A Day In The Life Of Beth Watson: Digital Marketing and Product Officer

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Beth: Hello, my name is Beth and I am a Digital Marketing and Product Officer for a grief charity, and I do a mix of product and project management and content marketing. And this is my day in the life of a marketer! Okay. So on a good day – I don't do this every day – I start the day off with a walk around Clissold Park, which is my nearest park in Hackney, where I live, and it's just it's just great because I love seeing everybody get up and walk their dogs and stuff like that.

And then, because I'm working from home, it's nice to feel like I'm part of a community, you know? Also I am a full on podcast addict, so I need to walk as much as possible to make sure that I listen to as many podcasts as I can, because they are a huge part of my self-care and a huge part of my life, basically.

So today, as I walk, as soon as I finished this video, I'm going to put on "Maintenance Phase", which is one of my favorite podcasts. It's kind of like a science debunking podcast and today they're talking about sleep. So exciting! Once I get back from my little walk, I get a pot of coffee on. Very, very important for anyone who works in marketing or content marketing. Coffee must come first!

Okay, now we're ready to start the day properly. Okay, so I am fairly lucky in that I have a little office space in my flat in London, and I know that's a massive privilege because not everyone in London has room to put their laptop permanently. So, yeah. Then I'll start work and something I'm currently working on is we, so we launched our brand new website in September, and that involved also launching a whole lot of brand new content.

So something I do is monitor the progress of all this content using ahrefs every week. And to kind of provide myself with a little bit of a summary of how that content is doing, I will also then take a look at our website form entries, and analyze how our new content plan is having an effect on conversions.

Also, a unique problem we face in the charity sector is that – it's not like being in e-commerce or being in all kinds of other content marketing games, like where the end goal is always traffic and conversions, traffic conversions, traffic conversions – in the charity sector, when we make new content, we want it to inform the user. But we have one eye on the fact that we are a charity.

The charity I work for provides services, provides free counseling, and the demand for those services actually really outweighs the supply. We don't have enough counselors to provide everybody who wants it with counseling all the time. So when I'm creating new content for the website, I have to have in mind: what's my call-to-action? Where am I signposting? If I'm going to create a really popular piece of content that I know is going to work really well, which you know, of course I do all the time because I'm excellent. But if I'm going to create a really popular piece of content, I have to have in mind, well, where am I directing this user to get the help they need? If I direct them to our helpline services, but it's out of hours, are they going to get the support they need at that moment?

If I direct them to local support in the area, how can I guarantee that that area hasn't got a massive wait list? So it's, it's less about driving conversions all the time, and it's more about thinking where are the call-to-actions sending this user? So what we tend to do is we end our kind of content, our self-help content with multiple calls-to-action.

So that could be call the helpline, or keep reading more about this kind of grief support, self-help stuff that we offer. It kind of, it's almost like you're deliberately breaking some of the golden rules of content marketing, golden rules of SEO, so that you can ensure that the person who's reading this content is going to get the help they need.

Obviously it's been a really long time, the pandemic working from home, et cetera, et cetera. And it is hard to stay motivated during that time. One thing that I keep in mind, at all times, is the service user. In this case, working for a charity, that's really easy. You can think, oh, actually the thing I'm writing, the content that I'm creating, the website that I'm improving, the H tags, I'm optimizing, whatever.

These things are directly leading people to get the support they need with grief. And grief is such a time when everyone thinks they know what it's about. They think they know seven stages of grief. I'm in denial, I'm angry, et cetera. But what professional grief counselors know, and what people who've been through

it know is that it's a lot more messy and a lot more complicated than that. And so when I'm writing content for my organization, I'm thinking all the time, this is going to be read by someone in need. And that keeps me motivated every single time. And so when I'm writing new content, which is, I generally try and get two to three new ideas every month – during our website redesign, that was like 100 new ideas,

because we wanted to launch with as much new content as possible – but yeah, two to three new ideas a month is really, really good, I think. So my process generally starts by analyzing competitors. So I will plug some competitor websites into our SEO keyword analysis tool. Find out if there's any words they are ranking for that we are not. You know, copying is the best form of flattery.

And then I'll have a look and see if there's any gaps in that content, and see if there's anything that is missing that we could possibly produce. Another place that I look for ideas is talking to our volunteers about the things that they find really helpful in session. For example, there are a number of different grief models that they use in session.

For example, the idea of "Growing around your grief" is a really big thing among grief counselors. This is the idea that you're never going to get over the fact that you've lost somebody. That's not really a thing. But you're instead going to fill your life with different things. So this is a common concept that I heard all the time when I first started working here, "Growing around grief", "Growing around grief".

And I was like, okay, we need information, because the general public don't know about this. So, then I put this idea to paper, found out some Frequently Asked Questions, used some keyword research, and now it's a really, really popular page on the website. Okay, so once I've done the morning, done some content analysis, had a look at website conversion through our web form, I will obviously stop for lunch.

Right now I'm eating some leftover pizza for my lunch. So as the day gets on, I generally start to feel, you know, a bit more tired, a bit more like I need to get some exercise. So I generally finish the day with a swim! So swimming is something that I do a lot throughout the week.

I either go Monday lunchtime, or I do after work on a Wednesday or a Friday. And I'm really, really lucky because the pool is just the other side of the park from my house. And so I can just pop there whenever I like, when I'm working from home. And I'm just getting my swim bag ready right now! Okay. So I've got the Speedo swimming costume, the goggles, the wash bag, the bag, the Goggle case, which I'm very proud of, and a jumper for the way home.

So I hope you enjoyed my day in the life of a Content Marketer! It's time for me to sign off now, go and have a swim, get some exercise, and then chill out. So, thanks so much! Bye!