Main Takeaways
- Katarina sees content promotion as an extension of the content creation process, and both are necessary to generate traffic and business. At User List, content promotion is integrated into the process, with a checklist of things to do once the content is published.
- They target communities where email marketers, SaaS businesses, and product-led growth professionals gather to distribute their content. Well-moderated, active communities with usual stakeholders in the email automation process are preferred targets. Most of the communities they target are free, but Katarina is part of a couple of paid ones.
- Katarina’s company tries to be truthful in their comparison articles and lead with their unique selling proposition (USP) instead of hiding other people’s advantages. They recommend other solutions if they’re not an ideal fit for potential clients and it’s not threatening to their niche position.
- Katarina is currently working on automating repurposing content for their podcast episodes, and they currently only create evergreen tweets for repurposing. They create podcast episodes and articles every other week and assign them different values and processes based on their content’s value. High-value content, such as podcasts, has a different process for distribution.
- They assign value to content based on business goals and success in SEO, and they measure distribution success by metrics such as backlinks and traffic.
Resources
Website & Social Media Links
Video
Transcript
Alan: Hello. Hello everyone. It’s nice to have you, Catarina. Welcome to the show.
Katarina: For having me.
Alan: Awesome. So we’re gonna dive deeper into communities specifically. That’s something that you do a lot at user list,
Katarina:
Alan: So the first question is, what does content promotion mean to you?
And also what’s, your take on the balance between content creation and content promotion?
Katarina: for me it’s it’s one unity. Like I can’t separate the processes. unless you are,
Alan: I.
Katarina: an aspiring writer. Just creating content for the sake of creation really doesn’t make much sense. So for me, content promotion is just the extension of the whole content creation process. And, because if you don’t really put out the content out there, there’s really not much going on.
once you hit publish,
Alan: So we see a lot of companies that come to us, for link building because essentially they are in the situation that I call the content graveyards, basically all of their content. Is just sitting on like page two and lower of Google. So not really bringing in traffic, not doing much for the business.
So is the promotion something that you guys at user list? Take into account when you go about creating the content.
Katarina: yes. It’s integrated in our process. Like once we have the content go live, once we hit published, there’s a whole checklist of things we go through.
because we do create, there’s one, that’s one of the reasons, I really like user list. When I was initially interviewing with them, they are creating content for.
For the user’s sake, like the putting down the knowledge is the primary focus, so once we have the knowledge written down and published somewhere, yes, definitely. the entire process after that is focused on distributing the content as far as possible.
Alan: Awesome. Awesome. So yeah, it’s definitely part of your, to-do list straight after you hit published, Definitely curious to dive. Maybe deeper into what the checklist looked like of well part of your job is to leverage community specifically,
To be able to distribute your content. So what kind of communities do you guys target and what makes these community a good place for you to distribute the content?
Katarina: Because we are the email automation platform. We do leverage, communities where email marketers are, but also SaaS related communities, product led, growth related communities. And also we have a interesting thing going with a couple of content marketing communities, I guess some content marketers eventually do end up in the email automation part of the process at some point, and they do have questions.
So we’ve had nice responses there as well. But it’s not our primary focus.
Alan: Can you make any names? can you name any of these communities that our listeners can maybe dive into as
well?
Katarina: for email marketing specifically, email geeks definitely on Slack. Women of email who are both part of the email geeks community and are also on Facebook, product club growth. product Marketing Alliance is great. Also Future of SaaS. Product led stack. Also by user flow, they’re also great and focus that.
That was an interesting discovery a few months ago. They’re like product led sales, but they’re like very well moderated, like really amazing team behind them and they’re good both in for us. They’re valuable in terms of distribution as well, but also in terms of like really having a community of professionals.
You can. Ask for feedback, for discussions like they have great, brainstorming sessions on different topics. So it’s been really a cool experience joining
there.
Alan: Cool. So are these mostly free communities or is there any paid kind of membership as well?
Katarina: mainly free communities. I think I’m part of one or two paid communities, but everything else I do just leverage the free ones.
Alan: And how do you guys go about identifying these communities like, What’s your process and what it is that makes these communities specifically great. Besides maybe the audience and the people that are in there,
Katarina: Before I joined User List, we didn’t have the whole customer advocacy position in place. We are really a small team, but I’m the sixth person that joined, so I established the process from the bottom up. I was already part of a bunch of communities thanks to my previous experience.
So I did have some idea of what kind of communities we wanted to join as being the email automation platform for SaaS businesses. It was clear that we are pointing towards the. Email marketer, communities and SaaS related communities. So I already had a good batch of half a dozen communities that were active.
Usually what I look for is that those communities are active, are well moderated,
and that they have that, that the members are some of the usual stakeholders when it comes to email automation process in the businesses we target.
Alan: so what do you mean with,moderated.
Katarina: just to, to have the team who is engaged with the community, who doesn’t, who makes sure that the members get some value from the community so they participate in the discussions, they don’t tolerate, abusive behavior and things like that.
Alan: So they keep the community clean essentially from
spam, basically.
cool. so in your experience, what, kind of content, perform well, do you do different type of strategies within this community, or do you just like randomly go out and try to provide value and help people?
Katarina: when it comes to the content creation part, lately what we’ve been seeing, success is like getting. Good real life examples, like for different email flows, getting actual examples from actual companies we know and use. because for email marketers, we do have to occasionally go in, check the stats, optimize the flows, and we wanna see the other examples.
And in general rule, when it comes to. Content that I do like to follow is to deliver value and to deliver actionable insights and as many real life examples as possible. That’s usually like the three aspects that do to perform well with the audience. And when it comes to email flows, it’s not really easy to stumble into examples just like that.
Like you would have to sign up for a tool, use it, go through the process yourself, just to see how another company does it and making sure we. Reach out because we do know the people in the community reach out to them, gather examples, and source them in one place, give feedback on what was good, what would be improved, and putting that in one place is one super actionable guide on different email flows that’s been performing really well lately, and the communities have been responding really well to that.
Alan: Awesome. Awesome. so what would you say is the format that works best for you? Is it like just posting a link to some article that you have or just posting screenshots or screen share videos? What does it look like?
Katarina: most of the communities I’m in, they do have the, like shameless promotion channel. so we do post there as well. when I was starting out, we got comment that we wouldn’t get. Too much not to expect too much engagement there, but if you’re not spammy enough, I figure that you still get the nice responses, and I’m trying not to sound too sales, even in those channels.
I do. I understand. What kind of thought process brings them to, to reading the article. oh yes, I have that task in mind. Let’s see if I can find something that will help me with that. And then I go with that. I don’t go with the salesy copy, don’t follow it with the salesy copy or anything. And usually we do get nice responses.
We do get follow up questions, so it’s just like a sentence or two or, oh wait, are you trying to revise your cancellation email flow? Check out these examples, and then we do get comments on that. So that is nice. Another thing we do is, and it is a bit of a slow and steady process, but we, I do, it’s a part of my routine to go through communities and relevant discussions on a daily basis, which is a lot of legwork, it seems so at first, but it does help to fill in the blanks at the exact point someone has an issue.
So responding to. Not, that doesn’t necessarily mean, sharing the link to your content, but you do answer questions based on the content you are familiar with and, it can lead to good relations and it can lead to people coming back to you with more questions and then you can proceed with providing more content.
Alan: That definitely ties back into content creation as well. so you get questions from people, then you know what kind of content you should be creating, so then you can. Use that content back again into answering the same thing for more people. In my experience I did check some of those, promotional channels in some communities, but I did see that there were a lot of people posting and I thought, it doesn’t even make sense for me to just post something cuz in two minutes it’s basically gonna get buried by everybody else posting.
So any recommendation or like suggestions for people to go past that?
Katarina: don’t go with the sales intention in mind. go with the, yeah, this, answer that question. You can check it out, and it just short and sweet and to the point, and then it delivers more results, at least in my experience.
Alan: Awesome. So is there any other type of promotion that you guys do, besides communities? Do you also do outreach?
Katarina: outreach now? Not so much. now we do heavily rely on like building relationships in the communities and posting in the communities. other than that, just social media. We rely a lot on Twitter and LinkedIn. And other than that link building, it is a part of the process. But for me, like for my part of the work, it’s mainly the communities.
Alan: And so how did you decide internally that, for example, Twitter and LinkedIn were the channels for you to use?
Katarina: When I joined, so both of the user list founders, they are very active on Twitter and they do have engaged community already and a very nice number of following. So it was like a natural choice to proceed with that, and that’s been going quite well when it comes to LinkedIn. I do have a decent following there and, General feedback we’ve been getting from discussions with other professionals is that it’s worth making an effort to post regularly there and be active there.
And so far, at least when I check the traffic, check the referrals, LinkedIn is one of the top sources.
Alan: Yeah, so I’m seeing that in my experience as well, it seems like Twitter is been declining in terms of engagement and LinkedIn is going up. I guess people is starting to move to LinkedIn from Twitter, after essentially, spamming it for the last two years of . With threads of all sorts of
things.
You’ve had some experience as well. I read in a short bio as an editor, for some tech publications, and so I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of mistakes that people make when they try to reach out and promote their content. So what would you say are the most common?
Katarina: Oh, good question. Especially, so I was an editor at Hack, which is a tech publication, and, Primarily the writers are developers, so that came with a lot of super short guides, which like, it doesn’t help. You if you wanna publish an article, you have to make it an article. You can’t make it 200 words.
also, some grammar used to be an issue. A lot. Formatting used to be an issue a lot there. and also overly promotional. Like I do understand the need for promotion. but you are writing for readers who are looking for. Answer is not for ads, so you have to keep that in mind. It’s all to pitch a product, but you have to go with the solution first.
Pitching later when you’re writing
content.
Alan: I’m sure a lot of people reached out to you to get back links or things like that via email. So what are some of the worst pitches or examples of outreach that you got?
Katarina: Oh,of course there’s always the essentials. Not having the name, not having the. The blog name, the Frog url?
Alan: still do those?
Katarina: yeah.
Alan: Not a lot has changed since
Katarina: Yeah. not really, especially in the hack we get, so it Hack was a, it is a tech publication and it has. And even as a tech publication, it was publishing a lot of versatile content, but it had to be tied back somehow to tech.
And we did get cooking blogs, back links and similar, which is I do understand the need, but you didn’t understand the assignment apparently.
Alan: Going back to communities, how do you guys balance creating content that informative? so providing value to the user, but also content that in a way can sell your product.
Katarina: as I mentioned before, what attracted me to usual is when initially was that goal with doing value first. so it’s not really a balance of 50 50 balance for us. we do go always with the trustworthy content, but we do try to pitch in where it is relevant. So if we are explaining an issue and explaining how to solve it, we also mentioned how to solve it in user list.
If we are doing a comparison of the tools we are. Of course comparing it to our own tool, but mainly like we are going with value first and then it is a long run. it is a slow and steady battle, but I think in the long run it really does pay off when it comes to building a trustworthy brand.
Alan: so you talked about comparison. This is something that’s interesting to me because, we get a lot of clients that ask us if we can promote and build back links to comparison pages, which is not very easy, specifically if the client is having a comparison page where it’s basically all made up stuff,
So they’re basically like, we do this better, blah, blah, blah. But then if you go and check the other tool does the same exact thing. so yeah. How do you guys go about doing those comparison pages and also what’s your best strategy for promoting them?
Katarina: When it comes to all like the main competitors, we do have comparison pages. We don’t promote them a lot, like we don’t actively distribute them. They do generate some traffic
based on seo, not much else, but there are couple of articles that we did for the sake of seo. Where we did, but we tried to be as truthful as possible because when it comes to our comparisons and our PO competitors and our positioning, we do have a distinctive advantage of being a very good solution for SaaS businesses, B2B SaaS businesses in particular.
So we do try to lead with that when not hide other people’s advantages because we do have our positioning in place and it’s been working quite well. We are aiming to promote ourselves in that area, and the other competitors are doing other things as well. so we are just trying to define ourselves within that, that vertical.
Alan: Yeah, so for us it’s very important. One of the first thing they ask to clients is like, what’s your usb, your unique selling proposition? Because I really think that if you are SaaS that does something similar to someone else, you definitely should have something better they do or different than some other people.
Cause otherwise it doesn’t really make sense for you to exist and then it gets really difficult to promote content, build back links, and do all sorts of things when. You’re exactly the copy of someone else
Katarina: Even in our Democrats, because I often join them. so I, and I like that practice. So if we, when we hear out what the business is, doing, and we figure out that we are not the ideal fit because they’re either not a SaaS business or not a SaaS business that would benefit from what we do, we are familiar enough with alternatives to suggest the one and.
Considering that we are well placed in our niche, it’s not something threatening to us to recommend another solution if it, that is really a better solution for that user.
Alan: Yeah. that definitely makes sense. It’s also something that we do as a link building or the promotion agency. If we get clients that don’t have the content ready for us to promote, then we simply send them to content strategy agency.
] it’s always helps to provide value, show people that you actually care, so that then maybe in the future, once the situation changes, they can come back to you and revisit, your solution. So we talk about communities distributing content. Do you also do some kind of content, repurposing,
Katarina: haven’t done it like in the previous year because I joined like May last year and we had one very simple, straightforward approach for the first few months until I. Settled in, get to know the niche better and get to know the processes better. But now we, like before in December, I redid that distribution checklist that we mentioned, that it’s more, a bit more extensive and, a bit more efficient.
And now the current goal is creating, we do summary repurposing, like very basic things. And now I’m trying to create a workflow that will help me. Automate things more and take more advantage of that, especially when it comes to our podcast episodes because they’re chunk full of value. but we are, like, for now, the only repurposing we do is just creating evergreen tweets that we post on, like on an ongoing basis.
Nothing else from that, but I’m currently one of the most interesting I’m having.
Alan: yeah. And so what’s the starting point for your content distribution? Is it, blog articles? Is it the podcasts?
Katarina: we do podcast episodes every other week, and we do articles every other week as well. so it’s But with the articles, some like I do have based on the content I do have different, I assign them different values and then I assign them different processes based on the value I see from them.
And then we have different processes, but all podcasters are like high value because definitely
source of knowledge.
Alan: It’s basically gonna look like a different checklist for, for each different type of content, In terms of value. first off, how do you measure value of the content, so what’s the business goal maybe behind that? And the second thing is how do you measure the success , for your distribution efforts essentially?
Katarina: When it comes to assign value, usually like the medium value ones are. Tools that are purely SEO driven, like if there’s a keyword that really suits us, but it’s like it’s an email automation niche. It’s really hard to make it super exciting. We are aware of that. so some topics are barely purely based on the SEO value and they, you can’t generate a lot of buzz with them, We do like a medium value, promotion for them.
the other ones that are like topics generated from communities or from a very interesting conversation on the podcast, those definitely can be more controversial in a way, are more interesting or more. Including more ReLife examples that, that are valuable and that draw attention. So based on that, it’s not like a strict science, it’s basically more, experience on what’s he,
what has been working so far
Alan: Cool. so yeah, you
don’t have a
fixed Grady for the values. It’s basically just a call that you make every time.
Katarina: yeah, but. an educated guess, like we’ve seen what’s working, so now we know how to focus our attention and when it comes to KPIs it’s really hard to de determine the KPIs of the distribution, especially when the community part, it’s really hard to track. And the attribution I is an issue, but we are trying not to read too much into that.
For now, I just follow the. Overall trends in traffic sessions, visits, social media engagement, and that’s it. And based on the trends, we see how we
are performing.
Alan: so when someone signs up to use a list, for example, and they start using the product, do you have a questionnaire that’s asking them where they found you or where they come from?
Katarina: I think yes.
Alan: Yeah, cuz that’s typically how, we internally as well measure where people come from. so I know if they’re coming from, because they heard me on a podcast, if they’re coming because they saw me on Twitter or if they’ve been referred from other people, things like that. So we typically use that internally for the agency to measure, the sources and that’s been pretty helpful for us to know where we should be doubling down essentially.
Katarina: Yeah, not sure if it’s currently productized when people do sign up without the demo. I know that for demo, definitely we do ask and I was very, it was a very nice experience. Few months after me joining to notice more and more responses, being communities in social networks and discussions on Twitter, that was a really nice. Switch in
responses.
Alan: Yeah. so I definitely believe that also those people that come from communities also might, be people that stay with you for the longer term as well, Because they appreciate the value of the tool and what you provide. They appreciate that you already provided value first thing,
So I’m guessing that this all leads to a better relationship as well with your customers.
Katarina: the good thing about our niche, that is once you do determine the, a new tool. For email automation, generally stickiness is quite good, but yes, the customer experience, the relations, the helpfulness does help get more, better feedback in the
long run,and
you
turn them into eventually.
Alan: have you ever had, Promotion kind of effort or a post that you did that literally bombed, with zero people? Zero comment. Zero, zero engagement. And how do you handle when that happens?
Katarina: Don’t really think so. But in general it can be to be says you don’t expect a lot, you can’t expect
as much morality. Yes. so on socials, yes. The results are already, you know what to expect. So like really to go. I don’t really think we have an example of when that
Alan: Yeah,
so basically like keeping in mind the expectations and what the benchmark and the numbers look like for the typical post. so what are some of your favorite, tools? If there’s anything that you use to manage some of these postings or things that you do to distribute, your content.
Katarina: I was thinking about that question earlier. we do use buffer for social posing, for communities. I did try a. Couple of tools for screening the discussions.
didn’t stick with anything. So it’s mainly just me now knowing which communities are more active and which communities I can rely on more at this point.
But it do, it did take some trial and error to, to figure out what is worth checking every day, what is worth checking weekly.
I am. Currently testing, trying out tools that could help, generate Twitter copy for the, like evergreen promotion. But that’s been like spotty and the results haven’t been, like, it still requires a lot of moderation, so sometimes it’s just easier to create them on your own than try a new tool.
But fingers crossed it’ll help.
Alan: And do you use any filters for notifications on Slack? Cause I know you can set up notifications for specific words or things that people
say.
Katarina: we do want to, just check for user list on Slack, on Twitter, and we’ve been getting that. And also, yeah, I’ve been using Hood Suite. For moderating the other relevant keywords like email automation, email marketing, SaaS, email, but
they are excluding their free plan.
so now I’m not sure if the value I’ve been seeing from the tool justifies the, switching to a paid
plan.
Alan: and what’s the seo,
tool that you use? Do you use h
s
Katarina: yes. I think Jane uses a Traps. I’m not sure Jane is the co-founder that leads the content creation part. I know she uses a Traps. I’m not sure what hell she uses.
Alan: Cool. so are there any trends or things that you’re seeing in the space that you think might impact, both content creation but also content distribution?
Katarina: I’ve been noticing more and more marketers. mentioning and testing out content repurposing like since November, December, like it’s been a buzz lately. I don’t know why now, cuz it’s not like a new term, but something has been happening. So more and more focus on content distribution.
Alan: Yeah. My last question, and this is always challenging for some people, because not everyone is a nerd like I am, but if you could have any eighties or nineties movie character promote your content, who would they be and
why?
Katarina: And that explains the posters behind
you, right?
Alan: exactly.
Katarina: So El Woods would be early, two thousands, wouldn’t be eighties and nineties. Yeah.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. The
nineties.
Katarina: Um,
Yeah.
Alan: I’m willing it took accept and go all the way through the two thousands.
Katarina: I think not really a movie character though. There was a movie, but I think Master Splinter.
Alan: Oh,
yes. That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s also eighties, nineties, so that
works.
Katarina: Yeah, but he was wise, he was knowledgeable and he only spoke when it was relevant, so he wasn’t too pushy. I think he
Alan: Awesome.
Katarina: well.
Alan: I like that. I like that. Cool. All thanks a lot, Karina. Is there any final thoughts that you would like to leave the listeners with and where can people find you?
Katarina: they can find a bunch of our super awesome valuable content on new.com. I am active on Twitter and LinkedIn. I think you’ll be linking to them in the show notes.
so feel free to reach out and ask me any nerdy questions about email marketing and email automations anytime. Oh, we can also share dog picks and cadp picks anytime.
Alan: Also does always work and yeah, definitely recommend that everyone check out the podcast as well. You guys have two?
Katarina: Better done and Perfect is the Useless podcast. Jane also leads UI Breakfast that is more design oriented. And Benedict the other co-founder, he has, his own podcast, which is called Slow and Steady. And yes, we do rely on slow and steady and Better Done and perfect as our general motto for things we do.
Alan: Awesome, awesome. Cool. Thanks a luck at Arena for being on the podcast and yeah, we’ll
talk soon.
Katarina: Thank you for having me. It was so nice.