- Faster content iteration and ability to create personalized pages for campaigns
- No more JIRA dev tickets waiting day(s) for dev to implement a request
- Improved SEO and ability to manage the page title, description, meta keywords/tags, and more
Transcript
Grant Deken
So, Jibran, I'm super excited to have you on the cast today. You know, I always find that marketers are kind of the people behind the curtain pulling all these strings. You're doing a lot of different initiatives. You're helping a lot of the founders and CEOs like me look great. And one of the things I'm really excited to talk to you about with regards to Unstack is really how it's enabling you and kind of giving you more throughput even as a as a smaller team.
Grant Deken
So I'd love to hear before we kind of talk about that, like tell me about you tell the audience a little bit about your background, what you do, at Grapevine maybe even just a quick blurb about what Grapevine does and kind of walk us through that.
Jibran Malek
Cool. So just some quick background. My name is Jibran Malik. I am the director of marketing over at Grapevine Village. We are a digital marketing platform that elevates trust, the trust that brands have not only in creators and influencers, but also vice versa. We elevate we work hard to build and to end digital marketing campaigns. That elevates the trust that consumers have and everyone's favorite brands. And so in terms of the specifics of my role, I specialize a lot and a little bit of product, but mostly working behind the scenes on our B2B marketing stack and sales enablement.
Jibran Malek
And like any B2B marketer, day to day's include talking to customers, thinking about how to improve the platform and how to improve customer service to looking deep into our data and developing content that our clients would like, whether it be white papers, whether it be case studies, whether it be even gathering testimonials. That's all in a day's work for the B2B marketers such as myself. And what is really important for for B2B marketers is being able to really build a user experience that makes it very, very simple for a lot of these really busy people to sort of access your case, to sort of access the content that you are developing.
Jibran Malek
And so that also requires a lot of management and oversight of front end websites as well.
Grant Deken
And so that's a really good Segway into one of the questions I have for you.
Grant Deken
You guys already had like a pretty sophisticated marketing stack what kind of drew you into Unstack and kind of changing things up and moving and moving on to our platform, just like the before and after to like I'm really curious, like what was hard before and sort of what's been enabling now that you've made the switch.
Jibran Malek
So what's kind of like I would say the Ockham's Razor for marketing is is developing but is developing like very, very easy to navigate and very appealing and very kind of optimized on letting letting pages and designing pages can not only be used to host your content, but also can be reconfigured and re-evaluated and really, really be leveraged for any kind of paid advertising campaign. And previously, before we had a very kind of like jury rigged back in a very templating landing page system.
Jibran Malek
However, it didn't really offer much in the way of customize the look and feel the landing page. Like if we had maybe like a special release of a theme to case study or, you know, we were developed we were launching some kind of new a new technology. And we wanted to put it on like, let's say product. Right. We couldn't really kind of specialize that at all without me kind of spending, you know, maybe like an entire day of work, learning how to be learning HTML as we and kind of things to develop something in the backend.
Jibran Malek
And so really the pain point that I was that I was experiencing was, you know, we had so much great content and we had so many interesting things to to post about it and to write about. But the velocity from conception to drafting to finally publishing would take way too long, so long that by the time we were everything was ready, ready to go, the kind of viral, the the kind of moment for that content to be real that had already been passed.
Grant Deken
Yeah, I actually agility is like one of the things that I think is becoming kind of like a super power for for teams like the faster you can move, the more competitive you can be, kind of respond in real time to either what's going on in the market or in your in your your industry. So it's awesome to hear you say that. So you guys. You basically now you've gone from kind of this more arcane or slow or involved process with multiple people having to touch it to like you're just able to go in and do it right.
Grant Deken
Is that basically how it's working?
Jibran Malek
100 percent like before to to literally do anything? You know, since we're a small company, we work with a team of freelance engineers and those engineers live overseas. Right. And so previously, whether it be a whether you wanted to test it, a new headline on our website, maybe like we wanted it, you know, change our age one on a certain page or we wanted to add a team member even we'd have to file a ticket into a tool like JIRA.
And then we have to wait like a couple hours, maybe even if we had to, like, file something like at the end of the day, we have to wait an entire day for that to happen.
With Unstack, I am able to instantly kind of able to log on and I am able to instantly change whatever I want, when I want without the without bothering anybody else.
Grant Deken
Had a little bit of background noise if there's a fire truck going by. So I've experienced that pain as well.
I think it's like one of the things that we're really excited about. No more Geotech. It's like just go like that. And I'd love to hear like like what your general sort of growth goals are around marketing for the rest of this year. And I think the twenty, twenty one like how do you guys look at like success with content marketing. Like what do you what are you doing on that front. Yeah.
Jibran Malek
So really now that now that we've kind of figured out some of our websites, the goal is really to reinvigorate and reestablish ourselves as a leader in the digital marketing field. And so that includes that includes greater agility in terms of publishing thought, leadership content, that kind of gaited content that gets really people excited about the kind of work that we're doing and then that's publishing more kind of benchmark reports as publishing more more white papers. That's working more closely with our brand partners in order to feature their work on on landing pages that they can be proud of.
That end at the end of the day, when you're working with clients and kind of the space, they want to be able to feel like they used your technology in order to not only boost their profile, but to boost their company's profile to and with the kind of easy design tools and and and content creation tools that Unstack has to offer that can really allow us to build those pages rapidly. And if any of those clients have feedback, we can easily change that.
Grant Deken
And what's your so far, what would you say has been kind of your favorite feature or kind of go to feature at Unstack?
Jibran Malek
Yeah, I've you can probably get take a guess at the kind of our favorite feature, but my favorite feature is easily, easily, easily one hundred percent being able to quickly build any pages, quickly build forms and that all ties into a very, very easy to navigate CRM tool as well, that I can easily create notes. And like this is this happened like even this morning where we saw an interesting brand sign up for one of our forms. And I was able to tag and write a note to a member of our team pretty, pretty seamlessly and quickly compared to other CRM tools that we've been using, which kind of take a bit long to load and to navigate where I would say tools like we've been using, such as HubSpot, that would probably take around like maybe like four or five clicks to navigate to a record and analyze it with Unstack.
It's I would say it's probably it's been for me like about two clicks to do that. Yeah.
Grant Deken
So it's just a little bit more integrated in terms of seeing that data in one place and being able to kind of act on it.
Jibran Malek
Right, exactly. And it's very, very easy to look at.
Grant Deken
And in terms of like where you see content marketing going, I know you guys doing a lot of white paper, has a lot of benchmarking, some gated content, maybe opening up some page content as well. I know that's been something you've done a lot with benchmarking and things like that. Like for for people listening to this kind of hearing, you talk like what would you say are some of the trends that you're seeing around SEO and content marketing and as you look forward to next year?
Jibran Malek
Yeah, I mean, it's it's actually pretty good. Going to be a pretty exciting year, I think, for for a content marketing.
So so one I would say that the the era of long form is still is still very much here. Right. And especially on on YouTube. I was doing an analysis of this earlier where our long content plus content on YouTube or half an hour content on YouTube is still doing wonders in terms of in terms of clicks and in terms of view, ability and view and viewer rate. And you can even kind of chop that up into. Little pieces for payroll or mineral content, and then what we're seeing now, too, is we're taking a big look at YouTube reels, right. So YouTube launched new product there. Right now, they're testing it in India called called Real's, which is their kind of Tic-Tac competitor. And we've seen that Tic-Tac is making a big push into advertising on their platform. However, combining the best of tech talk with the sophistication of YouTube's YouTube and Google's advertising network is going to be a game changer in the content marketing field. So we're expecting not only us, but other brands, too, is leveraging authentic content created by created by creators.
Not like that's simply just lifestyle creators. But we see entrepreneur influencers. We see tech influencers. We even see B2B marketing influencers that are posting like these long videos on YouTube. And so we see definitely see them trying to create shorter form content. That's kind of like an overall teaser. But then leveraging that for paid advertising on Instagram, Facebook or even Google AdWords is going to be a big thing.
Grant Deken
Yeah, and I'm curious, like, are you guys bringing a lot of that content back into open channels like like web and email and others?
Jibran Malek
Yeah, it's kind of just going to be we're looking at making sure everything is all fully integrated with our landing pages. Everything end. Then the day is going to go back to our website.
Grant Deken
Yeah, I think, like the the agility piece also helps with it on the fly, being able to create like very unique experiences of Yoruban, the new partner. In an hour you can have a new experience up that sort of branded or kind of welcoming people from a specific campaign.
And that's something you guys are big about.
Jibran Malek
Right? Yeah, 100 percent, especially with being able to ab test different landing pages, different copy pretty rapidly so you can quickly change your pages based on the audiences that were there promoting it to or even make it appeal to specialized, specialized keywords. Right. One big thing about PPC is, you know, you're kind of rewarded based on how relevant a pages towards a keyword. And this was a tough nut to crack working on such a hardcoded website.
Right. But being able to rapidly clone the same landing page and build different and build different iterations of that all within less than 15 minutes. Right. Is is really, really good for agility and being able to create a really awesome ad campaigns.
Grant Deken
So any any sort of feature requests that you have for us?
Jibran Malek
Yeah.
So in terms of kind of feature requests, I think one thing that would be useful, I talk about tech talk and I talk about Instagram. One thing that's useful is at least in, I guess, both blogging and landing pages, being able to directly embed that content in there. You can already embed YouTube videos, which is great, but being able to embed content from other social media sites would be would be awesome.
Grant Deken
OK, I think we can make that happen for you guys. For everybody else, too. Awesome. And sort of scale from one to ten, one being obviously not very good, 10 being strong recommendation. Like where would you put us today?
Jibran Malek
You know, absolutely, two you guys are awful. No, I'm kidding.
No, I'm kidding.
Grant Deken
I was like, we got to got to edit that out.
Jibran Malek
You know, I probably is a nine to 10. I think the customer service has been I think the best part of the Unstack experience has easily been the customer service. I can send a question or a note, and within within ten minutes I get a response. And for example, our blog really wasn't working like it wasn't loading or something. And I just sent an email over to Chris and we got to figure it out and in like five minutes.
And so that that, I think is the best part of any platform. You can really judge a platform based on its customer experience. And I'm really satisfied with Unstack because of that. And just like how intuitive the tools are and I haven't seen you in the community yet.
Grant Deken
So there's there's more good stuff for you. We got to get you in the community. Slack community.
Jibran, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. This is great for us to be able to share with our community and also learn from you, right. So excited to kind of see what we can do about some of the social events, for example. So thank you. Thank you very much. And looking forward to continue to see you guys grow and put these strategies in place and just get that traffic grow those leads in and see where you take it.
Jibran Malek
Yeah.
And I think, you know, one note, one super quick note to speaking of traffic, switching over from our hardcoded site to Unstack was aggressively using we lost no traffic, switching over from from our old site to our new site. So that was really awesome to see.
Grant Deken
Yeah. I mean, that's like one of the most important things. You've done all the work to get there, then you want to lose it when you switch.
Jibran Malek
I would say to anyone listening to this, don't be afraid to take the plug because you're thinking, oh, I'm going to lose out on my ACA or I'm going to lose out on all these things that I built. I spent years building. The Unstack team is there to make that transition super easy. And you're just going to, at the end of the day, is just going to make your life easier. Being able to access these tools.
Grant Deken
Yeah, hopefully actually makes it better. Should should actually improve a lot of cases as you improve across the board saying that the new particles, for example, are really, really awesome to see.
Yeah, AMP pages has been great.
We've got a search console integration coming out. In the next weeks, you're going to see a lot more data coming directly into the platform to help guide some of the decisions you make around content. So I think the best is yet to come.
Jibran Malek
Excited to see it.
Grant Deken
All right, man. Thank you.
Thank you so much. And again, looking forward to seeing where you guys take this.