The Animalz Content Marketing Podcast

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. 

Content outliers, posts that generate a disproportionately high volume of search traffic, can make the rest of your site performance appear insignificant. The solution is in your reporting, today Jimmy and I discuss how to leverage data craft better narratives around whales and put those outliers to good use for things like brand awareness and backlinks. 

A well-executed rebrand can reinvigorate your base and attract new customers. Devin speaks with principal designer at Mixpanel, Mark Johnson, about how to execute a successful rebrand.

“Ranking for a keyword” is becoming increasingly synonymous with “ripping off the existing search results.” As a result, SERP results are becoming crowded with copycat articles. Content is becoming more and more homogeneous and companies are slipping into intellectual plagiarism. This is sloppy, boring and bad for customers and readers alike. This week, Ryan and Devin discuss how to creators can overcome the copycat content crisis to produce original ranking content. 

It turns out that most B2B SaaS companies have more or less the same problems. Execs do need to better understand their teams’ day-to-day issues, but content creators also need to appreciate the bigger picture. After 168 sales calls over 18 months, Jimmy shares his take on what's burning hot in content marketing right now. 

As content marketers, we’re laser-focused on, well, content and the strategy we create around it. But even the best writing will fall flat if you’re working with the wrong value proposition or worse: none at all. Today, we’re joined by brand strategist Doug Fox, who shares his advice on finding a unique message that connects with their audience and drives new business.

BLUF is a military communications principle originally designed to enforce speed and clarity in reports and emails. But when applied to content marketing writing, it transforms loose narratives into succinct storylines. In this episode of the podcast, Animalz we explore how to use the BLUF method to achieve better writing as well as work communications. BLUF CommunicationWhat is Good Writing? by Jimmy DalyHow to Make People Care About Your Content: Find the Right Angle by Jan-Erik AsplundYou can follow Devin on Twitter at @devinemily and Jan at @janerikasplund.