with Erika Kramarik and Daniel Prindii

Content and copy are frequently treated as separate skillsets, and sometimes content gets broken down even further by channel, fragmenting messaging and making it hard to align on how to talk about the brand, the product, and its benefits.

But what if instead we treated all of the content, from ads to knowledge base articles, as one ecosystem?

This is how Erika Kramarik and Daniel Prindii approach this task in their work. In our conversation, they’ll take us behind the scenes of helping Omnivore (now acquired and shut down) go from speaking predominantly to early adopters start attracting, converting, and retaining early majority users.

E&K Interactive Studio website: https://ekinteractive.studio/

Omnivore case study: https://ekinteractive.studio/portfolio/omnivore-case-study

Erika Kramarik on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikakramarik/

Daniel Prindii on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-prindii/

Transcript

Erika Kramarik

I am Erika Kramarik. I am co-founder of E&K Interactive Studio. Me and Daniel are content strategists, marketers as a background.

And what we do is that we work in content strategy and help businesses, tech companies, startups work with content and figure out how it can help grow their businesses and build better customer experiences.

Daniel Prindii

Yeah, hi, I'm Daniel Prindii, also the co-founder of E&K Interactive Studio. I have a background in marketing, started as a cultural public relation in a bookstore and moved to community design and content strategy.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

I think that in B2B SaaS, we are very much used to treating content as a channel-specific affair.

And while ideally there is some kind of overlap on the messaging level, it tends to be not very visible on the channel level, so between social media posts, blog posts, web copy, and then maybe even things like community-related communications or emails.

But what if we change this approach and try to think about all types of content as a part of a content ecosystem?

Erika Kramarik

I can tell you a bit about this idea of content as an ecosystem. I wouldn't say there's a particular story about it in terms of, oh, this is like the aha moment we had. How it started is that both me and Daniel have a lot of experience in terms of working with a lot of companies.

And what we've been seeing is this pattern of organizations that are doing a lot of content in terms of we are trying to figure out who we are and how we want to stand out in the market, and we're trying to figure out how to do all of the content that we're doing, and we're trying to figure out how to get all of the teams to work together.

And it wouldn't matter if they were a nonprofit or a service company or a product startup or an enterprise company where I worked in at one point, this pattern of what they were struggling with was pretty much the same.

So that's how we said, "Oh, okay, I think we're on to something, this idea of content that is everywhere in the organization and that can be seen as an ecosystem." I think that this can be relevant for everyone.

I would define a content ecosystem as an organization's content footprint in terms of everything they put out there.

So it's all of the content the marketing does, all of the content that sits inside the product, all of the documentation that they do, what goes on social media, what sits internally. And if you take it piece by piece, usually all of the teams that do this kind of work are doing a great job at it.

But when you try to find the connections between them, when you play the role of the user and do like the whole journey of, "I'm trying to use this product and I'm converting, now I'm using it, now I'm trying to get support," you sometimes find points of friction.

You sometimes find confusing information because one site tells you one thing, another team tells you another thing. So that's the point of seeing content as an ecosystem.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

What about the community piece?

Erika Kramarik

Definitely that too, because that's also an important touch point for a user who interacts with the business or interacts with the product.

Daniel Prindii

I can add to it from the community side is that in community, usually if it's a product, you get people with different problems, you get people with problems that you didn't know as a product owner that they have, or they're using your app or a product in a way that you didn't think about.

So having a community and preparing your content for the community makes sense to solve this kind of situation, but also to educate them because maybe you cannot change the product, maybe you can.

But if you have something like an enterprise-level product with thousands of options, changing something in that context is hard.

So you need to nudge the user a little bit to put it on the path that makes sense for him, for the use case, and for the business.

Erika Kramarik

And what I wouldn't do is think of it as a framework that is very rigid. So there isn't a recipe or template that says you need to look at content that sits here and here and here and it must sit here.

No, every organization is different and you need to map your own content and see your own connections because what works for one organization may not work for another and that's perfectly fine.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Well, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to fixing them. Friction points that exist when content is treated as separate initiatives and not as an ecosystem are fairly common. So Erika is going to share some examples of what they may look like for your organization.

Erika Kramarik

So what I would highlight as points of friction, I would say is positioning, in the sense of how do we talk about the value we are delivering and how are we talking about the services we're doing or how our product is impacting our users so it's helping them do a job or get something out of it so they are happy about using that specific product, like this is one part.

Another point of friction can be about operations and productivity, like how do I get all of this repetitive work out of the way?

And I know like AI is something that everyone is talking about and we are a bit afraid like is AI coming and replacing us or is AI going to take out all of the like special creative sauce out of the work that we're doing, but the thing is that unless we have like these foundations figured out, it's going to be very hard to put AI into the mix because it's only going to make a very complicated thing even more complicated.

So this part of operations and being productive and figuring out who does what and how things are handed off between teams, this is one point of fiction.

I think another one is about silos in terms of how do different teams inside an organization collaborate, in the sense of how does the information get handed out between them or what are the guidelines that they are working with?

What are even the brand guidelines and how do they get adapted to their specific work? Because brand guidelines can mean, in terms of language, one thing for the marketing team. It can mean a different thing for the technical writers.

And if these two things don't fit together, there you have a bit of a friction point. And everyone is happier if you can solve these.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to fixing them, friction points that exist when content is treated as separate initiatives and not as an ecosystem are fairly common. So Erika is going to share some examples of what they may look like for your organization.

So would you say that the problem is the same, but the complexity changes depending on the size of the company?

Erika Kramarik

Definitely, yes.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

OK, sort of devil's advocate question: since startups are small, why do they have this problem?

Daniel Prindii

Startups have kind of the same problems because we, as humans, we generate a lot of content.

For example, us, preparing for this podcast, we generated probably four or five documents.

When you put two people or more people working together with the same goal, with the same North Star, they're going to generate a lot of information, a lot of artifacts .

And everyone has a different way of doing things, of note-taking.

So, when you try to put it together, even if it's four or five people, it's going to be a mess.

And if you don't have someone that has some kind of overview of everything and says, Okay, let's put it in a [specific] way.

Let's say every title starts with a capital letter.

If you don't have that, everyone is going to be with their own system, and when you're trying to mix it, everything is going to be horrible.

So yeah, they're going to have this kind of problem. And especially in a startup where the velocity of development is high, you test things, you bring new stuff, new tools in the mix, and you don't have time to say, "Okay, let's try to make our knowledge base top[-quality]." No, they don't have the time, because they're iterating and trying to solve something.

Erika Kramarik

And at some point, to build on what Daniel is saying, there is this tipping point of the group is small enough, so this kind of misalignment of how content works together and how collaboration is happening can be fixed on the go, and we can forgive each other's different ways of working because we are talking to each other live so we can fix it on the go.

And then there's this tipping point when the team gets bigger, the content assets [volume] get more and more, where it stops working.

And that's where the pain point gets bigger and we say, and the team says, oh, you know, I think we need to start working on templates.

I think the scary sentence gets said, "I think we need processes."

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

So hopefully at this point, you are at least open to the idea that siloing your content and treating it as standalone communications is probably not the most effective way to grow.

If that's the case, in the next couple of minutes, we're going to talk about how this concept of a content ecosystem can benefit you as you start expanding to groups that are more interested in kind of extensive, not tech-first messaging, for example, shifting from early adopters towards early majority.

Daniel Prindii

So Omnivore is an up and coming read later app with features like newsletters, RSS feeds, note-taking, digital archive, with a lot of integration to note-taking apps like Obsidian or Notion.

And they needed help from us regarding their marketing and community support.

So we helped them with product messaging, product content design, website improvements, and search engine optimization, community design, including onboarding, engagement, retention. And e-mail marketing and a bit of social media management and influencer marketing.

They had a problem, I mean, they had a goal to to grow their product user base, to move from that early adopters, very technical people that are happy to test out beta tools and to to find, let's say, a more general, normal-like audience that can appeal across types of needs of the users.

So, their goal was to grow the user base and attract new people and in the end monetize or make it sustainable. So, we identified the main problems with them.

One was that product that needed some content design and information architecture work that changes will affect the user experience.

The other one was articles and newsletters and updates from the technical team - this didn't happen on a regular basis, didn't end up in, you know, in an inbox for a user that makes sense.

And the Discord, the community that was hosted on Discord, was a bit relaxed, focused more on tech, not focused on templates or ways to use the app for someone that is not very technical.

So we we tried to approach this with the idea of an ecosystem, like we said before, to cover the positioning, thinking about how Omnivore can can help audience users with their goals, with their jobs,how to make the product better and easy to understand and how to make the community more engaging and more useful for the team, because we're getting customer support problems, bugs, and everything, and also more friendly for the new user, because if you're joining as a new user, you don't want to hear about all the bugs.

You want to hear about the things you can do, the amazing things you can do with the app and how it can help you be more productive or you can read more or stay on top of every newsletter and article you want to save.

And in the end, to cover the marketing, to have consistent messaging and reach across all our channels.

We didn't ignore the technical users because they were giving a lot of useful information and feedback.

We involved them in creating, let's say, ways of using the app that a technical person is going to say this is how you do it and you have three bullet points and working and building on top of that, making sense for a non-technical user.

Because in the end, it wasn't very complicated to use, but how you package that can look very technical and scary.

So working on what we have, building on that, making the language more accessible, more user friendly, eliminating information that doesn't make sense for the user in the end, like, you know, you need this type of Java library or this type of that, no. It's just how you move your newsletter from your inbox to Omnivore, how you take notes on that, and how you want to save the highlights in Obsidian, for example.

We did this with a lot of visual help, like screenshots, short videos, with a structure that makes sense to follow it around while you're trying to make that workflow, for example.

Erika Kramarik

I think an example here, because you were mentioning getting a lot of questions in the Discord, we updated the onboarding e-mails to make them more friendly and more accessible to this early majority audience.

And it was immediately obvious in the Discord in the questions we were getting becauseIt suddenly stopped being about "How do I do these very, very obvious tasks?" And it started being more specific questions about, "I want to do something very technical. I have this very specific use case. Can I do it or not?"

Daniel Prindii

And another thing we did in the community was to, let's say, separate the onboarding stuff, the learning stuff from the hardcore technical discussions.

We created channels for new new users where they can find a short knowledge base with with articles to the most important things to to do in the first week of using Omnivore, like adding a newsletter, how to take notes, how to sync with Obsidian or Notion, how to add a RSS feed, how to look for problems if that RSS feed doesn't work.

Not the complicated stuff, but something that is going to make you look at the app and say, "Okay, I like to use this and let's try to use this step by step," and when you feel confident with it, you can go with the more complex flows where you can, you know, seeing the colors of the highlight from Omnivore, Obsidian, and then do something complicated with Obsidian with other plugins and so on and so forth.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Aligning content around a single message and a single idea is not just for communities or for web content. It's also for finding people willing to amplify your message.

And in this case, what I find particularly interesting is that Omnivore did not rely on a very rigidly set messaging that influencers were supposed to replicate, but rather it was more flexible, giving them the opportunity to align the messaging with what they care about, what matters to them, which, as you will see, has worked really well.

Daniel Prindii

Yeah, we did a lot of outreach, first in communities related to Omnivore, like Obsidian, like Notion, like reddit, that are discussing personal knowledge management or productivity, and basically looking at the community you are in, you adapt your message.

If you have something that you're discussing very generally, "I want to be more productive, I want to read one newsletter more per day," you don't push your complicated flow.

But if you have a very nerdy technical community like part of the community in Obsidian is, you present something that makes sense for them.

You have people there that are using, I don't know, 10 or 15 plugins to create a big Star Trek enterprise of [an] app.

Yeah, you're going to do and bring them an engine that… it's run with Omnivore, you know, and they're going to react to that.

The same with our outreach to attract, let's say, influencers.

We try to find people that are good at explaining things, that they have a community besides them, and they know how to translate that this is a complicated thing and something that makes sense for them.

And [we] give them the liberty to frame their work in a way that makes sense for their community, for their readers, and so on.

Erika Kramarik

What was consistent, it was the core positioning that this was a read it later app, and it was a tool that was very flexible in terms of what you could do with it.

And behind the scenes, what was standardized, if I can call it that, was the approach in terms of, we know this is our positioning, we know we want to look at the audience, and depending on the audience, we want to adapt the message to know how in-depth, how detailed we want to go.

So we had this workflow of how we want to build, how we communicate with this audience.

And from the outside, what it looked like was that they were getting something rather personalized and hands-on for what they were interested [in].

But from our side, we had the process in terms of how we were doing the work.

So it wasn't like "We are writing to everyone, we are targeting everyone because we don't know who we are targeting." No, we knew very clearly why we are going to every specific audience.

Daniel Prindii

And this type of personalized outreach interaction that happened in direct messaging or e-mail and also on social media, got the attention of big tech media websites like The Verge and TechCrunch, that they sensed that something is happening, that people are there behind that that app that are trying to work on something that is going to be useful for everyone.

So they jumped on the wagon and said, okay, this is something I want to test, this is something I want to promote, and this is something I want to tell others about.

And that was, I remember the discussion in The Verge newsletter.

That was one of the selling points for them because they saw us or the users of Omnivore being friendly and open on helping others to understand what is happening.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Thank you for listening. I hope that this episode has changed the way you think about content and copy as a subset of all of the startup-generated content and that you will be able to find a way to keep messaging more consistent and to avoid situations where your users or prospects are confused because suddenly the messaging has changed when they haven't expected it.

Featured