Isla McKetta, MFA

Look to me if you need someone to rethink your marketing and content strategy. Curious, creative, and organized, words are my passion. I love connecting deeply with an audience by learning about the way groups of people communicate and what motivates them to take action. Having grown up on three continents, I’m also fascinated by the cultural nuances that shape our interactions. I have very high standards for perfection but am not afraid to take risks.

Project Samples

Educating Consumers

People need good information to make the choices that are right for them, and I’m passionate about delivering on projects that educate people while positioning a business as a solution. I’ve worked on a variety of different content types, often using the tools at hand and little to no budget. Here are some highlights:

Product Explainers

Governments want to use Speedtest to get a customer-eye view of what internet providers are really delivering, but some consumers face a barrier in finding the right app, taking a test, and understanding the results. I wrote the script and worked with a voice-over artist to build this video in Camtasia which delighted our clients (who then used this to educate their constituents and increase our usage numbers).

Educational Content

One way to reach an audience is to meet them where they are at. We realized that consumers did not always understand the metrics we were using in Speedtest. At the same time, we know that explain like I’m five (ELI5) is still something people look for when they want a simple explanation of something. And Legos are hotter than ever. So I conceived of, voiced, filmed, and edited a series of videos that had the appeal of childish wonder while delivering important information.

Infographics

Infographics still work, especially if you gear them toward data your audience might find surprising and collaborate with your designers to format them to represent well on social media. Here I strategized with my team to create something that our gaming audience would engage with as part of a larger guide on gaming performance.

Content Strategy

You can’t fix something if you don’t understand what’s broken. Few things make me happier than analyzing a system and finding a way to re-think it so it serves the business and its customers. Below are a few meaty projects where I had the pleasure of working with stakeholders to understand the problem, create a plan, and sell a solution internally.

Combining Ookla.com and Speedtest.net

Speedtest and Ookla are two faces of one brand, and we wanted to bring those identities together into one site to match the corporate direction at the time. I worked cross-functionally with leaders from Design and Marketing to rethink our brand identity, catalogue pages, create personas, imagine user journeys, map the new site, and write site content. A few years later we went through a similar exercise to separate the sites again to better reflect Ookla’s growing brand portfolio.

Revamping Moz’s Learn Center

The challenge: Take a decade’s worth of content from a rapidly-changing industry and turn it into something that helps beginner SEOs, content folks, and general marketers level up while giving more advanced professionals an easy reference for industry updates.

• Learn Center Proposal (.docx). Created to sell the idea to internal stakeholders so I could get started, this document lays out the business case for the project and prior research and projects that the Learn Center would build on.
• Learn Center Field Guide Edition (.pdf). Where I distilled the broader Learn Center idea into a concept inspired by a poetry project I was working on (don’t tell). This includes the content hierarchy.
• What Learning Looks Like (.png). Once I discovered another team was working on a competing project, I sketched out this interaction flow to understand how a user might experience both so we could work toward integrating them.
• Zen and the Art of Content Strategy: My Approach to Redesigning Moz’s Learn Center (PDF). Equal parts “How to approach hard tasks” explainer, philosophical inquiry into process, and project preview, I used the writing of this post as an opportunity to work through some of the questions I had about the project itself.

This project was shelved after I left Moz as the business goals changed.

Nurturing Leads through Email

After a successful lead generation campaign for Moz Local, we needed a way to get those leads sales ready. This deck introduces the reasons behind the program and the multi-track flow of the emails. I also wrote copy for all of the individual emails and worked with design and marketing colleagues to make them picture perfect.

This project was warmly embraced by Moz’s CEO and the emails were still dripping out to new leads over a year later.

Content by Type

Different types of content require different approaches and tonse to meet a specific audience where they are at in the funnel. Here’s a quick look at several different types of content I’ve written over the years:

• Feature announcement. I wrote this article and a related video for Ookla to tell consumers about a new feature (push notifications) on Downdetector.  (PDF)
• Original research. Ookla worked with a PR firm to survey consumers about their mobile pain points. This article presents that research to a B2B audience of mobile operators as a series of issues the Spatialbuzz product can solve for. (PDF)
• How-to content. This article gives concrete examples to content marketers and SEOs about how to write with more authority. It was written as part of a series on writing and content marketing as Moz was growing a product in that sphere. (PDF)

Writing Samples

Client and In-House Work

I’ve worked in-house and with clients on everything from developing a complete content strategy to creating interactive pages, and writing onsite content including (but not limited to) blog posts and product descriptions. Here are a few highlights.

• Which US Airport Has the Fastest Internet. At Speedtest by Ookla, I focused on turning interesting data on internet speeds around the world into consumer-friendly content to increase brand awareness and encourage people to take tests. This piece was referenced everywhere from The Washington Post and Fortune to Life Hacker and had our highest number of views on any piece of content to date.
• Starlink: Bridging the Digital Divide or Shooting for the Stars? (PDF). I delight in exploring new verticals and delivering content that captures the attention of decision makers who might be interested in our product. Here I started a series of articles that got Starlink to call us and continue to talk about our service for years to come.
• Power is Key to Mobile Network Recovery After Earthquakes in Puerto Rico (PDF). Connecting with the human story behind an event is critical for a brand to connect on a deeper level. Here I worked with my data science team to explore new metrics to convey what we saw on the ground after a disaster.
• India’s Internet Speeds Improve, But 5G Can’t Come Fast Enough (PDF). My global experience helps me relate to consumers beyond middle class North Americans. In this article, I considered how advances in wireless technology were and were not helping Indians and advocated for more while also positioning our brand as a solution.
• 12 Reasons Hobbits Should Live in Alaska Instead of New Zealand. How do you attract attention for a smaller-sized client in a crowded market? Raise a challenge that gets people interested and talking. This blog post, published just before the release of The Hobbit earned record shares for the company on Facebook.
• The Collaborator: Interview with Rico Quirindongo AIA (PDF). I’m used to working with decision makers and leaders (in corporate America and beyond). Here I interviewed an up and coming architect and social advocate for a national publication.

Marketing and Content Strategy

Engaging with an audience requires understanding their needs. I enjoy looking past cultural conventions to connecting with an audience’s pain points. Sometimes this means nudging a strategy in one direction or another and sometimes it means upending a process to build something new. While I am a flexible writer, these articles and those in the next section are often written in my most authentic marketing voice.

• When Is a Blog the Right Form of Content Marketing? (PDF). This article spoke to an emerging question (and SERP query) among marketers who had been told to “just blog about it,” giving them the tools they needed to put effort into the right content for them.
• A Content Strategy Template You Can Build On (PDF). This article gave new content strategists a place to start and makes Moz the authority on an emerging marketing vertical.
• Content Actually is All Around (Not Just On Your Blog). This post looks at some often ignored places companies use content including email, product descriptions, landing pages, and offsite materials. It provides a consumer’s-eye-view of why tone matters (and a few shopping confessions).
• Manufacturing Serendipity: How to Create Content that Captivates Your Audience (PDF). This article focused on using human experience to really connect with an audience.
• Sneaking a Peek at My Inbox: What Types of Email Subject Lines Should You Be Using? (PDF). Using real life examples, this article explored what makes a subject line effective.

Copywriting and Storytelling

I bring a fiction writer’s eye to marketing and content strategy which means an emphasis on craft and storytelling. Multilingual from an early age, I am also fascinated by linguistics and cultural subtleties. Below are a few blog posts I’ve written that outline aspects of my approach to copywriting.

• Editing for Creativity: How to Enhance the Writer’s Voice. Finding the perfect balance between the voices of a writer and a brand can be tricky. Here I look at some ways to work with a writer to get the best of both. This approach improves morale when I’m leading a team and soothes egos when editing SMEs.
• Why You Should Add “Building a Lexicon” to Your Copywriting Toolkit. Connecting with an audience starts with a shared language. This post outlines one of my favorite techniques for researching that voice to get it just right.
• The Art of Concision: How to Effectively Make Your Point in Fewer Words (PDF). Enough said?
• Storytelling 301: Site Content as Story (PDF). People often forget how engaging narrative is on a primal level. In this article, I show marketers how to use the storytelling skills they have to effectively move their audience toward a goal.
• “But How Do I Know if It’s Good?” How You Can Evaluate Content Quality (and Ditch Content Anxiety) (PDF). A heavy emphasis on creating more content for the sake of more content was leading people to wonder what even mattered and what good content even was. This article provided insight into separating the wheat from the chaff.
• The Un-Checkbox Approach to Content Marketing (PDF). Here I tried to shake content marketers out of what was becoming the drudgery of just writing more. It’s a reminder that content marketing can be fun and that content you care about is more likely to resonate with an audience.

Other Skills

Reaching new markets

Breaking into new markets requires an understanding of what makes each one individual. I specialize in connecting with the human needs in a target market. Here I worked to understand what people are actually using the internet for during Ramadan while connecting our product to their needs (PDF). All with an eye to the cultural respect I bring to every project.

I also developed a user acquisition campaign for Speedtest and Downdetector tailored to linguistic and cultural needs of specific markets. Using Google ads, a very small budget, we saw a 91% increase in new users in Nigeria, 89% in Colombia, and 45% in Spain within a short timeframe.

Going Viral

Connect with any audience’s needs deeply enough and it’s relatively simple to create content that will resonate with them. On social media this is a fast-turn proposition, but the potential rewards are high (at least in terms of attention). Read about the time I went viral on Twitter and how I analyzed the experience from a marketing lens.

Public Speaking

Though I’ve been out of the limelight in the past few years, I enjoy engaging with an audience on a personal level as I put a literary twist on content marketing.

• The Storytelling of Content Strategy. A fun approach to beginner-level content strategy.
• Clients In Translation: Learning & Working Within A Brand Voice. The first speaker at Content Harmony’s inaugural Content Meetup, I spoke to a linguistic approach to connecting with clients and their customers.

Additional Information

For my full professional resume, please visit LinkedIn. More writing samples and information about my creative writing projects are available here. For even more information about me, check out my artist resume, artist statement, and contact page.