#83: Behind Zapier's Content Marketing Machine (with Lane Scott Jones, Head of Content Marketing)

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Exit. Okay, I'm really excited to be here. Love Exit 5. So today I'm going to be talking about mainly how Zapier has built this content marketing machine. Our team structure, how we measure content, how we prove value to our execs, which has been a really interesting journey. And at the end, I'm also going to leave a little bit of time to talk about AI and automation and how that works within our content marketing strategy. So if you don't know Zapier, we are a tool that allows you to connect your team's apps between each other and move information between them automatically. And I'll do a quick introduction of me. So I have been living in Nashville, Tennessee for the past eight years or so. Currently I'm in Lisbon and maybe we can crowdsource in the chat where I should go next because I'm going to be traveling around for a bit. But right now I am head of content at Zapier. I've been at Zapier for two years and before that I was at Campaign Monitor, leading content and then leading marketing for three years. Overall, I've been in B2B content marketing in tech for 10 years, a little over a decade, and this kind of stuff, talking to other content marketers about how we approach things is probably the best way to learn. So excited to be here. For today, here's a just loose structure. I want to talk about where we started with Zapier when I first got here in 2021, kind of the state of content marketing then and how we've evolved it. And then I'm going to deep dive into this idea of proving content roi, because I know that as content marketers that can be really tricky to put a revenue number to the work we do, but it's absolutely essential to getting the resources and budget that we need. And then of course, it wouldn't be complete without talking a little bit about automation and AI. So where we started, first of all, I was a huge fan of Zapier when I applied for the job. And I, from the outside, was so impressed with their content, so impressed with the team, and it's all true. Like, it's so nice to get on the inside of a company and realize that the things that you loved or thought you loved about them or the actual reality. So Zapier is known, I think, for our content and this far predated me. But a couple of the things that really stood out to Me, when I started as head of content, were. First of all, Zapier has built an extremely strong SEO program. And that's because from its very inception, because we have so many integrations, we were able to build this SEO moat by creating landing pages for every integration, plus two service pages that covered how those integrations work together. And as a result, our content ranks really well. We have really strong domain authority. And so we were seeing 2 million plus page views per month. We had over 2,000 articles. And even though the SEO was really strong, I don't want to understate the actual quality of the content. That's something I was just so impressed by. The voice, the tone, the value that the content delivered was, to me, stood apart from a lot of other B2B tech blogs that I've encountered over the years. And then, I mean, the thing that maybe shocked me the most was the team size. When I started at Zapier, it was only four people working on the blog doing all of that. And I honestly couldn't believe it when I was interviewing, because from the output, it looks like it must be a team of dozens, right? But it's a highly efficient, highly talented team. And the other big benefit of working at Zapier is that people just love the product. I could have pulled so many different tweets and social proof talking about how people love Zapier and love the content that we put out, but to me, as a content leader, that's just a huge advantage coming in. But some of the challenges I think that are interesting when we think about, or when I started at Zapier in 2021, were that what had gotten Zapier to where it was when I got there wasn't going to get it to the next level. So even though we were seeing these really strong numbers of traffic and signups, we were also starting to see that begin to stagnate. The company had really ambitious goals when it came to revenue, and we weren't able to see a path immediately to that kind of growth with the trajectory we were on. Then we had a leaky funnel and limited distribution. Content was pretty much just constrained to organic. And then the thing that really stood out to me, especially when I was talking to the team, was that content was seen as a services function, right? Like they were taking a lot of requests, but they weren't always getting a seat at the table to really talk about the way that all of the massive amount of insights that you gain from being in content and being close to the audience in that way weren't translating into the company strategy the way that I think they really should and can. And so because of that, we didn't really feel like we had a seat at the table. So my job as a content leader coming in was really that I want to get content a seat at the table. That meant moving the team from services to strategy. It meant building a content funnel that converted so went beyond the top of funnel success. We were seeing to really think about how do we get through the entire customer journey with content. And then once we've done that, to prove the value of content so we can get more resourcing, more headcount and grow the team. So now I'll jump into how we've evolved and where Zapier is now. The first thing we did expand content into the entire customer journey. So I have it mapped out here and just some examples of how content hits every single area. We know the blog is really strong when it comes to awareness and acquisition, but we've also built out now a mid funnel program that helps people who were initially attracted by top of funnel content topics to go deeper and learn more about Zapier, be inspired about how to use automation and really get practical tips on what it would look like to do that in their role. And then because we're driving so much traffic to the blog, a really important piece of the funnel is to optimize the actual on site experience for signup. That's something we've done. We actually established a content operations function that helps us do all of that, which I would love to talk about more. Content now is really involved in helping nurture people to consideration and purchase decisions by getting involved in demand generation and lifecycle campaigns. I mean, content, it really is the fuel that drives those type of campaigns. So that's something that's really well integrated now. And finally, we have a user education team in addition to our mid funnel team that is focused on once somebody signs up, which is actually pretty easy to do for Zapier, you could sign up and still not know that much about how to use the product. We have a whole program that's dedicated to educating them, helping increase adoption. And for us as a business, really look at expansion and upgrades. And then the next big change that I call out here is that we grew the team to support the strategy. So in the same way that content needs to go throughout the funnel, we wanted to see a team that represented the way that content fuels every part of the marketing journey. So in 2021, it was four people, all focused on the Blog and today we've got 20 people and growing by the way, across 16. So in addition to blog, top of Funnel Bin Funnel, we've added a team to support campaigns. We've got a video marketing team, our user education team, and then that strategy and ops team, which really helps us pull insights from the content data and use that to inform not only the content strategy, but the company strategy. And then I also wanted to talk a little bit more in detail about how we measure the success of content. The way it works at Zapier is that top of Funnel, we're really looking at awareness sessions and signups. And then once we get into somebody into the product, we're looking at activations, which means you successfully set up a zap and used it for the first time, and upgrades, which means you've paid for a plan. So either gone from free to paying or expanded into one of our higher tier plans. And I think the way that we set goals really originates with finance, our FPA team. So they're setting goals for content around sessions and signups. And that's the thing that we're tracking when we're in our weekly business reviews. That's the thing we're gold against. But we consider these other down funnel metrics to be guardrail metrics, which means to us, like is the traffic and are the signups we're driving high quality. And so the way that we know that is by looking at conversion rates for activations, for upgrades and at revenue per user that is coming from content.

Hey, can we pause here? Because I have a bunch of. I like to take notes and I have a bunch of questions.

Let's do it.

Okay. And for those that are in the chat, I have no idea why this is the font for this. Obviously if I knew that, I wouldn't have picked it on purpose. It's bad and I'm sorry for the eye strain. We will fix it and make it better for next time. Okay, so I want to go back to a couple things that you mentioned. So one of them is content and measuring content across the customer journey. Because I think this is something that I completely agree with. I think lots of teams get that content is very. Content touches everything. People who don't know who you are need content. People who know who you are need content. Customers need content. There's lots of different ways, but inside of a company that gets very messy. It gets hard to measure, it gets hard to justify what you're working on. And it kind of comes always back to like, it's much Easier to measure, like, well, we know when we create content for like a new audience, we generate trial signups. Can you like shed any light on how you think about measuring content across the funnel? And like, are you creating specific content pieces, content campaigns for one customer type versus another? It just, I've seen it inside of a company before where like you can kind of get in this like a la carte mode of like we wrote this one, like the customer success team or support team, like wants us to write this one article. Like, all right, now we just did this one article. Now you're kind of playing whack a mole and just creating all this different content. How do you think about the customer journey as it relates to what types of content you're creating for people?

Yeah, let me go back to that side. So the way I think about it, especially starting at Zapier because we had such clear gaps in the customer journey, was it really is a trade off with resourcing. Because what we as a content team saw was there was a very clear opportunity for that mid funnel educational content because we knew that even though the top of funnel traffic or content was driving so much traffic, the mid funnel was driving, not only driving the upgrades, so the revenue at a much higher rate, but that is the content that we've been leveraged in all of our other campaigns. So that's what we're using in user education, that's what we're using in dimension and lifecycle in our onboarding. So I think that's one consideration for us is knowing what we know about the upgrade rates and the way that the amount of effort spent on top of funnel translates really well to high volume. But the amount of effort spent on mid funnel translates really well to those down funnel metrics. How do we balance those? It's actually, it's an active question because especially when we're talking to leaders and execs, the numbers that top of funnel are really impressive. But at the end of the day we are going to be accountable for the revenue driven. So those are some of the considerations, but we can dive a little bit deeper.

Well also, I was just going to say I think it's important to tie this all back to like the company strategy and what you're talking like this content strategy might not be the right content strategy for every company out there. I think given Zapier's product and the way that things work and the way that you're. It's definitely a traffic led business. Then content can play such an impact where if you Had a much more, you know, outbound field, sales focused type of selling motion like content might play a different role inside of that company.

That's a great point. So it's worth saying about Zapier's business model that we've been pretty much product led self serve signup for the majority of our history and it's only recently actually that we've started a little sales team. Sorry, not little, but it's new. So the. We're still defining maybe some of the content assets that they will need. But because it's so easy for somebody to get into the product and start trying it, a lot of the stuff that we're creating for Mid Funnel. So somebody asked what I mean when I say mid Funnel for us, that would be anything that talks about how to use Zapier in automation in your work. So anything that mentions the product, a lot of that content really works for the sales nurtures as well.

Got it. Okay. And I see all the questions in chat. We're going to try to get to some of them in a minute. Another thing before we move on to a new section, as you mentioned, the team.

The team.

Is this the content team specifically that went from four people to 20 people?

Yes, it is. Yeah. So when I started, we had one editor for top of funnel and one writer and one editor for Mid Funnel and bottom funnel and one writer. That was the whole team. So where we've really expanded is through the addition of these other teams.

Got it. Can you just do a quick like, highlight of the. Just a little bit more color. People are usually interested in, in the roles and responsibilities of the makeup of that team.

Sure, yeah. So I will say this is also evolving because like you said, our marketing strategy is evolving. So we try and be adaptable. But the way that this structure looks today is that we've got an editor on top of funnel, an editor on the funnel, we have writers who are working on all of these different initiatives who are also still contributing to the blog. Our campaigns team is primarily serving demand generation, lifecycle marketing and product marketing initiatives. That's led by a content marketing manager and she manages two editors and five writers. Then we've got our video team, which is one team lead and two producers. We've got our user education team, which is a program lead and three learning designers. And finally our strategy and ops team is one person, Janine, and she is phenomenal and she's really digging into data analytics, vendor management, capacity planning, covering a lot of territory.

And then you have video and what's Video and user ed.

Yeah, video. We've got our team lead and then two producers and then user ed, program manager and three learning designers.

Do you think this will continue to evolve? Like one of the topics that is interesting is in a lot of B2B SaaS companies, content used to just be blog. And a lot of, you know, your business today is driven off of SEO and traffic from the blog. But content as a role is evolving today. You know, if I'm starting a new business today and I think of content, oh, we need to create content that, you know, almost I default to not blog. I think of social media, I think of video, I think of email copies, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, blog content. I'm sure that's a hot topic inside of the company. How do you all think about like the evolving role of content and what should the content team be responsible for? And for example, I know that you have like social lives on the corporate marketing team. Can you just talk about that? I'm sure it comes up internally.

Oh yeah, it comes up all the time. It's like we're constantly doing a gap analysis of, okay, given the budget we have and the headcount we have, where should we invest it? And the thing about all of these areas, pretty much without exception, is that there's so much more opportunity than there are people to do the work right now, to be honest, because like for instance, we just did a TAM analysis for the blog. I think there's potential to double the traffic that we're getting to the blog. So there's a very compelling reason to continue staffing and growing that team. At the same time, what you're saying about the way that content is going to our video team is still a three person team and that's an area we see a lot of opportunity to expand into multimedia, to grow our YouTube channel, to work closely with our social team on short form video. So that's another very compelling area of investment. And then we're doing so, so well at driving that top of funnel volume. But teams like user education and like our campaigns team are going to be the ones ultimately responsible for converting it. So what I'm saying basically is I want to grow all of the teams and just figuring out how to do it.

But I think it's also an important point which is like it's never going to be perfect. Somebody's got to manage it. It's okay to split it up. And it's like, yeah, in a perfect world it would all be together. But that's just not how it is. Okay, back to a couple questions from chat. I think you mentioned this when you were talking about the things that content is responsible for. This got a bunch of upvotes in the chat, so I just want to mention it. Can you give an example of how you all are measuring brand awareness? I know this might not be Content Team KPI specifically, but I know it's something that you all care about. Can you shed some light on that?

Yeah. So there are two main ways we're approaching it. One is that we've got our brand marketing team who's actually doing brand sentiment analysis and they're doing biannual surveys to get the actual quantifiable measurement of brands. But as a content team, when we talk about awareness, we're kind of using organic and web traffic to certain pages as a stand in for awareness. So our top of funnel program is the one driving the majority of our traffic traffic to the website even. I think last time we checked it was around 70% of all of the Zapier website traffic is coming through content through that top funnel content from the organic channel. So what we know is that the traffic that's coming to that content is not as likely to be qualified or ready to buy as coming to some of the zapier specific content. But what we see the value in there is that they're engaging with Zapier, beginning to know the name, getting value from our content. And so to us, that's how we're talking about awareness a lot of the time. And I'll give an example which is that we have just recently begun publishing a lot of content around AI because AI and automation go hand in hand. And right now, as I think a lot of you probably seen, there's just an explosion of interest in AI. But there isn't a great, I don't think there's a great general knowledge of how to use AI to really drive your business right now.

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There's a lot of playing around and experimenting. So we're creating content like we had one called the best AI image generators. Right top of funnel, no zapier mention. And that piece alone, I'll have to double check the actual metrics, but was responsible for maybe a 50% increase in traffic in the month of April. So what we know about that audience is that they are probably not ready to jump in and buy Zapier and start using the product right away. But where we see the value with awareness is that they're exposed to the brand and it's an audience that we could grow and nurture over time.

Beautiful. All right, let's go back into your slides. I see you all. I want you to know that you're seen, you're heard, I see your questions, I see your chats, but Lane's going to get through the slides and then we're going to spend like the last 25 minutes taking all your questions.

Okay, perfect. Okay, so next thing I want to talk about is proving content roi. So at this point, the opportunity is really clear. Everything I just walked through about ways we could grow the team, things we could be doing more of, was just abundantly evident once we got these systems rolling. But where we were struggling was getting execs to buy into investing more in content because it was seen as, you know, it's doing its job, it's driving traffic. But we still didn't have, I don't think we had the seat at the table where we were seen as a revenue driving function of the business in a way that we really behind the scenes could understand that we were. And part of that is tracking. It's hard with some of those top of funnel metrics to prove the value. And our CMO at the time was a performance marketing. He had a foreign marketing background, advertising guy, and so it was really hard to get him on board with content. So what we decided to do was calculate content ROI using a performance marketing approach, which in advertising it's called return on ad spend, our oas. So we created return on content spend and this was our way of speaking his language. So we took the investment that we're making, content, which included everything that's in our budget as well as stand ins for headcount tech data support. And then we mapped it against the return that we were getting. And we measured the return from content as all real revenue resulting from content signups with a three year multiplier, which is our estimated lifetime value. And when we put these numbers together, I will say even we were shocked by what we discovered, which is that with a little bit less than a million dollars in content spend for 2022, we influenced a little over $4 million in revenue, which gave us a 454% ROI from content. We ran the numbers many times. We worked with our data science team because we knew it was good, but we didn't know it was delivering at that level. I guess a couple numbers I'll call out here too, is that like I told you, traffic was really high. The percentage of organic search was really high. But I want to Draw your attention to these numbers, which are influenced activations and specifically influenced upgrades. These are the things that drive revenue. And nearly 50% of upgrades had touch content at some point within Zapier's the year of 2022. So we brought this ROI number to our CMO at the time and this is what he said with these ROI numbers. Tell me why I shouldn't give you advertising's entire budget right now. So that was very affirming. And I love my advertising colleagues. What we do is very complimentary. So I did not take their budget. But what I loved about that is it really showed that because we had the numbers, we were able to help the CMO see the value of content. And that made it a really easy yes. When we came, we paired the ROI evaluation with a budget ask and a headcount ask. And it was an easy ask because he could see that the money that we invest in the content program is going to come back in revenue.

I love this that you. I think for a channel like content, part of the job is owning the. You need to own the internal marketing of it and the internal communication. And so, like, you have to be able to show these things. I think a lot of times we try to go and ask for more or talk about the things that we want to do with content before we've been able to articulate how content drives business. And it doesn't have to be this perfect analysis, but I think like, what you've given is like a, you know, a rough analysis of like, oh, yeah, content is definitely fueling our business. Like, let's go do more of it. And I think a lot of times we try to go and have. We're like, well, I don't get. Why don't the C level execs at my company understand content? It's like, well, it's your job to educate them on that as the experts in content. And so I think it's very tough. And maybe if you just want to be a writer, and there's nothing wrong with that, be a great writer, go be a writer. But if you want to be head of content or own content strategy, like, you have to be able to do the editorial stuff, but also have the business level conversations about content with your boss, with the executive team and the rest of the company.

Yeah. And one thing I want to say there is that like I said at the beginning, Zapier's content program was amazing. Before I got there, the writers were phenomenal. The content they were putting out was great. And I felt Like a little self conscious coming in because normally I come into a content program that's so at the beginning or immature, this was an extremely mature content program. So my question is, what value can I bring as the content lead? And I talked to Deb, I talked to Janine, I talked to the team that was in place at that time and they're like, very clear. Request was like, we want to write, we want to focus on the work, but we need you to be the person who's like having those conversations, proving the value of content, sitting in those meetings, getting us a voice in the strategy because they knew their stuff. And where I came in was really helping the rest of the company understand the work they were doing.

Can you go back to influence? Because I know this is something that comes up with inside of a lot of companies and talking about. You mentioned touched content. Can you break down, like, how do you all. What is the exact metric that you look at? Is it they interacted with one article on the website? Is it five articles? What's, what's the actual measurement of how you figure that out?

Yes. So we're looking at, in this ROI calculation we're doing last touch session start. So if the point at which they signed up was the very first touch of that session was content, that's how we did the ROI calculation. So to me it really kind of undersells the overall influence. The other thing we can and do look at for different parts of our measurement is the first touch. So if content is any part of their journey, for the most part we can track it. And that's just one piece of content. But I think it's kind of impossible to get through the zapier experience and only encounter one piece of content. So even the reporting we're able to do is still looking at just a small segment of the ways that content is influencing the journey of somebody to sign up activation upgrade. And this ROI calculation is only looking at content that is hosted on the blog. So the stuff that we're doing for emails, for short form landing pages, that's actually not even included in this calculation.

Got it. All right, let's talk about content, AI, automation and then we'll get into everybody's questions.

Let's do it. Okay, so getting into automation AI, this is one, a really fun and interesting area. But two, I think any content team that is struggling with the same things we were and still do struggle with, which is we're never going to have enough people and we're never going to have enough money to do all the things that we could hypothetically do, automation and AI are a really good way to scale and sort of supercharge your content program. So I wanted to share just some practical ways that we have combined AI with automation to free up our writers and editors and content marketing managers to focus on the more fun work, the creative work, the strategic work, and not the grunt work that comes along with just the nature of the beast. And I think especially because AI can sound kind of intimidating or scary for content writers, especially because there's this sort of vague fear that AI will replace those jobs, I want to reassure them and say what it's going to do is free you up to work on the things that you enjoy working on. So some areas that we've just implemented over the past few months, one is using AI for strategy and research. We just did this total addressable market analysis that was led by our SEO team and they used AI to take this massive amount of keywords that were pulled from tools like SEO clarity and do the work of categorizing them by things that matter to us as a business and us as a content team. So they're looking at content type. Is this going to be a mid funnel piece? Is this going to be top of funnel? Is this going to be some other format job role? So for us that's use cases, Are they a marketer, Are they in sales and subject? So it cut down dramatically on the amount of time and manual work that our SEO team would have had to do there and gave us insights more quickly. And then with content creation, I think there's so many great examples. The one I have here on the screenshot is a bot that our editor Deb created. And like I was saying, we get a lot of requests to review content, to edit content from teams outside of the actual marketing org. It's important we want to make sure that any content coming out of Zapier has our brand voice and is representing us well. But as a leader, I really would prefer my team to be focused on the most strategic and most revenue driving initiatives. So Dev created this bot where anybody at Zapier can put their copy in and have it edited essentially with her brain, but automatically through AI, which has been so helpful and our team uses it too, just because there's a lot of troubleshooting that it can help them do. We also have used AI for creating content outlines, generating titles, SEO descriptions. One great example is that in in a lot of our educational content and especially a lot of our mid funnel content, we want to use Examples. And we don't always want or have the ability to pull specific real life customer examples for everything that we're illustrating. So one of our writers created a bot where she has fake use cases and customer stories that she's able to plug in to give examples. And the best part about them is they all feature Deb's dog, Winston as our star customer. And then of course, I've got to mention the lanebot. This is one I created a couple weeks ago when I was heading off to my vacation in Italy. And I knew that there were going to be a lot of questions for me while I was gone. So I trained lanebot to answer marketing strategy content strategy questions from my direct reports. I also told them that if they could get lamebot to give them a raise, then I would approve it, but nobody was able to.

All right, and now it's time for the big reveal. What none of you all know is that this actually is Lane bot. Lane is actually still on vacation right now. So this is how good things have gotten everybody.

That is the dream. That is actually the dream question. Question in the chat is, get her on video.

No, there's not enough glitching. What did you use to create editor bot? Was one of the questions in the chat.

So this is what shocked me about creating AI bots. Because I was intimidated. It took maybe 30 seconds for me to build Lanebot. It's ChatGPT and Zapier. So zapier. We have interfaces. You can choose the interfaces option of a chatbot. You fill out a little text box that just says like it's their directive, basically giving them the brain. And it took me 30 seconds to stand it up. So it was so remarkably easy. My colleague Carly, you should talk to her, Dave, separately, because she's created press release generators. She's created, I mean, all these really helpful tools that just takes so much of the boring work out of our jobs. So it's been really fun to experiment with.

Love that everybody thads in the chat saying what everyone's thinking right now, which is like, oh, I need to go create my own bot right now.

All right. It's so fun. Once you start doing it, it's hard to stop.

Are you ready to hit some of these questions?

Let's do it.

All right, we got 20 minutes. We'll try to go as fast as we can. I'm not saying you have to do like one line answers because there's so much nuance, but we'll try to hit them. So this is the most upvoted question that we got so far from Bethany. What tool are you using for attribution to track content through the entire customer journey?

We use Looker.

Looker. All right, Everybody is out there looking for Looker is going to get six new demo requests today from this webinar. Just put the YouTube, just put the source as Lanebot. When Looker asks, How'd you hear about us? Say Lanebot.

So let me caveat that I've used Looker. I've used other business intelligence tools. I've used Google Analytics. The actual secret weapon, though, is that we have a content operations team. So our content operations manager is digging into that data because you can get that data through any tool. Sorry, Looker, but what we're able to do is have somebody dedicated to pulling insights from that. That's something I've never had at any other company. And it has truly been a game changer. And that's actually one of the things that we use this ROI report to lobby for was a content ops person.

Well, which is great because, like, I think as the company grows, like, you want your content team to focus on making great content. I don't want my content team. If I'm a cmo, I don't want my content team worried so much about how we're going to measure it. Let's hire a great ops person and put them on the content team and have them work with content and let's figure this out as a team together. Now, this is why all of this. There's so much nuance in any of these sessions that we do in any of these conversations, because it's all stage related. Right. If this was just Lane and a team of one, you would have to be like, yeah, I don't know. We're using HubSpot and Google Analytics and like, I kind of measured it that way. I think all of this measurement stuff evolves as the company scales. Okay, thank you for that. Next question is from Jonathan. What method do you use for SEO, content research, planning, and so on.

So, okay, this is something else that shocked me about Zapier. SEO has been the primary driver of the business for as long as it's been in existence. And do you know how many people are on the SEO team? Just one. Matt. It is just one person. And Matt is responsible for the SEO across the entire website, not just content. So he really provides a lot of guidance for keyword research opportunities. But our editors do a lot of that too. So our editors are evaluating what are gaps, not just in the actual keyword Coverage, which is important, but it's technical. It's like a list we could pull. But really thinking about mapping topics against Personas, use cases and the audiences we want to target and then building that into the editorial calendar.

Beautiful. This question's from Alex. How did you get leadership buy in and budget to grow the content team?

So it's grown slowly and in some of those cases, there were teams that existed already in the Org that moved over to content. Because I'll give the example of user education. That is a team that was previously a lot more aligned with our support and community. But in thinking about the opportunity for user education and where that fits into the customer journey, there is sort of a strong argument to be made that it should live in content. And so I'm really excited about that. In the cases where we were able to open new job recs and hire the ROI document that we were able to put together, and proving a business case for each of those roles has been the number one way that we've gotten approval for new headcount.

Cool. And the presentation that you shared today basically kind of says it, right?

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I think every time that we want to grow the team, it really is we're going to be asked to prove what adding this person would do to our numbers. And so, like an example with the Mid Funnel program is that we needed to hire an editor because an editor is always going to be the cap to how much content we can create. So we could have a ton of budget to hire freelancers, but if we don't have somebody to manage those freelancers and edit their work, then it's going to be the ceiling on how much we can produce. So those are sort of some of the considerations that we are pulling in.

Well, and like, it's never going to be like a perfect. There's never going to be like a formula. Like you're not going to like go into looker and looker is going to say hire two writers and you'll get X. It's got to be like a combination of data and articulating. Well, here's the capacity of an editor right now. An editor can do this much with this. We think that if we bring on this person, like that's how you make you present a business case. It's not just the data from some report.

Exactly.

Okay, this question's from Jonathan. This is like, it's a very broad, wide ranging question. So see how you answer this. But how do you decide on what content to write about?

Hmm. That is broad. So I covered a little bit like tactically how we do that. With the SEO keyword coverage and our editors doing trendspotting, our product marketing team will do Personas for us to help us understand generally what topics. I think the bigger picture is that the content we've written and the topics we've covered have adapted and evolved as the company's strategy has changed. And that's been really interesting to watch even in the two years I've been at Zapier. Because when I started our target audience was small business, like diy, sort of builders. And as the company has matured, gotten bigger, we're now looking at how do we create content that targets these more team wide use cases. So for us that's like, how do we get in with marketing teams? How do we get in with sales teams or operations teams? And that's really changed our overall content strategy. So I think that having the content strategy be in lockstep with the company strategy has been really important because we've seen and had to pivot and that's been a little clunky at times because we have this whole corpus of content that's dedicated to small businesses or even remote work. That was something that was really popular during the height of the pandemic and we saw that it wasn't driving the quality leads and traffic that we needed to become successful long term customers. So looking at the company strategy and then looking at the insights from the data are the guiding principles for what we're focusing on.

I like this question from Craig. Outside of SEO, what are you doing to drive Top of the Funnel traffic to your content?

I think that the other. Okay, what am I doing to drive Top of Funnel traffic to the content?

The answer could also be nothing. We have so much SEO like that could be the play. Does it have to be? I would guess if you're in Zapier's case, you're not like thinking about like, oh, if we, we should tweet this blog post to drive more views.

Yeah. I mean when it comes to Top of Funnel, it is almost exclusively going to be SEO and organic. But the other thing I would say for Top of Funnel is the brand awareness piece. And for that we have our brand marketing team that's done a lot of work in the past year to build up the Zapier brand, to do some brand advertising, brand videos, brand campaigns. So that's thinking more, I guess, about branded Top of Funnel search. But that's an important piece that is fueling our success at Top of Funnel on the organic side.

It all is going to compound, right? The more your brand awareness grows, the more people are going to turn to you as a resource on topics, discover more content, get on your email list, follow you on TikTok, go to the blog. It all has a compounding effect okay, this is a question from Sarah who's Exit 5 member. Sarah said, do you hire content team members who are subject matter experts on the topic and industry or do you just hire typical marketing writers and they learn the knowledge and the market.

So at Zapier the very first thing we screen for is writing quality because I think in our experience that's the thing that you not that you can't learn it, but at the caliber that we're creating content that's a non negotiable. So we're hiring people who are excellent writers. As far as subject matter expertise, I think hires moving forward we would be looking for a tech background, but I'll say that the majority of our content team now did not come from a tech background. They came from editorial, journalistic and they have just demonstrated skills of being able to write really well and research really well. So while I have some basic requirements around like I need you to understand tech, I need you to be excited about tech and learning new things. The most important thing is going to be the writing. And I'll give an example again about AI, which is that we have an amazing writer on our team who was previously working on partnership content and when this sort of AI boom happened and we needed to cover that, she went from knowing ostensibly nothing about AI to being one of our in house experts, not just for content but for the company and has produced so much amazing content. So that ability to research, synthesize, understand, learn new things to me is going to be more valuable than bringing in somebody who has all the expertise on a certain subject but doesn't have those other skills as demonstrated.

This question is from Jason. If you were just brought on to an organization that has been flailing at capturing momentum down economy, lack of leads, minimal budget, limited resources, how or would your content strategy change to help elevate growth?

I was just brought on. They're in kind of a bad situation it sounds like. I do think it depends a lot on the business model because I've worked at both the self serve and the sales led side of things and my approach would be very different for each of those. The first thing I would do would probably be some opportunity sizing. That's the first thing I did when I started at Zapier was just a ton of informational interviews, seeing all of the possible things that we could go after and then trying to quantify as best as I can where it makes sense to invest the effort. So coming into a new company, we definitely need to know a lot more about the specifics. But one thing that can be helpful as a practical exercise is mapping out that content journey. Like I shared earlier, I've just done that again recently at Zapier because we have expanded so much into the funnel and now user education is on the team and looking at where your coverage is. So the gaps that I was talking about earlier, around Mid Funnel or even around adoption, that would maybe be my first signal for where to focus.

Beautiful. This question is from Yafees. How much time do you all spend creating content versus distributing content? We may have just touched on that, but it might be asked in a different way that might get a different answer from you.

Yeah, I talked about how when I started at Zapier, the content distribution was pretty minimal and just relegated to organic. And since I started actually we've created a lot more teams within marketing that are focused on distribution. My view is that our content team should be focused on content creation and our content strategists and content marketing managers should be partnering with those channel leads on distribution. So I want my editors and my writers focused 100% on creation and then I want the liaisons within content like our CMMs to be working with the managers on paid ads, on email, on Lifecycle, Demand gen, all those different channels to make sure that the content is getting to the right people through those channels. So I see it as highly collaborative and I also see it as a different skill set than the writing and content creation.

Bunch of questions. Through the chat, through this other doc that I have in Q and A, people want to know the mix of freelancers versus in house. I've only heard you talk about in house. Do you have any freelance writers that you all work with?

Yes, we have a ton of freelance writers. We're really reliant on freelance writers, especially at Top of Funnel, because we're publishing roughly like 85 blog posts per month. And even though the team has grown, our responsibilities have grown too. We're working on a lot of different programs. So what we've found we do work with freelancers both at Top of Funnel and Mid Funnel. But what we found is it benefits us most to outsource Top of Funnel and keep Mid Funnel in house. So when people need to really know the product, really know Zapier that's where we want to make sure that it's our in house writers and so we're more likely to outsource the top of funnel post.

Rebecca's in the chat and said I'm.

Sorry 85 I know and that was the case when I started and the team was so small. There's some sort of magic happening behind the scenes because I don't know, I don't know exactly how they're cranking out all that content.

But on a serious note, like isn't that. But the volume is because of your existing content like the SEO and organic traffic moat that you all have already built. It seems like because you're ranking for so you have such a stronghold on SEO, the strategy is to feed that. I don't think that's good advice for just like the smaller startup you know trying to come up. It's not necessarily create more but it seems like and correct me if I'm just making this up and it's wrong but it seems like at this point in the business and because of your model like the answer to grow traffic more is actually going to be more articles at this point.

That's exactly right. But I've worked at companies where 30 posts a month, it didn't make sense. We were doing 12 posts a month and it's really looking at that sort of 80, 20. What are the topics that are going to drive the most traffic? And for zapier we've saturated so much of that list at this point that we're expanding into longer and longer tail type articles. We're covering trends. But if I'm thinking about giving advice I would say find the given your resources, find the list of topics that's going to have the best return for you and focus there. I am never going to advocate for volume for volume sake. It needs to be tied to numbers and also just a sustainable pace for your team. But I will say as a tip, I think that the model is zapier of having dedicated editors is also new to me. Previously it was just a content marketing manager leading a team of writers. I think the editors are what actually enable us to do that level of content production because they're not writing all the content but they're managing the freelancers and editing it.

And on the flip side, I see a question in chat on the flip side of this, if you're just starting out like don't pick a number and say we're going to write 10 articles this month. I would say in that model like hey we're going to take two weeks and we're going to try to write one article and here's why we're going to write this article and here's how we're going to distribute it and like build from there and use the response, like, what was the response to that article? And build from there. I think, you know, you're now looking at this 10 plus years into the company and that that's the volume that you're at. Okay, last question to end on. Just because this just came up roughly, like, where do you source freelancers from? Any tips out there for people that are trying to scale up their content and want to go and hire freelancers?

Yeah, well, the great thing about Zapier is we did get a lot of inbound requests for people who want to write for us. So I know that won't work for everyone, but we do have a form where freelancers can submit and apply. And I think other than that, like just being in the content world, we have a lot of great networks. But I guess to the freelancers out there, it's also a good just tip that we're always looking. So feel free to submit and apply.

My answer is you have to be a connoisseur of sorts of content. If you want to hire great writers, you have to be consuming content from others. And so my place would be like, if I want to hire a writer, I would be reading other blogs and websites in the space and trying to find out who wrote those articles. And I've also found that with a lot of writers, even if they are working for a company in house, a lot of them do take on freelance little writing projects. And so you can find writers. Hey, I might write for this company, but I can take on two articles a month on a contract basis. So I think in order to find good writers, you have to start with finding good content. Okay, Lane, this was great. Thank you for jumping on the hot seat at the end and answering all these questions. We're going to wrap up so you can get out of here. Get on with your day. The recording will go out to everybody. We got you. If you did ask for the recording, you do owe us one mile and a hundred pushups, as we've mandated in the chat. So please get in touch with me after and we can talk about how we'll keep track of that. I'm just kidding. Go to LinkedIn. Go type in Lane Jones Zapier and connect with her. Send her a message, let her know that you got value out of this session. And just say hi, Lane, you are awesome. Thank you for this. An overview of Zapier's content machine generating results, how to do it. Thank you so much for giving us an hour out of your day to chat with everybody here. Thank you.

Thank you. It was so fun.

All right, awesome.

We'll see you later. Goodbye. Enjoy. Bye, everybody. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get Smarter by About B2B Marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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