Latest / Content, Briefly / Verblio: How Ryan Sargent Is Cutting Through the Content Echo Chamber

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Verblio: How Ryan Sargent Is Cutting Through the Content Echo Chamber · Content, Briefly

• 0:01
  I think content encompasses so many different parts of marketing. Like, in my perfect world, brand is reporting to content, CX is reporting to content. It's like that whole ecosystem of content.
• 0:11
  Your content needs to be so ubiquitous and immersive that anyone who wants to interact with the subject matter somehow needs to experience your content and your brand.
• 0:20
  Hey, and welcome to another episode of Content Briefly. We're off to a pretty good start. We've gotten a lot of really good feedback on the podcast so far.
• 0:27
  And before we get into this episode, I have two quick favors to ask of you. First, if you're enjoying it, we would really appreciate a rating and/or review in your podcast app of choice. That would really mean a lot.
• 0:38
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• 0:46
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• 0:55
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• 1:03
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  So if you're interested in any of those things, there are, of course, links on superpath.co. Thanks so much, and enjoy this episode. Hey, everybody.
• 1:42
  Jimmy from Superpath here today with Ryan Sargent, Director of Content at Verblio. Ryan, how are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to chat. We've chatted many times in many different contexts.
• 1:52
  I'm excited to do it in this format. Actually, I did a podcast with you. Y- I was gonna say. To link back to that for, for people who want more.
• 1:59
  Could you start, Ryan, by giving us, uh, just some quick background on yourself, you know, a little bit about yourself, the work that you do, and then Verblio as well.
• 2:07
  Can you kind of paint the picture of who/what is Verblio? Yeah. Uh, Ryan Sargent, uh, based in Denver. The Director of Content Marketing in Verblio. I came to content from a music background in, like, the creative space.
• 2:18
  I was a music teacher. I was a music professor. I played in wine bars for tips to make rent at one point.
• 2:24
  That creativity and creative process, uh, led me to music software and the marketing team, and I kinda haven't looked back. I've, I've really fallen in love with content.
• 2:33
  I realized that content was the thing that made me so passionate about music, and it is also the thing that works if... in marketing. That's really interesting. We haven't heard that background before.
• 2:41
  Usually [laughs] it's like, "I was a journalist, and I wasn't making money, so I [laughs] became a content marketer," or something like that. So that's cool. Y- yeah.
• 2:47
  The, the teaching background, I think, helped segue into writing a little more easily than someone who was purely on the performance side. But- Yeah... yeah, all the stuff I love about music.
• 2:56
  The-- don't get me started on the music and marketing analogies. I can go way too deep and way too long. Yeah, so Verblio's a content marketplace.
• 3:03
  Uh, we work with 3,000 freelance writers, uh, that are part of our marketplace, all sorts of different industries and, and niches.
• 3:09
  Produce thousands of pieces of, of content every month for, uh, around 400 agencies and 1,000 clients total. As I suspect everyone can imagine, uh, AI has turned that, uh, upside down in the last six months or so.
• 3:21
  Mm-hmm. And, uh, while we're still producing all of that human content, we're also very much on the front lines of, like, what does AI content at scale look like?
• 3:29
  Should you be using AI to produce content in 2023, last month, next month?
• 3:33
  And, uh, I'm been really lucky to be not just on the front lines from, like, uh, an industry perspective, but literally helping build some of that content and figuring out what works and what doesn't.
• 3:44
  I think that's my job as a director of content, to understand w- what AI holds for us as a community and what good content looks like in that context. Who's the customer? You mentioned agencies and then 1,000.
• 3:56
  Like, who are those... or maybe there's a few buckets of, you know, customer types that make up those other 1,000 or so clients. Th- theoretically, all content marketers are our customers.
• 4:04
  I will say content marketers who want to outsource large amounts of content are gonna be the best fit for Verblio. That's our, that's our primary kinda customer profile.
• 4:14
  That's a big part of why we work with so many agencies. Um, but we, we also work with startups. Like, we work with, with large startups. Uh, startups actually of which Superpath is a customer, uh, in a couple cases.
• 4:24
  Because startups often need large quantities of content to start a go-to-market strategy, to finish a go-to-market strategy, to build something that can support pr- a product-led growth model.
• 4:35
  So those kinds of clients also are, are a big part of our work. Got it. Very cool. I guess I should also say, just full disclosure, Verblio is Superpath's 2023 title sponsor. We did the same thing in 2022.
• 4:47
  Verblio's been wonderful to work with, so just calling that out for folks. Although this interview is not part of that package or anything.
• 4:53
  We're having this conversation purely because I think you're interesting, Ryan, and I think what you all do is interesting. Likewise. So with all that said- [laughs]... what does marketing look like?
• 5:02
  Or I guess maybe first, uh, how many people work at Verblio, and then how many of those people work on marketing? FTEs and full-time contractors, uh, we're in the mid-30s, if I recall, uh, for a total employee headcount.
• 5:14
  Of those, half dozen are on the marketing team. Uh, so I report to, I think Paul's title is SVP. He, he's the CMO. Like, I report to the CMO. Okay. Yep. I have one person right now full-time on my team.
• 5:24
  Unsurprisingly, I think a lot of listeners are probably felt this, uh, the team is leaner than it was a year ago, and- Mm... that's, that's been an adjustment. There's, there's been a lot...
• 5:33
  I mean, all of the typical processing in that kind of situation, and then also division of labor and figuring out where are we doubling down tactically and where are we stepping away tactically to get the most bang for our buck in an environment where the team is smaller and funds are tight.
• 5:47
  Can we unpack that for just a second? Yeah. I'd be curious, like, what have you decided?
• 5:51
  'Cause for a lot of teams, like, you're, you're right, a, a lot of people have experienced this shift over the last year, even probably more acutely over the last couple of months.
• 6:01
  Can you give us a look inside of what that's looked like for, for you and the content team specifically?For the content team, it unfortunately means less, less content production.
• 6:11
  We had a, had a couple freelancers that we, we really enjoyed working with, right, that aren't part of the publishing, uh, calendar anymore. That was, that was one thing.
• 6:20
  Internally, uh, it means we're doubling down on content. Um, the team is leaner, and there's still a content team. And that's meant less focus, I think, on, um, well, on product marketing in our case.
• 6:33
  We've wanted to lead with, with content as much as possible. Got it.
• 6:37
  And then in terms of like responsibilities, like one thing I have heard some teams say is, we were relying on freelancers, agencies, whoever to produce a lot of content.
• 6:46
  Content production is just kind of expensive like no matter how you slice it. So you're bringing more of that internally. Are you writing more? Is the person on your team writing more? Yes to both of those.
• 6:57
  The other place we're, we're going back to what I've realized is my favorite well, and, and that's subject matter expertise within the company. Hmm.
• 7:05
  I've done that in, in past roles several times and, and now I'm doing it here. We, we, when we need, um, an AI expert, I go ask the AI expert on our team.
• 7:14
  In terms of the nuts and bolts, like what, what does a tech stack for using OpenAI's API look like? I, I go ask and, and we have the resources to do that internally.
• 7:24
  And I feel really lucky to be getting the support for that internally in terms of like everyone is happy to respond, happy to write a piece, contribute a quote to a piece, uh, in that, in that way.
• 7:33
  I'm gonna assume something but I feel pretty confident that it's true, that doing content at a company that is a content business is easier and kind of more fun because everybody, you have 30 something people who are all really, really care about content which is quite different from, you know...
• 7:51
  Neither is better or worse but I'm saying like say you work at like enterprise software company, you know, you're a content team, there's 1,000 employees, they're all doing different things.
• 7:58
  No one really knows what you're doing. It's, it's just different. But I'm assuming your job is, is made easier and hopefully a little bit more fun just based on like the, the culture of the business.
• 8:07
  Definitely more fun for me that the challenge of marketing to other marketers is very exciting. This is one probably my favorite music marketing analogy. This is just like playing music for other musicians.
• 8:16
  You can get away with all kinds of stuff when you are on stage playing music and the audience has no clue what's going on.
• 8:21
  [laughs] And when the audience is full of people who are know exactly what they're doing, you gotta bring your A game. So that inspires me. I love that challenge.
• 8:30
  In terms of the organization, yeah, I think, I think there are some key things that are easier.
• 8:35
  The biggest one is I don't sweat metrics the way I know other content marketers have or have to or the way that I have had to at other roles because the CMO and the CEO know how content works and are invested in content.
• 8:49
  I don't-- I never have to prove that content is a viable channel. Yeah, that's pretty-- that's a beautiful thing. I guess going down that road a little bit, what metrics do you care about?
• 8:58
  I mean, I'm assuming that there's like, like you and Paul the SBP sit down or CMO, you know, do you guys sit down once a month and like run through a spreadsheet that you put together?
• 9:05
  Or like, like how does that work and what numbers are you kind of most interested in? Yeah, we, we have a spreadsheet. Like I, I'm not-- I don't, I don't get to just ignore numbers.
• 9:14
  We're good to look at signals as opposed to I, I don't have a quota right for MQLs.
• 9:19
  Operating on great advice from you among other people, and I- I'm thinking also of Tommy Walker's quote, "Stay close to the money," I'm really interested in conversions.
• 9:27
  So how many emails can we generate, um, from our content with a sidebar or, or heaven forbid a, a pop-up or a gate?
• 9:35
  And those people represent, um, people who are entering our ecosystem and who are now we're able to distribute to without LinkedIn or a podcast. Like we're able- Yeah...
• 9:46
  to talk to those people directly and that's really valuable and that's, that's the top of funnel thing that, that we're looking at, uh, most closely.
• 9:53
  Um, bottom of funnel, the actual account signups are the, the final, the final piece of the puzzle. You, you can sign up for a Verblio account and, and essentially go completely self-serve.
• 10:02
  Most of our largest clients don't end up doing that. They enter through sales. They have a managed services team that supports them.
• 10:07
  That's not necessarily the typical workflow but, um, that's another metric we pay attention to. Got it. Got it. I'm always curious how teams format reporting. Like for you, for y'all, is it a spreadsheet?
• 10:17
  Do you just sit down in a Zoom call or, and pull up Google Analytics and talk through it kind of ad hoc? Or like what is-- how do you guys handle that?
• 10:24
  When we're looking specifically at content performance, yeah I'll, I'll share Google Analytics with, with Paul, with, with my boss and we'll go through and I'll say, "Hey look, this article we refreshed it and now bounce rate is down, time on page is up."
• 10:35
  That's for the kind of onesie-twosie stuff. We, we have a spreadsheet. To be honest, this is not our team's strength.
• 10:40
  I think we are, we are so good at some parts of this and, and keeping a tight ship with spreadsheets is not necessarily where we shine. Uh, we have a giant spreadsheet.
• 10:49
  It includes everything from podcast downloads to, uh, blog refreshes completed to traffic. Um, and we update that once a month. We take a look as a team. Got it. Okay, that makes sense.
• 10:59
  And then speaking of kind of team communication, are there any other standing meetings that you all have either with your boss, with the team that reports to you, with sales, y- with any other parts of the organization where you're either sharing what you're doing on the content side or collecting information from other teams that informs your work?
• 11:18
  Uh, so we have a weekly marketing team meeting. I think that's pretty standard. The thing I like that we do that I, I've never done on a, on any other team before is that it's at the end of the week.
• 11:26
  Serves as a really nice bookend on Fridays to, to say, "Here's, here's what we accomplished. Here's what's next." And so that's a, a full team meeting.
• 11:33
  Uh, every other week we also have an extra meeting, uh, set aside in the middle of the week to specifically talk about content needs.
• 11:39
  That's where we talk about, hey, here are the emails we're sending for the next two weeks. I need copy for this one, uh, an updated CTA for this one, image for this one.
• 11:46
  You know, that, that kind of really nitty-gritty publishing stuff happens on a, on an every other week basis. And then how about creative brainstorming?
• 11:54
  Like we're-- that's another thing we've been asking folks about is-- a- and I guess really the question is how do you fill your queue of approved content ideas with ideas? Like where do they come from?
• 12:04
  Does it come from a creative brainstorming type meeting? Some people have so many they don'tLike they don't want meetings because they don't wanna add more [chuckles] to that queue. Yeah.
• 12:12
  This is where I get to talk about the team's massive strength. Well, which is that this team is never gonna run out of ideas. They are oozing out of us at all hours of the day and night.
• 12:22
  I will often wake up to Slack ideas in all sorts of channels. This is the thing that, that is, is definitely the Verblio marketing team's superpower, and, um, I feel also very grateful for that.
• 12:33
  Managing all that can be tough. Uh, sometimes it feels like we're getting a little chaotic, um, and prioritization then becomes something that takes a little extra time.
• 12:42
  Like, we have to, we have to dedicate resource to prioritizing 'cause we have so many ideas. A- again, something that I learned from you, lanes help a lot.
• 12:50
  Like, we decided to focus in, on this content type, uh, moving this metric for this reason.
• 12:56
  That's, that's our focus this month or this quarter, and so the ideas that don't fall into that bucket can be set aside in parking lot. Yeah.
• 13:02
  That's one of my favorite things about lanes or buckets or kinda whatever terminology you wanna use to describe the different types of content you create. It gives them a home, you know.
• 13:10
  And it makes it easier to say no to things. Yeah. Maybe, maybe that's even the most important thing. How much content do you create, or how much content does Verblio publish on a weekly or monthly basis?
• 13:20
  Well, Verblio produces thousands of pieces of content for clients. Um, we're, we're much leaner, and when I started at Verblio about a year and a half ago, uh, I immediately noticed...
• 13:30
  I mean, I was doing this research as part of the interview process. The, the base of content for top of funnel stuff was quite strong. Verblio's domain authority is high. The... There's a bunch of old articles.
• 13:39
  Honestly, most of them need refreshing. Please don't go read them yet.
• 13:42
  [laughs] There's a bunch of great top of funnel stuff that was already present, and so one of the things that strategically that I've tried to do is focus
• 13:49
  what, what do we really need to do to move the needle and stay relevant right now. We don't need more articles about how to blah, blah, blah SEO.
• 13:57
  While content marketers and SEO, SEOs are the target audience, that's kind of covered.
• 14:02
  To answer your question more concretely, we're producing, uh, two podcast episodes a month this year, uh, at least one webinar a month, blog post or two a week I think pretty, pretty confidently.
• 14:12
  That's the place where I'd like to continue ramping up, honestly. Yeah. Just a quick follow-up on that. So you are responsible for audio and vid- multimedia essentially, right? Like, it's...
• 14:21
  When you say you're the director of content, you do not just mean text. Right. And I, I think that's more and more common. I have a soapbox. Like, I think content encompasses so many different parts of marketing.
• 14:32
  Like, in, in, in my perfect world, brand is reporting to content, CX is reporting to content. It's like that whole ecosystem of content.
• 14:41
  Your content needs to be so ubiquitous and immersive that anyone who wants to interact with the subject matter somehow needs to experience your content and your brand. That's a, a very tall order.
• 14:52
  It- that's incredibly hard to do, and, and it takes a lot of time. It... Like, you gotta stay the course with that.
• 14:57
  It's also very easy for me to sit here and say w- when I don't know that I've actually accomplished that, right, in the world of content marketing, for example.
• 15:04
  All that to say, I guess, yes, multimedia I think is absolutely part of content. If you're a director of content, a content leader, you should be considering all of that as part of your strategy and your tactics.
• 15:14
  I like that. Really interesting.
• 15:15
  I feel like podcasts, podcasts in particular, I'm finding that content teams are a little intimidated by the medium, and it doesn't always feel like a natural fit for the skills of the existing team.
• 15:26
  So, you know, they might hire someone with specialist skills to handle that. Maybe they sit under content. Maybe they sit over on a brand team. Maybe they sit over on a demand... uh, de- maybe probably not demand gen.
• 15:38
  But you know what I mean. Like, they don't necessarily end up with the other content creator type folks. And I feel like that is all still shaking out.
• 15:44
  Like, at some point, probably a few years from now, every B2B SaaS marketing org, the, the podcast folks will sit in, like, more or less the same place, but I feel like we're not quite there yet.
• 15:55
  And, and i- if your videographer reports to the creative director instead of to the content director, I still think it's incumbent on the content team to be thinking about how to use video.
• 16:04
  If you have a videographer- Yeah... like full-time that works for your company, bless you, and you're so lucky. [laughs] And please use that person every day. [laughs] Totally.
• 16:12
  In terms of podcasting, uh, you didn't ask for this, but my, my number one tip to avoid being just another white dude with a B2B SaaS podcast is be so specific about your audience. Be picky. Mm.
• 16:24
  Make sure that this podcast is only useful to people who you desperately want listening to it, and frankly, not useful to people who you don't care about. So, right, Content Bounce House is not an SEO podcast.
• 16:36
  It is, like this podcast, about content leadership and, and what, what to do with content, and if you're not a content leader, you probably don't get much out of it.
• 16:44
  You know, my, my family very kindly listened to the podcast and was like, "We didn't understand it." And I was like, "Great. That's actually perfect." That's so funny you say that. Yeah.
• 16:53
  [laughs] I got the exact same thing from mine. Okay, cool. No, that's, that's cool. I like that. Just one last thing on kind of content production.
• 17:00
  When you think of content strategy, like, can you boil down your current content strategy into a sentence or two? And then do you have a vision for how that looks or how it might be different in, say, six months?
• 17:12
  Right now, the strategy is lead the way with AI. Be- become an authority as a brand on AI content and what, what works, what doesn't work, and do it with original research.
• 17:22
  All of the content we're producing right now is about our own experiments. We went and tried Jasper for this. We went and tried our in-house tool for this. We're trying this other use case over here.
• 17:29
  Frankly, the future of the business depends on it. Like, we have to know- Yeah... this stuff, and we have to be a leader on this stuff. And we're learning a ton, which is so cool. That's the strategy right now.
• 17:38
  Long term, I would love to see some, some more real thought leadership in terms of long form writing that kind of changes what content could and should look like.
• 17:50
  I'm, I'm thinking of Ryan Law, who is just better at this than anyone else I, I've read, and- He's the best thought leadership guy out there.
• 17:56
  Like, that is, that is my dream goal, is to, to have a blog that, with stuff like his on it. Totally. Let's do, let's talk AI. You know, I've been... It, like, kind of comes up on each episode we do.
• 18:06
  I'm, like, a little hesitant to, like, press people on it because I feel like, honestly, like, we don't really know. Like, most folks were like, they used to be skeptical.
• 18:14
  Then they're like, "Oh, it's really cool, actually." And then now we're like, "What do we do with it?" [laughs] You know? Like, or their boss is saying like, "Hey, what's our plan here?"
• 18:22
  But there's a few things here.It's become a very important part of the service you offer to clients. As you mentioned, the business is actually shifting around this, which then means it becomes part of your marketing.
• 18:33
  There's probably some dogfooding of it, I would imagine. L- I don't even know where to start, but let's just like dive in. Maybe could you help us understand, like what is Verblio doing with AI as a business?
• 18:43
  You know, before we get into like how that affects marketing. So for what it's worth, there's not a single piece of AI-generated content on Verblio's blog. Oh, interesting. Okay.
• 18:52
  We are learning about AI and then writing about it as humans and publishing it. So- Okay... if you don't think AI is right for your website, I, I don't blame you.
• 18:59
  I think human-AI hybrid content, right, is closer to ready for most websites than most websites think it is. Okay. I too have seen that same journey you just described. Oh, I'm very skeptical. Oh wow, this is so cool.
• 19:13
  I'm gonna go back to work now. [laughs] Yeah. The first thing I'd keep in mind for, for folks is content marketing LinkedIn echo chamber is way ahead of actual real world society on AI. That's a great point.
• 19:26
  And we are all more worried about it. We all spend more time thinking about it than the average person. That's like, just keep that nugget in the back of your head.
• 19:34
  N- Next, I'd say the doomsday scenarios are taking up a lot of space on social media and are actually very few and far between.
• 19:42
  I'm talking about everything from Google will de-index your website to creatives add something to content that a robot will never be able to replicate, right?
• 19:52
  All of those kinds of doomsday scenarios are true and also like not, not real yet. Right. Yeah.
• 19:59
  At the Colorado State Fair, there's some judges thought that an AI generated image deserved an award over some human created images.
• 20:05
  I don't actually know anybody, like, right, like book publishers are not flooding ChatGPT to fire real world authors.
• 20:12
  Yes, these doomsday scenarios exist, but, but no, they're not, they're not hard and fast yet, and that leaves marketers in a, in a really awkward position because we still need to be producing the content we were gonna be producing six months ago, and now we have a new tool to do it.
• 20:26
  One of the quotes I heard recently that I fall in love with, tractors didn't stop farmers from farming. Farming changed. There are fewer farmers.
• 20:34
  They do a different day-to-day task, but there are still farmers and, and like I think content marketing might be headed for a similar type, type evolution. And all that was very conceptual.
• 20:47
  All that to say, you can go on LinkedIn and find a carousel that says, "99% of people are using AI wrong," or, "ChatGPT wrong," and then listen to a sales bro give you a bunch of ideas for generating a moderately shitty email subject line.
• 21:00
  Yeah. [laughs] That's fine. That doesn't actually help content marketers do their real world job. AI has the potential to actually help us do our job.
• 21:08
  One of the experiments we ran, this one hasn't even been published yet, I think I'm allowed to talk about this. Last week I built a 3,000-word article on what is keyword research.
• 21:16
  I used our internal process, our internal system. Um, we go back and forth on a paragraph by paragraph basis with the AI, and it's set up so that it takes into account edits I make to the previous paragraphs.
• 21:29
  Um, I have tested that. It, it does work. I put in like three em dashes in a, in an introductory paragraph once, and it put em dashes in every single paragraph it generated for me afterwards. So- Oh, wow...
• 21:38
  it, it does weird stuff like that, and I wrote a 3,000-word post in under three hours. It wasn't, it's not technically finished. It needs a bunch of images. It needs a couple more external links.
• 21:48
  It needs an internal linking structure, top to bottom. This was not my best writing, but with AI, I was able to produce that volume as a subject matter expert, right, 'cause I've done keyword research very quickly.
• 22:00
  And my, my thought, my takeaway from that was that if you were relying on mediocre content to get the job done, it's about to get much cheaper and faster, or maybe you shouldn't. [laughs] It's like- Hmm...
• 22:13
  I don't wanna hold up like our internal system as, quote, mediocre there. This article was pretty good. I don't think it was gonna compete for the number one spot.
• 22:21
  Keyword research is unfortunately a high difficulty term, but it was better than some of the stuff on page one. Yeah. Yeah. No, I hear that. I mean, [laughs]
• 22:31
  in some ways, the stuff you find on page one for almost any keyword, maybe it's not generative AI, but it's, um, highly tuned to an algorithm that wants very specific things, which is basically means a person is following this set of instructions, which turns out AI is, is quite good at, right?
• 22:48
  Like, there's no piece on page one for any remotely difficult keyword that hasn't been run through a tool like Clearscope, which is also using AI to help you achieve basically the same goal.
• 22:59
  Yeah, and I should, I should also clarify, there's a set of editing skills that I think is different than the typical set of editing skills when you're working with AI. Yeah. Let-- Can we talk about that? Yeah.
• 23:08
  And, and that's something that I've been practicing as part of this, this research and like the content that we are producing as a human content team for Verblio, which is you, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah.
• 23:18
  The editing skills, I have actually found it really difficult to get into a flow.
• 23:21
  There's not the same flow state that you can get with copy editing in other, in other ways because the AI, it's, it's so busy predicting the next word that it, you have to read every sentence twice. It's kinda weird.
• 23:32
  Yeah, for those that don't know, right, A- the AI is not sourcing anything. It's not like aggregating the internet for you.
• 23:37
  It is literally just predicting what word should come next in the sentence based on what you told it to write about, and its training model is so large that it does that like with uncanny accuracy.
• 23:47
  Best example of where this goes wrong. Recently, I was producing a, like a short form article, but I was on a subject matter that has a lot of, um, peer reviewed research around it.
• 23:57
  The AI actually thought that we'd got to the end of the sentence, proper punctuation was period bracket one close bracket.
• 24:04
  [laughs] It tried to add a footnote because it assumed that when we're talking about this subject, the logical next word, quote unquote, was a footnote, was a citation. Yeah. That's interesting.
• 24:16
  It wasn't citing a source. It just thought that that word should come next. So finding stuff like that is a key piece of the editing process.
• 24:23
  Being careful not to include things, say like em dashes, that it might pick up on later in the flow.That's an unusual thing to have to edit for, right?
• 24:31
  'Cause if I'm editing a human and I add an em dash to their first paragraph, I don't have to go through and worry that later on in the article they're gonna flood me with em dashes. Right.
• 24:39
  But also that's, like, a writing technique that should be used sparingly, right? I don't want one in every paragraph.
• 24:44
  So the, the way that the AI interprets that craft of the English language is, is something that editing can get a little wonky on.
• 24:52
  Editing kind of takes on a whole new meaning because you're not giving feedback to a writer who then tomorrow is gonna make some changes and say, "Hey, I did this or that."
• 25:01
  Like, you're, you're fine-tuning the input as it's generating output to get it closer to what you want. Is that, is that an accurate way to describe editing of AI content? Yeah.
• 25:11
  And, and so again, our, our internal system here we're, we're using an outline that is... We're, we're injecting humans into the process very early.
• 25:19
  So AI or an SEO tool will help, help generate a draft outline that then the human updates and adds to. So based on, like, H3s or even more detail if I want, the AI is moving paragraph by paragraph through the flow.
• 25:36
  Mm-hmm. And, and so after every paragraph I get to go fix it. And having the outline up front that I've already vetted, right? In this case, like, as a subject matter expert, right?
• 25:45
  I was like, okay, 3,000 words on keyword research. I know as a director of content marketing what belongs in that article. The AI didn't do that for me. That's, that's something that I had to know.
• 25:55
  It could spit out some bullets, and I could reorder them and fix them. But, like, I had to know what the insight at the end of the article was.
• 26:02
  In, in that example it suggested a section on customer intent and, and I was like, yeah, that's, that's accurate. Doing keyword research without [laughs] understanding audience intent is, is gonna be a disaster.
• 26:12
  But you got the, you got the H3s there all wrong. I, I went and fixed all of the H3s- Oh...
• 26:17
  in that, in there so that the, the insight of what intent means in the context of keyword research was accurately presented in the article. Other, other editing, uh, tips and tricks for AI.
• 26:27
  You, of course, you have to fact check it. Watch out for repeated words. Watch out for run-on sentences, but the run-on sentences will still have variety 'cause the AI understands...
• 26:36
  Again, we're, we're way deep in the weeds with AI here, but- No, it's good. I love it... it doesn't always predict the most likely next word.
• 26:42
  It, it knows what, based on the entire internet, the actual most likely next word is. But if it always gave you the most likely word, it would only ever generate the same thing for each prompt.
• 26:52
  It would never feel like it was new. At set intervals it will pick the second most likely word or the third most likely word, and that's the thing that you're actually paying for when you access an AI tool.
• 27:05
  How often does it do that, and what... Is it the second most likely, the third most likely, or the 10th most likely?
• 27:11
  That kind of fine-tuning is really what you're paying for, and if you want to you can go do that in OpenAI's playground and API for free. Like, that's, that's all these tools are really doing for us. It will do that.
• 27:23
  It will have variety and sentence structure, and then they'll all be run-on sentences in a slightly different way, and editing that makes you wanna pull your hair out sometimes. Like- [laughs] Yeah, I can imagine that...
• 27:33
  e- even in, in a couple articles from the same freelancer, right? I get used to their style in such a way that editing a person becomes somewhat habituated, right?
• 27:42
  I get to say, "Oh, I know this person has a tendency for fill in the blank."
• 27:46
  The AI is designed to never fall into that pattern, but also it's still gonna have problems like run-on sentences, and so you're kind of constantly recalibrating, and that's where things get very difficult on the editing side.
• 27:57
  I think Verbio understands its brand very, very well. It's kind of quirky. It's kind of funny.
• 28:02
  Verbio sponsors, uh, our newsletters and some other things, and whenever you all send over copy it's like I totally understand how it fits into the brand that you've built, but it's always something, like, a little...
• 28:13
  It's, it's new, a little unexpected. How do you channel that, that energy of the brand into the work that you do? And then I guess the thing that I was kinda gonna get at was, like, can you do it with AI or not?
• 28:25
  Uh, AI can, can be trained on voice and tone. So for example, in one of our custom workflows for one pilot client we're working with, uh, they are taking out all the Oxford commas.
• 28:33
  Thank God, because if I also had to edit out Oxford commas, I would be a disaster. I love Oxford commas. So you can... Some, like, grammatical style guide type things push into, into AI.
• 28:45
  In terms of Verbio's brand, thank you. That is awesome. I love being on a team with such a clear, like, heart and soul, and the name of that heart and soul is Annika. Annika is our copywriter, and she's amazing.
• 28:57
  She just has this complete sense of what a brand needs to entail in this really wonderful way. It, it does permeate all of our work. I think it's...
• 29:06
  It can be tough in long form content, content or when you're hosting a podcast to really work that clear sense of brand in, and it, it becomes us an attitude as much as it becomes a, a style guide. Mm-hmm.
• 29:18
  We don't have a, like, a set of vocabulary or something like that.
• 29:22
  And honestly, we're not perfect at things like when in a slide deck do we use all caps and when do we not, and, like, on a title slide and stuff like that.
• 29:31
  Those kinds of, of nuts and bolts I think are important if we were larger, but that's not, like, the soul of the, of the brand. And, and the soul of the brand comes from, I think, having beliefs and values that we share.
• 29:43
  And that sounds very campy, but we're not afraid to curse, tell the truth, spend time on humor, and, and make it clear that we're gonna spend the time on humor. And you can skip it if you want, or you can leave.
• 29:57
  But that's part of who we are, and we're gonna put that in front of you. That works itself into different types of content in different ways.
• 30:04
  I think in a, in a blog post that, that might look like, you know, a parenthetical, or, uh, we have a, a tool tip, little widget in- installed on, on WordPress.
• 30:13
  I suppose they're plugins, not widgets on WordPress, but so we can insert tool tips, which are asides. They're funny- Yeah... uh, on, on our blog posts.
• 30:20
  And so when you read those y- you get a sense for what we were thinking as we wrote the article, and that kind of inner monologue becomes a big part of the brand too.
• 30:28
  Maybe that's the thing I was trying to say earlier when I said, you know, beliefs and values. You should show your inner monologue. Yeah. That's cool. I like that.
• 30:34
  And I feel like, I think Verbio's done this exceptionally well.
• 30:37
  I would also just, like, highlight for folks it's actually not that difficult to stand out with your brand because at least in the B2B SaaS world, I [laughs] recall back at, uh, at Animals at one point we-Put together a list of target customers, and we were, like, just doing some research on those companies, and one of the things we noticed is that they all had blue websites.
• 30:53
  Like, every single one had a blue website. Yeah.
• 30:55
  And then, like, the main header on the homepage was something like, "Collaborate faster," or, you know, like, something where like, what does it even-- what does the product even do, you know?
• 31:05
  Verblio, the site is purple, right? The copy is, is catchy and kind of funny. Verblio's taken it to the next level by, like, incorporating it into the copy you put in sponsorships, into the tooltips, into your emails.
• 31:19
  Like, they've really taken it to the next level. But there's an opportunity for, for basically any content team to, like, do a couple things to make your stuff stand out. Being self-referential can really help.
• 31:27
  Our email newsletters regularly have screenshots from Slack that we found amusing. Yeah, that's cool. I love that. This is another place where having a CEO that gets it really helps.
• 31:35
  Like, we published a video a couple years ago where the CEO was wearing a bunch of ridiculous costume hats, including a plague doctor mask.
• 31:41
  Like, having access to that helps when you're trying to build a quirky or humorous brand. I think having something that, that's really, uh, unique to you and feels really individual and special doesn't have to be humor.
• 31:55
  Humor's an easy vehicle for that, uh, if you can do it well. But you could also choose something that, that resonates with the product.
• 32:02
  You know, for-- I'm thinking of things in this whole, like, product-led growth B2B SaaS world, right? Yeah.
• 32:06
  And if your product is for people who are at the, the top of the food chain and, and true subject matter experts, own that with your brand. Mm. Yeah, I love that. I love that.
• 32:15
  I would encourage folks, like, explore the brand a little bit. It'll give you some inspiration for some stuff that, that you might do within your own work. A few other things I wanna make sure we get to, Ryan. Tools.
• 32:24
  Can you tell us a little about your tech stack? That can include AI, but it doesn't have to. But I am also just curious what you use for content calendar, for publishing, for distribution, or anything else.
• 32:33
  Website's based on WordPress. The typical Google Suite of, of options. I am personally dreading and horrified about, uh, GA4. So analytics, Search Console, Trends, all that good stuff from Google.
• 32:46
  Uh, content calendar's in Asana. Huge shout-out to Rachel, content marketing manager, who keeps me honest with our Asana calendar.
• 32:54
  We, we definitely, uh, as I mentioned, are, are ideas and strategic-focused, and so, uh, sticking with the calendar and focusing on the project management is a skill I've had to learn as opposed to something that I feel, like, safe and at home, uh, doing.
• 33:09
  Uh, we're all over Slack. We're a distributed team. I'm based in Denver, and the company is based in Denver. I'd say about half of us are in, are in Denver company-wide. Got it. And are y'all in the office?
• 33:18
  No, we have a WeWork lo-location, so I can go in when the power goes out or the internet is slow or I wanna see another human. So for me, that's once or twice a week. Uh, other people are in there more often.
• 33:29
  Other people are in there less often. Got it. Okay, cool. Man, I would love to go to an office once or twice a week. Sounds so nice.
• 33:34
  Sierra, who's our content manager, is in Florida, and we got together a few weeks ago for the first time, and it was great. Like, not only did we get a lot of work done, we had a lot of fun.
• 33:42
  We just had some, like, time to, like, talk about things that, like, just are hard to- Yeah... hard to do on a Zoom call, you know? What's next for you and Verblio? Like, what are you, what are you thinking about?
• 33:53
  Sounds like maybe there's some projects going that you, you maybe can't talk about yet. I'll press you a little bit on that, though. Yeah, can you tease anything that y'all are working on that's not public yet?
• 34:01
  A big one for us is webinars. We had not really invested in webinars for a bunch of reasons and a bunch of excuses, uh, [laughs] in 2022.
• 34:09
  And this whole AI thing, webinars, there's, there was a sense of urgency and, like, a webinar is a great way to get in front of people right away. Mm.
• 34:17
  With that sense of urgency, we kind of essentially did a sprint in, to put it in engineer language, and sales and marketing for a week and a half, like, went nuts on the slide deck and topics, and we built the thing, and we gave the webinar, and it was a huge success.
• 34:30
  And when you do something for sales and it's a huge success, they immediately ask for four more, so. Yeah, yeah. Um, I'm building four more webinars for sales. Uh. That's cool. That's cool.
• 34:38
  Webinars are surprisingly effective, right? I mean, like, it's, it's the intent of the people that sign up, right? It's probably, too, the expectation that there will be some follow-up.
• 34:48
  Like, people don't, aren't surprised when they get an email afterwards, you know?
• 34:51
  But they are genuinely interested in the thing you have, and it's like this kind of, like, beautiful, like, little event that brings the people and the interest, uh, and the educators together.
• 34:59
  The biggest webinar tip I, I have is present original research. I used to think that the biggest webinar tip was don't make it a lecture. Like, don't just sit there and put slides up.
• 35:08
  You gotta make it more involved than that. Have an activity. Do it, right-- uh, it's like I was teaching eighth graders again.
• 35:13
  But presenting original research, telling people something that they can't just go out and find on their favorite blog because you went and, like, did a survey or asked people or tried it yourself.
• 35:25
  Here is what we learned. That's what gets people to stick around. Yeah. That's great. I love that. We will be doing a webinar together. I don't know if it's-- I'm not sure exactly when this episode will release.
• 35:34
  Anyways, we'll make sure we either link to the invite for it or we link to the recording of it, depending on the date. You're just setting us up to have to tag each other on social media like six times- Yeah, yeah...
• 35:43
  in a five-day period. [laughs] Uh, that's true. Cool. Ryan, thank you so much for doing this, for spending time, uh, kind of sharing kinda the inner workings of Verblio and the content stuff y'all are doing.
• 35:53
  We'll definitely link people to the Content Bounce House podcast. Where else? There's another podcast, right? Yeah. So, um, obviously verblio.com/blog. We have a whole category of AI stuff there.
• 36:04
  Content Bounce House podcast, you can find that pretty much anywhere. CEO, uh, Steve, does a podcast, Yes & Marketing.
• 36:11
  Connect with me on LinkedIn, Ryan Sargeant, the person with the funny black and white caricature, which is a Content Bounce House thing. Yeah, I think those are the best places. Okay, cool.
• 36:19
  Ryan, thank you so much for spending time with us, and, uh, look forward to seeing you down in Denver sometime soon. Thanks for having me. This has been a blast. Take care, everybody.