Workflow by ServiceNow

When ServiceNow launched Workflow in 2018, it was an experiment to test whether the company could engage with C-level audiences around ideas and not just products. Now, Workflow is a thriving editorial site that publishes hundreds of longform articles a year.

At its heart, Workflow is a high-quality digital magazine that never compromises editorially. It’s produced by a team that comes from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and similar publications. Each article is grounded in strategy and has a clear goal, but also features original reporting and research, strong points of view grounded in experience, and original design intended to heighten the reading experience.

Over the last year, we expanded the way Workflow is organized to help people find experiences that were relevant to them.

We created the following curated experiences:
Crash courses that group together articles on the same topic.
Guides that combine articles on a single theme or industry with related reports.
Persona pages where people can find articles curated by audience.

When COVID-19 hit, we saw a big increase in the amount of time people spent with articles. In particular, we saw a degree of interest in columns from ServiceNow leaders, topics related to the future of work, and the skills needed to succeed in the future. We use these insights to guide our ed/cal and creative campaigns for the year.

We also focused on editorial experience. Our data shows that about half of readers leave a page before reading a single word. So we tested and implemented designs to keep people engaged. This led us to include more graphics, subheads and visuals in our stories and to start them higher in the experience.

Workflow’s impact grows each year. Sessions jumped 50% in 2020 to almost 500,000, even as paid promotions intended to drive traffic decreased. The time a typical reader spent actively reading our content jumped to more than 2 minutes, almost 4x Chartbeat’s benchmark for North American publishing sites.