Latest / Content, Briefly / Appcues: Ramli John's Multi-Pronged Strategy for Running a Mature Content Program

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Appcues: Ramli John's Multi-Pronged Strategy for Running a Mature Content Program · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [gentle music] That's the thing with AI is like you gotta... You can't just, like, give it, like, a sentence. You have to, like, give it a structure to make it- Yeah... really sound good.
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  We encourage you to try it for yourself. Just go to usefathom.com to get started. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here with another episode of Content Briefly.
• 1:28
  Really excited to have Ramli John from Appcues on today. We'll be talking about Appcues, um, and we'll get to that. But Ramli, first, it's so good to officially meet you.
• 1:37
  Could you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about who you are and your background?
• 1:42
  A little bit about my background, I've been in marketing for ten years, but, like, I wrote a book around onboarding, and, uh, that what got me into, uh, Appcues, which is a software tool for onboarding.
• 1:56
  [chuckles] And I was really writing more about thought leadership in the past, uh, eighteen months that I've been here. I'm excited to just be here and talk about this. Super cool. So the book came first.
• 2:06
  The book came first. I was working at, uh, ProductLed with Wes Bush at that time before I joined, uh, Appcues. How about Appcues? Can you tell us a little bit about Appcues?
• 2:15
  Uh, you know, they're, in some ways, I feel like, um, just a classic B2B SaaS company. You know, like they fulfill this need that every other SaaS company has. Uh, they've been around for a while as well.
• 2:27
  You can explain it better than I can. Could you tell us a little bit about the company and the product itself? Yeah.
• 2:32
  I was started with a couple folks, uh, Joel, uh, Jackson Noel, and Jonathan Kim way back in two thousand and thirteen.
• 2:39
  Jonathan at that time was working at, at HubSpot, and he created a software to help companies to onboard their users to their product. Like, you can create product tours, in-app experiences, everything else with that.
• 2:50
  That software now, it's available on mobile. People can... mobile apps can create this- Oh, cool... in other places. So I think that's, uh, exactly what Appcues is at.
• 2:58
  They're really focused on helping SaaS companies specifically improve their, like, product adoption or retention or increase their engagement and usage with the product. Super cool.
• 3:09
  So it starts with onboarding, but it also kind of it bleeds into retention later on, I assume, which is all, I guess, sort of part of the same package, but maybe a, a good distinction for folks. Yeah.
• 3:18
  Could you talk about the marketing team? Like, what does the marketing function as a whole look like? So you, you're heading up content. Is that- Yep.
• 3:25
  Content program director, I think, is your title, which is a cool title. I like that. [chuckles] Where does content fit in? Like, what, uh, what else is happening in marketing? Yeah. So we have a few other functions.
• 3:34
  Product marketing, of course. They've, uh, you know, we've been releasing a bunch of new features. Uh, somebody's in charge of that. The paid and growth side, somebody is, uh, Meg is in charge of director of growth.
• 3:45
  We have a, a in-house marketing designer. He's-- She's actually a shout-out to Tanya. She's the design director.
• 3:52
  She designs all of our pages that we create for our content, uh, for our blog, uh, for our YouTube channel as well. As well as we have a marketing ops person, um, Jared. And that's the team. It's seven.
• 4:06
  Uh, the, the company size right now is about a hundred, hundred and ten. So we are a small team, uh, that's, like, running this, this, uh, this company going forward. Yeah. Yeah. That's very cool.
• 4:19
  I actually had the chance to work on the Appcues blog- That's cool... a little bit back in the day through an agency, of course, not directly. Um, but we worked with Ty Magnin and then, um- That's cool...
• 4:28
  Margaret Kelsey. Margaret. And Appcues was doing really cool work. You know, this was probably twenty sixteen or so.
• 4:35
  But even before that, Appcues was investing pretty heavily in content, like more so than other SaaS companies were at the time. Yeah. And I'm sort of curious.
• 4:43
  So the commitment to that continues, which I suppose is a signal that it's worked. It's, you know, it's good, and it's something the company wants to keep on doing. But I would be a little curious.
• 4:54
  You know, I feel like we talk a lot on this podcast about launching, but you're not really in that phase. You know, this is a more... it's a mature company and a mature content program. Yeah.
• 5:03
  This is a huge, very broad question, but tell us about that. What's it... You know what I mean?
• 5:08
  What are you factoring in as you think about, like, this kind of long history of an investment in content as you think about, you know, what's going on today?
• 5:15
  Earlier, the investment in content was more an investment in SEO. [chuckles] It's like, how do Calendly is like organic and get more rankings?
• 5:23
  But we have seen more competitors pop up around the same tool, uh, you know, Userflow, Userpilot. Intercom has brought out with their product tours, and it's like a race to the bottom [chuckles] to see, you know...
• 5:36
  There's like, uh, top eleven onboarding tips, and then the next one- Yeah... releases top twelve, top, top fifteen. So, like, it really is more increasing there.
• 5:44
  I think the transition has, in the last, like, two to three years, has been more so how do we establish ourselves not just like top search result but, like, establish ourselves as a, a leader in the space, putting out, like, really great, uh, educational content?As well as like putting out opinions ar- that we have abou- about how we're improving our own onboarding and seeing how others are improving theirs.
• 6:09
  So we're sharing like data and sharing how others are doing it and our, our own experience through that.
• 6:16
  That really has where it's evolved more so in a mature space where there's multiple companies who are like competing for the search result.
• 6:24
  How do we compete outside of the search result and really like get into people's mind and like see when they think about onboarding and then looking to improve their retention or the ac-activation, how does Acti-- how does Appcues, um, get to the top of their, of their top lists that they're gonna be looking at?
• 6:42
  And one way to do that is through education. A lot of comp-- There's certain companies that, that has done a good job of this that we're, uh, inspired by.
• 6:50
  Examples is like HubSpot, of course, where they've released the HubSpot Academy, where, you know, we've structured a academy that we can talk about later on, Product Adoption Academy.
• 6:59
  Also inspired by younger companies like Mu- Mutiny, where like they are putting out this amazing like content, even though they're like a young team. Uh, and I think their, their team is only...
• 7:10
  the content team is only, uh, one person.
• 7:12
  I'm not sure if they've hired more, but like it's interesting how they're playing this approach of establishing themselves as leaders in the space, as experts, rather than going towards more of organic approach.
• 7:23
  So I, I'd s- I'd say that more mature companies are more, probably more shifting and thinking about, "Well, okay, we have more competitors in our space. We can only do so much to rank higher.
• 7:34
  How do we establish our content in other ways and establish ourselves as experts there?" That's great. That's so interesting.
• 7:41
  You know, one thing I've noticed in talking to a lot of content folks is that there's like a subconscious anxiety that a lot of content teams have about the amount of traffic that they get. Mm-hmm.
• 7:51
  Do you sleep better at night- [chuckles]...uh, knowing that there's this large library of content that was primarily created for search that I assume is driving, you know, recurring traffic month over month?
• 8:01
  And maybe I'm assuming too much, but it sort of frees you up to think a little bit more- Hmm...deeply about- Interesting...uh, things that will move the needle beyond search.
• 8:08
  I think a lot of teams are s- they get stuck on the search piece, and it creates a constraint for them that makes it a little more difficult to get into the, the academy type content or thought leadership or other things.
• 8:17
  That's a really good point. I do f- feel like there is... like there... we have a few pieces that is ranking really well. Example is like, you know, best way to launch a product.
• 8:26
  Like we have like a messaging guide around that, that is ranking really well, bringing us traffic. It does probably, if you put it that way, it does, it does make me sleep better at night.
• 8:35
  [both chuckle] Uh, but I do still think about that, like, you know, is it, is it good traffic or is it like, you know, does it really help the, the company overall? But, um, something to think about for sure.
• 8:47
  I'm curious about net new content versus, you know, content maintenance- Hmm...you know, refreshes or pruning or other things you might do. How do you think about that today?
• 8:54
  And then I promise we can sort of leave the, the theme of you, you know, Appcues has had a blog for a long time behind us to talk about other things. Yeah.
• 9:01
  I think a big part of it is like restructuring and like pruning our content was a big part of what last year happened. It seems like cha- things are changing. I'm sure we'll get into this with AI. [chuckles] Mm.
• 9:14
  And like really things are changing, and now we're thinking, should we continue like thinking about like content hubs and pruning content that is not really bringing stuff up?
• 9:24
  That is something that we're currently working through. Some of the SEO folks that I've talked to have said that... this, this is just a guess, because we don't really know what Google [chuckles] or even Bing is doing.
• 9:34
  Yeah. That they're really like m- thinking a lot more about authority and relevance around this topic more so than the technical stuff that, that has really played a big part in the past few years in terms of SEO.
• 9:48
  So we are in, in the last, you know, few months have been rethinking should we be getting more into video? Because it seems like- Mm...certain SGE respond, or responses are, are getting... like showing up TikTok.
• 10:00
  And we did launch our YouTube channel last year, and one of our best performing, uh, content pieces right now have video in them. So like what is user onboarding?
• 10:09
  If people go to YouTube right now and type user onboarding, I, w- I created a playlist guide to user onboarding with like fifteen videos, and that's the first thing on the list on YouTube that shows up, and it does show up on the, some, some search result because of that.
• 10:24
  So I think that's something that we've been thinking a lot about is like, should we think about content beyond just like traditional SEO written form rather than like thinking about thought leadership and, and things like that?
• 10:35
  So it's still up for debate for sure. That's super in- very interesting and kind of makes me think of something, uh, related, which is that a lot of SaaS companies, it used to be like the blog was the content strategy.
• 10:45
  Mm. And then that kind of expanded to like, um, I've heard Kevin Lee, formerly of Buffer and Oyster and a few other well-known companies, talk about the blog plus- Blog plus.
• 10:54
  Okay...playbook, where it's like, you know, you have a blog, you have an academy, you have a resource center, which might have a... there's maybe a section of guides. So it's like blog plus.
• 11:01
  But now even that playbook has expanded to include video, and in some cases a lot of SaaS companies now are doing podcasts.
• 11:10
  I, I find it interesting because it used to just be that like the blog just helped you get that top of funnel traffic.
• 11:15
  All these other things are aimed at more like that middle and bottom of the funnel, where you're trying to educate people about the product, move them a little further along.
• 11:22
  And so I'd be curious, you know, you had mentioned that, uh, Appcues had launched an academy. Is that the main purpose? Like, is it... is that a, a fairly product-oriented content initiative?
• 11:31
  That one is probably more like middle of the funnel. The reason why I say that is like we try to minimize mentioning Appcues as much.
• 11:40
  There are some courses that are more like product focused, uh, and that is i- in another academy that we have called Appcues University that our CS team created. Mm. I- I've been like really looking at what App...
• 11:52
  HubSpot has done with the HubSpot Academy, where they do have like top of the funnel courses like, you know, social media 101, where they probably don't talk about, uh, they don't talk about the, their HubSpot social as much.But there is one where, like, they have a whole certification course on HubSpot Social.
• 12:09
  Within the academy itself, you can have top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, and that's something that we're currently working on.
• 12:15
  Our academy right now, our product adoption academy, is probably more like top, middle of the funnel than more product focus itself. That's interesting.
• 12:23
  Do you have a sense-- Like, how much content do you publish on a week [dog barks] or monthly basis? Publishing, we probably publish like maybe one, maybe two in a week.
• 12:32
  We have definitely, like, reduced it i-in the, in the last few, few months, just trying to figure out exactly [chuckles] what we're gonna do with AI, because, like, publishing- Yeah...
• 12:42
  in this changing landscape might, uh, not be the best strategy. And like we're really figuring out what is next for, for our SEO, our search.
• 12:50
  What is next for our content beyond, like in a post-AI SEO world, um, how will we, like, establish ourselves, continue to establish ourselves as a, a leader? And I, I'm talking about here on the more on the blog side.
• 13:04
  Academy, in terms of courses, probably one.
• 13:07
  We're working on one course right now every two to three months, and then, like, producing like a report that's like a survey-driven report or a content, uh, that's more thought leadership, like once every quarter as well.
• 13:19
  So we are, like, heavily considering how we're investing between blog that you mentioned and the blog plus side, the academy- Yeah... and the b- podcast and the video and, uh, other places.
• 13:33
  I feel like it's probably worth stating explicitly that this is probably the craziest- It is... couple of months- [laughs]... content marketing has ever experienced.
• 13:41
  It's like everything has been thrown into question, and there's- Right... not a lot of answers yet. Are you able to share anything that you're thinking about on the AI front? Any cool ways you're using it right now?
• 13:51
  One cool way we're using it right now, more like an experiment. What kind of user onboarding tool are you if you're a Taylor Swift song?
• 13:59
  [chuckles] So something weird like that, and we're using AI to like seed like, okay, how will each connect to another one.
• 14:06
  I have used it sp-particularly for like fleshing out more built-out structured content, where like I already have the points, I already have like the quotes from people, and now I'm just like, "Hey, give me a first draft," and I edit it down to something that makes more sense, uh, and matches our voice.
• 14:24
  I have done that a few times, uh, and that's worked well. It's probably something that we're, uh, considering in the future.
• 14:31
  I've also used it to write some scripts, um, YouTube scripts, where like I ask, "Hey, write me a script about like, you know, tips about onboarding. Make it funny. Give some examples."
• 14:41
  And I-- That's the thing with AI is like you gotta, y-you can't just like give it like a sentence. You have to like give it a structure to make it really- Yeah... sound good. Like, add me puns, give it jokes.
• 14:50
  Like, uh, give it life. Yeah, that's super interesting. And I guess another question regarding content creation: Who writes? Do you write? Do in-house folks write? Freelancers? Agencies?
• 15:00
  Like, I-- We've been asking everybody basically- Mm... like who's the kinda muscle behind the content creation? Because that, that does seem like it's shifting.
• 15:07
  You know, that's probably over the last couple years, not over the last few months. But, uh, I'd be curious at Appcues, like who's doing that heavy lifting?
• 15:14
  Right now the content team, l-looks like I forgot to mention that I do w-- There's-- We are a two-person content team. There's me, and then there's somebody, the senior content marketer.
• 15:22
  Uh, she manages like six freelancers that we have right now, uh, that was helping write content for the blog itself. In terms of like other-- I'm going back to this blog plus, plus 'cause I've, I've been thinking a lot.
• 15:35
  Like you, it just sounds so good. Anything on the plus side, we try to keep in-house as much as possible. Mm. Okay.
• 15:41
  Like I'm writing some of my YouTube scripts, adding spice to it, that Taylor Swift slash onboarding [chuckles] LinkedIn post that Eric, our VP of Marketing, posted up that he wrote himself.
• 15:51
  He used AI, and he, he fleshed it out himself. So a lot of like the more thought leadership stuff, uh, we do keep in-house.
• 15:58
  Like, and once we have the process and we have like kind of a layout that we can re-re-re-reuse is when we start thinking about a few ways to, to reorganize it. Got it.
• 16:10
  Uh, one other thing we've been asking everybody is about content team meetings. Do you have a weekly or a monthly sync? Can you share a little bit about what the agenda is like for that call?
• 16:18
  And the things sort of specifically that I'm curious about are, you know, I'm sure there's sort of an update, like "I'm, I'm doing this, you're doing that, when's it due?" That type of thing.
• 16:25
  But, you know, is there a br- a brainstorming element to it, you know, a review element where you're kind of like looking back as like a postmortem on other stuff, or just anything else that kind of helps you like think deeply about what's working and what's not?
• 16:38
  Yeah. We, we follow a system called EOS, where like every meeting has, it's called an L10, where you grade your meeting after, after the meeting and give it a- Oh... score out of 10. Right? Oh, interesting. Yeah.
• 16:52
  So the way that it works, it starts off with like highlights, and then we have a weekly data board that we all review. Um, I can go through the, the metrics. I know that was one of the questions.
• 17:03
  [chuckles] I have to pull up our, our data board later, and see which ones like on track or off track, and then we add it to our issue list. Uh, and then the next part after the data review, we look at our issues.
• 17:14
  So issues could be anything that our metric's off base or something's behind schedule in terms of content. Is there anything coming up?
• 17:21
  And we just discuss, um, the issue in that hour we have that week to see if there's anything we can like figure out and debug together. And then the last part is like a to-do.
• 17:31
  Like here, here's what's the next steps in the next week that we have together, and figure it out. Um, you know, this is what we're gonna do before we meet next week for our next L10.
• 17:41
  And then the grading is like 10 is like this is the best meeting in the world that we've had so far, and then zero is like this is the worst meeting w- we have in the world. [chuckles] And that's essentially what a...
• 17:50
  L, L means leadership, so leadership 10. So it's your team score for that specifically, so... That's so interesting. Do you use-- Is there a piece of software that you use to enable that? We use a software called Ninedy.
• 18:02
  It's the word Ninedy.io. But-In my previous company we were at, at ProductLed, uh, with Wes, we were just using a spreadsheet.
• 18:11
  [laughs] We were just using a spreadsheet and Notion to host all of this so that we can track it on a week-to-week basis, basis. I'm kind of fascinated by that.
• 18:18
  So I assume that, like, meetings that are scored well means it's, it's productive. Are there some meetings that are, you know, that get a one?
• 18:25
  And what do you [laughs] You know, like, are there meetings that get cut from the calendar because they're not really necessary? Not because it's a bad meeting- Right...
• 18:31
  but just because maybe it could be done asynchronously. That's true. There are certain situations where we're like, "Do we have any, like, meaty issues this, this week? Or is this something that we can discuss async?"
• 18:42
  In those situations, yes, we do cut it off. Most of the time we do come up with issues as we discuss, like, what's on our, our workflow board or what's, uh, what's our metrics doing. So I haven't seen a one yet.
• 18:57
  [laughs] The worst I've seen is five.
• 18:59
  And usually when somebody gives the lowest score or the highest score, let's say everybody gives it an eight, but somebody gives it a 10, you know, the follow-up is like, "How could we make this a 10?" Is the discussion.
• 19:09
  Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's more like we need to come up with more issues, more meaty issues. Like it's kinda, um, shallow right now, our discussion.
• 19:18
  Or it could be like we didn't really get into, you know, the big issues that we should have brought up sooner rather than later. So I've never gotten a one. [laughs] That's good. I guess that's good.
• 19:28
  [laughs] I am curious about metrics. The thing that I'm curious about is like what are the couple of numbers that tell you you're moving in the right direction?
• 19:35
  Yes, and once again, this is shifting because, you know, our focus more on thought leadership. Obviously we're, we've, we're so focused on organic in the past 18 months.
• 19:46
  Like we're looking at organic sessions and organic signups. So like out of or- you know, out of the organic, how many of them ended up signing up?
• 19:54
  And kudos to mar- our marketing ops person, uh, Jared, who like, "How do you attribute organic signups?" [laughs] I'm like, "I'm, I'm not sure."
• 20:03
  We use HubSpot, Google Analytics, uh, that's a whole, uh, discussion on its own [laughs] about attribution, but we do have organic signup as our, our tool. Uh, and then that's all more on the organic side.
• 20:15
  In terms of like thought leadership, we look at our, um, we released this Product-Led Experience Report that is like this quarter's, uh, survey-driven content, and we look at...
• 20:24
  It's ungated, so we're look- we're looking at page views on that.
• 20:28
  Uh, and then the other one, we have program called Product-Led Growth Assessment, and we're looking at completions of this quiz that tells people, you know, are they a beginner- Oh, that's interesting...
• 20:38
  are they an intermediate, or are they like an expert level product-led growth company? And based on that, we suggest like, "You should take a look at our course," or, "Do this," or, "Do that."
• 20:49
  Uh, the other two programs that we have that is more thought leadership, we have a podcast, so I look at like podcast downloads and listens, uh, that's available on, on YouTube and on our, our platform, as well as, uh, our certification issued to, for our academy.
• 21:03
  So seems like the metrics have shifted [laughs] lately more to focus on those, those plus side to content rather than the blog side of the content. I mean, I feel like that makes a ton of sense.
• 21:15
  I have a couple follow-ups. One quick one is the podcast. Does that fall under your purview or is that a separate team? In terms of like running it, like m-m-me interviewing folks, that is me.
• 21:26
  We do have like an editor that is like a freelancer that like does all the editing that's makes me all hands-off. So yes, it is under, under my team. Cool. That's interesting.
• 21:35
  I've talked to a few folks about this and seems like 50/50. Sometimes audio content falls under the content team. Sometimes th- they have a separate team dedicated just to that.
• 21:46
  I guess probably because the medium is so different, but- Yeah... you know, content is content. The planning, the execution- Yeah. [laughs]... a lot of it is pretty similar.
• 21:53
  The other thing I wanted to follow up with you about was tools. Are there any tools that you and your team use that stand out?
• 21:58
  Things that maybe help with productivity or other things, research tools, tools for distribution or publishing or anything else? Yeah.
• 22:06
  Uh, in terms of like the podcast side, we've been exploring a lot on like how to repurpose our YouTube videos, our YouTube interviews more easily as a Short.
• 22:17
  I've f- come across this cool tool called Opus, Opus Clip, so it's opus.pro, where like you plug in your YouTube video and then it's an interview style.
• 22:27
  It will like cut like what it thinks is the most viral and like it'll format it and reposition it so that the face of the speaker is like centered on it.
• 22:37
  So like if there's two people talking, right, you and, you, you and me like side by side per se, it will cut between the two and we'll say, "What the heck? How is it doing this?"
• 22:45
  And it even adds like Alex Hormozi style captions.
• 22:49
  So I think that's like something that we're been using lately in this like past few weeks to like put more content on Shorts, YouTube Shorts, as well as like, um, TikTok just to see like the, if there's any traction there.
• 23:01
  That's one tool that's cool. Productivity-wise, like we've been using like the typical stuff, Notion, but like we plugged in Notion AI to like have context.
• 23:11
  I know ChatGPT has like been expanding their ability to like take inputs, but they still have like a, I don't... It's a 10,000-word limit.
• 23:19
  But like Notion, we have all our planning docs there in Notion, and we can just say, "Hey, um, summarize like this interview," or like, you know, "Take this piece of content and like give me a tweet based on this long, like 3,000-word article," or something like that.
• 23:35
  And it can produce a few tweets that our, um, KK, our senior content manager, can like tweet to post up on our Twitter and LinkedIn. That's great. I love that. I've been doing a kind of similar thing.
• 23:46
  Sort of funny, uh, because I feel like whenever the topic of generative AI comes up on this podcast, it's usually in the context of are you using it to enable content creation?
• 23:55
  But some of the things it's doing are more behind the scenes, and the example I was just gonna cite was I use a tool called Grain to record- Grain... our sales calls. Yeah. And their AI is fantastic.
• 24:05
  It automatically creates a summary of the call, which totally replaces the notes that I used to take. It's that good.
• 24:11
  So now I just take those notes and I copy and paste them into our CRM and I don't have to write anything.
• 24:15
  I guess it's basically the same use case as like taking like a bunch of planning docs or a very long blog post and just sayingJust do the, just condense it for me, you know? Exactly.
• 24:23
  That's a really, really cool use case for AI, I think. Yeah, totally. And even, like, repurposing.
• 24:28
  Like, people don't realize that people like to preach about content repurposing, but they don't realize, like, how much work it sometimes takes to, like, make the repurposing look good or, like, be good. So- Yeah...
• 24:39
  I feel like that's potentially where, you know, AI can help with is, like, here's how to repurpose this blog into a video so that it's, like, YouTube script ready or something else. Yeah. That's cool.
• 24:51
  I'm curious about what you're thinking over the next six months, not necessarily in, like, a industry-wide thing. I feel like that's an unfair question right now- [laughs]... 'cause just, like, who knows?
• 25:00
  But, like, for you and for Appcues specifically, are there some things you have in the hopper or some things you're, you know, you're noodling on that you anticipate spending a lot of time on in the next six months?
• 25:09
  Nothing super big. Well, maybe there's one thing super big. We're definitely gonna start really focusing on, on more, like, that middle and bottom of the funnel content pieces, specifically the p- the academy.
• 25:21
  Right now we have two education programs. One is the Appcues University that the CS team created that's more, like, product focused, and then the Product Adoption Academy, Academy that's more, like, education focused.
• 25:33
  And I feel like there's a natural user experience progression where somebody learns about, like, how to improve the onboarding, and out of curiosity, they wanna learn a tool that can help them do that.
• 25:43
  So from a learning experience standpoint, it makes sense to, like, integrate them into one place.
• 25:48
  I think the other thing, the second thing that in the next six months we're really looking at, we're, we're seeing, like, really promising, like, s- stats from our YouTube and, like, our videos.
• 25:58
  I don't know what that looks like, but we're in the very early stage of, uh, discussion.
• 26:02
  Is this something that we should, like, double down on or something that, you know, we have some folks within our team that have, like, not, not even marketing team, our product engineering, our design team that have, like, video experience.
• 26:16
  Mm-hmm. And, like, I wonder if we can tap into their ex- their expertise and get them to come on, on video or, like, highlight their expertise somehow. Uh, we're not entirely sure.
• 26:26
  This is a very early stage, and that's, like, uh, we're still trying to figure out exactly what that is 'cause it seems like that's something that is gonna be hard for generative AI to do.
• 26:35
  Um, you know, one day it will be like it'll scan your body, and then you can, like, produce YouTube videos [laughs] that looks like you- Yeah. [laughs]... talks like you. It's very natural.
• 26:44
  But at this point, it is, like, one of those hard to copy things that, you know, you can highlight expertise, and it's hard to reproduce with, with generative AI.
• 26:53
  Yeah, that's a great point because, like, as the generative I- AI thing is commoditizing written content, all of the social platforms are leaning so heavy on video. We noticed that, yeah. You know, and that's...
• 27:04
  I don't think that's an accident, right? And so I think you're, I think you're wise to be, like, thinking about what, how and where and why the investment in video should keep going, so that's, that's super interesting.
• 27:14
  Anything else Appcues content related that I should have asked you or that you wanna touch on but that I, that I didn't prompt you for?
• 27:20
  The other piece that we're, we've been thinking, I've been thinking a lot about is, like, templates. Like, how do we share templates and, like, examples?
• 27:29
  We have this content program called Good UX, goodux.appcues.com, where it shows, like, some of the best, like, onboarding experiences and examples.
• 27:37
  And I've seen, like, companies like Hypercontext with Hiba Amin, like, do really well, where they show, like, templates of h- how the best has done it, or even fellow.app, where they've shown, like, the best one-on-one templates for meetings.
• 27:50
  And I feel like that's something that is also potentially, like, uh, also hard to copy and, like, how, how to...
• 27:56
  I've been thinking a lot about, like, how that would fit into everything, where it becomes more of a curation. You know, like, the problem with, like, a generative AI is, like, we're gonna get a crap ton of content.
• 28:07
  They'll rise to the top. The need for somebody or something or a company to curate this, this content somehow.
• 28:15
  You're doing a good job with that, with the community that you've built here, and, like, you really, like, the-- you, you are a trusted voice when it comes to content.
• 28:22
  Uh, and I feel like that's, that's where the thing is going. And I'm not sure. I've also heard a lot about, like, B2B influencers, like how, you know, B2C side has, but I don't know what that looks like right now.
• 28:33
  But, you know, that's another rabbit hole that, um, that you don't wanna open up. It kinda worms. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.
• 28:39
  [laughs] You know, honestly, the thing that I really appreciate about this conversation is you've just... like, you've covered every base.
• 28:46
  You know, as someone thinks about a content strategy, like, you're checking every single box. The top, middle, bottom of the funnel. It's SEO, it's thought leadership, it's sales enablement, it's multimedia.
• 28:56
  There's just, like, anything that a content strategy could have is in here, and it... but it's not just that you've jammed it all in. It's all, like, quite thoughtful and proven.
• 29:04
  That's the other thing I find so interesting about Appcues is, like, this didn't start yesterday. Mm. This is 10 years old at this point. Like, all this has evolved in the way that it has for a reason, so kudos to you.
• 29:14
  Really, really interesting. Thank you. Ramli, where can we send folks? You have a couple of things going on. We mentioned the book, Product Led Onboarding, which we'll definitely link to folks.
• 29:22
  Where else can they find you, follow you? And your podcast, where can they listen to your podcast? Yes. Uh, people can find me on LinkedIn, on Twitter. Uh, just Google my name, Ramli John.
• 29:32
  I'm everywhere [chuckles] with that handle. In terms of my show, I have a show called... a newsletter called Marketing Powerups. I'm gonna have Jimmy on the show, so I'm super excited about that. I had Ryan.
• 29:42
  I chatted with Ryan Law this morning, and I'm having- Oh, cool... Devin, Devin later this month. So, like, Margaret Kelsey was also on. I think you might have worked with her when she- Mm-hmm... was working at Appcues.
• 29:52
  So, like, there's some really amazing folks who's been on that show that I'm, like, pretty excited about. You can look up Marketing Powerups or marketingpowerups.com for that. Ramli, so good to finally meet.
• 30:03
  Glad we got to do it in this format. I'm sure people will really appreciate the... And we could record it so they could, you know, capture some of your, your experience and your knowledge. So, thank you so much.
• 30:12
  Thanks so much, Jimmy. Take care, everybody.