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 * The difference between B2B and B2C marketing * Our experience helping customers make this transition If you have feedback, comments or suggestions, reach out at podcast@animalz.co.

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/2018/04/your-strategic-plans-probably-arent-strategic-or-even-plans * https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-strategy-puzzle-of-subscription-based-dating-sites * https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2017/5/11/jpeg-your-ideas Have feedback? Shoot us an email at podcast@animalz.co.

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 for your brand and help the people in your industry.

Our teammate Jan-Erik Asplund recently wrote a piece for the Animalz blog that blew up. The piece—BLUF: The Military Standard That Can Make Your Writing More Powerful—trended on Hacker News and racked up 30,000+ pageviews in just a few days. It was shared all over Twitter, included in a few popular newsletters, mentioned on Lifehacker, and earned links from 120 domains. We had a real whale on our hands. What happened next was unexpected. Our traffic increased 4x—and then it sustained for the next few months, even long after the surge died off. Today, Jan explains how and why he wrote the post and we dissect the impact it had on our site.

Paid, earned, owned and shared. Our VP of Marketing Devin Bramhall chats with Liz Gottbrecht, VP of Marketing at the influencer marketing platform Mavrck. They explain the nuances of distribution, bounce around some great ideas and talk about their experience using various distribution channels.

A successful onboarding experience makes the customer feel heard. They are excited about the future and confident that you - their partner - will help them bring their vision to life. A fraught onboarding experience involves too much talking (by you), not enough listening, and - therefore - uninformed actions that do more to divide you and your new customer rather than build trust.  So what’s the secret to successful customer onboarding? I sat down with our VP of Operations, Haley Bryant, to get answers. She spent 5 years running teams at Apple and 2 years directing customer ops at Brazen Technologies before joining Animalz and transforming the way we onboard and service customers. 

What do you do when you’re tasked with building a content team from the ground up? What are the first roles you should hire? What metrics should you be accountable to? What should your initial strategy look like? To tackle this challenge, I’ve called in Sonja Jacob, currently the head of content marketing at AppDynamics. She has over 10 years of experience working in content, generating demand for companies such as Drift, Mattermark, Zenefits, and HubSpot.This episode covers topics useful for people who are building teams from scratch, as well as those who are augmenting existing teams. From how to show ROI to justify new hires to the core functions that every content team needs, we’re talking team building today so let’s get into it.