The Animalz Content Marketing Podcast

Blake Emal, Chief Marketing Officer at Copy.ai, explains how AI can help small content teams, how to get great at Twitter marketing, and why Copy.ai encourages its team to embrace side projects. --- Hosts Blake Emal is the Chief Marketing Officer at Copy.ai , and the founder of Float , an online course creator for Notion. Ryan Law is the Director of Marketing for Animalz , an agency that delivers...

Dr. Fio Dossetto, editor-in-chief of contentfolks and former Senior Editor at Hotjar, talks through "product-led" content, writing search content without becoming a copycat, and levelling-up your career by thinking less like a writer, and more like a strategist. --- Hosts Dr. Fio Dossetto is the editor-in-chief of contentfolks , and the former Senior Editor at Hotjar. Ryan Law is the Director of M...

In this webinar recorded for Superpath, Ryan and Andrew talk Jimmy Daly through Animalz's first annual Content Marketing Benchmark Report. They explore six key findings from the data; cover the methodology and process behind the report; and share stories and experience from working with the 70+ SaaS companies analyzed in their research. --- Mentioned in This Episode: The Animalz Content Marketing...

In today’s episode, Animalz's COO Haley Bryant talks with Sydney Carlton, Director of Brand Marketing at Storyblocks, a stock videos, images and audio provider. In October, Storyblocks launched Re:Stock, a campaign to more than double the representation of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC content in their library from 5% to 10% by 2021 and 20% by 2022. The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked unprece...

In today’s episode, I set out to answer one of the hardest questions in marketing: how do you become a thought leader? I pick the brain of Animalz’s strategist Katie Parrott, and we chat through the defining traits of a true thought-leader (and why it requires more than adding the phrase to your LinkedIn bio); we discuss the idea of “earned secrets” as the fuel for thought leadership; we dig into...

In today’s special episode of the Animalz podcast, you have questions, and we have answers. I enlisted Animalz CEO Devin Bramhall to help me answer some of the hardest content marketing questions you could throw at us. We tackle launching new websites, balancing paid and organic spend, content promotion, offline buying processes, and a whole lot more.  We’ll do another Q&A episode in the not-t...

In today’s episode of the Animalz podcast, I enlist Animalz Head of R&D, Andrew Tate, to talk through the good, the bad, and the downright mind-blowing aspects of GPT-3, the uncannily powerful natural language model from OpenAI. We share examples of the type of content you can create with GPT-3, we analyze the quality and calibre of its writing, and we answer the question on every content mark...

Few industries are more saturated with content marketing than ecommerce. From juggernauts like Shopify and Bigcommerce, to a growing multitude of scrappy startups, every ecommerce company is hungry for rankings, traffic and mindshare. In today’s episode, I’m chatting with Laura Moss, Animalz resident ecommerce pro, and the founder of her own ecommerce brand, Adventure Cats.  We chat through strate...

Content audit. Two words to strike fear into the heart of every content marketer. Well, not really. For any blog more than a year or two old, getting to grips with the performance of your older content is a necessity. But the tools used to do that, content and SEO audits, generally get a bad rep. And with good reason: most audits are long, bloated documents crammed full of context-less keywords an...

As a company whose entire reason for existence is creating the world’s best content marketing, we spend a LOT of time thinking about quality: What does it really mean to create something quality? How can we consistently create quality, despite the fact that we work with hundreds of customers, in dozens of industries, each with their own, idiosyncratic tastes and preferences? How can we stay ahead...

In today’s episode, Ryan chats with Animalz team members Cassie and Stephanie about Education Technology, an industry undergoing a gold-rush style boom in the wake of COVID-19. We talk through the different business models used in EdTech, and the supporting role of content in each;  we discuss the biggest opportunities facing EdTech companies as they launch go-to-market strategies in the wake of c...

In today’s episode, Ryan talks with Andrew Montalenti, Founder and Chief Product Officer at content analytics platform Parse.ly. We use Andrew’s experience working with some of the world’s largest publishers—the likes of WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, and Medium—to explore the changing face of content marketing. We talk through “platform-risk” and the growing need to diversify marketing channels;...

In today’s episode, Ryan chats to Emily Byford, Content Marketing Manager at SaaStock. We discuss SaaStock’s pivot from one of the premiere in-person SaaS conferences to an entirely online event in the wake of COVID-19; we dig deep into category creation, by way of Emily’s work at would-be category king Akkroo, and explore the role content plays in conceiving, evangelising and owning an emergent c...

The Degreed 2020 marketing plan is changing, and fast. With their original plans out the window, learn how their team is adapting their marketing strategy to keep growth trending up and to the right. Degreed's head of content and comms Sarah Danzl and managing editor Bella Lazzareschi joined us to talk about the importance of a diversified marketing plan, the role of PR during a crisis and how the...

In this episode, Jimmy and Ryan talk about our new product: on-demand consulting for your content team. We explain what it is, who it's for and why now. We also talk through some of the behind-the-scenes of putting this together. Enjoy!

Are you rethinking your content strategy right now? So is Joei Chan, content director at the e-learning company 360Learning. She was hired to lead content just a few weeks before the Covid-19 crisis and is now launching a new content program right in the midst of it. In this episode, Devin and I interview her about the experience, plans, goals, resources and constraints.

In an environment where acquisition of new customers is very challenging for most business, retention is extremely important. In this episode, Jimmy and Devin talk about what we're doing to retain our customers, and what our customers are doing to retain their customers.

In our first-ever live podcast, Devin and Jimmy talk about content marketing during a crisis. We talk through a few situations that we're seeing our own customers experiencing and take questions from the group. Check the show notes for links, snippets and the video.

Join us for an upcoming LIVE podcast. We're going to talk about content marketing during a crisis and answering live questions. If you'd like to submit a question, just send to podcast@animalz.co. Register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_rgucukfsTmuP3t6qTSMrvQ

This is among to the most things we common things we hear on sales calls: "Paid acquisition is getting too expensive and we haven't made any investment in content. How soon can we get started?" It's true that content can reduce your paid acquisition costs, but it also takes time to develop. In this episode, Jimmy and Devin talk about: * How to keep content very lean for better and faster results *...

Great content requires great context. In this episode, Jimmy and Jan talk about the inputs needed to paint that context. At the very least, you need a deep understanding of: * The customer * The product * The business model * The industry * The competition * The literature Once you have this information, you can create a strategy that suits the company's business needs.

In this (very) quick episode, Jimmy talks about why so many blogs don't generate leads and talks about how to address that problem. This advice won't disrupt your entire strategy—instead, you might consider a few small changes to help you drive more revenue with content.

Is that a content strategy? A plan? Or is it a vision? We've realized that a lot of the terminology in our space is actually really confusing. Let's make sure that when we say the word "strategy" that we are all actually talking about the same thing. Here are a few of the resources we mentioned in this episode: * https://hbr.org/2019/10/5-simple-rules-for-strategy-execution * https://hbr.org/2018/...

Terms like top, middle and bottom of the funnel content are thrown around all the time—but are we all speaking the same language? Ryan and Jimmy recently realized they had very different ideas of what these terms actually mean. They sat down to sort it all out and explain how to use this very imperfect framework.

Community is decentralized, hard to measure and difficult for marketing teams to execute on. So why is it so important? In this episode, Devin and Jimmy talk community. Jimmy show his bias for easy-to-measure marketing channels and Devin explains why and all marketers should get a lot more comfortable with this type of work. Community, as it turns out, is probably the best way to create goodwill f...