Schibsted on Driving KPIs with Content Marketing

August 12, 2022

Words by Ellen Cabrinetti Meum

Crafting visually compelling digital content that stands out in a competitive media landscape and hits business KPIs is no small undertaking.

Yet Schibsted Partnerstudio—a global group of digital consumer brands and media houses—has been successfully nailing both over the years, garnering numerous awards along the way. Partnerstudio produces immersive web editorials and campaigns at both an international and national scale, which reach three million readers every day.

Partnerstudio’s main goal is to produce high-quality content that is valuable to readers and deliver tangible results for their clients, who number among some of the Nordic’s biggest brands. We caught up with Ellen Cabrinetti Meum, Product and Tech Lead at Schibsted Partnerstudio, to learn more about how they do it.

Ellen, what does content marketing mean to you? What are you using it to achieve for your clients?

For us, content marketing is one of the most effective pull-based marketing strategies out there—provided what you’re producing is quality. At Partnerstudio, our specialism is editorial and long-form articles that put real people and real stories front and center. This type of content can be applied to practically any industry and background. Our clients, for example, range from banks and property developers, to automobile dealerships and NGOs.

As a brand advocate for our clients, our objectives are tightly aligned with those of our clients. These KPIs differ from client to client, and can include raising brand awareness, supporting campaign-specific conversions, and providing the best possible user experience.

"We’ve found that high quality content is always the main contributor to the success of our clients’ campaigns—it consistently yields results."

What makes content quality?

Quality content is all about relevance, trustworthiness, and the ability to engage the users. When a brand produces something of real value, readers will naturally form a positive connection with them. Many often then feel obliged to “give back” in some way too, often through exploring more branded content or by taking a specific action that’s guided within the content itself.

Above everything, we’ve found that high quality content is always the main contributor to the success of our clients’ campaigns—it consistently yields honest, tangible results. High quality content includes tailor-made design, engaging story lines, premium video content, and new technology that allows users to engage with the content.

Facial expression, Flash photography, Smile, Hairstyle, Photograph, Eyebrow, Black, Happy, Style, Black-and-white

Ellen Cabrinetti Meum (Leader of Product & Tech)

So many companies struggle to produce quality content. Why does Partnerstudio find it so easy?

Aside from having access to ambitious talent with bold ideas, producing quality content really requires a modern toolkit. The boundaries of what content you can produce on the web are changing all the time, and you need to ensure your content marketing software can keep pace.

Pairing great stories with stunning visuals is incredibly powerful. Yet, too often, we see that creatives are limited in how they play with these by their legacy content management systems (CMS)—they stick to the same tired templates, because introducing more interesting, interactive elements requires too much work.

That’s where Vev changed everything for us. At Partnerstudio, we now use Vev to create and publish the majority of our articles. It’s allowed us to work creatively and experiment with interactive features that always impress our clients and let us go the extra mile. We’re now able to create better articles that hit KPIs and strengthen our client relationships. Without Vev, we wouldn’t be able to deliver the immersive content at the speed and scale that we’re able to now.

What are your favorite interactive content features?

We’re huge fans of sticky position, video scrolling, show/hide, and scrollytelling—these are helping us drive high view counts and an elevated level of engagement. Small animations can also go a huge way to improving user experience, building more intrigue into your content while gently nudging readers to take an interaction or click a CTA.

All of these features are available in Vev either as pre-coded components or add-ons that you can just drag and drop to your design. You also have the option to create your own custom widgets using the inbuilt Code Editor. It’s super easy to tweak and personalize each article design, and you can create templates for different content types, so you don’t have to start from scratch each time you go to create a new piece of content.

What work are you most proud of?

We’re particularly proud of this story about Selhi, the Coordinator at the Council for Religious and LifeStance Communities (STL), and a Member of the Board of Directors at the Rabita Mosque. It chronicles the experiences of immigrant families in the Muslim community during the height of the pandemic and can be viewed in five languages, ensuring readers from diverse ethnic backgrounds can access it.

Christmas is one of the most festive periods for many, yet for others, it's a heart-wrenching time of financial hardship. This animated editorial offers a look at the lives of struggling single-parent families, and how they are finding hopes and dreams. Packed with beautiful illustrations with scrollytelling add-ons, it allows readers to make donations directly from the article.

Featuring a famous Norwegian national runner Henrik Ingebrigtsen, this piece is interactive content at its finest—even if we say so ourselves. Readers can scroll through the article while being entertained with quizzes about Vipps, Norway’s most popular payment app.