How do you continually create solid, relevant content when your small team is already overtaxed? The team at the intelligent test automation company, mabl, recently struggled with this issue.
Feeding the Beast Takes a Lot of Work
With a five-person marketing team—only one of whom was focused full-time on content—the company struggled to meet its ever-growing content needs. “I’m always in need of more content,” said Katie Staveley, Head of Marketing. “With constant demands for different types of marketing and sales materials—from case studies and infographics to blog posts, ebooks, and white papers—feeding the beast takes a lot of work.”
“Our content creation process was slow,” Katie explained. “We had a ton of ideas but simply didn’t have the bandwidth or resources to get stuff done quickly enough. And like so many other businesses, our subject matter experts were focused on their own daily tasks—so asking them to create content consistently wasn’t an option. Our lean team needed a way to boost our content output capabilities.”
Data-Driven Content Decisions, Accelerated Content Timelines
Having worked with nDash at her previous job, Katie once again turned to the company and its freelance writers to help augment her team and expand her content program. And just as she anticipated, nDash was able to provide immediate value.
“nDash has helped us to move faster, accelerating timelines for content in a way that allowed us to be more responsive,” she said. “For example, if the data showed us that an ebook was getting great traction, we could immediately act on that by creating additional content— infographics, a blog post series, etc.—to help capitalize on that interest. Before working with nDash, we would see the data, but we simply wouldn’t have the capability to react to it in a meaningful way. nDash is an enormous value add for me, serving as an extension of my team.”
mabl Gets the Maximum Mileage out of Every Asset
Working with nDash has let Katie and her team focus on strategizing and building core assets that serve as content pillars—and fodder for additional efforts. “nDash has helped us get much more mileage out of every piece of content,” said Katie. “Case in point: we developed and hosted a big event last fall, and one of our goals was to ensure that all of the content we created for the event had a life well after the event day passed. By handing off the recordings from the event to our nDash freelancers, we were able to create numerous blog posts, infographics, ebooks, etc.—effectively creating an entire library of content out of the event presentations.”
nDash writers have also helped bring life and freshness to mabl’s brand voice. “When we have a single individual writing the content for every asset, it’s easy for those assets to start to sound a little canned. nDash’s freelance writers can create new, fresh-sounding content that still follows our content guidelines,” Katie said.
Beyond Freelance Writing Services
In addition to taking advantage of nDash’s freelance writing services, Katie and her team also used nDash freelancers for Japanese translations. “We have two people on staff who are fluent in Japanese—one is an engineer in the US, the other is in sales in Japan—and we quickly realized that asking them to do one-off translations wasn’t a sustainable process,” Katie admitted. “We worked with another translating company, but the process was arduous, and the results were less than stellar. From translating blog posts and press releases to terms of use and our privacy policy, we’ve been delighted with nDash’s accuracy and have been impressed by how seamless and easy the process has been.”
Content that’s Ready-to-Go
Katie credited nDash’s vetting process with delivering truly professional freelance writers. “It’s hard to find outstanding writers who will be able to hit the ground running, providing me with immediate value. I feel confident with nDash writers because I know they’ve been vetted, not just given a cursory grammar test. In my experience working with freelancers outside of nDash, I’d consider it a “win” if the writer got me 80% of the way there. My nDash freelancers consistently delivered work that’s ready-to-go with nothing more than a quick glance or occasional edit. It’s a huge time savings for me,” Katie said.
Katie concluded, “I get so much value and a huge return on investment from using nDash—I can’t believe everybody’s not using them. Any B2B team can and should be benefitting from nDash, particularly smaller teams.”
What Can You Learn from mabl?
The main takeaway from mabl’s experience is that nDash’s freelance writers provide a scalable, high-quality way to augment a lean internal team. By focusing your team’s efforts on ideation, strategy, and creating pillar content—and allowing vetted freelancers to handle the derivative works—you can squeeze much more value out of every piece of content you create.
Taking this approach, you’ll be able to react more quickly to both data trends and content requests without overburdening your in-house content providers.
About mabl
mabl is an intelligent test automation company that empowers high-velocity software development teams to integrate automated end-to-end testing into the entire development lifecycle. mabl users benefit from a unified platform for easily creating, executing, and maintaining reliable tests that deliver high-quality applications faster. That’s why customer-centric brands like Splunk, NCR, JetBlue, Dollar Shave Club, Charles Schwab, and many other enterprises rely on mabl for testing their business-critical apps. For more information, visit their site today.
