Ash Read, Editorial Director at Buffer, talks through: how to compete in an industry saturated by content marketing; finding your unique differentiator; the power of brand and vision in content; how to create and update “topical” content; and the content strategy he used to grow his side project’s traffic from 0 to 130,000 monthly pageviews.

---Hosts

• Ash Read is the Editorial Director at Buffer, and the founder of modern homeware directory, Living Cozy.
• Ryan Law is the Director of Marketing for Animalz, an agency that delivers high-quality content marketing to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms.

Mentioned in the Episode

• Ash's side project, Living Cozy
• Webinar, How to Manage Big Blogs (feat. Buffer, Zapier & Amplitude)
• Breaking Brand, a Buffer podcast series
• The Animalz article about "content whales," Here’s How to Handle a Wildly Successful Article That Makes the Rest of Your Content Look Bad

Connect

• Connect with Ash on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Connect with Ryan on Twitter and LinkedIn

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 high-quality content marketing to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms.

Mentioned in the Episode

• GPT-3 is the Sparring Partner You Didn’t Know You Needed

Connect

• Connect with Blake on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Connect with Ryan on Twitter and LinkedIn

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 Marketing for Animalz, an agency that delivers high-quality content marketing to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms.

Mentioned in the Episode

• Fio's newsletter, contentfolks
• Fio's talk for Wynter: Product-LED Content: A Powerful (& Under-utilized) Approach to Content
• Examples of product-led content
• Ahref's free course, Blogging for Business
• Animalz's article, Copycat Content: SEO Tools Got Us Here, Humans Will Get Us Out
• Animalz's article, You’re a Content Marketer, Not a Writer

Connect

• Connect with Fio on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Connect with Ryan on Twitter and LinkedIn

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 Benchmark Report 2020
• Read the deck that accompanied the webinar
• Visit Superpath

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 unprecedented focus on the Black Lives Matter movements.  Diversity, equity and inclusion transcends this moment, and to make significant progress, our focus has to be evergreen. As companies are challenged to figure out how to improve internally, some companies are taking their commitment to DEI a step further by sharing their action plans externally to challenge themselves, their customers, and their competitors to step up.

---Mentioned in the Episode

• Storyblocks
• Storyblocks’ Re:Stock Campaign Seeks To Boost Diverse Stock Content

Follow Sydney:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Follow Haley:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

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 the 5 “sources” of thought leadership we use at Animalz; and we wrap up by asking—is it really worth it? (spoiler: yes).

---Mentioned in the Episode

• Everybody Wants Thought Leadership Content. But How Do You Do It, Exactly?
• a16z Podcast: Earned Secrets

Follow Katie and Ryan

• Follow Katie on Twitter
• Follow Ryan on Twitter

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-too-distant future, so if you have a question you’d like us to tackle, click the link in the show notes.

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• Share your questions via Google Form
• 5 Content Marketing Strategies for Niche B2B Industries
• Follow Devin on Twitter
• Follow Ryan on Twitter

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 marketer’s lips: should we be worried?

---Mentioned in the Episode

• Titles and URLs written by GPT-3
• Tweetstorm partially authored by GPT-3
• Creative writing authored by GPT-3
• Copycat Content: SEO Tools Got Us Here, Humans Will Get Us Out
• OpenAI GPT-3 waitlist

Follow Andrew and Ryan

• Follow Ryan on Twitter
• Follow Andrew on Twitter

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 strategies for turning the saturation and rate of change in ecommerce to your advantage; we dig into the power of “niching down” and competing for search volume on your own terms; we look at the short- and long-term impact of COVID on ecommerce marketing; and Laura shares nascent trends that she thinks all ecommerce marketers should pay close attention to.

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• Visit Adventure Cats
• Follow Laura on Twitter
• Follow Ryan on Twitter

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 and statistics.

Here at Animalz, we’ve been on a mission to reinvent the content audit, and create a new process that’s fundamentally more useful. 

In true Animalz fashion, we wanted to experiment with our new audits on... ourselves. So we did! Our head of R&D, Andrew, audited the entire Animalz blog, and surfaced a few familiar problems. And as Animalz Director of Marketing... well, it’s up to me to solve them.

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• Learn more about content audits for your content and website
• Revive, our free tool for finding content that needs refreshing
• Follow Ryan on Twitter
• Follow Andrew on Twitter