Danny’s a Minnesota native, Creighton alum, the former Managing Editor at the Silicon Prairie News, a Omaha, Nebraska resident and someone that is deeply passionate about startups and business. At the startup, Zapier, Danny creates content focused on teaching people how to use “zaps” to increase productivity & efficiency. His work has been published in TheNextWeb.com, unbounce.com, GrowthHackers.com and of course on the Zapier Blog.

Press play below and start listening to Danny share his content marketing  insight with us, on this week’s B2B marketing podcast.

The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/zapier

Beginning of Transcript

Danny Schreiber: Hey, thanks for having me Jeff and also thanks for pronouncing Zapier just as it’s

Danny Schreiber

intended.

Jeff Zelaya: I know. Yes, you’re right. I’ve heard some people pronounce it in a lot of different ways. But Zapier makes me happier. So that’s how I tend to remember how to pronounce …

Danny Schreiber: You got it.

Jeff Zelaya: … the name. So tell me about yourself Danny. What exactly do you do at Zapier? What is Zapier for people that really haven’t heard about the company before?

Danny Schreiber: Sure. Really, I actually like to say that if they’re saying it at all, I’m happy. So you can say it Zapier, Zapier, however you say it. I’m good. But Zapier is an easy way to connect the apps that you use, get them talking to each other. Really the best way to think about this is to think about to the apps you use. I think today professionals, 15, 20 apps isn’t uncommon.

When I say “app†I really talk about these web apps, the project management tool, the email marketing system that you have or the form software.

So let’s say you wanted to get two of those hooked up. like you have a Formstack form on your website and you’re using MailChimp. Natively they might not integrate or you might need a more robust integration than what’s offered.

Typically before, you might go look for a developer. But instead this is where Zapier comes in with the self-service platform that within, I’m telling you, five minutes, you can give it a try. Five minutes, you can get this thing set up and have these new email addresses automatically sent over to your campaign – excuse me, campaign monitor. Well, you can do campaign monitor. We actually have about 15 different email marketing systems on Zapier.

Mad Mimi is another one, AWeber. So you could take it from this form software, any kind of email marketing system you will have and take that same idea of connecting two apps and look at – we have over 360 apps today. The possibilities become almost limitless.

So my job as a content marketing at Zapier is to really pull in people by telling them about how they can solve problems by using apps. Of course Zapier is one of the options that we often bring up in our blog post. But really, it’s about educating people about hey, here are some neat ways to get better at using Gmail or Google Docs.

Then on top of that, if you want to go a little bit more advanced or if you have a problem that it doesn’t do itself, you should think about using Zapier. So that’s my main role at Zapier. I also help out with a couple of other items but for the purpose of this podcast really, it’s content marketing.

Jeff Zelaya: Yes. Content marketing I think is one of the reasons that you guys have been so successful. I mean of course obviously your product is awesome and I use it and I’m very happy with what it does for me, the time it saves me. But I think another reason is that people love your content. Like I see it spread across social media, across the web. People are sharing a lot of the content you’re producing, the articles, the blog post, the handy guides. I mean you have just tons and tons of content.

I want to know Danny like why do you think content is so important for marketers nowadays? How have you see it impact your organization?

Danny Schreiber: Well, I think what you just hit on there is gets people talking. I’m not sure if I would be on this podcast today – well, actually I can guarantee. I don’t think you would have me on this podcast today to talk about Zapier, to introduce a new audience to Zapier if it wasn’t for our content. Really that’s why we started content marketing at Zapier. We had the referral or viral program as some companies call it.

You can think of Dropbox or invite your friends to Dropbox. You get more space. We have something similar at Zapier. We also have other growth strategies that we’re working on. But we hadn’t yet done what is quite popular today for a number of SaaS companies. You think of Groove or Buffer, KISSmetrics. They’re provided a great blog that wasn’t talking about the company but was talking about problems the customers might face. They were making themselves available by really just dumping knowledge down.

If somebody wanted to pick it up, that was very easy to do. Sometimes you have to do an email exchange. But that’s actually why we got into it is because we saw folks around us doing it. We saw that it was really working for them. So to be honest with you, we got to copy what they did well.

So KISSmetrics talks about long form content. You find long form content on Zapier. Buffer talks about many of the things you can do with social media. Well, that works great because when you write an article about social media, you find that people often share it on social media.

So there has been things that we kind of pull from different places and apply to Zapier and then give it our own personality. At Zapier, we have fun with our product. If you’re inside Zapier and trying to set something up, you get kind of a friendly message back. So we try to make this content friendly, not too staunchy or technical or complicated. But really no matter what level you’re at, beginner to advanced, you will be able to visit the Zapier blog and extract some value from it.

Jeff Zelaya: The ideas that the blog post are focused on, where do those come from Danny? What’s your process in generating the ideas? I’m going to create a blog on this topic or I’m going to do an article that focuses on doing these things. Where do those ideas come from for your content creation?

Danny Schreiber: Initially, it was really talking about the company itself. So, Zapier started at Startup Weekend three years ago by three cofounders, one of them [0:05:42] [Indiscernible] marketer who worked at a company and had an issue integrating two apps, believe it or not, and that’s where Zapier came about.

So for the first year or so, it was about the company. But then when they said, “Let’s create a content marketing strategy,†it started to become about the customers and that’s where we looked first. We looked at the personas of the people that were signing up for Zapier, found that there’s quite a bit of marketers and small business owners, designers and developers and then we also saw that these people liked to do more with less.

So if you set up a zap, you get more time back. It’s essentially one of the number one outputs of Zapier is you’re automating something. You get the time back that you would have spent doing that. So productivity was this natural fit for our blog and that’s what we started out doing actually really intently in November of 2013, at which point we said, “We’re going to put out two blog posts a week that are for marketers, that are for small business owners and they have something to do with productivity,†whether that was about productivity apps or here’s a productivity lesson we learned.

Then from that, we started to say, “Wow, this article on apps that we did a really in-depth look at how you can use Gmail well, that did really well. What if we tried that with how to use Google Hangouts well?†and that also did well.

So then we started to say, I think our audience which is coming to Zapier to connect a lot of apps, I think that they like learning about apps. So we’ve had a lot of app guides. So you started with, “Who is our customer?†and then it went to, “OK. What posts are doing well traffic-wise?†and then on top of that, it kind of goes with our gut.

I see that for example that Google Hangouts, I personally have issues with Google Hangouts. So one day I said, “I’m going to research everything that has ever been written about Google Hangouts video and summarize it in one post,†and I’m going to call that the missing guide to Google Hangouts and that has actually been one of our most visited posts since because we’re actually not doing this interview on Google Hangouts.

There might be a reason for that. It’s because sometimes it just is buggy. It’s an awesome product and in fact I often use it. But I need answers and sometimes Google didn’t give me that. So that’s why I created this guide, and other people like it. So sometimes the gut works as well.

Jeff Zelaya: Yeah, listening to your gut and listening to your customers and being able to keep track of it, measure and analyze and figure out what content should I create based on what we’re succeeding at already. So I think you guys have a great tactic, a great strategy on creating and generating those ideas and I’m always looking forward to the next big idea and the next content piece that you guys are going to be putting out, which makes me wonder.

For a startup, how touch was it for you? Because like now you’re I think in the area where people are really looking forward to what is Zapier going to put out next. What’s your next content piece? You have a subscriber base and you have fans and followers. How did you guys go about building that? Because I know in a startup environment, sometimes the starting part could be difficult, right? How is the content marketing for a startup different from the content marketing that you do at an established company? A Fortune 500 already has a brand and recognition. Can you speak on that subject Danny, how it started building up?

Danny Schreiber: Yeah. So one piece of content that I haven’t talked too much about, it’s apps. But beyond that, it’s actually reviews of apps. The way we do this is we take a category. Recently we did CRMs.

If you actually just search “CRM†on Twitter, you will find that more than half of those tweets are people asking, “What CRM should I use?†and so that’s what we deliver to people. We give them an extensive roundup of all 35 plus CRMs that we have on Zapier and we showed off what was best about all of them and we categorized them. We kind of made this [0:09:36] [Indiscernible] kind of.

I think we succeeded in making this CRM landscape less intimidating. How can – if I need a CRM that tracks conversations, what are the CRMs that I should be using? So we tested that out. It worked and we actually are throwing a lot of resources into that. I think that’s what happens in an established company from my perspective is that you’ve tested something. You’ve got it. You see results. You see sign-ups because of that. We see people coming back to that post. We see people referring that post.

We’re going to throw resources that hire another marketing person on the team, that’s working with more freelancers, that’s really keeping that as the top priority of the post that we [Indiscernible] this month.

In a startup when we were – I would still say Zapier is still very much a startup and we’re testing different things. You fail quite a bit in content and you do that actually gladly because I want to put out something that if I know it doesn’t work, then you know that, I’m not going to dedicate any more resources to that. We’ve had some flops, I will tell you that much. I very much have put seven or eight hours into a post and when it got out there, it got about a tenth of the traffic as I thought it could have or other well-read posts do.

So that’s where I see the difference between the startup and the established company. I guess at this point we’re fortunate where we have the ability to also throw some of our marketing budget at kind of testing still as a startup. So we haven’t really put all eggs in one basket and reviews. We’re still testing.

Jeff Zelaya: Got it. You can’t be afraid to fail. I think that’s a valuable lesson in doing content marketing for a startup. You have that to your advantage.

Danny Schreiber: Sometimes you should be happy you failed because when you’re at – when you know something doesn’t work, then you can get moving on to the next. There’s a great book that we’re kind of basing the next six months around, which is called Traction. It really actually – probably the most relevant to a founder of a startup because it’s trying to coach you through getting traction in order to take the next step, but for our marketing department it’s great. It’s talking about all the different channels you can reach your customers.

So for us, it’s really about focusing on the channels that we’ve seen work so far and that means that the test that we run in the past on other channels, like going to a conference or starting up a video series aren’t worth our time right now with the limited resources we have.

Jeff Zelaya: Speaking of limited resources, let’s say you have a B to B marketing team. They have limited time, limited resources. Where do they start? How should you focus your content marketing strategy and what are the first things that you should be doing if that’s a scenario that you’re in?

Danny Schreiber: It’s a great question. I think there’s a temptation to try a lot of things. That’s actually going back to that traction book. That’s one of the things we talk about there. But you should really start with what you know. For me, I was hired on a little more than a year ago to lead this content marketing strategy at Zapier.

I came from a news background where I was interviewing a lot of people every week. I wrote posts that were – articles that were around 700 words sometimes. So that’s what I did. I went and I interviewed people. I presented them as stories on our blog and some of those got traction and I think you asked the question earlier that I didn’t quite answer which is how do you start to kind of spread the word about posts or know that people are interested.

There was a lot of leaning on people that were mentioned in the post. So just like – I’m going to share this interview with myself that you’re doing. I was expecting and hoping that people that I would interview would also share it.

A good example of that might be when I interviewed the founder of Pocket, Pocket kind of shared it and that’s great because Pocket is this app that collects stories that people want to read. When they share an article of yours, it’s almost like this endorsement that you got to read it. You want to read it. So we saw some great traction on that early on where people got excited about that article in particular. The same goes for some of the other articles that we had that mentioned people.

Of course I haven’t talked about that. That article has to be really good. So I put in maybe more time than I would on some articles and really had people check it over and make sure that it was – when it got out there, that Pocket would be happy with it, because they aren’t just going to go and share any article. They want to share what makes them look good, what makes – tells the whole Pocket story and that was something that I tried to deliver on. I think they were happy with it. So they shared it.

Jeff Zelaya: Wow, congratulations on that feature. What are the publications that you tend to follow that you are a subscriber of and you’re always going back to that blog post or magazine or podcast because you love the kind of marketing insight that they share on that particular outlet?

Danny Schreiber: I kind of have a smorgasbord of outlets that comes to me through following newsletters or Twitter. So I subscribe to Andrew Chen and what he puts out. I get Greg Ciotti. I think it’s Ciotti or Ciotti. I need to ask him how to pronounce that, his newsletter. I get a newsletter from Sean Blanda. I follow Belle Beth Cooper. She’s a freelancer of ours at Zapier and these folks put out great links to resources that they have read or they did themselves.

Andrew Chen writes fantastic posts about marketing that he has either learned from somewhere else or learned him or has a guest poster. OkDork is another great resource that I’ve kept following and have enrolled in a couple of other courses that they’ve offered.

So I kind of pick up what I think – if I read something, I likely will subscribe to the newsletter. In fact that’s what I want people to do with Zapier is subscriber to our newsletter. So I return the favor. I return the interest and see how they do their newsletters and read their content.

Jeff Zelaya: OK. I just – while you were saying that, I just opened up some tabs and I subscribed to each of the ones that you named. So I will be following those guys. Thanks for the insight Danny!

Danny Schreiber: Yeah.

Jeff Zelaya: What are the companies, the brands that you would say are doing content marketing really well, that you look up to, that you say, “Hey, these guys are really innovative. They’ve had a great team. They’re posting out really awesome content� Are there brands that come to mind that stand out from above and beyond the rest?

Danny Schreiber: For me that is looking at brands that – earlier I mentioned we’re mimicking, copying, taking tips from people that are doing this long form content well. So a few of the companies that I would say that we’ve modeled ourselves after, that we’ve looked to for inspiration, you think of – I mentioned Greg Ciotti. He’s at Help Scout. Help Scout has this fantastic blog only once a week but every one of those blog posts is golden.

Intercom, that blog is unique because there’s so much internal knowledge shared there. What’s also neat is that a cofounder writes several blog posts there. So you know that you’re getting this information from a cofounder which honestly is pretty tough to maintain after a while. Wade Foster who had cofounded Zapier, he wrote a majority of the blogs the first couple of years. Then after I got hired, he started to hand more of the reins over to me and focused his duties mainly on his CEO role.

So it’s really neat to have a company blog that has somebody continuing to participate in it. Another one that is just like that is Groove. Groove has this blog where they have this focus. OK? We’re going to get to $100,000. We’re going to let you know everything that happens along the way.

There, you know what you’re getting. You can sign up for that. You can follow the story. They really pull you in. I don’t know what they’re going to do after they hit 100K. In fact they might have already hit – I think last time I checked, they were like hitting 94. But I think they’ve already sucked me in enough that I want to kind of – going to want to keep following that story.

Unbounce is another fantastic one. Again, you have a cofounder there who really blogged quiet a bit early on – well, two cofounders blogged quite a bit early on. They pull you in with this fantastic content. They hire this team of writers and they continue to do so on the site.

In fact I mentioned Wade earlier. Wade writes all of our really remote team posts today, which is this great series we have that looks at how we work as a remote team. Those posts are really some of our best read posts because they’re just this great deep insight into OK, here’s how we hired as a remote team. Here’s how we hold a company retreat as a remote team. Here are the tools we use as a remote team and he provides a great perspective there.

I know I’ve mentioned Buffer before but Buffer is also one that I keep on top of. How can you not? They seem to be everywhere. They have a fantastic PR strategy with their transparency, which is also a really neat internal company guideline that they follow. But I really admire what they do over there.

Jeff Zelaya: Yes, I agree. I think Buffer along with Groove, those two examples, what makes them innovative is how transparent they are. I know Buffer really releases the salaries of their team, how they hire, how they’re structured, even recently how your fee, your Buffer monthly fee, how it’s allocated to different parts of their company, how much of it goes to salary, how much of it goes to profit, et cetera.

So it’s really innovative to me how companies are taking that transparency and going at it all out, similar to the Groove story, how you’re getting to be part of their journey as they grow their revenue to 100K and it really brings you in, like you said. So those are great examples. Thanks for sharing that.

What do you see as the next emerging trend, right? So transparency was one that we talked about and long form content and just really being helpful and useful with your content. What are some of the other trends that you think will emerge in 2015 and beyond? What’s next for content marketing?

Danny Schreiber: I’m really starting to see I think a lot of content marketers themselves under the name of their company posting to the LinkedIn publishing platform of medium publishing platform with the same content.

So syndication isn’t just happening on the fast company site or on the next web but it’s happening on people’s own personal channels. We’re going to I think see more of that as these blogging platforms start to carry a brand of themselves. I mean I never anticipated that a company that I consider almost – you look at it. They’re providing a similar service to WordPress. They’re allowing you to publish your thoughts online but way different approach. I mean you want the medium brand. It doesn’t quiet ensure quality but it certainly delivers on it and that’s something that’s neat.

So I think when you take a post that you published first on your company blog, a week later you’re starting to see it disseminated elsewhere.

Another part that is pretty much widespread now is images imposed are so much tailored to let’s make sure people can share that on Twitter or let’s make sure that looks good on Facebook. To me almost sometimes it’s done a bit too much. I’ve seen posts that have – every picture has somebody’s logo on it. I think that can be – it’s not – to me as a reader, I don’t enjoy that. But I understand.

It’s because that if somebody shares that, they’re for sure going to get that logo out there. I personally don’t think that pays off as much as I think it does. I think it kind of becomes more annoying. But at the same time, I’m sure they’ve also felt like we’ve got great content. People are sharing it. But they’re forgetting about us. Let’s get ourselves more out there.

So images within blog posts, the way people share posts today is no longer just a link. It’s really you’re able to give a teaser and so readily making people – giving people the tools to make a teaser is something that I see as a trend.

Jeff Zelaya: You’re on track. I think people are now so visual and it’s like we want to give them that visual impact, but we don’t want our brand to get lost in the mix. So how do I balance the two? It’s something that marketers I think are still struggling to figure out. They want to do that without crossing the line and being annoying as you said. They’re being a little bit too much or too self-serving. So it’s always that balancing act of how do I help my audience, but how do I make sure that they know about me and my brand, so I could get known and get revenue and grow my company.

So very interesting how that will unfold in the upcoming year. I’m excited to see what trends will emerge as well. So any last words?

Danny Schreiber: Yeah. I mean I would definitely say that no matter what kind of strategy you take, what wins at the end of the day is a really great story and that makes the content compelling.

So no matter the email newsletter list you have or how many people you tweet to or send the email to that says, “Hey, can you please help share?†when it comes down to it, compelling content gets surfaced.

You get to see that by platforms like Prismatic or on – what’s the – the other one Zite. When you start to see your articles take off there, you know you’re doing something right because they want to deliver the best post to their audience. So I think that’s something to strive for is to strive for syndication in what I would call the best content places. If you post as well on GrowthHackers.com for example, you know you’ve written an extensive guide.

You get on Hacker News. It might just be because it’s an opinionated piece and it’s not necessarily the best written piece. But look for places. Look to place content in places that give this stamp of, “This is worth your time,†and I think that’s a good way to measure that your content marketing strategy is also worth your time.

End of Transcript

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