How to turn a company blog into an award-winning website

This story may sound familiar to you.

A small team writes and publishes content for a company blog. The Company does not know what impact, if any, the Content may have on visitors. The team just keeps creating and publishing content, and no one knows if, let alone how, it will ultimately lead to action.

At Ally Financial, it was the beginning of an innovative story that ultimately led to a win for Best Content-Driven Website and Best Use of Interactive Content Content Marketing Awards 2024. It also led to this Jim Bentubo B2B Content Marketer of the Year 2024 Award.

The story received its first new chapter in 2021. Jim, who was director of social content at Ally, saw that the blog was both literal (it was on a separate platform from the main website) and figurative (he published a blog unrelated to the brand was an article about the best bumper stickers).

“I would like to accept that. “It’s a big challenge,” says the former journalist.

That’s what he and the Ally team did. Jim became Senior Director of Content Production and it became “Blog.” conversational, a data-driven content hub.

First-party data reveals opportunities

“We’re in such a unique situation that (our clients) are literally telling us what they’re saving for and what their life goals are,” Jim explains.

This is done through a feature of Ally’s savings and spending accounts. Customers can create Bucket E.g. a vacation, a home, higher education, etc. and set an overall goal. They can then automatically or manually save a portion of their income for this area.

Jim wanted to use this and other data to develop a personalized “blog” strategy that would connect all the threads under the Ally.com umbrella.

He and another Ally employee dug into first-party data to understand what people were spending money on, saving on, etc. They overlaid search trends, social conversations, and third-party research to provide perspective , from which one can think content.

“Our leadership gave us a lot of freedom and said, ‘We agree with your direction.’ “You are the experts, build this,” he says, noting that the original planning took place over 18 months.

The audience thinks about uses, not products

Many financial sites explain what a mortgage is, but the Conversational team sees their role differently. “People don’t say, ‘Oh man, I can’t wait to get a mortgage,'” Jim says. “They say, ‘I’m saving for a house.”

Therefore, Ally sees customers’ goals as savings buckets for houses, weddings, travel, etc. They also serve as comprehensive topics for Conversational. “There is a lot of potential in personalization and the ability to place content closer to our products,” says Jim.

For example, the personalization he’s referring to isn’t just homeownership content aimed at mortgage seekers. Instead, Ally tailors the content to the trip.

For example, if a person starts a Wedding Savings Basket, content based on their progress will appear. So once they’re close, Ally knows they’re probably about to get married, so she provides content about tip sellers.

Someone with a lot of money to spend on home savings wants to know how to choose the right real estate agent at the beginning of the trip, but doesn’t worry about closing costs until the end of the trip.

While this advancement lends itself well to personalizing wedding and home ownership content, the Ally team has found that audiences with travel savings buckets operate differently. Most people vacation before they have saved 100% of their goal. Because the journey is not linear, Ally delivers a mix of content that might resonate at any point in their travel savings journey.

Ally calls this the “nurture nature of content” – Conversational nurtures its readers to become customers. Someone who reads an article on the Data-Driven Content Hub and visits an Ally product page is twice as likely to become a customer than someone who only visits a product page.

In its first year, Conversationaly received nearly 4 million page views.

Publishing partners help Ally find an audience

But to get there, the team had to develop a strategy to reach the audience. Not only do potential visitors eagerly await an update to the company blog, so the Conversational team needed a strong sales plan to reach people as they think about money and important life milestones.

By partnering with media brands, Ally went to the places where these audiences were already consuming relevant content. The team worked with Condé Nast’s Traveler to reach the travel savings audience and Architectural Digest for the home savings audience. The company turned to Dotdash Meredith to reach the brides audience for wedding savers and the parents property to connect with growing families.

In these co-branded distribution partnerships, Ally relied on the publisher’s expertise and credibility to create the relevant content that Ally published on the Conversational website. The publisher promoted the content on its social media channels and directed audiences to the Conversational website. After visitors read this article, Ally was able to provide content about how its savings products could help them achieve their goal.

Jim says this co-branding idea isn’t common. Many times the publishers slammed the door on his idea. They wanted their social media followers to end up on their websites, not Ally’s.

But Jim knew that the best outcome for Ally was for the publisher’s social media audience to visit the Conversational website and engage with Ally’s content ecosystem.

Ally is building a Conversational team across the brand

Started conversationally as a team of two with the support of an agency partner who designed the wireframes and conceptual elements of the website. An internal engineering team performed site development work and ensured that Conversational was connected to the Ally site.

The content hub had a soft launch in 2022 and the fully integrated website was launched in 2023. The team now consists of seven people – mainly content strategists and editors with specialist areas such as deposits and investments, house and brand, as well as sales channels Meta, Pinterest and Reddit. They provide information and work with an external agency that creates the content.

The Conversational team looks at content through the lens of an end-to-end consumer journey. “We are paying more attention to how the content is displayed. Will people see it? If they see it, will it result in something that is beneficial for both the consumer and Ally? The team focuses on ensuring every part has a logical path to our product.”

Although an external agency produces the majority of the content, an internal team member is dedicated to writing for brands and telling the money stories related to their corporate partnerships like Charlotte Major League Soccer team And NASCAR driver Alex Bowman.

Although the Conversational team is small, many people at Ally play a role in the content and advertising.

The Conversational editorial team meets quarterly. Department heads, technical managers and marketing managers find out about the data-based editorial plans and share their perspective. This ongoing approval of content means that the Conversational team does not receive requests for individual pieces of content from different departments.

In addition, a two-day content planning meeting is planned. The research team presents the trends they see in consumer mindsets, spending habits, and other subject areas. The search team looks at what causes spikes and what people are talking about. Social listening is also included in the conversation.

With all this data, the team is better informed to plan the content.

For example, at one point in these planning meetings they learned that one of the main reasons people used their credit cards was because of cruises. Although Ally published widely about travel, he had not studied the cruise industry extensively. The next quarter was the day.

The Conversational team also analyzes the bigger picture, looking for overlap between what’s happening and where people are today, as well as expected events like the US election, to create a content plan that will resonate with audiences.

In conversation, he chases a better North Star

Conversational uses a data-driven, executive-backed editorial plan that shows how corporate blogs can evolve into a dynamic and engaging website.

“All too often, brands find themselves searching for SEO terms that ultimately may not reflect their desires, the benefit to the consumer, or what they offer as a service,” says Jim. “Our guiding principle is to offer personalization whenever we can so that it is relevant to the audience. But ultimately it puts someone on the path to the right product or solution, so it’s mutually beneficial too.”

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute