Hi! I’m April Saylor. I’m a writer, editor, digital strategist, marketing pro, and social media expert.

I’m based in Des Moines, Iowa, but I got my start in online marketing on the East Coast.

Before that, I was a scrappy kid from the Midwest holding down multiple jobs while I went to college in Washington, DC. After several internships and even more hospitality gigs, I landed my first digital media role with the award-winning Energy.gov team. It was an exciting time to be in the online space, especially at a Federal agency. Our team experienced a lot of “firsts”—we even created some of the first Cabinet-level social media accounts for Energy Secretaries Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz.

Afterwards, I joined HuffPost Partner Studio in 2014. Before it was bought by Buzzfeed, this was the Huffington Post’s outstanding branded content team, where I juggled the creative challenges of Fortune 500 clients and marketing agencies to launch branded social media partnerships.

At HuffPost, I quickly learned to balance advertiser needs with the excellent editorial standards of the site’s journalism team. Our digital native advertising campaigns won media industry recognition (IAB Mixx, OMMA, and Digiday awards), and it was a crash-course in the worlds of publishing, advertising, and social media. Under the mentorship of HuffPost’s best and brightest, I learned how to turn advertiser needs into valuable content.

I left NYC to freelance for a year while I traveled. I settled back into office life at Meredith in 2016, working with amazing household names like Better Homes & Gardens, PEOPLE, Real Simple, All Recipes, Martha Stewart Living, Parents, and SHAPE magazine. I lead a brand-new team of creators and editors who made huge traffic gains through quick-turn content designed to capitalize on social trends. Those strategies were quickly adopted and incorporated across the company’s lifestyle brands, and I found myself back in native advertising at Meredith’s in-house custom content agency, now called the Foundry. For the next four years, I led creative strategy for advertisers in almost every industry: home, pets, finance, healthcare, wellness, food, and more. We won lots of accolades.

At the beginning of 2020, I had the chance to build a team for Meredith’s brand-new pets site, DailyPaws.com. We created service-driven content that reaches pet parents at the intersection of entertainment and information. And it’s damn good—already exceeding several million monthly visitors through social and SEO-driven content since the site launched in August 2020.

I’m drawn to challenges that let me experiment with messaging and find the formulas that make people click. I’m forever testing and turning the dials on what works, and why.

The big shots have been doing content marketing for years now, but it’s the regular folks—the small business owners, nonprofits and charity organizations, and scrappy startups—who have the most to gain.

Want to work together? Shoot me a note at april@snackablecontent.co.