I was hired at Zoho to revamp Zoho Academy, a content marketing project that had fallen by the wayside. Unfortunately, COVID hit about 4-5 months after I started at Zoho, which caused some restructuring of company and team priorities. During my time at Zoho, I worked on Zoho Academy, but also multiple other projects and initiatives:

Zoho Academy

The existing content at Zoho Academy had been written by someone with an extensive academic background, but not a content marketing background. While it was high-quality and well-researched, it wasn’t particularly optimized for search engines or for skimmability when reading on computer screens. 

The first order of business was a complete audit of all content and a list of updates/edits needed, including: 

• Updating outdated content for relevancy, accuracy, and SEO
• Splitting posts into two or more pieces of content if necessary
• Revisiting the information architecture of the site and updating it to be more user-friendly 
• Managing and providing creative direction on updated header and cover images for content throughout the site

After wrapping up this initial project, my content-focused work with Zoho Academy included: 

• Oversaw and co-wrote a new guide for their marketing series (The Essential Guide to Marketing Automation), coinciding with the Marketing Automation team rolling out a new series of onboarding emails (see “Work with product teams”)
• Managed the editorial calendar, including recruiting content from other team members and editing their content for publication 
• Wrote articles for the site myself (Examples: 3 Types of Systems Your Remote Business Needs, Analytics and ROI: How to Track Your Social Media Progress)

Other work was oriented around creating and improving the email marketing and marketing automation for the Academy and its content. In the course of this work, I: 

• Created a new series of autoresponder emails to match the subscriber’s interests and increase subscriber engagement
• Implemented and measured results from A/B tests for email subject lines and CTAs
• Created and scheduled emails for the regular Academy newsletter 
• Added email opt-in forms to all pages and posts 

Enterprise work

During my time at Zoho, enterprise marketing efforts ramped up. I worked with both the sales team and the customer marketing team under the Enterprise umbrella, regularly meeting with both of those teams, as well as the Chief Strategy Officer, to help create and implement a comprehensive marketing strategy. 

Sales enablement 

• Researched and wrote whitepapers to use during the prospecting and pitching process 
• Wrote and edited outreach emails for the sales team 
• Example whitepapers:
  • Incorporating Integrated Analytics into Employee Workflows
  • How Data Analytics Spur Innovation for Big Business

Customer marketing 

• Created list of webinar topics based on customer feedback 
• Wrote landing pages for customer marketing webinars 
• Wrote and input emails leading up to the customer-facing webinars and following up after webinars
• Input, formatted, and scheduled those emails in Marketing Automation
• Repurposed webinar content for use in other customer marketing efforts

Miscellaneous 

• Wrote posts for the Enterprise blog 
• Worked with technical team members to create an analytics dashboard to track the results of our efforts 
• Monitored and reported on Enterprise analytics 

Work with product teams

Marketing Automation (formerly MarketingHub)

When I started at Zoho, the Marketing Automation team had just finished revamping their interface and feature set, but didn’t have any supporting content to drive new users or guide them through the product. This was a large part of the reason behind creating the Essential Guide to Marketing Automation for Zoho Academy — creating genuinely useful content that also could be used to support product goals. With that in mind, I: 

• Talked to the product owners to learn more about the improvements and new features, and how they hoped users would interact with them 
• Reviewed prior onboarding emails to see what did/didn’t perform as far as user activation, open and click through rates, conversion to paid user, etc. 
• Created the marketing automation guide with the intention of being able to use specific content pieces to target different audiences 
• Wrote multiple versions of an onboarding email sequence, targeted on business size (which is collected during the trial signup process) 

Example sequence: You can view the Microbiz/SMB onboarding sequence here. 

Creator 

While the Creator team was getting their Decode publication off the ground, I and others from the enterprise content team joined in on the project. My work included: 

• Researching specific use-cases that are most popular amongst their users, including interviewing product team members and reading customer feedback
• Pitching content ideas that fit into the existing goals and initiatives of the product team 
• Researching and writing the content
• Editing content per feedback from product team, as well as editing and giving feedback on other team members’ content 

Example post: Planning a Low-Code Development Project

Ad hoc work 

Aside from the above projects, I also did ad hoc editing for product teams as needed, including blog posts, sales content, marketing emails, SEO landing pages, and social media posts.