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Klaviyo: How Tracey Wallace Operationalized Success · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  Hey, and welcome to Content Briefly, the Superpath podcast that explores how content teams operate.
• 0:06
  We'll be talking to content leaders from the world's best SaaS brands to understand how they think about strategy, org structure, KPIs, reporting, meetings, tech stack, and more.
• 0:15
  You'll learn exactly how these teams operate smoothly and efficiently. I'm your host, Jimmy Daly, founder of Superpath.
• 0:21
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• 0:36
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• 0:46
  This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Writer. Writer is the generative AI platform built for business. And unlike other AI writing tools, Writer learns from your best content and style guide.
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  We cover some common marketing tasks like brainstorming blog post titles, repurposing content for sales, spinning up copy for social distribution, and about ten other use cases.
• 1:29
  You can learn more and kick the tires over at writer.com. Okay, I'll get out of the way now. I hope you enjoy this episode. Got Tracy Wallace here for this episode number two of the Content Briefly podcast.
• 1:42
  And, uh, as I mentioned last time, there's a lot of things we're doing differently about this podcast. One thing we're not doing differently is we're bringing on some of the same people we talked to in the last one.
• 1:51
  So Tracy, you were one of those back on the career thing we did a couple years ago. Anyways, thank you for being game for doing this. Um, we'll talk today about you, about Klaviyo, about your team there.
• 2:01
  But maybe first could you just give introduction of yourself, tell us a little about who you are and what you do? Yeah, for sure. Um, I... One, thank you so much for having me here.
• 2:08
  I'm excited to be back for a new podcast in, in general. Uh, I'm Tracy Wallace. Uh, I am the director of content strategy, uh, over here at Klaviyo.
• 2:18
  I have been in content marketing for, like, 12 years now, which is upsetting, um, to, to think about and talk about.
• 2:26
  Um, but, uh, yeah, prior to that, I was in journalism, so, um, was working over at Elle Magazine, Mashable, um, Time Out New York, all of that jazz. Um, and there's no, like, real romance story.
• 2:38
  I hopped over to content marketing 'cause the salary was better, um, 12, 12 years ago, um, and ended up kind of just finding my way. Um, I will say I am a self-taught content marketer.
• 2:51
  Historically, um, their content marketing wasn't a career path. It was kind of like a random thing that some B2B companies were trying.
• 2:59
  Um, so most of the stuff that I know how to do is very much self-taught, um, and/or, um, really just learning with, with other content marketer folks out there, including, um, folks who are working for a lot of my competitors, uh, who, who turn out to be some really good friends.
• 3:13
  That's awesome. That's really cool. And so today you've had a really interesting career, you know, MarketerHire, BigCommerce, a few others, like really, like, big, really cool brands. You're at Klaviyo now. Yeah.
• 3:24
  Can you tell us a little bit about Klaviyo? Like wh-who/what is it? Like a little bit of background on the product itself, and then who's the customer? Yeah, for sure.
• 3:33
  So Klaviyo, um, is an, i-is a marketing automation platform. So we do email marketing, SMS marketing. Um, it's a CDP really for the e-commerce industry.
• 3:44
  Uh, it started back in 2012, um, and really since then, you know, it built a strong integration with Shopify very early on, which was really beneficial for the company.
• 3:54
  It now serves really anybody on any e-commerce platform as well as custom platforms through APIs. Um,
• 4:01
  it, uh, is, is one of the most used apps, if not the most used app in the Shopify ecosystem, um, but specifically for, uh, email and, and SMS marketing.
• 4:12
  Uh, and then Klaviyo will likely be looking to expand verticals in a, in the near future too. So we, we do really well in e-commerce, um, and looking to, to grow, grow even beyond that as well.
• 4:25
  Um, and, and also offer a few new features beyond email, SMS, and, uh, the CDP that we have. Cool. Can we talk about the CDP for a minute? It's an acronym you see popping up now. Yes. Customer data platform, right?
• 4:37
  That's it. [laughs] Yeah. Sorry. Yes. Uh, customer data platform. Do you want me to explain what it is? Do you mind?
• 4:44
  'Cause I feel like it's, it's a little bit of a nebulous concept until you've actually used one, and then you're like, "Ah, it makes so much sense now." Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 4:51
  So a CDP is, um, in, in a lot of ways, a lot like a CRM, so it's a customer relationship management platform.
• 4:58
  So like HubSpot would be a, a CRM in which you're collecting a bunch of data and then trying to leverage and activate that data to create unique experiences, um, on, on your website and emails, all of that jazz.
• 5:10
  So Klaviyo certainly does that.
• 5:12
  There, there's a CRM aspect to it, but the reason why it is classified as a CDP is because it integrates with Shopify, so all of the data that, that is pulling in from Shopify ends up over in your Klaviyo account attached to the specific customer who took it.
• 5:26
  But it's not just Shopify. It's any app that you are using.
• 5:29
  All of that data comes back into Klaviyo and lives on a single customer's profile so that you can see absolutely every action, every engagement that those folks have taken.
• 5:39
  And then beyond that, you can personalize, again, the website, emails, SMS messages, but, but even, like, retargeting, right? So think, you know, beyond kind of your owned channels.
• 5:51
  You can leverage that, that data in a variety of different ways. And then CDPs also, um, often have, uh, an intelligence layer over it, right?
• 6:00
  So helps you predict, um, longevity of the customer, so customer lifetime value, what specific segments are worth, how to even find more segments like that, um, all of it based on your own customer data.
• 6:12
  All of this is becoming a lot more important as third-party cookies or third-party data in general-Kind of goes away [chuckles] over time, um, or becomes a lot more difficult to, to use and in some cases illegal to use.
• 6:24
  So a lot of companies, um, are pulling in CDPs which existed before the third party, like data switch really happened. Um, but a lot of folks...
• 6:34
  The reason you see it popping up more is 'cause a lot of folks are, uh, relying on CDPs now as they collect more first-party and zero-party data, um, to, you know, improve their, their marketing, their targeting, their lead scoring even.
• 6:49
  You, you might see, you know, D2C companies over time even begin to, to do more lead scoring in the same way B2B companies do. Um, all, all of that jazz. So CDPs historically kinda started in the B2B tech SaaS space,
• 7:02
  and you see them, uh, expanding into e-commerce and really across all industries where third-party data was really important, but again, really challenging, uh, to get and/or illegal to get for a variety of reasons.
• 7:14
  Got it. Okay. That's super helpful. Um, I think of Klaviyo as part of this category of SaaS companies that's B2B2C, and that introduces a new flavor to it. I mean, do you think of it that way? Because you...
• 7:27
  So, like, you're selling to a business, but I imagine that business could be like a range from a hobbyist who wants to sell something online for the first time to like, you know, a giant direct-to-consumer platform that, you know, does hundreds of millions of dollars in sales a year.
• 7:42
  Yep. Yeah. Yes. So, um, Klaviyo is technically, I guess, B2B2C. So most of our customers are selling to consumers.
• 7:52
  So our marketing is specifically to other businesses, but we're educating them on how to sell to their consumers, right? So, um, we do have a large, uh, entrepreneur segment, so, you know, folks just getting started.
• 8:04
  Our bis- biggest segment, um, is small business, so that's folks, um, making, um... I ca- I can't remember what the bottom is, but it's up to 20 mil in annual revenue.
• 8:15
  Uh, and then I think it's like th- there's a large portion of our customer base that is mid-market. Um, so, uh, again, you know, we, we do really well in the Shopify ecosystem, including the Shopify Plus ecosystem.
• 8:27
  So vast majority of brands, uh, on Shopify Plus and Shopify are, are using Klaviyo, and again, we have integrations for BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix, um, and, and then the APIs for anyone who wants to do something custom.
• 8:39
  Okay, cool. That's really interesting. All right, let's talk content. So your role- Okay... is director of content strategy. Um, what is your job, and who is on your team?
• 8:48
  I'm just trying to get a sense for, like, what does the content organization look like at Klaviyo. Yeah.
• 8:53
  So the content organization at Klaviyo is the largest content organization I have ever had [chuckles] prior to this.
• 9:00
  Um, I have been a one-woman show, maybe with, like, a, a couple other people, but not really for a long time. So over here at Klaviyo, I'm dir- the director of content strategy.
• 9:10
  I have two content marketers, social content strategists, uh, on the team, and then two full-time writers. One of them, um, also kinda doubles as our full-time editor.
• 9:21
  And then we just brought on a full-time case study person, uh, as well. So I'll have a good size team, like- Yeah, yeah... five. So fi- five people? Yeah. Ri- that's amazing.
• 9:33
  Okay, so the next question is, how do you communicate with them? We're gonna ask everybody this 'cause I'm just sort of curious, like, how much of it is async? How often are you meeting?
• 9:40
  Do you do one-on-ones with everybody? Do you have, like, a weekly content meeting? You know, like, that's a bunch of random questions, but general gist is, like, how do you guys communicate? Yeah. So, um, we do...
• 9:49
  We have a weekly 30-minute stand-up, so that's our Tuesday stand-up in which we look at the content that was published the week prior, and then all upcoming content, so it's really a status call.
• 10:00
  Um, and we usually are looking at content, um, anywhere from, again, what published the last week and kind of how it's doing, all the way up to about three months out.
• 10:10
  Uh, and then I do have individual one-on-ones with each one of those five folks. Uh, we have a monthly content marketing meeting. Those meetings usually are looking, um, at data, right?
• 10:21
  Tryn- trying to help educate the team on, um, understanding our, our data and goals a little bit more and better, as well as, like, any general feedback that, like, everyone on the team [chuckles] needs to know, rather than saying it, um, again and again in all those one-on-ones.
• 10:35
  So that includes things like values, any changes in strategy, anything that's kind of, like, coming up and/or im- important that everyone should know. Um, we talk a lot over Slack, um, including...
• 10:48
  I probably do at least two kind of one-off calls, uh, a day with someone on the content team, which is just, like, a quick ping where it's like, "Hey, can I run something by you?
• 10:59
  Hey, can I, like, get, get your take on this? Hey, can, like, you help me, like, make sure this, this sounds a little bit more accurate?" And we do those over Slack's nifty little video tool. Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 11:11
  That's really nice. It makes it so much easier. Yeah. And wh- who do you report to? I report to the VP of brand. Okay.
• 11:18
  And I'm not asking for specific numbers, but, like, are there, are there a set of metrics that you and the team are responsible for?
• 11:25
  Like, do you have to go to the VP of brand each quarter or whatever and say, like, "Here's, here's how we did on our, like, our big, our big KPIs"? Yeah, so I mean, this, this has actually changed a lot.
• 11:36
  Uh, so I only joined Klaviyo about a year ago, um, and when I first joined, um, the content team was primarily measured on, like, production. How much are you producing?
• 11:47
  Uh, and, and I came in and was like, [chuckles] "No way."
• 11:52
  Um, production is, is an okay way to, to measure things, but I prefer to run content marketing organizations as strategy organizations rather than a service-only organization.
• 12:02
  Um, and, and, and right, and there's, there's a real big difference there. I mean, we still have to straddle service to, to a certain extent, but if you're a strategy organization, you need to be responsible for KPIs.
• 12:14
  So-I started implementing last May content downloads on the site. We started seeing those working really well. We're able to track those back to revenue um and, and start-started reporting out on it.
• 12:27
  So now, as of twenty twenty-three, a content team is responsible for growing overall um sessions to our content properties.
• 12:36
  So that includes our slash blog, our slash marketing resources pages and particular case studies kind of we're still figuring out the KPIs for that.
• 12:44
  Those just got moved over to our team, so those are a little bit separate.
• 12:48
  Um, so responsible for all up sessions to content properties um organic sessions to content properties um organic visitors to content properties, which is a bit of a unique Klaviyo way of, of looking at the world.
• 13:03
  So visitors is anyone who visits our site who is not a-- who does not have an account with us already, free or paid. Um, so we're looking at like prospects only, right?
• 13:15
  Uh, so we're responsible for those folks, organic visitors, which we primarily try to drive through non-brand SEO.
• 13:23
  Uh, and then of course, we are also responsible for reporting out on content assisted, uh, MRR, so monthly recurring revenue, organic monthly recurring revenue, and content download monthly recurring revenue.
• 13:36
  Okay, got it. That's interesting. How do you measure that? I mean, how, like... I know that's, like, we could probably talk about that alone for an hour. Are there any tools that, that you rely on?
• 13:46
  Or like, for some companies I find it's just a matter of, like, everyone-- I think some, like, if you get a group of people and say like, "Okay, let's talk about attribution," they all kind of, like, have a slightly different idea of what you're talking about.
• 13:57
  And if everyone can just agree on something that's, like, good enough, like, we believe that if this moves up, it, revenue will also likely move up too, that, that's, like, probably good enough.
• 14:06
  But I am curious if you have like, you know, like a more formulaic way to do it. Yeah. I am very much in, in the camp of good enough, um, mostly because content doesn't just...
• 14:17
  And I, I guess you heard me say a minute ago, we look at content-assisted MRR, not
• 14:22
  only MRR because content-only MRR is typically a very small number versus content assisted is really taking into the, into account that the organization is serving both strategy and service.
• 14:34
  A lot of our content gets used by our performance marketing team, by our sales team, by our events team, and they have to take credit for, for the metrics that they drive through, through those channels, um, which means all the work we did to produce that suddenly isn't ours anymore.
• 14:52
  Um, and that changes when you can include the content assist revenue. So, um, Klaviyo is continuing to work o-on [chuckles] improving the way we measure this. Uh, we are actively moving.
• 15:04
  Um, so Klaviyo uses Klaviyo um as our... It's like how we capture content downloads, all of that jazz.
• 15:12
  And we're actively, uh, working to sync all of those leads over into Salesforce, and then we'll be able to get a much more definitive view of, of these content downloads, like how much revenue are we driving exactly.
• 15:26
  Right now, we're kind of triangulating the metric, which is anyone who comes to the website, any visitor, and remember, visitors are prospects only, so somebody who does not have an account at all, no account. Um,
• 15:40
  any visitor that comes and visits the website, um, and is not a lead or an MQL, if they MQL within sixty days of landing on a content page or downloading a content asset, then we're, w-we're getting to, like, count that as a content assist if they close later.
• 16:03
  Yeah. Okay. That's great. I'm loving this because... Okay, so we're gonna talk to, like, a variety of people on this podcast. We're gonna talk to some people who are lone wolf, at early stage- Mm-hmm...
• 16:13
  startup, you know? This is so fascinating because this is, like, grown-up content marketing.
• 16:18
  You know, like, a lot of people who work for larger organizations, I don't know how exactly how many people Klaviyo has, but, like, it's a very well-established business at this point. It is. Yeah. Yeah.
• 16:26
  And I mean, to be fair to everyone listening right now who's like, "I could never build that myself," I couldn't either. Our data team [laughs] helped me build this out. That's the thing. Like- Um, yeah...
• 16:36
  yeah, at a certain stage, you have a data team that assists you- Yeah... with these things.
• 16:39
  Whereas, like, a lot of content marketers are, like, banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out an Excel formula that will- That, that will do it, right. Yeah.
• 16:46
  So- So our data team over here helped me build it out at the request of our CFO, right? Who specifically said, like, "I know content, like, has a halo effect," right?
• 16:58
  "I wanna, like, be able to kind of understand what that effect is," and, like, looked to her data guy in the room and was like, "Help Tracy figure that out." I'm like, "Great, we will go figure out how to do that."
• 17:09
  Um, and they were, they were super helpful. So we have this new, um, content assist metric, which we have to kinda keep close eyes on because sometimes it breaks for a variety of reason.
• 17:19
  Salesforce will get us more accurate data, which our paid team, our performance team is more interested in, right?
• 17:26
  The, like, the performance team's like, "Content assist is, like, okay, but we actually wanna see, like, how much actual revenue is this stuff driving?"
• 17:33
  And we'll be able to report out on that more, more clearly here soon. Um, at other organizations, though, where I did not have a data team able to do something like this for me, uh, I relied really heavily on HubSpot.
• 17:49
  So, um, I'm super familiar with the Hu- with HubSpot as just a CRM tool in general.
• 17:54
  Um, so would use, you know, Google Analytics to see overall sessions coming into a site, which HubSpot will also capture and typically organize it for you, uh, typically properly, though sometimes you have to hop in by the, uh, default channel that it comes in on.
• 18:08
  So whether that's organic, direct, paid, all of that jazz. Uh, and then from there, because, uh, HubSpot also has content, has forms, so you can do content downloads, you can do newsletter captures, all of that jazz.
• 18:21
  You can ultimately see over the, like, life of someone, like, when someone downloaded a piece of content or even saw a piece of content, if they later ended up becoming an MQL or, you know, an opportunity or a paid customer.
• 18:35
  All of that, while it is not-Necessarily immediately easy to build out in HubSpot. Like I, I think everyone listening could probably figure it out. There's a lot of articles out there on how to do it.
• 18:47
  The HubSpot folks in particular are, are also really helpful if you have a support team over there.
• 18:52
  Um, so that's how I've measured it historically in the past when I was just like a team of Tracy trying to prove that content drove revenue. That's really, really cool. Do you all use HubSpot as your CMS also? Not...
• 19:03
  So, so we don't... So at those organizations, no. Um, pretty, have used WordPress and, um, Webflow for, for those orgs. Um, HubSpot, to my understanding, isn't a great platform for CMS from an SEO standard.
• 19:19
  Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. That's what I was kinda getting at is like, yeah, I would like... W-Webflow and WordPress is what you hear everywhere.
• 19:25
  But you don't have to switch a CMS in order to get some of those same benefits. Oh, ab-absolutely not.
• 19:30
  Um, h- uh, so tools like HubSpot, even Klaviyo, right, part of the way that they collect so much data is you're dropping a, like a, a token essentially on your website so that when folks land there, the same way CDPs, all CDPs collect data this way too, right, um, you're dropping a token on there, and they're following people through all of their, uh, interactions and engagements, um, which, which is ultimately how you're collecting it.
• 19:55
  So you don't have to use that tool as the front end by any means. You just have to drop some, some kinda cookie code in the, uh... I'm so sorry to any developer listening, that is not what- [laughs] Um, [laughs]
• 20:08
  but, but you, you just have to drop that into like the website header, uh, and, or, or footer kinda depending on how your dev team wants to do it.
• 20:15
  I, I am not technical at all, and I just set this up for LinkedIn ads, like put a LinkedIn pixel in our, on our site through Google Tag Manager. I was... It was so much easier than I thought it was gonna be.
• 20:26
  It, it's, it is. It's way easier than you think. There are really great YouTube videos out there on it, like HubSpot, other platforms have... Uh, Klaviyo has really great documentation on it, right?
• 20:35
  Like it is very easy if, if you have access to the backend to figure out how to do it. But if you are nervous, you could ping your developer, and it will take them no more than five minutes to drop that on there.
• 20:47
  Content marketers in general should probably bug developers more than they actually do anyways. Oh, for sure. It's, it's super important.
• 20:53
  I mean, we're going through, um, a blog redesign right now, and my poor developers [laughs] are getting hounded because this is the time to make sure that we get our schema right, to make sure that we get our H tags right, to make sure that, you know, images are tinified as, as they, as they, you know, get pushed online.
• 21:12
  We do a lot of manual background work right now to make sure that our content is as optimized for search as possible, and a lot of that can be automated, but it has to be built into the system, and most developers just don't know technical SEO well enough to know what needs to be done where.
• 21:30
  Um, so yeah, our, our devs have a lot of notes come into them. [laughs] That's awesome. That's awesome. Um, I wanted to touch on content production.
• 21:39
  So when I go to the Klaviyo site and I hover over the Resources tab, there's a lot here. Blog, podcasts- Yeah, we just added like 20- Case studies. [laughs] Uh, yeah. I mean, is everything...
• 21:49
  I guess support is not under your purview. Support's not there, yeah. So Klaviyo has, um, a couple different organizations internally that produce content.
• 21:58
  So there's the content marketing organization, which is responsible for the blog, case studies, and marketing resources as well as like, you know, in the future, you know, I imagine we'll do like podcasts or we know we wanna put on an online conference.
• 22:11
  Like that kinda stuff will come from our, our organization. Our product marketing team publishes a, a blog called What's New, and so they are publishing all of our like new feature content essentially.
• 22:25
  Um, which when I was over at BigCommerce, uh, we didn't have that separation. The content marketing team did, did that also. So again, that's kind of unique at different organizations.
• 22:35
  Our product marketing team also puts on what we call, uh, call our KPEs, so that's Klaviyo product events, and those happen, um, once a quarter.
• 22:44
  And then our academy team, our education team publishes, uh, our academy content. They manage our community, um, and then any, any of our like specific like Klaviyo how-to a-articles and- Okay, cool. That is robust.
• 23:01
  How much... Do you, do you have a sense for how much content is going out on a weekly or monthly basis? Ooh.
• 23:06
  I mean, my team alone is putting out at least two blogs a week, and most of those blogs are repurposed into at least one PDF, if not up to five PDFs.
• 23:22
  Um, our, our product marketing team is publishing probably at least two to three blogs per month on their, on their What's New.
• 23:33
  And then our, um, academy and education team, I'm not sure how much is going out kind of on like the how-to section, but they host a biweekly live Klaviyo trainings.
• 23:44
  Um, so like biweekly, like, and that's like, that's twice a week, not every other week.
• 23:49
  Two times per week, uh, live Klaviyo trainings for prospects, customers, anyone, where anyone can come in, ask questions, and they like walk them through how to do stuff in the platform. That's amazing.
• 24:01
  Um, who writes all the content? And there's like, there's kind of a little bit more underneath that question, you know? Yes.
• 24:07
  We-we're certainly seeing a trend of in-house teams producing less content in-house, relying more heavily on vendors. Um, how do you all approach that? Y-You know, I assume s- you have writers on the teams.
• 24:20
  I assume that they're, that they're- Right... writing. Like do you, do you scale that or supplement that with freelancers, agencies? Yeah.
• 24:28
  So, um, w- uh, on the content marketing team, we, we do have two full-time writers.
• 24:36
  So they write the majority of our content.Um, we use right now only one other freelance writer, um, and she writes anywhere from one to two pieces for us a month.
• 24:48
  Uh, we have really scaled down and scaled back our freelance writing budget. Uh, we, we had a much larger budget last year, but also we didn't have those two f- two freelance...
• 24:57
  like, two full-time writers until, like, halfway through the year. They lived on a different team doing different stuff, and then they ended up coming over to ours, and, um, we used that time to kind of, like,
• 25:12
  m- [laughs] remove the freelance writing and increase the in-house writing. Um, I personally...
• 25:21
  and I, I've always used freelancers to, to help supplement, um, but on most of my teams, most of the writing, I would say, like, 70% of it has been done in-house, and there's a couple reasons for that.
• 25:32
  Um, one, again, I come from a journalism background, uh, and as a result including, like, real customer interviews in content is really important to me.
• 25:44
  Um, go- going back just to journalism principles, like, we want three interviews for every single piece, and I'm talking real interviews. Like, not we're just surveying people.
• 25:53
  Now, to be fair, at Klayvio we don't do it for every single piece, but we do it for, like, 70% of our pieces. Um, and it's hard to outsource to freelancers that, that work.
• 26:04
  I mean, we're interviewing customers, we're interviewing partners.
• 26:07
  It's really important that we show up as, um, well-educated on our own platform and tool, well-educated on Klayvio's stance, as well as how the customer or partner is using, using the tool, and that we ask really great questions and, like, build good rapport.
• 26:23
  Uh, and then of course because Klayvio's big, we have to get all of that approved from a legal perspective.
• 26:27
  Um, so they have to sign customer consent forms and partner consent forms [laughs] for us to be able to move all of that through. Similarly, we are also...
• 26:36
  Again, Klayvio's a big organization, um, and a CDP, uh, and so we collect a lot of data and can anonymize that data across all of our customers.
• 26:45
  So we are now also on about 60% of our content including proprietary Klayvio data to help supplement. Yeah, so, like, right now- Oh, that's amazing.
• 26:54
  Yeah, we just published a piece on, um, or republished a piece on subject lines that Kaylee Moore actually wrote for us last year.
• 27:00
  And we didn't, like, change any of the content that she wrote, but we did add, like, six new charts to it, um, showing, like, what the average, you know, email headline is, open rates, all of that jazz.
• 27:12
  All of that pulled from proprietary Klayvio data.
• 27:15
  Um, and it looks at it specifically for, okay, this is what small businesses are doing, this is what mid-market businesses are doing, um, really in an effort to kind of, um, show people how all of that works.
• 27:26
  And we're getting better at data visualization [laughs] more- That's amazing... more and more. That's so interesting. It's just...
• 27:32
  It is interesting because on the last podcast we talked to Sean Blanda, who echoed two of the same things. One is, uh, bringing the, um, uh, like a journalism mindset to content marketing, and two, data visualizations.
• 27:44
  Like, he, he harped on both of those things as well. Um, do you have... H- how do you think about, um, I'll call it content hygiene? You know, refreshing, sprucing up, maybe even overhauling old pieces.
• 27:56
  Like, is that an ongoing effort? Is that- Yeah... the k- type of thing that comes up, like, couple times a year, and there's, like, a sprint to fix a few things? No. No, no. It's, it, it's ongoing.
• 28:05
  I would say we publish... Maybe about 40% of the content that we publish is on a net new URL, um, and about 60% is on an existing URL. Whoa. Interesting. Um- That's a lot. It's a lot.
• 28:18
  I mean c- again, I, I've only been here a year. Klayvio's been around since, since 2012. Um, there's a lot of old content that, um, isn't...
• 28:28
  like, w- wasn't done to the current standards that we have for a lot of reasons, right? Different teams. Some of it's from, like, 2014, right? [laughs] Like, a lot... like- A lot of that.
• 28:37
  Yeah, it's just, it's just dated. But from an SEO perspective, the URLs are great, right? Like, like, they're old, right?
• 28:44
  And, and you wanna, you wanna reuse, um, URLs that have, like, good old, you know, one, backlinks, li- a lifespan, all of that jazz. Cleaning up in general also just typically looks good to the Google bots.
• 28:56
  Um, so we try to use any, uh, URL that, that we have available, and we are only gonna be publishing on net new URLs as no URL that we [laughs] currently have will serve that purpose.
• 29:10
  Now, this year for Klayvio, right now, we are focused on the content marketing team. About 70% of our efforts are on SEO.
• 29:18
  Um, Klayvio hasn't historically really focused on that from a editorial point of view, uh, and so we are r- really working to grow and scale that this year.
• 29:28
  Uh, but next year we plan to, if we hit our goals this year, which we plan to, we plan to reduce that, um, to a 40% focus on SEO.
• 29:37
  And primarily what we'll be doing then is updating and repurposing existing content, right? So we need to clean this year. We need to get pieces to a good place.
• 29:46
  And then every year we want to go back into, um, pretty much every piece of content we have every 12 months to every 6 months, uh, and update it with new data, new quotes, new examples, new headlines, and, and, and republish to, to make sure that we are keeping it fresh both for our audience but also for, uh, s- search engines.
• 30:07
  So that's the way we think about it. This is such a professional operation. I love it. Like, you're just doing all the things that people are like, "Like, ah, I should probably do that," but you just like...
• 30:14
  You've operationalized all of them and are making sure they all happen, which is, I think, is awesome. Um, I... We're gonna get you out of here on time, so I just have two quick questions for you. Um, the first is tools.
• 30:25
  Are there any tools you rely on, you know, other than kinda, like, the basic tools like, you know, Google Analytics or whatever everybody else is using, you know, that you might use for, like, content calendar, project management, um- Yeah...
• 30:36
  or anything else? Yeah. Klayvio uses monday.com for project management, but I would not recommend it to anybody. Um, I histo- I, I have used, I've used them all at, at every, at, at all the different places.
• 30:49
  I mean, Asana, Jira.Trello, um, a- ah, Airtable. This is my first time with Monday. I'm gonna say this, and then I... If any Monday people are listening, like, please help us.
• 31:00
  If all you did was allow a ticket to live on multiple boards, not mirroring. Mirroring sucks and doesn't work. If you just allowed a ticket to live on multiple boards, Monday would be useful and effective.
• 31:11
  But because it can't, oh my God, it's awful. [laughs] That's so frustrating. Yeah. So that's like a top-down thing. Like, Klaviyo uses Monday, like therefore the content team uses it.
• 31:22
  The, yeah, th- therefore, therefore we have to use it. Um, I, I prefer Asana and/or Airtable. The, those are the two that I like. Y- tickets can live on multiple boards.
• 31:32
  Airtable's really nice 'cause it's really easy to automate things. My team does a lot of manual, like copying and pasting from different docs just because Monday, um, sucks.
• 31:41
  Anyways, um, so that's the project management tool we're using. Would not recommend it. Um, in terms of, uh, content tools, uh, we use Ahrefs, so A- Ahrefs. Um, we use Clearscope, of course.
• 31:56
  Um, WordPress is what we publish on. Um, we have an account to Statista. We're looking right now at a data visualization tool called Flourish, um, which, uh, our, our creative team is, is an in-house only team.
• 32:11
  We don't use any agencies. And so when 60% of our content needs data visualization, bless their hearts, it's a, it's a big request. [laughs] And so Flourish is a tool that's now owned by Canva.
• 32:23
  Um, they allow y- your creative team to go in and essentially like set like branding templates for like 150, 250 plus, um, uh, data visualizations that they already have in there.
• 32:37
  And then a content team could get in and drop data in, and it just like automatically visualizes it. They have moving graphic, and you can export it over to Canva and like, and into social templates, all of that jazz.
• 32:49
  So we are about to like put it through our testing processes, 'cause you know, we, we have like, you know, strict security on our CMS, all of that jazz that we kinda need to like test it with.
• 32:59
  But I'm excited about that one. Uh, we are looking also at Jasper AI, um, and just trying to figure out how to use AI tools better. The main way
• 33:11
  that, that I want to use it, that I'm sure is a use case that will be more popular in the future, but AI tools just aren't very good at it right now. I wanna be able to drop a like piece of content in.
• 33:23
  Again, we interview people, we have data visualizations, like the content we're producing is really high quality.
• 33:29
  But then most of our internal channels need that piece of content in different formats for their own channels. And my team can't really do that, [laughs] right? Not for everybody.
• 33:42
  Uh, we need to serve as a, um, like a, like as a kinda centralized production hub, and then everybody else can turn, like take that content and put it in whatever format and edit it, all of that jazz.
• 33:56
  Um, but I'm sure other people have run into this, which is anyone not on a content team says they can't write and edit. Um, and as a result, [laughs] they won't take content and put it in that new stuff.
• 34:07
  And so I am hoping AI can help us figure out how to do that.
• 34:11
  So again, dropping blog posts in, you could tell it things like, you know, "Customize this for, you know, a, like a fashion marketer, um, and like m- like put it in a one-pager kind of style," like what- whatever.
• 34:25
  I don't think we are far from that. Um, I just don't think that has been a highly requested use case just yet. But man, I am talking to every AI tool about it.
• 34:34
  I'm like, "Someone build it for me, and I will use you endlessly." Yeah, that's amazing. That's really cool. Um, one last question then we'll get you outta here 'cause I know you gotta run. Yeah.
• 34:42
  Uh, your newsletter, where can people find it? Um, yeah, so, uh, my newsletter is, uh, through the good folks over at Workweek. Um, I honestly do not know the URL of it right now. You could go to my Twitter.
• 34:54
  Uh, so I'm, I'm on Twitter @tracewall, and it's linked there. Uh, or... Okay, perfect. You can also type in like contentment- Yeah... on the internet, and it- Workweek.com/brand/content.
• 35:06
  We'll just link it s- Yeah, honestly... so people can easily get it. It's really good. It's a really good newsletter. It comes up in the Slack group quite a bit actually. Um, we'll make sure w- that we send people there.
• 35:14
  Um, Tracy, this was dense. There was so much informa- It was so helpful, so interesting. I feel like I learned so much.
• 35:21
  My main takeaway is, is like I said, that you've just operationalized all the little things, and that's how you run a professional content organization. So kudos to you. That's... It's amazing. Thank you. Thank you.
• 35:31
  And thank you again for having me, truly. Yeah, absolutely. Um, we will, we'll see you around. Um, and, uh, we'll see everybody next time on episode three. Thanks, Tracy. Take care.
• 35:43
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