Client
Known for smart and capable HR products, PeopleDoc—now part of UKG (after the mega-merger of parent company Ultimate Software and Kronos®)—makes life simpler for corporations around the world. Marrying elegant design with the latest in cloud technology, PeopleDoc’s software is popular with customers from Starbucks to American Express.
As her company grew, marketer Jolene Nicotina found she needed help too. “It became a lot to keep up with,” she laughs, describing how she struggled to balance a constant stream of blog posts, lead generation content, and more.
Without the headcount to hire a deputy, Jolene decided to outsource her content needs—and hired MarketSmiths to pen some of the posts on PeopleDoc’s blog.
Client’s Challenge
Before she approached MarketSmiths, the other outsourcing solutions Jolene considered left her frustrated. Coming across an online ordering website—where you post your request and wait for the content to appear—she says her problems began even when she just tested it out for a demo.
“I knew I wanted a service where there was some kind of dialogue, some level of conversation and brainstorming,” she remembers. “I didn’t want to work with a document creation shop, where I just punch in an order and get something spit back out to me.”
Nor was the finished copy with this kind of service up to par. From derivative ideas to lazy transitions, the quality “just wasn’t there,” she explains. “I knew that the caliber of that writing just wasn’t going to cut it for our brand.”
And as an experienced writer herself, who expects every word of her posts to sparkle, Jolene found that far from saving time, she was actually wasting hours fixing the efforts of lesser wordsmiths. “If you get content that isn’t hitting the mark,” she says, “editing is almost more work than having to write it from scratch yourself.”
Shared Success
After being dazzled by MarketSmiths’s work for LinkedIn, Jolene decided to bring us aboard for her PeopleDoc blog—and she didn’t regret it.
Right from kickoff, she says, she was impressed by how working with MarketSmiths felt like a genuine relationship. “[You’ve] been really good at making sure we’re not saying the same exact things everyone else is saying, or taking the same spin on something that has already been done before,” she explains.
And if Jolene is pleased with our story development, she’s thrilled with our writing. As a passionate scribbler, she’s delighted to see us having fun with our posts, describing how we fill our paragraphs with unique analogies and clever metaphors (a special favorite involved boats).
Yet Jolene never feels our elegant prose ever detracts from the marketing target of our work. As she puts it, every post we submit feels handcrafted for “the audience we’re trying to reach—higher-level HR leaders.”
That means that Jolene can now trust MarketSmiths to send her excellent copy without carving out time for major edits. “It’s honestly so straightforward,” she says. “I’ll take a look and then my edits are usually very minimal—and I almost never use more than one round.”
In all, Jolene estimates that she saves around three business days a month working with MarketSmiths, time she can productively spend doing other things.
“I’m in meetings all day and juggling a ton of different projects,” she explains. “Thanks to MarketSmiths, I never have to worry about missing an editorial deadline or scrambling for contributors.”
Jolene adds that our posts are great news for her company too. After inviting MarketSmiths in, PeopleDoc grew blog traffic by 40% compared to the previous year—bringing Jolene and her team crucial publicity in a crowded market.
Specific posts have been hits, with one winning a coveted spot as a Google Snippet—gaining PeopleDoc even more publicity.
No wonder, then, that Jolene summarizes her experiences with MarketSmiths so positively. “If I had to sum up working with you,” she says, “it’d be like cloning myself. I’m the only content marketer at PeopleDoc, it’s like having another writer on my team.”
