Partnering with Words for Breakfast was the ‘missing piece’ of the sales puzzle for GrownUps.co.nz
GrownUps is a well-established and loved lifestyle website and social club dedicated to people over 50. With a unique monthly audience of over 100,000 people, maintaining fresh, relevant content is key to the site’s success. Like most media outlets, advertising and sponsored content are where GrownUps makes most of its revenue.
But Garth Hill, Manager of GrownUps, had a problem. Selling content marketing packages was one thing – getting content from his clients was another.
“Selling advertising for 10 years, I pitched and sold a lot of content packages, but a lot of that didn’t come off, because clients just didn’t know how they would get the writing done,” says Garth.
WFB was the solution.
“It’s nice to be able to take that stress away for clients,” says Garth. “They get to see and approve it all, they just don’t have to write it!”
Working with WFB, GrownUps could offer in-depth, specialist content to its audience on behalf of clients.
Garth says, in using WFB they’re “getting the benefits of a big publisher, but being an agency, it’s fast and flexible, which you need for this market. Every project starts with a professional content-planning session – it’s a slick service,” says Garth.
WFB manages the entire content-creation process directly with GrownUps clients, from sourcing information, conducting interviews where necessary right through to final approvals.
“It’s all seamless and working really well. It’s like having us all in the office, with the content team down one end of the room, except it’s all virtual,” he says.
Nick Marquet, Senior Digital Account Manager, says WFB’s work is reliable – he trusts us to get things done.
“It comes in 99.9% on brief and any changes required are made quickly and without any fuss.”
This leaves the GrownUps team free to focus on maintaining existing client relationships and building new ones.
The process always starts with WFB sitting down with new Grownups clients for a “nice, professional content planning session – it’s a slick service,” says Garth.
“Typically they’ll plan a year of content, making sure the GrownUps client’s business goals are woven in throughout,” he says.
While GrownUps have a pool of writers they use to commission light magazine-style content, WFB could bulk up the site with more comprehensive articles.
This helped keep audiences super-engaged, adding to GrownUps’ value as a marketing channel.
Thought leadership articles shared on LinkedIn and aimed at marketing managers also brought in leads.
Garth says making it easy for their clients to implement a content marketing strategy has been the ‘missing piece’ in their offering.
“We’ve seen some really good new sales come in, and this is one of the only things we’ve changed. It’s the same market and same marketing packages. All we’ve done is add in this solution and made the terms a bit more flexible for clients, so it’s a fair assumption to say that it’s helping.
“They’ve been fantastic – they can take that pain point away.”
And how are clients responding? Garth has an easy answer for that.
“Clients are given a three-month review option, with the ability to pull out. No one’s taken us up on that – so that’s a pretty good sign.”
