Millions of customers. Billions of transactions. The trillions worth of assets. The finance sector, as we know it, is the propelling force of the global economy and the world we live in. In the 21st century, with the advent of digital transformation, the sector has also undergone a sea change. What used to work in the previous century is no longer feasible for the digital generation. Take, for instance, the change in customer behavior. Accountholders rarely visit banks for day-to-day transactions. Banks have restructured their operations and services to cater to the modern needs of customers as well. It is at this juncture that a new form of transformation is taking shape. It is Artificial Intelligence.  It is a disruptive technology that has positively affected all aspects of businesses across sectors. Read how it is transforming the finance sector. Head over below for more details.

Micromanagement is a topic that usually relates to negative behavior. A micromanager strives to control every part and even the smallest detail of an enterprise’s activity. This is a person who can easily stand with binoculars at the desk of an employee and demand maximum productivity and engagement. However, is this really such a scary person? Do not be surprised when you find out that Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs are examples of outstanding leaders who happen to excel at micromanagement. So why do we only see the negative connotation? The goal of this post is not to upgrade your perception of what micromanagement is. However, here we’ll try to explain that a micromanager is not always a leader hated by his/her employees and society.

Liv Up DNA  Between lunch breaks and the end of a long journey of work, or after a marathon of classes and the end of a business trip, the first instinct of a Brazilian is to open a food app and ask for a snack from their favorite fast-food restaurant. But Liv Up believes that they can change this scenario when a group of young friends got together with this hard mission to combine practicality with healthy, tasty, fresh food and why not organic.  Deliver food might not seem something new for D2C companies, but the search for tasty meals, made from uncomplicated ingredients and that improves the quality of life of the consumer differentiated Liv Up among its competitors. And their growth is proof of that.  The company has already received rounds of investment from Kaszek, Spectra e Endeavor Catalyst. On their latest one, ThornTree Capital Partners injected $16 million. Victor Santos, one of the three founders, said that this money is important for them to expand geographically and attend new customers, like more healthy foods for kids.  The success and growth of the Brazilian food tech are based on a culture and mentality of constant innovation that considers every client's opinion in their product and new projects.   Because of their mission to put healthier food in the work/home of Brazilians, they brought more than 25 local farmers to be part of Liv Up's production chain. Now, the company counts with an impressive mark of 80% of its production being composed of organic ingredients.  Since its creation in 2015, Liv Up's growth has also been linked to their marketing strategy. Among influencers and social media (+580K followers), they saw content marketing as an opportunity to educate their audience on how to achieve a better quality of life.   Their Instagram has more than 500K followers. More than just food and products, their blog incorporated other topics, such as physical activity, well-being, and sustainability. Relevant guidelines, especially for Generation Z, which is increasingly looking for identification with the brand culture and product quality. Liv Up's Blog. GrowthHackers spoke to Rafaella Finci, SEO, SEM, and CRM strategist at Liv Up. She is based in São Paulo and shared with us how their content strategy is following the company’s explosive growth. The Content Process  Phase 1: Validation Liv Up content structure is an ever-evolving one. During their first years of operation, they started testing the content on their blog and social distribution as an acquisition channel. To maintain that lean operation, they used internal resources to write blog posts and help distribute these articles on social media.   Once content marketing proved to be an effective strategy with a low cost of acquisition and great upside on search-engines through SEO, together with the long-term vision of its founders, they decided to double down on content, scaling up their production and distribution.   By that time, they hired a Content Manager with background expertise on that field who could help them out. However, as the production would scale, so would the number of google docs to keep track of, as well as the editorial line controlled by spreadsheets and the painful process of accountability with all providers (agencies, freelancers) by the end of every month together with their finance team.   Process, organization, and automation started to become their biggest bottleneck, preventing the marketing team from achieving the full potential this channel could achieve.  Phase 2: Scaling Before their strategy became unscalable and chaotic, they hired Workflow by GrowthHackers to help streamline and scale their production. Here's how it works:  a) Team  Liv Up suddenly gained access to a pool of +2k freelancers segmented by skillset (mostly nutrition, gastronomy, healthy), language (Portuguese), content type (blog posts, infographics, social posts), and specialty (writing, editing, translating, designing).  Deciding to recruit their own team of freelancers, the Liv Up pool of content writers accounts for +100 professionals always at their disposal, so no one commits to producing content they don't know about or don't have the availability to do so. All freelancers are trained about Liv Up strategy prior to joining the team in order to keep aligned the right message to deliver without forgetting to optimize it for SEO.    Liv Up's Content Team. b) Access  When you bring in +100 professionals from outside of your company to your workspace, things can get messy pretty easily without the proper level of control. To avoid it from happening, the Liv Up content team is divided into 3 different roles, each role with a completely different level of access, preventing freelancers from accessing content they were not responsible for or even publishing something that shouldn't go online yet.  The three roles that Liv Up chose to integrate their team. Aftter choosing the types of users' in their team, Liv Up could also control precisely what each actor could (or not) do/see. c) Content types & Workflows  After testing a few different approaches, they've landed on a simple yet complete model that is consisted of:  Content types, templates, and workflows are chosen before starting content production. For each of these content types, their content manager was able to customize precisely all the steps the content needs to go through, the specific deadline of each step, which of their roles could join that step as well as subtasks for each step.  Pre-defined deadlines help the team to follow the content editoral. By connecting all players together under the same roof with a layer of automation over their heads, their Content Manager opens up time to focus on things that can't be automated (such as strategy, talking to their audience, decision-making meetings) and, just as important, with the peace of mind that if, and only if, something goes off track, they will be instantly notified.  d) Distribution  As the production scaled, so did the need for a centralized and automated distribution process. Although there were tons of social scheduling tools out there, there aren't many with the production process integrated and one that covers not only social but the blog as well. The drag-and-drop integrated editorial calendar the team found on Workflow filled up all of these gaps. Once an idea is approved and picked up by a writer of their team, the publishing date is already set and, if the content is approved, no further action is needed, aside from looking at the success metrics:  Workflow allows the team to drag-and-drop editorial calendar integrated with blogs and social media to schedule and publish pieces automatically. The Workflow platform has enabled us to increase agility during the entire process: from approving ideas prior to producing content, to the automation of the production workflow up to the native integration with WordPress allowing us to automatically push content from the platform to our blog and social media.  Phase 3: Content Results  According to Rafaella, beyond content production, Workflow allowed Liv Up to improve their whole content marketing strategy. From ideation to publishing, it's clear that the platform brought agility to their team.  But in numbers, what are their results so far?  After seven months, Liv Up observed an increase of 525.57% in impressions followed by an improvement of 734.82% in click-through rate (CTR), what drives more traffic and improves their Quality Scores (lowering costs on paid campaigns among other benefits). In other words, this means that not only they're reaching a bigger audience using the right distribution strategy, but also creating a good content that's almost impossible not to click just even if it's just to learn more about the brand or actually buying that healthy snack that you spent the whole afternoon craving for. Their awesome content followed by a delightful user experience has also reflected on the number of blog sessions, but what they were not expecting was an increase of 1490.38%. Today, Liv Up counts with organic and direct search as their biggest blog's sources of traffic, and these results are the proof that they're on the right track and look for more opportunities to growth hack their marketing strategy. What’s next for Liv Up?  Built upon the culture and mentality of the search for a better way of life, Liv Up is accelerating the number of healthy, easy, and tasty meals delivered to more than 30 cities in Brazil. All of this in a bold, irreverent and friendly way, like they say.   With a customizable subscription plan sold out right after the launch, it seems that the company is ready to keep its torrid growth. Further expansion plans include a bigger presence in the corporate world and delivery restaurants. Even with risk to overlap their current business model, founders said that’s a risk they are willing to take in order to hit a bigger audience. Only time will tell, but their history shows that they’re not in this business to play. Let’s keep looking closer to the growth path of this food tech. Disclaimer: LivUp is a GrowthHackers customer - they use Workflow to manage their entire content process.