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Matt Stewart is Director of Marketing at Stericycle Environmental Solutions. He is responsible for marketing communications activities, including company websites, email, social media, advertising and public relations efforts. Prior to joining Stericycle, Matt held key marketing positions in the restaurant, retail and entertainment industries, working for brands such as Cooper’s Hawk Winery and Restaurants, Sears Holdings and Caesars Entertainment.
Interviewed by Shwetha Mahesh
/ / How has the content marketing function evolved in your company over the past few years?
At Stericycle Environmental Solutions, we’re striving to position ourselves as compliance and regulatory experts. Having said that, we provide our customers – who generate regulated waste in virtually any industry (from manufacturers to Fortune 500 retailers) – with value by curating relevant content for their specific areas of expertise.
/ / What challenges do you face while planning your content marketing strategy?
Achieving the correct balance between relevant content, timing and the channels being used can often be a challenge for any marketing team. However, we focus on being proactive and building strategies for each one of these areas to help achieve that balance.
/ / What are the things you keep in mind before devising a content marketing strategy?
It’s crucial to establish and align on KPIs, and then build a cadence of check-ins to ensure you can accurately measure progress. It’s also important to establish goals. Our overarching goal is to place the right message, to the right customer, at the right time.
/ / What tools and technologies do you use for content marketing?
We’re currently using a combination of tools to push content on the various channels (social, digital, email). These have helped us to understand our customers’ needs better and drive key KPIs like open rate, click-through rate and impressions higher.
/ / What are the different metrics you track to evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy?
Metrics will vary across different channels, but they all eventually lead back to customer engagement with the brand. Defining and aligning on these metrics is crucial for an organization to help analyze performance and guide strategy.
/ / Does content differ with respect to the channel of distribution? Which channels have you found to be most effective in reaching out to your customers?
Yes, content will differ across channels as a message that worked on a paid digital ad for a particular audience won’t necessarily have the same impact in an email campaign. We have found success in digital, social and email, and are exploring new channels and technologies to better serve our content strategy.
/ / Do you think it is better to have an in-house content marketing team or to outsource such services (including ideation, content creation and marketing)?
It’s a combination of both as each can bring different perspectives to the given areas and the alignment eventually helps to produce a more complete product.
/ / Despite having different stakeholders and different content repositories, how do you manage consistency (tone, language, brand voice, messaging, etc.) in your company’s content?
Communication and teaching are key to ensuring the teams are aligned and keep content consistent. We have put a system of checks and balances in place to ensure our content is consistent before it reaches the end user.
/ / How relevant is content marketing today, especially considering the abundance of content available to consumers?
Providing consumers relevant content is highly impactful as technology has enabled consumers to have many choices at their disposal. Offering customers value through targeted blog posts, newsletters and webinars are key differentiators that set brands apart in a very crowded marketplace.
/ / What are the trends/technologies that you think will drive content marketing in the future? How should businesses gear up for this?
We’ve already seen signs of brands leveraging automation and algorithms to provide consumers with relevant content through their preferred channel. Automating content curation across different platforms is a key trend many brands are likely to adopt, if they haven’t done so already. Businesses can prepare for this by identifying key resources and building content automation into their long-term planning.