The content strategy challenge
Global financial services company EY, formerly Ernst & Young, approached MSL Group London with a exciting brief. They wanted to generate more applications for apprenticeships.
Their research found young people’s career paths were most influenced by advice from parents, yet many parents didn’t feel confident they’d give the right advice.
The obvious choice was to reach out to parents, improving their understanding of the advantages of, and growing availability of, apprenticeships.
MSL Group London recruited me as a freelance content strategist for this project.
Challenges of this project included a tight timeframe and high media interest, meaning the content would be under much public scrutiny.
My response
While MSL Group’s PR team generated great ideas for events for parents to attend or watch online, I worked on a content strategy: How to use web and social media to promote and support the events, and use event content to generate even more interest.
I began with an initial brainstorm alone, coming up with as many possible content ideas. I use the Periodic Table of Content Marketing by Chris Lake of Econsultancy to help think of options:
Feedback from colleagues led to a further group brainstorm. Out of this came a full content strategy. The User Experience (UX) strategist used my content strategy to design a landing page.
The content strategy included:
- Summaries of the research findings as infographics, differentiated for different parts of the UK. This meant we could use
- On-the-street interviews with young people and parents, edited into longer videos as well as 15-second ‘Vox Pops’, used on social media to promote the parent events.
- Facebook Live broadcast of the panel event.
- Edits of speakers thoughts during and after the panel event, to be shared on social media.
- Six accessible ‘think pieces’ by magazine writers, using popular formats such as listicle and what kind are you?
We also needed a plan for how to update the website fast after, and in the lead-up to, each event.
I documented each piece of content that must be changed, when and to what, so the content population team, who didn’t know the project detail, knew exactly what to do.
Writing questions for the on-street interviews with parents and young people, and for panel participants, I took care to make sure they could be easily understood by someone with no background to the project. Here’s one of the vox pop videos:
The results
My content strategy for EY Parental Advice aimed to make maximum use of every opportunity to produce and distribute high-quality content around these well-run, popular events.
Throughout the project my team reported updates to EY’s project team, including key numbers like event attendance, website visits and social media post engagement.
Our client EY was delighted with the high levels of engagement Parental Advice received. Most importantly, their apprenticeship programme received strong interest as a result of this project – the ultimate measure of success.