I served as WCIV-TV’s executive producer of digital content for five years (2017-2022). I was responsible for managing the station’s website and social media content, and managing the four-person team producing that content.

During my tenure and continuing through today, the station’s online brands have maintained an upward trajectory of unprecedented success, with website traffic and social media engagement increasing annually to give the station an authoritative share of the voice in a competitive media market.

The digital content manager role was simultaneously the most challenging and rewarding of my career.

It was a period of significant professional growth. Through it I learned how to effectively manage a team in pursuit of both brand goal and individual success.

I also learned entirely new skills related to Search Engine Optimization, digital analytics and digital content marketing.

This education and growth helped propel us from an afterthought to a model of successful strategy in our own company as we quickly surpassed local competitors.

SUCCESSES

Website Traffic

By the end of my five-year tenure, the annual number of visitors to our station’s website had grown to an average of 9.4 million users per year, up from a yearly average of only 2.8 million users during the five previous years. Crucially, our growing user base began to reflect significant increase in brand loyalty. Returning users increased from an average of 490,000 to more than 1.64 million repeat visitors annually. Direct traffic to the website increased from an average of 641,000 direct visits per year to an average of more than 2.47 million. Other KPI’s demonstrating the enormous growth of our website: Yearly pageviews jumped to an average of 32 million from 11.5 million under predecessors, and video views increased to an average of 2.4 million from only 707,000 in the half-decade prior.

Social Media Engagement

Our social media audience and engagement grew exponentially under my leadership. We consistently outperformed local competitors who had more well-established followings and larger staffs. These days, we’re firmly in the No. 2 ranking behind our top competitor after years in fourth place, and perpetually breathing down their necks.

As one example of success my team achieved, I’d offer the station’s performance on Facebook in 2019. We ended the year ranked No. 1 among Charleston news media in three out of four major KPI’s. Our audience interaction rate (.3%), follower growth (+44,500) and video views (67.9M) all exceed our primary competitor, only falling short in total engagements (4.8M>3.3M) — this despite having 60% fewer followers. Still, we set the station’s current record for annual Facebook engagements, and our stats in all four KPI’s were higher than our third- and fourth-place competitors combined.

Facebook was the No. 1 single source of referral traffic to our website (38%) for years, making it a no-brainer to devote the bulk of our focus and resources there. The return on investment demonstrated in analytics consistently supported a “Facebook first” approach. However, algorithm changes in 2020 sent Facebook engagement into a tailspin. Fortunately, I’d built a savvy, motivated team around me allowing us to quickly reassess our social strategy and pivot to increased ROI opportunities on other platforms.

We took our lumps in the late summer and fall of 2020, but not standing still. We got busy building out our YouTube page, diversifying on Instagram and eventually finding ways to incorporate TikTok — all in an effort to truly embrace a 24-hour, multiplatform online news ecosystem. We also buckled down on significantly improving SEO and more effectively utilizing our No. 2 traffic referral source: organic search.

Search Engine Optimization

Search referrals by 2020 had increased to become a significant external traffic driver for our online content. In late 2017 when I stepped into the digital manager role, search accounted for about 21% of traffic. By the end, it was up to 25%, with average search referrals increasing from 775K to over 2.5M annually. While Facebook traffic fell off a cliff in 2020, search traffic continued to climb. Knowing we were already doing something right on that front, I encouraged my team to make SEO their top priority, taking extra time to make a series of small but potentially lucrative tweaks to each story we published in hopes of squeezing out more value than normal and making up ground lost from Facebook’s philosophical changes.

Tweaks we made to optimize our website content for search engines included:

Frontloading headlines and page titles with high-ranking and intuitive search keywords appealing to both human readers and search engine crawlers.
Enriching the content’s URL with additional topic- and location-specific keywords in hopes of boosting the article’s search ranking.
Increasing use of “outline” or “list” formatting in stories to allow for heading tags, a tactic demonstrated in the structure of this very page. The addition of sub-headings increases keyword density while making it easier for search crawlers to summarize content for readers.
Revamping “related content” linking strategy within articles to emphasize integrated hyperlinks in keyword-heavy sentences within the story.
Adding metadata descriptions to every piece of media on the website, boosting the keyword density in a way that diversifies potential content discovery and entry points through search.

PHILOSOPHIES

Audiences reflect the brand, its employees & their values.

Beyond boring corporate mission statements, every company has its own unique culture and identity shaped by the diverse personalities, histories, ideals and values of the company’s leadership and staff. Whether it’s a physical item or media, the “product” a brand creates will reflect those traits and will largely attract an audience that reflects the same. To that end …

You can’t beat a competitor by being them.

Improving upon good ideas and emulating successful strategies from competitors is a given, but there’s a fine line between adaptation and cheap imitation. Authenticity matters. Why would a consumer come to you for a product exactly the same as something they can already get elsewhere? So don’t try to be something you’re not. Your audience doesn’t want you to be your competitor. They like you for you. Lean into that. Be different. Be yourself

Meet your audience where they are.

The most compelling story reaches no one if it’s not shared in a place the audience can discover and interact with it. That means your brand needs to be present and active on the same platforms as your prospective audience. It’s a dual mission of actively seeking your audience through social media while using SEO to drop metaphorical map pins helping them find you — even when they didn’t know they were looking for you.

A brand cannot succeed online by behaving differently than its audience.

Presence on social media is a must, but if you’re not doing anything to meaningfully differentiate yourself from the infinite competition online — you’re wasting your time. What seems to set brands apart is behaving less like a “brand” and more like a “real person.” Thus, it’s essential to be in tune with evolving content trends and format preferences among your audience across various platforms. Relevancy and creating demand for your brand depends on being able then to authentically and naturally integrate those behaviors and preferences into content.

SKILLS

DATA VISUALIZATIONS

WEBSITE TRAFFIC

FACEBOOOK ENGAGEMENT

YOUTUBE VIEWS & SUBSCRIBERS

What makes good content?

An essay on the crossroads of digital analytics and quality journalism

Through my on-the-job education as a journalist turned yeoman digital marketer, I was forced to reevaluate what I thought I knew about good content. A quick study of the station’s online performance statistics showed me the Venn Diagram of good journalism and good content isn’t the singular circle journalists adapting to the digital space may naively hope.

Good journalism should be a guarantee from any reputable newsroom, but there’s no guarantee people will consume it — on TV, online or otherwise. That speaks to the running joke in the news business about how silly, soft news and tabloid, clickbait journalism often outperforms hard-hitting, useful reporting. The best stories don’t always perform the best when the goal is to get people to read or watch them.

This dilemma raised for me several questions about the intrinsic value of news content as an online product and service. Can we reliably define and quantify “good journalism” through that lens? The objective attributes of good reporting and storytelling in the eyes of journalists may (and often do) differ from what’s good in the consumer’s eyes. Wants, needs and expectations vary, as they’re influenced by a bottomless quarry of intangibles.

Quality therefore is indeed subjective. Sometimes the stories we think are good and important won’t be a hit, and there’s not a good reason why. I quickly realized the folly in trying to unravel that mystery for the sake of informing content strategy. Again, if the newsroom is worth its salt, the raw quality of the news product will always be there. You can’t make people care; rather, the digital content manager’s job is to make sure the audience has the opportunity to care.

There stands the true hurdle for journalists in the digital landscape: reaching the audience. Enter digital analytics. After taking on the digital content manager role, I was able to quickly spot trends leading me to a powerful realization about the objective quality of content. Good performance — and therefore good content — is often circumstantial, and circumstances can be replicated.

From format of the content to how it’s marketed, many important circumstances influencing success are in the producer’s control. Thus, an effective digital content manager’s role in a news environment is no different than in other industries: Enhance the brand’s product (the news) and leverage circumstances in the content’s favor so it has better footing against competing interests and products online.

But where to start? Turning “good journalism” into a “good content” begins by using analytics to determine where your audience is spending its time online, adapting your marketing strategy, then modifying your product to make it more accessible and appealing to the audience as they “shop” for content. If all goes well, you’ll get a click, a video view, a “Like,” a “Follow,” a “Share” and another and another until you’ve recruited loyal “customers” who return regularly to your brand as a trusted source for their news.

In a newsroom setting, the mission for an effective digital content team then becomes developing an intimate knowledge of what “works” on any given platform, and then adapting the work of the talented journalists surrounding them to be powerful and enticing content for the station’s various online platforms. Practically speaking, it also means digital journalists must have video editing, graphic design and creative writing skills to go with journalistic chops.

Put into action, an investigative report might be transformed into a Tweet thread, or a slideshow of captioned images and graphics on Instagram. An emotional and cinematic human-interest story might become a minute-long TikTok or YouTube Short. Breaking news may end up as a Facebook Live, a Tweet or an Instagram Story. It’s situational and depends on what your observations and data have to say about your audience’s behavior and preferences over time.

Website & Social Media Manager