Episode #4:

In this episode of The Craft, Shorthand’s Dawn Murden chats with Meredith Metsker, Content Marketing Manager at uConnect. 

Meredith shares advice and practical tips on how to build a personal brand online. As Meredith says, “What better way to show how to market something and brand something than building your own personal brand?”

Listen as Meredith and Dawn discuss the importance of getting to know your community, crafting high-value content that inspires your customers, and managing work-life balance. 

How to listen:

• Listen on Spotify
• Listen on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Watch on Youtube

Guest name: Meredith Metsker

What they do: Meredith is the Content Marketing Manager at uConnect

Company: uConnect

Noteworthy: Before working in content marketing, Meredith was a newspaper journalist covering a variety of beats. Today, they use their journalism skills to create branded content that is inspired by real customers and their stories. 

Where to find Meredith: LinkedIn

• Beyond the Queue: Inside Customer Support podcast
• uConnect webinar event series
• Dawn Murden on LinkedIn
• Shorthand on LinkedIn

It's important to spend time with your audience

“That’s how you learn. You learn what’s important to the audience. Again, both in terms of their work — their day-to-day work — and what's important to them because ultimately, we're all people. Even if it's business-to-business interactions, we're still human beings.

“The person on the other end of that email or phone call is human. So it's been helpful for me to figure out who my audience is, both as people and as professionals. How do I put that together? How do I make sure that any content I'm creating helps them learn something valuable and will hopefully hit them in a way that makes them respond personally to it.”

Why has podcasting become so important for marketers?

“We started this podcast. It was for customer support leaders, and it was called Beyond the Queue: Inside Customer Support. And we started it completely from scratch. [...] A podcast is a great piece of pillar content. So for those who may or may not be in marketing, it's your main piece of content. And from there, you can pull other different types of content. 

“In our case, we would make a full landing page with a summary and a full transcript for each episode. I would make short video clips and audiograms to share on social. Sometimes I would write blog posts based on a single episode or trends. 

“So it was the right move for us for a lot of reasons. We could get lots of content from each episode. We could draw that experience directly from the source. And I could personally draw on my passion for interviewing and taking a more journalistic approach to content marketing.”

Find a working style that allows for better work-life balance

“One thing I started doing with my writing that I never used to do — I never used to be a writer who did outlines before I wrote things. I think it was from my training in journalism, but I just wrote everything in one setting. It didn't matter how long it was. If it was a 500-word article or a 3000-word article, I would do it in one sitting. 

“And I have found that recently trying to balance my time and balance those boundaries of work and life, I've started to use outlines a little bit more. So I will write out my general outline. And then I'll say, ‘Okay, if I can write these three sections today, and I can stop by 5pm, great. I'll return to the next section tomorrow.’

“That’s one way I’ve broken down the process a little bit, but that has been very different from my past workflow. In the past, I was like, who needs an outline? And I was proud of it. I’m like, ‘I don’t write outlines.’ And now I see why people use outlines.”