Content in Context: How Content Management Links Product, Brand, and More

Max Malterer, Manager of Global Marketplace Content, on how Content Management underpins GetYourGuide’s varied output, and why testing matters.

The Content Management team sits at the intersection of product, operations, and content. It partners closely with customer-facing product teams to define and A/B test industry-leading marketplace content standards focused on serving customers' informational and inspirational needs at every stage of their journey.

That spans everything from the carefully crafted wording used in activity and location descriptions, to specially commissioned imagery found across our website, ads, and more.

Content Management also partners with internal- and partner-facing Product teams to define and roll out tooling and systems to process, store, and manage that content at scale.

Finally, the team manages the operational workflows for the creation and maintenance of marketplace content with a base of more than sixty freelance content editors and photographers. Varied, collaborative, and fast-paced, it’s fair to say Content Management connects the dots across multiple facets of GetYourGuide.

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Constantly Surpassing Standards

The Content Management team’s mission is to provide the most customer-centric marketplace content in the travel experiences industry at scale. What makes our challenge especially exciting is the fact that we keep a massive content ship running, while changing parts of it at full speed. For example, every week we ensure that around 500 new activities that are uploaded to GetYourGuide’s marketplace meet our current content standards.

Keeping on top of such a wide-reaching, fast-moving marketplace, not to mention a sizeable and international freelancer pool, calls for exacting standards. This relates to the accurate configuration of activities; how and what we communicate in copy, including standardized phrases and labels; as well as clear parameters for imagery. Together with different Product teams, the Content Management team runs A/B tests to evolve these standards so that we continue improving our customer offering.

A great example is our current imagery project, which involves elevating our activity images to higher quality, increased authenticity, and stronger relevance. As ever, the purpose is to deliver better, clearer information to our customers across search ads, on our landing pages, and on the activity detail page.

Working closely with Brand, we defined a new aspirational imagery standard. We then set up a process to shoot a selection of 500 activities in the first half of 2022 in collaboration with two external agencies in the US and Europe.

Our own network of freelance photographers was also invaluable in shooting attractions and activities that require more hands-on direction. Illustrative of the range of internal teams Content Management collaborates with, we’re now working with Analytics and Product to test and analyze the impact of the new images. Looking ahead, the goal is to establish processes and tools for our local partners to scale the new imagery standard to all activities in our inventory.

The Two Sides of Content Management

All this work is done by two sub-teams. Our Content Operations team manages and optimizes all content workflows related to the text, imagery, and data for activities and locations. Every week, the team checks and edits thousands of content pieces. It also supports projects inside and outside of Content Management with high-volume content creation or audits to test and roll out new standards.

In addition, it shares operational insights and intelligence to establish new processes and tooling. To do all of this, the team hires, trains, and retains a high-quality pool of freelance content editors and photographers.

Our Content Projects team co-defines, tests, and iterates content standards with Product, UX, and Brand. It designs and establishes the processes for scaling new standards; and then co-develops tooling for scaling and automation with Product teams and Business teams.

For example: defining a new standard, then working out how to ensure all our 40,000 plus activities adhere to this new standard, before translating it into new features in our internal content management tooling.

Collaboration is Key

As you can already see, because content sits at the heart of every product that GetYourGuide’s customers interact with, our work is highly cross-functional. That includes working closely with Sales, Localization, and other teams to ensure we get the best possible content from our local partners.

Of course, working with local partners must always be two-way. For example, we recently collaborated with the Catalog, Localization, Sales, and Customer Experience teams to develop a new process and tools to allow local partners to directly change their content.

Previously, they had to request changes through us, which was frustrating for them and time-consuming for everyone. The new system allows local partners everywhere to make changes themselves, marking a dramatic shift in how we work with this specific type of content.

Collaborating with so many teams is definitely a highlight of being part of Content Management. You get to work with many fantastic colleagues and learn about multiple aspects of the company.

Putting Teamwork to the Test

None of this would be possible without seamless internal collaboration between Content Operations and Content Projects. Each team brings invaluable insights and supports the other in delivering both day-to-day and long-term goals.

A good example is when we aimed to rework our activity title standards. The intention was to define a new standard that would improve customers’ understanding of what the activity was about. The Project Manager drove the overall collaboration with Product and Content Design to define the standard, set up the A/B test, and decided with the Product team what actions to take based on the results.

The Operations Specialist provided key insights on titles and selected and trained the freelancers to rewrite the titles for the A/B test. Demonstrating the importance of testing in everything we do, it transpired that our existing standard performed better than the new version.

Nevertheless, this was a valuable exercise for our team: we were able to gather lots of insights for future tests and took the results as a clear message from our customers that at this point there were more important content elements to improve.

Culture Matters

To foster a strong team culture and collaboration between all Content colleagues, we have weekly touchpoints to share our learnings and wins; as well as discuss and brainstorm topics that affect us all. We also have more casual social check-ins to get to know each other better on a personal level.

The latter is especially important in our hybrid work setup, as strong relationships foster trust. In addition to our weekly meets, we also have monthly team lunches and drinks, a quarterly team event, and an Innovation Day to work on finding solutions to our biggest challenges. All of these forums are arranged by our ‘Spirit Squad’ which is a volunteer team whose mission is to take care of our emotional and psychological safety.

What I find the most fascinating about this team is the range and diversity of our work.

Our scope covers the whole marketplace content value chain: we define and test with Product what content we need; we define and establish processes for creating and managing that content, and we work with other Product teams on building the tools to do so at scale.

Second, our content covers data, text, and visuals for activities and locations, and gets used across the entire customer journey from ads on Google to CRM emails after the customer has had an experience with us. Finally, in addition to the content machine, we also run innovation projects.

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