When the Experian EMEA Central Marketing team started, one of the objectives was to bring consistency to our online presence and communication. As part of this drive, and because of my background as a journalist, I was asked to put together a quarterly newsletter with high-level, strategic content that showed the company’s thought leadership and level of expertise in the credit management, risk and fraud markets. I would then distribute the finished newsletter to the marketing teams in the EMEA region, which translated and localized the content if needed, and then delivered it to their clients and prospects.

I managed the editorial process, aided by an editorial committee composed of several senior managers from different parts of the business. At the beginning I was the author of most of the content. As the newsletter evolved and gained support from inside the business, my role became more of an editor. In this capacity I could commission articles from experts from within the business, which provided content around their field of expertise.

This strategic content initiative lasted four years. After which most countries were starting newsletters and blogs of their own, to which I also contributed content, but it rendered Panorama redundant. Even so, Panorama was the template from which other content initiatives were molded.

Some numbers

  • 26 countries, including Spain, Italy, France, Germany, South Africa, Turkey and India, distributed the Panorama newsletter.
  • More than 30.000 people received this newsletter quarterly.
  • It had an average open rate of 12%, with some countries having an open rate as high as 33%. It’s worth noting that this initiative helped contact some clients and prospects that never received a communication from the company.

What could have been

Before we stopped releasing Panorama, I had big plans for this initiative. I intended Panorama to become a regional magazine, transformed into a separate site. The newsletter would continue to exist, to compile every quarter the best articles published the previous three months. This magazine would also feed social media accounts at a country level and be a content hub for the region. This strategy would have required a regional framework for the marketing activity of the company, but the focus was on country-level actions. This, and shifting priorities, prevented the implementation of this strategy.