Latest / Content, Briefly / Calendly: Emily Triplett Lentz on rethinking content for 2024 (rerun)

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Calendly: Emily Triplett Lentz on rethinking content for 2024 (rerun) · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
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• 0:28
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• 0:54
  And so we've gotta lean into, yes, influencer marketing, but also leveraging our own team to talk about Calendly across their social channels and, like, what happens when we put our own people and influencers in the industry in front of the camera and have them talking about Calendly on our behalf in a way that we just get results that we wouldn't get in a way if we were trying to spread that message ourselves.
• 1:25
  [instrumental music] Hey folks, and thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, we've got a rerun for you. I've got Emily Triplett Lentz.
• 1:34
  We ran this episode initially January twenty fourteen. We're bringing it back because many of the things we talked about are just as relevant, if not more relevant today.
• 1:43
  And in full transparency, had a little bit of scheduling snafu, [laughs] and I've got, uh, more guests booked. We'll have new episodes rolling out next week. In the meantime, I love this conversation with Emily.
• 1:53
  She's the senior manager of content and brand at Calendly. You may think of Calendly as, uh, you know, a little company that makes it easy to schedule meetings.
• 2:01
  But in reality, it was estimated they did two hundred and seventy million dollars in ARR last year. So this is a massive business. There's a lot going on here.
• 2:10
  Emily talks a bit about how they balance product-led growth with a sales-led motion. She talks also about verticalizing content.
• 2:18
  And we did, in this episode, talk about where video and social fit into her twenty twenty-four plans. That is especially relevant now as folks are thinking about their twenty twenty-five plans.
• 2:27
  And then we also go into her team's hackathon. They did an AI hackathon to try to find some new ways to use AI in their content workflow. So like I said, I feel like we could record this today.
• 2:37
  It's every bit as relevant. Emily's fantastic. She's incredibly smart, very experienced, and very generous with her wisdom. So as always, I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too.
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• 3:55
  Hey everybody, Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly. Today we have Emily Triplett Lentz, content legend. I was just looking at your LinkedIn, Emily. Your resume is really cool.
• 4:09
  I will first ask you to introduce yourself, but could you also talk a little bit about that too, like just the arc of your career to date? Yeah.
• 4:14
  Or put another way, I have been a B2B SaaS content marketer for way too long. [laughs] Yeah. I started out more as a journalist/comms person and then did just a variety of editorial work until I moved into SaaS.
• 4:31
  So started out doing CX at Thirty Seven Signals, which became Basecamp and is now Thirty Seven Signals again. Then I took a content marketing role at Help Scout, so that's...
• 4:42
  I worked with Greg Ciotti for a while, who you just interviewed on the podcast as well. Wow. Then I moved to Loom,
• 4:48
  where I built and ran the content team there, and now I've been at Calendly for the past two plus years, just growing the content team in here, which has been a lot of fun because the company's scaled a lot, so has the marketing team, and that's just been a wild ride to be on.
• 5:06
  Yeah. That's awesome. Calendly is surprisingly large, right? Yeah. I wanna say, like, six hundred-ish now. Oh, wow. That is... That's even larger than I thought.
• 5:15
  The reason I say surprisingly is just because I think of Calendly as a startup, but it's not brand new any longer. It's now like a proper- No. No, no... enterprise tool. Yeah. Yeah.
• 5:24
  It's been around since twenty thirteen. Founded in Atlanta by our CEO, Tope Awotona. And initially, like, it was just created to solve the annoying problem of going back and forth to try to find a time to, to meet.
• 5:40
  So instead, you send someone your Calendly link, they book time on your calendar, it makes it really easy. And a lot of people still think of Calendly as just a scheduling link.
• 5:49
  Of course, it's evolved quite a bit, and now it's grown into an entire
• 5:54
  scheduling automation platform that makes it really easy for whole teams to schedule and automate meetings, like especially teams that have a lot of external meetings, so sales teams, customer successRecruiting teams, marketing teams, and then whole industries, education and financial services, stuff like that.
• 6:15
  Yeah. Literally this morning I was on Policygenius looking at a, an insurance plan, and I like filled out the little form, and two minutes later they sent me a Calendly link to like book time to talk with somebody. Yeah.
• 6:28
  Yeah. Like even- Serendipitous... people who haven't heard about Calendly, when I tell them what it does, they're like, "Oh yeah, I've seen that." Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
• 6:37
  Can you talk about the content marketing perspective here? Because Calendly, maybe a lot of folks think of it as like a freemium SaaS tool. Lots of individuals use it, but that's not where the money's made, right?
• 6:47
  Like, it's these larger B2B plans where you're selling into teams and also now like selling into multiple industries. I assume that's where the content kinda does the heavy lifting. Is that right?
• 6:58
  We actually straddle both. We do have a lot of like onesie-twosie accounts using solopreneurs, et cetera, like using Calendly to automate their scheduling.
• 7:08
  So there's a ton of like product-led growth that the content team supports in that ba... and then of course also like the sales-led side and selling to enterprise and that kind of thing.
• 7:21
  And what, which side we're supporting, it can be on a pendulum a little bit depending on the needs of the business at the time, and it's, it's changed a lot even since I started.
• 7:33
  I think I was marketing team member number nine when I started, and now we're like sixty plus. Oh, wow. Yeah. Our, our strategy [chuckles] has shifted just I wanna say even quarterly as we've scaled. Yeah. Got it.
• 7:47
  That makes sense. Could you talk a little bit about the content operation? What does the team look like?
• 7:52
  And if you're able to, this might be a difficult question, but if you're able to like sum up your current content strategy in a sentence or two, like how would you describe it? Yeah. The first part's easier.
• 8:02
  I'll say like content sits within like the corporate marketing branch of the marketing team alongside creative, comms, uh, events and international marketing.
• 8:15
  And we have six full-time employees on the content team, and then we rely on contractors as well.
• 8:23
  So there's myself, there's a couple content marketing managers, one who focuses more on like long form writing and editing, and one who began as a writer but is moving into more of a hybrid content ops role.
• 8:39
  We have a senior copywriter, a senior video marketer, and a senior social media manager who is also moving into co-owning influencer marketing with- Oh, cool... the business development team. Yeah.
• 8:51
  That's very interesting. That's my team. Cool. I'll probably have a couple follow-up questions about that. [chuckles] But would love to, would love to also talk about the harder of these two- Yeah...
• 8:59
  questions, which is the content strategy piece. The strategy of...
• 9:02
  I can tell you what we used to do, and I can tell you what we've been doing, but you've caught me at a moment where like, probably like a lot of content teams right now, we are reassessing everything. Yes.
• 9:12
  Like everything. We are- Literally every team I talk to is experiencing that right now. Yeah. Yeah. We're in exact same boat.
• 9:19
  What's working, what's not working, if we were to create space in our day by automating something or outsourcing something or
• 9:29
  just not doing something anymore, or enabling another team to self-serve that we've historically served.
• 9:34
  And like if we could create this space, what could we then turn around and focus on and experiment with and explore and see if it makes a bigger impact on the business?
• 9:45
  'Cause, yeah, we're all just amidst this like seismic shift right now. The old playbooks, the stuff that served us well ten years ago, even two years ago, like that stuff is just straight up not working.
• 9:57
  But, and like the continued surefiredness of those tactics is like at the very least up for debate. Yeah. I think 2024 is gonna be an awesome year for content marketers. I think- And I think we're gonna see...
• 10:10
  Yeah, everyone is rethinking stuff. I think a lot of teams are gonna come up with some really cool content, new concepts, new formats, new mediums, whatever.
• 10:19
  I think we're gonna see a lot of really cool stuff that we haven't seen before.
• 10:22
  And for all the challenges of 2023, there is this silver lining where at least for content teams, you get to look at everything you do and be like, "Should we do this anymore?
• 10:33
  Is there some stuff that we can just drop 'cause we don't really need it, and we just did it out of habit," or it was like hard to let go of, and now you're free to start over if you want to, or really take a hard look at what does work and double down or...
• 10:47
  It doesn't happen that often, and like even though it happened for some reasons that created a lot of other stress and challenges for a lot of people, I guess that's why it's called a silver lining.
• 10:55
  [chuckles] It's not like a... It's not perfect, but it, I would imagine it probably helps a lot. So it sounds like Calendly has experienced that kind of like taking a hard look at content and starting to rethink 2024.
• 11:07
  Yeah. Yeah, very much.
• 11:08
  I mean, I think, you know, these times are just calling for us to look, to take a really hard critical look at all the stuff we're producing and the, and, and our distribution strategies and just give ourselves permission to step off the treadmills that we've been on and say, "Okay, if I stop doing that, how bad would it really be?
• 11:30
  'Cause then I can go over here and really figure out like what... All right. What's the, like really creator-driven, like human person first, like channel-specific distribution strategy? What's that look like?"
• 11:45
  And then go figure that out and execute on that versus just like continuing to update all of the listicles on the blog that are like falling in the SERP. And I'm human.
• 11:57
  I have a little bit of an SEO background, and I see it fall, and I'm just like, "Oh, I know exactly what to do to fix that." But... And that's the temptation, but is that really where like my team's time is best spent?
• 12:11
  This is not at all-I, I still believe in it very much. It-- I think it will always be a part of the strategy, but I do think, like, we're in a moment where it's time to give other initiatives a bigger piece of the pie.
• 12:24
  Yeah, definitely. It's an interesting thing about the emergence of AI and ChatGPT is I think it's pushing...
• 12:33
  Like, that has been the driving force pushing SEO kind of down the priority list for content marketers in what started as, like, a sort of terrifying experience and now is starting to look like, "Oh, you mean I don't have to churn out all this content anymore?"
• 12:51
  Or, like, maybe you do. Maybe we will. Maybe a year from now I'll be like, "Oh, it turns out we did need to do that." I don't know. But it does open the door, like you said, for some more creative stuff.
• 12:59
  Which actually leads me to a follow-up question I wanted to ask you, which is about having a video person and a social person on your team. Could you talk a little bit about their roles?
• 13:09
  Because I'm finding in talking to a lot of content teams, very few of them have in-house video folks, and maybe a handful have social folks.
• 13:17
  But I'm just be curious, like, what is a kind of a day in their lives look like? Yeah.
• 13:22
  Without exception, every single person on my team, because of the stuff we've just [laughs] addressed, is, like, looking at their role and reassessing what they're doing. Sure.
• 13:33
  So, like, our social media person, like, on the one hand, yes, she is there monitoring social, responding to customers, keeping the lights on, creating content for Calendly's accounts. But she's now in this new era.
• 13:49
  She's also, like, working with the video marketer to determine what that creator-led distribution strategy looks like in, in twenty twenty-four.
• 13:59
  And she's working with comms and demand gen on, like, influencer marketing and employer... excuse me, employee advocacy.
• 14:08
  Yeah, she and, like, everyone on our team do still have to balance the functions of being, like, the service org and the strategy org. Mm-hmm. But the work they're doing, like, in this age is shifting quite a bit.
• 14:19
  Same with our video marketer. She used to be primarily just, like, a video production person, and any marketing videos that Calendly produced would go through her, and she would make the...
• 14:30
  And now she's being called upon to be more of, like, a video marketing strategist and developed that, co-develop that, like, creator strategy with our social person and all kinds of interesting strategy work that she hasn't gotten to get her hands dirty with yet just because- Yeah.
• 14:48
  -the volume of videos that, that we produce is so high. But what can we outsource to AI? And there's just, like, a lot of things that can change now, so we're all reassessing that. Got it.
• 14:59
  Just a quick follow-up about the video piece and kind of the volume of video that Calendly creates.
• 15:03
  Is it primarily stuff for social, or does that also include things like tutorials and onboarding and help docs and stuff like that? Yeah.
• 15:11
  It's l- She creates a lot of different kinds of videos: brand videos, product launch videos, like i-i-introducing a new feature, and those get distributed in lots of different kinds of channels: social, email, our own site, YouTube, et cetera.
• 15:30
  It depends on the, it depends on the campaign.
• 15:32
  But yeah, she's, like, the person at Calendly [laughs] who handles video, and we've, we've even had to, like, train other teams and enable other teams to create high-quality videos 'cause we-- obviously she can't do everything.
• 15:45
  She can't be creating every single, like, how-to video that lives in the help center- Yeah. Mm-hmm. -and stuff like that. So yeah. Got it. Very cool. I'm very excited for video and audio in particular next year.
• 15:56
  And there was another thing you mentioned I wanted to ask you about, which was creator-led distribution.
• 16:00
  When you say that, do you mean Calendly, like, tapping into some of the tactics that creators use in building their own audiences and distributing their content?
• 16:11
  Or do you mean employing or relying on creators/influencers to do some of that work for you? More of the latter.
• 16:19
  I think just, like, moving away from the classic playbook of as Calendly, we tweet x times per day, and we post to LinkedIn, like, as Ca- because, like, just the value of doing that
• 16:31
  is, it's just, that's one of the playbooks that's not working anymore.
• 16:35
  And so we've gotta lean into, yes, influencer marketing, but also leveraging our own team to talk about Calendly across their social channels and, like, what happens when we put our own people and influencers in the industry in front of the camera and have them talking about Calendly on our behalf in a way that we just get results that we wouldn't get in a way if we were trying to spread that message ourselves.
• 17:04
  So that's what I- For sure. Yeah. That's really cool. And I'll be curious to know, maybe we can check in a year from now, kinda how that goes because I've... I sense that there's interest and hesitation.
• 17:15
  Like, a lot of companies, obviously they realize if you let the individuals do it, you probably gonna get better results. But, like, how do you operationalize? Yeah. Do people want that?
• 17:22
  Should a company invest in people's personal brands or not? What happens to the followers if they go with the individuals? Like, all that type of stuff.
• 17:29
  I feel like there's a lot of questions there, but I think it's the smart thing to do, and I feel like it'd be cur-- I'd be interested to follow up on it later on and see how all that goes. Yeah. Yeah.
• 17:37
  It is really thor-- And I, it's, it doesn't look as much like a program with a bullet list of line items underneath it as just a mind map.
• 17:46
  Like, we've got influencer marketing over here, and we've got employee advocacy over here, and we've got our YouTube channel, and we've got... Are we gonna start leveraging TikTok more?
• 17:56
  And I, like, it's, I-- that's why I've tasked these folks with coming up with a strategy. How are we going to operationalize this?
• 18:04
  Where we, in the past, we've dabbled here and there, and we've seen good results, and we want to continue to go further down that road, but we do need a cohesive strategy before we go further, I feel like. Yeah. Yeah.
• 18:16
  Got it. That makes sense.How verticalized is Calendly's content? Meaning, you wanna reach people in education. Do you create...
• 18:25
  Do you kinda sprint through a kind of a burst of content creation for that specific industry and the personas associated with it, and then rinse and repeat for different?
• 18:33
  Or do you basically sell that same feature set across the board without taking that extra step of verticalizing? Yeah.
• 18:41
  We are very verticalized, and we have a talented solutions marketing team that sits with product marketing, so not on content, but those folks are creating, like, massive amounts of, like, sales enablement content specific to certain ICPs.
• 18:59
  Yeah. So yeah, we do... Like, I, I run a meeting once a month with all the content creators across the marketing team because just because, like, you're not on the content team doesn't mean you're not creating content.
• 19:12
  So like I said, we have the solutions marketing team. We have a fabulous webinar team. We have the life cycle team, the comms team.
• 19:19
  All of these folks are creating massive amounts of content, so it's really helpful for us to come together as a group and brainstorm and look at how did this thing that we shipped last month actually perform, and what do you have planned next month?
• 19:32
  What do you have planned next month? And avoid duplication that way and just find opportunities- Sure.
• 19:37
  -for cross-pollination 'cause it doesn't make sense for everyone who creates content to live on the content team, but we still have to enable everyone on marketing to create content that's aligned with our overall goals and strategy.
• 19:50
  Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool, actually, and I feel like that's relatively new, that not everyone who creates content's on the content team. [chuckles] Yeah.
• 19:57
  Not new, like, yesterday, but new over the past couple of years, I guess, where, like, marketing in general has evolved or come to the realization that lots of marketing is actually- Yes.
• 20:06
  -content marketing, and there's different ways and different skillsets and different objectives and da da da, but the organizational stuff is fairly challenging, actually.
• 20:14
  And so having that meeting sounds like an excellent step in keeping everybody organized. I'd be curious, too, is there, like, a central or centralized kind of Q&A... Sorry, say that again.
• 20:25
  Is there a, a centralized QA process that everything runs through to make sure it's adherent with, like, brand guidelines and things like that too? No. I will say each team that's response...
• 20:36
  that, like, each channel owner has their processes and their checks and balances that they will run a piece of content through. And a lot of times it does come through the content team.
• 20:49
  And like those meetings, it's also on the content team to enable the rest of the marketing team to create really high quality, really aligned content.
• 21:00
  And we have some incredible, super talented folks on the marketing team, but you still have to give them a really good style guide to work from. You still...
• 21:10
  And you still have to, like, train folks on what we mean when we say, like, human speak versus marketing speak in our voice and tone guidelines and whatnot.
• 21:19
  So that's something that, like, our team has been responsible for. Got it. Got it. That makes sense.
• 21:26
  Any tools in your stack that you find to be particularly useful in terms of, I don't know, all content things, the project management piece of it, the editorial calendar piece of it, keeping team, keeping individuals across teams on the same page?
• 21:40
  Like, anything in there that you've found to be especially helpful? Yeah. We're a fully remote team, so we're in Slack a lot, but we also manage everything in Asana, which is hugely helpful.
• 21:52
  And the whole marketing team uses Asana, so that's really n-- 'cause I've been on teams where that's not the tool of record for everybody, and it's just really nice that, like, we have dedicated PMs, and they're using Asana, and their system is ties in how we all use it as a team.
• 22:09
  But I've used... I, I, I feel like I could use any project management tool for an editorial calendar or whatever. It's just a matter of what is your company using.
• 22:18
  But I was really happy when I [chuckles] arrived at Calendly, and they already had an Asana account in place. Yeah. Asana, Asana is really nice.
• 22:25
  And using it in a structured way across the entire organization actually sounds like a beautiful- Yeah. Yeah. It is, for sure. How do you think about content that gets created in-house versus externally?
• 22:37
  'Cause I think you mentioned earlier that you do occasionally rely on contractors, agencies, et cetera.
• 22:42
  Like, in your mind, is there, like, a clear split on the type of content that you might create in-house versus externally, or is it just a matter of if there's overflow, you'll bring in external help? Yeah.
• 22:53
  A lot of our content, just because of, like, the, the massive, like, PLG origin of Calendly as a company is very product-focused.
• 23:06
  So if we have product-heavy content, we try to keep that in-house and anything that's a little more top of funnel or, say, a, an e-book that can be...
• 23:19
  you can interview SMEs, but create as a generalist, that's the kind of thing that, that we would outsource. And then our video marketer does work with an agency or two to...
• 23:33
  They're all set up with our brand and our product guidelines, and she has them working on certain videos or production stuff as well. Got it. That makes sense. I have a whole list of other stuff I'm just- Yeah.
• 23:45
  -gonna run through, if that's cool, because there's so much to cover here. Another thing I wanted to check in with you about was data points.
• 23:51
  Are there a handful of metrics, and maybe historically metrics that you've cared a lot about, realizing that potentially is up for debate heading into 2024? Yeah.
• 24:02
  I mean, our metrics change, like I was saying, quarter to quarter, and Calendly has gotten really good at determining what our overall goals as a company should be.
• 24:13
  So, like, marketing very much ladders up to those, and content ladders up to those. And I can't be super specific about what those are.
• 24:22
  I will say that whatever the objective is, we try to writeA key result that serves that objective in a measurable way.
• 24:30
  So like I was saying, say we were gonna run an experiment with increasing the blog's efficiency, that might be in service of a bigger goal like driving more signups or passing more MQLs along to sales or whatever it is that quarter or half, and we might try to drive
• 24:47
  X percent more form fills from the blog to gated content like period over period.
• 24:54
  But that makes it sound like it's about demand gen all the time, [chuckles] but it's also about like supporting adoption and activation and monetization, and also some more difficult to measure efforts like brand awareness.
• 25:08
  So it runs the whole gamut. Got it. That actually makes me think of another thing I wanted to ask you about, which is product marketing.
• 25:13
  Whenever I hear PLG, I immediately think product marketing 'cause not always, but oftentimes products with a free trial or a freemium version, it's not that the hard part isn't getting people to use the free one.
• 25:25
  The hard part is getting people to use- Mm-hmm... the paid thing. Yeah, like oftentimes, that's where product marketing comes in.
• 25:30
  But because you have this PLG motion and then probably running in parallel and probably with some overlap a sales-led motion too, where does product marketing fit in, and how much do you work with product marketing?
• 25:40
  Yeah.
• 25:40
  We have a super talented product marketing team, and they also have to split between those two motions, but they determine based on our product roadmap that sort of determines like the themes of our campaigns for the coming months, and then we collaborate really closely with the product marketing team, which is where solutions marketing also sits, to figure out, okay, what are the assets that we're going to need or we're gonna need to update for this particular campaign as we bring a new feature to market or whatever the case may be.
• 26:16
  Yeah. Got it. Got it. That makes sense. Really cool. There's a How I Built- Uh-huh... This episode about Calendly- Yes... from a couple years ago. Yeah. It's really worth listening to.
• 26:24
  It was actually- Partially because-... sent to me in a recruiting email that was like, "Go listen to this interview" [chuckles] Really? So yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Hey, why not? It's a good podcast.
• 26:33
  And you don't always get SaaS companies on there. Usually, it's from other industries, so it's cool to hear Guy Raz take you through these founding business stories when it's a SaaS company 'cause usually it's not.
• 26:44
  So go check that out. I'm gonna pause for one second because there's a whole list of stuff I wanna ask you about, and I just wanna see how I'm doing on my list of questions for you here.
• 26:51
  Six is actually fairly large for a content team. I'd just be curious, what is your... How often do you talk with everyone? Is there a weekly cadence?
• 26:57
  You mentioned a monthly meeting with kind of anyone who creates content, even if they're not on your team. Even if it's in broad strokes, it would be interesting to know like how you all stay on- Yeah.
• 27:05
  It's like I said, we're remote. We manage everything in Asana. We're in Slack a lot.
• 27:09
  I meet weekly with each of my team members one-on-one, and we use small improvements for the agenda, so either of us can add talking points to it.
• 27:21
  And sometimes the folks on my team will wanna use that time to talk through like their projects or processes, which is totally fine, but I also try to reserve time to think about the big picture and have ongoing career conversations and performance feedback and workload balancing and that kind of thing.
• 27:40
  And then we also meet weekly. We have a weekly 30-minute team meeting, and we rotate hosts, and
• 27:50
  we track the agenda in Asana, so anyone can add items to the agenda, but it's mostly just like a time for us to connect and go through our goals, discuss projects, process, strategy, any blockers, what have you. Got it.
• 28:04
  Small improvements, is that an app you use- Mm-hmm... or is that like a methodology? Yeah, it's a tool. Oh, interesting. I haven't come across that.
• 28:09
  Does it fall into the same category as like a fifteenfive and- Cali uses it company-wide. It's our tool of record for like performance conversations in total.
• 28:20
  So all of our performance feedback is recorded in small improvements. Got it. That's cool. I like that. I'll have to check that out.
• 28:27
  Do y'all ever run into the problem of what content should we create, or is it constantly an issue of there's too much demand for net new, and part of our job is to sort out what's a high priority rather than coming up with stuff from scratch?
• 28:42
  Yeah.
• 28:42
  I will say that having the guidelines of these are our OKRs for this quarter really does help us have those kinds of conversations with our team, where they're like, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could have a blog post about the..."
• 28:57
  And you're like, "Yes, it would, and unfortunately, we don't have the bandwidth for that this quarter. Like we can stick a pin in that."
• 29:03
  But it's just really nice to have those guardrails there to help drive, all right, these are the campaigns. This is what we're doing. This is what we're supporting.
• 29:12
  And then anything like strategy-wise that my team wants to do, it's also... It's not out of left field.
• 29:20
  It's also, "And this supports this like PLG campaign that we're running is because we're updating these kinds of pieces of content," et cetera. So yeah, I will...
• 29:29
  I don't have to have a ton of like uncomfortable, "We can't do that," kinds of conversations because everybody knows what the goals are. Got it. That makes sense. That makes sense.
• 29:37
  There's something that happens in companies, I don't know exactly like what stage of the life cycle this happens, but content shifts from purely net new, let's get people on the website, to this more mature stage where it's partially net new and partially
• 29:52
  maintenance, I guess you'll call it or like hygiene where, you know, you every now and then you do a content audit and you refresh old posts and you maybe even prune some.
• 30:01
  Does that type of thing fall under your purview as well? Whereas like maybe in some companies it's an SEO team that's separate from content that deals with that thing. Yeah, absolutely.
• 30:09
  In fact, we're the only ones really looking at or caring about that stuff, and I would say like no one is specifically like breathing down my neck asking me to run an audit or update old pieces of content.
• 30:22
  So if and when we do that, it's often because we'll be looking into something else and we'll just be like, "Oh my gosh, these pieces have been sitting there for four years, and they haven't been touched, and the product doesn't even look like that anymore, and we need to do something about it."
• 30:34
  And so we'll spin up-Yeah A project for ourselves to take care of it. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I find that stuff to be really interesting and actually fun to work on.
• 30:41
  And the only company I've ever worked at that was large enough to really have this issue, the issue in this case being like, should we do net new content or should we do maintenance?
• 30:52
  Because we don't actually know which one will help us more.
• 30:56
  And it was a, this-- as a QuickBooks when I worked there, and we actually stopped producing net new content for a little while to run an audit, and the results of the audit were a bunch of cleaning up and pruning some content, and we were able to almost double traffic without creating anything new.
• 31:10
  But that only happens when the site is of a certain size, and it seems like the importance of that grows and grows as the company and kind of the content footprint also grows. Yeah.
• 31:20
  I mean, we've definitely gotten to that point here at Calendly where it's just, do we actually need anything new? And we're like, "You know what?
• 31:30
  Actually, let's just look at what we do have, and let's try to do a better job incorporating our existing content into campaigns, and if it does need to be updated, like great, let's update it.
• 31:41
  But let's definitely not continue creating new con- especially for the sake of creating content." Like we, we don't. Yeah. That is a treadmill we do not want to be on. And fortunately- Yeah...
• 31:52
  we have full leadership support for that as well. But I think it can be hard to get off that particular treadmill if you're, if you're a content creator, if you're a blog writer, everything looks like a blog post to you.
• 32:04
  [chuckles] Yeah. Yeah. I feel that for sure. Have there been any pieces of content that your team has created that have performed really well, or maybe they surprised you in terms of how well they've performed? Yeah.
• 32:18
  So we just recently produced a state of scheduling report.
• 32:23
  We just shipped that a little over a month ago in, in November, and it blew past every goal we had for ourselves in, in terms of like how many visits, how many downloads, social engagement, et cetera, like just across the board.
• 32:37
  And it was like a great piece of content based on an actual survey that we ran with people about like, how are you feeling about your calendar and AI, and how do you feel about productivity in general?
• 32:47
  And not just reporting and regurgitating that data, but actually like telling a story about it, about like people's sentiments.
• 32:53
  But the reason it did so well isn't because my team produced a great piece of content, which they did, but like it was that there was this concerted super cross-functional team wide effort that like lived with even, an even larger like AI thought leadership campaign.
• 33:11
  So we had a PM driving the whole thing.
• 33:13
  We had, you know, we had social, we had video, we had animated graphics, we had a beautiful landing page that like drove to a forum, that drove to more like AI wait list signups, and we had follow-up nurtures.
• 33:25
  And very rarely, [chuckles] I would say, does a piece of content that like outperforms all of your wildest expectations exist in a vacuum. Like- Yeah.
• 33:35
  So we're very fortunate that we have just a very talented, very aligned team here, and that we all have the same goals. Yeah. So not an accident. Not an accident. [chuckles] Yeah. That's really cool.
• 33:47
  I'm looking at it right now. I would encourage... I always encourage folks, listen to the podcast, then go to the website and- Yeah... see what it all looks like. Yeah.
• 33:54
  'Cause I feel like that's where you can really gain some inspiration for your own content work, but this is really cool. We actually, we recently did a state- Yeah... of content report.
• 34:01
  Not that everyone needs to just go out and do a state- [chuckles]... of X report, but the cool thing about it is, to me, at least in our case, the interesting thing was like there's a lot of... I hear a lot.
• 34:11
  There's a lot of like anecdotal information that might float around in the Slack community or on social media about like the state of content marketing.
• 34:17
  So to be able to put data behind that, validate people's feelings, or in some cases challenge things that I hear and say, actually, not everybody does feel that way.
• 34:27
  And it's really helpful just to give people a benchmark for how things are going. So I think that's something we'll probably continue.
• 34:33
  I did wanna ask you about every now and then, it's so dumb, but I'll see on Twitter people arguing about how rude it is to send a scheduling link, and then a bunch of other people say, "That's insane.
• 34:43
  Like, it saves so much time. Why wouldn't you send a scheduling link?" Do you have... Is that something y'all talk about internally? Have you done- Oh, for sure... investigating it? Yeah.
• 34:51
  And by the way, like, we love it when this debate surfaces like every few months or so because our fans just come to our defense. Like they just jump on- Oh, nice... whoever's, "I think it's rude." Like a bunch...
• 35:05
  You'll then see a bunch of- Yeah... Calendly users being like, "Are you kidding? It saves so much time." But yeah, we definitely did create... We, we have a couple blog posts just about Calendly etiquette.
• 35:17
  We have an e-book, so like a gated piece of content about how to share your scheduling link politely. And like a piece of content that I worked on
• 35:26
  after the last major kerfuffle, like Calendly etiquette dust up happened, was about how there's like this shift in perspective of like just how people view scheduling links over time and likening it to any new technology.
• 35:42
  Like how when text messaging was new, people were like, "This is rude. I just wanna call people on the phone." And now it's like nobody even picks up their phone. Yeah. And that's what's happening- Right... here as well.
• 35:51
  It's just like taking a while for it- Yeah... to hit the mainstream. I can't even imagine going back and forth with someone over email about, "Does this time work?" "No." "Oh, how about this time?" It's...
• 36:01
  It reminds me of like when in one of my first content jobs we used Word docs, and we would send Word docs around, and then you would like lose track of- Yeah... which version it was, and it was like- Yeah...
• 36:11
  this is crazy. So I... That's interesting. I actually feel, I'm, I feel a little self-conscious now that I sent you a scheduling link that wasn't Calendly, so- [laughs]... I apologize. I apologize for that.
• 36:20
  I'm a big Calendly fan. I've used it for a long time. No, no offense taken. I do find myself, I do find myself using scheduling links with some etiquette around it too.
• 36:30
  This is like getting way off course of content obviously, but I might say some, "If you see something convenient here, grab it, and if not, just let me know." That's the key. Something like that.
• 36:38
  You have to provide some context. You can't just be, "Here's my scheduling link. Pick a time." Emily, hard to let you go withoutTalking about AI, I'm like he- a little hesitant to bring it up just 'cause [laughs]
• 36:48
  that's been like the theme of the year, and maybe there's some fatigue. But I am curious, like where are you... Like where are you on all this? And is Calendly incorporating AI into any of its content right now?
• 36:58
  Yeah, for sure.
• 36:59
  I think my team is like always fatigue, and like timing-wise, this is a great question because we're actually in the middle this week of an AI summit on our content team, which was just like a way for us to very like consciously and deliberately set aside time to give ourselves space to learn and explore and play with some new
• 37:25
  concepts and tools. Like same thing like company doing a hackathon or like an innovation week, but just specific to my team and AI tools. So like by the end of the week,
• 37:36
  we're each gonna bring a couple potential tools/use cases to the group, and then we'll debate them and commit to implementing maybe two or three of it.
• 37:47
  Not all in on, on everything, but just like doing a really good job trying to bake a couple new tools or processes into our workflows.
• 37:57
  So everybody's really been enjoying it and saying that it's great to just have the head space to do something like this. Yeah. You never get the head space. What a fantastic idea.
• 38:06
  I feel like that's why a lot of innovation doesn't happen is because you can't- Yeah, people are busy... at your job. They don't have- Yeah... quote, unquote, downtime. Right. And, and if they do, they're not
• 38:15
  necessarily gonna use it for personal development related to AI. It just hasn't been a mandate, but it should be for everyone out there, or you're gonna [laughs] s- you're probably gonna get left behind.
• 38:28
  But, yeah, we have a couple tools that we're already using, but we just really needed to get comfortable with this and get smarter about it, and start defaulting to like thinking AI instead of just continuing to do what's comfortable.
• 38:44
  Or writing AI off, writing AI off like it's useless because a lot of, a lot of tools in the content space are just like not where we want them to be yet. And so- Yeah... I, I think that's really easy to do.
• 38:58
  Like why would I use this? I'm a professional. I can make... I can write way better stuff than this. And yes,
• 39:05
  like that's true, but could it help a product marketer write a first draft for a launch post based on the very detailed brief that they've already put together?
• 39:14
  And then could it edit that based on our style guide that we've uploaded? Like maybe. Maybe. Yeah. So then it comes to us for editing, it's 80% of the way that, yeah. Let's play with that. Let's see.
• 39:25
  Let's just, let's see. So we just like, yeah, I just put a whole curriculum together. We watched a bunch of webinars. We read a bunch of articles together.
• 39:32
  We all played with a bunch of different tools, and we are syncing every day this week for 30 minutes a day and just talking about what we've learned.
• 39:39
  And then tomorrow, last day, we'll, like I said, come together and just talk it all out and say, "Okay, these are the recommendations we're gonna make for this team, for the marketing team, and these are the tools that we're gonna invest in, and these are the processes that we're gonna..."
• 39:53
  Like we're, this is where we're doubling down. Yeah. I love that. That's... I ask almost everyone about AI. [laughs] That's what they do. Seriously, because you're so right. You're so right.
• 40:02
  You have to take a break from the day-to-day work and go explore it to give your mind space- Yeah... to think about. Yeah. We had done it a little bit here and there, like kinda ad hoc.
• 40:12
  Ooh, yeah, shoot, we really need to like figure this AI thing out. But like if there wasn't like that clear cut, "Nope, this is the assignment this week. This is the curriculum.
• 40:23
  I expect everyone to do this, and this is not extracurricular. This is not optional. This matters. This is important," and everyone has just responded really well to that.
• 40:34
  And I think actually like it's working, and by tomorrow we're gonna get some really great ideas, and we're gonna get to a place where, okay, so like by next year we're no longer gonna feel like
• 40:45
  in danger of being behind the curve. Yeah. That's awesome. Emily, it's been so good to chat. You did an AMA, gosh, I don't know, a year ago? Two years ago? Yeah.
• 40:55
  And so it's good to just check back in, see how things are going. Hope we can do it again in the future too. And it's just great to hear about all the cool stuff you're doing at Calendly.
• 41:03
  Really encourage people, go to Calendly's website. Check it out. Product is great. Go check out the How I Build this episode, and go look at the content too. Go look at the State of Scheduling. Just, just see.
• 41:13
  Like that's, like I said, that's where I think a lot of the inspiration comes from. But where else can we send people to keep in touch with you? LinkedIn, Twitter or, or any- anywhere else? Yeah, for sure.
• 41:22
  You can find me on LinkedIn. Twitter, I'm there, but not as active these... I'm still waiting to see where we all might [laughs] choose next. But- I hear that. Yeah, I hear that. [laughs] Okay, cool. Awesome.
• 41:32
  We'll be sure to link in the show notes to your LinkedIn and Calendly's website. Emily, thank you so much. Seriously, great to chat, and talk to you soon. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much.
• 41:40
  [upbeat music]