The Receptionist

Andy Alsop & Michael Ashford: Why The Receptionist team loves working with Audience Ops
"I swore up and down I was never going to use a 3rd party content company again. Then I worked with Audience Ops and they completely changed my view. The consistent quality, crafted content for our personas, driving organic traffic and conversions like crazy. It’s a marketer’s dream! "
Director of Marketing, The Receptionist
Michael Ashford

Had you ever outsourced content before, and if so, how was working with Audience Ops different?

Major props to Audience Ops. Before I came into The Receptionist, I had tried other kinds of third party content producing companies, and I swore up and down I was never going to use another one. I just had terrible experiences with them. 

When I came on board to The Receptionist about two years ago, I inherited the relationship with Audience Ops. It has completely changed my view on it because of just the quality of the work that is produced and the results that it helps us drive. 

I mean, as a marketer, nothing beats the organic traffic. I’m able to work with Audience Ops to help build and craft content targeting our industry and persona type. 

It drives organic traffic like crazy to the point where we have other companies and other industries wanting to be a part of our blog so that they can capture some of that organic traffic!

You’ve been exceptionally adept at pairing in-house with outsourced resources when it comes to Marketing.  What is your philosophy on that?

We have a philosophy here, which we call, hiring “sharpshooters.” A sharpshooter is somebody who has expertise in a particular area, which would be difficult to find in a single in-house hire. 

And I think that’s actually what happened with Audience Ops. 

I said, “Let’s take a look at them.” So we did an interview and they talked about the content calendar and how the content was created and we really looked at it and said,“This is the type of process we need.” 

So it gave us that sharpshooter that we wanted. Somebody who could really specialize. And I think that’s an interesting thing is that Audience Ops is a focused company, and, as are we. We’re very diligent about going into other areas of business because we want to make sure we’re the best visitor management system. 

And I think that’s sort of what I’ve seen with Audience Ops as well, is that there is sort of a deliberate focus on, we are content creators and then we have a program that supports your content creation.

More importantly, we were getting that organic SEO that we wanted in addition to providing our customers with important content that they’d want. So I think that worked well.

More importantly, we were getting that organic SEO that we wanted in addition to providing our customers with important content that they’d want. So I think that worked well. 

“Audience Ops made our job pretty easy. The content they produce comes in reliably and fully edited the way we wanted them. That prevents it from being a drain on resources.”

How has Audience Ops made your job as an in-house Marketer more effective?

As the first full time marketing hire at The Receptionist, I knew that producing blog content was going to be unsustainable real quick. 

And so having the Audience Ops team in place, I learned pretty quickly that hey,this is a really high quality, high level of work capacity that the team is able to produce for us. It’s consistently high quality. 

I think it is one of the key catalysts to the growth of marketing in and of itself here at The Receptionist because it’s allowed me to do so many other things with marketing that I would want to do but wouldn’t have the capacity to do had I been in charge of writing blogs and producing content all day long.

Hear more of the story: Podcast & video interview + full transcript 

Additional resource: Playing to Your Strengths & Knowing When to Outsource: Tips from The Receptionist (Article)

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