Off the Page with Amanda Weller

In her Off the Page interview, Amanda Weller, director of marketing and communications at Wellth, shares why content marketers need a crash course in sales and why video content isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Meet Amanda Weller

Amanda Weller leads the marketing and communications team at Wellth, a digital health company that improves adherence in chronic disease populations by blending the science of behavioral economics with an appreciation of human nature.

Amanda is a writer by education and at heart, but unlike the stereotypical content creator, she doesn’t hesitate to execute.

“As a writer, I have a major affinity for good content and good grammar,” Amanda says. “But I also enjoy executing projects and closing them out.”.

Amanda is also a self-professed “fan of collecting leads,” a professional hobby that will serve her well as she takes on her new role of director of marketing and communications at one of the fastest-growing digital health companies across the country.

What recent piece of content made you jealous?

HIMSS Media: "The 2021 Healthcare Technology Marketing Survey Report."

It does a great job of establishing need for and efficacy of their services in a way that brings significant educational value to me as a reader in my own role. This report was sent out following a webinar, and it sealed the deal on my commitment to register for their other webinars and subscribe for other content.

What content marketing skill or tool are you learning this year?

This year, I've been working on improving how we choose our SEO keywords.

It's easy to choose what you think they should be, or what you'd like to them to be, but without the right analytics know-how, it's easy to fill your content with keywords that are driving all the wrong traffic to your site.

(Anybody else struggled with inbound leads that turn out to be students working on some paper or project? Just me?) It's been an interesting learning goal for 2021.

Which other brand’s content do you admire most?

In healthcare, there's a joke that our marketing tends to be ten years behind the times. While I think that's unfair for a number of really amazing healthcare orgs, I will also admit that my favorite content crush is outside the healthcare industry: I fell in love with Nerdwallet's content marketing platform when I was working in marketing for a bank early in my marketing career.

The quality of content they're able to not only produce, but update regularly so that everything you read has been updated with stats within the past six months or so is incredible.

And while their monetization strategy won't work across industries, they do a great job keeping it educational while optimizing opportunities for profit through affiliate links and CTAs.

If you could recommend one book to every content marketer, what would it be?

Victor Schwab's How to Write a Good Advertisement.

Most content marketers I meet fall into two main categories: sales people disguised as content marketers, or creative writers disguised as marketers. And between those two categories, I often meet more of the second.

As someone who graduated with degrees in music and English, I understand the allure of taking a job with "writer" in the title because you knew you didn't want to teach for a living, but weren't sure what else to do with your English or writing degree. And I think that those people make awesome content writers on my team because they bring life, a strong editor's eye, and an endless supply of ways to refresh content.

However, having a solid understanding of sales copy is needed to learn how people buy and how to optimize content for conversions. I love How to Write a Good Advertisement because it teaches those basics of copywriting within the context of advertisements—one of the shortest pieces (and often most difficult) pieces of content around.

If you can learn to master the hook and sell in a seven- to fourteen-word headline and ad, you'll be able to write subject lines that get emails opened, CTAs that get clicks, and landing pages that get conversions.

Which individual or organization would you love to collaborate with on a content project?

The National Health Care for the Homeless Council has done so much to support better care for patients experiencing homelessness and get them the care and housing they need for their physical and behavioral health conditions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated wealth gaps and lead to higher rates of evictions and homelessness, but stigmas surrounding homeless populations continue.

I'd love to work with NHCHC on a project that addressed those stigmas, clarified misconceptions about homeless populations, and advocated for funding to support programs like those with the NHCHC.

What don’t non-content marketers understand about content?

A common misconception I come across is that content marketing is synonymous with sales content.

While it's true that most content marketers do double duty, creating sell sheets, web content, decks, program overviews, etc., content marketing is about supporting long-term organizational growth by building brand and thought leadership with education-first content.

What part of the content-marketing workflow do you wish went faster?

Final approvals.

No matter where, or with whom, I've worked, that last 10% of a piece of content always takes the longest. Whether it's working with a partner's communications team to get approval for logos, getting those last little design tweaks just perfect, or doing a "final" reading through something sixteen times and finding a new typo or missing footnote each time, that finalization step seems to take as long as the rest of the project sometimes!

What do you consider the most underrated type of content?

I'm a big fan of a thought leadership piece.

Getting a big name from a third party organization to speak to something tangental to your organization, without overly selling any product, can bring a lot of credibility quickly in a single article. Just make sure you've mentioned the piece was a collaborative effort and link back to your site at the bottom or in the author's byline.

What type of content marketing do you secretly hope goes extinct soon?

I don't love video content.

It's expensive, time consuming, and inflexible once it's completed, which makes it hard to reuse and refresh in the constantly evolving healthcare industry.

That being said, with more people working from home with the pandemic, videos are becoming more popular (no more hurrying to mute your laptop when video audio starts and you're surrounded by coworkers), so I know they're unfortunately likely here to stay.

Which content marketing talent would you most like to have?

Better marketing automation skills, and the ability to enjoy doing said marketing automation tasks!

What is your most treasured content marketing tool?

Data.

Whether you get it from Pardot, Hubspot, Google Analytics, Marketo—when it comes to content marketing, it's easy to get caught up in the brilliance of your own creativity. Or to make excuses that it's impossible to objectively judge what writing is good and which is not.

However, my experience is that such excuses don't fly with execs, and it's important to be able to prove the value of your work in driving web or social media traffic.

Data that tracks sales team usage of your collateral also offers valuable insight into what content efforts are working—and which aren't worth continuing moving forward.

What do you most value in your teammates?

Forgiveness, especially with the little things.

We all make mistakes—or miss typos in content (after being reviewed 50 times!)—and a team where forgiveness is run-of-the mill fosters an environment of safe learning, helps newer/less-experienced team members feel more confident in accepting stretch projects and trying new things, and boosts accountability as employees are more willing to own up to mistakes and ask for help rather than hide them out of fear of repercussions.

When you hang up your content-marketing hat(s), what one word do you hope colleagues and clients will use to describe you?

Genuine.

About the Off the Page series

Legend had it that Marcel Proust, a French novelist, had a list of twenty questions that could reveal a person’s true nature. Vanity Fair later adopted and popularized the questions for a series of interviews with cultural figures and celebrities.

Off the Page (probably) won’t reveal any of these have-to-follow marketers’ true nature. But it hopefully uncovers attributes, points of view, and experiences worth learning from.

Who else should Off the Page Feature?

Recommend a content marketer for a future edition of Off the Page.