Latest / Content, Briefly / Teal: Lia Zneimer's mission to turn 500,000 users into customers

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Teal: Lia Zneimer's mission to turn 500,000 users into customers · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [gentle music] When I started last January '22, we were at almost sixty-five thousand members, and we're getting ready to do some work with a press release, and I was like, "Can we round up to sixty-five?
• 0:12
  It just sounds better." And this past week, we passed five hundred and ten thousand members. Oh, wow. Yeah.
• 0:18
  And so we went from kind of struggling to figure out our product market fit last year, we are now on track to hit three million ARR by November of this year. So it's a wild ride.
• 0:28
  [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, we're talking to Leah Zanimer. She's the VP of marketing at a company called Teal.
• 0:39
  Teal is a B2C software product that helps individuals with their job search. So there's tools for resume building, for job tracking, and a few other things.
• 0:47
  There's a free version and a very reasonably priced paid version as well. They even allow you to choose whether or not you want a recurring membership or not, which I think is pretty interesting.
• 0:56
  We talk all about that, of course. We talk about some of the differences between B2B and B2C.
• 1:01
  We also talk about Leah's own career journey, and actually, when I reached out to her to be on this podcast, she was the head of brand and content at Teal.
• 1:08
  Between then and our recording, she was promoted to the VP of marketing, so we obviously chat a little bit about that as well. It's a really cool episode. Teal has five hundred and ten thousand users.
• 1:19
  So the scale of their operation is very different from many of the B2B companies that we talk to, and there's a lot of learnings in that. A lot that B2B marketers can learn from the B2C side and, of course, vice versa.
• 1:30
  So I think you'll really enjoy this episode, and thanks for checking it out. Also, just a quick reminder to check out the new and improved Superpath Slack group. It's now twenty bucks a month.
• 1:39
  You can also get an annual discount. Your employer should probably cover it for you, since it definitely counts as professional development. And I think what you'll find there is gonna be really exciting.
• 1:48
  There's some really interesting high-level strategy discussions, in-depth conversations on things like people management and career development. Honestly, it's awesome. I'm enjoying being in there more than ever.
• 1:58
  I think you will too. If you wanna check it out, just go to superpath.co/community and sign up there. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here with another episode of Content Briefly. Talking to a new friend today.
• 2:13
  We have-- We're just meeting for the first time. Leah Zanimer. Did I pronounce it right, Leah? Perfectly. Okay, perfect. VP of marketing at Teal, which is an amazing career resource. We're gonna hear all about that.
• 2:22
  And interestingly, when we started talking about this maybe a month ago, your title was Head of Brand and Content. So you've been promoted very recently, right? Last week. Well, congratulations. That's awesome.
• 2:33
  Also, this is like I wanna flag that for people listening right now. Like, we get a lot of career-related questions in the Slack group, so I wanna unpack that a little bit more.
• 2:41
  There's a future for content marketers as marketing leaders, which I think is fantastic. Leah, could you just introduce yourself?
• 2:46
  Tell us a little bit about you, some of the work you've done over the past couple of years, and then after that, we can get into some Teal-specific stuff. Perfect. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me.
• 2:55
  I was fangirling so much when I saw you DM me, not to mention you're living in my hometown, so super exciting connection there.
• 3:02
  But I love the work you're doing to support and empower content marketers, so honored to be here. Oh, thank you. [chuckles] Yeah, you're welcome. My name is Leah. I grew up in Colorado.
• 3:11
  I actually studied theater and English undergrad, so there was no time in my early career that I thought I wanted to be a marketer.
• 3:17
  I actually set out to be an actor and auditioned professionally for about a year and a half before pivoting and working in corporate communications at Scholastic.
• 3:25
  So got a really strong foundation in internal comms, social media, PR, then production, and then from there, moved on over to WeWork.
• 3:33
  My sister was one of their first hundred employees and encouraged me to come join the team and the mission, and I didn't believe her at the time that it was gonna be something incredible.
• 3:41
  I was like, "I don't wanna do real estate." [chuckles] But it was the ride of a lifetime.
• 3:45
  I learned so, so much in my five-plus years there, sort of starting as the first full-time social media hire on the organic side, growing through the ranks, building and developing an international team, and then being the head of the team by the time I left in May of 2020.
• 3:59
  And it was there that I was able to cross paths with Dave Fano, who's the founder and CEO of Teal.
• 4:04
  So that is what brought me back to Teal in the first place, was sort of following what he had been building ever since his WeWork departure and being really inspired by it. Oh, that's really cool.
• 4:13
  And along the way, also, you started a newsletter and community called MarketHer, which is career resource specifically for women, right? Could you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely.
• 4:21
  So that too was born out of this first round of layoffs that happened at WeWork in the fall of 2019, which in hindsight, it felt like a huge number of layoffs.
• 4:30
  Nowadays, unfortunately, based on what we've seen in 2023, it doesn't feel like the scope was as drastic.
• 4:37
  But at the time, it felt major, so I wanted to try to do something to help my peers in the marketing org who were being impacted by layoffs. So kind of hopped into action, and overnight spun up this newsletter.
• 4:48
  I reached out to friends who I knew were hiring at their companies and put feelers out, pulled together a newsletter, and it evolved to be a job board, a website, a regular newsletter, and doing that work sort of teaching myself to fill these gaps in my skill set as a marketer.
• 5:03
  I'd never done email marketing, so I was teaching myself Mailchimp and to build a newsletter, and I'm still not a graphic designer, but coming up with a color palette and a logo and building out a website in Squarespace, sort of self-taught.
• 5:15
  It was a wonderful way to connect with so many fantastic marketers and try to make a little bit of a difference in what's otherwise a really daunting process. Just a quick question about MarketHer.
• 5:24
  Is it still-- Do you still work on it? Is it still active? No. That's a great question. It's not technically still active. I've had a few offers from folks to buy the website, and I'm not ready to part with it.
• 5:34
  I'm very indecisive about it. I love the mission, and I loved being able to do it.
• 5:38
  That said, I just, in starting at Teal full-time, didn't feel like I had the bandwidth to do both and do them both well, and I really wanted to focus on growing and learning in this new company.
• 5:48
  So I did put it on hold temporarily.
• 5:50
  That said, I've been really inspired by some recent connections I've made on LinkedIn and people who are doing similar roundups in the job space, so I've been just toying around with restarting it and putting together a newsletter again.
• 6:01
  But I might need toHave some help to be able to do it bandwidth-wise, or turn to AI and figure out better automation workflows.
• 6:08
  We're three years in now at this point, and I should probably have some better systems in place. Yeah. Yeah. I hear you on side projects that are...
• 6:17
  Like, I have a newsletter that I sent from 2014 through 2021 every single Friday.
• 6:22
  I missed, like, two Fridays in that seven-year span, and eventually I just couldn't sit down on Thursday nights anymore and write a newsletter after working all... Like, I just kinda lost my steam for it.
• 6:35
  There's like 5,000 people on the list. Like, I don't know what to do with it, you know? Like, and I am keeping it because it's sort of the same thing.
• 6:40
  Like, one day I'm gonna do something with this, but I don't know what exactly. [laughs] Well, for sure, and it's tough.
• 6:45
  You feel like I don't wanna burn out either, in that honestly I'm on my computer or my phone all day, every day, and sometimes it's hard to force myself to, like, spend another few hours staring at a screen.
• 6:55
  If people are getting value out of it, it definitely incentivizes me, but I'll have to kind of wait and see where it goes, how it goes.
• 7:02
  But, you know, I always wanna be a resource, particularly for lifting other women up and helping them succeed in this space. So I'm here to do that as best I can, with or without the newsletter. Totally.
• 7:12
  And Teal seems like a great platform for that as well, which maybe is a good segue into the business. Could you talk us through who/what is Teal and who is it for? Sure. So Teal is an early-stage B2C startup.
• 7:25
  We were founded in 2019, sort of born out of Dave's personal experience as he was leaving WeWork, where he was our chief growth officer.
• 7:33
  And he really was aware acutely of this infrastructural disparity between the tools and resources that are available to companies and HR teams and those that are available to job seekers.
• 7:44
  So oftentimes companies will have an applicant tracking system, an ATS for short, to help manage the pipeline of all of their candidates and track every stage of the process, and job seekers really have Google Spreadsheets and not one central place to feel like they're in charge of their careers.
• 8:02
  And so he really set out on a mission to help change that and level the playing field for job seekers. And at this point, it's evolved to be much more than just a job tracker.
• 8:12
  But the thought is really, like, you have an app for almost everything else in your life.
• 8:16
  You have health apps that help you track your fitness and your water intake and your sleep and your meditation, and yet there's not, like, one central solution for a consumer-friendly app that helps you manage your career.
• 8:29
  We spend so much of our lives at work, and we identify so closely with who our work selves are that it feels like a miss to not have that, so we're building it. Right now it's desktop only, not mobile app.
• 8:41
  We hear you for anyone who is like, "When is there gonna be a mobile app?" But it is multifaceted at this point.
• 8:46
  In addition to the job tracker, there is a Chrome extension, so you can save jobs from 40-plus job boards directly to your job tracker.
• 8:53
  You can see the keywords highlighted of what are the most important things to highlight in your resume and gain insights from what the job is actually looking for and what parts of your own experience are important to highlight.
• 9:04
  And then the AI resume builder helps you pull it all together. You can do AI-generated bullet points and professional summaries and cover letters based on your personal experience, plus the job description.
• 9:15
  You can track and manage all of your outreach, your networking, your interviews, take notes to prepare. There are follow-up reminders. There are email templates.
• 9:24
  So it's this real, like, all-in-one solution for managing your entire career, and we don't wanna do it for you.
• 9:30
  We wanna be your companion in the process and really be a partner in your search, so the goal isn't to use AI to automate every single bit of it, but to really lessen the things that are the most time-consuming so that you can be freed up to spend your brain power on the things that matter most.
• 9:45
  That's awesome. And it's fascinating. It's been, like, a wonderful experience, an amazing opportunity to learn.
• 9:50
  And when I started last January '22, we were at almost 65,000 members, and we're getting ready to do some work with a press release, and I was like, "Can we round up to 65? It just sounds better."
• 10:02
  And this past week, we passed 510,000 members. Oh, wow. [laughs] Yeah. And so we went from kind of struggling to figure out our product market fit.
• 10:10
  Last year, November of '22, we rolled out a freemium model, and we made $3,000, and we were like, "Oh, I think this is good. Like, 3,000. We've got this."
• 10:19
  And we are now on track to hit 3 million ARR by November of this year. Amazing. So it's a wild ride. That's so cool.
• 10:27
  I'm glad you mentioned some of the revenue stuff, 'cause I wanted to ask, like, what is the monetization strategy like?
• 10:32
  Do the individuals pay directly, or is there a B2B side of the business where companies are paying for access to candidates or data or something like that? Right now it's primarily B2C.
• 10:43
  It's essentially a freemium model, so we have a base free version of Teal where we offer a ton of tools, resources.
• 10:50
  You have access to everything that you would have in the premium version, but sort of less detail when it comes to the keyword insights and analysis, and a little bit more limited AI generation.
• 11:00
  And then Teal Plus is the premium offering. You can pay by the week, by the month, or quarterly, and you can choose to have it recurring or not.
• 11:08
  We very much don't want people to feel like they're being taken advantage of, especially if they're in a financially sensitive situation, so it's very much in your control at all times.
• 11:16
  So right now that's $9 a week, 29 a month, or 79 for three months. Got it. That seems so reasonable. It's tough.
• 11:22
  I mean, it sort of depends, and that brings us back to a lot of our target personas and our ICPs, and we wanna be mindful and sensitive to job seekers who are perhaps on unemployment and don't have the financial resources, and yet there's this sort of misconception out there that job seekers are all unemployed.
• 11:39
  But it's not necessarily true. We hear from folks all the time who have been at their role for four or five, six years. They're ready for a change, but they're stuck, and they don't know how to break out of that.
• 11:47
  Or perhaps they were laid off from a really big company and have an amazing severance package, and they have the ability to invest in their careers long term, and they're willing to spend a little bit in a long-term investment.
• 11:58
  So that's been an interesting line to tread as well. That makes sense. Are most of the members in the tech and SAS space, or is this really for, like, anyone who's looking for help with-career development?
• 12:10
  Well, I'd say it's a little more industry agnostic than just tech, but our primary ICPs and personas are largely tech-focused.
• 12:18
  It's really geared toward knowledge workers and folks who are, we say, in the first quarter of their careers primarily, although not exclusively.
• 12:25
  And then it's available globally, but we're only really supporting English. But we've had messages from folks in Germany and France saying like, "Oh, I used this and it was just fine in German."
• 12:34
  I'm like, "I think that was accidental," 'cause I don't- [laughs]... think we have that. But yeah, so that is sort of our target audience at the moment. Got it. Okay, cool. That makes sense.
• 12:42
  B2C is interesting because it really opens the door to the number of people you could reach and probably want to reach, and then how you'll go about reaching them.
• 12:51
  So, it's a pretty broad question, but how do you do that? Maybe starting from a content perspective, but I am curious just on marketing more broadly, like, there's plenty of resources out there on career stuff.
• 13:01
  I don't know how much of that comes from businesses that are really built for the individuals rather than the businesses, like the job boards and the recruiters and the ATSs and all that stuff.
• 13:11
  So, I would imagine there's some green grass there still from a content marketing perspective.
• 13:15
  But I could also imagine that you could, like, do some keyword research and come up with a million keywords and start chipping away.
• 13:20
  So, a long build-up to a broad question, like, how are you thinking about marketing at Teal from a 30,000-foot perspective? Oh, gosh. I think you hit the nail on the head in so many ways.
• 13:30
  I think there are so many folks out there that we wanna help, that no matter how much we're growing, it still feels like just a drop in the bucket, 'cause we're like, "No, there are so many more people."
• 13:37
  Um, but I think one of the things we struggled with initially when approaching this sort of crowded field was what does set Teal apart and what makes it different and what makes it unique in its value prop, but also in the way that it looks and feels and sounds, and who are we as a brand that we can stand out amongst all of this incredible career advice that's out there, and some really bad career advice that's out there.
• 14:01
  But there are a lot of sites and companies, content companies, that are really focused on solid career advice and have been for a long time. The Muse is one that comes to mind immediately.
• 14:12
  It's like, well, why would you trust this unknown company instead of this established brand?
• 14:17
  So I think for us, the content strategy and the marketing strategy in general was really, and still is, rooted in wanting to listen first and then create content around the needs and the pain points of our members, and to think about it less from a what keywords are high-volume, low-competition, what would be the easiest things for us to try to rank for.
• 14:38
  I mean, that strategy is great, too, and that playbook is great in a lot of ways, and we were doing that in the early days and sort of following the standard content marketing playbook.
• 14:46
  And then I think one of our findings was that those pieces weren't really product-led or tying back to the product. So, for example, we did a piece on what careers are available in the capital goods space.
• 14:57
  And on paper, it looked fine from a keyword standpoint.
• 15:00
  There was lots of opportunity there, high volume, low difficulty, and yet our competitors were doing the same thing in the SERPs, and, like, kind of all there for the same reason, and we were still sort of missing what that differentiator was and what sets Teal apart.
• 15:13
  And so for us, we've really found from trying to lead with, like, a product-led growth angle. We experimented with a sort of middle-of-funnel piece last December on how to use ChatGPT to make your resume.
• 15:25
  And it was this kind of electric moment of luck and sweet spot for us in terms of tapping into this trending topic in an opportune time, and then really leveraging and inserting the product into that content.
• 15:38
  And that insight, ironically, didn't come from keyword research at all because ChatGPT wasn't really a thing yet. So I think this, I mean, is skating where the puck is going.
• 15:46
  I'm not a sports person, but I think that's hockey.
• 15:49
  But that was sort of our big bet at the time was, okay, we are going to take what we're hearing on social media, and we're gonna take those insights and apply it to repurpose for a different medium, and then that bet paid off big time and sort of led to an interim strategy where we then doubled down in the spring on all things AI and ChatGPT.
• 16:07
  So I'd say we, long story short, instead of trying to boil the ocean, we're trying to really think specifically about the pain points that our members face as it pertains to the products that Teal's in a place to be able to help solve, so we can position ourselves as a potential solution while not being overly salesy and still delivering value.
• 16:26
  Got it. That makes total sense.
• 16:28
  I would imagine there's a lot of evergreen stuff to write about, but also 2023 specifically has been such a crazy year, which probably opens the door to a lot of timely stuff as well, like AI, like you mentioned, kind of just disrupting everything.
• 16:42
  I haven't thought much about the use cases for job searches, but I'm guessing there's a ton of really cool stuff there. Also, just, like, in the tech space, like, the macroeconomic climate is a little weird.
• 16:52
  There's been tons of layoffs. Also, like, remote work, I feel like a lot of companies did it because they had to, now they're not sure anymore. It's kinda like a frothy time for someone on a job search.
• 17:03
  Things have changed a lot recently, and also 'cause I think a lot of these companies probably are still figuring out as well.
• 17:08
  Are there things besides AI that have become hot topics for Teal to cover as we, like, emerge from COVID, recession, AI, you know, just kind of all the other things that make this a different and unique time? Sure.
• 17:19
  So I think AI is definitely the one that comes to mind first just in terms of how much it's integrated into Teal's tools and the product itself, and so we've really leaned heavily on that from a content perspective.
• 17:30
  Something that I actually thought would resonate that didn't, we put together this layoffs playbook to really help people navigate every step of what to do after you've been laid off.
• 17:40
  And also coming from WeWork, we heard a lot about the rumors of, oh, there are layoffs coming, there are layoffs coming, and you know, what to do with that anticipation, how to best prepare. Right.
• 17:49
  So, this was actually last June that we started working on this, and in hindsight I look back and I was like, "Oh, knowing what I know now, I think I would've approached this very differently."
• 17:57
  We didn't create the piece with content distribution in mind or with keyword research in mind, and we just created it as, like, a central hub of something to be helpful to folks so that we had something to send them when we heard people reaching out to say they'd been impacted by layoffs.
• 18:10
  So I think that helped build a lot of goodwill, but it didn't really do much for us from a marketing standpoint, although the layoff angle is something we see more and more of, unfortunately.
• 18:20
  And so that's been an interesting way for us to step in and offer support.
• 18:24
  And I think oftentimes people are hungry for something that feels like an easy win or a hack or a shortcut, and it's not as glossy or as fun to talk about, like, the hard work that goes into something.
• 18:37
  But we do find that our content around job boards, or we have an amazing Teal member who put together a list of 300 VC firms and their talent pools, sharing these-Job boards with people or showing them LinkedIn isn't the only place to look for jobs.
• 18:51
  That for us is always buzzier and trendier and more interesting than like, "Here's how to identify [laughs] metrics for your resume," 'cause no one wants to think about doing the hard work of their resume.
• 19:01
  So we do wanna help alleviate that pain. So we've definitely seen an uptick in interest around support for layoffs, remote work. I think you totally nailed it.
• 19:09
  We actually had a post last week that was one of our best performing in a while that was all about how to find remote work these days now that remote jobs are more difficult to come by, and sort of how to help yourself stand out as an applicant in that really crowded, competitive market.
• 19:22
  Right. It's interesting, as you were talking about that, I was just thinking about some of the differences between B2B and B2C.
• 19:28
  Like, I think you mentioned there's 510,000 members, which I'm assuming that encompasses freemium plus paying users. Is that right? Yeah. So, like, for a B2B company, like, you'd kill for that.
• 19:38
  Also, the price point maybe is a lot higher, or there's other factors that go into it, like it's a team of people making a decision rather than just one. And so I'm curious, like, 510,000 people is just so many.
• 19:49
  Are there certain data points that you look at to help you get a feel for is what we're doing working in terms of, like, helping more folks convert into a paid plan? That's one piece of it.
• 19:59
  And then two, do you have any structured ways to collect feedback from those people about is the content you're creating helpful? What questions do they have that they don't have answers to, and things like that?
• 20:08
  Both are fantastic questions. So to your first point about measuring and how we track, I think we can safely say that we have a lot of work to do on that front.
• 20:17
  And to be able to better put numbers behind everything that we do in terms of what we can do to increase conversion, and that's honestly our primary goal of 2023 and beyond, is more focused on conversion and retention.
• 20:31
  It's a tricky space because we haven't historically wanted to focus on retention because we've wanted people to not need us. Hmm. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. It's like Tinder. Success means you don't need the app.
• 20:40
  Totally. So then it's thinking through, well, what does this life cycle look like? How can we start to encourage people to stay?
• 20:46
  Even if they're not paying for Teal Plus, stay involved, stay up to date with your resume, even when you're not job searching. Always be job searching so that your materials are ready to go if and when the time comes.
• 20:56
  So that's been a shift for us, and we're still trying to figure out what we can actually best measure to impact conversion. So I'll have to get back to you on that one.
• 21:04
  But I do think what's cool is that we do have really clear data on every week, every month, every day, you know, how many folks are moving jobs into each stage of their job tracker.
• 21:14
  So we're getting and collecting all of this proprietary data. Oh, interesting. Okay, what do the trends look like right now in September of 2023? How many people are moving jobs into the accepted stage?
• 21:24
  And based on that, how does that compare to last September? Are we seeing any trends in the hiring space?
• 21:29
  So we're actually looking to bring on a data analyst to help us really dig into a lot of the data and be able to do some storytelling and marketing around numbers, and also providing social proof for people who want to know more about what their chances of success could look like with Teal.
• 21:44
  On the B2B front, we're not there yet, but I do know there are so many exciting and awesome opportunities that could come into play in the long term.
• 21:52
  The closest we've gotten to B2B at this moment is sort of working with outplacement services to provide- Mm-hmm... support for employees as they're being let go, and help them transition in with their job search.
• 22:03
  So that's definitely one opportunity. But there are endless opportunities out there. Yeah, yeah, totally. In your WeWork days, working on social primarily, right? Is that B2B?
• 22:13
  Like, are you trying to market to companies who could rent office space, or is there a B2C component of that too?
• 22:19
  And I'm, I guess the reason I'm asking that is I'm just sort of curious how your social media background and any other B2C experience you have, like, influences the way that you think about the stuff at Teal today.
• 22:29
  That's a great question. WeWork was an interesting one in that we were doing both B2B and B2C at the same time, and not necessarily always in the clearest fashion.
• 22:38
  I think I was there at a really interesting moment in the company when it was probably around employee 250 in 2015, and at the time it was a much more B2C.
• 22:49
  We were targeting entrepreneurs and solopreneurs who had the buying power and the decision-making power to rent office space, and they didn't need a boss, and they were their own boss, and there was no one else to consult about those decisions.
• 23:01
  And then as the company matured and evolved, and as the product evolved, enterprise solutions were introduced, and it became much more of a flexible office space solution- Right...
• 23:11
  globally for companies looking to set up business in a new way. So that really shifted, and our marketing shifted along with it. But I do think my comfort zone is more in the B2C space. Sure. No, that makes sense.
• 23:22
  I am curious about your social media background too, because I think it's one of those things that is tangential to content marketing.
• 23:28
  So, like, when I think about, you know, kind of the median Superpath member, they're probably a content manager or head of content at a SAS company. Social media is on their radar.
• 23:39
  It's probably not a specialty of theirs, though. And I wonder if you sort of during your days, like, focusing on that sort of felt the same way about content marketing.
• 23:46
  It's, like, on your radar, but, like, not the thing you're working on every day. And, like, how a social and a content team could work together for better performance, right?
• 23:53
  Like, whether it's just distributing content or brand building or probably a b- number of other things that I'm not thinking about. Sure. No, I think that's a great point.
• 24:01
  I think I feel very much like I did not realize the relationship between social media and content marketing for a long time, and in fact, it's still something I'm wrapping my head around.
• 24:12
  I think that I absolutely came in through the side door, if you will, of content marketing. Like, I did not have a background in it on paper.
• 24:19
  I was full of self-doubt, not even sure totally what content marketing meant or what it entailed.
• 24:26
  When I started at Teal, I was in a fortunate position to be able to interview directly, and my past track record and experience sort of paved the way for me to take on a title and step into a role that I felt unqualified to fill.
• 24:39
  And over the past year and a half, I've done everything in my power to learn, to be involved, engaged, to get to know folks in the community, turning to resources like Superpath to help me better understand what content marketing looks like.
• 24:51
  And it was only then that I really was more aware of, oh, this is what we've been doing all along.It's just I didn't know the name for it, and I didn't have, like, the vocabulary to describe what it was we were doing.
• 25:02
  So I think the more that content marketing and social can really work hand in hand and be partners and not just think of social as the distribution channels, not just think of content marketing as the blog, the better off everyone will be.
• 25:16
  I have this sort of funnel analogy in my head that doesn't really make sense.
• 25:19
  It's just how I think of it, where I sort of think of the blog and content marketing strategy as, like, as if you're thinking of a marketing funnel, and that's top of the funnel.
• 25:28
  And then you're taking these longer form pieces of content or these longer hero videos, and you're chopping them down, and you're making a bunch of other pieces of content, and then that gets smaller.
• 25:37
  And then at the bottom here, I sort of think of organic social media and the social listening layer and all of the content pillars and the topics that are being really sourced in real time from people who are listening and contributing to the conversations and then building that up to this point where they, like, meet in the middle, and it's this sweet spot of the two talking to one another.
• 25:57
  Not sure if that really does it justice, but I sort of think of the, like, top-down and bottom-up approach as being both effective mutually. They work in tandem.
• 26:07
  I love that actually because I think for most B2B content marketers at least, they think of social as, like, "Hey, we wrote this blog post.
• 26:14
  I guess we should put it on Twitter and see if anybody clicks on it," [laughs] you know?
• 26:17
  And I feel like there's maybe a hesitancy for some B2B companies to invest heavily in social because maybe they think that no one wants to follow our brand or maybe our brand isn't strong enough and we don't have, like, a well-defined voice that social would give us a platform to actually use.
• 26:33
  Or maybe I think some folks actually are afraid of the dependence on algorithms, right? Which content marketers are also, right? Whether it's Google or even Gmail, right? The way that they filter out some e-mail.
• 26:44
  Like, we are all dependent on these algorithms to some degree. So are there any tips you have for a content marketer or content marketing team who's...
• 26:51
  Maybe they, all they do right now is they just auto-schedule a few tweets and LinkedIn posts when they publish a new blog post.
• 26:58
  What might be the first one or two things that they could do to improve their social presence? Sure. So I think a lot of it starts with asking questions before making any decisions.
• 27:07
  So I think thinking through where your audience is and where they're most active, where those decision-makers are, who your target audience is and who those personas are, and how this content could meet them where they are.
• 27:19
  I feel like when people are scrolling, they wanna do the least work possible, and you have to kind of catch their eye in a quick way.
• 27:26
  If you do have a blog post, let's say, and you are looking to distribute it, I think a couple of easy wins are to take that written content and slice and dice it up into a few different posts.
• 27:37
  So you can do a Twitter thread where you can have, you know, not word for word what's in the blog post, but you can summarize the high level concepts and thread the content.
• 27:47
  You can turn that into a listicle post for LinkedIn. You can then take the five key takeaways from every LinkedIn post you create and turn that into a carousel.
• 27:57
  You could do one pull quote from a subject matter expert in that blog post and turn it into a graphic post. There are ways to quickly put together a social first video and have a native video content.
• 28:09
  You could do a poll on a topic pertaining to that content and then link to the article in the comments of the post.
• 28:15
  Right there, you get five posts at least out of this one blog post without having to actually link directly to the post itself.
• 28:23
  Amanda Natividad coined it zero-click content, and I think there's really something to it in terms of keeping people on platform and meeting them where they are and not requiring them to have to do more work than needed to get value from your content.
• 28:36
  Yes. I'm glad you brought that up 'cause I wanted to ask you about that.
• 28:38
  It's like I feel like measuring the click is the worst thing to measure because it just incentivizes you to behave differently versus if you choose something else, maybe it's engagement impressions, literally just anything else besides trying to get people back to your website, you can treat the medium so differently.
• 28:55
  Absolutely. And we're finding, too, that a lot of our website growth has come from not us sharing links on social. A lot of it has come from... Well, I have to give credit.
• 29:04
  We have an incredible director of growth marketing, Matt Sturkenberg, who's just been a phenomenal asset to the team, and so a lot of our website growth is very much organic search, and a large part of that has been on the back of his programmatic SEO strategy.
• 29:18
  Oh, interesting. And just ability to create content in that space and in that way at scale that me sharing links to social platforms every day would not drive a fraction of that kind of traffic or long-term brand equity.
• 29:33
  So it's just investing more resources where we're gonna see more bang for our buck and then using social as our playground to sort of test and learn openly and then route these gems that we find, like, "Oh, ChatGPT content is performing really well for us on TikTok.
• 29:47
  Let's turn that into a written piece." That's sort of where the sweet spot is for us. Right. It's not so much about linking to Teal's career hub in every single article. Right. Right. No, it makes sense.
• 29:58
  Programmatic SEO is interesting to me. I feel like every company has a programmatic SEO opportunity, and about-5% of them pursue it because you need, you need a growth-minded person to run it. It's sort of content.
• 30:11
  It's mostly SEO, but also you probably need some developer resources behind it to bring it to life, and I feel like that may create enough friction that most teams are like, "Ah, we have other stuff going on, so we're not gonna work on this."
• 30:22
  But just flagging that for people as like the ratio of effort to the traffic potential could be very favorable, you know, if the right opportunity is there.
• 30:31
  Huge, and I'm so grateful to be able to learn from Matt firsthand as he builds all of this out, has been such a master class.
• 30:37
  I mean, I still would not know how to do it on my own, but just to see the use of AI too to supercharge the process, and we have over 1,500 now resume examples on the Teal website that didn't exist a year ago.
• 30:49
  He's working on a resume synonym builder to help you find those words when you're like, "Ugh, I can't say the word assisted with one more time on my resume" [audio breaks] you. Yeah.
• 30:58
  [laughs] And it's an SEO play, but it's also really helpful for people, and they can get value from it. So those are sort of our, our main intentions through doing programmatic. Yeah. That's cool.
• 31:07
  We talked to a friend of mine, Jan Asplundh, a few weeks ago on this podcast, and he runs a company called Sacra.
• 31:13
  They do tons of interviews to help create the content that they write, and they did a very interesting thing. They repurposed the transcripts in a programmatic way.
• 31:22
  So like they broke out every Q&A into its own page, and then they used ChatGPT to kinda refine it because it's not like perfect, I ask a question, you provide an answer. It's not that clean.
• 31:32
  So they used AI to clean it all up, and now they have thousands and thousands of individual pages, each with a question which could be someone's query.
• 31:40
  Essentially like a long tail query, plus an answer from a subject matter expert. I thought that was just like a really cool way to take all this existing stuff and do something with it. Love that. So yeah, programmatic.
• 31:49
  I'm still trying to figure out what Superpaths is, but I feel like there's something out there that we ought to do with it. There's a there there. Yeah. Somewhere there.
• 31:55
  I have a checklist of stuff that I like to ask just about everybody. We talked about data a little bit, but I also wanna ask you about team structure. What does the marketing team look like at Teal?
• 32:03
  So I think of ourselves as still relatively small, and I... People like Eric Daudi, who are out there running the world as a one-person content team. So shout out to him doing the work.
• 32:12
  But I do think, although we're a small team, we're scrappy and we get a lot done.
• 32:16
  So Dave, who's our CEO, functions as our head of growth at the moment, and Matt, as I mentioned, is our director of growth marketing and essentially oversees everything programmatic, technical SEO, CRO efforts.
• 32:28
  He's been really helpful on some email work that we're doing. And then on the marketing and content side, our team at the moment is three folks, and we are looking to grow the team in the coming months.
• 32:39
  But right now, we have a social media manager, who actually was a recruiter and has pivoted into social. Oh, cool. So we're leaning heavily on her subject matter expertise, which has been fantastic to learn from.
• 32:51
  A video producer who has been running point on all of our YouTube and TikTok content, and a senior copywriter who's wonderful and has been doubling as an editor for the moment.
• 33:01
  Though we are looking to bring on probably a content marketing lead or content marketing manager who can really serve as an editor to keep the content engine so that Katie can be freed up to focus more on writing, and she also writes our newsletter.
• 33:14
  So wanna be able to empower her to do more of what she loves and sort of lessen the editorial workload a little bit.
• 33:20
  And then we're hoping to bring on this editorial role, and then a influencer marketing lead in the coming months. So that is gonna be another big bet for us as we continue into the end of the year.
• 33:30
  So we also work with some consultants and freelancers. That sort of comes and goes in wave, depending on...
• 33:36
  We've gone back and forth a few times of utilizing the agency, bringing it back in-house, using an agency, bringing it back in-house, and struggling with a little bit of like, well, what's most cost-effective for an early stage startup?
• 33:48
  I think at this moment we're really finding that having it in-house just allows us to be closer to the product, and we have sort of a unique opportunity here to focus on product positioning in a way that's just best understood by folks who are in-house.
• 34:03
  Sure. So we're now going back to working with more freelance writers who've been fantastic in terms of being able to support us in these efforts.
• 34:10
  But I would love to build, you know, an even bigger roster of folks to be able to work with, and we've also talked about are there ways we could incorporate folks who are recruiters who are open to work right now because recruiting's been hit so hard?
• 34:24
  Are there ways we can tap into them for written content?
• 34:27
  Are there ways we can work with candidates who may not have been the right fit for a role at Teal but who are really strong writers and interested in the content space and understand the product and the mission?
• 34:37
  Or can we double down on working with people internally who are strong writers? So kind of getting scrappy and creative about where we get our writing from. Yeah. I like that.
• 34:47
  One thing we do ask some folks about is if or how they work with a sales team, but I'm assuming Teal doesn't have a sales team. We don't have a sales team. Yeah, you- I guess you don't need one.
• 34:55
  [laughs] Is there a customer support or customer success that is sort of able to fill the need? The need being, like, hearing what people are saying.
• 35:02
  You know, like sometimes you get ideas from content, kinda making sure you're all on the same page. Absolutely. Great question. Emily Woodward is our secret weapon.
• 35:09
  She is-Really the kindest, most wonderful soul, and she is spearheading our customer support efforts under our head of operations, VP of product and ops, Lara.
• 35:20
  So Emily is really, like, boots on the ground, hearing every single question, complaint, possible objection that comes in, and then we are working on the back end.
• 35:28
  She puts together great reports sort of outlining thematically what the pain points were. We're able to pull from that internal Slack channels to sort of come up with ideas around where pains are.
• 35:38
  And then she also is wonderful at identifying members who are willing to talk about their experience and share their success stories, and that's something we're also excited to lean into in Q4 and hopefully early next year is sort of this more emotional member storytelling part of the job search.
• 35:54
  It's been very product focused, which is great and I think helpful in terms of the brand building, but we really want to dig into some meatier storytelling. Yeah.
• 36:01
  I think about that with Superpath a lot too is, like, I could write all day about content marketing and scratch, like, 0.0001% of what there is to say about it.
• 36:10
  Like, the real power of a group of people like Teal or, like, Superpath on a smaller scale is that every individual there has their own story, and those are the things collectively that make it really powerful and interesting for other members, just to hear the huge, wide variety of experiences that people have, and give them probably inspiration too, you know?
• 36:31
  Like, on the Superpath side, like, content marketing careers are not super clear after content manager. You know, like, kind of beyond that, it's like, "Well, now what?" You know?
• 36:39
  So, but, like, so hearing from someone like you and, like, the other 17,000 people in the Slack group, it's like there's so much you can do and so many, like, cool stories and ideas, and I'm always trying to find new ways to unearth some of that.
• 36:50
  Sounds like you're kinda trying to do the same thing there too. Absolutely.
• 36:53
  And I think you brought up a good point earlier before [laughs] we started recording, but in terms of the career pathing, content is so hard because you're so versatile in many ways. You can be a generalist.
• 37:02
  You can choose to stay the generalist path. You could go in a more specific niche. You sort of have the luxury and the paralysis of choice. And it can be a tough decision, and there's so much that we don't know.
• 37:12
  Like, you don't know what you don't know. And so how are you supposed to know what you wanna do or what career path is right for you?
• 37:18
  And there's no easy answer to that, but I do think reaching out to people, networking, chatting with other folks in the Superpath community and learning more about their stories or finding folks that you follow and engage with on LinkedIn whose stories you find inspiring, reaching out to them.
• 37:33
  You never know. Have a coffee chat. See if they're willing to talk about how they got to where they are.
• 37:37
  We used to run a podcast called Nonlinear that was all about nonlinear career journeys and sort of how most of us don't have a linear career path, and they're just stressful to figure out what you want and how to switch gears, but it's doable, and many of us do it many times over.
• 37:51
  Totally. One cool thing about career stuff is that say you're trying to learn about content strategy. People are sometimes a little cagey about it. You know? It's like their secret sauce maybe.
• 38:01
  They don't wanna share stuff or whatever. But in the career space, like, when you want help, people rally around you. People tend to be incredibly supportive. They'll tell you everything.
• 38:11
  Like, people are more transparent about salary than you might think they are. They'll give you tips.
• 38:15
  They'll tell you all kinds of really inspirational and crazy stuff, and they're just more open about it than they are about almost anything else. One of the reasons I like Superpath, 'cause the vibes are good.
• 38:23
  Like, people just... It just, like, naturally comes that you just, like, see someone who has a question, you wanna help them.
• 38:28
  I also think one of the things that was interesting to me about content marketing in general is the ability to just log in to Ahrefs or Semrush and see all of the information about anyone else's- Yeah, yeah.
• 38:39
  [laughs] It's very public, yeah. That is pretty public.
• 38:41
  And, like, I can't log in to any other company's, you know, LinkedIn and see how their posts are performing, but I can certainly get all of the intel on competitors and non-competitors and other brands, and it's fascinating.
• 38:52
  So that, what's the point in...
• 38:54
  I mean, I understand the point in gatekeeping, but I do think that the, like, rising tide lifts all ships mentality, the more we continue to, like, pay it forward and do good and share the knowledge, the better off we all are.
• 39:06
  Yeah. That's great. It feels good, which probably makes it fun to work on, too. Six months from now, what's different about Teal's marketing? That's a great question.
• 39:14
  Every question you ask, I start with, "That's a great question." Can you tell I'm stalling for time? [laughs] So six months from now, personal wish list.
• 39:22
  I think our personas will be much clearer in terms of who we're targeting with every single post, and that content will be, like, specifically created for those personas.
• 39:32
  Right now it's a little bit blurry around the edges, I think, as we suss out who our members are, and I think we have some cool data coming that will help shed some insight into that and just paint a clear picture, and I would love for our marketing to reflect that.
• 39:45
  I also think we're gonna take some bigger bets on some influencer marketing and partnership work in the next six months or so, some exciting podcast sponsorships at the end of the year that I'm super excited about. Cool.
• 39:58
  So that's a new space for us. It's, like, sort of taking a bet and really trying to do what we can six months from now.
• 40:04
  I mean, we really want January to be the go-to brand for anyone who's thinking about job searching in the new year. New Year's resolution is to land that new role.
• 40:14
  So kind of getting our ducks in a row now so that come January we are ready to hit the ground running.
• 40:18
  So I would also love for six months from now, us to be marketing ourselves in a way that's positioning ourselves as a longer term career growth solution, not just for the job search, but also for the moments in between, with sort of this idea that we're with you every step of the way, even if you're not actively searching.
• 40:34
  I like that. Plug for everyone listening to go check out Teal. It's free. You can check it out. It's the moments in between, too. It's not just, "Oh, crap. I got fired. I need a job," or, "I'm sick of this job.
• 40:43
  I need something new," or, "I've hit a ceiling, and I'm, I'm ready for a promotion or raise that I'm not gonna get here." So yeah, just a plug. Go check it out. Thanks.
• 40:51
  And I think the other thing I'm really excited about for the next six months i- in terms of our marketing, growing the team and seeing what superpowers and talents people bring to the team.
• 41:01
  'Cause I know there's so much more I don't know stepping into this new role.
• 41:04
  I'm, like, super excited to learn and grow and continue to build out a dream team of people who have fresh thoughts and ideas and are feeling really motivated to tackle some of these big problems. Love it.
• 41:15
  And how about for you personally? Where can we send folks to connect with you on social or a personal website or anywhere else? I would love to connect. I'm probably most active on LinkedIn, actually.
• 41:24
  So it's just my first name, last name is my profile name. Feel free to connect with me there. And yeah, I'm trying to sort of lessen my screen time these days on as many platforms as I can. Fair enough.
• 41:35
  [laughs] That's probably good advice for all of us. Oh, well, do as I say and not as I do, but, uh- [laughs]... and don't look at my screen time please. But I'd say LinkedIn is the best place to connect. Okay, cool.
• 41:45
  Your LinkedIn is really good, so I'll link to it in the show notes so people can check it out.
• 41:48
  Like, some of the job roundups you do are really good, and, uh, you've posted good career advice, so we'll make sure to send people there. And Leah, thank you.
• 41:54
  Seriously, it's just, like, so great to chat, so great to get to know you and learn about the work you've been doing at Teal. And congratulations on all the progress you've made so far.
• 42:01
  It sounds like, you know, there's a really powerful mission here, and that you've made a ton of awesome progress so far. Thank you so much, and thank you for the invite to join.
• 42:08
  This has been so fun, and I love the work you're doing, so I'm excited to continue to support it. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Hopefully we can talk again soon. For sure. Thanks so much. Thanks, Leah.
• 42:17
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