News360 Blog Content Marketing All-Stars Q&A: Allison Chesky of Resy

What's the key to Resy's content success? Focus.The restaurant reservation app's pieces have a clear goal - helping consumers find where to dine - which gives them the clarity and strong point-of-view often missing from content from other brands. Recently we chatted with Allison Chesky, Managing Editor at Resy, to learn more about how the company creates its exceptional blog, mobile, social, and email offerings.Check out the full Q&A below:Q. What is your professional background and role at Resy ?A. My background is in editorial. Prior to joining Resy, I earned my stripes working on editorialteams of some storied magazine brands, culminating in a role as an editorial director overseeing digital, print, social, and creative.The experience was invaluable for a few reasons, if none other than it was an excellent primer in quality standards (especially in the advent of digital). I was fortunate to learn from talentededitors. Working in editorial helped me develop a sense of what could exist, and how to realize a vision, building something from the ground up - from the story angle to the creative - and seeing it to completion in, you know, two weeks or less.As for my role at Resy, I lead our content marketing, editorial, and social strategy, so my job is to tell the Resy story and the stories of the restaurants we work with. That includes creating content that's engaging for our users, ideating email marketing campaigns, overseeing the blog and in-app copy, ensuring our messaging adheres to the brand vision, and crafting our creative for social.One of the hallmarks of producing content for a tech company is how holistic we can be. I think the inherent nature of being at a startup lends itself to "stretching," which is really beneficial from a content perspective because blog, email marketing, social, messaging-everything is aligned.Q. What role does digital content play for Resy? Why are you creating it? A. Our content, which bridges a few platforms, including our app, blog, and email, serves a few purposes- primarily to engage our users and provide a tool for discovery. Put simply, I hope that by reading about a restaurant or chef we've highlighted, a diner can discover something entirely new or a newfound appreciation.Q. What sorts of pieces are you creating? And how is the content being created?A. At Resy, we are obsessed with restaurants, chefs, and hospitality, so that's the lens we apply to the stories we tell and the pieces we produce.Our blog posts frequently feature Resy partners and chefs; however, we do also highlight chefs and restaurants who do not use Resy, but whose work we respect. It's a testament to our devotion to the industry, and our love for it.Our coverage is also sometimes indicative of trends we've observed in the data or where our users have expressed interest-whether that's surrounding a highly-anticipated new opening or aimed at revealing the inner workings of a storied favorite.It also doesn't hurt that we work with wonderful restaurants and that the Resy team is deeply knowledgeable about hospitality and F&B. It provides us with constant material for content creation!Q. How do you measure the success of a piece of content? Which metrics do you pay close attention to?A. Engagement is, of course, an indicator, but the ultimate test is the trust we build over time with our users. It's great to see a spike in reservations once, but it's even better to see that we've built brand equity over time, and therefore have a user who will consider us-and our recommendations-in any market they travel to.Q. Do you have a few favorite pieces of Resy content? What showcases what you guys do well?A. Two of my favorite content pieces are The Resy Hit List, which can be found on the Resy blog and in our emails, and Why We Like It, a new feature in the app that's our take on what makes that restaurant the ideal place to dine.The team has a knack for predicting the hard-to-get-into places before they're too difficult to get reservation for, so keeping up with our content and Hit Lists can help to inform diners' decisions and encourage discovery of new and emerging restaurants.We've also introduced Climbing on Resy (indicated by a lightning bolt beside a venue in the app), which uses real-time data of the most sought-after reservations, determined by Resy users, in a given market. It's a democratized view of the restaurants that are being buzzed about.