Case Study: San Francisco Travel Sets New Agenda For Content Marketing Management

For San Francisco Travel’s busy marketing department, the goal is more trips, not getting tripped up. But that’s exactly what was happening to the content marketing management process before the destination marketing organization of record for the Golden City enlisted the help of content marketing platform DivvyHQ.

“Before Divvy came along, the content team and the marketing team in general were very siloed. A lot of people were creating content on their own with little-to-no feedback from the rest of the team, and a lot of the content that people ultimately wanted to create wasn’t being created. Basically, it was siloed chaos,” said Dan Rosenbaum, San Francisco senior manager of content and social media marketing.

SFT’s Content Mission, Scope (and Pain)

With 24 million travelers choosing San Francisco as a tourist destination every year, San Francisco Travel’s mission is to promote the city to potential visitors around the globe. Each week, the agency’s 20-person marketing team publishes 5-10 pieces of editorial content, including blog posts, email blasts and a digital newsletter. Each piece of content is then tied to one of four topical pillars: culinary, arts and culture, diversity and iconic/destination 101.

“Our pain point was that nobody was on the same page when it came to managing the content creation process from the beginning. A lot of content that we created was haphazardly put into Google Docs, but then people wouldn’t be notified about changes to documents, and things would fall through the cracks,” Rosenbaum said.

“The tipping point was when we published an article about ‘must-see’ museums in San Francisco, only to later learn that some stakeholder museums weren’t included on the list. We realized we needed to find a solution to better manage content creation.” – Dan Rosenbaum

Rosenbaum was introduced to the concept of content planning and workflow platforms during a Content Marketing Institute webinar and wanted to learn more. He attended Content Marketing World in Cleveland with a plan to shop for content marketing management solutions with a variety of vendors. After an on-site demo with DivvyHQ, he was sold.

Rosenbaum signed up for a trial run, which he used as an opportunity to introduce the software to his content team. The migration from Google Docs to DivvyHQ happened quickly.

The Difference is in the Details

For San Francisco Travel, the DivvyHQ difference is in the small process improvements that resulted, including:

• Status Notifications – Team-wide notifications about where an article is in the content process
• Team Collaboration – The ability for any team member to comment on content in order to work together to improve it
• Get Out of Email – Sidestepping the laborious and mistake-prone process of sharing marked-up documents back and forth via email attachments.
• Reduce the Chaos – DivvyHQ’s multi-calendar architecture helps keep content chaos at bay.

“We have several calendars, one for blog content and another for email blasts with ‘child’ calendars for business-to-business and business-to-consumer newsletters. We also have separate calendars for ad partnerships, website personalization and social media schedules for both consumer and b-to-b posts,” Rosenbaum said.

“Divvy really replaced our entire process and became the central repository for all of our content,” Rosenbaum said. “It has improved workflow and communication between the team drastically.”

Featured Image Credits – Scott Chernis Photography, San Francisco Travel