Latest / Content, Briefly / Apollo.io: Robyn Showers on content differentiation

Transcript

Apollo.io: Robyn Showers on content differentiation · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  Hey folks, before we dive into today's podcast, I just wanted to let you know that the new and improved Superpath Pro is up and running, and it's awesome. So I'll just give you a quickie overview of what you get.
• 0:09
  Superpath Pro members get access to a library of courses and content. They get monthly one-on-one calls where we pair you up with a peer and give you a simple agenda.
• 0:19
  It's an opportunity to meet people and kind of brainstorm and talk through content challenges. We're also doing monthly what we're calling Superpath Socials. So these are group calls. We just did our first one.
• 0:28
  We had forty-five people. There is a sort of large group component, and then there's breakout sessions where you're put into smaller groups for sort of specific discussion on a content trend or problem.
• 0:37
  And then we're also doing private AMAs in the Slack group. So each month we bring in somebody for an AMA, and we run that in the Slack group. So all of that is five hundred bucks a year.
• 0:44
  Our goal is to make it the absolute best deal in content marketing. If you wanna learn more about it, it's all on the homepage, superpath.co. And if you have any questions, feel free to hit us up. Thanks so much.
• 0:54
  I think there are a couple of big bets that we're making. One is that Apollo, I think to this point, has really won on brand, and that's awesome because that is sort of-- that is the differentiator.
• 1:05
  That's what all of us are finding. So we are doubling down on that. We are really investing in our social and evangelism teams. We're investing in community. Uh, we're investing in really making some viral moments.
• 1:18
  [upbeat music] Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, I've got Robin Showers on the podcast. I've been wanting to have her on for a long time, and I'm so glad we finally made it happen.
• 1:31
  She's had a very distinguished and interesting career in content marketing, and for the last six months, she's been running content at Apollo, which is a tool for sales and revenue generation teams.
• 1:41
  She explains exactly what it is and how it works and who it's for and all that. But we talk about a few things.
• 1:46
  One is what it's like to come into a company that's been around for ten years, has an established content program and team, and what her role looks like in that context.
• 1:55
  We talk too about a book that Apollo has just published and some of the details of that project. It's really cool. It's part of an effort, pretty serious effort, that Apollo's undertaking to differentiate their content.
• 2:06
  So it's not just blog, it's not just NCO. They've got books, they've got video, they've got academy.
• 2:10
  They have a number of different things, but, uh, Robin explains in some detail what they're doing, why they're doing it, how they're going about differentiating content, how they treat it like a product, which I really like.
• 2:20
  So the book story on its own is fascinating, and there are links in the show notes to the Amazon version and the web version. The web version's free if you wanna check it out. But anyways, tons of good stuff here.
• 2:30
  Robin's really a wealth of wisdom, and it's just great to talk to her.
• 2:35
  I also just wanna quickly apologize that I'm not in my normal podcast studio, AKA home office, so I don't have my nice microphone, so I do apologize if the quality of the audio is not as good as it normally is in this episode.
• 2:47
  But despite all that, really good conversation. I very much enjoyed it, and I hope you do too. Content Briefly is produced by our friends at Minutia.
• 2:55
  To learn more about their podcast production service, as well as their other adaptive content marketing services, check out minutia.com in the show notes. Hey everybody, Jimmy from Superpath here today.
• 3:05
  Very excited to have Robin Showers, currently running content at Apollo, but you've run content at Vimeo. I think you had a stint at HubSpot, done some agency work. You've had a really cool career in content marketing.
• 3:18
  I'd love to chat a little bit about that. So thank you for being here, Robin, and would you mind just introducing yourself to folks who don't already know you?
• 3:22
  Just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you've been up to for the last few years. Yeah, absolutely. Um, yeah. Hi, I'm Robin. I am the Director of Content at Apollo.
• 3:30
  I was previously the Director of Content and Social over at Vimeo, and I have also done stints at, yeah, like you mentioned, startups. I ran social media at HubSpot for a little bit. I've done a lot of things.
• 3:43
  I've been in tech for a very long time, which has been interesting, I think, especially the last few years. I live in DC with my husband and my cat, who is sleeping down here, like, pretty- [laughs]...
• 3:55
  pretty calmly, so I don't think he'll join, but sometimes, sometimes he likes to join if he hears me talking. He's welcome. He's welcome. Excellent. [laughs] Cats welcome. Yeah.
• 4:03
  Yeah, and I haven't done a podcast in a while, so Jimmy, I'm super excited to chat with you. Cool. Well, I'm very excited to have you here. Do you have roots in writing or marketing?
• 4:12
  Like, how did you find your way into this world? Yeah, that's a great question.
• 4:16
  I majored in English in college, but I minored in journalism, so my plan, my master plan was to become a journalist, and then a couple of different things happened.
• 4:25
  Like, A, I got really sick at the end of my college career, so I had to take a few extra years to finish school, so I was, like, gonna go to grad school, decided not to.
• 4:33
  And then secondly, journalism became really difficult around the time that I was graduating school. So I kind of pivoted. I went into copywriting.
• 4:41
  My first job was at a publishing house, and then my next job after that was at an advertising agency. And that was definitely a fit. Like, I could tell that I was really interested in marketing.
• 4:52
  I-- it still fed into that, like, how words work, how, you know, strategies of communicating with people, telling stories.
• 5:00
  So it was a lot of, yeah, it was a lot of the things that I was looking to do, just in a totally different context. So I really fell in love with it.
• 5:07
  And then from there, I had started reading the HubSpot blog because I was really interested in how we could get more attention for our agency. Like, I was doing a lot of internal marketing for the agency.
• 5:19
  And the more I read it, the more I realized I actually wanted to be on the marketing side, less so than on the creative services side, and ended up applying for a job at HubSpot, and to my great surprise, got it [laughs] and- That's so cool...
• 5:31
  moved to Boston. [laughs] Oh, that's-- So you were in the office at HubSpot? Yeah, I was. Yeah, yeah. Cool. That was be- it was before we went remote. So yeah, I was living in DC before, and then, yeah, got the job.
• 5:41
  Actually flew up for the interview, flew back, got the job, moved to Boston. And actually, I would've stayed at HubSpot way longer if they had been the remote company that they are today.
• 5:50
  At the time, they were still pretty in person first, and I tried it for a couple of weeks, like, doing it from DC. I just didn't love Boston. It wasn't for me. How about DC? I'm from DC too.Love DC Oh, are you? Yeah.
• 6:01
  I didn't realize that, Jimmy. Where in DC? Well, I'm from, I'm from, you know, Maryland suburbs, but I went to- Okay, nice... school in DC, and I sort of always think of DC as home.
• 6:08
  Worked there for a couple years after college and all that. I love it, yeah. Yeah. I'm from Virginia suburbs. I'm from Alexandria originally. Got it. But, uh, my husband and I live in Capitol Hill now, so I- Oh, nice...
• 6:17
  claim DC officially. [laughs] Okay, cool. I went to Gonzaga, so I, I know that area well. Nice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you do. That's awesome. Yeah. [laughs] And actually, I worked there for a little bit after college, too.
• 6:26
  Okay, tell us about Apollo. I sort of sometimes, uh, think of myself as a salesperson 'cause I, you know, like, super path, like I, I'm the sales guy, but I'm not really... Like, I'm not a trained salesperson.
• 6:37
  I've never worked on a sales team. I don't, like, really understand, like, what the problems that a sales organization has. So I feel like I only have kind of like a rough understanding of what Apollo is, who it's for.
• 6:48
  Could you give us kind of an overview of that? I think that might be helpful context for talking about content at Apollo. Yeah, absolutely. So Apollo's really an end-to-end revenue platform.
• 6:58
  It's for revenue teams, which can be salespeople, it can be founders like yourself, it can be the marketers who support the salespeople, the revenue ops people who also support the sales team, like anyone who's really involved in that, uh, we need to, we need to bring this product to market, we need to make money for the business, right?
• 7:16
  And so that's like all the things that Apollo's tools help with. We're really known for our data. That's definitely, that was the first product to market.
• 7:23
  That's where we really went out against the competition, like look us up on G2, we're at top and to the right of every single chart, which is also part of why I joined.
• 7:32
  I, I looked them up on G2 and I was like, "Oh, a product people like. That I can market." That helps, yeah. [laughs] Um, yeah, that helps. And yeah, we're, we're just doing a number of different things.
• 7:43
  It's funny that you say that about kind of like feeling like you're sort of in sales, but not really. I would actually say that's a lot of our target market, so we- Oh, interesting...
• 7:51
  we are more small and midsize businesses than, like, some of our competitors who are more, like, focused on the enterprise. We definitely- Got it...
• 7:57
  have some enterprise clients, and we, you know, serve revenue ops teams which tend to be at larger companies. But our sweet spot is really, like, those kind of scaling startups, like anywhere from...
• 8:09
  Uh, really anyone with a sales team of greater than one is kind of Apollo's sweet spot. That's where we can- Got it... really come in.
• 8:14
  But we do have a lot of people, and so a lot of the content is written for people who are doing sales for the very first time.
• 8:20
  Either they have joined a startup, or they've joined another company, or they're starting their own company. And so while that's not, like...
• 8:27
  I would say that our power users are definitely those people who are very much embedded in a sales team, we welcome and have a lot of content for people who are kind of just getting to know what the sales thing is for the very first time.
• 8:39
  Yeah, yeah. That's really cool. That's interesting.
• 8:40
  Like when I first started doing some sales work at Animals, it's the first time I'd ever done that, and, uh, you know, go, I would go out and, like, research things like, okay, like how do I make the transition from like, okay, this is a friendly conversation, to like, let's close this deal, you know?
• 8:54
  And like, just trying to, like, better understand, like, how to run a call, you know, how to pitch and all that stuff. And you go out and read stuff. I found it interesting, 'cause like I'm reading content marketing.
• 9:03
  I sort of get these people, these B2B SaaS content marketers, but then I'm gonna take it, and I'm gonna, like, apply it on a real live sales call, and like, if it doesn't work, I'm gonna be mad, and if it does work, I'm gonna be thrilled.
• 9:12
  It was interesting being on the other side of the content marketing for the first time, being like, "Wow, I, like, actually really need this.
• 9:18
  Like, this better be good information if I'm gonna go, like, test it out on a real call with a real prospect with real money on the line," you know? Yeah, the stakes are so much higher, yeah.
• 9:26
  And we think about that, too, when we're creating content. We're like, everything that we put out, someone in sales needs to be able to take and make more money by the end of that piece of content.
• 9:35
  You know, like, it needs to be immediately applicable, 'cause yeah, it's- I love that... there's no time for fluff in sales. Yeah, yeah.
• 9:40
  Well, that, that's actually kind of a cool, like, kind of mission for the content team, that every piece has to, like, help that person earn more money, 'cause I do feel like, you know, it's harder for...
• 9:48
  One thing that's nice about sales is it's just so black and white. It's like, did you close the deal or not? Did you make more money or not, you know? Yes. Whereas, like, other fields are- You know your performance.
• 9:56
  Exactly. So that's kind of nice. I wonder, like, do you bake that idea into style guide, content production process, things like that to, like, really reinforce that idea? That's a great question.
• 10:06
  In some ways, I would say that we do. Like, we definitely, in our style guide and just in our content in general, we really emphasize plain language, right? Like, we're not going to beat around the bush.
• 10:15
  We're not going to use the inside baseball terms. Like, we're gonna say what we mean, and I think part of that is sort of that black and white line, right? Yeah. Like, it's either it's helpful or it isn't.
• 10:25
  You closed the deal or you didn't. You got in touch with the prospect or you didn't. And so yeah, I think, like, we kind of understand that there is no grading on a curve, and, uh, we write with that in mind. Yeah, yeah.
• 10:36
  Could you give us like a 30,000 foot overview of content at Apollo? L- I mean, the company's been around I think for maybe 10 years. Like, it's, it's not brand new. It's not brand new, yeah. It's been around for a while.
• 10:48
  It's really the last, I think, like, the last couple of years. Our Series D was last year, and it's really the last couple of years that we've sort of seen this, like, extreme growth, right?
• 10:57
  So the company is definitely in a scaling period right now, which is always an exciting time to join, and it's kind of, that's kind of my sweet spot.
• 11:04
  I've joined a couple of early stage startups and realized that that's just not really... I don't know. I love it in the fact that you can, everything's your own. You can make all the- Yeah... decisions.
• 11:13
  Like, you can kind of try lots of things and go after lots of, I don't know, like, try out lots of growth strategies, but I really love process.
• 11:20
  I love managing, and so I've always found that my particular skill set works really well with a, a company that's scaling to kind of start to help it, like, work with all of the new things that are coming its way.Yeah.
• 11:32
  So I stepped into a fully formed content team. So our... And actually, one of the reasons that I took the job is that content is so much a part of the marketing strategy here at Apollo.
• 11:43
  I've definitely been in roles where it was either they were trying to turn into a services agency.
• 11:48
  I have a lot of thoughts about, like, content should be a program agency, not a services agency, or it was just they weren't quite sure. Like, content has been changing, right?
• 11:57
  So they weren't quite sure what its role was. Like, does demand gen own it? Who owns it? Yeah, yeah. At Apollo, content owns it.
• 12:03
  So we-- Actually, my boss is the VP of Content and Product Education, and so then across that entire organization, we have the help center, we have academy, we have my team, which is really in charge of content strategy or written content, scripting, copywriting.
• 12:18
  Like, there's a lot of stuff that kind of fits into my team. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. And then we have social and evangelism under there, too.
• 12:23
  And then we have our own video team, so, like, our own in-house creative, and I feel like I'm... Oh, and community. Community also rolls up into us, actually. So it's like- I think that's awesome...
• 12:31
  it's kind of all the pieces that you need. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 12:34
  And I find that that's kinda rare, so I really admired that, that they had invested in that, that Josh, my boss, had really built that out and, like, had this very clear vision.
• 12:43
  He's a former salesperson, so he's definitely, you know, they talk about companies there being missionaries and mercenaries.
• 12:49
  Like, missionaries are people who very much, like, feel the mission in their bones, and, like, Josh is a missionary. Like, Josh, like, embodies the mission, and so I loved all that.
• 12:59
  So yeah, when I joined, we had a couple of content programs running really strongly. Academy was pretty new, and now we have a director of Academy who's really building that up into something incredible.
• 13:11
  We were-- But my team was running that at the time. We were running webinars, which we have recently handed mostly off to product marketing. We're still doing, like- Nice...
• 13:18
  some big thought leadership flashy ones a few times a quarter. The magazine, which is, like, our version of a blog, and that's actually a really big focus for us now.
• 13:27
  And then what I act- what I immediately dropped into when I joined Apollo was we were writing a book, which is now out on Amazon, and it's launched. I just saw that yesterday, I think, right? Yes.
• 13:38
  As we record this, it's, uh, October 18th. That was yesterday that it came out? It came out a little bit ago, but we had a free day yesterday. Oh, okay. So yeah. Got it, got it. So you probably saw a lot of, like...
• 13:46
  Yeah, Amazon lets you have five free days, so we've been, like, kind of spacing them out throughout the month. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I saw some LinkedIn stuff about that yesterday. Yeah. Okay, that's cool. Awesome.
• 13:55
  I'd love to know more about the book. How did that come to be? Oh my God, yeah. So that was a huge initiative across a couple of different teams, so it had buy-in all the way from the top, right?
• 14:03
  Like, our CEO was really excited about it. Our mission is to make go-to-market as simple as possible, and so I feel like we kind of treat content like a product here. You know? Like, content is part of that mission.
• 14:14
  And so the book was really, it's a brand awareness play, but it was also, at the time, an activation play. We had some people who clearly just didn't...
• 14:22
  Or we had heard back from some customers that a lot of what was missing for them was just the best practices of selling, right?
• 14:28
  Like, they were using our tools, but they weren't really sure how to put it all together, and so we were like, "That's somewhere that we can help."
• 14:33
  So before I joined, a team partnered with product marketing and the research team. They went out and surveyed, uh, I wanna say 500.
• 14:42
  I don't have the exact number in front of me, but a whole bunch of, like, sales professionals on a whole host of topics.
• 14:48
  They looked at a bunch of data inside Apollo to kind of see, like, where people were running into stumbling blocks, and then they also interviewed 50 different experts within our community.
• 14:58
  So folks like Sam McKenna, folks like the CEO of Gong, folks like... You know, like, these people who really know what they're talking about. Yeah, yeah.
• 15:06
  And so we sort of, like, took all of those big questions that had arisen in the early research, and we're like, "How would you solve this?
• 15:12
  How are you dealing with the fact that it is harder and harder to get attention in today's world, and that sales as a result is much harder than it used to be?" So yeah.
• 15:21
  You know, I kinda thought you were gonna say that the content team kind of repackaged some existing blog posts and created a book, and I was gonna say, "Hey, that's awesome."
• 15:30
  But this is, like, [laughs] way, way beyond that. Way beyond that, yeah. And I would say now, actually, our job is sort of doing the opposite, right? Is, like, unpacking it into other content- Yeah...
• 15:39
  and pulling those threads through. But yeah. So when I joined, that research was mostly done.
• 15:45
  There were, of the, I think we have nine chapters in the book, four of them were written, two of them were, like, pretty much done, two of them were still...
• 15:53
  We were putting all of the chapters through a review process with our customer advisory board, so we were having them read them, tell us, like, you know, "Yeah, this hits," or, "No, this doesn't hit."
• 16:04
  And so we were being pretty, you know, like, pretty processed about that, but we also really needed to get it out. So we did this launch in sort of a two-part thing. So first I joined.
• 16:13
  We set up, like, I don't know, an editorial tiger team to attack this. [laughs] Um, got the rest of it written, got it fully edited.
• 16:22
  You know, like, sent it through, like, as meticulous as we could put together without, like, truly bringing in publishing professionals, but I think we did a pretty good job. Wonderful.
• 16:29
  Like a line editing, you know, 'cause it's, it's what? It's 30,000 words, right? Oh, wow. It's, it's a book. It is a lot- Yeah... of content, and so a lot of what we were...
• 16:38
  Our challenge was just, okay, how do we parse this up? How do we build a style guide that... So we were taking notes. So we were in constant contact, the four people on the content team.
• 16:49
  We set up a Slack channel, and we were just like, "Hey, this thing keeps coming up. Do we like using dashes here or colons? Like, which one do we prefer?"
• 16:57
  Or, you know, just style questions like that all the way through to, "Is this the way that we wanna describe this particular go-to-market motion? Is this right?" Right. "Does this hit?" So that was probably...
• 17:08
  We pushed the deadline back 'cause it was, it was insane. Apollo is very ambitious, which I appreciate, but sometimes we set deadlines that-I look at it and I'm like, "I don't know. I don't know how it's gonna happen."
• 17:18
  [laughs] Right. Right. Um, so it probably took us month and a half to get the book into publish-ready state, to finish writing it, to editing it, and of course designing it.
• 17:29
  So we launched it at the end of June on web first. Okay.
• 17:33
  So actually if you go to Apollo Academy, apollo.io/academy/pipeline-generation, with a dash in between pipeline and generation, you can see the book, and so it's all the chapters. It's beautifully designed.
• 17:47
  We've got all of these incredible graphs throughout. It's also linked to templates and all kinds of things that we built inside the product at the same time, so it's got...
• 17:57
  It'll teach you how to do something and then, you know, essentially be like, "Oh, and we made this really easy. Go do it now." Mm-hmm. You know, like, you can take your...
• 18:04
  So it's kind of, it's definitely the easiest- This is cool. Yeah. Thank you. I'm looking at it right now. It's just- I'm gonna make sure we link to this in show notes so that people- Awesome... can check this out.
• 18:10
  This is really cool. Please do, and I'll send you the Amazon link too, because... Well, I'll tell you about that in a minute.
• 18:15
  So that was the easiest way, we thought, to, A, get it out there quickly, and B, help with the issue of customers needing it for activation, right? Like, this is the easiest way to kind of use it alongside Apollo.
• 18:27
  But almost immediately after we delivered it in that way, people came out of the woodwork, and this makes sense. Like I said, it is 30,000 words.
• 18:35
  It is a full book, and so people came out and were like, "Can I read this like a book? Where is the book? Can I hold it in my hands?" Yeah. Yeah. "Can I read it on a Kindle? Can I...
• 18:43
  " And that is really how it's meant to be read. It's very narrative. It's a lot of first-person stories. So that was our next challenge was, okay, we've never done this before. We're gonna self-publish.
• 18:53
  We're going to get it on all of these different channels, and then we're gonna make a lot of noise. So that's what we're in the midst of right now. That is so cool.
• 19:02
  One thing I'm curious about, was there one writer who ultimately pulled all this together, or did different people on the team kinda take on different chapters?
• 19:10
  Like, what- That's a- I'm, I'm sort of curious, like, how did the words get on the page? Yeah, that's a great question. So our head writer, her name is Carly. She's incredible, and I would say she is really the...
• 19:20
  Like, most of the words on the page are from Carly. She's just- Okay... she has a way of pulling together ideas, of making it very narrative, making it extremely easy to read.
• 19:29
  We did have a couple of chapters that were written by other folks on the team, so, like, the email deliverability chapter is really technical.
• 19:35
  Someone on our team named Janet, who is also incredible, really understands- Oh, yeah. I know her. Yeah, yeah. You know Janet, yes. Yeah, Janet wrote that chapter.
• 19:41
  She was my arch nemesis for a while, but we're friends now. But yeah, she worked at Costar Io- That's right... so she knows, she knows that, that email world well. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
• 19:48
  Yeah, so she just like, she knew it already, and so she, she worked with our, um, internal email deliverability folks, you know, to really, like- Yeah...
• 19:55
  gut check everything, and, like, that space has changed really a lot over the last couple of years. But yeah, so she wrote that chapter, and it was... And- Cool...
• 20:01
  throughout the entire process also, I mentioned that Josh is a former salesperson.
• 20:06
  A lot of the ideas honestly came from Josh's brain, and so Carly for a while was meeting with Josh, I wanna say twice a week for, like, two hours each. Like, she was just doing- Oh, wow...
• 20:16
  these deep dive sessions- Yeah, yeah, yeah... where they were sort of, like, talking through the concepts in a chapter, and then Carly was turning it into words, right? And then we were editing it from there.
• 20:25
  It was definitely a team effort, but Carly led the charge there. That's really cool. That's really cool. Okay, so then you launch it on Amazon. Yes. And that's, that's, like, a whole nother thing.
• 20:34
  I mean, I assume the intention isn't to, like, make a buck on it. Selling books is probably not gonna change Apollo's business, but what a cool way to legitimize the whole thing. Like, it's a book.
• 20:43
  You can buy it in the place where you buy other books. You can read it. You can put it on your shelf. I feel like that really changes... The medium changes the significance of the content, I would imagine.
• 20:54
  I completely agree. Yeah, and that's how we're looking at that part of the play is it's really, it's an awareness play. Like, now it's also discoverable on Amazon.
• 21:01
  If you search for outbound sales, you find the book, you know? And- Yeah... and it already has, I think we've sold over 2,000 copies already.
• 21:09
  It's got, like, maybe 50 reviews so far, so if you're listening and you read the book, please leave a review. And- I gotta check it out. Yeah, please do. I, I feel like I'm actually...
• 21:17
  Now that I know for sure that I'm, like, part of your target market, I am gonna check it out. I think you'll get a lot out of it. Yeah, I really wanna hear your thoughts on it.
• 21:24
  Yeah, it is really more of an awareness play. We actually... If we could give it away for free every day, we, we would.
• 21:29
  Amazon actually doesn't let you do that, so $1.99 is the lowest we can sell the Kindle for, so that's what it is. Oh. And then we have these free days that we've kind of been promoting throughout the process.
• 21:39
  And then the print book, actually I have two of them here. I have the paperback and the hardback. Paperback, hardback. Nice. That's cool. Very fun, very cool. That's so, so legit. I love it. Right?
• 21:49
  And these are print on demand, so it's essentially whatever the printing place nearest to you, whatever the materials cost to actually print it. Got it. So it's, like, just at market. It...
• 22:00
  You know, it's so interesting talking to content folks, and, like, as you get into, like, what's going on on their specific team, like, there's these rabbit holes of, like, nuance and complexity, and it's like I wasn't necessarily...
• 22:10
  Like, I'm guessing that you have learned a lot about publishing.
• 22:14
  Or, I mean, may- I guess maybe you had some experience from publishing early in your career, but, like, getting the book out, how Amazon works- I mean, that was 15 years ago... all these things. It's changed so much.
• 22:22
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. [laughs] Really cool. That's really interesting. Well, I will definitely make sure we link to all that in show notes. Just, it's like, you know, it's a cool way to differentiate content.
• 22:30
  There's a ton there, so encourage people to check it out. I wanna ask you too about the magazine. So you mentioned earlier that- Yeah... the magazine is a focus right now. Why is it called a magazine? What's there?
• 22:40
  What's the intent of it, and then what kind of things are you working on there right now? Yeah, that's a great question. So the reason it's called the magazine is essentially because we...
• 22:48
  I mean, this decision was made before I joined, but my understanding is essentially because we, A, didn't wanna call it a blog, right? Like, I think that word has become a bit of a dirty word in content. I don't know.
• 22:59
  I'm just... I've now been in several places where everyone has a different idea of what a blog should be- Yeah, yeah... because it's been around for so long.Yeah, magazine's a little clearer.
• 23:09
  So part of it was that, was just sort of like we wanted to... And then the other part, which is related, we wanted the, the idea that, like, this content is very much curated. It's very editorial.
• 23:19
  Like, we spent time on it. It's crafted. And so a lot of the stuff that we do have, you know, a news section on the magazine, right? Which is more like a traditional blog.
• 23:28
  So if we have a press release, if we have a product announcement, all of that stuff, like, that does go in the news section. We're not gonna, we're not gonna deprive people of the, the information that they need to know.
• 23:38
  But a lot of what goes on in the magazine are our customer stories, which we write in a really narrative, like, we heroize, you know, whoever we're talking about.
• 23:45
  We wanna get into the nitty-gritty of how they did the thing that they did. And, yeah, or they're sort of, like, newsworthy, right? So we recently... Actually, I mean, email deliverability recently...
• 23:57
  Sorry, I'm gonna screw this up 'cause this is a more complicated topic.
• 24:00
  Google Mail started putting, like, a warning, maybe you've seen this, a warning on emails that had any images in them, essentially saying, like, this might be spam, which caused more people to send them to spam.
• 24:13
  And so the question was, is the act of just adding photos in your email or adding any images in your email triggering this? And then also because the pixel that tracks emails, tracks email opens is read like an image.
• 24:29
  Like, and that's what they were actually- Oh... trying to find. Yeah, yeah. Um, and so yeah, so it was like, can you still track emails or is that actually gonna get you flagged?
• 24:37
  And so this was something that, like, we were hearing from customers, like, a lot of people were panicking about. We ran a bunch of tests with our product team and put up an article about what we found.
• 24:46
  So we do stuff like that. What we are... And if you look it up, it's also, like, it's very slick.
• 24:52
  It's, like, very coolly designed, and I think that was a lot of it, too, is we wanted it to feel like a magazine, an online magazine, not like a blog. Yeah, blogs have- And-...
• 25:01
  kind of become like a dumping ground for all types of content, you know? Yeah.
• 25:06
  And then some blogs, a hand- there's like a handful of blogs out there that still, like, stay true to, like, the early days of blogging, where it's like a place where people kind of like journal and, like, record thoughts.
• 25:18
  Like, there are a couple come- like, Equals comes to mind. It's a company that kind of does that. Yeah, but I agree with you. Blogs have just become kind of like, what is this? Like it makes- Yeah...
• 25:26
  so much more sense to have academy resources. Like, I love the magazine idea.
• 25:30
  Like, separate it out so the reader and the potential customer has a much, much clearer understanding of what they're gonna get when they arrive. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I don't know if you know Emily Epstein.
• 25:40
  She's the, uh, head of content over at Sigma and used to run editorial over at Asana. She once called...
• 25:46
  She said basically that SaaS blogs had turned into the junk drawers of the internet, [laughs] which I just really liked. I like that. I need to get her on the podcast. [laughs] She's... Yeah, you definitely do. Yeah.
• 25:55
  Yeah. We've talked a lot about, like, editorial strategy. She comes from a journalism background, so I've picked her brains a couple of times. Very cool. There was, I actually, so many other things I want to ask you.
• 26:05
  I'll try to keep it relatively brief. You've been in this role for six months, right? Just about, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm nearing six months this month.
• 26:13
  So you come in, the k- cus- this company is 10-ish years old, content is established, there's a team, you come in, you've been here for six months.
• 26:20
  There's so many times on this podcast we've had conversations with folks who, like, are hired to build the content program, or hired to like, you know, maybe like the founders or the very early team kind of like was just scratching the surface.
• 26:29
  They're like, "Okay, we think there's something here. Let's bring in our first content hire to, to do this." And this is not that. You know, I'm just curious what you get there and then what? Like, how much,
• 26:42
  what goes into kind of like unearthing all the things that are there? I sort of think of this as like, um, layers, right? Like, you know, you're sort of like digging through the layers.
• 26:52
  You find, like, the fossils over here. You know what I mean? Excavation. Yeah. [laughs] Totally, right. There's probably a lot of that.
• 26:57
  You gotta get to know the team, you gotta get to know the other teams you may collaborate with. Anyway, sorry, I don't wanna answer this question for you.
• 27:03
  What was it like to arrive and, like, what were your first like 90-ish days like? What were you up to? Yeah.
• 27:08
  I would say one thing that this role had kind of, I don't know, going for it, is that even though the company is 10 years old and content was definitely established, the company has changed so much that most of the marketing team is actually still, I would call them fairly new.
• 27:22
  I was at Vimeo for five- Okay... and a half years. I think the most tenured person on our marketing team has been there for four. And so, like, a lot of people joined within the last year, right?
• 27:31
  Like, we had that Series D, and so there was sort of an explosion of growth. Yeah. A lot of people were hired. So I didn't feel totally alone, right?
• 27:38
  It wasn't like the new person joining with a whole bunch of people who had been there, done that forever. Got it.
• 27:43
  So I could learn aside, uh, across a couple of people, but there's definitely, yeah, there's a lot that I don't know. We have a really good culture of documentation at Apollo, which I love, and that was also...
• 27:53
  I mentioned I love process. That was also part of why I joined. And so in Notion there are every brief that we've ever put together.
• 28:00
  We put together briefs for every program, for everything, anything new that we want to, uh, sometimes that we don't even actually do, right?
• 28:06
  It's just our way of actually turning an idea into something that we could action about, on, and something that we can actually now discuss. So I went through the entire brief library.
• 28:16
  They've kept a really good audit library of like all of the content that's gone out. So I've gone through... I actually still haven't read all of it, but I've gone through quite a bit of it.
• 28:25
  Like, that's kind of my goal is by the end of the year to have read and watched everything. Wish me luck. [laughs] I, I bet that is the, that- [laughs]... that's a project. [laughs] That's a project, yeah. Exactly.
• 28:36
  So I've kind of been, like, prioritizing. And then I would say I actually do keep... It's funny you called it like an excavation. I actually do keep a, a Google Doc that I have named Apollo Content History Lessons.
• 28:48
  [laughs] Yeah. And it's just anytime I come across something that confuses me, I drop it in there so that the next time I'm talking to someone who's been here a while, I can be like, "Oh, by the way, why do we do this?
• 28:58
  Like, I noticed this." Yeah. Right. Um-So yeah, so a lot of it's been that, but yeah, I don't know. I think that they did a really good job of setting new people up to succeed.
• 29:09
  Like, they're also really big on the product, and a lot of, um... or not big on the product, everyone's big on the product. They're really big on everybody using the product, right? On like dogfooding.
• 29:19
  I don't really like that term, so drinking your own champagne.
• 29:22
  But yeah, so my first couple of weeks were really just getting to know the product, like pretending that I was a salesperson, building lists in Apollo, building workflows from there, reading a bunch of our...
• 29:32
  Like, we also have sort of a, a Gong, like, you know, um, it, it records calls, and then our AI takes insights out of that. So I was going through some of our sales calls.
• 29:41
  So there was a lot of stuff like that to sort of parse together. But honestly, I also just was thrown in immediately.
• 29:48
  Like I said, that book project was hot and heavy, like, in the works when I joined, and we'd had some shakeups where we thought we would have resourcing that didn't end up appearing.
• 29:57
  And so I jumped in headfirst into that project, and I would say that's the best way to do it. You know, I had all of these grand plans of, okay, for my first 90 days, I'm gonna spend, like...
• 30:07
  I'm gonna spend this time doing a listening tour, and I'm gonna spend this time doing an audit of everything that exists, and then I'll have... Six weeks in, I'll have my early strategy.
• 30:15
  You know, like, I had all of these plans. They all completely went out the window. [laughs] But just doing the work actually was, I think, the most effective onboarding.
• 30:25
  So I'm definitely going back and doing some of that now. Like, I've, I... My listening tour has been woven in over the last six months. My audit, I've been, uh, same thing.
• 30:34
  Like, I set aside time every Friday to go read a bunch of our content, watch a bunch of our master classes, and also to read and watch stuff outside of us because this is a bit of a new space for me.
• 30:46
  I've been in the marketing space for a really long time, but sales is slightly different. Um- Right. I don't know. Is that a good answer? I- Totally... I kind of rambled there. [laughs] No, I think it's great.
• 30:55
  You know, I, I will actually, I will flag what you said about learning to use the product. I find that that is so often overlooked. Like, I've done that. Like, I worked at...
• 31:02
  Actually, when Janet, Julia and I were, uh, when we were enemies, we were working at these competing, [laughs] these, like, directly competitive companies. And, uh, I worked there.
• 31:10
  It was an email, transactional behavioral email tool. I worked there for, like, six months, and I was writing all these blog posts about email marketing and tips to get better open rates.
• 31:19
  And one day the founder sat me down and he was like, "Look, stop writing about email marketing. That's not why people use this product.
• 31:26
  You know, they're trying to understand customer journeys and then build these campaigns that react to the behaviors people take." So he... And so I was like, "Oh, okay, yeah.
• 31:36
  Could you show me how that works in the product?" And he, like, kind of walked me through, like, some customer examples and then, like, kind of helped me get set up to create some campaigns of my own.
• 31:44
  I was like, "Oh my God, I've had this all wrong." The nature of content marketing is changing. We all know this.
• 31:54
  What bets are you making with Apollo's content right now that are maybe different than you did at Vimeo or HubSpot or Brazen or some of the other places you worked when the world was different and the content environment was different?
• 32:09
  Yeah. This is a good question. I, I have thought... I mean, every content marketer has a lot about this, especially... Well, I won't go off topic.
• 32:17
  We can have an aside later about, like, the role of content within the organization and how you move up I think about a lot. But yeah, as how it's affected our content strategy, that's huge.
• 32:27
  So I think there are a couple of big bets that we're making. One is that Apollo, I think to this point, has really won on brand, and that's awesome because that is the differentiator. That's what all of us are finding.
• 32:40
  So we are doubling down on that. We are really investing in our social and evangelism teams. We're investing in community. We're investing in really making some viral moments. You know, like we're trying to...
• 32:52
  We're gonna try a lot over the next couple of months just to see how can we reach more people, have more fun. Like, I don't know. I love that kind of marketing, so I'm really excited about it. Yeah.
• 33:03
  But it is, it's hard to measure, and so it is gonna be- The book I would imagine falls into this too. Yeah. Yeah. The nice thing about the book is that it kind of straddles two things.
• 33:12
  Like, one of the things that we were able to test from the web version of the book and why we did this first is we could track people who visited the book and then went to the product. Mm.
• 33:21
  And we had, we tested them against people who hadn't visited the book, and people who read the book were, like, 5.1 times more likely to be successful in the product. And so we had a couple of- Whoa...
• 33:34
  metrics that went into that, but yeah, we were able to prove out this actually, we know that this correlates to better activation, which got us more buy-in for the brand awareness side of it. Whoa. That's amazing.
• 33:46
  It was cool. That's really interesting. You know, I just... Wow, my mind is a little bit blown by that because I think I sometimes think of, like, okay, what could we do for brand or how can we differentiate?
• 33:55
  And then it's like, I think there's a, a greater appetite for that right now, but then there's sometimes this caveat of, like, but we're not gonna be able to measure it that well.
• 34:02
  You know, like if we could try this offline thing maybe, but like, who knows? You know?
• 34:06
  So the fact that you've been able to do both, like the differentiation piece and the brand building piece and tie it back to product, that is really cool. Yeah. It was really exciting.
• 34:16
  We won't be able to do that for every initiative, but agreed. Like we, the fact that we were able to prove that correlation I think unlocks some other things for us. Another thing we're...
• 34:24
  Actually related to that, another thing we're continuing to make a really big bet on is we hear this a lot, that people who use Apollo are blown away by how good the product education is.
• 34:33
  We're still investing a ton in that. Like, we are going to have best in class product education. We are creating the Khan Academy for salespeople. Like, we are going to...
• 34:42
  It's ludicrously valuable content that we're giving away for free. So I think that's somewhere that we're continuing to invest.
• 34:48
  And then the last one is actually, it's gonna sound like a playbook from the past, but-We haven't invested a lot in, we haven't invested a lot in SEO.
• 34:56
  We've invested a lot in sort of, um, some programmatic plays for finding the data that we, that we provide.
• 35:02
  And we get a ton of branded search because of the fact that brand has really been our strongest play to date, but we don't rank for almost anything non-brand.
• 35:11
  So that is something that we're, we're- What a cool opportunity, yeah. A really cool opportunity, yeah. So we're investing in it, but I think we're taking a very...
• 35:19
  Because search has changed so much, and because we don't want to... I always say, you wanna rank, but you don't wanna make a bad first impression at scale, right?
• 35:27
  Like, I don't wanna be out there just, like, pissing people off. Like, yeah, we're ranked, [laughs] but then they decided that Apollo is kind of spammy. So- Yeah, like what is sales? Stuff like that.
• 35:38
  [laughs] Exactly, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we're being really strategic about what we're choosing to write about, and we are setting a really high bar for it.
• 35:45
  So it's sort of like, okay, all of it has to have a first-person opinionated perspective.
• 35:50
  It all has to be based on people who actually did the thing they're writing about, or who interviewed SMEs who actually did the thing that we're writing about. Mm-hmm.
• 35:57
  It has to have proprietary insights if that's, you know, if that's what would actually make sense for this particular article. So we're putting a bunch of guardrails on that, that I think is going to...
• 36:07
  It's not gonna be the high volume play that I've run in the past, you know, where you're pumping out, like, hundreds and hundreds of articles a quarter. It's gonna be smaller in scale than that, but
• 36:18
  it's gonna take a lot more work. It's gonna [laughs] be a lot more work per article. Yeah. So yeah, I would say those are the three things that we're, like, investing heavily in. Cool. I love it. Really interesting.
• 36:28
  One thing I've been doing with Podcast Cast is we have this conversation, I set a reminder for 12 months, and I reach back out, you know, to see if people wanna come back on and like, "How did it go?" You know?
• 36:37
  Like, "Could you give us an update on like all the things we talked about that you're working on?" So if you're open to it, I will set that reminder, and maybe we can do a round two of this sometime.
• 36:46
  I would love that, yeah. Especially, I think we said before I even came on, I was like, "I'm only six months in. I haven't, I haven't had too many successes yet." Still, there's so much ahead of you. Yeah.
• 36:53
  [laughs] Yeah, yeah. Totally. So in the show notes, we will definitely link to Apollo. We'll link to the book, both the web version and the Amazon version. And then how about you?
• 37:01
  Like, where's the best place we can send folks to follow along with you and your work? Definitely LinkedIn. I am a big LinkedIn girlie. Okay. So yeah, LinkedIn/IN/ just Robyn Showers. I've got one of those.
• 37:12
  Oh, Robyn- Okay, cool... R-O-B-Y-N. Okay, cool. I'll put... Link will be there so folks can- Oh, yeah... can get there quickly. Uh, Robyn, thanks so much. You're a wealth of knowledge.
• 37:21
  You've been very generous with, with your time and your wisdom, so we really appreciate you. Thank you, Jimmy. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. Talk soon. Talk soon. [outro music]