0:00:01 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to Experience-focused Leaders! I am delighted to introduce you to Miruna Dragomir who is the CMO of Planable, a content collaboration tool for social media teams. Miruna had a fantastic story at Planable, growing it from 50 to 6,000 customers, and fantastic companies that she's worked with before in marketing, like Uber and Oracle. So welcome to the pod, Miruna! I would love to learn from you!
0:00:31 - Miruna Dragomir
Thanks so much for inviting me. Very excited to be here!
0:00:34 - Alex Shevelenko
When we met with one of our favorite mutual event organizers, SaaStock, you guys were involved.
We had a lovely chat, and so it's really great to have you on the pod, Miruna. I think one of the reasons that I really wanted to chat is that you're working on something that's really front and center for a lot of businesses, whether they're SMBs, agencies or multi-location businesses that have more complexity, where, “Hey look, we all know a CEO is not going to solve our problems right now in terms of communications. We need to be where the customers are.”
And, speaking for myself, I know it, but without proper organizations and proper tools, it becomes non-scalable. We call it random acts of content. And you're building effectively a way for people to do social media marketing at scale. As we were chatting earlier, I’d like to describe you as if Buffer and Asana had a baby, you guys would be that. So tell us a little bit about how you're helping these 6,000 customers scale up their social media so it actually delivers real touch points with customers at the level that they need for it to become a source of leads or source of engagement.
0:02:04 - Miruna Dragomir
Yeah, the metaphor that you made with the Asana and Buffer having a baby, that's beautiful. Keep it in mind. So we help these marketing teams trying to, I don't know if “coping” is the right word, but it's definitely part of it. Social media has become a very complex game for a long time now, but it is not getting easier at all. We're seeing new platforms entering the scene constantly. Some make it, some don't, but TikTok made it.
0:02:36 - Alex Shevelenko
For a while. We're going to demake it now.
0:02:39 - Miruna Dragomir
We're in a fuzzy area there.
One less to worry about, whether it's TikTok or Instagram Reels. There's this new whole type of content and type of backend operations that's happening because of it. So it's a job and a team that is dealing with constant change. And every change that happens is changing how they work behind the scenes. It's making their collaboration more complex. Just to give you a bit of context here, let's not forget that you talked about Buffer. When Buffer ages started, the biggest issue for social media people was just getting content out there. Because it was something that people had to do besides other tens of jobs. And so it was just about saving the links, saying something very briefly about whatever the content was in the blog they were sharing, and putting it out there. Now it's like tens of people behind the scenes: the design, creative, copywriter, script editor.
There's a collaboration that happens at every step of the way, from finding videos or content that inspires them to jump on a trend, to make something similar or to adapt it to their context, to discussing the script or the idea of the poster or campaign. Obviously, when you have the final copy and visual, you have all these small tweaks that happen to make sure that you're on brand, that you're consistent, that you're using the right hashtags and so on. And finally to get it live.
0:04:25 - Alex Shevelenko
So there's so many, and that's just for one channel, right? And then you've got this multiply. “I'm going to use the reel here and I'm going to use the stories here.” And so then you've got basically the same content. Then how do you execute that? Post-production distribution that's optimized for each channel, and you're helping with that journey as well, I would imagine.
0:04:48 - Miruna Dragomir
Yes, you have to personalize for each channel, but it's not just that. Basically, you have to orchestrate all these channels and it's very difficult to do in makeshift ways. It gets impossible when you have multiple channels for one brand. But if you manage multiple brands, because so many businesses are, that becomes just completely chaos.
0:05:10 - Alex Shevelenko
It's a funny metaphor again, but I'm going to go with it and see what happens. So I have three kids, and when we had one kid, I think you could keep in your head the schedule of certain things. But when you have three, they all have their school activities, extracurricular activities, friends and everything. And not getting organized becomes a mess. So it feels we have about seven or eight kids here and we're like a small team trying to get the calendars and everything sorted out. So it makes perfect sense that, given the number of channels and the sophistication that's now required to break through the channels, you need the right tooling.
One of the words that you brought up is that marketers are overwhelmed already and they're like running hare on fire. This is a complex issue. And then you're coming in and saying, “Okay, we're a marketing technology company and we're going to solve your problems.” But the problem is that they already have. Martech companies are the ones that are really active on social and content channels. And there's this joke that there are a lot of social and content marketers at content marketing companies talking about content marketing. How do you break through? What's the secret to building a lean business where you're not throwing VC money into fire yourself? And are you using your own tools? Are you doing other things beyond that that help you get an edge in getting these marketers to pay attention to your solution?
0:06:52 - Miruna Dragomir
Marketing is such a trial-and-error game, and it's been for us as well. I joined Planable six years ago. In six years I've tried many things, many channels, many tactics. There were eras in which we did only content and then we realized, “Okay, maybe we don't have the distribution set in place to build as much content as we do.” And so we changed tactics. These days we have some channels that are working and scaling, the bottom of the funnel channels. The SEO, the PPC and everything else is about creating value for our customer base and we try to build it. We try to stay away from quantity. You can do 10s of webinars, you can do ebooks and reports all day. But a lot of them can fail if you don't put in the work for research. And plan the distribution properly, which was a project of mine.
That was really hurting us because it felt like we knew our channels and knew what to do. So we just planned the campaign, including the topic, idea, launch date, and that was about it. Then every channel owner was supposed to distribute it. And it did not work. Many of them just faded away, and we didn't get the awareness and attention that we needed.
0:08:19 - Alex Shevelenko
You just throw some stuff in there and you're like praying that it sticks and something goes viral. But we're in the B2B world. It's noisy and without the deliberate distribution even the best content may not go and have enough of the oomph, so to speak. Is that accurate?
0:08:41 - Miruna Dragomir
That is accurate. And I know it's funny because you talk about distribution and planning and it sounds like these basic concepts that everyone knows about and I knew about them. I feel like I'm using buzzwords, but to put an actual pen to paper or digital pen to digital paper, to see everything that goes out on the channels, and the purpose of each channel, and the purpose of each type of targeting, — then it felt like when we want to say something, it speaks throughout our entire pores.
There is no mouth of Planable out there that is saying something else. And so we're making sure that everyone who we can target knows what we're doing. One tip that I can share here is that we split our channels into a simple version of a funnel. Basically, we split them into cold, warm and hot. Hot being active customers or active users, so they're already in the app. It's the easiest base to announce something to. Then warm are people who interacted with us but they haven't converted. And cold are the ones who have never heard about us. We create concept messages that are different for each of these audiences.
0:10:07 - Alex Shevelenko
Let's break that out. Let's go like specific. So let's say LinkedIn, right. Linkedin, we say something like, typically, maybe our sales team that may have have connected to some people or maybe they're following the company domain, and so when that could be one audience. And then you're saying the audience, there could be customers, right, like we could drive customers to follow us on LinkedIn, as an example, right, like the marketers generally they tend to hang out there reasonably frequently. And then there is the separate audience, that sort of. They're there but we may be not super well connected with them, right, and we may need to use ads or other means to re-engage them. And then there's people that don't know we exist. So how to play it out? Like, what kind of content you would do for whom? And is there like something that works for everybody? Is there some? Is there these universal big rock type of content that kind of you could wrap around the rest of the strategy, or is this really personalized to each of those three buckets of users?
0:11:15 - Miruna Dragomir
No, there's loads of campaigns that are fit for all these audiences, but you do have to personalize them. For example, let's say a big launch of ours was when we integrated with AI. Whose wasn't so? When we integrated AI, that was a big campaign for us. So we did a video, we did a webinar, we did lots of content around the launch, but the campaign was for everyone. But when I'm going with social media ads to a completely new audience, I'm not saying Plannable, just launched AI, because who's Plannable?
0:11:46 - Alex Shevelenko
And why do I care?
0:11:48 - Miruna Dragomir
That's equal to nothing. I can say something completely different empower your social with AI, or your AI right in your planning tool or whatever. I'm just, you know, spitballing ideas here, but I have to assume that they've never heard about Plannable. When I'm reaching out to my users, I'm obviously saying try this now. I don't need to convince them why that's super important. I don't need to convince them as much. They know what Plannable is. They know the value. So there are concepts that you have to apply to each audience and you have to really know them. Like for my users, we knew how much they love AI already, so adding one of those lengthy paragraphs of why AI is helpful and enhancing and time-saving and so on was irrelevant. They knew that. They just wanted it more handy. So I'm speaking to their main need. Got it?
0:12:43 - Alex Shevelenko
So you have 6,000 users, right Like it's a big group, or 6,000 paying customers. Right Are all of them.
0:12:50 - Miruna Dragomir
Paying customers.
0:12:52 - Alex Shevelenko
Some of them could be multi-user, obviously, since your collaboration functions. So, in our experience, in a multi-user universe, some people are power users and other people are, “What is this tool? Oh, why are we paying for it?” There's going to be some skeptics and some people that are your champions. And so you've got this range of users and I think you probably have a bit more of a challenge versus somebody like Canva, which made its bones in social media content creation, because I think Canva originally did get started with one power user that was creating the content, so it was like as limited to a specific persona that was more like, I would say, want to be visual designer, like probably is the classical one, and it worked really brilliantly because they are, like, in the product, they had to publish a lot of stuff.
Right, you could have some of those folks that are Canva users obviously in there, but you have more. Maybe some teams are more sophisticated, maybe using the whole Adobe Creative Suite and other tools that are not Canva. You're facilitating this collaboration. And then there's this range. Right, some are power users. Some are like do we need this? They're just there to maybe approve something occasionally. So guide me a little bit on how you're switching up your communications depending on the user profile within the company.
0:14:11 - Miruna Dragomir
Yes, so there we have personas and the product personas, of course, and they are quite different from one another, as you said you and intuitively called out a few of these personas. By default, the most active persona is the creators, the ones that actually give life to the content. Those are the most engaged in the product and they care most about everything that we launch, everything that we do, because it's like where they live, it's their main product. I don't know, Slack is for some of us. It's very central to their work life. And then you have, like, on the opposite side of things, you have the approvers, which probably go in once, twice a month, look at the content, approve it and they're done.
First of all, what we do is we try not to overwhelm people with information, especially people who don't need that information. So approvers don't actually get a lot of communication from us unless it's directly related to the approval or feedback, giving experience. But even then we again we don't overwhelm them with information because we expect the creators to do some education and ambassadorship within the company. They are deeply involved and they have direct interest to make and ask approvers to do it right. So that's like how we funnel the conversation. We focus on those that are most interested and that are most likely to actually read and go through the content that we provide. And for the clients and approvers, we try to only give them essential information, super structured and only when needed and likely more in the app than through emails or notifications, because, again, it's not a central product to them, so they don't want to get buzzed all the time by us.
0:16:20 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it Okay, so you have a different. You've adapted both the product and the information load for them, and do you feel like you need to keep your 6,000 customers? That's quite a lot. Are you worried about churn and do you feel like you need to keep your 6,000 customers? That's quite a lot. Are you worried about churn and do you feel like you need to keep educating them consistently on the value and new capabilities, like AI, that you're bringing? Or do you feel like, hey, we're like, once people are on, provided that power users engage, we're in right.
Like the price point is not, like it's SMB friendly and the agency friendly. So it's not like going to get a, it's not a this sort of going to raise up, hey, the way, we're paying a hundred thousand dollars for social media. So Fitz was in the compensation structures that are going to afford the role. So guide me a little bit of. How are you thinking about that? Especially recent environment was not friendly to CMO budgets and marketing teams. In some sectors, right, I'd say B2B had a bit of a, you know, marketing recession, right. And so the, the spend went to sales, not to the, not to the tools, and in other, certainly awareness budgets. So guide me little bit. How do you think about that?
0:17:39 - Miruna Dragomir
We think a lot about it. It's not something. It depends, of course, on what the tool does, but for us it's a workflow tool, so it's not actually every feature that we launch. For them to use it, it requires a bit of a change in their recurring habits of doing something. To give you an example, until recently we only had comments, so you could just leave a general comment to the post and say whatever change this change that. Here's the section that I don't like a new version of it. And then we introduced annotations and suggestions. Annotations meaning in Google, very similar to Google Docs.
0:18:19 - Alex Shevelenko
Specific area text. Got it. Okay.
0:18:22 - Miruna Dragomir
Exactly, and suggestions like you can actually do the edits yourself and and you can track the changes we've. We're seeing we've seen like a difficult adoption right there and I'm looking at recordings. I'm seeing people doing exactly what leaving like changing an entire paragraph and leaving it as a comment, as opposed to doing and suggest mode, and I don't understand why. And then I'm thinking these people have been with Plannable for maybe a year two years now they're used to just they're doing this on autopilot.
For me, to go in and say, “Look, there's a better way now to do this”, is I'm asking them to change a habit, to change a behavior. It's much harder than you'd expect, even when it makes their lives so much simpler. So, yeah, it depends on how big of a difference it is in their habits and the way they've been using the product. Like AI, that was simple, it's a button and they can just rewrite it, and they were probably using ChatGPT anyway. Now it's in the tool itself. So that's simple. But if it's something that's already deeply embedded into the way they work, that's a lot harder to increase adoption to. Now, the way we do it is we try to think in the product first. Product discovery will beat anything anytime: emails, experiences, webinars or any other type of content, as long as it lives in the product and is timed at the moment when the person needs it most.
0:19:57 - Alex Shevelenko
That's it for you so product, so it and the scale that you were in product has a more critical role, obviously, than some sort of a launch campaign. But what have you like? Where have you said? Back to the question about worrying about churn? Right, so, like, the advantages if people are used to your tool, they're probably not likely to leave, right, so that's advantage of workflow tools, right, because it's important. It's not an easy thing to rip out, right, like, once you get them out of the spreadsheet mode or Google Sheets or Airtable type of whatever substitutes to the workflow tool.
But back to like, where do you see the risks in a business, right, like with 6,000 customers? Right, obviously, you can't go and monitor every customer at human scale. How, like, how do you think about that kind of in depth engagement and me and the? You know, maybe even you have a super happy customers, but the social media department gets smaller. And what do you do about that? Like, how do you think about that? And how do you, how would you advise other companies that are dealing with recession type of issues? Like, deal about that, both in communication or kind of trying to help your customers justify investment in Planable?
0:21:20 - Miruna Dragomir
So about what you said there's we have a lot of agency customers and they have big fluctuations in their client portfolios, so that directly impacts the churn. They lose clients and during this recession that for sure happened. As you said, the marketing budgets decreased a lot. That's involuntary churn, so there's only so much you can do. There's a life in itself to the market that you can't really control, of course there is. You can help your agencies retain their clients and that's something that we definitely feel like we have an impact on. By default. The experience with the client is smoother, is nicer, so clients are happier and they're more likely to stay with the agency unless a recession happens and their budgets get cut and then it doesn't matter, right?
0:22:12 - Alex Shevelenko
So yeah, so basically, yeah, you could be the best ever, right? Like, the budget is cut, but you're definitely a tool that facilitates agency communicating with their end customer and creating a safe feeling for the end customer.
0:22:27 - Miruna Dragomir
Yes, in our experience with churn, what I can say is that focusing on churn itself can be demoralizing. Because that's the end point of the journey and that's usually where your hands are tied.
The moment of churn means the person has decided they already found a new way to do whatever they were doing with you, so you can't impact that. It's too late, even if you give them discounts, which we do. There's so many other tactics, but that saves such a small amount of churning clients. So we're focusing more in the beginning of the journey, because usually, the biggest or the most frustrating turn is when people that onboard the customers and tell them how to use the product, they discover it themselves and if they don't use it, they are likely to churn because they're not getting the value of it. So we're really focusing on onboarding, on the initial stages of the journey and on setting the workflow right and Plannable from the very beginning, and that is that we have an onboarding squad, so that's a dedicated team that dedicates part of their time to fixing onboarding and to constantly, because it's an iterative game and, yeah, that's our main area.
0:24:02 - Alex Shevelenko
So got it. So in a low touch product solutions like yours, you got to avoid this. You got to get like the initial upfront education before they buy, so they look at it more, allocate the resources, understand what they're buying and then the moment they onboard is the critical moment that determines what happens a year from now.
0:24:28 - Miruna Dragomir
Yeah, it's not necessarily. It doesn't have to happen before they purchase, because many purchase from the start. When you have a lower price point, they might not do so much decision-making before they actually buy. But, like the first few months, it's like a paid trial. They're still testing it out. They're not sure because they can cancel at any time and the price point is low, whatever it's. Just we find that the first two, three months of them using the product are vital to their education and to them setting up again the workflows in the right way.
0:25:01 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. That's really helpful. So on that kind of moment of getting you have a long tail, obviously it was a relatively affordable price point, but it's something that we discussed previously is that one of your super customers are these agencies, right, and they obviously have their own challenges. But this is a classical example of 80-20, where you know example of 80-20, where 20% of the customers could generate 80% of revenue. And I would suppose then it's a bigger win if you get an agency customer on board down the road and retention for them is obviously more critical as well down the road. So how do you think about agencies relative to your other customers and do you target them specifically with specific campaigns? And they are also busy. They don't have huge budgets right, because the margins in that business are maybe tougher than in some other businesses. So guide me a little bit on how do you get to that highly valuable customer that may not be the easiest one to get to.
0:26:05 - Miruna Dragomir
Yeah. So actually this is a great time to ask me that, because we've just started really focusing on agencies. For some reason, until now, we kept the messaging a bit more on the benefit side of things rather than on the actual target customer. What we find is that we can't really target them on the classic channels that we know in terms of they don't search. When you target an industry. They don't search like this for my industry. So it's not like social media tools for agencies or anything like that, so you can't expect them there. What we're doing is that we're tailoring the content towards this audience. We're trying to. For example, we have webinars coming up on the topics that are most interesting to them and that are really captivating for this audience. Like, we have a lot of agencies that are super successful and that are founders that took an agency from zero to scale or even exiting with the agency, and we're trying with them to create the content that really attracts agency founders.
0:27:17 - Alex Shevelenko
I see so as an agency founder, which you, you know, principals often make big decisions, investments in agencies quite more than some other areas.
Do you want to say, hey, I have a founder of this company that I exited to publicist, or our friends, like we have friends at Omnicom. So we, we sold this great agency. Hear the story of this digital marketing agency founder and how they built it from scratch was woodstrapping and whatnot. Is that kind of the? That's where you abstract the content a little bit to that level, which is specific benefits and features of your product for agencies or for the agency's customers.
0:27:57 - Miruna Dragomir
Yeah, 100, and we have free tools as well, like, for example, we have a social media pricing calculator that's attractive to more beginner agencies that we also have a lot of. So we have freelancers. We have a social media pricing calculator that's attractive to more beginner agencies that we also have a lot of. So we have freelancers. We have small agencies as well, and so it's a calculator that they can actually access, and it has loads of fields like where you offer your services and what types of services you offer, and so on and so forth, and it gives you a range of the price that you should charge. That particular content was built as a result of a lot of research that we did. We just talked all the groups with agency people to try to understand what their biggest pain points were, and that was one of them how much do I charge?
0:28:43 - Alex Shevelenko
For my services? Is that for? And particularly around social media, which is kind of your core kind of product area, yeah. And so this is actually really fascinating, because I do feel like the biggest challenge for most agencies is that, especially in the digital marketing world, they say, hey, we do everything, and you know, as somebody who's run an agency and who's like now, like running a martech is like really you do everything? You can't be great, how many people you are, right? Are they all like unicorns?
You know that kind of like just to run the social media thing itself? Right, like you gotta have a creative side for visual, creative side for copy, hopefully, get process oriented to use a tool like yours. Right, be distribution savvy, measure the ROI. This is left brain, right brain, back brain front, brain, hands, arms all working together. Right, and that's just one area. We're not even talking about product marketing and we're not talking about solutions. And so is that kind of part of the opportunity that you could go into a broad digital marketing agency and say, look, you got a lot of things to do and we could maybe, without being super expert in the social area, we could make the trains ride on time and could provide the resources and help you on board. And they are gravitating to just a tool to make things more efficient? Guide me a little bit about how that plays out.
30:41 - Miruna Dragomir
It can be a bit counterintuitive, but we actually we find that the biggest, most successful customers that we have with Planable are actually very premium agency in the social media space. The reason is that plan is a very visual tool and it's because it's built with, as I said, super deep and into collaboration.
Then the people that find most value in it is the people that really focus on every detail of that post. And that happens with these types of premium agencies that nothing gets out before people really looked at it before they change every small detail to make it perfect. That's a niche.
31:13 - Alex Shevelenko
It's not for their agency. Like, I don't know what social media is like you're not for them, right? Let's go use con for beginners and they'll educate you. That's not your group. So your group is, you're at a brand savvy agency, the brand is the queen and you need to be on brand. And this gives you the precision and the control.
The devil's advocate question, right? Clearly, they value what you're building, right? Because they're sophisticated. This is the brand, the brand is in charge and why not charge that much, right? Like why have an affordable pricing for an audience that attributes a lot of value to this? And it clearly does not need to be taught about like why social media marketing at scale is important.
32:08 - Miruna Dragomir
It's important. Yeah, first of all agencies are not known for their, let's say recklessness of spending money, ok? They don't have the highest margins and so they don't necessarily have a lot of it to spend. Also Planable gets more expensive as the agency scales.
So for agencies that have tons of customers with numerous people, for each brand involved, Planable becomes quite expensive. And so that's why we try to not make the pricing a reason why not to bring that.
32:48 - Alex Shevelenko
You want to try all your clients. You want to try it and then over time if there's enough volume and scale, it kind of all works out well for all parties, right? They see the value and you capture some of the value that you create for these folks. Great. Look, so we've talked a little bit about getting to specific clients. One of the things that we can have covered a bit upfront is trying various marketing tactics and I love one of your quotes from an article that you wrote in content group is it goes something along the lines of sometimes it is good not to give up and keep pushing until someone notices your content.
So you mentioned like there's experimentation and then there is persistence and then I, I have a feeling that the organizations that are like all about experimentation. Sometimes they're just looking for this perfect channel, this unicorn channel that’s just magic. It's the sort of the whatever the PayPal using eBay as a way to get to their customers, like it's just perfect and that equivalent for content.
But the real life it feels is not that simple sometimes. And so either you persist and find the right length to let the experiments run out or focus yourself at least. So you're not doing 15 experiments at the same time. Guide me a little bit on how do you think about that and that trade off between? Yeah, it's not delivering results on day one, but maybe we continue experimenting or we just this is this dog won't hunt and we need to give up on that.
34:38 - Miruna Dragomir
Yeah. First of all, you, I resonate so much with what you said, the looking for that perfect channel is horrible. It's a horrible journey. I don't advise anyone to go on it because you're putting so much pressure on a tactic or on an experiment, you're probably gonna be disappointed. It's because we hear these success stories and it's because we see some channels that scale. Some channels are meant to scale.
Some are just don't work like that. SEO. Yes, that's for scale. But if you do, I don't know, influencer marketing, that's harder to scale. It's not as easy. You can't just turn on the faucet and, and expect leads to just fly in and yeah, on the balance of experimentation versus persistence.
I think first of all, one mistake that I've found that, that we've made numerous times is that we didn't actually put enough resources in the experiment that is in both time that the length of time to which you leave the experiment to run.
But also like active engagement in the experiment, we expected it to show us early signs of success that allows us to motivate further investment into it.
And that is, it can lead you to a very dangerous path because you can run these experiments, one or the other, you're going to consider them all failures and you find yourself three years later. That you ran so many experiments, but you don't really have a conclusive answer to any of them.
And you're disappointed that you didn't find anything that works. So we are really asking ourselves before deciding to run an experiment. We're asking ourselves if we're ready and prepared mentally and financially and resource wise in terms of people and time to put what it's needed into it.
Like social media, for example, that's not something that you can run for a quarter. Let's see if TikTok works for us, it's not gonna, if you're gonna leave it for a quarter and if you're gonna ask someone and you're not going to take any of their other responsibilities out of their agenda, it's not gonna work for sure.
We did that. We found the same thing we did it for a quarter for a couple of quarters. I felt like I'm not ready to spend the resources needed in it. And so it faded away. But what I think you should do is really assess if we're, if we want to try social media and make sure if that works or if we want to try it: books or webinar or podcasting, you need to be prepared to invest a year into it, which means that much time, that much money that many people and not be worried or discouraged by it throughout the year or would not get cold feet and, and close it after three or four or five or six months.
That's, I feel like the key to this balance of persistence versus experiment, assess and decide on the time needed to declare it a win or loss from the get go.
37:43 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, that's a fantastic insight I think because it's what you're saying is there is this, let's throw some spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. And oftentimes you get a messy wall and not that much sticks versus a more deliberate approach.
And I would add like from like you brought a podcast, but like, I, we were reflecting on what should we invest in a constrained environment. And we chose this podcast for a couple reasons. One is it's fun.
There's like, literally, I enjoy this, right? Like we're, it's like us chatting at an event, we would do it and we were doing it anyway, learning about each other's businesses. And here are like two people that care about marketing and the tech market, martech kind of challenges and know these personas and we're just comparing notes and I think we would do this anyway.
So I think there's some of this kind of DNA is like, how much you're enjoying this versus this is a forced experiment because if you're enjoying something, loving it, it gives you strength.
And for me these interviews like there, I'm like, I'm learning, I'm connecting with people. I wanted to like we would, what we were planning to connect anyway. Hey, this is a great way to do it and share in public and maybe I took a shower today just to look a little bit more. It's fun.
And then the other strategic thing and this is where I would say when you pick a strategy in our case, like we're picking things that really align with our business.
So actually, we're using this, we’re in the process of building a podcast, we're seeing this challenge that, hey, there's a lot of podcasts out there, a lot of hours of YouTube video, we're all busy and not everybody who's even interested can consume every podcast.
But imagine all those people that don't know you and there could be interested, but they want to take out, for example, nugget. We have a way to transform static content into interactive self navigable experiences. So we created this concept called the PodBook and that, that takes this podcast, which is a non-medium. We didn't invent it, right? And then it's a baby between an ebook and various podcast formats, right? Which could be audio only, could be video only could be transcript of one and we're mixing it and we're creating the best of both worlds and maybe over time, it's gonna be podbooks of podbooks, right?
Like where we create a theme of all the innovative martech companies, right? Like you wanna hear the, the best of martech because that's the business that you're in here is like a collection of the books around that. And we love it because we would do this anyway.
Like we're experimenting because this is in line with our business and it's a bit big alignment and, and guess what? Then some customers saw it and we now have an agency that's dedicated, that's a podcast agency. That's, this is one of their differentiators in that noise thing and they're reselling.
And then some people said, oh, I love your PodBook, but I have an event. Can I do an Event Book? And so we're now doing that book. So it's been so much fun!
And so I don't like maybe you have some similar examples, right? Because you're effectively eating your own dog food. I like to use the phrase we're eating our caviar and drinking our champagne. But oh, it's morning now. So I'm not sure I'm that much into champagne. But you know what I mean? You're probably picking some strategies that align with the usage of your own platform. And so guide us a little bit on how you're mixing the business strategy with the go-to market.
41:34 - Miruna Dragomir
Yeah, that's, I guess something that came to mind was that we try to, we're marketers, marketing to marketers.
So many times you have a lot of actually value to offer that you don't even realize. You constantly go to experts and you try to maybe sometimes copy the content off of internet or something, but you have the value and the expertise in house.
So that's something that we try to do in terms of dog fooding and a combination between dog fooding and building in public. Sort of like we try to do to talk about the campaigns that we launched about how we launch it.
Like the behind the scenes, about the marketing team publicly and take people transparently through that journey. That's something that we're doing right now.
So again, we talk about social media a lot. We don't do that much social media. So that's where it becomes a bit difficult, but we do have other channels in plan so you can connect your blog and newsletters and everything else and create that there. We realized actually we do a lot of content. So why don't we speak about our experience with content marketing?
And we launched a webinar about the team at SEO, the SEO team at Planable talks about how they do SEO and we're quite good at SEO. So that was actually something that we're confident in. And we had 300 registrants overnight when we announced it. So that was a huge success and it was driven by the fact that it was this lifting of the curtains type of concept.
43:17 - Alex Shevelenko
Fantastic. This idea of building in the open where you're actually talking about what's behind the scenes, right? Like you're not trying to manipulate people into doing something, right?
It forces you to be, you know, intellectually honest and really focus on what's the value for the customer? And I think that the best marketers are creating value. They're not trying to sell you something or get you into the products you don't need.
Miruna, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing behind the scenes. Everything that you've been doing, congratulations on the success. And I love the transition as well that you've executed personally from being part of a larger well known brands to creating a leading brand in your domain. So again, congratulations.
How can our audience discover Planable and you best?
44:19 - Miruna Dragomir
Thanks for inviting me! This was a blast. I love the conversation. Yeah, it was super casual and about me, they can find me on LinkedIn. I'm very responsive on LinkedIn. So feel free to reach out and Planable is simply planable.io. You can go in there just coming off of a workshop to revamp our homepage. But in the meantime, it works. So go on it and see if you like it.
44:47 - Alex Shevelenko
Miruna, thank you so much. Let's make social media that delights people at scale and use tools like yours to make that happen for brands and agency. Thank you again, Miruna, for joining us.