Nik is a creative director, copywriter, and content strategist working in Seattle.
My Background as a Strategist
Just how I planned it
Strategy is a pretty broad skillset—anything you plan out with an intended outcome and base a little on data and a little on intuition could be a strategy. In my career, this has most often been concentrated on campaign strategy, marketing automation strategy, content strategy, and website strategy. All of it is based on copious research, a healthy amount of curiosity, proficient use of tools, and experimentation.
How do I make it happen?
With whatever tools are available for the job, I uncover underlying trends to help inform my hypothesis. It might be various traffic segments in Google Analytics, sales over time in a Shopify site, keyword research in SEMrush, or Instagram Ads performance. What do the numbers tell us?
I dive into recorded sales calls, customer reviews, testimonials, sentiments captured on social media and in forums, interview internal and external stakeholders, and run focus group panels to help learn more. This shades the data I analyzed, making it possible to understand why things are happening.
I present a fully-formed idea of what’s happening and why, and the idea for how to address it. This takes the form of things like a creative brief, a UX flow for a website or app, building personas to inform brand strategy, or the cadence, subject and channels through which a content strategy can be delivered for maximum impact.
With whatever tools are available for the job, I uncover underlying trends to help inform my hypothesis. It might be various traffic segments in Google Analytics, sales over time in a Shopify site, keyword research in SEMrush, or Instagram Ads performance. What do the numbers tell us?
I dive into recorded sales calls, customer reviews, testimonials, sentiments captured on social media and in forums, interview internal and external stakeholders, and run focus group panels to help learn more. This shades the data I analyzed, making it possible to understand why things are happening.
I present a fully-formed idea of what’s happening and why, and the idea for how to address it. This takes the form of things like a creative brief, a UX flow for a website or app, building personas to inform brand strategy, or the cadence, subject and channels through which a content strategy can be delivered for maximum impact.
With a clearly-documented strategy delivered, I stay in touch with next team members in line to make sure the strategy is executed on properly, and to validate the hypotheses I proposed. This ensures future strategies are updated and well-informed.
Check out how I put this skill into practice.
Bringing an old financial giant’s website into the self-serve FinTech era.
See case