In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe interviewed special guest Alyssa Fox, Senior VP of Marketing at The CapStreet Group. Discover critical enterprise content strategy insights that Alyssa has gathered throughout her journey from technical writer to marketing executive.

In this webinar, viewers learn:

The broader picture of enterprise content operations
Strategies for integrating technical and marketing content
Best practices for using technical content as a marketing asset

Resources discussed during the webinar

The Content Strategy Toolkit by Meghan Casey, mentioned by Alyssa Fox
Content Strategy: Connecting the Dots Between Business, Brand, and Benefits by Rahel Anne Bailie and Noz Urbina, mentioned by Alyssa Fox
Study: 81% research online before making big purchases by Chain Store Age, statistic mentioned by Sarah O’Keefe

Other resource links

LinkedIn

Transcript:

Christine Cuellar: Hey there, and welcome to the next episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series hosted by Sarah O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Scriptorium. Today’s topic is bridging the gap between technical and marketing content, and our special guest today is Alyssa Fox, who’s the senior VP of marketing at The Capstreet Group. So without further ado, Sarah, I’m going to pass it over to you, and we’re going to get this talk about content operations started.

Sarah O’Keefe: Thanks, Christine. And Alyssa, welcome, it’s great to see you. Alyssa and I have had a history of running into each other at various kinds of conference events over the years, which infamously included beignet in New Orleans, and as I recall, a pretty hefty shopping expedition in Bangalore. So it’s great to see you. I mean, let’s talk a little bit about where you came from, because of course we had a ton of overlap over the years because you had some roles in techcomm. And then we’ll talk about where you’ve landed now, but tell us a little bit about where you came from and where you are now.

Alyssa Fox: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Sarah. It’s great to be here, everybody. So my background started in techcomm. I started out of school as a technical writer for a software company. I did techcomm for a number of years and started as an individual contributor and moved up through management ranks, led a couple of teams, led some teams around the world, and then I kind of decided I wanted to find a way to get closer to the customers. One of the things that I ran into at a previous company was that the people on the marketing side of the house, we’re not talking to the people on the technical content side of the house, we’re not talking to anybody else producing content in the company, and I saw that as an opportunity for me to get closer to customers, to improve the experience for customers. And after a number of techcomm leadership roles, I moved over to a marketing team at a software company and as the leader of enterprise content strategy. So once I got into marketing and started showing them how content strategy could work for them, most of the people I worked with had never heard the term content strategy, I started being more and more exposed to the rest of the marketing world and how that works. Marketing is really an art and a science, where I see techcomm is a little bit of that too, I see that as just a little more scientific, and we’ll go into why, but moving over into marketing through content strategy really afforded me the opportunity to see how content across an enterprise, across an organization impacts the customer and buyer experience. So did a number of roles in marketing. I’ve worked in a 12-million person company, or-

SO: $12 million revenue?

AF: No, large … Yeah, yeah, something like that. Sorry, it’s early here. I’ve worked in a very small startup. I’ve worked in between. One of the things that’s common in all of those is really getting your hands around content and understanding the content strategy, content operations, and all that. So it’s a really interesting challenge. Now I’m working for a private equity firm, which is really a different type of role for me. I’m on the operating team, and what we do, the operating team is, we are tasked with creating value in the companies that my private equity firm buys. So we go in there and help them with all of their various functional areas, obviously marketing is my specialty, to grow that company in the way that the private equity deal teams would like to see it grown. So a totally different kind of thing than what I’ve been doing, but it applies all of my communication skills, my content strategy skills, my cross-functional leadership skills, and it’s really been a fun ride so far.

SO: Yeah. I think amongst all of that, amongst this ridiculous resume that you have, it’s probably also worth noting that at one point you were the president of the STC, the Society for Technical Communication.

AF: Yes.

SO: Looking at our poll here, it looks as though we’ve got about an 80-20 split between technical writing and marketing. So we can take that on as what our audience looks like today, and thank you to all of you for responding to that. So when you did this, I mean when you shifted over from techcomm, tech management over into marketing, what was the biggest surprise? What was the thing that you didn’t expect that happened or that you saw?

AF: Well, the very first thing that I didn’t expect was understanding that the coworkers that I had, there’s a very similar setup in the way technical communicators are treated or handled by, for example, developers that you’re working with and the way marketing people are handled by sales teams. By that, I mean it’s one of those roles that everybody seems to think that they can do, but then when you start getting into the nitty-gritty and really showing them all of the stuff that goes behind the scenes in marketing, in techcomm, there’s a big similarity there. And I was kind of laughing, I was like, “Why do I keep picking careers?” And everybody’s like, “Oh, I can do that. Let me tell you how to do it,” because it’s just frustrating and annoying. Right?

But in both of those careers, there are things that you can show people, whether it’s your coworkers, your partners, your customers, whatever, that really show that the skills that it takes to do either of those roles are somewhat specialized and do have a focus and are data driven in a lot of ways, especially in marketing. There’s so much data. So that was a big surprise to me as well aside from the similarities in how the roles and the functions are perceived.

SO: Having been I guess on the out...