Content Marketing

Ally Approved Food

As part of my Digital Marketing Masters, I completed a personal portfolio over the course of 5 months. The main goals for this portfolio was to up skill in areas that I already had encountered over the 8 years that I was working, while learning new skills which would be beneficial to me, both in while finishing the MSDM course and in my future career. I chose to focus on different types of blogging (traditional blogging, image blogging and audio blogging) as I felt these are most relevant to the areas of digital marketing I’m interested in.

First, I looked at building a content marketing strategy for Ally Approved Food, a food blog for people with food allergies. While I had experience in content marketing, I was keen to upskill and learn best practises as my experience was limited to writing content and not the implementation or analysis. I have a personal interest in this area as I suffer from several food allergies myself and would often read blogs or look online for advice, tips and recipes. I thought that working on a topic I had a personal interest in would help me with the creation of content and understanding consumer needs.         

I wanted to bring variety and quality to Ally Approved Food’s content strategy by creating a blog, podcast and posting to Instagram.  While these 3 activities are all part of content marketing, they are very different and require different skills.

Traditional Blogging

After researching best practices I wrote and published 8 different styles of blogs, including:

  • Review blogging
  • List blogging
  • Link blogging
  • Insight blogging
  • Interview blogging

During the 4/5 months that I was blogging I experiments with how to drive traffic to each post as well as changing the time and days that each blog was published.

Image Blogging – Instagram

While the Instagram account was used to promote the blog and podcast, I would post daily about either allergy friendly product, how allergy friendly eateries were and sharing pictures and recipes of food I’d made.

For this activity, I made several strategy changes including hashtag tracking, photo style, posting times and paid promotions. I would analyse the results of each post and this would impact the decision on if a change in strategy was needed.

Audio Blogging – Podcast

I did 3 podcasts as part of this project, interviewing those would dealt with food allergies on a daily basis (e.g. chef).

I used 2 different softwares and 3 different microphones to record the podcasts as I was interested to see if podcasts could be recorded on a budget.