Q&A with Ashley Fern, Director of Digital Content and Strategy, Betches Media
By: Tesnim Zekeria
Tags: Journalism, Travel, Digital Strategy, Subscriber Spotlight, Brand Identity

Q&A with Ashley Fern, Director of Digital Content and Strategy, Betches Media

This week, The Idea spoke with Ashley Fern to learn more about how Betches Media leverages audience feedback and maintains a unified brand image across different channels and satellite communities. Ashley recently launched the company’s newest vertical, Betches Travel. Previously, she helped build the Betches Brides vertical, including its podcast. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.

Can you give me a brief overview of your team and role?

I’m the Director of Digital Content and Strategy at Betches Media. I joined a little over a year ago and at the time it was a new role for the company.

I manage Betches Media’s digital strategy across all platforms including our website, social media accounts, podcast, and video. I also work closely with our brand partnerships team.

My job is to connect all of the different content we produce and make sure we’re telling a cohesive story. This means that regardless of whether an audience member is a site reader, podcast listener, or Instagram follower, they will still be aware of what Betches Media is doing across different channels. Our focus is to deliver a consistent message — what you listen to, for example, will be supported by what you might then go on to read on our site.

Underneath me, my department is comprised of the editorial and social teams. Editorial includes our Editor-in-Chief Sara Levine, editorial assistants, and our network of freelance writers. Our social team is made up of social media managers who run our main instagram handle (which is our most well-known social media with 6.9 million followers) and our 12 satellite communities such as @betchestravel, @dietstartstomorrow, and @betches_sup. All together, we have over 8 million instagram followers across our 13 accounts.

What does your day-to-day look like?

My work is very meeting-based. My week usually starts off with a social content brainstorm that is led by our editor-in-chief that I help oversee. That same day, I also have a weekly sales and partnership meeting. I also meet with each person who manages a satellite account to determine what our current priorities and initiatives are. Aside from that, I meet with our three founders and serve as a liaison between upper management and our more specific teams.

What has been your favorite initiative to work on so far?

If you had asked me three months ago, I would’ve told you that it was our Betches Brides vertical, which I launched last March. I created the Instagram account, produced the podcast, and managed the Facebook group that currently has 10,000 members. At the time, a lot of people in our office, including myself, were engaged. And, because we see ourselves as maturing with our audience, launching a brides vertical seemed like a natural and appropriate opportunity.

Most recently, however, I launched Betches Travel, which garnered 40,000 instagram followers in its first week of launch. When we launched this, our strategy was to make sure that every satellite account had a piece of media that was travel-related but catered to that respective vertical. By doing this, we could move audiences from one vertical to another.

What drew Betches Media to travel?

Millennials are obsessed with travel largely because of Instagram. But, we noticed that there really isn’t a platform to get real travel advice. You could go on TripAdvisor, but you don’t know whether the reviews are trustworthy.

We want to create a space that provides honest reviews and experience of ourselves as audience members. A picture may be worth a thousand words but we want to help tell the authentic story behind it.

This has led us to create travel guides as well as hotel and restaurant profiles (and, of course, memes and tweets) based on our own criteria cards. With our first restaurant profile we rated the restaurant not only on its food quality, but also on things millennials care about in the travel space like the cost, the availability of gluten-free and vegan options, and the ease of making food adjustments.

What challenges did you face when launching these verticals?

I think the hardest thing is finding messaging that hits everyone’s budget and demographic.

With some of our early Betches Brides podcasts episodes, for example, we featured vendors that we loved but we received a lot of the feedback that it wasn’t accessible to our audience’s price range. So, we pivoted our messaging to be more inclusive. Our appeal lies in the fact that we’re reaching our audiences not as industry experts but as people that they can relate to.

Luckily, our audience is super engaged. They love responding to everything and voicing their opinions. And, of course, we love listening to their opinions because we don’t want to create content that they don’t find useful.

When we began looking into travel, we posted 20+ polls asking our audiences about their preferences: Do they stay in boutique hotels, Airbnbs, or hostels? Do they fly first class or economy? I tracked all these responses with our consumer insights and analytics manager and began to identify both the things that would draw in our audiences and also the things that would alienate them. We quickly learned that while our audiences are very open to spending money on travel, they want to know how to make it go further.

What is the most interesting thing (product, tool, article, social channel, special project, redesign, etc.) that you’ve seen from a media outlet other than your own?

The New York Times publishes interactive playlists that take readers through an artist’s album and reveals the backstory behind an album. The artist’s previous tracks are integrated and the reader gets to learn more about the the inspiration behind the album. As someone who loves to read, I love the idea of an interactive book where you get to listen to a song while reading about it. It’s an awesome way to bring words to life.

Rapid Fire

What is your first read in the morning?

Instagram feed or email.

What was the last book you read?

Lie to Me by J.T. Elison

What job would you be doing if you weren’t in your current role?

I would be a party planner.