Hey everybody welcome back to another episode of Stacking Growth. I'm your host Kaylee Edmondson and today we have a super special guest. We're joined by Lane Scott Jones, old friend, current head of content at Zapier. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me Kaylee. I'm so excited to talk to you in any capacity, recorded or not. Recorded or not? Yeah, we'll have to make sure today is recorded.
For anybody that's listening, Lane and I go way back, way back. I think at this point it's been five or six years ago, which feels weird to say. But yeah, we can at first connected at a stop in the road when we were working at Campaign Monitor and we'll get into that in a little bit. But I want to start off with a good old, intro yourself to the dance.
Who are you a bit about your background? I want this to really walk through in depth. Kind of how you landed at Zapier and we'll cover so much because we have crowdsourced a couple of questions. I have a lot of questions.
Definitely will end on Zapier, but I'd love to know how you got here. Yes, how did I get here? So I started out in content marketing as a writer. So I got an English degree and my big question was how am I going to make money with this English degree?
But luckily I got a lot of experience interning at different ad agencies and marketing agencies. And so one of my first jobs out of college was an agency called Golden Mural based in Nashville Tennessee where I worked as the lead copywriter and content marketer for a lot of B2B tech companies. And that was my first introduction into the world of tech, which I loved because I've always been very interested in tech. I think I'm an early adopter for a lot of things like AI, which we can talk about.
But it was this perfect blend that really hit the writing part and created part of my brain with the technical and sort of tech curious part of me. And that was really became the path for my career. So I just kept looking for more opportunities to lead content marketing at tech companies, which is highlighted at campaign monitor and then at Zapier. So your transition from agency to in house was that like an active knowing you only because I know you.
I know this was like an active, very precise decision to move from agency to in house. But can you walk us through like that process for others who are in transition or considering transition? Yeah, you're right. Every move I make is very calculated and has a board of directors behind it that I'm consulting.
I spent, let's see, I think it would have been probably three years in the agency world, which exposed me to tons of different types of clients. And I'm talking in every different realm of tech. I worked with an AI company. I worked with quantitative risk analysis, a lot of really great natural and companies based across the US.
What I found as a writer and a content marketer and somebody who is just genuinely interested in understanding the mechanics behind the business and what the work I'm producing is actually doing for these big goals and for revenue. I felt really disconnected in the agency world from knowing those things and having that blind spot makes it really difficult to truly adapt and optimize the way that you're approaching in my case content, but really any discipline. And I would also be in meetings with people, like the clients and their teams and really be jealous of the camaraderie and the experience of working in-house because they were all able to just collaborate so closely. So those things led me to thinking that the agency experience was great.
And I think if you're in an agency role, you're getting so much exposure to so many different things. And I almost look at it as a sample platter for what you want to go deep on. And for me, what I wanted to go deep on was being in-house as a head of content at a tech company where I could really get to know the product. I could really understand the business metrics that I was mapping my work against.
But I could also be part of a team that was all collectively working toward the same goal, which is really important to me. That is what makes work really enjoyable day to day. Yeah, it's really fair. I think we definitely overlap in our Venn diagram in that area.
But I think what leads me to a demand or performance role is normally that I am very competitive in nature. I love getting wins on the board as a team or individually, however, the pie shakes out that day and being in-house really allows you to get close to a metric and push something forward together. I feel what you're saying is platter is agency life for sure. There's also trend analysis.
There's an angle of faster, deeper learnings from a cohorted view because you do have the opportunity to look and inspect 30 to 40 sets of data at a time versus being in-house with one deeper, more rooted set of data. But the in-house moves make total sense. And you landed a campaign monitor. This was 2018, I think.
That sounds great. Yeah. 2018, so this is pre-COVID, which I'm sure is also geographically helping inform your decision because remote wasn't super hot yet and you were based in Nashville and so was campaign monitors. But ultimately you took on a head of content role.
Can you talk us through what happened there, your experience? You were there for three years, I think? Three years, yeah. Three years is kind of my sweet spot.
Sweet spot. You'll know that. Sweet spot. I'm getting into all these roles.
Yeah. You oversimplified a bit because I didn't actually start out as head of content. I was targeting at the time the company was Imma, Imma Marketing Platform and it was known around Nashville as tech darling and one of our flagship tech companies. So when I set my mind to become a head of content at a tech company, there weren't that many options within Nashville.
So, and I had Imma's job page bookmarked for years and I was- Oh, no way, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was ready to get in the door however I could. And so I never saw a content role come up and I did see this role called SEO inbound marketing specialists.
I'm going to be honest, at this time I had limited to no SEO experience but I interviewed really well. So I went in and I think I've interviewed with you, the head of marketing at that time and I always take the approach to my career where what I bring is the ability to learn really quickly and adapt as new information comes in. So my thought was like I'll get in the door as Imma Marketing specialists and then I'll sort of hit it to include content in that role. It was a little bit ambiguous but that's how I got in and then through several different strategy shifts and leadership changes I did eventually become director of content and this is happening alongside this merging of Imma and campaign monitor and a couple other marketing tech platforms and actually stepped into a role as director of marketing by the end of my time there which is really interesting.
I actually have found that to be the case in my career is that I as a content leader am often asked to step up at campaign monitor is director of marketing at Zapier I served as the interim director of demand and lifecycle marketing. It's very interesting because I don't think that on paper maybe people think that the content marketing skills translate but in practice I think because content does fuel the majority of those campaigns it really helps to have a content leader step in especially if that person like me is interested in growing into these other disciplines. So that's why I ended at campaign monitor as director of marketing and moving to Zapier I wanted to focus back on content marketing and that's part of the reason I moved. It's so interesting though I feel like I there are so many people that I talk to like on the side through LinkedIn or through my work at Refine Labs that struggle to nail or unlock this motion of like internal progression especially if the internal progression isn't a directly lateral move right if it is them having to kind of move horizontally outside of their traditional like swim lanes and trying to get a promotion at the same time it seems like people haven't really figured that out is this like a not that you have like a secret sauce but can you tell us about your experience in navigating those waters I feel like most of the people that listen to this podcast are going to be in B2B SaaS we know that churn happens change happens leadership shifts constantly pretty much in every organization so these are all things that are probably pretty applicable to anyone listening and navigating that seems to be something that's a little difficult for most.
Yeah so do you think it would be helpful to talk about how I thought about it when I was like yeah especially how you thought about it like I think that it's interesting in general that you see a position for SEO and truthfully I remember interviewing and meeting you but I didn't recall that you were interviewing for an SEO role only because I just think of you as Lane and I think of the skill set that you know had when we were working together and I'm like I would never remember that nugget but I think it's interesting in general that you apply for a role as a way to get a foot in the door and then of course I'd be so interested to understand just opportunistically how you navigated waters to earn you know either like work for the title you wanted or put a foot in the door to earn a talk in that interview segment whatever it was. Yeah so the way I visualize my career is very high level and it's almost like it's a I'm trying to think of a good visual slice of the pie that I'm trying to fill up so right now and for the majority of my career the content slice of the pie has been I've got a ton of experience there I feel extremely capable and competent and at that time I thought I was coming into Emma campaign monitor it was really on the writing side of content and the pieces of the pie that I wanted to get more experience with were people management I hadn't done that before marketing strategy demand generation working closely with you and so I'm always willing to say yes or proactively pursue an opportunity if it aligns with the piece of the pie that I am looking to build up and in the case of SEO and inbound marketing I didn't necessarily know that much about it but I know I could figure it out and I knew that having that skill would serve me really well in this long term vision of becoming a director of content or a director of marketing so that I think the mentality of not to oversimplify it but it's kind of like this isn't rocket science I can figure it out on the job and it's more interesting to me to challenge myself in that way than to keep doing the same thing over and over if you can't tell by my current lifestyle yeah yeah for anybody that's listening lanes like living on the road full time the whole time I've known her she's lived in Nashville where I live and now she's living out of suitcase and yeah it's wild I don't have that courage but I'm so jealous of your traveling but I love novelty and I have loved that in my career and I just I really do look for opportunities to grow even if and maybe especially if it's leaning into an area that I feel less capable in. When you find yourself because it seems like maybe this is like something you sign up to do like on some type of systematic basis to find yourself in a stretched situation not whatever they say not stressed but stretched do you how do you think about surrounding yourself to become informed is it through peers through articles through forums physical communities like I also know that you're a part of a time of communities how do you build like a board of directors per se to stretch yourself and then continue to like further index in whatever these areas of your pie are. It's a mix of all those resources the most helpful by far has been my peers and sort of pseudo mentors I haven't had any official mentors but I will glom on to somebody if I admire their career and either followed them like asynchronously or reach out and ask to talk to them but I found that people are really generous and willing to talk through things with you so I'll give some examples I mean one that comes to mind is when I started at Campaign Monitor and you were my main resource and we would spend.
But like let me say don't let Lane do all this to me but likewise right because I don't have a background in content and that's never been my like you know T-shaped skill so same whatever you're saying about me about to be on Jen equally for content because I had never been exposed to a proper content marketer before that honestly. And I never really worked with the Manchener so it was great we were very complimentary but we would be in these conference rooms and just like whiteboarding things and talking things through both kind of approaching it as we don't really know the answer but we can figure it out with enough collaboration. That's one example and then another one is more recently I was trying to figure out the org structure for my content team at Zapier and that's you know as a leader within an organization it really helps to step outside of your company and talk to other people who are doing this elsewhere so I reached out to my community of other content marketing leaders and just set up 30 minute calls with them to have them walk me through their content marketing structure and ask questions and I think I want to think it was mutually beneficial for them as well but seeing how other people are doing it and taking what feels like it could apply has probably been the best way I've grown in my career. I think that there's some podcasts that have been helpful there's some courses and books but really it comes down to conversations.
I guess podcasts are great because you're getting to tap into those conversations with people that you might not have access to. Yeah it's good from that perspective I think too though that there's an area of like for me I view I'm obviously I mean you know me well enough to know I'm obsessed with podcasts like both doing them and listening and consuming them but I view them as this like continuous education a handful of podcasts that I am like religiously subscribed to have notifications turned on and listen to them as they come out because otherwise I feel like it's not at least not yet somebody that runs podcasting technology needs to figure this out to where they are much more search and tent friendly. Hey I'm experiencing a pain let me go to this place and search in a problem find me a couple of you know podcasts that solve this problem I'll go listen to them that's not the behavior of how podcasts operate today so for me podcasts are like continuing education I listen all the time not necessarily for a specific pain but sometimes I'm like oh this is a good thing let me go see how I can apply it other times I just recall I listened to that podcast months ago let me go find it again I'll help solve this problem but peers help give you this opportunity there's always a lot of like guardrails or like if this then that and podcasts can answer those questions for you because the people that are answering those questions probably aren't in the same exact scenario that you are but with peers you can like volley in real time right like oh but what about this tweak or what about this scenario or I have this very random problem what are your thoughts that you just like aren't going to get from a framework or a playbook so I hear that peers are important do you have a secret for how you find seek out engage with a peer network when you have either a specific problem or just general growth goals for your career the two ways I've been most helpful for me are Slack groups and Twitter the company formerly known as Twitter but marketing Twitter specifically X yeah I put out a call about the content word question on Twitter sort of to the marketing Twitter world and that's where I got I got like 80 responses of people who wanted to chat and talk to me so that was amazing I made so many great connections that have content about social at the time I shop if I know they were so generous and willing to just chat with me and now their friends I regularly talk with and we now check in because that was probably two years ago now the questions are evolving and the problems have changed but I have that network and the other one I would call out is Slack groups I love a Slack group some that have been helpful for me as a content marketer have been super passed by Jimmy daily and then exit by my day of gear heart those are great because you can just drop in what you're thinking about and people are very willing to chime in yeah no those are all wonderful resources I also love that you have been so successful at networking and finding answers or solutioning through Twitter or X I feel wrong to even call it X but I digress I I think I found a pocket of people in my career that are like obsessed with the power of marketing Twitter I've never been able to crack the code but I'm continuously fascinated by those that have so that's the random aside but I feel like you've really stepped into your own moving to this role at Zapier you had hit your three year sweet spot and campaign monitor and ready to move on to take new challenges did you step into a head of content role at Zapier or was it similar where you saw a random gig and you're like this is my door let me take a chance so Zapier was another company that I had bookmarked for many years because I just admire the culture so much from the outside at the time I was leaving campaign monitor I really was focused on finding a role that was really culture focused and very like a place I could see myself saying for a long time Zapier posted a I try to remember what the job title was I think it was a head of content role so it was very aligned with what I was looking for but at the time the role itself had a much more limited scope than the role that I'm now in and so that's another one of my I think the trends in my career is that I will get my foot in the door with a small or very focused piece of the puzzle and through whatever you know whether it's it makes sense business wise or I make a case for consolidating teams underneath my program my teams do tend to grow a lot that way so my scope often grows once I'm in the door versus being hired into it when I started at Zapier the team was just four people and it was focused completely on the blog so that's what I was hired to do and in the time since I've taken on multiple other teams so user education video content operations marketing campaigns have all come under the umbrella of content marketing and we've grown the team to now 20 people and we're hiring which is wild yeah and you lead with this like insane ROI stat and obviously all of this doesn't come overnight you have done your diligence and been here for a long time and put in the work but I want to hear as much as you can share how that starts to unfold or systematically even how you think about not only building a team but really like finding gaps in like either the infrastructure the people the processes of like what content meant to Zapier than versus what it means now it feels like it's come a long way there must have been some type of like framework or system that you had in your mind as you went to like build this puzzle to what it is today yes absolutely so coming into Zapier's content team from the outside I expected it to be well much bigger first of all to have a lot of this sort of structure and strategy in place that you would expect from such a sophisticated content marketing program that's putting out such excellent content and when I got in the door at Zapier what I found was that they were really they had really found a lot of success with SEO specifically with the app integration pages that they had been creating and scaling systematically and but because of that success had never really needed to document a content strategy before I got there I mean there was there are many things that just had gotten into the level of growth that they were prior to me joining but at the time I joined they were sort of at this precipice of what has been working for us for all this time isn't going to get us to the next level of growth so just to give you a sort of a paint the picture they had really strong SEO we were getting two million page views per month to 2000 over 2000 articles the quality of the content was amazing and the team that was in place which was small but mighty were incredibly talented and still that team is just like among the best people I've ever worked with in terms of the level of work they're putting out and also I was excited to join Zapier because people love their products and I thought it was a really unique value proposition but all that being said when I was coming into the team I did see immediately in my listening tour that there were some notable challenges including the big one for me was that content was seen as a services function within the organization and not a strategic center so they were spending the majority of their time taking requests from other teams for copy for writing emails for you know tweaking this landing page but there was very little aside from the blog content led initiatives or strategy that we could clearly map to the business impact and so as a content leader that was maybe the biggest flashing red light of things that I needed to pay attention to is that I fundamentally believe content is a strategic function that should have a seat at the table not just within content or the blog but within the company strategy as a whole I've seen the way the content operates the closeness we have to the audience the sort of quick feedback we get from constantly publishing content and the insights we're able to draw about our customers from that data is so valuable beyond just marketing it's valuable to the company at large and I can give some examples of how that's played out at Zapier but that was the first thing I wanted to address was to move content from being a services function to strategic center and then in terms of the actual results we were getting traffic had been great but it was starting to stagnate and so that's where the question became how can we get to the next level of growth and I also noticed that we had a leaky funnel in the sense that we were excellent at driving top of funnel traffic and even signups because Zapier being a product product like growth strategy it's really easy to sign up for the product but you can get into Zapier and still not really know exactly how to use it or what you can use it for so those were some of the big gaps that I found in my initial listening tour that became eventually the content strategy for that first six to twelve months that I was there so I have so many questions that was like so much good knowledge one at the top of this you talk about a listening tour is that something that you do every time you take on a new role or is that something that's like part of Zapier's like classic onboarding plan that is definitely my MO when I start any new role what I can pay monitor with you in this conference rooms and at Zapier I just needed to take my first at least 30 days to talk to everybody about the history of content what different stakeholders thought was working and what they thought wasn't working so everybody had different really helpful opinions about this what that looked like for me was I had a giant Google Doc where I was just typing notes furiously and eventually translated that into this massive content opportunities spreadsheet where it was every single thing in my listening tour that I heard as a possible opportunity I mean it was probably hundreds of different things that we could be doing but then my role as a strategist is to look at that and say we can only do so much what among this list is going to be the most impactful or the most urgent and use that to shape the content strategy that's nuts I would expect no less than a spreadsheet as an output from you during a listening tour and this begs the question too like obviously most of these listeners have a background or skill set similar to mine and that they come up through a demand-gen function or revenue revenue function of some type we can leave the titles for later but what is your when you step into this role and the content team is arguably much smaller than you assumed it might be for especially for the output that they were producing publicly what is the supporting look around you look like around you within the marketing org or if you have like really close cross-functional partners that don't technically sit within marketing what does that look like when you joined when I joined so that's the other interesting thing about Zapier they have achieved such amazing success but the marketing team and many of the marketing functions are relatively new so when I started at Zapier this was two years ago in 2021 things like advertising demand generation even email marketing were relatively new functions the those teams had been hired recently to think about building out a much more documented nuanced strategy and so my partners were at the time product marketing I actually don't think that we had we didn't have a formal demand generation program at that time we called it marketing programs and they were running a lot of campaigns like webinars and lead generation and then email marketing team so those were some of my closest partners and since then the org structure has changed and shifted a lot and so now I would include brand marketing in that communications are we truly just stood up and a formal demand generation and lifecycle marketing program within the last year or so and so that has really helped to crystallize the ownership between what they are leading in terms of campaigns and what we are supporting or leading in terms of content campaign that's interesting can we get into that what is the obviously you all you're here as a content leader and have been established for a couple years demand gen looks new ish relatively new less than 12 months I'd say that's still new what are the like lines of service look like or the commitments look like between when they lead and use support versus when you lead and they support I feel like I mean and we know we did the same song and dance at campaign monitor because I think every org is different there's no right or wrong and I think it's kind of about playing to your strengths like as individuals like within the team who can take on what but we interact with so many brands that are struggling to find a sweet spot between the two yeah so it's been a very interesting negotiation of those lines of responsibilities not only because of the the natural overlap but also because at the time and this is around December November 2022 dimension have been reporting into our CMO he retired and so I stepped in as the interim head of demand generation and lifecycle marketing which blurs those lines even further but actually I think for the point we were at with Zapier it was a really helpful time to have those two teams demand gen and content working under one person's leadership because we had just not had a chance to figure out what those swim lanes were and so it forced us into this really close collaboration and starting to define how we think about the strategic leader and the support where I where I led the team was that given the limited resources we just had one demand generation manager and one lifecycle marketing manager I asked them to step in as people who were leading the program strategy setting our goals being accountable to the results that we were driving and they also did act as somewhat I hate to say project managers but program managers where they were kicking off these campaigns and then pulling in content on the content side I asked my content marketing manager to act as the content strategy lead for the projects that they were proposing so I didn't want to relegate content back to a services function but I also wanted to give the dimension and lifecycle leads a chance to really establish a strategy for their own programs and so we found a good rhythm in that way now since then in April of this year we hired our demand generation leader thank goodness I was I was so thrilled to be able to focus back on content and work with him as a collaborator versus trying to run all the programs at once because it's a lot as you can imagine oh yeah and since then we sort of started to rethink some of the ways that we're running these programs but no matter how it's evolved content and demand generation have worked hand in hand as they should as they should it's so interesting it's like an interesting topic to cover because either companies have figured out this rhythm as you call it like they are humming they've built an engine in collaboration because truthfully even like as a demand gen junkie like there is no demand gen without content and vice versa right like no content marketer wants to build a beautiful strategy and then have it sit and not ever be distributed into the world for people to consume and enjoy and engage and find value in and there are very cyclical patterns between the two but just like sales and marketing always have you know issues and things they need to seek alignment on I feel like content and demand gen based similar struggles and honestly my take on that is because normally content marketing and content marketing leaders are held to very different okars and kpis then demand gen is and that's the rug so other companies I've worked with too I feel like a sweet spot for me is normally an unlock of aligning those metrics and measurement goals to be as similar at the top level as they can be obviously like people on your team and people on what would be my team will have separate okars or kpis that maybe don't always perfectly align in the middle but like someone like you and I have to be in lockstep or else like that's the top of down right there where you'll never be rowing the boat the same direction because fundamentally you haven't set the same goals exactly and and that's I think part of what was so helpful about bringing those teams together was that we got rid of the silo and we introduced constant two-way communication so that they're telling us how these different content assets are performing within the campaigns and we're able to adapt and optimize or recommend existing content that we can plug in to test and improve overall success of the campaign. Yeah brilliant okay thank you for that side I really wanted to go down this rabbit hole because I feel like it would be a missed opportunity to not talk about the opportunity of really finding alignment within those teams but I also want to recognize you've done some really cool things in your tenure at Zapier primarily around like I'm very interested you've talked about it a couple times in your team structure how you've gone about building that and what it functionally looks like today also like if you have other thoughts for like what could come next I'd love to hear how you're thinking about your own like roadmap for structure and then I want to get to this stat so let's make sure we have time for that before we like end this but let's talk about your team today what it looks like what all you guys own or oversee and then we can probably get into pockets of each of those.
Perfect so let me I'll just ask you and share so you can see this while we talk through it. Beautiful so looking at our team structure today it's changed a lot from when I started in 2021 and there were just four people even in 2021 we did divide the blog into top of funnel and mid-fennel and bottom of funnel that has been crucial to us mapping the full funnel flow of how people engage with content and go all the way through to finding success and expansion and becoming a paying customer. Now everybody's gonna want to know you can't just throw out tofu mofu bofu you can't just say that and not back up what do those claims mean specifically to Zapier how do you delineate those parts of your funnel? When we're thinking about content we just define top of funnel as the non-product content mid and bottom funnel is anything that mentions Zapier and to get more specific the way we think about mid-fennel content is really thinking about automation inspiration so our top of funnel you know an example of that category would be best apps best to do apps best AI image generator so people are coming in engaging with our content getting a lot of value out of it but it's not mentioning Zapier but for the for the portion of that audience that would be good candidates for using Zapier how do we guide them down funnel through relevant content so we find that with Zapier people come in often with a very clear use case in mind like I want to connect Slack to Google Docs or Slack to do us and they have that one idea of how to use Zapier but it's hard to get them to expand to thinking about all the other ways they could use Zapier to not just accomplish this individual task but really run their entire business that's the goal so automation inspiration is our way of saying like look at this wonderland of all the things that you can do that people are doing with automation that is delivering so much benefit so that is a big category within mid-fennel and that is something that was a little bit under invested in when I got to Zapier and I've really advocated along with the team for more resources more dedicated headcount more budget because at the top of funnel we're looking at metrics like traffic and signups but we're also saying that unless we can pair it with the mid-fennel content it will start to lag when it comes to activations which for us is setting up your first zap and upgrades which is becoming a paying customer either going from free to paid or expanding into one of the higher level plans and that's something we've been able to measure as having a dramatic impact on the activation and upgrade rates at Zapier so that's how we define it makes total sense I don't want to take us too far aside but I'm like you can't throw this up and then not define for the people they'll be so curious to know yes so today what the content structure looks like is we still have our top of funnel and mid-fennel blog teams we've added marketing campaigns so they're the ones who are working really closely with demand gen and lifecycle with product marketing and with brand marketing to provide the content that fuels all of those campaigns and initiatives we also have a video team that now reports into content marketing a lot of really fun plans coming up for video video has their journey has mirrored content in a lot of ways which is they've been primarily a services organization and now we're investing in video as a strategic content initiative so look out for the Zapier YouTube channel that is coming and it's going to be wonderful and then we also have user education which is focused on our existing customers and helping them find success with the product and then finally we have a new team this was one of the things I consulted a lot of my peers on because I'd actually never heard of this team existing within content but I saw a need for it and we call it content strategy and ops or content operations and that is where all of our analytics and ROI analysis operational efficiencies thinking about how we bring AI into all of our processes and workflows it lives in content ops which is just one percent but she is an absolute genius and has transformed the way that we approach content that's so interesting and how does she partner up with other like analytics functions that support the broader marketing team if that role exists you all have an analytics guru sitting directly within content which is interesting I feel like most analysts for marketing support all of the branches or all of the pillars of marketing so is she a one hit wonder that supports the entire org or does she also now interface and partner with a more general marketing analyst that supports to demand gen and supports lifecycle and supports some of the other functions so Janine our content ops manager started as an editor within content so she knew content really well but she also in just the nature of her work she was running our mid-final program was looking really closely at looker for all the upgrade rates conversion rates and just had a real aptitude and interest in that and she was giving us insights that were letting us update our content strategy in a way that was clearly having impact so she would partner in that sort of role where she was still a blog editor she would partner with our decision science team but it became such a valuable function that we decided to carve out a role for her to be our in-house analyst she still does work with our decision science team she'll submit tickets for anything that's really sticky but she can run a lot about herself which means that we are able to move really quickly whole insights in real time and update our strategy because she is so embedded into the team so it is interesting because decision science and also operations are distinct functions within Zapier and I think within most teams but we really benefit from having somebody who came in with the content expertise and then developed the analytics skill set because she fundamentally understands the work we're putting out and how to interpret the data that we're seeing coming yeah it's so interesting it's like a little internal superpower I too have never heard about content team having a dedicated strategy and ops role but honestly for the size and scale of your team and the impact to the company it makes total sense it's an interesting like structure dynamic yeah it has been probably the one thing I would point to as the most transformational team structure change I've made in my time at Zapier all right so let's talk about impact we can't get through all this without talking about impact there was this wild you shared I don't know like 450 something percent ROI somehow proven four contents impact on Zapier how in the world like how do you get to that what is your what are your KPIs that you're working towards like how are you ultimately measuring your impact as an organization yes that's that it was as shocking to me as I think it is when I'm telling the story now when I saw it but let me start with just showing how we think about measuring success for content because that'll give you a sense of how we've been calculated ROI so at Zapier content is gold against these primary metrics of sessions really think top of funnel that's where the highest volume of those are coming in but we look at guard rail metrics of activations upgrades and ARPA to make sure that that huge volume we're driving at top of funnel is actually high quality as in they they have some likelihood to convert down funnel even if it takes some time we want to know that we're translating that translated to actual revenue so that's that's sort of the dichotomy there is the primary metrics that we are reporting on in WBRs every week that our finance FVNA team is holding us accountable for and then the guard rail metrics that we are looking at ourselves and keeping a pulse on to make sure that it isn't artificially inflated at top of funnel but not delivering results down funnel yeah it's super smart we're there just like high level where they're iterations or like turns of this to get you to this point of like sophistication in your reporting model for content like I'm sure it didn't start like this when you first got there it definitely did not start like this I would say it's been kind of a constant conversation about what should content be gold against so there was a time at which we were we were being gold against the things that we consider now to be guard rail metrics so like quantity of activations or upgrades and while those are really important for us to look at we made the case that content just has such little control over the experience that somebody has once they go beyond content and particularly when they get into the product because we could send a qualified user into the product through signup but there's the onboarding experience there's the actual UI there's all these different variables that impact how likely they are to actually take those next steps so we did make the case and I think we've got buy-in now that content when we think about the things we can directly impact and be held accountable for it will always be those high level sessions and signups but it doesn't mean that we are not also responsible for in collaboration with these other functions that own those different parts of the customer journey making sure that the people that people are converting so there's yeah there's been a time when we were looking a lot more at the sort of mid funnel metrics but now that's how we're approaching it beautiful all right cool now get to the real zinger though we need to know okay the good stuff so proving content ROI the reason that we needed to do this was that we were reaching a point within the content program where we just saw so much opportunity particularly within the mid funnel program to invest more and that meant we needed more budget we needed more headcount at the time our CMO was a true blue performance marketer he came from an advertising background and Kaylee I just could not get him to understand the value of content and I had several I mean hours and hours of conversation of me trying to explain from all other the different angles why content was worth investing in but it just was not getting through to him so we decided to speak his language by taking this performance marketing model and using it to calculate contents return on spend because we knew from the results we were seeing that we were doing a lot and having a big impact with a relatively modest budget compared to something like advertising but we had never actually crunched the numbers to prove that and we were at the point where we really needed to have that written down for him to look at and show him if you invest this much in content here's how much you're gonna get back so we developed our take on return on ad spend and call it return on content spend the way we calculated that and I worked really closely with our content ops leave Janine was that we looked at investment which we consider to be things like our biggest areas of spend are freelance writers agencies software and then we included some mock numbers for headcount tech data support all the things that we within org were contributing in in man hours to content and then for return we used real revenue from upgrades that resulted from content sign-ups with a three-year multiplier which is our estimated lifetime value so before you hit to the next slide which I was going to be the zinger I want to call out though because I think this piece is going to be applicable to so many people in so many different scenarios that part of like being able to walk the walk and move initiatives forward is this call out that you just did of your leader at the time came from a direct response background and was a performance guy he was used to languaging things a certain way and synthesizing data through a specific lens and so instead of you continuing to pound sand which is I'm sure how it felt the first couple of rounds with this you really adapted your languaging to what you already knew he was less guarded and had fewer barriers around which is super smart I think that it's honestly probably applicable to like so many applications in life but especially when you're trying to push hard initiatives or different or new initiatives over a hill like that's such a good take from from this line exactly and I see that as my role as a leader is to take the work that I know is happening and translate it into the language where people outside of content can absorb and understand it so when we calculated content ROI this is this is a big number we found that we were delivering four hundred and fifty four percent return on investment for every dollar invested in content at Zappier and we calculated this number dozens of times because we kept looking at it and thinking like that can't be right this was actually the more conservative of the different scenarios that we worked with decision science on to calculate but sure sure enough on a 0.9 almost one million dollar content spend in 2022 we influence over four million dollars in revenue and I want you to be like super clear on what this stat includes and doesn't include when it comes to programming like my obvious eye skims this and this is not including paid I'm sure there are paid efforts maybe getting off the ground at Zappier that support and push content is so it's like a fair assumption that these stats do not include your paid media spend to amplify and distribute your content we actually aren't doing a ton of paid content promotion especially for this particular analysis because this only includes blog content that that's the one line I wanted you to say like this is the blog this is just the blog so this does not include any of our campaigns for dimension any paid or advertising even even you know email copy that kind of thing this is just the blog and so when I say the conservative estimate it's because it is just looking at that small piece of things and it's also just last touch session start so when we think about content influence typically I would say that content is influencing this journey from the you know first interaction you have with a brand but in order again to just have an ironclad number to put in front of our CMO we wanted to take it from just last session start and calculate what that was and that's how we got to this number and his reaction was oh my favorite quote which I have to share which was with these R-OI numbers tell me why I shouldn't give you advertising's entire budget right now which tell me tell me how many content leaders ever in their career have had an advertising back CMO say something like that to them like probably none absolutely wild yeah I think I think he was astounded when he actually saw the numbers and we did compare them within Zapier to the numbers that our advertising team was getting they're not comparable it's not the same thing but just one third very complimentary and I know your audience is full of performance marketers so I want to say that but I think it really drove home our point that money time and resources investing content is going to come back at a huge magnitude to Zapier so I you know did not take the advertising's budget but I did use this as so I paired the R-OI report immediately with our head count and budget request so it was sort of a one two punch of him having this reaction to while these R-OI numbers are really good and me then being able to deliver I agree and here's each area that I think we should invest in in order to build on this momentum uh such a good one two punch so we're almost at time which feels like so ridiculously fast but to to round it out I think that one I'd love to know if you have other than you two which you've already teased if you have things that are exciting coming up that people should pay attention to either for Zapier or for yourself and then of course like round out with like where people can follow you and engage in case they have 10,000 questions like I do yes so in terms of things that are exciting me about Zapier and about our content program we are seeing such interesting engagement right now with our AI content um that is an entirely different podcast episode probably to talk about this but so because automation and AI go so hand in hand once that became a trend that we were noticing we pivoted really quickly at the beginning of this year to start producing content about AI and so this meant like we redeployed writers we shifted our editorial calendar mix and then we worked with our content ops team to do an AI audience analysis analysis to really understand who's coming in um and in h1 we saw a 96 percent increase in traffic and a 281 percent increase in sign-ups and the large majority of that was coming from this net new content that we created about AI so I'm really excited because we've unlocked this pocket of interest that is really well aligned with our product right because automation and AI are on almost synonymous in terms of how you would use them in your business but this is a brand new audience that content marketing was really on the forefront of not only identifying and bringing to our website but also then defining through content operations and looking at how the audience was behaving we create an audience report based on how people were interacting with content that was been surfaced at the company level in our leadership in VR with our C level execs and it informed the entire company strategy and pivots not only in our marketing strategy but also in our product strategy so that to me is such a testament to the the real value and impact that content can have and why I say that content really needs to see at the table because we have such great insights that you wouldn't be able to get at least not in real time without us exactly yeah and it's so interesting too the opportunity that you especially that Zapier is positioned to take when it comes to AI I think that it's worth noting that from what I have seen and consumed and trust me when I say I see and consume so much content in general the marketing team at Zapier is truly on the forefront of talking about and implementing AI into like your internal infrastructure within the marketing team obviously your product itself but then also pumping out and publishing content nearly in real time alongside the trend is wild to me and I haven't seen very many other brands competing like you guys are in that space so like commend for that it's really fascinating to even watch like externally so I can only imagine what it feels like inside the system yeah and complete credit to our team because we have a team of people who are able to put on their research hats and become experts really quickly so that's been amazing to watch so I'm really excited about our AI content work I'm excited about the ways that we're using AI within our workflows which there are a ton of practical ways we use it with like SEO content outlines creating an editor bot that takes the first pass at a lot of the coffee that comes in from teams like demand generation to make it a lot quicker and we're also having fun with it like I created a corporate jargon bot which is a bot that exists solely to translate all of the crazy buzzwords and acronyms that you're like in that meeting and you're like I'm gonna look dumb if I ask what this you know particular acronym is don't worry there's a bot for that so that's been really fine I've used it I'm not gonna call anybody out but I've taken people's lack messages and put it in the bot just to understand what they were actually trying to say so that has all been really fun to play around with I can only imagine that's also super interesting we can um if that's a public facing thing we can link to that in the show notes just so that if others are intrigued they can participate in defuttling corporate jargon as well absolutely yes I will share the link beautiful and then finally our youtube our youtube and video strategy is one of the things I'm most excited about because Zapier does written content so well you know we've talked about that extensively where I see the next frontier of content for us is going to be video and specifically like youtube first personality driven um and short form video and that's something that I think is going to lend itself really well to the topics that we already write about to some of this AI stuff and also I think there's new things that we'll start to uncover about our audience as we move into that format exactly I think so too right especially when you start getting into shorts and like potentially tiktok and then leveraging micro clips through other social forums like there's a different audience that consumes that that probably is a video first behavioral audience versus maybe a written first audience so that'll be interesting too I feel like you came in at the top of this talking about ways in which you could unlock growth because it seems like Zapier at the time has was stalling a little bit so you've unlocked one really opportunistically with AI and the next seems to be video which is really cool to see so maybe we do a follow up in a couple months and like get a download on the progress of that so far yes I would love that so for everybody that now wants more insights from your brain where do they go to find you they can find me on LinkedIn link then lean Scott jones i'm on twitter x it's lean scotchones you had to say it and then my website leanscotchones.com has some more information about my content work it's got a lane bot that you can ask content strategy questions and i'm happy to chat oh my gosh beautiful I love the plug for so many bots I feel like I have zero bots in my life other than the robot that haphazardly cleans my floor um I need more robots in my life apparently i'm not doing it enough lane this was a pleasure truly it's like rekindling with like an old friend so I have so much enjoyed this thanks for spending an hour with us we'll see you next time on stalling growth love you being here thank you daily