Product-Led Blogs Generate 50,000 New Sessions for Gale
“From making sure we have our favorite writers on our team to monthly meet-ups to ensure the best service, [working with ContentWriters] has been an all-around great experience.”- Tara Blair, Digital Strategy Manager
Executive Summary
Research database provider Gale sought to shift their content from sales-focused marketing pieces to blogs that focused on applications for their products.
By crafting insightful blogs centered on product functionality, the ContentWriters team successfully positioned Gale as an authority in the eLearning and research sectors, all while showcasing product features and use cases.
CW used Gale's content strategy to give them a powerful voice as a thought leader and ultimately increased product usage by a significant margin.
Highlights:
About
As part of Cengage Group, Gale offers database tools, eLearning products, and other scholarly resources for research and education. It provides access to extensive academic databases, archives of primary sources, eBooks, and digital academies for libraries, educational institutions, and individual researchers.
Challenges
Before working with ContentWriters, Gale's blog centered exclusively on marketing and product sales.
Tara Blair, Gale's Digital Strategy Manager, explained that Gale lacked thought leadership content that explored product usage on a more educational, practical level. "Our blogs were all written by our marketing team rather than thought leaders," said Blair, revealing a clear gap in Gale's content.
As a company focused on providing educational and scholarly resources, having a practical, product-focused knowledge base was critical to its success.
Gale's existing blog was primarily used as a sales asset and lacked search engine optimization. Gale decided to find a reliable, consistent group of writers who could leverage their expertise in research and education while applying up-to-date SEO principles.
Core areas of focus:
How CW Helped
Revamping Gale's blog started with an in-depth planning session designed to understand Gale's long-term vision for their content.
ContentWriters collaborated with the Gale team to get a feel for their authoritative yet accessible voice, develop style guidelines, and identify writers with the right background, style, and availability for their projects.
Based on this baseline, CW writers produced relevant, engaging blog posts designed to highlight Gale's products and platforms in an organic, educational manner.
CW writers placed thought leadership at the forefront of their strategy while also taking SEO value into account. By implementing the SEO keyword best practices, CW made Gale's blog more searchable and visible on the web.
Strategic headers, links, and meta descriptions enriched the value of each post, encouraging conversions while upholding Gale's educational brand image.
The Results
ContentWriters connected Gale with a team of experienced thought leaders to develop insightful, topical blogs that generated interest in Gale's products — and drove conversions. Over their four-year business partnership with CW, Gale developed a significant library of SEO-optimized content that greatly increased their visibility on the web, effectively marketing the business through their educational blog content. CW's thought leadership pieces actively increased product usage across several metrics from October 2021 to December 2024:
Gale didn't need a massive content campaign. They needed thoughtful, curated articles that helped their online presence align with their changing organizational goals. In response, ContentWriters generated a cost-effective content strategy that elevated Gale's online presence within a limited budget. "[ContentWriters] provides us with 8 thought-leadership blog posts monthly," Blair explained. "[Those posts] are optimized for SEO and focus on product usage, which is our main goal in the more recent years."
Because CW took an active role in curating the writer team and implementing feedback, Gale could release high-quality, brand-aligned blogs that achieved their goal of highlighting product functionality. "From making sure we have our favorite writers on our team to monthly meet-ups to ensure the best service, it's been an all-around great experience," said Blair.
Although Gale's main goal was to shift their online presence and build a product-oriented blog, CW's content quickly became an unexpected engine for product conversions.
