Andi Robinson ‘09 (MBA) didn’t set out to become the 2021 Content Marketing Institute Community Champion; in fact, she had no intention of joining the world of content marketing at all.
Andi earned her bachelor’s degree in juvenile justice from Indiana University. After graduation, she worked as a juvenile probation officer for Marion County and intended to go to law school. But life led her in a different direction. She met and got married to her husband (with whom she is celebrating 25 years of happiness this year) and started a family. Andi decided to stay home to care for her two sons, putting her law school plans on hold.
A few years later, Andi re-entered the workforce as a member of Eli Lilly’s Global Product Communications team. It was here that she discovered her passion for marketing and made the decision to pursue a Master of Business Administration degree with a concentration in marketing at the University of Indianapolis.
“UIndy’s MBA program provided me with the flexibility I needed, through evening classes and a small, intimate educational environment,” Andi said. “My professors were all very accommodating and flexible. I felt like they could understand the life of a working parent who wanted to go back to school and extend their education.”
Andi’s previous professional experience also gave her a different perspective when it came to her graduate studies.
“I think there’s so much you get out of getting an advanced degree, particularly after you’ve started your career,” Andi said. “You have a different view on things. Like when you are fresh out of high school and going into college for your undergrad, you’re not always focused on studies; you’re focused on learning your way in the world, making friends and building relationships. When you go through your graduate program later on in life, there’s much more focus on the work and the studies and learning your craft.”
Andi currently serves as the Global Digital Content Leader for Corteva Agriscience, where she is responsible for leading content operations and the global content marketing program as well as social media strategy for the commercial side of the business. In this role, Andi also has to manage a large budget, something that she’s much more comfortable handling after her time at UIndy.
“I’m not a math wizard,” Andi said. “But you have to take quantitative analytics as part of the MBA program, and it really helped me learn how to manage big budgets as well as how to really parse data and help tell a story around our content outreach. That analytics side of it really helped me because it wasn’t my strong suit. My strong suit is words. But that part of the program really gave me a leg up when I was going into the corporate world.”
In addition to her day job at Corteva Agriscience, Andi runs her own marketing consultancy, Hijinx Marketing, through which she helps local small businesses with their marketing strategies.
And if working full-time and running her own business on the side didn’t keep her busy enough, Andi has spent the last year writing and editing her first book: The Content Puzzle…And the Missing Piece.
“I’ve always had it on my bucket list to write a book,” Andi said. “I have a lot to say about content marketing, and I felt like I had an interesting angle, which is that missing piece, so I sat down and started writing. The writing part of the process was kind of cathartic. Like, I could just pour everything from my brain onto the page, everything that I knew about content marketing strategy. And then the missing piece is actually about the psychology of your audience and how it should play a part in your marketing strategy. That’s the missing piece that I felt was a little bit different than a lot of other content marketing books.”
The Content Puzzle…And the Missing Piece will officially release on Sept. 20, 2022 (and is currently available for pre-order). Andi hopes that her readers finish the book with a new perspective on their own content marketing strategies.
“In order to be successful in your product or content marketing – because content marketing is different from product marketing – you really need to put a lot of thought into how your audience will react to the content,” Andi explained. “It’s not always enough just to post a picture on social media with some text and think that people will purchase your product or service; you have to be very deliberate about it. You are trying to elicit a reaction, and in order for people to react, they have to have some sort of emotional response to that piece of content. I think most people don’t take that part into consideration.”
Andi’s continued dedication to uplifting the content marketing community and promoting the industry through her book, running Hijinx Marketing and working hard in general earned her the title of Content Marketing Institute Community Champion in 2021. Looking ahead, Andi is excited to speak at the 2022 Content Marketing World Conference and Expo in Cleveland, Ohio, and is open to the idea of writing another book – whether it be another content marketing book or maybe even a children’s book.
“It’s so funny, because it’s been a long process writing the Content Marketing Puzzle, and I’m glad it’s getting out there,” Andi said. “It’s been very exhausting, but also I’m like, ‘maybe I should write another one.’ There are a lot of things I want to do. Maybe another marketing book, maybe a children’s book. So maybe there will be more books, we’ll see.”
