When I started at Brit + Co, we as a company needed to make a shift to broaden our brand. We were largely known for DIY and creativity, and that was hemming in our ability to attract more mainstream advertisers with broader campaign goals.
1. Start by centering our founder: While our editorial categories were very broad in terms of daily coverage, we were mainly doing standard blog posts, covering products and celeb or lifestyle news. I knew that Brit Morin, our founder, had a strong reputation for encouraging women to follow their passions, which was made more convincing as she was a young successful female entrepreneur. So we sought to grow the brand around Brit's personal brand and interests.
2. Not moving too far away from the core: Our new push was around women empowering women to be bold and follow their ambitions. We didn't want the new direction to lean too far away from the core mission of creativity and DIY, so we instead we embraced the fact that "creative expression" comes in many forms — from personal style to the art we create personally or professionally to the way we care for our bodies and families. These are all central to what the "Brit Girl" loves and celebrates.
3. Let the content tell the story: Out of this new direction, I developed an editorial calendar that would establish a handful of “tentpole” programs to anchor the spiritual voice of our brand as well as create premium sponsorship opportunities.
4. Creating specialness: Tentpole programs were meant to have a very distinct visual brand, span different types of media (editorial, video, photo, design), and break out of the standard layouts with innovative new product features and interactivity.I also pushed my editors to create distinct Editorial Series that would establish the “Brit + Co” distinctive take on their beats. And I also pushed for a strong Seasonal program calendar which powered our SEO and Pinterest update cycles.
5. Unifying the teams: And finally, I rallied the content teams (video, design, photo, creative production) around that calendar, uniting efforts around common goals and a common vision.
When I started at Brit + Co, we had seen mild success with SEO, mainly around Halloween and Halloween costumes, but we had seen a few small successes in the food category. I knew that if we could win in this category, we’d see huge traffic for years to come. So, we took those small wins, and began to build a strategy form there. As of March 2019, we had increased our SEO traffic to the food category nearly 70%. Here was our path:
- I started by working with Data Insights to create a calendar of seasonal moments, tracking when food search would begin to trend, and began updating specific posts and roundups, from holiday recipes and frozen summer cocktails. We also looked at year-round terms, and developed consistent winners for big searches like “instant pot recipes” and “easy weeknight dinners.”
- I hired an SEO-minded Food Editor who not only worked with me to stick to that SEO calendar plan, but she was also strategic in picking new terms to go after, picking up new wins around big terms like “one sheet dinners.”
- Pairing up my product team and Food Editor, we built out a new Recipe Post Format to capitalize on the Google recipe structured data format. We built out a new template within the CMS to make it easy for my editor and her writers to build recipes in the best way for Google and Pinterest to see and display them. We were just beginning to roll out this format when laid off.
- We had a business need to create a lot more video views on our O&O platform in order to serve more pre-roll ads. I pushed for a O&O video project around our most popular SEO food posts, pairing my Food Editor and video team up to create video for placement in those posts. We went from ~100k views/month in November 2018 to over 1 million in April 2019.
Our first Tentpole Programs at Brit + Co was the gorgeous From the Outside In.
Born out of the emotions around the immigration debate, my Special Projects Editor really wanted to tell the story of the power of the immigrant experience through our own lens. I worked with her to shape the idea into one that fits with our core around creativity. The final concept was to show how female creatives used their immigrant backgrounds to create great art, great companies, and even great wine.
I pushed the vision for this project as a showcase of what our content team could do when focused around a big launch. And then I served as project lead, bringing together all the needed resources and people, mapping out timelines and deadlines, managing check-ins, and providing approvals.
When it came to launching a “year in review” package, we wanted to go beyond just a look at the ladies or people of the year. I wanted to carry over the “women helping women” theme into how we look back, and so I chose to focus in on moments and women who moved women forward during the course of the year.
Unlike From the Outside In, we didn’t have the luxury of taking our own original photography or shooting our own video. We had to make stock photography and video shine. still making it look distinctly Brit + Co. Using a fun and colorful swipeable interface built by our product/engineering team, we created a visual style guide of frames and photo treatments as well as a video format to help bring these stock pieces together into a beautiful, cohesive multimedia package.
Again, I led this project with a lot of help from our Director of Product. Project team included editors, video team, design lead, and engeineers building out the new features.
Wedding is a category pretty core to women’s lifestyle, but we needed an angle that would help us stand out. The New I Do was our answer.
We knew from looking at the numbers that our reader responded best to creative and unusual ways to make your wedding your own. What are those little touches or unconventional takes on traditions that could help personalize your wedding or help it stand out?
We also knew from looking at the numbers that our readers had three phases for exploring wedding content: As a bride who’s planning the event, as a bridesmaid . who is organizing all those bridesmaid events and activities, and as a guest who really just needs ideas on what to wear and what to gift. So we organized the guide around all of these “moments” and needs for each, and tilted all of it toward the fresh, slightly different, and delightfully fun.
For this project, I was deeply involved with the photo shoot creative direction as well as with shaping editorial. I wanted to ensure the angle of unconventional and creative came through in the visuals, but we had to walk a fine line of not going too far into crazy looks that wouldn’t register with middle-America readership.
Riding Solo started with one of our editors taking her first solo trip to Europe, and writing a lovely post about the experience. I loved it and was fascinated by the complicated feelings that women had around doing things alone — that mix of excitement, pride, but also fear and apprehension. It’s such a shared female struggle, and I had seen in the data that content around living independently and how to do things safely alone as a woman always performed well for us.
We launched Riding Solo on Valentine’s Day as an antidote to the standard “what to do with/buy for your special someone” or “how to find that special someone” content. We wanted to tell the stories or real women who either tried out or felt a special sense of achievement when doing things alone — from something as small as having dinner solo to taking a solo road trip to deciding to have a child without a partner.
This package resonated with our ambitious, driven young woman, that it inspired many women to share their own personal solo stories via social media. And it even got the attention of Cotton which sponsored our summertime update last year.
Adulting was a hugely winning category for us at Brit + Co. Learning the basics of how to manage everything from house cleaning and cooking your own meals to landing a dream job and financing buying your first home were in high demand with a our young female readership.
Jane Becomes an Adult started out as a concept for a video series that would be hosted by a young woman learning how to “adult” properly from experts, walking her through the biggest things she needed to learn before she turned 30. But because a huge show production like that would be super costly, we tabled it.
But when a sponsor like LOFT came calling looking for an idea for young women starting out in the workforce, I brought Jane out of storage, and tweaked the idea to become an editorial guide with a lovely illustrative look, peppered with accompanying articles that let readers deep dive into specifics of an overall topic. We also include sharable design assets to encourage readers to share it out to friends. This installment focused primarily on how to land your dream job, negotiate the salary you’re worth, and then become an indispensable but also thriving employee.
In 2018, we wanted to grow our reach beyond our female audience in their 20s and 30s. We wanted to look ahead to our future — Gen Z. We had spotlighted a couple of very impressive young women for our Year in Women package, and knew there were some incredible stories to tell if we looked deeper. Plus, we knew we had interest from advertisers for a Gen Z-focused program.
Future Women of America was the first title that came to mind when I started to develop this concept, and the idea built itself from the name. We decided to focus specifically on young American women and girls, all under the age of 20, who are making bold moves to shape the world they want to live in.
My Features team looked across the fields of sports, art, STEM, entertainment, journalism, and more to find 15 young women to profile. Initially we wanted this to be very video focused, but budget constraints forced us to limit our video profiles to three in order to really do them right. We created a youthful visual style guide that carried over into the videos, bringing together youth playfulness with our usual Brit + Co colorful playfulness.
And with Future Women, we for the first time were able to bring a site content package into the programming with a Future Women Panel at our annual live event called Create Good. Three of our featured Future Women took part in our Future Night of programming, talking about their already-amazing careers and accomplishments.
With our reader being young and driven, we knew she was experiencing the challenges of trying to push her dreams to reality in a world that isn’t always friendly to women. We wanted to really spotlight how women supporting women in the workplace and in entrepreneurship was particularly important in male-dominated industries.
A Woman’s Place was a monthly profile series that told the human stories of real women living the struggle day to day, talking about how they persevered with the help of other women and even with the support of ally men. We wanted to show that there ARE women killing it in every corner of the workforce, even the ones you wouldn’t expect. We brought this series to life with a mix of editorial, original photo, and photos provided by our subjects.
