Matt Holden (00:02)
So it's not necessarily what am I doing or what are we doing, but why are we doing it as a team or a
Ben Ard (00:33)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Matt. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Holden (00:38)
Hey Ben, thanks for having me.
Ben Ard (00:40)
Yeah, Matt, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun conversation. I think we've slightly touched on this, but never had a full episode on the subject. So I'm excited to see where it goes. Excited for your insights. But before we dive into it, let's get to know you. Tell us about your work history, background, and all of that good stuff.
Matt Holden (00:57)
Sure, yeah, I'm Matt Holden, digital manager for Lucas Oil Products based in Indianapolis. So I manage and lead our digital strategy that encompasses everything from e-commerce to web strategy to social video production, things like that. A lot of experience in strategy, content marketing, social media marketing, and before that, in editing and publishing.
Ben Ard (01:19)
That's amazing. Well, Matt, I'm excited for this conversation because what we're going to talk about is aligning content and promotional strategy. So what I'm excited about this is often these two different things are in different silos. You have the promotional side and you have the content side. They work independently of one another, but you really don't believe they should be siloed. You think they should collaborate. So what should we maybe fix in this space and why should we not silo these two groups?
Matt Holden (01:45)
Yeah, I think the issue you run into with siloing is they're sometimes operating on different timelines and they can lose sight of kind of the end goal of a given campaign or promotional strategy. And a lot of times different teams can become like fixated on their heads down execution of work. But when you're able to zoom out and kind of lift your head up to look at the overall strategy.
people become more aligned and they, think, become more engaged and motivated to help create good work based on that alignment.
Ben Ard (02:17)
love that. So the word alignment, it depends on who you're talking to, but it looks different for every person. When we're talking about the alignment of content and promotion, what does that look like in practice to you? Like what does alignment actually day in and day out look like when you are putting these two different areas together?
Matt Holden (02:35)
Yeah, for me, think alignment is about being able to answer the question why.
So it's not necessarily what am I doing or what are we doing, but why are we doing it as a team or a
When you have everybody kind of leadership on down, understanding the why behind something, they're going to they get clarity in their work, I think, and they're going to help provide good insight, good feedback, take good feedback as well.
⁓ knowing kind of the reasoning behind a given campaign or strategy, especially when that clearly ladders up to larger business goals.
Ben Ard (03:08)
Okay. So that was probably the best definition I've ever heard of alignment. I've never heard it actually articulated that way where if you're aligned, you know the why. And if you don't know the why, that means you're not aligned. And I think it's a great kind of metric for people or kind of foundational understanding to say, am I aligned and do I know the why? And if I don't know the why, I need to go back and have more conversations because I'm really not on the same page. I love that. That's cool. Like
That's going in like the highlight of this this episode. That's super cool. So
Matt Holden (03:39)
Yeah, I think
just as just to touch on that again, sometimes alignment can be misconstrued as like, we all know the deadline. So therefore we are aligned. I think, you again, just to reiterate, it's, it's a little bit more than that.
Ben Ard (03:50)
Yeah, I love that. That's amazing. I mean, I think that's the greatest definition I've ever heard of alignment. That's so cool. So when you're looking at it, often we have these content calendars or publishing calendars, and then you also have promotional calendars. How do you align the two different schedules to kind of line up and match up? You know, obviously that's something you're going to have to work on from day one, but how does that kind of work?
Matt Holden (04:13)
I think you, some of the easiest ways to do that is to bring in as many people as you think need to be in there for any of that tactical planning. certainly, I love the mindset that you should be bringing in your agency partners into your planning tools, into your calendar tools, so that it's not.
you're operating in different areas. You're really bringing them in to serve as that agency partner to operate in the same area so that everyone is communicating. You have shared resources, shared vision, but bringing them in allows for better alignment, better communication.
Ben Ard (04:51)
love that. That's cool. So you talk about early on having them in those different channels. When does the conversation with the two different groups start? Like at what point in time do you need to get them involved and how does that look?
Matt Holden (05:04)
Well, I think you, it's always important to like reverse engineer or work backwards from, you know, a decided date for a promotion or a campaign to go live. So when you work backwards from that, you need, you want to bring people in as early as possible. Honestly. ⁓ I think whether they are doing content, they're doing ad buying, they're creating strategy, whatever the case may be, when you bring people in early, that allows them to.
⁓ see the full scope of the campaign to understand where they fall into that progression. If people are sort of in the dark until the moment that they need their work to be executed, there's gonna be probably like a mix of confusion and frustration about not knowing earlier or feeling like they don't really have skin in the game or don't have agency in the work that they do. And when you can give people and empower them to have that agency, you're gonna get, think.
Ben Ard (05:55)
them. So when it comes to like the scheduling of content it almost feels like it makes more sense to understand the promotional calendar and build out your content accordingly based off of that or do you have two different calendars and try to sync them up? What does that kind of look like?
Matt Holden (06:11)
Yeah, I think you're spot on. think the best kind of, you know, calendar work ties all that together in a really clear lens. So, you know, we have a calendar we use that pulls in all of the different promotional opportunities, whether that's trade shows, major events that we're helping sponsor, seasonality within the business and given our product line or, you the same applies to other businesses, right? Depending on
kind of how that seasonality is reflected for your bottom line. But when you pull in all those dates and all the different products and services you can offer that kind of align with those different opportunities, you can really get a lot of clarity about what that content strategy should look like and what are the pillars of
Ben Ard (06:53)
That's cool. So I like to get really tactical. So don't share anything you can't share. So like it perks people's up ears. Like I should say that every time, even if there's nothing proprietary, but how do you actually like physically maintain a calendar? Like, are you building it in a document? Do you have tools that you're utilizing? Is it just in your normal work calendar? Any advice like on a very tactical level?
of where that lives, how people access it and how people can kind of coordinate with the calendar itself.
Matt Holden (07:23)
Yeah, I mean, I think without, you know, naming any specific products or services, think at a high level, what you want is a platform that is flexible, very easy to bring in people, even if they are from outside agency, for example, like I mentioned before, very easy to add people in and out to change their permission set so that they can access the things that they need access to, but not to, you know, potentially pull at the wrong thread.
but you want something that is very integrated across your tech stack if possible so that one click can bring you to a dashboard or a view of everything that's relevant for that campaign or that project. so trying to share as much as you need to within different platforms and provide context is I think really important. Sometimes it's easy just to kind of piecemeal different
parts of a campaign or different assets for a campaign, I don't want people to feel like they're sharing too much information in a platform, right? Like I'd rather people overshare or provide more context than they think necessary instead of the reverse of that. So that's something that I preach.
Ben Ard (08:27)
So do you have like a, and again, you don't have to mention any tools, but do you have a dedicated tool that's just for content coloring or do you actually just use like your task management tools and kind of people get ingrained with that?
Matt Holden (08:37)
Yeah, we have a dedicated tool that we use for dashboarding and then it links to different project management, software and things like that.
Ben Ard (08:44)
Very cool. I love that. So when you're aligning up these two calendars and you're getting these groups involved, how does like the brainstorming process go? Like obviously, you know, hey, there's something on the calendar. It's a promotional thing. And then the content group or whoever's responsible for creating content has to obviously say, okay, cool. Here's the constraint that we operate in. We're going to build out this kind of campaign or this kind of content.
What does that look like? How do people like operate within those constraints? Because a lot of time creative and content people kind of like the freedom to say this is our business. We want to talk about what we're going to talk about. How does that process change maybe a little bit and how can people still say kind of creative in that ecosystem?
Matt Holden (09:24)
Yeah, I think to me, like some of the best opportunities to be creative are when you have very clear guardrails or you have a very set sandbox within which you can play. so the more you can understand sort of your brand guidelines, if it's collaboration, understanding what assets are available to you or what you can say versus not say, just establishing those guidelines as quickly as you can.
allows for creatives to really work within those confines, which I think is an exciting opportunity to just kind of give people a blue sky to say, you can do whatever you want. That can send people down the wrong path, I think. so having a kickoff meeting where you have people that are strategic, people that are creative, people that are thinking about ad buying versus delivering on assets versus telling a story, get them all in the door early to share those ideas.
and see who has the best idea versus worrying about if you have the best idea. It can come from anywhere and being collaborative in that way I think leads to good work.
Ben Ard (10:23)
I love that. That's so cool. So when you have all these different groups of people and the ad buying the content, the assets, all that kind of stuff, the promotional side, how are you measuring content success kind of in this framework and in general to know if it's moving the needle to improve the next time around? How do you kind of just look at attribute? Maybe not attribution, but just analytics in general around the content.
Matt Holden (10:45)
Yeah, I think you have very high level campaign goals, whether it's very conversion heavy or understanding brand lift or brand sentiment in different campaigns. But depending on the channel, they also have their own metrics that are important to measure. metrics for email versus social versus just engagement on a website or advertising. I think it's good to compare.
those metrics, you benchmark them twice in my mind. You benchmark them against the industry and you benchmark them against your own company performance. Because I'm sure like many of us, you don't just want to beat the end. You don't want to be better than kind of the middle of the road. You want to be better than yourself and continue to improve. And so by benchmarking twice, you can really measure success to me in that way.
Ben Ard (11:33)
love that. I think that's such a cool concept. That's awesome. Well, Matt, as promised, these episodes go by crazy quick and this has been so informative. This has been fun. Again, I will never think about the definition of alignment the same way ever again. That's amazing. Matt, for anyone listening who would like to reach out and connect with you online, what's the best place for them to find you?
Matt Holden (11:54)
Yeah, best place to find me is probably email. My email is mholden at LucasOil.com as well as I'm on LinkedIn, so happy to connect there, but those are probably the best places.
Ben Ard (12:04)
love it. For anyone listening, just scroll down to the show notes. We will link to Matt's LinkedIn profile right there so you can find him nice and easy and connect. Matt, this has been absolutely amazing. I really do appreciate the time and the insights today.
Matt Holden (12:17)
Yeah, likewise. Thanks, Ben.
