, talent, and strategy to run a full-fledged content operation.

“We pulled the trigger on Contently when we had three people in our company because it was something I could literally run in ten minutes per week,” said the CEO. “I’m an okay writer, but I don’t have the time, and it’s not the same as people who do this for a living. The quality of the content and its structured approach is why I went with Contently.”

With Contently, Motley gained access to over 70,000 professional freelance journalists and multimedia creatives, each specialized in their respective field. The integration of this freelancer network left him time to focus on the other important responsibilities of a CEO.

And time, Motley said, echoing the old cliché, is money. “The thing ROI doesn’t account for is time—and that is the key point.”

Since May 2015, Better Weekdays has published over 100 long- and shortform stories on the Better Weekdays Blog, such as, “What Students Really Need from Career Centers” and “How to Help Unemployed Recent Grads and Alums.” Already, they’re making an impact. While online readers generally lose attention after just eight seconds, the average Better Weekdays reader stays engaged for over two and a half minutes—over 18 times the amount spent on general online content.

According to Motley, Better Weekdays’ stories are valuable because they cover a wide range of topics from the perspective of specialized freelancers—everything from an article aimed at helping students look for work in a marine lab, to one that explains what makes an engineering student competitive in Silicon Valley. “I don’t find ROI in writing content that adds to the millions of things already out there on job search,” he explained. “The only way to ‘skin the cat’ is to curate content specifically for an individual.”

Motley’s strategy is to use high-quality content to empower the entire organization, not just the marketing department. The power of storytelling, he explains, affects everything from a blog post to an investor pitch deck. “At the end of the day, it’s all connected.”

As Motley and his team expand their content program, he remains committed to investing in technology and talent services that promote efficient, high-quality storytelling.

“When you’re an entrepreneur in technology, and you’re building something out of basically nothing,” Motley said, “the only way you can get people to support you is by telling stories.”

And one of the biggest places he’s seeing support is from his investors.

“My investors know they will see the value of content strategy because when you’re trying to educate, inspire, and engage a segment of the market, the most efficient way to do it is through storytelling.”