#108: Content | The Role of Content Operations, Treating Content Like a Product, and Optimizing for the SERPs (with Janine Anderson, Content Operations Manager at Zapier)

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1, 2, 3, 4. Exit.

Exit.

Exit. All right, Janine is here. And Janine, you're the first person that we've had on the podcast that has a role in content ops.

And yeah, there's not a lot of us out there.

Yeah. So what? Tell me about content ops. You've already piqued my interest.

Yeah. So at least at zapier, what content ops is for us is I think of it as I'm like the person who helps enable our content marketing team to do a lot more, a lot faster. So I spend a lot of time looking at our analytics. I try to figure out what's working, what's not working, and I give our editors advice on how to prioritize fixes or where we might have opportunities to go into a new focus area for our content. I help with strategy things across the team. So I'll Work with our user education team, the video team, our blog team, and with cross functional partners on content strategy. When we are developing like content first or content adjacent campaigns, I'll work with those. I've done some project management. I am our primary representative with the product team that maintains the software that powers our blog. I just kind of show up in a lot of different places doing a lot of different things, and I like it a lot. I love to get into analytics and see what's working and what's not working, working. It's one of my favorite things to do. So it's a great fit that I get to do a lot of that these days.

And do you think that is there a gap for this at a lot of companies? And I'm asking. I'll kind of like lead the witness a little. A little bit. But content is my favorite topic because I think that it is the most important ingredient in marketing. And I don't think there is content marketing and marketing, at least the way that I like to do marketing. Content is the marketing. But I have struggled a lot with content teams in the past or hiring or managing my own because it's the scope of the job becomes massive really quickly. It's like you got to write, you got to edit, you got to think about SEO, you got to think about format and content and creative and performance. And like, I've always struggled with like, the person who might be great at writing that article is not the same one who's thinking like, well, how many, you know, leads is this article going to drive? I'm just curious, how did this role come up for you at Zapier? Like, you have a. We'll get into some of your background. You have a background in journalism. You were managing editor at Zapier for a while. Like, I'm curious as to, like, what the inflection point inside of the marketing team and at the company was that was like, maybe we need to put Janine in this content opera content ops role.

Yeah. So this ties in a lot with just my coming out of journalism. I think, like my main. This is in my LinkedIn. Like, I think it's the first sentence in my LinkedIn profile. It's something like paying the bills with curiosity since 2001. And that is like the thing that.

Drives me as what a line. I love that. Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a bar right there. Paying the bills with curiosity. Love that.

Yeah. So like, when I was a journalist that made like, it was very easy to see exactly how that connected to what I was doing. And as I shifted into, into tech and into these marketing roles, I really like, that just is still the primary driver for me in seeking like work fulfillment is. I want to understand like what is happening, why it's happening, and to figure out ways to influence things downstream of the work that I'm doing. Like, that is just really something I love to do, like understanding things. I like taking it apart and putting it back together again so that it makes sense. So when I was brought in to Zapier initially it was as an editor. I was working on our blog team. I built out our mid funnel content from a place where it had been kind of set aside for a couple of years in favor of some other initiatives. And as we did that, we were also kind of at the same time seeing a renewed focus or a new focus on understanding the performance of our content. So if anybody gives me access to a data analytics platform, I will learn it and I will spend as much time as I can reasonably get away with figuring out what is going right and what is going wrong and where we have opportunities to use content to drive results. So I was doing that while also being an editor. And so at some point we just saw this larger opportunity for us to really focus on that kind of strategic analysis, enablement and all of these other things that kept coming up, like having somebody who could jump on special projects and like plan it out, drive it and get that across the finish line. So when that opportunity was identified, they kind of came to me and said, would you like this? And I said, yes, please. So that's what happened.

And are you like, do you have a team or are you in an individual contributor track?

I'm an individual contributor. I was a manager when I was in the editing role and then shifted into an IC role here with this one.

Are you happier now?

Yeah, I mean, I don't mind managing. I've done that. Manager. I see flip a lot of times in my career. I don't see like, personally I don't see management as like an end goal. Like, if I manage people, great. If I don't manage people, also, great. So I just.

And by the way, where I'm coming from in asking that is I want to highlight like through this podcast. We've done a hundred episodes and I, I enjoy highlighting more of those opportunities because I meet people like you and I even feel this way myself. It's why I'm doing what I'm doing now with exit 5 as opposed to being a CM like, I think that a lot of people, if you're good at your job in a capacity, it's very easy to just like, you kind of just get on this track and all of a sudden it becomes manager and you're managing people and you're managing a team. But there can be something so liberating about, like, hey, you're really good at this thing, like, own this thing at our company and work with the team. And I enjoy talking to other people and highlighting, like, I don't want this podcast to be like the how to become a CMO podcast. I enjoy talking to people, like, doing all different types of things inside of companies. So I wasn't asking because I think one of those is right or wrong. I think they were all wired differently. And I think it's clear in voice there's a passion for something in the curiosity and content performance bucket. And jamming those two things together and like, not forcing you to become a manage a team, but allowing you to, like, play a strategic and important role in the team is pretty cool.

Yeah, it's great.

And is it normal for a person with a writing background to be obsessed with performance and metrics, or are you unique?

I don't know that I'd say it's normal, but when I went to college, I thought I was going to be a geneticist. So I have always been really interested in the math and science side of things. But the part that I liked the most was when I was taking research that was already done, understanding what happened and figuring out how to repackage it and make sure that other people could understand the most important thing from those research projects. I went to UW Madison and they had a science journalism grad program. And so I just kind of, as an undergraduate, walked right alongside those folks as much as I could. And when I was in newsrooms, if somebody would give me a data set, I would play with it. I would get really excited. When census data was released, I spent a lot of time with, like, analyzing criminal justice data. It's just something I like to do. So maybe it's unique. I don't know. I'm.

I know that there are people who do that, but pairs well in What a, like B2B SaaS Co. Or any company that wants to invest in content needs because it's. I don't want to say creating good content is easy, but there's often a mismatch between, like, what content could be created, what the business needs to create, and then, like, how is that actually doing? And I Want to go back to what you said earlier about this obsession over content performance? What did you find in there? Let's talk to the thousands of B2B marketers that are listening to this. Like how. What's the right way to be thinking about measuring content in today's world? What are some of the things you learned? I want to, if we can kind of like rewind back or talk about, you know, what you've done and learned at Zapier, that would be super interesting.

Yeah. So at Zapier, our blog is a like search powerhouse. We show up all over the web when you're looking for information about apps.

What's an example? Like, what's an example?

Like I'm going to just do a quick Google search here and see if.

I can do it. Yeah, do it on the fly. This is what we're here for.

Yeah. If I search like best to do list app Zapier is going to come up. Probably it's the first non sponsored result. Okay, so like things like that where we are producing reviews of apps or we might do tips on like how to remove duplicates from Google sheets. Those kinds of things Hit search terms that people are like looking for. They find our content. It's useful, it helps we just kind of grow this search audience as a result.

And are you able to do that? Because like if you and me started our own company tomorrow, we probably couldn't write a best to do list apps article and get it to rank. Right. Like there's Zapier has been in the content, you know, been doing content for over a decade. Is there some level of. Because it's on the Zapier site you can do the like there's very high domain authority or whatever it might be.

Definitely. Like we certainly continue to like because we've been so strong at it for so long, it helps keep us like when we publish new things, it's easier for us to rank for some new keywords than it might be for somebody who has no history with all of the bots and algorithms that decide what's valuable content on the Internet. But when we start looking at like how does that content perform? So if it's we want leads generated or we want new signups or we want people to go from these articles and we want them to go into their account and try to do something within our product, it doesn't always line up quite one to one with like lots and lots of visits, translate to lots and lots of signups or lots of leads or lots of whatever because There can be a pretty big gap sometimes between a piece that we might write and. And the intent of signing up for our product. We have one piece that we did. I don't know when we first published it. It was before I came to Zapier. And it's on like, how to force a public WI FI network to open, which has nothing to do with automation. Like, I don't know why they wrote this piece. It was probably like in 2015 or something. Somebody was just like, this is a problem, I'm going to write it. And they did.

And that just blame Danny. Right, right.

I know. Danny, what were you thinking? Who knows? But this piece is out there and it's a great piece. It's super helpful. People find it all the time. Covid hit and that piece like, tanked because nobody was in the world and needed to make a public WI FI network open. So the usefulness of that piece plummeted because nobody was out logging into WI FI networks at airports and hotels and coffee shops where they didn't already know how to get on their WI FI network. And then as people started going back into the world, we would see that piece start to climb back up again and become more. They would get more visits. So I bring that piece up in part just because that's part of what I'm trying to figure out is if we see our traffic do something new, are we getting lots more visitors? Are we getting way fewer than we used to? What is the thing that changed? And so that's where we'll just try to understand what are the trends going on in the world that we can capitalize on to do. Lists tend to spike going into January and then they taper off at some point. But it's because people want that stuff at that moment in time. So the more that I can do to understand what some of those trends are, the better we are able to match and make sure that we have something for people when they need it. And that specific challenge of like, what is the knowledge gap that exists? Is it appropriate for us to fill it? How can we fill it? And how can we lead people toward the action that we actually want them to take from that piece? Like, that is the content, performance piece piece that I really spend a lot of my time on. And some of this is defining what's your content goal. So if your goal is traffic and you don't care about generating leads, and you don't care about generating signups, and you don't care about whether someone visiting is a current customer, a former customer or a prospect. Like, then you can target high volume search terms and it doesn't really matter. Like WI Fi login help might be exactly what you want on your blog. If your goal is to drive signups, or if your goal is to drive people to fill out a sales contact form and get really good quality leads, you need to understand who are the people that you want to sign up, what are the characteristics of that person, what do they want to know? And how can you deliver something that they are searching for that gets them on your site and helps them see you as a solution to the thing that they like? They need to be able to identify the problem that your product can solve for them. And your content is supposed to be that link between I have a need, you have a solution. And then this blog post is going to be that linkage between their knowledge gap and your solution to that gap. So in terms of like, what do you look at to determine whether something is successful or not? It depends so much on the goal of the content, the audience you're trying to reach, and what you really want them to be doing when they get onto your site through content.

Okay, that's a great, that's a great little segue because that's the challenge that I think a lot of marketing teams have is I think we see a lot of marketing teams doing random acts of content, right? It's like, we got writers, we're making content, we're writing blog posts. But content also kind of does email and then like, oh gee, short form video is a thing. So like we should also be making TikTok. Like maybe you can talk about how you all do it inside of Zapier or if you have strong opinions about like how a marketing team should do this. But when it comes to the content, like content creation process, like, where does like the, we should create an article for this and where does the goal get set? I'm curious to get into that process a little bit.

Yeah. And for us it depends a little bit on like what is the content we're creating. And we, in some ways we start from the goal. So our like search focused top of funnel content. We are targeting traffic and we're targeting.

Can we, can we pause? Can we pause on that for a second? So that, so that would come from. As a marketing team, one of the key metrics that you all have is a traffic goal, because traffic is important to Zapier's business because you have a free product that lots of people can sign up for and you have a Funnel, right? Is that right?

Yeah. And it builds brand awareness. Like it helps cement us as a place that you see as valuable and trustworthy. So I think that that's. A lot of people who are in the search game are trying to do that same thing. You're. You're looking to make sure that you are seen as valuable and useful. So even if somebody isn't ready for the Zapier product, if they found our content to be helpful, we hope that that leaves them with a positive association with our brand. And then if they see us later and have a need for our product, that will hopefully carry over. I think that that's a lot of like brand awareness and brand marketing approaches, like really try to tie into that loyalty and just developing affinity for your brand so that you're recognizable later. So when we create like top of funnel content, our goal is going to be on the brand awareness traffic side versus something where if we're creating a tutorial that goes through every single step you need to follow to set up a really valuable like Zapier workflow, for example, that piece is never going to get as much traffic as a best to do lists article, because it's going to be like, how do you download Facebook lead ads and automatically load them into Google sheets? That article, what we're maybe looking for, there would be a different metric. So we don't judge totally different content by the same goals. We set different goals for different types of content. And that's one of the things that on our content marketing team especially, we really try to not put everything in the same format because we recognize that it's not always going to work. We have some articles that are meant for people who already use Zapier and we know that they have trouble using a specific or they need help getting something to work. Exactly right. But if you've never used Zapier, you don't need to understand this thing yet. We might create pieces that are designed to get a really small, very narrow audience, but we know that for that audience, it's going to be incredibly valuable information and it will enable them to find success in a way that might have been harder for them to do otherwise.

Got it. And do you think about like, from a content creation standpoint, are you thinking about different stage of a customer? Like this is. And each one of those is going to have a different measurement. Right. This is more for Net new. This is more for getting someone who already might be using Zapier to do more. This is more for an enterprise level. It's like as you unpack this more, there's all these variables as to like who are we creating this content for and why? And there's, it's not like somebody's just going to sit down and bang on an article and then go try to do that in reverse. It's like you have a high, finely tuned machine here where you're doing all of those steps in order. I'm just curious to how do you create content for multiple audiences under one brand?

Yeah, there's a little bit of just like our team is kind of magic and does a really good job at flexing into all of these different areas.

You have good people, sure.

You know, we've got great, we've got a really great team and as a result we have people who are super, super good at focusing on top of funnel and we have people who are really focused in, on middle of funnel content, which we really define as like things that are bringing people into Zapier directly. So it's either telling them how to set something up, highlighting the value of automation, making them understand what's possible if they were to use Zapier with the tools that they're already using to get their work done. And we often will find that especially for our kind of middle of funnel content, it plays to different audiences at the same time. So that piece that I kind of mentioned earlier, where you're trying to. Somebody wants to set up an automation that will run forever, that will send any new Facebook lead ad lead that comes in into a Google Sheet so that they can do different analysis with it and share it with their team more easily. Somebody who has never used Zapier before but knows that that's the thing that they want done. If they search for how to connect Facebook lead ads to Google Sheets, they will find that article and it will give them the steps that they need to be able to set up this app for the first time, be successful right away. And that's great. If somebody has been using Zapier for a while, maybe they've got some other zap that they have, but they can't figure out how to get this one to work. Maybe something's tricky with Facebook lead ad setup, maybe there's something tricky on the Google Sheets side that they can't do. They make that same search, they find the same article and they're going to have the same outcome of success. It's just a success in a very different part of the user journey. So instead of we're leading this to a like sign up who finds success within their first three days of signing up. We are instead looking at somebody who's maybe creating a fifth zap that then they are using or maybe it's somebody who's increasing the number of things that they're able to do within our product because they've got the solution that we produced that helps them find success to something that they were a little bit stuck on before. So that's a little bit of just like we sometimes will create things, understanding that they'll play at different places in this user journey. For our content marketing team, we work really, really closely with other teams at Zapier in the marketing department. So we will work closely with our lifecycle marketing department with Demand Gen, we work with our sales team, we worked with our ecosystem partner marketing folks, we work with the folks who manage our onboarding emails and we are always trying to figure out ways that we can suggest content that will function and help enable people wherever they're communicating, wherever they're receiving that Zapier communication. We want to make sure that if, if a team needs a resource that we have on the blog that we give that to them so it can be used. So if we're going to send an email out to everybody who uses Google Sheets, then we want to make sure that the team that's going to do that big Google Sheets email blast has all the highly performing like highly successful pieces that we have about Google Sheets in their list of resources that they could push out so that we know that they are getting the full breadth of what we could provide in terms of enablement we will provide like our content team, we work on the blog, we have a part of our team that helps with campaigns and so they'll be doing more like landing page copy, they do email copy. They'll work on other kinds of special campaign related projects. We have a video team, we have a user education team and the team that works on campaigns. One of the things that we started doing, can't remember this is like late 2022 or early 2023 at this point. But we like they'll put together their strategy for the campaign and then we will create like a separate set of content specific goals and ways of measuring success. So if your campaign as a whole is looking to generate new leads or generate sales calls or to get so many people to do some specific action, our content related success metrics might be click rates on those emails that go out. We might be looking to make sure that the piece that we think is most valuable in each email is actually getting the most clicks. And it's not like they're clicking on the fourth link and skipping over our main cta. Those are kinds of like detailed content specific metrics that we will sometimes look at to try to make sure that like, did we create the best content we could for this audience? So even if the campaign is hitting its goals of generating however many leads they wanted to generate, if we can come back and look at it and say, this email feels like it's not structured in the most optimized way because people are having to go too far down to click on a link, we might suggest like, can we make these changes and rearrange it so that the most clicked thing is at the top?

For example, it's such an advantage to have a team that is thinking about all of the pieces in the marketing machine at that level because it's so easy to just be like, yep, on Tuesdays we send this email, on Thursdays we send this email, we look at open rate. But it's like this obsession about like, well, could we rearrange it? This, you know, it's like treating that email like are all pieces of content as if it's a product. Right? And questioning those things and mixing up the ingredients to see if you can get a different result without having to change the overall structure of the campaign. I love that type of stuff. And I think that goes back to the beginning of you talking about being obsessed with content performance in all forms. We might not even have to rewrite this piece, but we can rearrange the parts and get a better result from it.

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Yeah, and one of the things that I think is really powerful about having this like, question of like what is going on here as like the drive driving thing behind what you do your job with is like you can take that approach no matter what your job is. So if you're a writer and you want to know like what happened with my piece, you can find out like there's somebody at your company that you can ask. Even if you don't have access to all of the analytics, the way that Zapier lets people have access to all the analytics, if you have a strategic goal that aligns with something that you're doing, understand what it is and figure out how you can suggest changes. It lets you have this solution focused mindset. When you come back to look at how it did or when you're starting to plan for your next piece, you'll learn better questions to ask about what's the outcome of the work that you're doing, and you can start to make small strategic changes, which really helps you understand the impact of your work, helps you showcase the impact of your work, and it really keys you into the work that's being done on a global scale at your company. Rather than being quite so focused on just, I wrote this one thing, it got published. I'm writing the next thing and it got published. There's just this, like, incredible value in being able to come back and be like, how did it do? Like, it was the lead article in a newsletter. Did people click on it or didn't they? And it just kind of gives you this added benefit of putting your work in a broader context, which I think is like, when you're creating content, you want your content to be part of a broader context. So it's really important for a team to understand the product that they've created, the content product within that same larger framework. And as much as you can do to help everybody on your team understand what the framework is and where you expect it to function, the more powerful your team's going to be and the more impact you're going to be able to drive.

That's so well said. I hope every let that marinate for everybody on the airwaves, because I think it can be hard marketing working with creative people, writers, video, you know, videographers, designers. The worst feeling is when like a video person or whoever, a writer, whatever, they go spend lots of cycles making something and then they have no idea, like, was that good? Did it even get used? And if you can build this relationship between, like the creative people and the marketing ops, type of, you know, performance analyst, that's where you get the whole team working together. I think where. Where you see lot of burnout happen in marketing and with creatives is like, we're always asking for more content, more articles, more videos, but then we don't know why we're doing this. But if you can come back to the team and say, hey, this thing was actually our highest performing thing that we've done and here's why, they're going to be like, awesome, I know how to make this next one better. And you can create that feedback loop. Is this your role specifically? Like, are we talking about the role of content ops or is this kind of just broadly how you all think as a team?

I would say that at Zapier, that is something that I have been focusing on since I've been in this role, is really helping us understand, like, here's the large strategy, here's the content strategy, how is our content performing? And as we've brought more teams in and started looking strategically at all of these different drivers, I've been kind of called in to help do that same thing across all of our content marketing teams. So I'm working a lot more this coming into 2024 with user Ed and with our video teams to just really understand like, what's going on with those, those teams. How can we better enable them to be used more widely around the company as well? Because we're doing really interesting stuff in all of those areas and I think that's one of the places where content marketing is a little bit funky. Like you can make something and you can put it out there and if you're lucky and it hits on search, people show up. But if you have a specific audience in mind, you sometimes need help to get it there. So like, do you need paid advertising behind it? Do you need it to be, be promoted in paid search results? Do you want it on social? Do you need it in an email that goes to users that have a certain set of characteristics and could benefit from receiving this at a specific point in their user journey? And those are some of like, should it be in a tooltip in your product? Like, those are incredibly powerful questions for a content marketing team to be able to come back and say, we made this thing, it performs like this. I think that it would help this whole other group of people and here's how we can like partner with other teams at my company to make sure it gets in front of those people when they need it.

You're like, you're like every marketing creator's like best friend.

I, I had a co worker ask me a couple weeks ago how I stayed on top of everything and I was like, I don't know, I just really like to know things. And so I just like look for places where I could be like, oh, we have a blog post that solves that problem and then I try to plug it in.

What was your line again? Your, your curiosity line.

Like, yeah, paying the bills with curiosity since what you continue to do.

But there's something that like, I've struggled this like we made this like awesome 2 minute explainer video, but now what do we do with it?

Right?

And how do we measure that? And I think somebody that sweats that and is thinking about that, it's not only going to like, you're going to get a better return from those things, but you're going to figure out what's working and what's not. My question for you from this little piece is how do you think about measurement? Because so often, especially in B2B, it's not just we make a video and we get a hundred new customers. Right. A lot of these things are not direct response. And so do you look at how content has influenced certain behaviors further in the funnel? Could you say, like, are you trying to come up with stats and looking at things like, yeah, you know, 75% of our open opportunities have read at least three articles on, on the blog and I'm just completely making up. But yeah, I feel like there's some people who are good at this and really understand content inside of the company, have a story here and the companies that don't, it's like they look at every article as this direct response thing and it's not how that works. And so I wanted to get your opinion on that.

Yeah, I, I do like, because I'm a.

Well, that's why I'm asking you that.

But I would say, like, I, I don't think that influence is a way that lots of people at Zapier look at content performance. Part of why I think it's important for us is because of how much content we have on our site and how varied it is. Everything from like, productivity routines, remote work tips, ways to be a better marketer, how you can start your own business, how to set up a very specific automated workflow, how to use really in depth parts of our product, what is a web hook and why should you care? Like, all of these things are on our site and we find that people serve them up to themselves by going to Google and typing something in and they end up on our site. So we don't know when someone goes to Google and types in, I don't know, Gmail templates. We don't know who they are in terms of their relationship to our product. They could be somebody who's never heard of Zapier but just really needs like Gmail signatures that they can add in. They could be somebody who's used our product for years and is paying us a ton of money all of the time because we power their business. They could be somebody who is ready for automation but doesn't know that they need it. And we want to make sure that for any of those audiences, when they find this piece that serves their search intent, that they have a pathway into whatever the next thing is that makes the most sense for them. So when I look at how our content performs, part of it is understanding where in the user journey did Somebody encounter it and how likely was it to have influenced them toward that next successful milestone that they could hit? So if it's somebody who's never used Zapier before, that first success milestone is like, did they sign up, did they book a call with our sales team? Something in that realm. If it's somebody who's been with us for a while, but only on our free product, it might be like, did they start paying us after they read this article? So that's, for me, where influence helps us take a look at, like, how influential are all of the different types of content that we produce in enabling groups of users to move through this journey from discovery of our product or our brand to discovery of our product, to successful use of our product, to having it be something that they really can't function without. And we find that the same piece can perform at all of those points and then other pieces perform way better. With people who've already been using our product for a long time versus people who are brand new to it, how.

Do you think your role will continue to evolve? And I'm not asking for a future like career prediction at Zapier, just more using this as a way to like, articulate. I think the term content marketing 10 years ago specifically meant like website, blog content. More and more of these other channels. You and I are talking on a podcast right now. There's, you know, companies have a podcast, they have an email, they have a newsletter, they have video, they have all the different social channels. All of those things get lumped into content. What do you see the future of that being as it relates to your role and content ops. It seems like you're already starting to bleed into those other areas. You know what I'm trying to articulate? It's like content is not just blogging anymore. So how do we. But like, you also can't have those things siloed. It's not like demand Gen team can own this. It's like all, all of these things are content. So now is everything content and who owns that? It's just, there's a. There's a lot going on.

Yeah. You said something earlier in our call that I've thought for a really long time of. Just like, you need to treat content like a product because it is. It's getting a lot of people to show up and you're expecting it to drive some business result just like you do your actual product. Product. If you're a SaaS company, like, the volume of visit to paying customer is usually a little different. For a blog than it is for your homepage, for example. But it's the same thing. You're trying to get people to show up and look at this stuff and take action that leads to business results. If you don't think of content as a product, it becomes a lot harder, in my opinion, to figure out where it can go and how you can integrate it into your larger overall product and marketing strategy. I would say the thing that I would most like to see happen with this idea of content operations is really integrating your content production strategy into this enablement function where it can be delivered to people when they need it the most. Earlier this year, we were launching the GPT plugins with OpenAI. When that first came out, this was April. I don't remember what month. The early part of this year is a blur. We were launching this thing and we were discovering that there were maybe some roadblocks and people finding really good success. And there's a weekly meeting that I'm a part of and a bunch of other teams are a part of. And we were just trying to kind of understand, like, what's going on with this. I was like, well, we've created a bunch of articles that help people find success with this. And we know that people are searching for them and they're landing on them and they're doing stuff like, what if we compare what we've learned from these articles with what the actual experience is to onboard and use this and figure out where there's breakdowns. And we found a lot of places where we could say, like, oh, we're not being clear in the product about how people actually should be experiencing this and how they might be able to be successful with it. And we were able to identify for the product teams, like, looking at this from a content strategy lens, what is the content we're delivering, when are we delivering it, what. What information do people need at which point to make suggestions on how they might want to change the ways that the onboarding experience might go for these folks as they're learning how to use this totally new thing. That, to me is where this like content operations model can really be beneficial in the future. It's just like understanding we launch a new thing, we're going to write about it because people are going to search for it and if they search for it and we don't have something like, that's a huge missed opportunity on our end, if we don't already have something for like a brand new splashy feature that we're going to put out There.

Yeah. Especially with the volume of traffic and audience that you already have. That makes a ton of sense.

Yeah. And I think that that's true, like, for what's helpful there is like, we produce it because we think people are going to search for it. And it's often true for Zapier. But like, at the last SaaS company that I worked at, we didn't have like a product that everybody in the world was. Not that everybody in the world pays attention to Zapier either, but they could. But like, we didn't have this, like millions of people paying attention to our site every month. It was a much smaller audience. Our customer base was primarily newsrooms and we might develop a new feature. We would write about the new feature, but our primary delivery mechanism for things like that wasn't like, people are going to search for it. It was that we were going to send an email out to all of our customers, everybody in our like, like lead funnel, and make sure that they knew, like, we just launched this new thing. Here's how you use it. If you want to learn more about it, set up a time to talk with your engagement consultant or your salesperson. It's the same kind of philosophy. Like at Zapter, we make it and we expect people to search for it. Other companies, maybe you're not going to get the search traffic, but you have a delivery mechanism to go out to your prospects, people who are in your active leads group, anybody who's an existing customer, and deliver that to them so that they can find success faster. And like, those are places where I think content and the rest of marketing and your product teams have an opportunity to really help each other out. The earlier we know about new features, the better we are able to produce that content in advance of launch and have it ready to go.

Oh yeah. The days of the product team telling you that they want to announce this thing in 48 hours and we need an article for this.

I mean, like, we've done that. Of course not our favorite. No, but, you know, it's. It's nice when you get noticed and you can like, play with it and make sure everything works right.

I also think the brands that do content really well, Zapier's in this bucket for sure. They have a clear vision for what role the content should serve. Right. And so, like, I'll just give you an example just because this is the only example that I have because it's in my head. But like, with Exit 5 as a business, I'm investing in the business and hiring and growing. And this year was like, I want to do so much content. This is a content business. But then to your, what we've just talked about, well, what does that mean? Well, we have this vision of, okay, our, our vision is to help B2B marketers build successful careers. And so if you have that, then you can ask the next question. Okay, well then, like how does content help serve that, like help achieve that goal? So we could have a blog, we could have a newsletter, we could have a podcast, we could have a, you know, TikTok. Whatever it is, it's where the company has no, it's where content is like an afterthought. And it's like, hey, we're doing this, like let's write an article about it, that this doesn't work. Whereas like in the Zapier example, it's very clear, like you have this vision of helping people unlock. And this is a, this is not the actual brand approved word. So apologies for saying unlock. But like you want to help people unlock the power of automation. Right? And so you're going to write, you're going to create content. It could be written content, it could be video content, it could be in person events. That's going to help people do that. That's a mission that the team can rally around and say, oh, I see how I can create content for this thing. That to me is like, that has to be a company love. Content succeeds when there's a top down company level like mission and then you can go and create content for that.

Yeah, it makes it a lot easier to understand what kind of content is important. And it's from my side of things where I'm really taking a look at what is performing and how it's performing. That kind of knowledge around what is the ultimate success signal for us helps me really be clear and say, okay, so this piece is getting a ton of traffic, but it's not leading to the farther downstream quality metric as opposed to this other piece that maybe gets less traffic, but is way better at having people find success from it than this other piece. And for us it's valuable to have both of those because they do different things. Which is why earlier I said we have different ways of judging success for different types of content. Because it's not fair to measure a webinar that has 150 existing customers go to it against a blog post that gets 10,000 visits a week.

Right. And it's so topic dependent. Yeah. Okay, last question then I'll let you off the hot seat.

Okay.

As a former journalist. Well, you're still a journalist at heart. If you could help the marketers listening to this to think more like a journalist or give us some point of view, some. Some framework, some lesson from your past life as a journalist that we could bring into our lives as. As marketers. What advice would you give?

Oh, man. Ask so many questions. Like, just ask all the questions, and if you don't know the answer, like, that's great. Like. Like, I get excited when I have a question and everybody is like, I have no idea. And then I'm like, excellent. I'm going to go find out. And then I just dig into it and I figure out the answer in some way. Like, when I talk about, like, curiosity as a, like, strategy skill, like, that's what I'm talking about. This, like, what is going on here? And then you figure it out. And I think, like, being curious about what your work is, what it should do, what it can do, what it is doing leads you to this place of always being able to investigate what actually exists and then determine what opportunities you might have next. I wish more people would do that.

I love that. That also can be repositioned as advice for somebody who 99% of us listening to this podcast didn't, like, weren't born to go work in B2B SaaS. Right. But. But if you have. Well, you and me were. We were born for this. But if you have that mindset that that's what's fun to me about marketing, that's what's fun about journalism. It's like, I'm gonna figure this out and I'm gonna ask the right questions and create content to do that. So this is. That's great advice, Janine. Thank you. This was a really enjoyable conversation. Fun to learn more about your role, fun to chat about content performance. It seems like you have some exciting things that you're working on heading into the new year at Zapier. So if you're listening to this podcast, the number one CTA that we have is to go and check out our awesome guests. So go find Janine on LinkedIn. Send a message, send a. Send a connection request. Say, oh, my gosh, I totally related to that thing that you said about that, you know, rant about content performance. I'm right there, too. It's awesome to get a look into your life and unpack your role a little bit. Thank you for joining us. I appreciate you giving us some time for the Exit 5 podcast.

Absolutely. Thank you.

All right, thank you. Exit.

Foreign.

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