Latest / Content, Briefly / Juro: Tom Bangay on building customer personas and creating content for their target market

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Juro: Tom Bangay on building customer personas and creating content for their target market · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  The thing that moves the needle, especially if you wanna be a big driver of growth, is doing something unusual.
• 0:05
  Like, if you have just, like, a great content marketing strategy that's just what a big company would do, and you just do it at a smaller scale because you're a startup, and you just deliver like a solid seven out of ten for everything, like, nothing's really gonna happen.
• 0:18
  Yeah, like, you'll be okay, but you're not gonna be driving growth. [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, we're talking to Tom Bangay.
• 0:29
  He's the senior director of content and community at a company called Juro, which does contract management for in-house legal teams. Tom explains exactly what that means and why it's important.
• 0:39
  I actually found it to be very interesting.
• 0:41
  Admittedly, not something I thought a whole lot about, but it was cool to hear him talk about the company, the product, the personas, and then how they create content for those people.
• 0:49
  And they're coming at it from all angles, from community and job board and podcasts, which feels very familiar to me, of course, to SEO, case studies, and other bottom of the funnel stuff. There's a lot going on here.
• 1:00
  I felt their content strategy was very well-rounded, and Tom did a very good job summarizing what they do and why they do it. I'll let him explain it because he does a much better job than I will in this quick intro.
• 1:11
  As always, I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today with Tom Bangay, senior director, content and community at Juro.
• 1:23
  Tom, this is our first time meeting, so we have to do some little introductions here so we can get to know each other. And then I have tons of questions about Juro.
• 1:30
  Just a quick look at your website gave me a lot of food for thought. So we'll get into all that. But first, Tom, would you mind saying hi to Superpath listeners and telling us a little bit about who you are? Sure.
• 1:39
  Hi, everyone. Thanks for inviting me on, Jimmy. Very happy to be here. My name's Tom. I look after content and community at Juro. I've been there six years, which is, you know, it's like dog years at a startup.
• 1:49
  That's like fifty years- Yeah [laughs] it's a whole career.
• 1:52
  [laughs] So lots of, uh, interesting things have happened on the content journey while we've been there, but, um, it's all been great fun, and I'm still there, so really happy to share some of the stuff we've learned.
• 2:00
  Cool. And you're a journalist by trade, is that right? Kind of. No, not really. I mean, ish. I sort of fell into it. I, um, had a law degree, and then I didn't wanna be a lawyer 'cause it seemed like it's really hard.
• 2:12
  So I found another job that was sort of related to legal, uh, working for a legal directory, and sort of fell into legal journalism at the IBA, International Bar Association, and had a few jobs like that, and then ended up looking after thought leadership at Thomson Reuters, which is the umbrella corporation that owns Practical Law and Westlaw, which are two of the biggest kind of SaaS products in legal.
• 2:32
  Oh, interesting. Um, and from there I kind of found my way into a legal tech startup. Okay. All right. So, okay, that kinda makes sense.
• 2:38
  So legal background, that's a good setup for Juro, which is like a contract management platform, which, you know, frankly, is not something I've spent a ton of time thinking about, but, like, as I was browsing through the website this morning, I was like, "Oh yeah, this makes so much sense."
• 2:51
  If you can, like, more easily generate contracts and, like, actually integrate them directly into workflows, that sounds fantastic. I'm probably oversimplifying the product a bit.
• 2:59
  Would you mind just giving us kind of an overview of how it works? Sure, yeah. So Juro is an intelligent contract automation platform, so B2B SaaS.
• 3:06
  Uh, we were founded in twenty sixteen, and what the product does is, you know, a mixture of AI and other, um, sort of innovative developments to enable legal and business teams, um, to manage contracts end to end, from creating them agreeing, and executing them, managing post-signature.
• 3:22
  And it's kind of much, much higher adoption than legacy CLM tools.
• 3:27
  So kind of historically, you've got e-signature, kind of great up to a point, but when you get to a certain level of complexity of contracts and volume of contracts, you'll need a bit more than just signing them.
• 3:36
  And then those kind of first wave CLM products, which are, like, a little bit clunky.
• 3:39
  I won't name and shame any of them 'cause they were pioneering in their own way, but we try and take a kind of more universally usable approach to CLM, 'cause it's not just for legal.
• 3:48
  Everyone in the business needs to agree on contracts, so we wanna make it a kind of delightful experience for everyone. Got it. Really cool.
• 3:55
  Yeah, I'm a Dropbox Sign, formerly HelloSign, customer, and, uh, it's, you know, my use case is relatively simple, but, like, even small things like a contract is expiring, you should renew it, like, that doesn't happen, you know?
• 4:07
  Sure. And I would imagine there's a lot of sophistication, that being a very small example, that's built into Juro. Is there any- For sure, yeah.
• 4:13
  I mean, you'd get an email reminder if your contract is about to expire, for example. Just a very classic simple use case that can actually save you millions of dollars by not auto-renewing into a new contract. Totally.
• 4:23
  And actually, you know, I'm very curious about the AI generation of contracts because I've had to pay a lawyer to put contracts together for some of the work that we do through our marketplace, and it's very expensive and very complicated.
• 4:34
  Oh, yeah. Is there any service component to Juro? Or, you know, like, if you need legal advice, is that built in anywhere, or is it all- Um-... baked into the product?
• 4:42
  Well, Juro's not a law firm, so we can't really offer legal advice. That said- Sure... um, the AI assistant can draft contracts for you. You just need to kind of...
• 4:50
  You know, often the, the buyer of Juro is the legal team with other teams in mind. So similarly, with anything else super important, you probably won't trust it one hundred percent to AI.
• 5:00
  But if you wanted a really good first draft that you as a lawyer would then just check is okay, um, certainly Juro and other generative AI solutions can do that for you. Okay, cool.
• 5:09
  Okay, I'm glad you mentioned the buyer being legal teams, 'cause the next thing I wanted to ask you about was who is the customer? So it's primarily an in-house legal team.
• 5:18
  I assume that means it's a company large enough to have a legal team. Like, could you paint a picture of who your average customer is? Sure, yeah. I'd say about half of the user base are legal use cases.
• 5:28
  So often contracts, you know, there's a lawyer in the business, as you mentioned, that will be shoved in front of us, and contracts will be shoved in front of the lawyer.
• 5:36
  There are other circumstances where either the company's not big enough to have hired one yet, or perhaps, like, contracts are of a different type, so they might sit with someone else.
• 5:44
  So for example, a really good use case for contract automation is employer of record providers who agree, like, massive amounts of employment contracts on behalf of companies, and most of those are customers of ours.
• 5:55
  So kind of remote velocity global, which is such a great use case for contracts automation.
• 6:00
  But generally, the kind of persona that we care the most about and spend most of our time trying to engage with, in-house legal teams at kind of midsize companies gradually moving up market as the, the product develops and becomes more complex.
• 6:11
  Yeah, we spend a lot of time thinking about what lawyers want, where they are, what they do.And it's a really interesting persona for, from a marketing point of view because they have very high BS filters. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
• 6:22
  So if, if you're selling to, for example, account execs or sales leaders, you know, if you've allowed us on LinkedIn, it's gonna get you a long way.
• 6:28
  I'm oversimplifying what it takes to sell to sales people, but lawyers are very different. They're sort of offended to be emailed, [chuckles] so- Yeah, yeah...
• 6:35
  um, you know, you really have to, um, prove expertise before they're gonna take you seriously. So we, we work a lot on that kind of building authority in the legal domain.
• 6:42
  You know, I have so many questions I wanna ask you about how you approach content to reach those people, but one thing that's just occurred to me that I wanted to ask you about personally is that
• 6:51
  it's quite rare, this is the 60-something episode of this podcast, it's quite rare that we have a content leader come on who has academic training and hands-on experience doing the thing that they ultimately help to market and sell, right?
• 7:05
  So, like, your background, going to law school and then, you know, working in that world for a while, that doesn't happen very often outside of, you know, marketers selling to other marketers, like, they sort of understand the practice.
• 7:15
  How important has that been to your career journey as a marketer? I think that's a really good question. I think I'd say both extremely important and also kind of useless. So- [laughs]...
• 7:26
  on the one hand, I wouldn't have the job if I didn't have some kind of legal background, because I wouldn't have found my way to the sort of network and the opportunities that I did.
• 7:35
  I think, you know, the amount of stuff from my law degree that I use day-to-day is, like, zero.
• 7:40
  But I think, I think in any kind of particularly B2B sort of marketing environment, your content in particular lives and dies by how well you know the customer.
• 7:48
  And, like, I'm constantly appalled that people in marketing roles don't know customers personally. I feel like everyone- Mm...
• 7:55
  in a marketing team should have, like, three or four customers they're, like, really close to, and if they have any ideas, they can call them up and be like, "Is this a stupid idea?" Yeah.
• 8:03
  I feel like that, that kind of shortcuts so much learning for you.
• 8:06
  So while I don't think I use kind of much legal knowledge in my work, like, the ability to be comfortable with and talk to and be around lawyers and kind of understand how they operate, they're not like an alien species.
• 8:17
  I'm talking about them like they're wizards or something.
• 8:20
  [chuckles] But just being comfortable kind of engaging these, like, very senior knowledge workers who are a particular kind of person, definitely that's helped me. Yeah. Fas-- Really interesting. Not to go off on
• 8:30
  any big tangent here, but I feel like subject matter expertise really is probably the core problem in content marketing as a whole, right?
• 8:36
  It's very difficult to find people who have the experience to then go and write about it.
• 8:40
  Like, the people doing it are doing it, the people writing about it are writing about it, and there's not always a ton of overlap there. Yeah.
• 8:46
  I think it's a really interesting challenge if you're hiring as well, because you've been through this journey a couple of times where, um... So I needed someone to help me with SEO.
• 8:53
  I needed more muscle in, in organic search.
• 8:56
  And I said to our, um, I see now as VP of people and talent, "I need someone who's, like, really good at SEO, knows loads about contracts or, like, something about contracts, and is a great writer."
• 9:05
  But there's no way on planet Earth you'll find all those three things at a cost you can afford. So, like, two would be great.
• 9:10
  He just said, "Hold my beer," and went off and found a unicorn, and, [chuckles] like, she's amazing. She's a big part of why we've been so successful. But I think if I...
• 9:18
  If were I not so lucky with that hire or generally when hiring, if I had to choose out of those three things, I would always keep subject matter expertise if you can. 'Cause everything else you can kind of teach.
• 9:28
  You can't really teach someone to be, like, a great writer. You can make them, like, an eight out of ten, let's say.
• 9:33
  But the shortcut of having them know stuff about legal is just, like, they just get going so much faster, and they require less hand-holding, all that kind of things. Yeah. Yeah. Really cool. Really, really cool.
• 9:43
  Okay, let's talk content. One of the things I like to do, okay, I hit a SaaS company's website, I hover over Resources, and, like, now I instantly have kind of a picture of what's going on.
• 9:53
  When I do that on the Juro website, it's quite impressive. Like, you have kind of the stuff you expect, case studies and blog and events and things like that. You also have a podcast.
• 10:00
  You have a section of e-books and reports, a community, a job board. Templates, you know, I guess templates makes a ton of sense in this space too.
• 10:07
  Kind of a tough question to throw at you, but, like, could you just paint, like, a, even in broad strokes, a picture of your content strategy?
• 10:15
  You know, like, even if it's just 30 seconds worth, 'cause I, I could understand that it might take an hour just to talk through the strategy part on its own. Yeah, I think so.
• 10:22
  Um, let me try and answer that really quickly in two parts.
• 10:25
  So kind of the way I pitched to our CEO when w- I was talking to him about joining the company as employee number 12, which seems crazy now, how we should do content at Juro is, like, this pyramid with a dollar sign at the top, where usually people in a startup get a blog and they're like, "Let's go.
• 10:40
  Let's talk about the last funding round. Everyone's gonna care about that." Like, I, uh, me as the founder, I'm gonna write some stuff.
• 10:45
  And after about six months, eight months, people run out of ideas and then it's like, "Why are we doing this blog?" And it gets killed.
• 10:50
  And if you go to the blogs of lots of Series A-ish companies, you find that it's, like, a graveyard where nothing's happening.
• 10:57
  And I think if you can't link everything you're doing back to revenue, then number one, you shouldn't be doing it, and number two, your job, you won't survive.
• 11:04
  Like, it's, marketing often gets cut in downturns, so if, if you're not directly contributing to revenue and you can prove how you are, you're probably not gonna make it. I think with Juro, we went through a few phases.
• 11:15
  So when I first joined, I'm not gonna say it was, like, easy, but because you have no brand, everything you do works as long as it's not terrible. Yeah. So everything gets you a l- a little bit higher.
• 11:24
  So it's, like, very, like, high levels of dopamine in those early days [chuckles] 'cause everything- Yeah. [chuckles]... is just coming back to you.
• 11:30
  So our approach at the beginning was we did lots of thought leadership, so lots of e-books and stuff like that. The main reason being that we had a completely empty database in HubSpot. We needed contacts to market to.
• 11:41
  So we would borrow the expertise of better legal teams and write e-books. It was a very kind of mid-2010s model, uh, where we'd get 2,000 downloads of an e-book, whatever.
• 11:50
  Now, okay, now I've got a list, let's market to them. That worked for a bit, and then it just wasn't really scaling.
• 11:55
  You can spend, like, three months working on a piece of content, and then if you don't get the yield, it's, like, terrible.
• 12:01
  So then we started investing a bit more in organic search, and it was kind of slow at first, but then picked up, and then we really put our shoulders to the wheel there.
• 12:08
  And now that's our primary revenue channel, has been for a few years now. So we work very, very hard at that.
• 12:14
  It's a mixture of kind of in-depth classicKind of long form, high intent articles, you know, contract management software, buyer's guides, stuff like that.
• 12:22
  Mid intent stuff where it's like, okay, you care about contracts, you might be ready to buy, blah, blah, blah. And the low intent stuff, like a contract template, for example, is low intent.
• 12:31
  The fact that you need like a property management contract template does not indicate you're a person in a small legal team who's got like thousands of dollars to spend on software.
• 12:41
  But it's just like a really great nonlinear way of growing the data space and growing brand awareness. So yeah, we kind of do a big mixture of stuff.
• 12:47
  I would say what's unusual about us to an extent is that we do publish a lot of content. A lot. Mm. Um- Could, could you quantify that? Like how many net new pieces go out on a monthly basis, maybe?
• 12:58
  Well, we're having a sprint at the moment, so it's all been a bit mad. Um, [chuckles] so I think, like I don't believe in content calendars for organic search.
• 13:05
  I think for other things like events and if you're doing a big PR splash, like a big report or something, it's worthwhile to think about dates.
• 13:13
  The right time to publish something where the main distribution channel is Google is like right now, as soon as it's ready, 'cause it just needs to get crawled. Yeah. Right. Like nothing can happen until you publish it.
• 13:22
  So the way we tend to plan content is we would do that twice a year. I don't really like to slow down arbitrarily between Q one and two and Q two and three. Like, that's just a bit silly.
• 13:31
  So we would do deep planning in December and then like soon, probably the end of July, maybe mid-July, but we actually brought it forward this year.
• 13:40
  And the outcome of that will usually be a very long spreadsheet of content ideas, like two hundred, three hundred.
• 13:45
  We'll segment them by, you know, intent and kind of subtle stage and all that kind of stuff and look at the keyword volumes, and then just go. Just get through it as quickly as we can.
• 13:56
  We do some off-page stuff as well, but I think since that helpful content update from Google, I can't remember when that was, a couple years ago, just find off page is a bit less important for like, you know, obviously our website authority has gone up as well, but it's easier to rank for middle and kind of lower end keywords without doing any off page.
• 14:14
  Mm. Um, so we find, I don't know, like over time I started, I've really thought about it a lot in terms of content.
• 14:21
  I think the thing that moves the needle, especially if you wanna be a big driver of growth, is doing something unusual.
• 14:27
  Like if you have just like a great content marketing strategy, that's just what a big company would do, and you just do it at a smaller scale because you're a startup and you just deliver like a solid seven out of ten for everything, like nothing's really gonna happen.
• 14:39
  Yeah. Like you'll be okay, but you're not gonna be driving growth. You gotta do something unusual.
• 14:43
  So if you find any advantage, and in our case, we found that like we were able to rank certain keywords ahead of much bigger companies, just like really push it, really push that advantage. So that's what we do.
• 14:55
  Yeah, there's lots of other stuff we do, but that's the main kind of growth driver at the moment. That was wonderful, and I have so many follow-up questions for you about that.
• 15:02
  Going back a couple minutes, actually, the one thing you said that really stood out to me was that you said that organic search is your largest revenue channel.
• 15:09
  Like that is such a strong signal that content is [chuckles] like you're, you've got serious top-down buy-in on content. Even just the way you phrase it, like it means that you have data to support it.
• 15:22
  You know what I mean? That it's built into the business strategy. It's not just this content thing that kinda happens over here on the side while, you know, sales and product are doing their thing.
• 15:31
  Could you dive into that for a minute? I mean, I am sort of curious about the attribution side, although that may be its own rabbit hole, but I guess more specifically, is this discussed from a top-down level?
• 15:40
  Like is this, you know, when you think about Juro's marketing, is organic search like the thing? And I guess who else is working on it? Um, it's not the only thing 'cause that would be quite risky.
• 15:51
  I think particularly in the impending arrival of the search generative experience or whatever, like it's pretty risky to put your eggs in Google's basket at the moment.
• 16:00
  That said, like it's really easy to get lost in the weeds in what makes content rank and all the updates and stuff. I try not to worry about that too much.
• 16:08
  I mean, I do read them all whenever there's an algorithm update or whatever, but like really good, strong content that answers user queries and is comprehensive and is authoritative and looks good, like you know it when you see it, and you can worry here and there about, okay, is this, should this be a H2 or a H3, or like do we have the right FAQ schema?
• 16:25
  Just don't worry about that. If you have loads of good content that is like good for your ICP, they can find it. The more of it you have, the more of them will come.
• 16:33
  So I think from a kinda top-down point of view, um, there are lots of other successful channels at Juro, like paid marketing events, like the, the rest of the mix you'd expect.
• 16:42
  But we do model it on a kind of quarterly basis in terms of what should be the contribution to leads, opportunities, revenue. I think on the attribution point, uh, so we have, well, we have two ways of looking at it.
• 16:54
  We've moved away a little bit from first click attribution, not because it's not effective.
• 16:59
  It's a bit of a blunt instrument, but it's quite difficult to have things like events and campaigns in a first click attribution world 'cause you don't really know what's working.
• 17:07
  But we do have like very strong data infrastructure around kind of what, what's driving people to the site and then full funnel metrics all the way down. I take no credit for that.
• 17:16
  We hired someone called Vadim, who's an absolute wizard, who created all that for us. Before that, we were just stumbling around in the dark, just leads bouncing off us. [chuckles] Yeah. Yeah.
• 17:24
  He showed up, he showed up and, um, gave us some maturity and data, for which we'll always be grateful. But yeah, that really helps 'cause like we have the receipts. Very cool. You know, SEO is...
• 17:34
  One thing that's interesting about SEO is that kinda like you said, you don't have to stick to any type of calendar. Like you do your prep, you publish it as quickly as you can, and you get it out the door.
• 17:43
  You also have the kind of flexibility to create different types of content for different personas and even different stages of the funnel.
• 17:51
  Kind of on the other end of that, you have a few other things happening, a podcast, a job board, and a community, which all feels quite familiar to me, which really requires you to commit to a persona and does require you to commit to that schedule.
• 18:04
  So my first question is, are all of those things on your team or are there other teams that are working on community podcast, et cetera, versus SEO?
• 18:13
  'Cause it's just like the, kinda the rhythm of the work is so different. Yeah. It's a real problem.
• 18:19
  Um, [chuckles] I mean, it's a good problem to have, but it's the reason why we have a community is, um, so we used to do in the early days, uh, our office is in, um-Was in Clerkenwell in London.
• 18:27
  It's a nice bit of London, and there's this restaurant just around the corner called Modern Pantry. So good. And um, we would have these breakfasts there.
• 18:34
  Lawyers love breakfast, so if you try to get lawyers to an event, like forget drinks after work just 'cause like lawyers tend to go in-house when they're like in their early thirties looking to better work-life balance, having killed themselves at a law firm.
• 18:47
  So they're just quite likely to wanna go home and see their partner and see their kids and stuff. Yeah. That's why they took the job, and we're oversimplifying. So they...
• 18:53
  your drop off rate if you do an event after work is really high, but breakfast is great. It will show up. Sometimes we'd get like 16 people sign up, and they all show up. Then there was the pandemic, [chuckles]
• 19:03
  so couldn't have breakfast anymore, so we're like, what do we do? How do we kind of keep this goodwill thing we have where people show up?
• 19:09
  'Cause there's this big cast of characters who are familiar to the company, but not yet customers, and we'd see you all the time, so we can convince them to buy.
• 19:16
  So we sort of panic-started a community in Slack, and, um, we just begged everyone we knew to join, like all the people we knew we had that kind of relationship with.
• 19:25
  We were like, "You gotta walk into an empty Slack group. Nothing's gonna be happening. Just be patient. We'll fill it with people, and then you can all talk to each other about your lives."
• 19:33
  And, um, being an in-house lawyer, especially in a scaling mid-market tech company, is quite a lonely gig.
• 19:38
  You're probably gonna be the only lawyer, and there's like 30 salespeople, and when that sales team grows to 100, there might be 30 in the legal team. Oh, wow.
• 19:45
  And probably you manage the other person, so actual peer-to-peer sharing is quite hard to do. So we put them all in this group and hoped for the best, and lo and behold, they started just talking to each other.
• 19:54
  And there's a channel in the Slack group called Ask Anything, which is just like a live feed of the inside of your ICPs brain. It's just the most useful thing for content ideas. Yeah.
• 20:03
  They just tell each other their problems. It's like, "Well, what should we do for this event next week?" I just look at that, see what they're- Yeah. [chuckles]... see what they're thinking about.
• 20:10
  So we have a community and events manager who, um, looks after that group. Does an amazing job, and we have two in-person conferences every year for the community.
• 20:18
  One called Scale It, which is in, which was in May, which is now three, four hundred people, and the next one's called Draft Punk, which is in October, and that's a bit more focused on contracts.
• 20:28
  So yeah, the organic kind of search engine is really one full time, full time IC, and me as a manager, and then like half another IC.
• 20:36
  They're both absolutely incredible, but their podcast and kind of short leadership stuff is the other half of that other IC.
• 20:41
  Um, it's a bit of a stretch, like it's a, a lot of stuff to do because those modes of working are quite different. Yeah. So if you think about search, you can...
• 20:50
  If you've got to produce like 10 amazing SEO articles, get your headphones on, cancel your meetings, close the door, and then you can write them all. But community is like a spinning plate.
• 20:58
  You have to keep it going all the time. You can't take a day off and just let the Slack group go dead. You can't do that- Yeah... 'cause people will leave. So it is quite a challenge to oscillate between the two.
• 21:07
  That's probably the, the thing I struggle with the most at work. Yeah. Is there someone dedicated just to the community, or does everyone on the content team chip in?
• 21:16
  So lots of people in the company are in community, but the only reason I believe that community is so successful is we banned the sales team for obvious reasons. Yeah.
• 21:23
  Like a Slack group of a thousand of your perfect prospects, every salesperson is gonna be DM'ing everyone. Who wouldn't?
• 21:29
  So there's no salespeople in there, but we do let the customer teams in there and all the marketing team and, um, direct access to the CEO for customers is a, is a cool benefit as well.
• 21:38
  So yeah, um, managing that group is sort of split between our community events manager, me, and a few other people who help out. Got it. Got it. I've heard that before actually.
• 21:46
  Lattice is a company that comes to mind as a SaaS company that's done community really well. I think it's called Humans of HR or Resources for Humans or something like that.
• 21:55
  But yeah, they also banned salespeople from their- Yeah... community to kind of... and I- it's, I think it's the right move.
• 22:00
  You probably have to tell people too, like that we will ban the salespeople so that you can kind of keep this safe space. Yeah. It's a really interesting one to message as well because like,
• 22:10
  you know, it's not the case that we don't wanna sell to them. We want to sell to every single one of them. That's why they're there.
• 22:15
  [chuckles] We just can't do it in the group, so we often have to educate new arrivals in the sales team. They're like, "What do you mean? You have all my prospects on DM. I can't talk to them." Yeah.
• 22:24
  [chuckles] I think it wouldn't, it just wouldn't fly as a group if, if, if we did it that way. Yeah. Yeah.
• 22:28
  And, and also, you know, the, the thing about community is, um, when, especially in the early days, we weren't very good at nurture.
• 22:34
  So like classic ways of nurturing people within newsletter or sequences or whatever, we were just really bad at it, and we've got a lot better now.
• 22:40
  Great VP of marketing who knows what she's doing, but I didn't know anything about that.
• 22:44
  So community kind of solved that for us because it's just always on like, and it doesn't mean that they're all gonna buy, but it means that if they ever need a contract platform, the chance of them not considering us is zero.
• 22:55
  Yeah. Like, 'cause they see us every day.
• 22:57
  Um, and it doesn't mean we can solve the problems that they have with contract if they bring us into the sales process, but it will always be considered, and those are always the best demos as well.
• 23:05
  When you just get a DM from someone, be like, "Oh, hey Tom, can you introduce me to the sales team?" Oh, that's the best. It's like- Direct attribution for the marketing team. I love that.
• 23:13
  You know, one thing you said before we started recording was, I think you used the phrase like infinite nurture sequence when you were talking about the community, which I've never really thought of it that way, but it's kind of interesting because like you said, it's always on.
• 23:25
  And one other thing that I'd be curious if this has started to happen, I don't know how long this has been going.
• 23:30
  I guess, I guess kind of early pandemic maybe, but at some point, communities do start to kind of run themselves, which is very interesting.
• 23:39
  You know, like the early days of Superpath, I answered every single question, you know.
• 23:43
  And then over time people start answering questions for other people, and then you get this beautiful peer-to-peer thing which like creates the engagement on its own.
• 23:50
  And for a SaaS company, for, you know, if that kicks in and it sort of functions as this endless nurture sequence that, you know, almost runs itself, that could be a really, a really cool thing. Yeah.
• 24:01
  I mean, we're not far away from that. I guess one issue we have, and I say this with all love for our, our key persona, the lawyer, lawyers are kind of lurkers.
• 24:10
  [chuckles] So often we would have, you know, the early days we'd have low engagement in community and, um, we'd do what any sensible person would do, and we'd ask for feedback, and we'd send out surveys and be like, "Why aren't you enjoying the group?"
• 24:21
  You know. And they're like, "No, we love it. I'm there every day." And we never- Purchased no posts yet. [chuckles]... purchased something. Yeah.
• 24:26
  [chuckles] So I think, you know, if you imagine there's like 1,000 people in that group now and probablyThree hundred. They're there every week or every day or whatever.
• 24:34
  And of that group, there's maybe a hundred who are, like, active posters, and then there's probably like thirty super engaged- Yeah... members. And the more you push those numbers up, the better it is.
• 24:43
  But it's a really interesting challenge with Slack groups because so we have Slack groups for all of our investors. When we, we get a new investor round, we get access to a new Slack group.
• 24:53
  And I find our seed stage one still the best because Series A and Series B ones are, they're too big. There's too many companies. It's like a group of five thousand people in it.
• 25:02
  S- you're not gonna see the same people- Right... again, and it's just too hard, too hard to keep track of it. So getting the right balance between scale and intimacy is quite difficult. Oh, wow. Yeah.
• 25:11
  You're speaking my language for sure. I did wanna ask you about team structure. Who is on the team? I mean, there's a lot going on here in terms of content creation. There's SEO, there's community events, et cetera.
• 25:19
  Like, could you give us a sense of what the content team looks like? Sure, yeah. So we've got our VP of marketing driving the ship, and then we've got the biz dev team is in marketing.
• 25:27
  We actually brought them in over from sales. They keep our lead funnel flowing really well. And then the main kind of buckets in marketing are kind of content and creative IT.
• 25:36
  There's performance marketing and sort of paid and marketing ops, and there's, uh, events and community.
• 25:42
  There's some other cross-functional stuff we do and, you know, those kind of reactive things that come up as you know, then like PR and awards and stuff that you, you do, like, from a hygiene point of view.
• 25:52
  But that's the main structure of the team.
• 25:53
  So we've got nine people in total in the whole function, and in the content team, there's senior content manager looking after SEO, content producer looking after some SEO and some thought leadership and podcasts, stuff like that, organic social.
• 26:06
  There's marketing design. We've got one full-time designer, and product marketing is within content now as well. Very cool. I did also wanna ask you about the podcast. Is that relatively new?
• 26:15
  And I'm just sort of curious, a lot of companies have podcasts now. It always kinda differs, like, where exactly the podcast folks sit in the org, and also, like, what is the point of the podcast?
• 26:26
  And I, and I-- what I mean by that is, like, what's the, what is just... what's the primary business objective?
• 26:31
  You know, like, are you measuring numbers directly from it, or are you just kind of assuming that the benefits of it will trickle down later on?
• 26:37
  Like, any, any kind of context you can provide about the podcast and how that's been, I think, would be really interesting. You know, we made it through the pandemic without starting a podcast, much to our credit. Yeah.
• 26:46
  Wow. [laughs] So I was, [laughs] I was really reluctant to hold the line- [laughs]...
• 26:50
  'cause the, you know, the last thing anyone needs is another podcast from some, like, mid-thirties white dudes talking about stuff, but here we are, you know. [laughs] But we got to a point where, um...
• 26:59
  so I think we had an interesting problem, which I think was unusual and just an accident of the, the talent we had in the company where, you know, our revenue graphs were like a real Twin Towers vibe.
• 27:09
  We had this, like, massive chunk from organic search, huge chunk from paid search, and, like, not much else.
• 27:15
  And in the early days, all we did was thought leadership, so we completely flipped it on its head and ended up with the opposite problem.
• 27:21
  And we're at that point now where the kind of like account based is a bit more important.
• 27:24
  We just need a bit more sort of leadership and a bit more kind of constant dialogue with the right kind of account, and we just thought podcast would be quite a nice way to do that. So it's called Brief Encounters.
• 27:33
  I love naming podcasts, and if there's some kind of pun involved, that's, like, the best thing ever for me. So really enjoyed that, and available for podcast naming consultancy services.
• 27:42
  [laughs] And the podcast is our CEO, Richard, talking to kind of interesting guests in legal, particularly around kind of lawyering and contracts, but also AI, 'cause it's such a big part of the conversation in legal.
• 27:53
  I think timing's really good for a podcast, in particular, um, relating to AI, because, like, this is the second AI hype cycle for lawyers.
• 28:02
  There was a really big one in kinda like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen when machine learning first pops up, and there was these AI contract review providers that were just like magic.
• 28:11
  No one had ever seen anything like that before. So lawyers are a little bit like, "I feel like we've been here before"- Yeah... with how noisy the AI, um, conversation is.
• 28:19
  So anything that's educational and builds trust I think is well timed in legal. Very cool. Very cool.
• 28:24
  Yeah, I'm sort of fascinated by what's happening with podcasts right now, and I'm curious about, I think, the next wave. I think everyone's got a podcast now, or just about everybody.
• 28:31
  I think video is probably the next thing that every company is making significant investments in. Has Juro experimented with video k- you know, kinda beyond, like, webinars and podcast clips and things like that?
• 28:42
  Um, not really.
• 28:44
  I mean, so we've just started TikTok because we started a podcast, and we have a content producer looking after the podcast who is fantastic, and is genuinely the only person in the company who can do this work.
• 28:53
  [laughs] Like the hard skills of video and audio editing, and also kinda inherent understanding of new social platforms. Nobody else has it. She's doing an amazing job. So that's kind of new ground for us.
• 29:03
  I think, like, video is in legal is sort of an interesting thing.
• 29:07
  It's quite hard to do engaging video content about being a lawyer, and there are some people who do it spectacularly well on LinkedIn, but I find LinkedIn quite a noisy platform. Yeah.
• 29:17
  And I'm not sure how much lawyers actually like to watch videos of other lawyers on LinkedIn. So it's all a bit experimental for us at the moment, but it's going very well.
• 29:24
  The poll numbers are going up, so I'm, I'm happy. Very cool. Very cool. This is the part of the podcast where I say to everybody, "Okay, you've heard Tom explain all the content stuff happening at Juro.
• 29:34
  Now go to the website and check it out yourself."
• 29:37
  I think it could be very helpful, very insightful for people to actually go to the website, look at the content, check out the podcast, just, like, get a feel for it, because I think that's oftentimes where folks kinda glean the insights that they can bring back to their own company.
• 29:47
  So Tom, seriously, thank you. Wonderful to meet you. Really cool to hear about all the content and cool marketing stuff you guys have going at Juro. We'll of course link people to the website.
• 29:56
  Where can we send them to connect with you or anywhere else on the Juro website we should send folks? Sure. I think if you come to juro.com, you can find out about the product.
• 30:04
  There's, like, a green banner at the top as well to join a, a demo if you wanna kind of see what CLM's all about, but you don't wanna get in a sales thing. [laughs] So I'd encourage people to do that.
• 30:13
  And if you go to juro.com/podcast, Brief Encounters is available there. You can find me on LinkedIn, but I don't think there's anyone else called Tom Bangay, B-A-N-G-A-Y.
• 30:21
  Um, and yeah, very happy to connect with people and talk about content. I love it. Awesome. All those links will be in the show notes for folks. Tom, can't thank you enough. Hope we can do it again one day soon. Cool.
• 30:31
  Thank you. Take care. [outro music]