Parallax Spotlight: Content Manager Robin Swire
Our former Q&A’s have included our directors, Andy Fitch and Lawrence Dudley, project manager Tom Faller and most recently marketing executive Alex Peters. This week Robin Swire, Parallax’s content manager is under the spotlight…
Robin, you’ve been with us since the summer now so you know your way around. How are you finding life at Parallax?
Parallax is an absolutely brilliant place to work. As well as working on some exciting accounts, I’ve really enjoyed working with the team. There really is an amazing group of people here who’ve welcomed me with open arms since I joined.
I’ve had the opportunity to work with everybody in the team on various tasks for a multitude of clients, which has been a great experience. Being able to share ideas with a group of like-minded individuals has been really beneficial to me and I’m really proud to be working at such an exciting, growing digital agency in Leeds.
How do you think ‘content’ marketing has affected SEO in the past few years and how you and the content team approach marketing for clients?
Content has become vital to how successful a business is online. Since Google switched their algorithms, those dirty SEO tactics no longer work which has caused problems for a lot of businesses and digital agencies out there.
Content marketing gives businesses a new way to market themselves online and climb the search engine rankings. Using cool stuff such as interactive infographics, engaging articles, videos, and ebooks we’re trying to create awesome content that people can enjoy. We carefully plan our content to ensure that it meets their business objectives.
We want to make amazing, engaging content that we know our clients and their audiences will love.
The Bonkers for Conkers campaign was a huge success with some great exposure, can you tell us a bit about that?
Making car parks seem interesting is quite a challenge. Over the past few months we’ve been thinking of creative ideas for our client Town Centre Car Parks to grow the business online and help them meet their overall objectives. The ‘Bonkers for Conkers’ campaign came out after a conversation between myself and Lawrence and ended up as a viral success. With an environmental slant and a bit of a quirky story, people loved it globally!
The premise was quite simple. Visitors to several of TCCP’s car parks in Leeds and Manchester could pay for parking using just conkers for one week only. The story got picked up by the Daily Mail, BBC News, TIME Magazine, ITN and hundreds more across the world. I had quite an amusing encounter dealing with China TV who came to film at the Merrion Centre in Leeds.
This campaign has given us a lot of exciting ideas for the future.
What do you find most challenging as a content manager at a digital agency?
There will always be obstacles in the digital industry and staying ahead of the curve is incredibly important to remain successful. Outreach has become quite challenging over the past few months. Many of the “SEO” agencies that previously used the nasty black hat techniques have now turned to firing hundreds of spammy emails at journalists in an attempt to get them to publish their keyword stuffed guest blogs or desperately put a link within their content.
This has made it challenging for journalists to wade through the rubbish and find interesting and engaging content. We always try to be honest with our content and establish meaningful relationships with the media; this has proved to be really successful for us.
Adam Grunwerg at Searchable.co.uk put together a really good article on spammy, terrible outreach. Check it out.
Can you recommend any tools or tips to anybody else working in content?
There are thousands of tools out there that can help you out when managing content. I’m a big fan of using content calendars like DivvyHQ and Kapost. Using an editorial calendar to plan out your campaigns will help them run much more effectively, especially if the client can access it online and choose what they’d like to run with. Sometimes, a Google Doc spreadsheet can do the job just as well though!
Tools such as Spike by Newswhip and MuckRack will be incredibly important in the future for all online PR activities as well.
Finally, what would you be doing if you didn’t work in digital marketing?
Probably working on something music related. Whether that’s creating amazing events and festivals, touring or just general music marketing.
Cheers Robin!
If you’ve got a question for Robin about content marketing or strategy let us know in the comments section below or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook.