Census Saves 12 Hours a Week on Content With Letterdrop

About Census

Census is a data activation and Reverse ETL platform that helps sync customer data to over 150 tools. They transform data warehouses into a hub for business and marketing ops, saving the trouble of custom scripts and engineering hires.

Company Size: 150

Funding: Series B

Founded: 2018

Website: getcensus.com

Industry: Data Activation

The Challenges Census Faced Before Letterdrop

The marketing team at Census migrated their blog from Ghost over to Webflow.

While this helped them build a beautiful site with content on the same domain, it became clear that the Webflow CMS was not user-friendly for posting content, especially for developer marketers dealing with elements like code blocks. This was frustrating and a major time suck for the marketing team.

The Content Team Was Losing Time

It took their Content Marketing Manager, Nicole Mitich, 2 to 4 hours to format code in Webflow. Some issues she ran into were line breaks, syntax highlighting, copy/pasting from Google Docs, being unable to preview code, and breaking the entire page from tiny mistakes. It took her 3x longer to post developer content than content with just plain text.

She was also responsible for creating new content from their community events, subject matter interviews with internal experts, partner content, and managing social posts all while overseeing the migration of over 200 blog posts. The last thing she needed to be spending time on was marketing ops and content publishing.

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Distribution Was a Manual Effort

The team had to schedule posts directly on multiple social and content syndication platforms, which took up time.

It was also a cause of stress. Census works with lots of partners and mentions them in their posts. On LinkedIn, they had to frantically click over to add the content link in the comments before anyone noticed.

Onboarding Took Longer

The marketing team had to onboard people on Webflow for publishing content. It took longer because of how technical it was.

"Onboarding people took a lot more time." - Nicole Mitich

The Bug Fixing Process was Tedious and Expensive

When the marketing team encountered publishing issues, they faced a long, delayed process before fixing the issue, relying on their web developer, a contractor they paid by the hour.

"[When you have an issue] you have to go through 30 people plus your web developer." - Nicole Mitich

There Was Trust Cost with Their Founder

The lack of a preview feature meant that formatting errors were being pushed through live to the CEO via the RSS feed. This hurt trust with the marketing team — "why are our technical guides always broken?"

How Did Letterdrop Help Census?

With Letterdrop, Census has a layer between non-technical marketers and Webflow. They don't have to 'bug' their web developer the whole time.

Specifically:

• Nicole, their Content Marketing Manager, saves 8-12 hours a week on technical content with Letterdrop since it natively supports Markdown and syntax highlighting. She can add code blocks in one click. She can save and reuse code templates for CTAs and embeds.
• Nicole can auto-generate first drafts of social posts and distribute to multiple channels instantly. Letterdrop integrates with Census' distribution channels like Medium, Hashnode, dev.to, Twitter threads, and LinkedIn.
• Nicole can see previews of social media posts and blog posts before they go out, cutting down on mistakes and the pressure that comes with it.

Allie Beazell, Marketing Chief of Staff at Census, talks about the value of the social media scheduler and how it's better than HubSpot.

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• Letterdrop's built-in SEO tooling replaces Clearscope, and they use it to sanity check their SEO agency's work.
• They save hours turning their webinars into blog posts with Letterdrop's video-to-text tooling.
• Day-to-day publishing and onboarding are much easier for the team because of the user-friendly CMS and granular user roles instead of copy/pasting between loose Notion files, Google Docs, and Webflow.
• Grammarly Business built-in ensures fewer mistakes throughout, especially when non-writers who usually don't have licenses need to write.
• Response times for bugs and other support queries are super fast since the Customer Success team at Letterdrop is so active on Slack.

For Nicole and her team, a user-friendly experience from start to finish has made all the difference and has saved hours of frustration.

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What Has Been the Business Impact of Letterdrop?

In addition to time saved, the marketing team has seen an uptick in site traffic and an increase in social media impressions, both contributing to the overall pipeline. Allie tells us how freeing up time for marketing gives them more time focus on more strategic and creative work.

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"The hours saved are pretty meaningful in terms of the business impact, because that means we can focus more on important lead gen activities to have an effect on down funnel metrics." - Allie Beazell

Advice From Nicole For Other Content Marketers Thinking About Content Ops

Nicole acknowledges that taking the plunge with a new tool can seem scary to most marketers. But she emphasizes that the time saved down the line is worthwhile. Onboarding and customer success for Letterdrop have been smooth.

Census Saves Time and Headaches with Letterdrop

"It's been great. There's no real reason for us to have to go into Webflow to access our blog content and mess with it. And honestly, the social scheduler and how you'll handle social posts is better than HubSpot in a lot of ways." - Allie Beazell

If you're interested in giving your marketers back one to two days a week and putting content jobs to be done on auto-pilot like Census, reach out to us. We help hundreds of content marketers streamline their content ops.