Latest / Content, Briefly / Zapier: Lane Scott Jones on proving a 454% content ROI (rerun)

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Zapier: Lane Scott Jones on proving a 454% content ROI (rerun) · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  Content is not just a brand play, it's not just an awareness play e-even, it is really driving measurable impact and revenue. And if you give us more resources, we can do more of that.
• 0:11
  So after we put together this calculation, what we found was that content at Zapier was actually driving 454% ROI. [laughs] That's insane.
• 0:22
  [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, we've actually got a rerun for you. We're gonna air the Lane Scott Jones episode, which we recorded last summer.
• 0:34
  Lane was and is the director of content marketing at Zapier. We're rerunning this one because Lane's podcast was our most popular episode ever.
• 0:43
  And to be completely honest with you, I went on vacation, and I don't have a new episode queued up right now. So we've got some other stuff in editing, so we'll have fresh episodes for you next week.
• 0:51
  There's some really great stuff in here. Obviously, some of it is a bit outdated, given this was a year ago, but tons of evergreen content as well.
• 0:58
  The biggest takeaway from this conversation was that Lane was able to calculate a 454% ROI on content. We talk also about she grew the team up to about 20 people.
• 1:09
  We also talk about why Zapier publishes 85 articles a month, and then we do get into some of their AI use cases as well. A lot of really good stuff in here. No surprise this was our most popular episode to date.
• 1:20
  Huge shout-out to Lane for coming on and sharing her knowledge, and I will be reaching out to see if we can get her back for round two. As always, I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do, too.
• 1:30
  This episode of Content Briefly is brought to you by our friends at Campfire Labs. Doing more with less is the mantra of marketers in 2024, and nobody feels the weight as much as one-person content teams.
• 1:40
  Campfire Labs spoke to 40 B2B SaaS content marketers who are flying solo about the expectations they're asked to rise to.
• 1:46
  They found that 76% have to create content for marketing needs and internal needs, including sales collateral, UX copy for the product team, and community content.
• 1:53
  40% have zero external support in their day-to-day work, whether that's in the form of freelancers or agencies. And 21% of one-person content teams feel they don't have the resources to do their jobs properly.
• 2:03
  It's tough out there for tiny content teams, but despite the pressures, Campfire Labs' newest data report unearths a ton of opportunities for one-person teams to hit it out of the park.
• 2:12
  Go check out the report for tips, tactics, and workflows to help one-person teams survive and thrive. Just go to campfirelabs.co and click on the blog, or check the link in the show notes.
• 2:22
  Content Briefly is produced by our friends at Minutia. To learn more about their podcast production service, as well as their other adaptive content marketing services, check out minutia.com in the show notes.
• 2:34
  Hey, everybody, Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly.
• 2:38
  Really excited to be talking with Lane Scott Jones, head of content marketing at Zapier, a content program I have long admired and don't know that much about.
• 2:46
  Like, I don't know that much about the behind-the-scenes, so very, very excited to chat about that. So Lane, welcome. Uh, would you mind saying hi and introducing yourself for folks who don't already know you? Yeah.
• 2:54
  Hey, thank you so much for having me. I am a big Superpath fan, so this is exciting. So I'm Lane Scott Jones. I lead content marketing at Zapier. I've been there for about two years.
• 3:04
  Before that, I was leading content marketing at a company called Campaign Monitor, and I was also leading just their overall marketing strategy as well. Where in the world am I?
• 3:14
  I am-- have been based in Nashville, Tennessee, but lately I have been doing the whole digital nomad thing. So most recently I was, uh, in Europe for three months working from Lisbon mostly. Oh, wow.
• 3:26
  And today I'm in Denver for the month, and I'm, like, doing my great American road trip to the West Coast for the summer. Oh, super cool. Well, you're just- Yeah... down the street from me.
• 3:35
  I'm, like, two hours away, Vail, Colorado, so that's awesome. And, like, what a beautiful thing about remote work. That's cool.
• 3:40
  You know, Zapier I feel like was really, really early on the remote work, you know, async team collaboration.
• 3:47
  I mean, and actually that's probably part of the early content strategy, too, was, like, documenting a lot of that, but we can get to some of that. Could you talk a little bit about Zapier?
• 3:56
  Just a little bit about the company and the product itself. Yeah. Yeah. So Zapier, for those who don't know, is an automation tool.
• 4:03
  So it allows you to connect your team's favorite web apps to each other and then move information between them automatically.
• 4:10
  That-that's logistically what it, it does, but it's so interesting to see the way that people use Zapier to actually fuel their business by automating so much of the manual work to-- from things like lead generation, marketing, sales, operation, to really free up their team to do what they do best.
• 4:30
  And I think there's actually some really interesting overlap, too, now that we are talking a lot about AI, in the- Mm... connection between AI and automation that we could maybe get to as well. Okay, cool.
• 4:40
  That's awesome. I'm a Zapier power user, have been a customer for a long time. I love the product. I sort of think of Zapier as, like, the perfect SaaS company in a sense, because it makes every other tool better.
• 4:53
  So, like, why wouldn't you use it, you know? It's like everybody at some point is gonna have to connect data from one app to another.
• 4:58
  It's always the best way to do it, unless those two tools already have a native integration, which they usually don't. And it's also a lot of fun to use.
• 5:06
  I feel like Zapier also was sort of early on, like, the no-code thing.
• 5:09
  To me, the best thing about no-code is that it's really fun for people who can't write code, like me, to build stuff, and Zapier's always an important part of that.
• 5:17
  So that probably represents, like, one kind of tiny sliver of the business, but, like, who are the customers, you know? Like, I'm sure it's a lot of folks like me who are like, "I can't code. I got a lot on my plate.
• 5:26
  I need to just make some stuff happen." I'm sure there's plenty of us like that.
• 5:29
  But, like, as, as the marketing team is thinking about who are we selling to, can you talk a little bit about, like, who that kind of target persona or personas are? Yeah.
• 5:38
  So the interesting thing is it's changed during my time at Zapier as we sort of developed an understanding about our target audience. The original power users are probably exactly like you. They're tinkerers.
• 5:51
  They love to DIY things. A lot of times maybe they were using Zapier for personal productivity workflows- Mm...
• 5:57
  just trying to make their individual work lives easier.But as we've evolved as a business and think about growing to the next level, we're really looking beyond just the individual impact of Zapier into how can automation actually help run an entire business?
• 6:13
  So when we're thinking about our personas now, we're thinking about, you know, marketers like me, content marketers, sales folks, marketing operations.
• 6:23
  The personas are who's that power user who could introduce Zapier to their company, and then advocate and sort of be an evangelist for the adoption of Zapier throughout the other departments that they work with?
• 6:36
  So there are so many cool examples of how to use it, you know, to manage your own to-do list or your own workflows, but the real power of Zapier is when it is running your business and freeing up your teams to do way more impactful and more strategic work.
• 6:51
  Yeah, that's super interesting. I wonder if there's sort of like kinda overlapping with that, there's so many things you can do, where do you even start?
• 6:59
  Like, how do you sort of tell the story of automa- I mean, automation? It's like you sort of get it.
• 7:04
  It's like efficiency, you know, keep costs low, that type of thing, but then like that's sort of the business case of it.
• 7:09
  But then like when the rubber meets the road, it's like, well, I have, you know, we're collecting email addresses through ConvertKit, and I need those to go into a spreadsheet, and then I need that to sync with my CRM, and I need to send a tag from the CRM back to...
• 7:25
  Or, you know, whatever, stuff like that. How does Zapier even begin to start addressing some of those probably millions of potential use cases? Yeah.
• 7:36
  You honestly just summed up our entire like content strategy question, which is that some people inherently know that automation is valuable, like you. You know?
• 7:45
  You, you've had your first pie experience with it, and so now you're probably looking for ways to incorporate it throughout your workflow.
• 7:53
  But what we find is that I think one of the biggest goals of our content strategy is to inspire people to use automation, so we actually have an entire category of content called automation inspiration because typically people will go to Zapier, and often through search, with one use case in mind.
• 8:11
  Mm. So how can I connect- Right... Slack and Google Docs, and you know? Or MailChimp and Gmail, whatever it is. And so they get to that one use case, and then they're kinda stuck.
• 8:22
  Maybe they successfully are able to execute that, but it's just the one Zap, and what we wanna do is expand it and their idea of what is possible with Zapier.
• 8:33
  So the majority of our content is really gonna be focused, and especially coming up in this year, on how to get to the next use case and the one after that.
• 8:41
  Automation inspiration is really fun because we see people in real time having those aha moments of sort of like the magic of automation when they are introduced to new ways to learn things.
• 8:53
  One great example of this is that we are currently producing a lot of content around AI and automation, and it has been so cool to hear the customer stories of people realizing what Zapier is capable of.
• 9:05
  And you're right, like the use cases are so expansive that our content has to mirror that and really cover a lot of territory. So that's how we approach it right now.
• 9:16
  Does that almost requirement for, you know, sort of addressing lots and lots of use cases and educating potential customers on them translate directly into a lot of content? Like, is the team large?
• 9:27
  Maybe you could talk a little bit about like kind of who is the team and what is the makeup of those roles?
• 9:31
  I'm just sort of curious like in my mind it's like a massive content engine, but I don't know, like I don't know what goes on behind the scenes. Yeah.
• 9:39
  So the answer to your first question is yes, there's basically an infinite amount of topics that we could cover.
• 9:44
  If you look at our SEO TAM analysis that we just did, I mean, it is literally hundreds of thousands of potential topics. That's crazy. [laughs] That's so crazy.
• 9:53
  It's overwhelming, it really is, and our team is small but mighty.
• 9:56
  So the one really interesting thing about the Zapier team, I was also a fan of Zapier before I started working there, and I was particularly a fan of their content because I just felt like it really stood out as extremely valuable and fresh and having a great voice as compared to some other B2B type blogs.
• 10:13
  From the outside I'm like, "Okay, this must be an enormous team. There, there must be dozens of people working on this."
• 10:19
  And I was absolutely shocked when I got into the interview process and found out that the entire content team was four people. Oh, wow. Yeah. So when I started in 2021, it was just four people running the blog.
• 10:31
  It was two editors and two writers, and they were creating all of that content through like incredibly great systems of working with freelancers, but also just because they are incredibly talented editors and writers, they were able to crank out just mind-boggling amount of content.
• 10:50
  Since then, since I started and we started looking at the opportunities for content, the ways that we could grow, the team is now around 20 people, and we're hiring by the way, for anybody who's interested. Super cool.
• 11:00
  Okay, that's really interesting. Yeah. And I can talk a little bit more about how we divide up the team now, but the question of how do we handle the potential volume of content topics is really just a...
• 11:13
  It becomes a question of prioritization, and we've tackled that a couple different ways.
• 11:18
  We work really closely with our SEO team and our product marketing team to hone in on, you know, ultimately which of these use cases and topics that we cover are gonna translate to our, you know, longest lasting, highest value customers who are gonna be really successful with the product.
• 11:34
  And there's also an interesting prioritization exercise that we're thinking through right now, which is like could we add a content score almost to each topic as we're going through that SEO list of opportunities to figure out, okay, we know that this topic will drive a ton of traffic, but are they actually interested in Zapier and would they be successful?
• 11:55
  Maybe not. And we know this topic may be more of a mid-funnel piece is- Yeah...
• 12:00
  not gonna have the highest volume of traffic, but we would expect to see those like activation and upgrade rates really high for this particular topic.Is that product marketing's responsibility to do that type of content?
• 12:13
  Or is that something you work closely with them on? I guess I'm thinking kind of like, of the automation inspiration type stuff, or maybe there's even, like, recipes or templates people can borrow from.
• 12:21
  Who takes responsibility for that kind of stuff? Yeah, so that actually sits with content marketing. Um- Okay, cool...
• 12:28
  the way that we divide up our team and our strategy, we talk a lot about top of funnel and mid-funnel, and for us, mid-funnel's gonna be inclusive of anything that talks about the product and those automation inspiration pieces.
• 12:39
  Our writers are, and our editors are really tuned in to the product, the use cases, and how to write about it.
• 12:46
  So while we might consult with product marketing, it's really, it's very content led in creating those pieces. And how about the 20 folks on the team?
• 12:55
  Could you talk a little bit about who those people are and what their roles are like? When I started, we had four people total. They were focused exclusively on the blog, top of funnel and mid-funnel.
• 13:05
  Today, we have expanded to not only the blog team, but we've also included new teams within the content marketing structure, so the expansion to 20 people is a lot due to having teams that were already existing in the organization come over to content as part of this larger strategy.
• 13:22
  So what it looks like now is we've got a campaigns team that primarily supports demand gen, life cycle, email, and product marketing initiatives.
• 13:31
  We've got our video team, which we have a, actually a lot of really interesting things planned for expanding it more into video content in the coming months.
• 13:39
  And we also have a user education team, which overlaps with mid-funnel in some ways, 'cause they're talking a lot about how to use the product.
• 13:46
  But whereas our blog is really focused more on the inspiration, user education is focused on the actual implementation and sort of a step-by-step walkthrough, but they're really complimentary, and that's why it's been really important to bring a lot of the teams within Zapier that were creating content independently, we have slowly brought them under the content marketing org umbrella, because we believe that by having them working really closely, we're, we'll find areas of overlap, areas of content distribution, and places that we can just make the work more impactful.
• 14:19
  And then one other team that we've added, which I think if I were to say one, one thing I've done during my time as the content lead at Zapier that has completely transformed our, not only our content team, but our organization, is adding a strategy and ops function, a content operations function to the team.
• 14:38
  This has absolutely changed the way that we think about measuring the success of content and how we work. So that might be something to dive into a little bit more too. Yes, I do.
• 14:46
  I def- I'm gonna make a note, 'cause I wanna unpack that. One other sort of team related thing I wanted to ask you about was partner marketing. Is that...
• 14:53
  So, like, Zapier has, like, thousands of integrations with all these companies.
• 14:57
  I mean, I'm assuming there's, like, coordination between Zapier and those companies to launch new integrations or, you know, kind of talk more about, you know, popular ones or whatever.
• 15:05
  Is that a content thing, or is that, does someone else handle that? Yeah, it is. So we have, within our campaigns team, we have an editor and a writer who are focused on...
• 15:14
  They actually handle both product marketing and partner marketing. Okay.
• 15:17
  But they're working with our partner marketing team, which has its own, you know, partner marketing manager to think about how to promote and incentivize those partners to build integrations and also to improve their integration quality, so that's something we're involved in.
• 15:33
  Amazing, and then the video stuff, I'm sort of curious about that. Is that... I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is, like, tutorial style video. Yeah. Is that part of it? Is there more?
• 15:43
  Yes, so I would say a lot of what we're doing right now is very product focused. We have a video producer who does exclusively product and feature launches.
• 15:52
  We have a team member who's focused on events, so we have our flagship event called ZapConnect, and he's creating a lot of the content there.
• 16:01
  And as you can maybe hear from this, video has tended to be in a position of serving the requests from the other parts of the organization- Mm-hmm... for a while, which is really important.
• 16:11
  But I think where we see video moving is more video led initiatives, so what does a video content strategy look like at Zapier? A lot of it will be tutorials, just because people want to know how to use the product.
• 16:23
  I think there's also a lot of curiosity about how other people are automating.
• 16:27
  Like, Jimmy, I would love to see the video version of you walking us through how you're using automation to run Superpath or all y- your other work.
• 16:36
  So I'm imagining actually that we'll be doubling down on YouTube and content that really features how people are practically using automation in their work, and that's gonna be kind of new for us in really, like, creating a
• 16:53
  YouTube first and, like, personality driven type of channel versus what we have now, which is a lot of really helpful content around product tutorials and that kind of thing. Really cool. Really cool.
• 17:06
  Kind of a side note, we run a site called Help a B2B Writer, which connects writers who want quotes and sources for their articles with experts who can provide that, and
• 17:15
  it is a standalone app built only on Airtable and Zapier, and I guess WordPress. There's a WordPress site. It's pretty fascinating. I mean, I, it, like, we acquired the site from, um, a woman named Elise Dobson.
• 17:29
  It was all functional, and then there's a bunch of improvements that I wanted to make, which, like, pushed my kinda no code and automation skills, like, to the absolute limit.
• 17:38
  But now it's, like, a fully functioning app that costs, like, 100 bucks a month to run, which is insane to me. You know what I mean? That we didn't have to pay a developer a ton of money to do it.
• 17:48
  And one thing that I found in building that is, like, I'm, like, pushing my automation skills further, and one thing I found was a lot of community or sort of user generated content that helped me solve, like, really niche use cases, and most of it was on, was from Zapier forums,
• 18:04
  which I found to be really interesting, 'cause I imagine there's just this massive long tail of keywords that, like, you can't possibly create content for every single-...
• 18:14
  feature and bug and use case and, but the community, I would imagine, fills a lot of those gaps. Is that, does that end up falling under content's purview at all? Or is that also a separate team?
• 18:25
  Community is a separate team. We collaborate with them to distribute content.
• 18:29
  And community at Zapier is actually undergoing an evolution right now too, to think about solving exactly what you just said, which is not only how do we answer technical questions within community, where it's sort of functioned as a support, part of the support org for a while, but now thinking about how do we use community to bring together these Zapier power users and people who are curious about Zapier- Mm...
• 18:51
  to, again, think about inspiring them with all the potential ways they can use the product, which is really exciting.
• 18:58
  It's paired really closely with our customer advocacy program, which is going out and finding customers who are using Zapier in really interesting ways and telling those stories. Really cool. That's awesome.
• 19:09
  How about ops? Maybe we can go back to ops for a second. Could you just kind of unpack that a little bit?
• 19:13
  'Cause I'm not sure, I think content ops, at least in my experience, means slightly different things at different companies.
• 19:18
  So I'd be curious, like, what does Zapier's version of it look like, and kind of what does that person or those people do on a day-to-day basis? Yeah. So our content ops team is one person.
• 19:29
  Her name's Janine, and she is absolutely amazing. And Janine was originally an editor on the team.
• 19:35
  When I started, what we found was that our editors and writers, to some extent, were spending way too much time tracking down, you know, stats, reports, reporting for WBRs, that kind of thing, and it was taking away from the work that they are really great at doing, which is the actual production of content.
• 19:53
  We also were in this kind of interesting place where we knew content was a revenue-driving function of the business, but we just didn't have the time or space or really expertise in a full-time position to deep dive on how that was happening, how we wanted to report on it, in order to then get more resources and headcount budget.
• 20:13
  Mm-hmm.
• 20:13
  So the really cool thing that I did alongside Janine is that we put together a content ROI report, and this ROI report, which I would love to dive into a little bit more, was actually what we used to lobby for the content operations function.
• 20:28
  So Janine had been moonlighting as our content ops person, but after we did this deep dive where we found out how much revenue content was actually driving, we were able to get buy-in to move her full time to content operations, establish that team, and since then, she's had an impact not just on the content strategy, but on the entire organization and marketing strategy, which is really cool to see the impact of content and content ops being so far reaching.
• 20:53
  That's really cool. Yes, please tell us more about content ROI. [laughs] Okay. I think whenever that comes up, it's like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yes. Like, tell us more.
• 21:00
  I know, 'cause it's such a, it's, like, such a tough problem to track or to crack when it comes to content leaders knowing the impact they're having and proving it to the leadership.
• 21:10
  So let me talk you through what we were trying to sort of solve for and what we ended up doing. Amazing. I'm gonna share my screen again. Cool. Okay. So we talked about growing the team. Um,
• 21:22
  so first it's probably worth saying how we track content success at Zapier, and this approach takes inspiration from the goals that are set by our finance team.
• 21:32
  So finance sets the goals for content around signups and traffic, and we consider those our primary metrics.
• 21:40
  But we're also looking at guardrail metrics of activation, upgrades, and average revenue per account to make sure that the traffic we're driving is high quality.
• 21:49
  So those are the things that we're looking at when measuring the success of content. Where we were at this point in the company was that we, we saw this big opportunity to continue investing in content.
• 22:02
  We wanted more budget, we wanted more headcount, we wanted to expand our mid-funnel program, because we were seeing that driving upgrades and activations at much higher rates.
• 22:11
  And at the time, our CMO was a, he was a performance marketing guy, like advertising background, and so no matter how much I tried to explain to him the value that content was bringing and the reason we should invest more in it, he wasn't quite grasping it.
• 22:27
  So what we ended up doing was deciding to speak to him in his own language, which led us to calculate content ROI. In advertising, they use return on advertising spend, ROAS, so we created return on content spend.
• 22:42
  And what we did was we took that performance marketing model of tracking content value and applied it to the work we were doing.
• 22:50
  So we looked at our investment along the lines of freelancers, agencies, software, headcount, and tech and data support, and then we looked at that against the return we were getting, which we measured as real return from upgrades resulting from content signups with a three-year multiplier, which is our lifetime value.
• 23:09
  And this is the number that we put together to present to our CMO to say, it's, content is not just a brand play. It's not just an awareness play even.
• 23:18
  It is really driving measurable impact and revenue, and if you give us more resources, we can do more of that.
• 23:25
  So after we put together this calculation, what we found was that content at Zapier was actually driving 454% ROI. [laughs] That's insane. Which it was insane. Like, we...
• 23:38
  I can't tell you how many times that we re-ran the numbers.
• 23:41
  We have a decision science team that we worked with to, like, triple check that this was true, because we knew that content was performing really well, but we didn't know it was performing this well.
• 23:51
  And actually, this is o- one of the more conservative numbers we were able to pull.
• 23:55
  But the way we landed at this, maybe I'll just repeat this, uh, we, but we landed at this by taking investment, freelancers, agency software, and then stand-ins for headcount and tech and data support,
• 24:07
  and then we calculated the return that we were getting from revenue resulting from upgrades that had signed up through content with the three-year multiplier, which is our lifetime value.
• 24:18
  And-We, we got to this number of four hundred and fifty-four percent ROI, so that was looking at a little less than a million dollars in content spend in the year previous that had resulted in $4.1 million in influence revenue.
• 24:35
  That's wild. It-- [chuckles] that's really insane. Uh, how-- do you know how if content influences a sign-up, do you know like exactly how it gets attributed?
• 24:45
  You know, like if someone reads a blog post a month ago, and then whatever, lands in the community, but then leaves and then comes back through like a partner page or something, like would content would get some credit for that?
• 24:57
  Yeah. So the interesting thing about this number is that it is actually only looking at last touch session start. Whoa. That's even crazier. Yeah. I know.
• 25:07
  [chuckles] So we of course also track things like, you know, first touch, and if you think about the influence of content at that level, it, it would be magnified way beyond this.
• 25:18
  So this is last touch, last touch session start, and that's how we tracked this number. Again, wanting to be conservative, but also wanting to really showcase the impact of content.
• 25:29
  I can't believe that's the conservative version. That's so cool. That's so cool.
• 25:34
  So that makes obviously an incredibly strong case for more resources to create more content, expand the team, and also like the way that you described the current team structure I think is really, really interesting because it's quite holistic.
• 25:48
  You know, like you're describing content as a growth function built up of more than one medium, and with sort of people supporting the whole spectrum of it too, not just the content creation and the editorial side, but the operation side as well.
• 26:02
  It's just it-- I'm sort of fascinated by this because not everyone gets to market a product as awesome as Zapier, but there's also quite a bit to learn here about what I would describe as the discipline of like really, really understanding the numbers, you know, really thinking deeply about like where the dollar should be spent to get that ROI from, how to, how to bring it to life to, you know, how to...
• 26:25
  I mean, it's, it's easy to dream up a big strategy, hard to execute it. There's just like a lot of really, really cool operational things here that the Zapier team I hope is extremely proud of. Yeah.
• 26:36
  And, and one thing I would call out here is that
• 26:40
  when I started at Zapier, content was seen as this really valuable part of the marketing team, but we didn't necessarily have a seat at the table when it came to informing strategy.
• 26:53
  My view on content marketing is that content is obviously the fuel that drives all of these other campaigns and channel performance,
• 27:01
  and content shouldn't be relegated to just being services, a services function within an org, but should really be seen as the strategic center.
• 27:09
  And so putting together these numbers was a big part of trying to get the rest of the organization to see that and really view content as a growth engine for Zapier as a whole.
• 27:21
  And we knew it, you know, we were seeing the results in our tracking, but putting these numbers together and then sharing them with leadership and socializing them with my peers across marketing and beyond has really allowed us to get a seat at the table that we didn't necessarily have before, because people can so clearly see the value of content.
• 27:42
  And it's also made it a really easy yes for when we want to grow the team or grow the budget because we know that every dollar we put in, we're getting this much back.
• 27:52
  So the ROI report was ultimately my attempt to raise the visibility and reputation of content within Zapier, which was already high, but I wanted it to be at the level of informing not just the content strategy, but the marketing strategy, and even the company strategy, which we have since seen it influence.
• 28:13
  I also wanna share with you the-- going back to our CMO, performance advertising guy, we presented this to him, and this is what he said.
• 28:22
  He saw the report and he said, "With these ROI numbers, tell me why I shouldn't give you advertising entire budget right, right now," which was an amazing response.
• 28:31
  Of course, I did not take him up on that because advertising is very complimentary to what we do in content marketing.
• 28:37
  But I think this just really illustrates the way that by adding these concrete numbers and measuring the actual revenue impact of content, we were able to just use that as leverage to expand the program and ultimately drive even more impact.
• 28:54
  That's so cool.
• 28:55
  This is just making my day, especially just, you know, as we're recording this, it's July of twenty twenty-three, and we've been in the kinda the midst of, I don't know, I, I sort of hesitant to use the word recession, but there's like a content recession, for lack of a better word, happening right now.
• 29:14
  Like a lot of companies are holding back. There's been a ton of layoffs of content marketers over the past couple of months. It's been a really difficult time for the individuals who participate in this industry.
• 29:26
  I can't help but wonder how many of these companies
• 29:30
  don't or didn't have a really clear understanding of how content influences the business and potentially just are making gut reactions, you know, emotional reactions to economic uncertainty or AI or kind of whatever these other factors are that are influencing a lot of this, you know, as opposed to
• 29:47
  maybe for some companies it's as simple as a spreadsheet. For, for larger, more sophisticated companies, it's obviously a little more complicated than that.
• 29:54
  But, yeah, I just can't help but wonder, like if everyone sort of applied the same thinking to their content, what would, what would've been different over the past couple of months, you know? Yeah.
• 30:03
  I've given that a lot of thought actually, because, you know, even though the team was small when I started at Zapier, the caliber of content they were putting out was absolutely amazing.
• 30:12
  The, the level of content and sort of that amazing program existed before I even started at Zapier, so my question coming in as a content lead is what value can I bring?
• 30:24
  And that's exactly what I honed in on, is that the team is doing this amazing work, but-Because they're so focused on the work, they aren't able to focus on articulating the value of the work to leadership and building that buy-in.
• 30:37
  And to me, that is absolutely crucial to, like you're saying, having content regarded as something that is not just a nice to have, but an absolute essential if you wanna grow the business.
• 30:49
  And that's where we are at Zapier now, and I think a big part of that is that we have crunched the numbers, we've set up the tracking, and we...
• 30:56
  anytime a conversation comes up about resourcing or head count, we point to this report.
• 31:03
  So we, we ended up doing, like, an exec summary of this that we can just share out anytime we need to, and it has been really powerful to not just say that content is doing really well, but show it through the numbers.
• 31:13
  Yeah. That's amazing.
• 31:15
  Is there, like, a monthly or quarterly component to the reporting too, where you're sort of plugging in the, the new traffic and sign-up and revenue numbers and sort of comparing it to existing team size, or does that happen...
• 31:26
  Is that even... I guess, is that necessary any longer?
• 31:30
  I think we'll probably look at this ROI report as an annual thing because what we wanted to know really is broad strokes, how is content performing, investment versus revenue. Mm-hmm.
• 31:42
  So I think updating it yearly will probably be the thing that we start doing after this.
• 31:48
  Our reporting though, we, we do tons of reporting on a weekly and even more frequent basis, so we're always articulating the value of content in some way.
• 31:58
  Most, most often now it's through our weekly business reviews where content is right there up along advertising and all of our other main channels to talk about how our performance is driving business results.
• 32:10
  So we've gotten really, like, we've gotten really fluent in how to translate content performance into that high level exec and leadership conversation to show them where we see the biggest opportunities, where we should press the gas, where things aren't working and we need to either optimize or remove investment.
• 32:30
  But we're in a position now to make those recommendations and have them taken really seriously because of this report.
• 32:37
  There's a theme in some of the things you're saying that I'll just call out for folks listening, which is that you're not letting anyone else tell content marketing's story for you. Like, you're harnessing the narrative,
• 32:47
  you know, building upon data, which is fundamental, right? But then you wrap it in sort of your beliefs on what you've seen in the past, where you think this can go, and it's quite compelling.
• 33:00
  You know, it really changes the way I think that people think about content. I think it's, it's too easy, it's too easy for a content team to think in sort of a more narrow window about this kind of thing, you know?
• 33:12
  It's like just looking at Google Analytics is like, the numbers going up or down? You know what I mean? Are, are we sort of proving our worth or not?
• 33:18
  You know, but what you're doing is, like, you're crafting a whole narrative around it, which I think is really cool, and I applaud you for it. Because I think it's... Like, I talk to a lot of content marketers.
• 33:26
  I don't see a lot of stuff like this. Yeah. And putting together the ROI numbers, putting together the content operations function, it was all kind of new territory for me too.
• 33:36
  And so one resource that was really great was Superpath. I actually reached out, and this was... This must have been right when I started at Zapier, like, a year and a half or two years ago.
• 33:48
  I was looking at the content marketing org structure and some of the things around how do we staff against our priorities, how do we measure the success of content, and I just put out a call and I was like, "Hey, I would love to talk to some other content leaders about how you're thinking about this."
• 34:02
  At the time, my big focus was on org structure because I saw where we needed to get, and I knew the team was gonna have to shift to reach those goals, but I wasn't exactly sure how to think about it.
• 34:12
  And I, I actually got, like, dozens of responses and ended up connecting with some amazing content leaders through Superpath. Shout out to Ronnie Higgins and Alicia Johnson.
• 34:23
  And they both gave me such amazing guidance on how their teams are structured, why they've made the decisions they've made, and we were, like, live mapping out my org structure on, you know, mind map while we talked because getting their input on just how things have worked, what hasn't worked, really shaped my thinking around venturing into somewhat uncharted territory when it comes to wanting to create a content
• 34:50
  organization that doesn't look the same as every single content org that I've worked at in the past. That's amazing. That makes my day. I'm so, I'm just so excited to hear that.
• 35:01
  One of the things that I hope to achieve with the Superpath community, and I think this is true for all communities, actually kind of like I was describing with the Zapier community as well, is, like, filling in the gaps where, like, you can't find this anywhere else.
• 35:12
  Like, no one has written a 2,000 word blog post on your exact problem. You know what I mean? Yeah. And they probably never will, you know?
• 35:19
  But there is this other way to kind of bring that information together, so that's just- Yeah... that has me beaming over here. I love it. Um- I'm so glad. I'm so glad. I just recommended it.
• 35:28
  I have a friend who's trying to break into content marketing, and she was like, "Do you recommend any, like, books or blogs?"
• 35:33
  And I was like, "Honestly, I, I'm not sure that I've ever learned anything super transformative from a book or a blog, but talking to other people in content marketing has absolutely changed my career." It is, it's huge.
• 35:46
  It really is huge.
• 35:47
  Even if you come in and you just observe and just see what's going on and kind of get your feet wet and start to get a feel for, like, what are the problems other people are having, are my problems unique or not, and it can be quite informative.
• 35:58
  So I appreciate it. Thank you. Can I ask you a couple, like, quick hitters? I just have a couple things I was just sort of curious about.
• 36:04
  One is, who do you report to, and w- does content fall under brand or demand gen, or is it kind of, is it separate from those things as well?
• 36:14
  So content at Zapier is part of the corporate marketing team, which is led by my boss, Steph Donnelly, who's amazing. And so she manages brand marketing, a team that we're calling community marketing right now.
• 36:27
  Content falls under corporate marketing at Zapier, which includes brand marketing, events, comms and PR, content marketing. Got it. How many people roughly work at Zapier now?I think we're in the 700 to 800 range Okay.
• 36:43
  Got it So we've grown a lot. Yeah, that's really cool. And then your team, 20-ish people, how do you communicate with them? I mean, I'm imagining it's remote and async. There's probably a lot of that.
• 36:53
  Do you have a regular meeting cadence where you all get together, or are there kind of breakouts where, you know, smaller parts of that team are getting together on a weekly or monthly basis? Yeah.
• 37:04
  Working at Zapier is interesting because Zapier has been remote from the very beginning.
• 37:08
  We've never had an office, so whereas other teams I've been on are trying to adapt, you know, post-pandemic to working remotely, Zapier has these systems in place that make it so easy and seamless.
• 37:20
  So in terms of team meetings, I tend to default to asynchronous wherever possible. Mm-hmm. Part of that is because we are an international team, so we have people in England and Brazil.
• 37:31
  I was personally in Lisbon for a couple months, so doing that makes it really easy and accessible for everybody. The couple rituals we have, there is a mix of live meetings. We'll have a corporate marketing monthly.
• 37:43
  I have a biweekly sync with my direct reports, which include the leaders of each of those different programs within content.
• 37:50
  And then we also do a lot of check-ins on Slack, so people can jump in and add their updates when they're online, but there's no pressure to constantly be attending meetings, which I think is a big advantage 'cause it just lets us stay in our flows and, and work
• 38:06
  in the schedules that work best for us. Yeah, totally. That's cool.
• 38:10
  I can only imagine what an advantage it was in 2020 and 2021 in particular, where like everyone's trying to figure out like, "Oh my God, how do we do this?" Yeah. Yeah. And Zapier's like, "Oh, we know.
• 38:21
  We, [laughs] we've been doing this forever." It's funny you mention that.
• 38:23
  We actually during the 2020 created a lot of content around how to work well when you're working remotely because we had so much experience doing it, and that was very popular for obvious reasons. I bet. Yeah.
• 38:37
  I mean, that's like a service really to the rest of these companies who are like, really don't know, you know? Yeah. How about documentation? Is that something that Zapier is big on?
• 38:46
  What kind of documentation do you mean? I guess I'm thinking about like, um, you know, sort of like a knowledge base or wiki that you're all contributing to.
• 38:55
  Like to me, I guess the reason I ask that is because I sort of find, at least for myself personally, that automation and documentation go very nicely together because
• 39:05
  like for example, I might build an automation that links up Zapier and Airtable and Google Sheets, and it's running and I kind of forget that it's running, which is exactly what you want actually.
• 39:16
  But then I try to document all those things too, so I have kinda like a master list of all the stuff that's happening, why did I set it up, you know, where do I go to change it, like that type of stuff.
• 39:23
  But then for a content team too, like, you know, when it comes down to how to prioritize certain ideas, you know, how stuff gets handed off between writers and editors, how stuff gets published.
• 39:33
  Do you find as the team is expanding that you lean on, you know, maybe it's written documentation or Loom videos or something else? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
• 39:43
  We definitely have a lot of documentation, and part of that is 'cause we do work asynchronously, so we wanna be able to have handoff document or an instruction manual and have people jump straight in.
• 39:54
  So I think the big thing that we focus on ed- ed- on outlining in documentation are our editorial guidelines. We have a lot of processes, and we also have a lot of automated processes that run on Zapier.
• 40:06
  So all that's documented, and it's b- a big part of the onboarding process when we're bringing on new team members. When people are working with our team, it's a quick way to get them up to speed.
• 40:15
  And then also when we're onboarding freelancers, we have that whole process like really well documented because we have a, such a high need for freelance writing help.
• 40:25
  We put out about 85 posts per month, so that can't all- Wow... be done in-house.
• 40:30
  Yeah, so we rely a lot on freelancers and have a really, really impressively structured way of getting them onboarded and up to speed on Zapier brand voice, how we write, you know, that kind of thing. 85, that's crazy.
• 40:43
  Is that all net new or is a portion of that refreshing older but evergreen content? Yeah. A portion of that's gonna be updating content based on SEO rankings, and a lot of it is net new.
• 40:56
  So we're very, very agile in terms of creating and producing content.
• 41:00
  It's really remarkable, and I can't take credit for that 'cause that, that team was in place before I started and it's just mind-boggling the amount of content they're able to produce. Really cool. I'm just like...
• 41:12
  I think we started this conversation me saying like, "I'm super impressed by Zapier's content program, but I don't really know what goes on behind the scenes." Now I'm more impressed.
• 41:18
  But also just like this stuff doesn't happen by accident, you know? Like there's a lot of thought and care and work that, that goes into this. [laughs] I have as one of my like quick hit questions AI.
• 41:27
  I don't, I don't know if it's possible to be... You know, hard to be like, you know, give us 30 seconds on the most transformative tech any of us have ever seen.
• 41:36
  But I am curious, I know there's a product component, but how about for the content team? Are you finding
• 41:41
  use cases for ChatGPT or Writer or Jasper or, you know, some of these other tools that are more purpose-built for marketers? Yeah. I could talk about AI for maybe 30 hours. Yeah.
• 41:53
  [laughs] Um, I'm actually really, really into it, and Zapier just by the nature of the kind of company we are, are... We tend to have a lot of early adopters of tech period.
• 42:03
  So we've been thinking about and playing around with AI on multiple levels. Obviously there's the, the product side of it, like how does AI work with Zapier?
• 42:11
  But then there's also the process side of it, which is how do we as a content team incorporate AI in a way that makes our jobs easier?
• 42:19
  And we've actually found a ton of really interesting ways to do that that I would love to talk about. I have just a quick overview I'll share. Oh, amazing. Yeah. So my view on AI is that
• 42:30
  combining AI with automation actually frees us up to focus on the more creative, strategic, and fun work of our jobs.
• 42:38
  Um, I know that AI can be a little bit intimidating, borderline scary for a lot of people, especially for writers, 'cause there's this looming idea that-AI will be able to take the jobs of writers.
• 42:50
  I can definitely say that that is not something that I've seen. As useful as AI is, I think that we still need the human touch and that, like, writer to step in and get things the last 20% of the way.
• 43:05
  But what I am loving is seeing that the ways that it's taking a lot of the grunt work out of my writers' and editors' lives. So a couple examples of how Zapier is using AI. One is through strategy and research.
• 43:17
  So we just did an SEO keyword research project and total addressable market, TAM, analysis, and that process would've taken our SEO lead, I mean, weeks, months maybe to do, but he was able to use AI to categorize the keywords by content type, job role, subject.
• 43:36
  We are gonna be trying to apply AI to then help us give that content score that will tell us how to prioritize within that huge list of SEO keywords where we should start with creating content because we know it will lead to the highest value result for us.
• 43:54
  So that, that is just a great example of AI coming in and taking out the grunt work. Another couple examples are actually around content creation.
• 44:02
  So within Zapier, we have this tool called Interfaces where you can build bots, and I never would've thought that I would be a bot-building person. I don't code.
• 44:10
  You know, I'm on the non-technical side of somebody who works in tech, but I have personally built probably 10 different bots at this point.
• 44:19
  And just some examples, our editor of the blog, Deb, she built something called the Editor Bot.
• 44:23
  We did this during AI Hack Week, which was an entire week we had at Zapier, which was no meetings, just focus on how to use- Whoa... AI in your processes. [laughs] That's so cool. Yeah.
• 44:33
  So her outcome was this Editor Bot, which she created to basically take out the first couple rounds of revision from her process because when we're creating, thinking about creating content, and the fact that we're trying to create 80-plus articles per month, the cap is always gonna be her time.
• 44:52
  So the more that we can outsource the very first few stages of editing so that when it gets to her, it's in pretty good shape, and she's really just editing for voice, the better.
• 45:03
  We can produce more content, which will lead to more traffic, more sign-ups, and more revenue.
• 45:08
  So she created this Editor Bot, which she fed it essentially Zapier's voice and tone guidelines and some very specific guidance on how we think about humor, how we think about writing intros, how we think about examples.
• 45:22
  She essentially gave it her brain to some extent, and so now anytime we get requests from throughout the company to edit content, which can eat up a lot of our time, we have them first feed it through the Editor Bot, so it comes to us in a much cleaner format.
• 45:36
  And we also use it within the content team, too, just to sort of fine-tune our writing. That has been a really cool example of using AI to make our jobs easier and more fun. That's amazing.
• 45:49
  You know, I, I thought I was a Zapier power user, but I've never made a bot. So I guess I gotta get up to speed here. This is really interesting. Yeah. We'll use AI to generate fake customer stories.
• 46:00
  So in the case where we wanna show a Zapier use case but don't necessarily have an exact example of a customer using it, we can generate example use cases featuring AI-generated customers just to showcase people and show that automation inspiration.
• 46:15
  I also will call out that I created a Lane Bot, which I was going on vacation- Whoa... to Italy. [laughs] And so I was like, "Okay. I know my team's gonna have a lot of questions while I'm out,
• 46:26
  and I am definitely not gonna be logging on to Slack. I'm gonna be eating pasta and drinking wine in Italy."
• 46:31
  So I just threw together in, I'm not kidding you, like, it probably took me less than 10 minutes, a Lane Bot where I set it sort of my brain when it comes to content marketing, marketing strategy, and general management stuff.
• 46:45
  And I left it as a little bonus gift for my team. I was like, "Hey, I'm gonna be offline for 10 days, but if you have any questions, ask Lane Bot."
• 46:54
  And that was a bit more of, like, a novelty, but it just goes to show how easy and fun it can be to play around with AI. And there are also so many good examples within our broader con- or corporate marketing team.
• 47:07
  Like, we have an AI bot that will generate press releases for us that then our comms lead just has to edit. So there's a lot of opportunity, I think, to use AI to expand what your team is capable of when you don't have
• 47:22
  money for extra freelancers, when you don't have the extra head count, when you can't get more budget, AI can really step in and fill that gap. That is so fascinating.
• 47:32
  Maybe this is a dumb question 'cause I'm not up to speed on the interfaces part of the product, but where does someone interact with this? Like, the Editor Bot, like, the writer goes...
• 47:41
  Like, you give them a URL from Zapier. They go there. They plug in their article, and it runs it through the Editor Bot. Is that roughly how that would work? Yes. So
• 47:51
  inter- when you use Interfaces, it basically creates a landing page for you, and it's just ChatGPT and Zapier, and this is what it looks like. So this is Lane Bot.
• 48:03
  Uh, I haven't updated her in a while, so she's still on vacation, but this is what it, what the outcome looks like. Oh. So it's just- So it looks like ChatGPT... a very simple... It looks like ChatGPT. It's a chat bot.
• 48:13
  The cool thing is, though, it's... You've already set in the directive, so you don't have to reset that up every time that you're engaging with the bot.
• 48:21
  So I, um, I'm happy to share Lane Bot with your audience, too, if they wanna ask her any content marketing questions. Yeah. [laughs] That would be amazing, actually. I would love to share that in the show notes. Cool.
• 48:32
  We've covered so much ground. You're so prepared, too. This is just, like, amazing. I just can't tell you how much I appreciate all of this info. It's just, like, so rich and so good.
• 48:42
  I think I covered basically all of my questions. Anything else that, that you might wanna touch on? Let's see. Yeah.
• 48:48
  I, I feel like I re-Rapid fired so many different things at you, so if you ever wanna take a deeper dive on any of them, I'm more than happy to. Um- Yeah, no, this is amazing.
• 48:59
  I think, I think we covered everything that was on my list.
• 49:03
  I really wanted to get through the ROI, AI, and the evolution of content at Zapier, which I think has been just a really interesting thing to witness and be a part of. Yeah, yeah. Super cool. Okay, cool.
• 49:16
  I think why don't... I'll sort of start wrapping up, and then I'll ask you kinda like where can people connect and follow along, and we can talk about the Lane bot and, and, uh...
• 49:26
  I feel like we could do this for like a 10-part series, not even... Sometimes I'm like, "Oh, we should do a second one," but we could do like nine more. Yeah. I- Um [laughs]... I'm game.
• 49:36
  Lane, this has been so informative. There's just so much here.
• 49:41
  I can't tell you how much I appreciate not just, like, how prepared you are with, like, great information and great stories for folks listening to this podcast, but also just your willingness to share some of your work and the way you've thought about kinda the execution and operational part.
• 49:57
  Really, really also appreciate Zapier's deep commitment, not just to content, 'cause it's easy to sort of be a, quote-unquote, "believer," you know, but to back it by data and really go for it I think is cool.
• 50:07
  And a- also I think the AI thing is really fascinating, because it has created disruption and in some cases fear of like, well, should we do content?
• 50:15
  You know, like, should we pay a content marketer 90K a year if ChatGPT is $20 a month? Like, yeah, I feel like it creates this, like, dissonance in some folks' brain that they're having trouble getting over.
• 50:25
  But I think you're kinda proving that, that you can have both. You know, you can get the efficiency of AI and all the cool things that it can do while also, you know, creating stuff that people actually wanna read.
• 50:38
  I feel like that's the thing that I'm see missing in some of the AI conversations. Like, sure, you could create it really fast. Does anybody wanna read it, you know?
• 50:44
  And your team is, is really focused on that portion of it, so yeah. Thank you. Thank you from, from I think everybody listening to this podcast. We really... It's, it's been really fantastic. Thank you so much.
• 50:54
  I love talking about this stuff. I've learned so much from talking to other content marketers and from the Superpath community, so happy to c- keep it going if people wanna reach out and continue talking content.
• 51:06
  Amazing. And we'll obviously send folks to Zapier. You should go check, check it out. You know, you can see that all that's happening in real time. And how about you?
• 51:13
  Can we send folks to Twitter or LinkedIn or a personal website or anywhere else? Yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn at Lane Scott Jones. Twitter, my handle is Lane Scott Jones, and my website is lanescottjones.com.
• 51:25
  Okay, cool. We'll link to that for folks. Um, Lane, seriously, seriously appreciate it, and, um, I hope we can do this again sometime. Yeah, me too. Thank you. Take care.