What Makes a Content Ecosystem Successful?

In this episode, we interview Dan Rosenbaum.

Dan shares his experience building a robust content ecosystem that drives measurable results.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• How to define and build a successful content ecosystem.
• Ways to identify what content resonates with your audience through research and social feedback.
• The role of user-generated content and how to leverage it effectively.
• Best practices for content distribution across platforms, including social-first strategies.
• Tips for building and engaging a diverse audience.
• Key metrics to measure content success and drive strategic decisions.

Discover the secrets behind creating content that inspires, engages, and delivers results. Connect with Dan after the episode on LinkedIn or Instagram (links in the show notes).

Transcript

Ben (00:06.435)
Okay, awesome. Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Dan. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Rosenbaum (00:14.284)
Hi Ben, thanks for having me.

Ben (00:16.089)
Yeah, Dan, this is going to be a fun conversation. I'm excited for this one. I think it'll be a lot of fun, a very holistic look at content and marketing. It's going to be good. But before we get there, Dan, share a little bit about yourself. What have you done with your career and what do you love about content and marketing?

Dan Rosenbaum (00:34.03)
My career started about over 17 years ago. I was in the right place at the right time in college when Facebook came out and hopped on it right away. And by the time I graduated college,

A lot of companies were like, we need to tap into this Facebook platform and start marketing our clients or our products. And I was able to get a couple of jobs at some agencies working on some entertainment clients, working on video game clients and running a team. And through that experience, I really enjoyed social media and the immediacy of it, but realized that social needed to be

in-house and there's a friction of it always being on. And so I joined San Francisco Travel when it was the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau back in 2010 as our social media manager. And if you talk to any social media manager, you'll realize very quickly that social media runs on content. And because I needed content to make sure my

channels were always on. I helped craft the content marketing strategy and process at San Francisco Travel. And we have been able to grow a robust process over the last 10 years. And I've grown my role to help the team run that as well as global advertising right now. So that's a long, maybe a long-winded question to how I got to where I am.

Ben (02:59.387)
I love it, I love it. And that background is so relevant. It's such a good conversation I think we're gonna have today. Really what we're gonna focus on is the entire ecosystem of content. So when we say a word like ecosystem, I imagine a lot of people have a different mindset and are immediately going towards different thought processes about what an ecosystem looks like. Dan, when we say the ecosystem of content, what does that mean to you? What are we really discussing today with that?

Dan Rosenbaum (03:27.906)
Yeah, so content ecosystem to me is a network of our own paid channels married with the content strategy, content creation process. And then the third prong is the measurement. And how do we measure success through our content, through our advertising? An ecosystem isn't just, explains really the concept of like,

It's not just important enough to build content and to expect people to discover it, but an ecosystem really is the answer to how do you create content and how do you distribute it and how do you measure its success and iterate off of that.

Ben (04:12.879)
I love that. That's awesome. So let's dive into it. So when you're looking at this ecosystem, you kind of nailed down the different parts of it. How do you look at the content creation side? What factors are you putting into that? Where are you getting inspiration and opportunities? Where do you really know what your audience even cares about? You know, if you have something to say, how do know they care? Like, what do you know to create?

Dan Rosenbaum (04:35.724)
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think you can look at what to create from many different avenues. Number one is research. My organization runs a visitor profile study where we intercept visitors coming to San Francisco to understand why they're there, what they're there to see. We understand where they go in their trip, how much money they spend.

And that number one is the basis of our content strategy. After 10 years, it hasn't really changed, but it has created our pillars of Destination 101 slash iconic content, culinary content, arts and culture, diversity. So that's number one. Number two is looking at channels that will give you feedback. And when I think of channels that give us feedback,

Obviously social rises up to the top because you get instant feedback that way. You post something or you do social listening or see what trends are going on to understand what content will resonate with people. But then you look at all your other own channels, say your website, understanding where people are going to on your site, how they are getting there, where they're going to next, the page path, what are they engaging with.

Email, know, email thinks, people think it's like one to many and you just send out emails on a regular basis, but people actually respond to some of those emails. And I think that's really important to understand whether you're hitting the mark there. So those are three really great channels to understand what's resonating with your audience.

Ben (06:29.507)
So in the line of business I've been in, this concept of intercepting your customers and understanding that, how does that work? Like, are you using specific technologies? How are you actually getting in front of these people at the right time to question them? What does that look like? Because I'm curious if we can extrapolate a way for businesses to be able to use that as well.

Dan Rosenbaum (06:50.188)
Yeah. So for us at San Francisco travel, we really look at our customer journey, our customer journey being, and it's part of a regular marketing funnel of the awareness top of the funnel, which is the start of the journey. People, call that dreaming. And then once you go into dreaming and you go into consideration, which is more about searching online.

Ben (07:11.823)
Yeah.

Dan Rosenbaum (07:18.242)
and then you go to booking and then you actually go to visiting. And so really when we create content, we want to ensure that we are number one, hitting all parts of that funnel from our perspective. That enables us to be specifically with SEO in places where we can, where people searching intent and just dreaming, we can hit it there.

down to consideration and down to even purchase where we're actually tracking hotel room bookings and attraction tickets. So that's number one, how we build out our content. That said, when we're thinking about technology that we use specifically, we run a lot of our advertising in-house, natively. So we'll use

Facebook and we'll use TikTok. And then in terms of getting content and seeing what's resonating out there, there's a product in the destination marketing organization space, the DMO space called CrowdRiff. And this allows us to search social video in our destination, see content that people are creating. This is user generated content and we can actually

ask, request rights to that content so that we can really promote it through our channels as well. those three things, and specifically that technology of CrowdRift has allowed us to really amplify content that's already being created in our destination.

Ben (09:04.579)
I love that. That's amazing. That's got the wheels turning about a lot of applications there. I love it. So moving on to the rest of the ecosystem, I liked how you really talked about, know, if you build it, you know, they will come this kind of concept where you can't just create amazing content and expect people to show up. How do you look at distribution? How do you really optimize for that? How do you know where to distribute things of that nature? How do you really plan out that part of the ecosystem?

Dan Rosenbaum (09:33.526)
Yeah, so obviously you want to understand and utilize leverage all the channels at your disposal. That includes email, social, and then how you want to promote stuff on your website. For us, if we're going to create an article, it's like, where does it get placed on our site? And how do we interlink back? But really, our distribution plan actually is social first.

and social first because of the immediacy of the feedback we get. So we create content, if it's new and it's updated, we'll definitely continue and promote it on the site, we'll promote it in our email. But social is where we help amplify and what I say atomize it because we will take a piece of content, share it on social organically first and see if it hits thresholds.

If it hits certain thresholds, then we'll immediately put it in our paid advertising to hit a broader audience. From there, we will see what type of feedback we get on the content itself. And our social media manager will look at it, how they can dissect the content and repurpose it for the channel. And then we'll report back to the team about

what is working that will create some social content, so specifically social content first that will then turn into an article. And so it's really about utilizing social for its immediacy as that first step to understand, OK, what else can this content become or what other content do we need to create?

Ben (11:27.883)
I how you have this threshold of when it's worth putting money behind it. think that's really powerful. Are you utilizing zero click content? So content that lives entirely on social media or primarily does the content live on the website? You're sharing fractions or snippets of it and ultimately trying to get them to the site or is it some kind of a mixture? What do you kind of look at there?

Dan Rosenbaum (11:51.606)
Yeah. So I think with zero click content, it's important to utilize the tool like Proud Rift to find that content, to help share. for us, zero click content means we want to still promote the destination and promote content that we just know will perform well. And then more people will see and help with the branding of the destination.

change our narrative around the city. But primarily, are gold against driving people to our website. But not just website visits, but getting engaged visits. So we'll do a mixture of both. But because of how the social platforms are geared towards that social content, we definitely want to utilize it as part of our bag of content tricks.

Ben (12:47.695)
Very cool. So with a company that has such a big social presence and emphasis, any recommendations that I'm throwing you a curve ball with this one. I apologize. Any recommendations on how to build up an audience of people that actually care and want to interact with you. can imagine you've got this really unique mixed bag of followers who are either residents that love the city.

or they come and travel to the city on a regular basis or they're considering it. And there's a million different reasons why, how are you first of all building that following and then how are you creating content that kind of tailors potentially to quite a few different segments that that audience might be comprised of.

Dan Rosenbaum (13:35.724)
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think when I look back at our social journey at San Francisco Travel, we have over 1.1 million social followers across all of our social channels. That really, really started out on one specific platform. And we grew to Instagram, TikTok, and threads.

and X. It really is about, when I look at it, taking a channel by channel approach, first and foremost, to see what is resonating. When you take a channel by channel approach, you look at the type of content that people are creating and that you want to create in that format because you know what performs on that platform. So that's number one.

And then from there you can continually build out the content. So when I started back in the day, were on Facebook, and Facebook is where the majority of our audience is, but we were creating and just posting text updates that people loved. And then they added photos, and now we're doing carousels, and Instagram came on board, and now it's all about the filtered photos and sharing UGC.

but now it's about the reels and video content. And so it's about leveraging those pieces of content across the different platforms that utilize them for video, it's YouTube, it's Instagram, and it's TikTok. And so once you get a handle on how to create that content for a specific platform, you know how to then...

turn it around and repurpose it for other platforms. And so that's really how I would recommend thinking about social and just building up a following and creating your content. How we go about targeting different subsets of our visitors. There's a couple of ways in which we think about it. You can slice it in one way of first time versus return visitors.

Dan Rosenbaum (16:00.344)
First timers, obviously for us, they gravitate more towards the iconic nature of our city, Golden Gate Bridge, Quik Tower, Alcatraz, Pier 39, and really want those general big list pieces of content, like 28 things not to miss, top 20 attractions, here's where you should eat right now. And then when you're actually targeting repeat visitors, it's more of that deeper content.

of more interest-based to arts and culture or culinary to the neighborhoods. So they've probably seen the Golden Gate Bridge before and they just wanna come back and explore our natural hills, drink a cup of coffee, go down. So it's really about creating that content that allows people to see themselves in the city itself. And so we try to...

really tap into the city assets to really target different visitors, whether they've been here many times or they haven't been here at all.

Ben (17:08.653)
I love it. That's super cool. Okay, we're running out of time. So one quick question, which is tough to ask quickly because it's a really dense subject, but I think we'd be remiss if we're talking about the ecosystem and didn't touch down here. You talked about measurement and attribution. High level. How do you look at those metrics? Any insights you'd like to share with anyone listening today?

Dan Rosenbaum (17:31.394)
Yeah, that's one of my favorite subjects of the ecosystem. So I could talk about this for hours. But like I said, the measurement for us really comes down to what our goals are as a marketing department, as an organization. So it really starts out as the 30,000 foot level. And then when we're thinking about, what is content drive for us? We look at, OK, what?

How are we driving people to the site? How many people are coming to the site? Are they actually engaged? So it's more, it's not just, they came to our site and then bounced, but we needed people who actually engaged with our site. Once they get on our site, we want them to complete a high value task. So that could be, that could be viewing a video, that could be going to multiple pages, that could be clicking on a button to see more or to sign up for our email newsletter.

all the way down to are they booking on our site? Are they signing up for our newsletter? And so we wanna make sure that we're driving quality, not just

Ben (18:41.869)
I love that. That's amazing. I love the concept of starting with your specific goals and then narrowing that down and finding what metrics mean the most to you. So I think that's really cool. So Dan, we have run out of time. These episodes go quick. There's so much to unpack here. I think this is a great episode. If anyone listening wants to connect with you and reach out and find you online, how and where can they find you?

Dan Rosenbaum (19:08.206)
So they can find me on Instagram at Dan J Rosenbaum, but they can also find me on LinkedIn where I'm very active. So come out and reach out to me after you listen to this episode and I'll be glad to connect.

Ben (19:26.927)
Love it. And we will link to Dan's profiles in the show notes below so it's easy to find him. Again, Dan, thank you so much for your time and all of the insights today.

Dan Rosenbaum (19:37.07)
Thank you.