Latest / Content, Briefly / Dovetail: Caitlin Burns on the "how and why" of content at scale

Transcript

Dovetail: Caitlin Burns on the "how and why" of content at scale · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [gentle music] The first 12 months was, like, all out. We published everything that I could kind of find that I thought we could publish. So that looked about, like, 50 articles a month. Oh, wow, 50. Yeah. [laughs] Yeah.
• 0:12
  Oh my gosh. Yeah, and that meant we could jump the queue, right?
• 0:16
  Like, we could unlock topical authority faster, we could start to get data faster around what keywords were not just ranking but converting, and then we could double down on them.
• 0:28
  So it just unlocked learning and unlocked results faster. [gentle music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, we're talking to Caitlin Burns.
• 0:40
  She's the content and SEO lead at a company called Dovetail, which you've probably heard come up on this podcast more than once. We'll talk about that and some of the use cases for content marketers.
• 0:49
  Caitlin has been there about a year, and she has been producing about 50 articles a month.
• 0:54
  As you might imagine, that caught my attention, and we talk about how she's gone about scaling that, the people involved, some of the processes and automation involved, all very cool.
• 1:03
  We also talk about her phased approach to her content strategy.
• 1:06
  She's currently finishing up phase one, which is generating tons of content and bringing traffic to the site, and now she's getting into phase two, which is conversion with a side of data analysis.
• 1:17
  Really interesting conversation, a little different than some of the others we have in the sense that it's primarily about scale and process and less about editorial. It was a great conversation.
• 1:26
  I really enjoyed it, and I think you will too. One last thing before we jump into this episode. I have three quick favors to ask.
• 1:32
  The first, if you're enjoying this podcast, we would really love it if you wouldn't mind leaving a rating or review in whatever podcast app you use. Two, we are currently running our annual salary survey.
• 1:43
  This is the sixth time we've done this. Basically, we ask anyone who works in content marketing to fill out about a 10-minute survey. We will take all that data, analyze it, and publish a report in January.
• 1:53
  If you go to the Superpath website, you will see calls to action for it. There are also links on our socials and in the Slack community. And the third is a reminder to check out our new paid Slack experience.
• 2:04
  There's now 10 premium channels. There are hundreds of members. The conversations there are fantastic. I'm just enjoying it more than ever. Basically, think of any content marketing-related thing that you can't Google.
• 2:16
  People are asking it, and people are responding. There's so much good stuff in there. It's only 20 bucks a month. You get a discount if you sign up annually. You can learn more about that at superpath.co/community.
• 2:26
  [gentle music] Hey, everybody, Jimmy from Superpath here today with Caitlin Burns, content and SEO lead at Dovetail, an app which has come up multiple times on this podcast, and maybe we can talk more about that.
• 2:40
  But first, Caitlin, welcome. Would you mind introducing yourself for folks who don't already know you? Yeah, of course.
• 2:45
  So I'm based in Sydney, and I've been at Dovetail for about 12 months now, working on their SEO and content program.
• 2:52
  Before that, I was head of content at HealthMatch, another Sydney-based startup in the health tech space.
• 2:58
  And yeah, I'm a huge fan of this podcast and of Superpath, so I'm super excited to hopefully be able to share something that's useful for someone. Absolutely.
• 3:07
  A long time ago, I too worked for a Sydney-based tech company. I was remote at the time, but I had the chance to spend about two weeks in Sydney. This was like 2015 maybe.
• 3:17
  And spent a week in Manly Beach and a week in Darlinghurst, I think it was called. Nice. Yep. And it was wonderful. Like, what a cool city. What an amazing country. I just loved it.
• 3:27
  Yeah, no, it's such a funny thing that you actually... So you worked for Vero. Yes. And the founder of Dovetail, Benjamin, is quite good friends with Chris, who's the founder of Vero.
• 3:36
  I think they used to share an office space when they were both very early stage, like, bootstrapping founders.
• 3:42
  And when Chris kind of, like, heard from Benjamin how our SEO program was going, he asked if we could get a coffee and if I could maybe, like, give him a little bit of guidance around what Vero could do.
• 3:53
  And he was telling me about his previous person who was running content, and he kept saying, "Jimmy," you know, "Jimmy in the States, Jimmy in the States." And I was like, "What's Jimmy's last name?"
• 4:01
  [laughs] And he was like, "Jimmy Daly." I was like, "No way." [laughs] Like, "You had, you had Jimmy." [laughs] That's so funny. The B2B SaaS world is surprisingly small. Oh, it's tiny, especially in Sydney.
• 4:13
  I just wasn't expecting someone from the US to pop in. Yeah. That's so great. That's so funny. I still keep in touch with Chris, actually. We just talked a couple weeks ago. Oh, he's great.
• 4:20
  Would you mind giving us an intro to Dovetail? And then maybe I'll explain how and why it's come up in some previous episodes of this podcast. Yeah. Dovetail is... it's a customer insights hub.
• 4:31
  It's a place where companies who do customer research, user research, can store it all centrally and continually access it, so they don't have to store it in a Google Drive where it's hard to revisit, and they might end up doubling up on different projects.
• 4:46
  So it's typically used by product teams, UX teams, especially at SaaS companies, like Atlassian is a huge adopter, Canva, Google, but then also companies like Porsche and big manufacturers and, like, companies that make tractors use it.
• 5:02
  So I think it has a really broad reach across all these different industries who are trying to get smarter about how they use their customer research and, and really kind of, like, tune into what their customers want and get that edge.
• 5:14
  And it's also just a cool brand. Like, I think that really helped it get traction, especially in the early days.
• 5:19
  Like, researchers didn't have a tool like Figma where they were, like, championed, and something was built for their needs.
• 5:26
  They were kind of, like, hacking things together with spreadsheets or printing things out and putting them on the wall and trying to make Miro fit their workflows.
• 5:34
  So I think that's really the success of Dovetail is they just got immediate product market fit with a group of people who were doing really important work but didn't have the tool to do it. What a great founding story.
• 5:45
  Yeah. And I'll tell you how that's come up on this podcast.
• 5:48
  It first came up because a person named Blake Thorne, who at the time was running content at a company called Launch Notes, was using it as sort of like a library of subject matter expertise that the content team was using in their writing.
• 6:01
  So just as an example, they had a podcast with, I don't know, several dozen episodes.
• 6:07
  They would load the audio in and then make the transcripts searchable by anyone who was writing for the blog, and that gave them immediate access to quotes and anecdotes and all kinds of cool things that they could then weave into the content.
• 6:18
  And I thought that was just such a fantastic idea, even though maybe it's not the exact-Use case that you guys market. I mean, I use it too in a similar way.
• 6:26
  Like, our sales team will record and upload their demos, or if they're having, like, a, a renewal conversation with a customer, and the customer might talk about what isn't working with the product, what is, or if it's a sales call, they're talking about what the problem is they're trying to solve, like what their job to be done is in the product.
• 6:42
  And I mine that for keywords because when you're marketing in B2B, especially in a niche, often you're trying to understand, like, okay, but what's the language people are using?
• 6:53
  Like, I don't naturally know the terms they might be searching. So I'm actually pulling things out of the transcript and then putting it in Ahrefs to be like, is there demand here?
• 7:02
  Is this what people are talking, or is it, like, a, a little bit different? What's the intent? So it, it's a versatile tool, that's for sure. That's really cool.
• 7:10
  I am curious, maybe we can just dive into some of the content marketing stuff because sounds like there's kind of a wide variety of customer types.
• 7:18
  In the episode prior to this one, we talked to Benjamin Elias, who heads up marketing at Podia, and actually one of the themes of that conversation was how to market to many different personas.
• 7:29
  So, like, in Podia's case, it's a tool for making courses and running memberships and things like that, and it's everything from people who create baking courses and recipes to people who teach others how to do tricks on their bikes and any niche you could possibly imagine, which, as you might imagine, creates a lot of marketing challenges.
• 7:48
  It sounds like Dovetail's is probably not quite that extreme, but Porsche, a company that makes tractors, and then Atlassian are very, very different companies.
• 7:56
  So I'm just curious, kind of in broad strokes, how do you think about content marketing?
• 8:00
  Is it really just about communicating the use case rather than creating stuff specifically for the types of companies since you may actually not even know exactly who they are? Yeah.
• 8:10
  I think when I started 12 months ago, and my challenge was to go out and create content that was going to kind of, like, hit the top of the funnel, bring in a new audience because we had thought perhaps we had tapped out the initial market, which was UX researchers.
• 8:27
  So when I was thinking about, okay, well, what topics am I gonna try and go after, as it makes sense for the product, I put it into almost, like, job functions.
• 8:36
  That's how I saw the use case because a UX researcher at a software company has a very similar use case to a researcher at Porsche where they're trying to understand, like, is this experience working?
• 8:49
  What are the pain points? What is the friction with the user experience? It's a similar job to be done even though it looks a little bit different.
• 8:55
  So I built out topics around, well, I think research, just, like, general research is one, and then I think UX is one, so product design, product experience, user experience.
• 9:06
  Then I think customer research is one where it's like you bring in support tickets, or you bring in feedback, and you do a more continuous kind of, like, have it humming in the background where you have a large volume of feedback, but you're trying to find trends and patterns instead of, like, you might interview 10 people and dive through it.
• 9:25
  So we did that. We did product teams who are making... trying to decide what features to build based on customer feedback. That's another use case, so went after that.
• 9:34
  And then from there, it was kind of like tailoring that and tweaking it to understand what the bottom of the funnel was because that's, like, the key. Top of funnel is easy for those topics. It's what is Agile?
• 9:45
  What is Scrum? What is UX research? How do I tag my survey results? What is that last piece of content where they're ready to try the product?
• 9:54
  So that's when I actually started to use Dovetail itself to be like, okay, but what is, what is the point where they say, "I need to talk to sales?" Like, what is that job to be done?
• 10:03
  And I think that's the tricky thing, but once you do it, it's a big unlock.
• 10:09
  So I feel like 90% of my time is actually spent on the bottom 10% of the content funnel, and then I'm hoping that [laughs] everything kind of just, like, hums in the background and, and brings in traffic so that once they're there, we're kind of ready to move them along, as it makes sense, into the product.
• 10:27
  Yeah. That's great. How much or how little is sales involved? Is there a trial, or do you drive folks to a demo? Yes. So we have two separate flows.
• 10:35
  We have someone comes to the website and signs up and self-serves into the product, and they get a free trial, and then they can upgrade as it makes sense for them, whether they're a solo or a team, or they need to talk to sales to basically unlock some enterprise features.
• 10:52
  And then there's another one which is, like, you know, maybe you've been using the tool and you wanna expand it out to your entire team, and then you might reach out to sales and say, like, "Hey, can you help me build my repository out?"
• 11:02
  Like, "What does that look like? How do I do it so that I can bring other people in, and it's not just a mess of my own work, but it's a, a repository of, of valuable information?"
• 11:12
  And then the sales team will kind of work with them on their particular kind of, like, set of data and making it work and explaining to them the different features, the collaboration tools that they might need, and then that's the enterprise sales flow.
• 11:26
  Got it. Okay, cool. How do you map out the content that you need to create? I'm imagining it's like a bingo card almost- Yeah. [laughs]...
• 11:33
  where it's like you have, like, your different personas, you have different topics, and you're kind of, like, mixing and matching the two, which probably creates quite a few, uh, content opportunities, but then it's a matter of, like, prioritizing it.
• 11:43
  It doesn't, at least in my mind, doesn't, like, fit neatly onto a calendar. Oh, no. Yeah. I'm wondering if there's another way you think about it. [laughs] I'm a big fan of, like, let's just do it all at once [laughs]...
• 11:52
  and see what sticks. [laughs] I throw a big pot of pasta against the wall, and then I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Like, that one stuck. So the big benefit of Dovetail is that we're a really well-funded company.
• 12:05
  We have resources. And so I think the challenge with SEO content is that you just don't have the budget usually to publish- Mm... everything at once.
• 12:15
  You have to think about, okay, like, if I can only publish 10 articles this month, like, what are the 10 articles? So I kind of said, like, "Hey, let's not do it like that."
• 12:23
  Like, we have a competitive advantage in that we have the resources to kind of just, like-Pump this, like turbocharge it. So let's do it and let's front load the investment So we did 12 months.
• 12:36
  The first 12 months was like all out. We published everything that I could kind of find that I thought we could publish. So that looked about, like, 50 articles a month. Oh, wow, 50? Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. Oh my gosh.
• 12:47
  Yeah. And that enabled us to build out every pillar. I think we have, like, six pillars of content. It's about nearly 1,000 articles, and that meant we could kind of jump the queue, right?
• 12:58
  Like, we could unlock topical authority faster, we could start to get data faster around what keywords were not just ranking but converting, and then we could double down on them.
• 13:10
  So it just unlocked learning and unlocked results faster because we could go after it aggressively. Wow. Okay. I have a lot of follow-up questions about that. [laughs] How do you publish 50 articles a month? Yeah.
• 13:22
  [laughs] The mechanics of it, of course, you know, who writes, how do you write that much, how do you maintain quality? Basically, how do you do it? How do you scale that?
• 13:29
  Yeah, it was funny 'cause when I started and I kind of put together this proposal and I was like, "This is what it's gonna look like.
• 13:34
  We're gonna publish this many articles and it's gonna be about 50 a month," we have a really brilliant writer at Dovetail who does our blog and long form content, and people kind of looked at him like, "Oh man, you're about to write 50 articles a month."
• 13:48
  [laughs] I had to keep being like, "No, no. It's not... Sean's not gonna do it. It's, it's not gonna be him. It's okay."
• 13:54
  So I was lucky in that I had had previous experience doing this even, like, on steroids because at my previous role at Health Match we were in a much more competitive space.
• 14:05
  So we were competing with, for medical content, with big, big players like Healthline, who get, like, 140 million sessions a month. They own the space and they're super well-funded.
• 14:17
  So at Health Match we were publishing 150 articles a month of medical content, which is obviously YMHL, like, it has a whole bunch of things around it that have to be in place for it to rank.
• 14:28
  So when I got to Dovetail, I was like, "Oh, 50's easy, like, and it's not even medical content. [laughs] It's, it's fine." And I was able to apply a lot of the mechanisms of 150 to 50. So- Yeah, it's probably easy. Yeah.
• 14:41
  [laughs] Yeah, I'm cruising. So. Yeah.
• 14:43
  [laughs] You know, I engaged the same content agency that I had a relationship with, which made it easy because they knew how I worked, they knew the process, and I could kind of give them exactly what we needed to get that off the ground quickly.
• 14:56
  And then basically I build out swim lanes of freelancers. So I have teams for every part of the content process. External teams, I have teams who create briefs.
• 15:07
  I check the briefs, I give them to the content agency and say, "We'd like these."
• 15:10
  And then I have teams of expert reviewers who go through the content, add their own unique perspective to it, check it, make sure it's right.
• 15:18
  Then I have teams who edit it, then I have teams who upload it to our CMS, and then I have a team who goes through new content and adds internal links so that we can keep everything nice and, like, hygienic and well linked and clustered.
• 15:31
  That is so interesting. Do you mind if I ask what tool or tools do you use to manage all of this? Like, do you have a content calendar tool or any other kind of production tools you rely on? Yeah, so I've made a...
• 15:42
  I've [laughs] I said to Dovetail before, "If I have to cancel my Airtable, like, I have to quit" because- [laughs]... Airtable is what keeps it all together. Yeah, it's doing 90% of the heavy lifting.
• 15:54
  I use Ahrefs to do my keyword research, and I basically, I pull it out into Airtable and then I set up automations to send it to each part of the stage.
• 16:04
  I have Google Sheets for our freelancers, so they get all their assignments in their Google Sheet. They get an email that something's in there for them to work on.
• 16:12
  They check a box in their Google Sheet, I get a Slack message that it's ready, I go into Airtable, and all I'm doing in Airtable is just changing the status of things.
• 16:20
  And behind the scenes, I have Zaps and Airtable automations moving that piece of content to where it needs to go next. That's beautiful. That's music to my ears. [laughs] I just love hearing about that kind of thing.
• 16:31
  Well, you're an Airtable power user as well. I love Airtable. The last thing I was doing before I got on this call with you was building out some automations to invite podcast guests.
• 16:41
  So, like, I have an Airtable base of all the people I would like to invite, and now I just change the status, triggers emails, gets them booked, all that stuff. It's great. Yeah.
• 16:49
  Is a customer insights hub, is it a tool in everyone's stack? Or is this a relatively new idea?
• 16:55
  And if so, is there a certain amount of category creation work for you to do to help people understand what the product actually does? Yeah.
• 17:02
  So that's definitely, like, the next frontier for Dovetail is that category creation. The initial market of UX researchers knew they needed that. That was an immediate pain point for them, and they needed a solution.
• 17:15
  So converting them into our solution was fairly straightforward.
• 17:19
  I think the challenge for us as we grow and as we kind of, like, mature into a bigger company and a more sticky product, I think what that looks like is infiltrating product teams at large.
• 17:32
  So the solution the product offers for a product team is you might have a Jira ticket that you give an engineer around a feature, and you link it to a Dovetail insight where it has a highlight reel of customers talking about why they need that feature.
• 17:47
  And then that gives the engineer who's building the feature immediate context and immediate understanding, and it also creates empathy. Like, you're building this for humans. Those humans have a problem.
• 17:58
  And I think that that really kind of is a powerful thing, and especially in large companies, I think you become more distant from your customer, and I think Dovetail is a really easy way to bridge that gap.
• 18:10
  So it looks like that.
• 18:11
  It looks like also for, like, leads or heads of product development, it looks like tying research to revenue because you may say, you know, we did all this research and we uncovered six features that we needed to prioritize to build, and those six features generated X amount of revenue.
• 18:27
  So it helps prove the ROI of research, which I think-Isn't immediately obvious and I think there's a real case to be made for doing more research because it's what's gonna separate you from another product that's just built based on, like, hunches and gut instincts when you're actually building something your customers will love, then it's sticky, it gets market fit straight away.
• 18:51
  Like, it's just a different experience for everyone. Totally.
• 18:55
  And also, there's something very different about hearing or watching real people talk about the things that they want versus other ways you might go about this, which could be surveys or screen recording tools like Fullstory.
• 19:08
  You know, both of which are extremely useful, but it's just different when it's, like, a person just explicitly saying something that then a designer or developer could use immediately. That's really interesting.
• 19:19
  I did wanna ask you, this is going back a little bit, but you mentioned a term that I wanted to follow up on, which was YMYL, which I think means your money, your life. Yeah. Can you explain?
• 19:30
  This term has only very recently come on my radar, but I'm intrigued that you mention it. I'm just curious sort of what you meant by it, and I think it was in the context of your previous role, right? Yeah. Yeah.
• 19:39
  So your money, your life content is classed by Google as basically more high stakes. So Google doesn't want its users getting bad information about the really important things, which is money, finances, health.
• 19:55
  I think Google deliberately makes this quite fuzzy.
• 19:58
  My understanding is that that type of content, they have a much closer look at it, and my understanding is that they get human reviewers rather than just bots, and they're looking for really strong signals of expertise in the area.
• 20:13
  So I think Healthline really did this at scale the best, where they said, "Every article is gonna have a medical reviewer on it, and it's gonna have all their qualifications.
• 20:23
  Every reference is gonna be cited, and they all have to be up to date." They only have references from.gov, from medical journals, and everything's peer-reviewed. Everything is very, very...
• 20:34
  Like, it all passes the sniff test. Same with finance. Like, you can't just go and recommend a financial product if you don't have the right credentials or your site doesn't really follow the local regulations.
• 20:45
  So when you're creating medical content, you have that responsibility not only to your reader to make sure it is accurate, but you also have to understand that Google will penalize you if you haven't taken the right checks and balances to make sure that what you're saying is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant.
• 20:59
  Is there anything you learned creating that style of content for Health Match that you've kind of parlayed into your work at Dovetail? Yes.
• 21:06
  So basically, I took that entire reviewer process with me, and initially I wasn't going to have a reviewer layer for the, for the Dovetail content 'cause my initial assumption was, it's not YMYL.
• 21:20
  There's enough information out there from reputable sources that the writers can build on it themselves.
• 21:27
  So I, you know, commissioned the content and was getting the first couple back and I asked our in-house writer, who I mentioned before, who'd been working at Dovetail for two years and really knew our customer, I asked him to read them, and he was like, "No.
• 21:40
  [laughs] This... It's not quite right. Like, it's very nuanced, and so when you say this term, it's really not right."
• 21:47
  So I, I realized, like, oh, that the content is actually a little bit more niche and a little bit more, I don't know even if, like, complicated is the right word, but it's a technical audience at the end of the day, and I think I underestimated the importance of speaking to a technical audience in a way that's really, like, authentic.
• 22:03
  So I just... I said, "Okay, no worries.
• 22:05
  Like, I'm gonna build up a reviewer layer so that we catch these and make sure that we're speaking in the right way so that we get buy-in and trust, and we can build that with the new audience."
• 22:14
  How do you go about reviewing 50 articles a month? Who does it? And then any notes on that process would be very interesting. Yeah, so this is what I get asked the most.
• 22:23
  I think this is, like, a concept that, for me as well, when I started at Health Match and my boss at the time, who was our head of growth said, "You need a medical review for these articles," I was like, "What?"
• 22:33
  [laughs] I was like, "Okay, where do I go to find a doctor who's gonna review articles? How do I pay them? Do they need to sign something? What needs to happen for that to be a reality?" And he was kind of like, "Hmm."
• 22:46
  Luckily, we had... At Health Match we had an internal doctor who was kind of like our go-to for internal kind of, like, regulatory things.
• 22:54
  So I said to him, "Do you have any communities or any groups where we could kind of, like, go and ask if anyone's interested?"
• 23:00
  And luckily enough, he was in a Facebook group for doctors who wanted a more creative career, who wanted to pivot into more creative careers. So I was like, "Great." That is so niche. Yeah. [laughs] Yeah.
• 23:10
  [laughs] I was like, "What? It's a what group?" [laughs] So... And it had, like, thousands of people in it, Australian doctors. [laughs] Like, fully qual- I was like, "Okay, weirdos."
• 23:21
  Like, [laughs] "What are we all doing here?" [laughs] So we kind of went into that group and said, "This is what we're looking for." I didn't give a price 'cause I had no idea.
• 23:31
  I just said, like, "If you're interested, let's chat." And then I kind of let their interest unit set the demand, and I listened to them around, like, how many hours they thought they could devote to it.
• 23:42
  And then I also thought about, like, okay, well, if it's a niche topic, say it's about kidney disease, there's not many... I think they're nephrologists.
• 23:49
  There's not a ton of nephrologists in this Facebook group, so I'm gonna have to pay more. So it's a supply and demand situation.
• 23:55
  And then once I got more confident with the system, how many hours, how I assign them work, how they give me feedback, blah, blah, blah, then I went into Upwork. I use Upwork for so much.
• 24:07
  There's so many people on there, you'd have no idea. You think, oh, no one's gonna have this skill, and then you go onto Upwork and there's 100 people.
• 24:13
  So I went onto [laughs] Upwork and started looking for US doctors because there were US-specific articles around insurance that I really needed an expert on.
• 24:22
  And so then I basically took that model of hourly rates based on supply and demand and was able to reach out to a whole bunch of UX researchers and product managers-On Upwork initially to be like, "Hey, I need you to collaborate on some content with me.
• 24:39
  This is what it looks like. Here's an example of a reviewed article. Here's how long I think it'll take. Happy to pay this much per hour, and here's how many hours per week I think we have for you."
• 24:51
  And nine times out of 10, they say yes.
• 24:53
  So it was a steep learning curve and something I'd never, ever done, 'cause, I mean, it's one thing to engage with freelance writers who you have an idea of what the deliverables are and what the pay is.
• 25:03
  But it was intimidating to tell a, you know [laughs] like a brain surgeon how much I was gonna pay them. [laughs] So yeah, it was... But now you can apply the same principles. It's much easier to do it the second time.
• 25:17
  Have you run through more or less the same process to find people to review content on UX and all, you know, kind of all the things you write about now? Yeah, yeah, very similar.
• 25:26
  So I troll through Upwork and find people who mention the topics that we're writing about.
• 25:32
  So, you know, we're doing product development sprint at the moment for content, so I'm looking for scrum masters and product owners, and, you know, in their Upwork they're saying, like, "I can help you build a product," but I'm actually reaching out to them and saying, "Actually, no, I'd just like to tap into your experience and your perspective to add value to our content."
• 25:50
  And then do you have some kind of SOP for those people to provide feedback in a structured way so that it kind of fits into the rest of the mostly automated workflow that you have? Yes.
• 25:59
  So I have a Google sheet where they get sent new articles, and there's a column in there where it's like feedbacks for me, which is like a high level, like, this one feels like it's written by AI, which I've been getting a little bit lately.
• 26:11
  Mm. So that comes back to me in a Slack message, and I can action it with the manager of our writer pool. There's also...
• 26:18
  We work in Google Docs, so the writer will deliver it in Google Docs, and then I've kind of provided guidelines around how a reviewer should comment in the doc or if they should apply suggested changes.
• 26:29
  And then we also have a process where if they have provided comments where it needs new content or rewrites, then it goes back to them after the writer has actioned the changes for a final check. Mm.
• 26:40
  So it's all very structured. That's very cool. Yeah. You know, I also want to ask you about data points. We ask everybody about metrics. Like, what metrics do you care about?
• 26:47
  In your case, I have to assume organic traffic or some version of that is very important to you. Could you talk about that? And then are there any other metrics that you pay close attention to?
• 26:56
  Yeah, I mean, or- organic traffic, for the first 12 months, organic traffic is the north star. So I made it clear to my team and leadership, first 12 months we're not trying to generate revenue.
• 27:07
  Our goal is to just get it ranking and to make sure that Google sees us as a site that should rank for the terms that we want. That's step one.
• 27:15
  Step two is make sure that people are coming to the website and staying, which would tell us that the content is good and relevant.
• 27:22
  And then step three is hoping they come back or doing whatever we need to do to hope they come back. And I have to keep guiding everyone back to that north star of like, "No, no, no, it's hitting all its goals this year.
• 27:33
  Even if it's not driving, like, a ton of revenue, it's doing what it needs to because we're building something."
• 27:39
  So the next 12 months, my north star metric is going to be conversion from website visitor to free trial, and the reason why I'm doing it in phases like that is because when we had first published and we were maybe getting, I don't know, like 15,000 sessions a month spread out over a number of articles, it's just not a big enough data set to do any kind of learning or experiments on in terms of, like, conversion.
• 28:05
  Mm. So I was like, "We need a big data set," and then we can make big swings and have a huge impact instead of tweaking a tiny dial and getting only, like,.1% of a small number.
• 28:16
  So phase two is taking the traffic we've built and taking the value of that traffic and trying to convert it into a customer, and that's gonna look like a whole bunch of experiments, a whole bunch of tests, building out assets that are like the intermediary between the article and the product.
• 28:34
  So, like, if they're not ready to convert to the product, are they ready to convert to something else, and what does that asset look like? So yeah, north star will be, like, website conversion rate. Very cool.
• 28:43
  You used a, a few terms in that answer that they're not words that content marketers use all that often, like experiments and tests and data sets.
• 28:52
  Those sound like things, like, in my mind, that performance marketers or demand gen folks think more about. How much of your time do you spend thinking about...
• 29:00
  [laughs] I mean, I'm kind of bucketing all that into, like, a category of marketing stuff that isn't exactly content. But, yeah, how much of your day or your time is spent on that kind of thing?
• 29:09
  So because the content machine is operationalized, I can actually spend a large portion of my day on other work. There's checks and balances that are happening with the content for sure.
• 29:20
  You know, I'm answering questions that our editors might have, or I'm updating our brief template or fixing a zap, whatever that looks like. It's kind of just like maintenance and slight improvements.
• 29:32
  So I would say maybe a third of my week is spent on keeping that going, and then the rest of it is thinking about, like, what's next, and at the moment I'm thinking, like, like, a big part of our conversion experiment, I wanna look at our page design.
• 29:45
  So at the moment, I'm spending a lot of time looking at other sites, and I've actually Super Pocket lots of these.
• 29:49
  So, like, examples of great B2B marketing sites, and how can I take parts of those pages and build out a SEO content experience that is far and away better than any of our content competitors.
• 30:00
  So I would say things like that, where I'm thinking about how we take our program to the next level in terms of, like, conversion to revenue, would take up the other two-thirds of my week.
• 30:09
  You know, your job sounds like a lot of fun. It is. [laughs] It is. There's a lot of cool stuff happening here.
• 30:14
  I wanted to also ask you about technical SEO, because at the scale of content creation that you're operating at, I would imagine the site breaks if it's not- [laughs]... built to handle that many articles, right?
• 30:25
  Even just things like you mentioned internal linking. It sounds like you have a good process there, but even resurfacing old articles.
• 30:30
  Like, how do you make sure that stuff doesn't get published and then pushed to the bottom of the pile and not seen again? That's a great question, and that's...
• 30:37
  We could do a whole nother episode on that, I think, which is the back end of how this all works. We actually adapt how...
• 30:43
  We actually change domains, like, three months into getting all this content off the ground, and I was, like, sweating. I was like, "Do we really need to?"
• 30:52
  [laughs] Like, "I don't know about this."But we've spent money to buy dovetail.com. We were previously on dovetailapp.com. So I knew long term it was gonna be a better signal for Google- Yeah...
• 31:02
  if we moved to dovetail.com. But I, I also know that, that that's when things can go really wrong, and we were inheriting the SEO of dovetail.com.
• 31:12
  So if it was a dodgy site with a whole bunch of back, like, weird linking things going on and 401s and redirects and all that kind of stuff, like, that was gonna be our problem.
• 31:22
  So luckily, with a company of, you know, like, 100 engineers, that was all [laughs] handled really well, and I kinda just sat in the room nervous listening to them fix all these problems, and, and it went really smoothly.
• 31:34
  But absolutely there was a dip in our traffic. I think there was a little bit of a lag, and then we dropped, and then it righted itself once we had had enough time on the new domain.
• 31:43
  But I also think the key to this working is the CMS you use.
• 31:48
  So we use Contentful, which is a headless CMS, and basically we have a team of web engineers who build it, but all I see and all our web publishing team sees is basically, like, text entry fields.
• 32:02
  And all they do is they map the text in Airtable to the field in Contentful, and it's copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste. Oh, wow. That's awesome. Yeah.
• 32:12
  So it's all templated, and then in order to make sure that everything is kind of, like, as programmatic and as hands-off as possible, we have on each page carousels with related articles and editor's picks.
• 32:25
  So two separate carousels, and this was a real hack that I brought from HealthMatch, which is basically you wanna increase the number of internal links to your most important pages within a topic.
• 32:34
  And how we do that is we enter a value indicator in Contentful of our really important pages, and then we sort and index those pages into carousels on every single page.
• 32:46
  I don't know if that makes sense, but basically what that means is if we have five really important articles in the UX pillar, then every single UX article will link to those five automatically.
• 32:56
  So that's, like, immediate uploads, and that's all programmatic. That's before our internal linkers have even started to, like, put things in contextually. That's really cool.
• 33:04
  I'm looking at the site right now to see this in action. [laughs] And I would encourage other people to do the same. That's very cool. Could you explain what headless CMS is?
• 33:11
  This is another term that I feel like I sort of understand, but I actually don't have any direct experience working with a headless CMS.
• 33:18
  I'm just curious, like, if you could explain it either broadly or just kind of your specific use case at Dovetail. Yeah. So we also use Contentful at HealthMatch, so it's kind of like what I'm used to in this space.
• 33:29
  My understanding of it from a content marketing perspective is it's basically a database of content.
• 33:36
  So once it's in Contentful, how you choose to distribute it and serve it can change without you having to go in and duplicate your content. So for example, you might have an app and a website.
• 33:48
  In Contentful, because it's headless, you can put it in once and then serve it, having it kind of display correctly for each device or whatever distribution method you have.
• 33:59
  Other companies use it for, like, in-product tooltips as well, kinda like an intercom thing.
• 34:04
  So it's basically just it's your database of content, and then how you distribute it and display it can change without the content marketer having to go in and do extra work. Got it.
• 34:13
  That's a very good explanation, and it sounds like, especially at scale, that's probably a much easier way to present content to people, and that you probably have a lot more optionality in terms of, like, how you display it, how you create recommended articles, how you do all the other UX, UI experience type things that I would imagine probably a developer helps out with.
• 34:31
  Yeah.
• 34:31
  I would say if you don't have an in-house web engineer, I think Contentful would be too hard to manage, but the benefit of it is that if you do have a web engineering team or you do have resources that can build templates, then anyone could publish your content because of how simple it is.
• 34:48
  And, and you don't need to worry about formatting or HTML or anything breaking as you publish or preview. It's all very much, like, as simple as it could be for the content marketer. Very cool. Very cool.
• 34:58
  You know, the topic of CMSs comes up a lot in Superpath, and interestingly, the responses to questions, like someone might say like, "Hey, we're in the process of changing our CMS. What do you recommend?"
• 35:09
  Most people only have experience with one or two, or like really deep experience with one or two.
• 35:15
  Maybe they run a personal blog on WordPress, but at work they have Webflow, and so it's kind of difficult to collect really great insights because it's not like you've used a dozen and, like, truly understand, like, the nuances of each.
• 35:27
  So I was actually just talking with a potential partner just this morning about some ways to just sort of help educate content marketers on the pros and cons of different CMSs.
• 35:35
  Anyways, I wanted to ask you too about, there is a... I don't know if I'd call it a microsite, but sort of a separate section of the site called Outlier- Yeah...
• 35:43
  which I'm just sort of curious, do you consider it a microsite? It kind of looks like a bespoke editorial project that has a different intent than probably some of the other SEO style content that you do. Definitely.
• 35:53
  So when I started, Outlier was kind of new. The concept of it is a New Yorker style publication, so it's very product and brand agnostic. As you said, it lives very separately to Dovetail.
• 36:06
  It doesn't ever talk about our product.
• 36:08
  It's meant to have long form, thought-provoking editorial content and lots of contrarian takes that our audience can really debate, and we actually have a, a Dovetail Slack group that has, like, 7,000 people in it, and often they'll be debating.
• 36:22
  Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. The engagement in that group is incredible. They're a wonderful community, and it kind of just built separately. Like, we didn't build it. [laughs] It came about. We try and support it.
• 36:32
  We don't market to it. It's there as like a, "Tell us what you want, we'll tell you what we're doing."
• 36:37
  And I think a lot of the times, like Sean, who's in charge of the Outlier content program, he gets a lot of inspiration from maybe some hot takes that are happening in the Slack group or some hot takes on LinkedIn.
• 36:47
  And yeah, it's not SEO optimized, so it doesn't live in my realm, but it's a brand play that I think is fantastic.
• 36:56
  I don't think a lot of other SaaS companies are devoting resources to something like this.And the engagement of it, like the newsletter opens, the comments, the tags on LinkedIn, like it's just super organic, and it's great.
• 37:08
  Like, I look at what they're doing and think like, "Oh God, how can I, how can I do that?" [laughs] Like, what can I steal from what they've learned to actually kind of like really speak to an audience? Yeah. Yeah.
• 37:18
  That's really cool. So quick follow-up on the Slack group. It was started by customers? I don't actually know how it was started.
• 37:24
  I think it might have been started by us in the very early days, and then it kind of just took off.
• 37:29
  But yeah, it's just one of those things, like we have a community, and we didn't kind of proactively go out there, and we've never had a community manager.
• 37:37
  I think we've just hired someone to kind of help support the group logistically and operationally.
• 37:42
  But, you know, since 2017, we've had that Slack group and we haven't had anyone really leading it, so it's been very organic. That's really, really cool. Really cool. Yeah.
• 37:51
  Y'all are covering all your bases here- [laughs]... which I really like.
• 37:55
  Are there any pieces of content on the site that have driven outsized results, something that really surprised you or has really been a workhorse for Dovetail? Yes. I think, [laughs]
• 38:05
  you know, when I started, the first thing I looked at was, okay, what on the blog is working? And it was kind of disparate. There wasn't anything that I could take from there.
• 38:15
  Like we were accidentally ranking really high for like [laughs] what a non-disclosure agreement is. [laughs] So I was like, "Oh, I don't think that's us." [laughs] So I kind of, I kind of had to start from scratch there.
• 38:27
  But what I quickly discovered was, in terms of traffic, what I thought would rank, which is like high volume, very top of funnel definition type keywords, brings in a lot of traffic. Like, that was confirmed.
• 38:39
  But what really surprised me was we use a service at Dovetail called Culture Amp. It's another tech startup that basically they do, like, employee engagement surveys.
• 38:49
  And our people team will send them round, and it will be a questionnaire of how do you feel about this, how do you feel about that?
• 38:55
  And then I was watching our people team take the comments into Dovetail and tag them up, and I thought, "I'd never thought about that."
• 39:02
  I've never thought that maybe HR and people teams are taking employee feedback and trying to analyze it and find patterns and things.
• 39:09
  So we published an article around analyzing your employee engagement survey results, which Culture Amp was already kind of ranking for, and BetterUp, and all these big companies.
• 39:18
  I just thought, "Oh, we'll give it a go and see what happens," because the intent really matches with the product.
• 39:23
  And even though it's certainly not our highest trafficking article, the conversion on it has been outsized. So I took that and said, "Okay, well, this is like a real use case, and this has intent to use the product.
• 39:36
  We need to double down." And so what I did is, that was initially living in the surveys pillar, like the cluster. Mm-hmm. People who do surveys, that was the use case.
• 39:44
  And I built out an employee experience pillar, so I broadened it out to, you know, employee wellness, employee engagement, employee development, all for the purpose of bringing in people who were thinking about that, who I assumed were people teams, who I assumed would then be doing employee engagement surveys, who then would hopefully wanna [laughs] analyze them in Dovetail.
• 40:04
  And that pillar has started converting as well. So it was just one of those really lucky things, where I was sitting near someone who did something I wasn't expecting, and I just thought, "Oh, we'll give it a go.
• 40:14
  Like, we'll see if it works." That's so cool. That's an even better response than I was- [laughs]... could have hoped for.
• 40:20
  I was sort of expecting you might say like, "Oh, this or that post got like a billion views," but, like- [laughs]... to uncover something that you didn't necessarily expect to convert really well is, is even better.
• 40:28
  That's really cool. Kaylen, thank you so much for spending time with us today.
• 40:32
  It's just so interesting to hear about the way that you approach content at Dovetail, but also in your previous gig at HealthMatch, because it's happening at a, a scale which is quite a bit larger than most of the companies and folks that we talk to.
• 40:45
  And it's also just interesting to hear about kind of how your skill set has developed in kind of a slightly more technical way than some other folks. Like, some other folks might head a more editorial direction.
• 40:55
  You're heading in more of this kinda like data-driven, analytical, sort of technical direction, so really cool.
• 41:01
  I would strongly encourage people to go check out Dovetail's content to see what 50 articles a month looks like in action, the product as well, and if you wanna hear Blake Thorne talk about it, it's episode five, that he walks through the process that he set up with Dovetail, so encourage people to check that out.
• 41:17
  And then how about you, Kaylen? Where can we send folks to follow you, your work? LinkedIn, Twitter, personal website, or anywhere else? Yeah, definitely LinkedIn.
• 41:25
  I'm also in Superpath, so if any Superpath members are listening and wanna DM me, feel free. But yeah, otherwise, LinkedIn is definitely the best place. Okay, cool. Awesome.
• 41:32
  We'll make sure we drop a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes. Seriously, thank you so much. It's wonderful to meet you, and appreciate you taking the time. Thanks so much, Jimmy. It was great. Take care.
• 41:40
  [outro music]