Duration: April 2020-August 2021
Project: Editorial Content Strategy Overhaul
Scope of Work: I joined the Brand Marketing team at JD Finish Line in the spring of 2020 and, alongside my duties managing brand social media channels, my director tasked me with ownership of JD Sports and Finish Line’s customer-facing blogs, JD Style and The Fresh Press.
As the blogs were not major conversion-driving channels, my director’s only guidance was “make a cool product people will want to visit frequently.” Combining more than a decade of digital journalism experience as well as a deep knowledge of the product, the culture surrounding it, and our target demographic’s interests, I started by digging in to Google Analytics data from the past two years to establish what content resonated, what didn’t, what was required to support business needs, and what underperformed and could conceivably be trimmed to free up resources.
Ultimately the content strategy I executed was twofold: I took over content creation for all business requirements (supporting product launches and brand partnerships) while utilizing a small monthly budget to engage freelance writers who created non-commerce-driving editorial content to help increase brand authority and credibility within the space.
The results ultimately spoke for themselves. The Fresh Press, a more established editorial property, experienced 101% traffic growth year over year and recorded more than 1 million page views per month five times in the 12 months I had ownership over the channel. By utilizing some simple on-page SEO tactics, I was able to achieve significant search referral traffic growth. From a personal standpoint, I was most proud of being able to shine the spotlight on some up-and-coming writers whose work was otherwise limited to channels with smaller audiences and written for smaller fees.
By monitoring my freelance contributors’ social media channels, I encountered significant positive feedback and not a small amount of surprise at the depth of topics and discussion that was being published on an e-commerce retailer’s blog. To that end, we were punching grossly above our weight and competing not with fellow retailers in the space, but dedicated industry publications.
Adrian Crawford 