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Kapwing: Greg Ciotti on the future of content marketing · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [gentle music] This episode of Content Briefly is brought to you by our friends at Editor Ninja.
• 0:06
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• 0:24
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• 0:38
  [gentle music] I love writing. I loved my role, but I was like, I do think that in the future, most content marketing leaders, they will have this video production side to them.
• 0:49
  It's not like you have to become a video producer, but it's like you have to know your strategy for video.
• 0:54
  You have to think video first in a lot of cases, and that's just like a huge shakeup for people that come from a super strong editorial background. [gentle music] Hey, everybody.
• 1:04
  Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode. Today, I talk to my content marketing hero, Greg Ciotti.
• 1:09
  Seriously, no single person has been as influential as Greg was, particularly in my very early days when I was first getting into B2B SaaS content marketing. This is like twenty twelve-ish.
• 1:21
  I shower Greg with compliments and make him blush, and you'll get to hear all of that. But really, Greg's story in content marketing is pretty amazing. He's had a fascinating career. We talk all about it.
• 1:30
  We talk also about his current role at a company called Kapwing, which is a video editing and repurposing SaaS tool.
• 1:38
  He's extremely bullish on video as the future of B2B content, and hearing him explain why now is the time to invest in video, I have to say, is quite compelling and also really exciting.
• 1:50
  So anyways, I'll let Greg explain all that. He'll do a better job of it than I will. Hope you enjoy this episode. Also, just a quick reminder to check out the new and improved Superpath Slack group.
• 2:01
  It's now twenty bucks a month. You can also get an annual discount. Your employer should probably cover it for you since it definitely counts as professional development.
• 2:07
  And I think what you'll find there is gonna be really exciting. There's some really interesting high-level strategy discussions, in-depth conversations on things like people management and career development.
• 2:17
  Honestly, it's awesome. I'm enjoying being in there more than ever. I think you will too. If you wanna check it out, just go to superpath.co/community and sign up there. [gentle music] Hey, everybody.
• 2:30
  Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly. Talking to Greg Ciotti today. Greg, I'm gonna ask you to intro yourself, but first I'm gonna fanboy for a minute. I'm sorry ahead of time.
• 2:41
  I'll try not to be too dramatic. When I think about, for myself, getting started in content marketing in twenty twelve-ish, you know, I looked to your work at Help Scout and your personal blog as the truth.
• 2:57
  I read everything you wrote, and it had truly had a really significant impact on the way I thought about content, the way that I pursued different career opportunities.
• 3:07
  I still, I still go back sometimes and think about posts you wrote for Help Scout. Like, there was one about principles that power our company blog. Some of this kinda like meta stuff.
• 3:16
  It wasn't just like ultimate guide to customer support tickets or whatever, you know. There was another you wrote about easy reading is damn hard writing. Oh, yeah. Like, I have that one saved, you know. I still...
• 3:27
  Actually, for a while, I had an if this, then that thing set up that it would send me that article every year as a reminder to reread it 'cause I liked it so much. Oh, man.
• 3:36
  Anyways, among many other posts, like I really, really truly admired, especially like at that very kinda nascent stage of my own career. Yeah. Really looked up to it.
• 3:43
  So anyways, we don't start all of our podcasts this way, but I had to start that off because that is something I thought about for a very long time. I'll be blushing through the whole episode now. That's like- Yeah.
• 3:52
  [laughs]... way, way too kind. I mean, it's, it's everything anybody who wants to write would love to hear, so I, I super appreciate it. And like, the same back to you, definitely.
• 4:01
  I have to give you the compliment that there are very few people that you can reasonably say are like a steward for like an entire discipline or like profession, and like what you've done with like Superpath is definitely that.
• 4:12
  How many hundreds of content leads could you get on this show who'd probably say the exact same thing about you and all your writing at Animals and your own site and then the community too?
• 4:21
  So I gotta send it right back in terms of being the de facto like steward of the discipline. Couldn't be in better hands. And no, he does not have note cards for me to read off of on the side.
• 4:30
  That's totally just- [laughs]... how I feel about it. [laughs] Oh, well, that means a lot, and I really appreciate you saying that. Will you intro yourself?
• 4:36
  You know, in my mind, I sometimes still think of you as the Help Scout guy just because that made such an impression on me.
• 4:42
  You've done so many other things since then, which was probably almost ten years ago at this point. So could you catch me up and just like kinda fill people in on the rest of your career and yourself? Yeah.
• 4:52
  I'll try to keep it compact, but yeah, I think career arcs are pretty fun 'cause they, they often are very different.
• 4:56
  Yeah, I mean, I got my start like generally to building websites, and that led obviously to the world of SEO and kinda just like creating content, and that led to some freelance, uh, like you could call it consultant work, but I was way more hands-on, obviously, especially early in my career, like actually writing a lot of stuff.
• 5:13
  So I wrote for companies like Buffer and Kissmetrics, and they introved me. I think Leo, the co-founder of Buffer, introed me to the team at Help Scout, particularly Nick Francis, the CEO.
• 5:23
  I just thought they had like an awesome co-founding team. There was sort of this promise of being able to work under Ivana, who was my boss at Help Scout for like five years. Best boss ever.
• 5:33
  Like, she better be listening. Maybe I'll send her a clip of at least this segment.
• 5:36
  But yeah, like I jumped at the opportunity to work for them like full-time based off of a mix of stuff, many things, and then worked there for maybe four years and some change, like four and a half, something like that.
• 5:47
  And then in between my next position, I, I was like, well, I just have the bug to like work for myself. Like I have the itch to do it. So I was kinda more strictly consulting for a couple months.
• 5:58
  And I remember, this is true. It sounds like revisionist history maybe, but it, it was true.
• 6:02
  I wrote down like on a notepad, I was like, "But if these companies reach out, I probably would jump at the opportunity, or maybe I'll even try to like network my way into knowing someone from these companies."And one of them was, was Shopify.
• 6:15
  I never thought that a Canadian e-commerce company would reach out for, like, a role, but the world of marketing is very small.
• 6:21
  I worked with their director of comms back in the day on some, like, guest posts I had written for them, and they had been hunting for a head of content for the kinda like English region, which is their largest kinda region for them, like North America.
• 6:34
  So they'd been searching for months, and they reached out, and yeah. Then I went to Shopify. I was there for about five years, moved to Canada.
• 6:41
  I was just telling you I completed my citizenship test, twenty like history and civics questions.
• 6:46
  So [chuckles] there was a, a really nice kind of like a, a side aspect of that experience, which was getting to experience Canada and Toronto and all that.
• 6:53
  And yeah, Shopify definitely opened me up to like what is a content program at like true scale sort of look like. I definitely built a lot of like, honestly, empathy for people who ran programs like at that size.
• 7:04
  I know it's often easy to have commentary about like, "This doesn't really make sense to me," or stuff that bigger companies are doing, but when you're owning that dashboard, it's a different story.
• 7:13
  Maybe we can get into that.
• 7:14
  After that, I was on the growth team for about four years and got into the comms team for my last year at Shopify, working with a, a friend of mine, Courtney Symons, who had kinda spun up a new team.
• 7:25
  Courtney was previously Tobi Lütke's writer. Tobi's the founder and CEO of Shopify. So he spun up a new team in comms helping with like product comms and storytelling.
• 7:34
  And then after that, I really loved the comms work, but I really wanted to get back to growth and kind of like marketing for like acquisition and didn't wanna really like lose my skill set there.
• 7:43
  So the opportunity opened up here at Kapwing. So Kapwing's like a video creation platform. I wanted a forcing function for a long time to like get myself to take video very seriously, like much more seriously than I was.
• 7:55
  So yeah, a opportunity opened up, and they were true believers in content all the way up to the CEO. They already had a great program rolling and just wanted to take it to the next level. So that was my last move.
• 8:05
  Got it. You know, you left out something really important, which is that you graduated from the University of Delaware. [laughs] Where I also graduated from. Yeah.
• 8:11
  University of Delaware, famous for producing excellent content marketers. [laughs] The launchpad of content marketing careers as we're learning. I know there are others. We should find them and get them together. Yeah.
• 8:20
  See how powerful that network is. Yeah, definitely. It's... I think it just speaks to how small the world marketing is generally, actually. I get reminded of that over and over. Totally.
• 8:29
  I wanna ask you about a bunch of things related to Kapwing. Could you talk about some of the content at scale things you dealt with at Shopify?
• 8:35
  That just like kinda caught my ear as something that I imagine going from Help Scout, which I think you were the first marketing hire there, right? Yes. Probably relatively small company when you got there.
• 8:44
  I mean, Shopify over those five years, I imagine, grew exponentially.
• 8:49
  And we actually, we had, um, Cameron Jenkins on this podcast a few months ago, and that was basically the focus of the podcast was how do you create great content when it's complicated? Yeah.
• 8:58
  Complicated because of it's global, and there's multiple products, and, you know, there's a sales team, and there's a Shopify Pro op or whatever. That's not even scratching the surface really.
• 9:08
  But not a very specific question, but I would just be curious if you could talk a little bit about what content at scale means for a company like Shopify. Yeah.
• 9:15
  One important thing to note is probably like something that most of Shopify's marketing struggled with for at least a year, which was exactly that.
• 9:23
  At one point in time, marketing was considered more of like a service line, so meaning it was like very centralized. It was responsible for really marketing the entire Shopify platform. Everyone felt pretty stretched.
• 9:34
  It led to some, like, really tough trade-offs because as I'm sure Cam talked about, I'm sure things are at least a little bit different in terms of what team owns what nowadays.
• 9:42
  But when I got there, like two thousand and seventeen, you know, marketing was like, yeah, figure out how to grow point of sale, but also figure out how to grow the flagship online store.
• 9:51
  But when Shopify Payments comes out, figure out how to grow that. And the other thing is that the product marketing managers were more embedded in those product lines.
• 9:59
  The product marketing managers were all amazing and great, but it did feel sort of like death by a thousand cuts because every product line has their product marketing manager that needs to get the word out about this product.
• 10:09
  But you on the growth team are trying to balance net new merchant growth with, "Oh, we have to get merchants to adopt Capital, and we have to figure out a content strategy for that." So it was really tough.
• 10:18
  There was a year where I think it kind of all came to a head, and Shopify kinda reorganized how marketing worked as like a direct result of that.
• 10:25
  So that's probably one story to tell is just like sometimes it's so tough that it requires a company-level, like change to support the marketing team to get it to work because, you know, I definitely feel like there was a period where it just simply wasn't.
• 10:37
  We just were having to say no to a lot of requests. Like, it was hard to do.
• 10:42
  It sucks when a new product is coming out and content, who's excited to play a part in supporting the launch or in supporting adoption, like, has to be like, "No," like we, we're literally out of time, and we have to work on net new acquisition and stay focused on that.
• 10:55
  So anyway, the big change for marketing was that we became kind of decentralized.
• 10:59
  The growth org then became led by Luke Levesque, who's an amazing sort of growth leader, along with Morgan Brown, who you may have seen or maybe you've read his book. Again, another amazing sort of growth leader.
• 11:09
  And we were sort of all given in the growth org the free reign to sort of like focus on net new merchant acquisition, standard merchant growth, like non-plus growth.
• 11:18
  Basically, as we saw it, like the tip of the flywheel, new merchants invite new folks to develop for the platform because there's a lot more customers they can reach, so on and so forth.
• 11:26
  So like, new merchants really are the tip of the Shopify flywheel, and we were given permission, so to speak, to like focus exclusively on that.
• 11:33
  And then other teams became like embedded marketing teams within each product line.
• 11:38
  So then you have retail with its own marketing team and its own content marketing manager, and payments and money all have their own sort of marketing folks too. So there was still a great need for collaboration.
• 11:47
  If you wanna say it this way, like I don't think we saw it this way, but if you wanna say like the growth org sort of had the keys to the main channels, that was partially true.
• 11:56
  We were sort of like stewards of the big marketing channels. So folks would definitely work with us like, "Oh, we need to get something up on dot com," or, "We need to publish on the blog."
• 12:04
  And we would just build systems for them to do that and to do that, like, safely and without creating any issues for growth or any other teams, right?
• 12:11
  So like for instance, we had a really super documented process of like, "If you're a PMM or an embedded marketer, like here's how you get something up on the blog, and here's how you avoid any kind of headaches or tripwires and stuff like that."
• 12:22
  So that was a big part of figuring that out.
• 12:24
  No one is surprised to hear that a content program at scale, a ton of the work is actually just figuring out how, how to work with so many people [chuckles] and so many different end objectives that everybody needs to achieve.I think the other thing was just the need for much more like granular data.
• 12:39
  I think a great person to talk to, by the way, if you haven't, is Derek Gleeson, who's at Shopify.
• 12:44
  Derek, I sort of joke, I feel like I followed him around on the internet for like a decade trying to like hire him or work with him, and we finally were able to at Shopify. Yeah, yeah. So he's, he's amazing.
• 12:52
  He ran Conversion XL for a while, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of unfair that he's also like a great writer and storyteller too.
• 12:58
  Like 'cause he's, [chuckles] he's like so sharp on the data and analysis side that he's also a great writer. It's just like, oh man, what's he not good at?
• 13:04
  But yeah, like he came in and we sort of worked together figuring out, for instance, how do we track content performance across individual topics?
• 13:13
  And our data science team at Shopify worked across all of growth to help people figure out what pages, campaigns, channels are not only adding leads, like the most surface level thing, but adding customers who actually retain.
• 13:27
  So you end up with this view into the data that's like, oh, and I'm just gonna make stuff up here, none of these are actually the truth, but like, oh, product photography topics tend to add retained active merchants, RAC.
• 13:39
  They, they add retained active merchants at like an exponentially higher rate than SEO as a topic or something like that.
• 13:45
  And we can literally see not only like a page by page breakdown, but like a topic level breakdown or like a time-based breakdown of, oh, this cycle when we were updating a ton of pages, we added a ton of new merchants then, and it's kind of dropped off in this most recent cycle.
• 13:59
  What happened? What changed? So that was a huge thing. Literally just the amount of data you did actually need to be successful because there's so many pages that you're managing.
• 14:09
  When you have all of these resources to create, you need to be really sharp about what you're creating because as I'm sure that the team that's there today can tell you even more so, when you're able to create hundreds of pages during a month, you better have an opinion about what you should be making, 'cause you can really steer the ship the wrong way.
• 14:25
  And so it's a different level of like thought put into it because, you know, a smaller team might justify the time working on a small set of stories during the month or one huge story they think is gonna make a difference.
• 14:35
  But a team at scale really needs like a lot of data, a lot more input to kind of figure out like what should we be publishing about and what is working.
• 14:43
  So that's one example of that, but it was like a dramatically different scenario versus like Help Scout, where we were kind of like, [chuckles] I mean, certainly for the first year at Help Scout was like, "Follow your heart."
• 14:53
  [chuckles] I'm being like, I'm just like teasing like we weren't that- Yeah, yeah.
• 14:55
  We weren't that bad with data, but it was kind of like we were driven by instinct and what we felt like customers were telling us more anecdotally or just what we felt would do well versus try having that conversation when you're responsible for like tens of millions in revenue and thousands of pages, right?
• 15:10
  Yeah. Final note there is just like so, so many other key players at Shopify that were also a part of that. Like that was not in any way like me or the content team kinda thing.
• 15:20
  Like again, the SEO team, incredible, probably one of the best in the world. Data science team, and then I think the team that's there today is running with the ball even further and faster. That's awesome.
• 15:31
  Was content at scale an acquired taste?
• 15:34
  All the kind of wrangling and complexity that came along with it, was it interesting from day one, or did you find yourself having to kinda reset your expectations on what content marketing means when it's not just like, "Hey, let's get this blog post out today?"
• 15:46
  I definitely think so.
• 15:46
  I definitely had to reset my expectations because, again, when you're, you're much smaller, the individual shots on goal matter a lot more versus when you're at that level of scale, it's more so like how you're steering the ship.
• 15:59
  If you're getting things directionally right and you're using the data to do things in a directionally right way and a really efficient way and you're scaling out your output and you're making decisions, like for instance, you make this conversion change and you know it's gonna affect hundreds of pages, that could be the biggest thing you do all cycle.
• 16:15
  Versus you're dealing with tiny levels of traffic, very little output, you're sort of more going for, I guess it's not this exactly dramatic, but you're more so going for like Hail Marys.
• 16:26
  At scale, it's about getting yards every single play, versus when you're smaller, you're taking bigger swings, you have to be bolder. So there's really, really interesting aspects of both.
• 16:36
  There's probably a lot more sort of like almost like detective work when you're operating at like a, a large scale, 'cause sometimes performance will shift in some way and you really have to figure out and deduce like why is that happening.
• 16:46
  It won't necessarily be something like obvious. Versus when you're working on a small team, like I think the fun is in your back is against the wall in a way.
• 16:55
  So, okay, we can't just pair a match up with Zendesk's output about customer service. We can't just sort of go head-to-head with them on certain channels, like we have to do something different.
• 17:05
  So that's kind of the fun when you're working on kind of a small team. I enjoyed both. I'm back at a smaller company now. I don't think that that's super conclusive on like which one I enjoy more.
• 17:13
  I was sort of just like ready for a change, but yeah. Right. Good segue into your current role at Kapwing. Could you give us first just an overview of the business? What's the product? Who's it for?
• 17:23
  And then what is your role like? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so Kapwing is a video creation platform. We do sort of build the product with content marketing and organic marketing teams in mind.
• 17:34
  We don't expect and really don't like require anyone to be a professional video editor to work with Kapwing.
• 17:39
  That's one of the really, I think, nice things about it.We have a very small marketing team, I would say, relative to the company size. It definitely shows our investment in marketing.
• 17:47
  So we're, like, a five-person marketing team. You have three folks that focus on content across video production, editorial, and then sort of like content design, copywriting.
• 17:58
  Then you have our product marketing manager, and then you have myself. So I report into one of the cofounders, Julia, who's, who's also the CEO.
• 18:06
  Kapwing's sort of like approach, or I guess like philosophy on marketing, has always kinda been content first. Julia and Eric, the other cofounder, they both worked at Google.
• 18:15
  They have a shared sort of philosophy on the importance of not only search, but just great original content generally. And so Kapwing was built on top of that.
• 18:23
  I really sorta came in to help the founding team, like to take the reins of the program and help the founding team focus on other areas of the business.
• 18:31
  And so yeah, I came in with something that was already working, which is great, and have tried to just help build out processes and a more disciplined approach to content and the telemetry part, too.
• 18:41
  But it's been super fun. Yeah, I've, I've definitely been enjoying it. Who are your customers? Are you selling into other SAS companies?
• 18:46
  You know, like when I hear words like creator in almost all video stuff, I kind of naturally associate that with social media influencers, more maybe they're kinda like prosumer-type customers.
• 18:57
  Is that true, or is there a different set of customers you're trying to reach?
• 19:00
  Mostly, we focus on marketing teams, specifically like content marketing, and I would say if you wanna broaden it just a bit, organic marketing teams, non-paid teams, or organic growth, if that's people's preferred term.
• 19:11
  So yeah, we have really cool customers in like Google and Intercom and Spotify who create content across podcasts and video explainers, product demos, and all that sort of stuff. Got it.
• 19:23
  There's definitely a strong B2B presence in terms of they are B2B businesses as well.
• 19:29
  I think that might be more of a symptom of organic video works so well for B2B, whereas coming from the commerce world, yes, like great original creative video content matters for e-commerce too, but there's a lot more of a paid component to that.
• 19:42
  Whereas in B2B, I think organic content generally, and especially organic video, goes a long way. So we see a lot of teams like that using Kapwing. That's really cool.
• 19:50
  I'm wondering, is your interest in running content and growth there linked to where you see video in content marketing right now?
• 19:59
  [inhales] Yeah, I literally just the other day was talking to someone and they were like, "I don't even know why we write blog posts anymore. It's so much work. It takes forever. It's expensive.
• 20:05
  Like, I don't even know if anybody reads them."
• 20:06
  [chuckles] Video's not the only answer to that, but I do feel that, like, video seems like is about to have its heyday in B2B as ChatGPT doesn't totally kill, but like definitely changes the way we think about written content.
• 20:19
  Yeah.
• 20:19
  I will say, like as a, a start to this, or just like an interesting anecdote that relates to this is, I just actually was talking to John Collins from, uh, maybe it's previously Intercom and Ramp, just yesterday, actually.
• 20:30
  And you know, John is, at least in my opinion, like a fabulous writer, longtime journalist, and they just have like the highest editorial standards.
• 20:38
  He has a similar viewpoint where it, at the very least ten years ago, and probably less than that, looking at the company blog as the place to start your content marketing program, like not just this thing on the website to spin up, but actually like we're gonna invest the content marketing program there first, was sort of like, it was like a default.
• 20:56
  It was like, "Of course we're gonna do that first." Whereas now, if you were, like John does, and I think if I were to land at a company that was truly starting from scratch, it's a way tougher question.
• 21:06
  And, and I think fewer and fewer teams are doing that. Like, fewer and fewer teams are going with the blog first. I-- There's a lot of reasons for that.
• 21:13
  That's like a probably whole podcast episode on its own, but we could, we could discuss some of them.
• 21:18
  But definitely like at least part of it is like, back in my time at Help Scout, the rigor that we were applying to opportunity sizing or tracking like link velocity and just links across pages and internal linking and all the stuff that we did extremely well at Shopify, thanks in a major way to the SEO team there, we weren't doing any of that [chuckles] at Help Scout, and we were ranking just fine.
• 21:38
  Like, it was literally like what a lot of people rally against today of like it was literally just like a Google sheet with keywords in it, and we were just knocking them out.
• 21:45
  And at that time, you know, it was such a different place. It was much less competitive. We were actually doing fine just with that extremely simple approach.
• 21:52
  Now, we went the extra mile, at least I like to think so, in like the actual content execution, but it was just a simpler time. It really was. So you have that.
• 22:00
  I mean, you also just have the fact that video creation has gotten so much easier. And so the hurdle of not having the technical expertise or not having the gear, that hurdle is dramatically lower.
• 22:11
  And then, of course, the platforms where we all convene and discuss things as a community and discuss things socially, like all these social platforms, they weren't nearly as big.
• 22:20
  So you building up a presence on Twitter, I mean, I remember when people were sort of like the first account that got a million followers. It was like this huge deal. Yeah. Yeah.
• 22:27
  And now people wouldn't blink at those numbers anymore, right?
• 22:31
  Then you just have these platforms get so big, and they all prioritize video that it really starts to challenge the whole old playbook of like start with the blog and expand from there.
• 22:40
  So to answer your question more directly, though, like, definitely yes.
• 22:43
  I came from a very editorially heavy job in my comms role at Shopify, but before that, in the growth role, we had saw really explosive growth from the YouTube channel.
• 22:54
  Big shout-out to Connor Fife, who was the manager of the YouTube channel. So we were seeing really great growth from video platforms, video first content programs or video first series and things like that.
• 23:04
  But I, I just got so back into like the editorial side of things that I was like, "I can't miss this. I can't miss this train." I love writing.
• 23:12
  I loved my role, but I was like, I do think that in the future, most content marketing leaders, they will have this video production side to them.
• 23:19
  It's not like you have to become a video producer, but it's like you have to know your strategy for video.
• 23:24
  You have to think video first in a lot of cases, and that's just like a huge shakeup for people that come from a super strong editorial background. Yeah.
• 23:31
  You know, one thing I find interesting about video versus text is that what happened with text-based content over the last ten years or whatever is like it went from Leo at Buffer as the founder writing blog posts.
• 23:41
  Like, that's very easy to get that stuff out. I mean, the timing of it for sure, but also because he's the founder. He's like sharing unique ideas.
• 23:49
  And then the content itself over the years has just been pushed down and pushed down and pushed down to the point where it's like ghostwritten by a freelancer as part of a package of a hundred other blog posts that are written by freelancers targeting keywords.
• 24:01
  So it's like pushed all the way to the bottom. The thing I am so curious about with video is you can't do that.
• 24:05
  One of the things that was lost in that is that the personalities, the subject matter expertise, all of that isDe risked to the point where it's not actually interesting anymore. But video like forces you to keep that.
• 24:17
  Yeah. You have to have a person talking probably who knows what they're doing and understands what they're talking about. Definitely. The medium enables a higher level of discourse in a way text just doesn't. Yeah.
• 24:27
  And I think that the formats that are most approachable, again, for people who are more marketers first, are formats that are gonna focus on making the production good and the content great.
• 24:38
  And then like you said, like that naturally just leads into it doesn't have to be a strict one-to-one interview style, but it's gonna lead to just more of a conversational format where you do bring in people who are like, yeah, they shared hard-won experiences.
• 24:51
  They talk about lived experiences. I can't send my assistant to this call [laughs] to talk about my time here, there, everywhere. Yeah. You have to get me, like, you have to get me on camera.
• 25:01
  So yes, video forces your hand to like have the expertise show back up because there is not an easy way to sort of just like kick it to the intern or something.
• 25:09
  It's definitely a shame that that seems to be how a lot of written content is degraded over time. But yeah, video sort of doesn't allow it, and then video can just go so much further.
• 25:19
  You can get so much more out of it, so you deliver one great video, and we can talk about like the repurposing treadmill.
• 25:24
  I think people do take repurposing a bit too far, but video is able to reach so many other places versus text.
• 25:31
  And I'm sure writers, I'm a, still a writer at heart too, I'm sure we'd love to have it another way, but that's just the reality of things, you know? Yeah, totally.
• 25:38
  You know, I feel like I should just clarify for the freelancers listening that I've worked with a lot of amazing freelancers over the years, so I'm not trying to downplay the importance of the role. Yep.
• 25:46
  But I feel like there's definitely a shift happening right now where the company that was producing a hundred blog posts is thinking very carefully now about whether or not it's worth doing that any longer.
• 25:56
  And I am curious on the videos, like what are companies doing? Like are you able to cite an example or two of what Kapwing customers are doing with video that's working well? Yeah.
• 26:05
  I would say to your point actually, and something we're doing ourselves, is the marketing team is actually setting up like internal experts, honestly, in a similar way that they used to for like really truly expert-led written content.
• 26:17
  I'll give you an example that like I'm sure many folks have seen, but I'll give you kind of our inside behind the scenes how we do this.
• 26:24
  So I think taking an executive, in our case, we work with Julia the most often, and we have this whole system for we set up talking points via text. We write out all the talking points.
• 26:34
  It's not like a hard line script, but it's just sort of like, "Hey, these are what our customers are talking about. This is input from the product roadmap.
• 26:41
  These are things that performed well on your account in the past based off of the data that we looked at." And we set up a bunch of talking points for her. She adds her thoughts.
• 26:48
  Again, this is all happening in a Google Doc at first. So for the writers out there, it still starts with great writing. So she adds her thoughts and comments, "Oh, I think we missed this topic," blah, blah, blah.
• 26:58
  And then we do what I think any great content team needs to do, regardless of the format, is we make it turnkey for her. She just shows up, sits down.
• 27:06
  We have the cameras, the lighting, the audio set up, all ready to go, and then she's able to just fire off within like an hour enough content to last her account like three months.
• 27:17
  And I think folks, for instance, like Chris Walker does this really well on LinkedIn. He's someone that we take a lot of in-inspiration from in terms of his like execution.
• 27:25
  You're able to get a surprising amount out of execs from video if you do your job and make it turnkey for them. And I understand for bigger companies this is much more of a hurdle.
• 27:35
  I understand that I couldn't go to Toby at Shopify and be like, "I'll be over in an hour so we can [chuckles] record all this stuff for your social." Yeah. But yeah.
• 27:43
  I imagine like a lot of folks at Superfare are working with smaller startups or maybe they're working with someone who's kind of like an exec in the department or the area or something.
• 27:51
  We're seeing that work really well because these folks have an outsized pool just by who they are. So if you could get them to say it, they are like an amazing vehicle, and they're on camera, they're on screen.
• 28:01
  You know it's coming from them. You know it's not something ghostwritten, it's in their words.
• 28:05
  But that's a huge thing, is figuring out the folks in your company that are great vehicles for the messages you wanna get out there, and then just making this process as easy as possible for them and really front-loading their work on the like points of view side of things, right?
• 28:20
  Like Julia, the most that she adds in terms of the prep work is just the points of view and the stuff we should be talking about, and then she just gets to show up and record, and we have video from that, right?
• 28:30
  So that's something I really love. I will give a shout-out to, uh, Intercom's team. They did this like bots, I think it was like Bots and the Bees video that I thought was like incredible. It was so funny.
• 28:41
  I won't spoil it for folks that go and search it. I'm sure you'll be able to find it. It's just an example of mixing humor with just enough production quality with a really strong, compelling message for the product too.
• 28:52
  It's like everything you would want in a marketing video.
• 28:54
  Um, because like not only is it great and memorable, but I'm sure it's something their team was able to come up with and not blow a ton of budget necessarily onto. So I thought that was like another great example.
• 29:03
  There's so much you can do, but I think I would just like emphasize it still works the same way.
• 29:08
  Content needs to set up what are the main points of view, who do we need to be the vehicle for these messages, and then how can we manage the production in a way that makes it easy for anyone to kinda like contribute to this?
• 29:19
  So that would be kind of like the mix of things I'm saying. Like very people first, and then also just very entertaining, funny, witty stuff tends to be the ticket for video. Yeah.
• 29:27
  I'm curious how you think about the platforms, right? Like you create the video, it gets published, YouTube, social platforms, on the website as well.
• 29:34
  I personally am like a little intimidated by creating native content for different platforms because like you gotta understand the platform really well to do it really well. How important is that piece of it?
• 29:44
  Like understanding the way that LinkedIn wants the video, how long it should be. Yeah. Even the dimensions. Like all that minutia that probably makes or breaks the success of it. Yeah.
• 29:53
  I would say broadly, one of the challenges that video introduces is you can do so much with repurposing, or more broadly than that, atomization, like taking ideas or originally created videos bespoke to each platform, right?
• 30:08
  But it can create this very complicated, almost like flowchart [chuckles] of like, once we have this asset, how do we take it to this platform? I will say up front, like number one, it's just tough.
• 30:17
  It's something that you do learn.Via experimentation. You can help yourself by writing down what you've learned too, what your team is saying.
• 30:24
  Certainly it's not as simple as the old days of publish blog post, send to newsletter, and kinda just worry about subject lines and things like this. Mm-hmm.
• 30:32
  I'll walk through a couple of things we do to try to make our, our life a little bit easier with that.
• 30:36
  Number one is actually just getting really, really clear on the messages we wanna get out there so that we don't allow this tailored to the platform reality pull us too far away from what we really should be saying as a company.
• 30:49
  Because that's very easy to do. You figure out a format that really, really works for TikTok, but works is initially being defined by like the number of views that it's getting or something very surface level.
• 30:59
  Whereas I think if we get clear on these are our talking points, these are our main messages, these are kinda the things we want people to associate with us over time or want people to really buy in and believe over time, like a shared belief we want them to have with how we see things, that helps because it just keeps you grounded.
• 31:16
  It doesn't let success on one platform start to pull you away from what you should be talking about or what the content should be about. So that's number one.
• 31:23
  Number two is we just actually end up with guidance for each platform based on our own experiences.
• 31:28
  Like the hook for this platform needs to be way shorter, way snappier, way more crisp in our opinion, versus over here where we, we-- feels like we have more time, and we gauge that by like, oh, you know, we're able to keep people on this platform for longer with like almost the same video.
• 31:44
  So that's one thing. I think the other thing too is you can start with like a kind of anchor format, like an anchor format for a video.
• 31:52
  Podcasts are a very popular one to start with because you can clip so much content from it. Mm-hmm.
• 31:57
  But then spelling out, okay, after we produce this anchor asset, where is it going to go, and what changes are we going to make to have it fit the platform better?
• 32:07
  So don't just take any random clip from your podcast to Shorts or to Instagram Video or to TikTok. Literally have an opinion and to find out about how long should it be.
• 32:18
  I mean, all of them should have subtitles, but like when and, you know, what kind of like video elements do we add to this? How should the hook kinda be structured for each?
• 32:26
  It's definitely like a learning process, and it's just something we try to like feed back in and document.
• 32:31
  Then the next time that we produce like a anchor asset, we kind of at least have a, a plan about what we need to do for each clip.
• 32:37
  And sometimes you're just wrong and it doesn't work, and sometimes we go back and revisit the stuff that we have kinda documented before.
• 32:45
  But that is a lot better than just coming in every single Monday with a bunch of video that you could potentially cut up and zero guidance.
• 32:54
  I mean, your video producer, if you have one full-time, will get a lot of gray hairs early if you, if [chuckles] you leave them to just that, right? And you probably won't learn a lot too. [laughs] Yeah, yeah.
• 33:03
  So it's, it's tricky. There's no like... We haven't found like a super easy way, but I think that's kinda how we try to make things a bit easier. Yeah, yeah. This is so interesting.
• 33:11
  You know, I'll just briefly tease that one of our next guest is gonna be a guy named Ben Tolson, who's the video content lead at Podia. Awesome. And we're gonna go deep on how he uses video to help grow Podia.
• 33:21
  So there's more video stuff coming.
• 33:23
  And part of my interest in this is literally just this morning, so we're recording this on, uh, October twenty-sixth, we released our State of Content Marketing report, and a lot of people, almost a surprising number of people, expressed quite a bit of optimism about content marketing.
• 33:37
  Like just given where things are, I always thought people would be a little bit more pessimistic than they are.
• 33:41
  And in talking to a lot of content marketers, I think one of the things that folks are starting to rally around is a return to content that is created primarily for a reader or a listener or a watcher rather than an algorithm.
• 33:54
  I feel like one of the really cool things about video and audio in particular is that the personalities really shine through, and I feel like we've really lost that in written content.
• 34:02
  Like the type of content you were creating at Help Scout in twenty twelve was personality driven. It was your name, your face, a very distinct style.
• 34:09
  There was more to it than just writing for customer support related keywords or whatever. Yep.
• 34:14
  I am cautiously optimistic that the future of content marketing actually is gonna be so much fun because SEO is not gonna die totally, I'm sure.
• 34:22
  But like we can kinda put aside this old, tired playbook that so many companies have been running and start to embrace new things. Like for a lotta companies, creating video, it's gonna be brand new.
• 34:32
  They will have never done it before. Yeah. And it's gonna be a new medium to learn. It's gonna be fun. They're gonna try stuff. It's gonna fail. They'll figure it out. The next thing will succeed, you know.
• 34:39
  And like there's been so little experimentation in written content recently that I think a lot of us in this industry are just really hungry for something new and something that is so much more focused on the people than it has been.
• 34:51
  So anyway, rant over, but I'm really excited about this. I completely agree.
• 34:55
  Two quick additions I would add is, yeah, number one, it's funny that video has been positioned as the, the next big thing for like ten plus years ago. Yeah, yeah.
• 35:02
  [laughs] Which I don't actually think is like a, a condemnation of these marketing reports. I actually think it just represents how far we can go with video. I think it's actually just the truth.
• 35:12
  Yes, it has been the thing we've kind of all agreed on is gonna be the next big thing, and that's been consistent for years and years and years, but there's still so much runway. So it's just frankly true.
• 35:21
  Uh, it's just maybe bigger, a bigger opportunity than anyone thought that it was gonna be. And then the second is just I see a pattern in these. [chuckles] I don't wanna sort of like compliment myself too much here.
• 35:31
  I'm more so complimenting the folks like you who kinda have this point of view.
• 35:35
  But the more daring content marketers I think are more optimistic about the future because there's almost a sigh of relief that there finally is a shakeup. Yeah, yeah.
• 35:42
  Because the past couple years have been so running the old playbooks to the most optimum extreme, and there hasn't been anything kinda fresh and new.
• 35:50
  So yeah, for whatever kind of like scary things may be introduced in the past couple months here, at least it's something new and interesting, and it's gonna require us to all like kinda rattle the tree a little bit and break out of this lull that it feels like the discipline has been in for a little while.
• 36:05
  Yes. You mentioned something earlier in this conversation about your Help Scout days, which I, I know I keep returning to, but you had mentioned like you couldn't go head-to-head with Zendesk on every channel.
• 36:14
  So you had to ask yourself, what can we do different? Yeah. I hope that that is the question that every content team is asking themselves as they head into twenty twenty-four. What can we do that's different?
• 36:23
  New concept, new idea, new format, new whatever.New people. Not necessarily replace people, like let personalities come out. I don't know. It'll be different for everybody, but it is possible.
• 36:32
  Like, I'm even imagining early twenty twenty-four, you go on Twitter and people are sharing content again, and you're actually interested to see what they're doing. Yeah. It's exciting. I think it's really cool. Okay.
• 36:41
  Can you tell us a little bit about content marketing at Kapwing? How much is video? How much is text? Like, could you give us even just a rough idea of what your content strategy looks like? Yeah, for sure.
• 36:50
  So we definitely have multiple parts here to go through.
• 36:53
  So I would say something interesting or maybe important to note about Kapwing is a lot of the way that we sort of like capture folks who are already sort of problem or product aware is actually through landing pages.
• 37:02
  And for us, the content team does own the landing pages too.
• 37:06
  And something to know about Kapwing's product is it has many, many different use cases, so you can do lots of things in it because it's a video editing platform.
• 37:14
  And then huge portions of the product are available either for free or without an account, maybe with some limitations, but, like, you can actually complete a full workflow potentially without even creating an account.
• 37:25
  So that has, like, made landing pages super valuable, especially for us, because we can create pages for so many different use cases. I wrote a blog post recently that kinda runs through the different page types. Mm.
• 37:35
  Saw that, yeah. Yeah.
• 37:36
  I mean, everything from something that's named and labeled as kind of like a tool, like video resizer, all the way to things that are more purely use case that probably start with a verb, like repurpose video content or something, right?
• 37:49
  That's important to note because that plays a huge part in our sort of like capture demand content or organic strategy.
• 37:56
  The other parts of our content strategy are much more around creating demand for Kapwing, building awareness of Kapwing, and I'll go through each of them really, really quickly.
• 38:05
  But-- And I, I already touched on this before, but the first is actually working with our founder, Julia.
• 38:10
  We're definitely gonna ramp up investment there in the coming months, but we've sort of nibbled at this and gotten some initial traction and some initial data back on, like, what's working for her.
• 38:19
  But we help her with her presence on LinkedIn, sometimes with off-site appearances.
• 38:24
  And so that consists of workshopping talking points with her, recording video with her so that she has video clips throughout the entire, like, quarter. And then we of course, like, manage her calendar and stuff too.
• 38:34
  But she's a very active participant in terms of the opinions and points of view. So that's one way that we sort of approach social meets video, I would say.
• 38:42
  The next is our YouTube channel, which I believe at this point has maybe a hundred and eighty-two thousand subscribers. Oh, wow. Yeah. Been built up many, many years.
• 38:51
  We sort of mix tutorial content with some story-driven stuff there. So that's another aspect of how we approach video.
• 38:57
  That channel and, and that sort of content program is much more tied with search and landing pages as well.
• 39:02
  So, like, we'll create a video for every main landing page, or we'll create tutorial videos for search queries that Google is saying a video is actually the intent here, where they're literally ranking a video first, right?
• 39:14
  So that channel is focused pretty exclusively on that. We then have kind of like a second channel for our video podcast, where I'm either talking to my colleague, Jack, who's our video producer.
• 39:24
  We call that "The Shortcut." We've just started bringing on guests. I mentioned John Collins will probably be our first guest for that.
• 39:30
  We make great use of the clips from that long form show, and that shows up on all of our brand social kind of accounts. And then we have sort of like created from scratch or, like, original videos for social as well.
• 39:42
  And there's a mix of content there. I'll, I'll give, like, just one example, so I'm not talking people's ear off.
• 39:46
  But, like, we love to do, like, tech flex videos, where we're actually gonna sort of show off something really interesting or unique you can do with the product, but it's done in a way that feels like a creator made the video.
• 39:58
  These are not super uncommon, but I, I think Jack, for instance, does, like, a really excellent job of just adding kinda, like, surprise and delight to these kind of, like, tech showcases, like product showcases.
• 40:07
  So that's one type of asset that we would create, like, from scratch for social video first, right? And then, of course, don't count the blog out just yet.
• 40:14
  We definitely still pour a lot of time and energy in our blog too.
• 40:18
  Everything from kind of more straightforward product announcements to taking maybe a major significant talking point from the podcast, drawing a line around it, and then Megan, our editorial manager, will write, like, a full post from that.
• 40:33
  So, like, not entirely from scratch, but just, like, taking that core material and really fleshing it out and doing it justice in the blog too.
• 40:40
  She'll also, like, occasionally write some other more roundup style pieces and stuff like that too. But I would say we're very much like video first. We're a very video-heavy sort of content program.
• 40:50
  We mostly use landing pages to sort of, again, capture demand. We don't do a lot of capturing demand through the blog.
• 40:56
  And the blog is our place to, like, have what we really want a standalone idea to stand on one authoritative post. We take it to the blog. So we'd like to have all the programs kinda work together.
• 41:07
  Hopefully, it feels like they work together. At least in my head, they, they sort of do, but that's kind of our content mix as it stands today. That's really helpful. How do you think about measuring all of that?
• 41:17
  Are there a handful of metrics that you really care about? Yeah. I mean, we definitely hold ourselves accountable to new revenue, but the more operational metric that we use is product qualified leads or PQLs.
• 41:30
  So these are folks that, based off some behavioral things that they do in the product, are sort of like we view that as they're raising their hand and saying they are our ideal customer.
• 41:40
  So, like, for us, that would be, like, a person who's using Kapwing for professional work, and they are on a team, and that team is either, like, comms or social media or marketing.
• 41:49
  And then, like, you know, they've exported a product in the past couple of weeks, or they've done so within the first week of using it, stuff like that. We use that as marketing's operational sort of North Star.
• 42:00
  And the way that we'll sort of dice that up to, like, take a closer look, I'll try to think of, like, some examples offhand. But for instance, we'll maybe look at last touch attribution for PQLs across our landing pages.
• 42:11
  So it's really helpful to uncover, like, oh, man, it's last touch, so yes, you're missing some part of the story there, but these pages really seem to do a good job of getting people into the product, and they stick around.
• 42:22
  Or we'll sort of use maybe self-reported attribution for the channels that are off the website because we do need people to kinda give us a hint of where they first heard of us, right?
• 42:31
  Those two are good examples probably because there's, like, obvious shortcomings for both. Honestly, like, there's definitely a huge gap in the story there.
• 42:38
  But I think, like a lot of small teams, we try to, like, triangulate our way to the truth based off of the data versus having one single source of truth, so to speak. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.
• 42:48
  Curious, a question for you personally is what new muscles are you building?
• 42:52
  You know, like, what skills are you finding that you need to develop that either maybe you haven't used in a while or maybe are actually just brand new? Yeah.
• 43:00
  I would say I am still more of a student of video.I'm treating video like I think I treated more traditional search-driven kind of content back in the day, which is, like, how do you build up the expertise?
• 43:13
  Scar tissue, make mistakes, have theses about how things work, and then go test it and then document what happened. So I am definitely a student, like, of video right now.
• 43:23
  I mean, like you just said, I think it's easy for me to talk about our repurposing sort of approach, but the messiness of that approach versus the messiness of, like, our editorial approach, you can tell which area I have more expertise in- [laughs]...
• 43:36
  just based off of that, and I'm sure my team will laugh at this as they hear that too. But, like, that's something that, yes, actively building the muscle through mistakes.
• 43:44
  I think that the other one is, I think it's a different style. It's a different enough flavor that it does feel new.
• 43:50
  So when I was in comms, obviously, like, I did work with execs for some of their writing support or just, like, off-site appearances and stuff like that, helping them with prep.
• 43:58
  But here, working with Julia so closely and specifically on stuff that's more growth oriented and her being sort of like the definitive voice for, or end point of view, for, like, how we feel video marketing should work and how our product is gonna reflect that and really help people, I mean, that's just, like, a whole different ball game.
• 44:16
  It's not just like, "Oh, this is our speaker. This is our talking head for this category." She is the point of view. Like, she is where it starts.
• 44:23
  So working with her has been kind of a, an awesome experience too, and it's just, like, way more hands-on, where, like, I'm in the recording session with her doing it and, and giving her feedback live versus being kind of hands-off, like, when, you know, you're at kind of a bigger company.
• 44:36
  So those are two things that I think are really exciting and new, at least for me. Yeah. It sounds exciting. It sounds fun, really. Yeah. In some ways, like, a reframing of things you already know for a new situation.
• 44:47
  Definitely. Starting something totally brand new from scratch is really hard. Kinda repurposing skills in new ways is really fun. Definitely. This has been super interesting.
• 44:54
  Like, really, there's so much here, and I really appreciate you taking the time to unpack a lot of this, like some of your career stuff, the video stuff.
• 45:02
  I'm gonna suggest that everyone listening go to Kapwing's website, go to the social channels, and see it. See what it looks like for a B2B SaaS company to invest in video, and see what you think.
• 45:12
  I'm encouraging everyone I talk to these days to, like, now is the time to start planning for 2024.
• 45:17
  There's still plenty of uncertainty out there, but one thing I am 100% certain of is that you have to find a way to differentiate, and this is a potentially really great way to do that. But where else can we send people?
• 45:27
  I've noticed you've fired up your personal blog again recently. Can we send folks there, and LinkedIn, Twitter, anywhere else?
• 45:33
  You know, whenever I get off of the treadmill for that, you bring me right back on because you'll see something I wrote recently and say that you read it, and I'm like, "Oh, man, it's just been months of letting Jimmy down, not publishing."
• 45:44
  [both laughing] So hopefully I don't let you down this time.
• 45:46
  But yeah, no, I, I actually would say I have a very high degree of confidence I'll be writing a lot more frequently just because we are living in very interesting times in this discipline.
• 45:55
  I won't go as far to, like, sigh and say, like, "Finally," or anything like that, but it's nice to be in a space where, like, there's so much to talk about right now. So yeah, definitely folks can...
• 46:04
  Number one, you can connect with me in Superpath, so, like, @ciotti in, in the Superpath Slack, but my website is just my name, gregoriociotti.com.
• 46:12
  And I'll definitely be writing on the Kapwing blog too, which is just kapwing/resources. So you'll see me all over the web, but those are the places where I think a lot of my writing will definitely hit first.
• 46:21
  And yeah, you know, as part of that, I, I definitely will write a lot more in the community too 'cause I see so many questions from Superpath members that I'm like, "Oh, I just need 10 minutes of quiet- Yeah, yeah...
• 46:31
  and I can get them an awesome response." So hopefully I can help with that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That'd be awesome.
• 46:34
  That'd be fantastic, and we'll link to your blog, the Kapwing site, social stuff, all that, so people can easily connect with you. Awesome. Greg, seriously, thanks so much, man.
• 46:42
  Can't tell you how much I appreciate it, and I hope we can do it again soon. Yeah, definitely. It was a pleasure, and same. We need to do a repeat. Definitely. Take care. [outro music]