Lessons on content strategy with Angela Mclean
By Will Shoukri
Welcome back to another week perched in the Owl’s Nest! This week I had the pleasure of sitting down with copywriter Angela Mclean. Angela graduated from TMU in 2019 with a bachelors in journalism, she’s been working in the industry ever since. She currently works as a copywriter for Accenture (look it up, super cool!) but has experience writing for numerous publications including the Toronto Star and Girls Life Magazine. Angela also has years of experience in content managing, the focus of today’s conversation.
We got specific today at the Owl’s Nest. I asked Angela about her content strategy… well strategies. Thanks to her fantastic responses, we have managed to create a cohesive guide to build the skills required to plan content for any brand… even (or especially) your own.
Tools of the trade
Content planning and analytic tools are something that have become a must-know in the content industry.
“Sometimes you come in to a job and they have certain tools that they use”
Hootsuite and built-in content studios are the go-to for most organizations but Angela has a method that she reccomends everyone be comfortable with, and it’s a little old-school.
“I feel like pen and paper is kind of underrated. -I definitely just pull out my phone calender and plug things in, see if they need to move around. Even just a Excel spreadsheet, – it’s easy to cut around things, colour code things it can be convenient”.
Can you believe it? Keep it simple folks!
Content Audits? Competitive Analysis? One and the same?
When Angela briefly mentioned content analysis in a previous question, I got excited. I jumped at the opportunity to get some advice on a real tangible duty that content strategists have to do. I first asked her plainly, what does she do when she has to sit down and do a content analysis.
“You want to look at your competitors main social media channels. What are their most-engaged posts? Take a look at their last month, which posts performed the best and from which channels? Are their posts being made fun of? You can even look at the comments, (she paused here with a slight smile) you might find something that gives you an idea for a post of your own.”
See why I jumped at this line of questioning? This is valuable information, people! Read it twice!
The next question I asked is something that every media and communications student will ask themselves at one point or another, “what is the difference between a competitive analysis and a content audit”. That’s right I’m not scared of embarrassing myself! The Owl’s Nest is here to get you the answers to the real questions!
I’ll stop parading around; here’s what she had to say.
“Sometimes being an outsider looking in you’re kind of limited in terms of what analytics you have access to. With a content audit you like to have those concrete metrics.”
So essentially unless you have access to the backend analytics of how the content is actually performing, you aren’t really able to do a content audit at all!
I’d like to thank Angela for sitting down with us this week. I think she did a great job of breaking down these vital concepts into digestible, understandable phrases. Hopefully everyone reading has gotten something of value from her expertise, for you first years, keep this in your back pocket; it’ll probably come in handy in a couple years!
You can find Angela on Instagram or X @angelaaaxo and @angelamcleanx, respectively. We’d recommend reaching out! She has so much more advice than we covered here.
This is all for us down here at the Owl’s Nest. Thank you for reading and catch us next week as we sit down with Ron Abraham, co-owner of Domin8 Digital.