“With these ROI numbers, tell me why I shouldn't give you advertising’s entire budget right now?” Zapier’s CMO said that when Lane Scott Jones showed her four-person blog was driving 454% ROI. In this episode, she reveals the “return on content spend” approach that converts performance-marketing skeptics into believers.
Lane Scott Jones turned Zapier’s four-person blog into a 30-person content and corporate marketing team. Her team focused on measurement, especially Return on Content Spend (ROC$). This proved content’s high ROI and helped win more budget and headcount that once went to paid ads.
Lane’s approach earned content a seat at the table at the highest levels of Zapier and is all about operations. Data shapes product, marketing, and company direction. She also uses AI in smart ways to increase production by 30%. For example, bots help with gap analysis, metadata, and customer-story outlines (but Zapier’s human editorial voice stays front and center). Lane also goes into her two main customer personas: practical “builder” use cases that power PLG sign-ups and strategic thought leadership for enterprise buyers.
Lane Scott Jones is Director of Content & Corporate Marketing at Zapier. She grew a four-person blog team into nearly thirty people and now attracts more than 4.5 million monthly visitors. Her return-on-content math shows a 454 percent ROI, turning content from a cost line into a growth engine. Lane mixes sharp prioritization with full-funnel storytelling, keeping every project tied to revenue.
Lane rethinks how enterprise content gets made. She automated workflows using Zapier’s own tools, built an internal AI editor called “LaneBot,” and created a data-driven content scoring model. The result is an operation that ships quickly, measures everything, and still sounds distinctly human.
Lane’s conversation gives you a look at how a modern enterprise content engine works. She covers everything from proving ROI to scaling output with AI. Here are the most useful insights and quotes from the episode:
Lane points out a common problem. Content teams can drive big business results but still lack executive visibility or influence. Even when content fuels growth and revenue, the team might not be included in key decisions. This shows why it’s vital to make content’s value clear to leadership. Content leaders need a seat at the table where priorities and budgets get set.
Lane’s team introduced a simple metric, similar to ad spend. ROC$ helped them speak the language of finance and marketing leaders. This reframed content as an investment, not just a cost. Executives could now compare content’s ROI to other channels. This clarity led to more budget for both staff and freelancers. Translating content results into business terms matters.
This moment shows the power of hard numbers. When you prove content ROI, you can change budget conversations. Content shifts from a support function to a main growth driver. The quote shows that data-driven storytelling helps win executive buy-in and resources.
Lane explains how her team tailors content for different people. Technical users want actionable templates. Decision-makers want proof of value. But both groups care about practical use cases. This lets the content team repurpose core ideas for different audiences. They get more impact without extra work.
Lane’s team values hands-on learning. They set aside time to experiment with AI. This helped them build real skills, not just theory. The willingness to “break things” keeps the team ahead in a fast-changing content world.
This quote shows the team’s fast, journalistic approach. They publish clear explainers as soon as new features launch. Content supports go-to-market efforts and captures organic demand before others can react. This makes content a launch accelerant, not just a follow-up.
Lane shows how AI can make teams more efficient without losing quality. They use AI for research, outlines, and workflow automation, but not for writing full articles. This helped them scale output while keeping high editorial standards. It’s a smart model for teams who want productivity gains but worry about AI-generated content.
This is a clear example of AI and automation saving time. What used to take hours, turning customer interviews into story outlines, now takes seconds. This frees the team to focus on deeper storytelling and strategy. It’s a look at the future of content operations at scale.
This season on the Animalz Podcast, we’re pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the door. Our mission: demystify these hidden machines and reveal what it really takes to run content at scale.
Hear from content leaders of some of the biggest names in SaaS sharing the systems they've built, the battles they've fought, and the lessons they've learned along the way.
Check out other episodes in the season here
Hard Fork (01:56): Tech and AI podcast Lane follows for news, analysis, and humor.
Zapier (whole episode): Automation platform where Lane leads content. It’s the main case study for content engine operations discussed throughout the episode.
Campaign Monitor (02:30): Email marketing platform and Lane’s former employer, part of her career journey.
Emma (02:30): Another email marketing platform where Lane previously worked, mentioned alongside Campaign Monitor.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) (24:30): New Zapier product that lets AI take real-world actions. It’s highlighted as an innovative step in the content engine.Zapier Agents & Chatbots (33:56): Internal tools Lane’s team uses for content operations, including automation and workflow improvements.
Follow Lane Scott Jones on LinkedIn.
Lane Scott Jones [00:00:00]:
If you are the CEO at a company, you know the majority of your team is using AI in some capacity. So you might have no oversight, you might have no control, no governance. No control, no governance.
Ty Magnin [00:00:12]:
Yeah. And it doesn't get to. It doesn't hit my bottom line. It's like, okay, great. So now Tim's on the beach at Koh Samui in the afternoon because he used AI this morning. But, like, I didn't save anything as a business owner. Right?
Lane Scott Jones [00:00:24]:
Exactly.
Ty Magnin [00:00:25]:
Hello, and welcome to the Animals podcast. I'm Ty Magnin, the CEO at Animals.
Tim Metz [00:00:30]:
And I'm Tim Metz, the director of marketing and innovation.
Ty Magnin [00:00:33]:
This season on the Animals podcast, we're pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex SaaS teams get content out the door. Hear from leaders of some of the biggest names in SaaS, sharing the systems they built, the battles they fought, and the lessons they learned along the way. Today we're chatting with Lane Scott Jones, the director of content and corporate marketing at Zapier. In this episode, we chat with Lane about how she has measured the ROI of her content programs and advocated for more resources and hires. She covers how she scaled her content team from four people just four years ago to about 30 people today. And we dig into her philosophies on how she and her team is using AI to boost efficiency at around 30%. I'm excited for you to listen to today's episode. Lane, thanks so much for joining us on the Animals podcast.
Ty Magnin [00:01:24]:
As our avid listeners know, we ask each of our guests this very important question at the top of each episode. Lane, what content are you consuming lately?
Lane Scott Jones [00:01:34]:
Okay, I know that this maybe isn't what you are thinking of, but what came to mind immediately is the latest season of Hacks. Have you been watching this?
Ty Magnin [00:01:45]:
No. I don't know. Hacks.
Lane Scott Jones [00:01:47]:
Okay. This is a max series. It's about two comedians. And that is my, like, post Work Unwind TV show.
Ty Magnin [00:01:55]:
Nice.
Lane Scott Jones [00:01:56]:
Yeah. And then maybe a little bit more relevant to this topic in this. This audience. I've really been loving the Hard Fork podcast. That's also my way of staying pretty tuned in to what's going on with tech and AI, but in a way that brings a little comedy to the situation. So maybe that's the unifying thread, is trying to keep it light.
Ty Magnin [00:02:17]:
Yes, I get it. Work is intense right now, especially as Zapier. I mean, you all are in the middle of the AI conversation. Before we get into all of that, would love if you could give your intro for our audience for those that don't know.
Lane Scott Jones [00:02:30]:
You sure? I'd love to and I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. So I have built and grown content marketing programs at B2B tech companies including Campaign Monitor, Emma and Zapier, where I am now. And in that time I've scaled high performing teams from zero to I think we're a team of 30 right now at Zapier. Wow. We've driven over 450% ROI from our blog and we're seeing four and a half million plus monthly visitors and overseeing millions of dollars in annual spend. But the thing I'm most passionate about as a content leader is really earning content a seat at the table when it comes to being seen as a strategic engine of the company and not just a services function. And I actually got my first job in tech at an agency that was focused on B2B tech companies.
Lane Scott Jones [00:03:21]:
And this was back in 2016, but I was working with companies that were doing things like machine learning and so I even back then I was at the water cooler talking and thinking a lot about AI and well that was also the year Westworld came out. So yeah, the water cooler kitchen conversations were really, really irritating. And then yeah, after that went to lead marketing at Campaign Monitor, which is an email marketing platform and landed at Zapier about four years ago. When I started at Zapier, the content team was four people and really focused on the blog. And in the time since I've taken over not just content marketing, but corporate marketing and really focused on expanding the reputation and visibility of the work that the content team has been doing far prior to me. Getting there, but especially accelerating it in the past four years has been really exciting, really interesting challenges. Everything from growing the team in headcount to pivoting strategy and then most recently of course the AI boom has begun. Has become everything that we think about, talk about, write about.
Ty Magnin [00:04:30]:
Of course, I mean, what a journey that you've been on and are on even in this present moment. That's pretty awesome growth. And I am curious when you mentioned you believe content specifically and probably corporate marketing at large deserves a seat at the table. Why is that? And it seems like that exists at Zapier if you can take us inside the four walls of the corporation too.
Lane Scott Jones [00:04:57]:
Yeah. The reason why is because having worked on content teams my entire career, I know that we are often among the closest to the customer of anyone in the org. Because thinking about the Zapier blog for instance, we're getting this leading data about what people are Most interested in reading about, talking about, thinking about. With AI, we saw this right when ChatGPT was taking off. We started publishing content around AI and the data that we're seeing about people's engagement with that, these astronomical numbers when it comes to traffic activations, that was a signal not just to content, but to the company at large. Like, oh, okay, this is this intel will help us shape our strategy. Because of course, Zapier as a corporation was already starting to think about how do we enter the conversation or sort of continue to grow and accelerate the way that we're already in the conversation. And it was really cool to see the way that we were able to use content data to help inform our understanding of the audience and what they were most interested in learning about.
Lane Scott Jones [00:06:04]:
And at Zapier, I would say when I came in, it wasn't necessarily a perfect setup where content was seen as a strategic engine. Content has always been a core driver of growth at Zapier, especially in the organic search world. Because Zapier has this long legacy, again predating me, of not only a really high value, respected, beloved blog, but also an SEO program where we were able to scale these programmatic pages to drive insane levels of growth.
Ty Magnin [00:06:33]:
Yeah.
Lane Scott Jones [00:06:34]:
And so it's been respected in that way. But when I got there, I would say it was a really small team. They were cranking out a ton of content, but we weren't necessarily in the rooms where we were able to drive strategy. And what I really wanted to do was connect the dots. And between the fact that the content team is driving this much growth really shows that we have amazing intel to share that can inform not just the content strategy, not just the marketing strategy, but the company strategy at large, the product strategy. And so those are the bridges I tried to build over the last four years alongside my team. And one way I did that was really figuring out a way to quantify the success of the content team and the actual business impact it was driving. That was step one to getting buy in for headcount, budget and a seat at the table.
Ty Magnin [00:07:22]:
So what did this practically look like? The idea. So I imagine, you know, it's clear you were intentional about bringing data towards stakeholders in order to elevate the. I don't want to use the word importance, but it did come to mind here, the importance of content and use that to inform, as you mentioned, the product strategy, the company strategy. Really impressive and I love that idea. Of course, bias as a content, you know, marketer, take us in the room. Like, did you build decks out of this, like what were some of the insights that you brought forth? And then if you can give examples of like downstream impact that the, the data you brought forth had, it'll be really interesting to hear.
Lane Scott Jones [00:08:03]:
Yeah, it really was about raising the visibility of content. It wasn't that content was maybe not respected, it's just that there was so much more growth and momentum and impact that I knew we could be getting from it that we were missing out on. So functionally what I did was worked with my head of content operations and we put together, we kind of stole from the advertising world this idea of return on ad spend. Except we coined it return on content spend Rocks.
Ty Magnin [00:08:32]:
Love it.
Lane Scott Jones [00:08:33]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we used our performance marketing model to calculate the content's return on spending. Smart. And it was mapping out like the investments we were making. So things like freelancers, agencies, software, we did mock up numbers for headcount and then tech and data support. So the resources we were pulling in from other parts of the company, that was the investment and then the return, we looked at real revenue resulting from content signups with a three year multiplier.
Ty Magnin [00:08:58]:
So Lane, you did that by like a first touch model meaning like, you know, say organic search traffic. People that came through that channel and ended up converting and then paying you counted those dollars towards content roi.
Lane Scott Jones [00:09:10]:
So I think the really cool thing about this number is we went really conservative. This is actually just looking at blogs, so not even counting content campaigns. And it was based on a last touch attribution model towards signup.
Ty Magnin [00:09:22]:
Last touch. Nice. Lovely. And so it didn't count those programmatic pages that I think a audience. By the way, if you haven't seen Zapier's like programmatic strategy, it's like a little, I don't call it old hat. Like you know, it was built a while ago, but those pages are pretty incredible. Great B2B programmatic use case. But anyways, you didn't count those programmatic pages in your content evaluation of roi.
Lane Scott Jones [00:09:44]:
That's right, yeah. So the ROI at this point really was just looking at the blog because that's where we had the majority of our team staffed and where we were putting the most resources. And it's also where strategically I wanted to get buy in and investment for more. So I wanted to hire more, I wanted more budget. So we really just focused on the blog so that we could have a really concrete idea of what business impact the blog itself was running. And we ended up doing this calculation and finding that the blog generated 454%.
Ty Magnin [00:10:16]:
ROI, I feel like that should get you all the headcounts and resources you could ever ask for. Right?
Lane Scott Jones [00:10:22]:
I completely agree. When we calculated that number, we had to run it so many times and this is like, this can't be right. This can't be right. It's too good to be true. But. But yeah, looking at the numbers, that is. And again, it's a pretty conservative look at a small slice of what the content team is working on. But the blog at that time was driving nearly 70% of all organic search visits, but it was driving product adoption too.
Lane Scott Jones [00:10:45]:
And I should say it is driving product adoption too. It was nearly a quarter of our influenced activations and almost half of our influenced upgrades were coming from the blog.
Ty Magnin [00:10:55]:
And so if you're Wade or like your CFO. Right, right. Are they not like Wade's the CEO? If you're Wade or the CFO, are they not like Lane, like, spend more money on this? You know, like, I'd be throwing money at you almost.
Lane Scott Jones [00:11:09]:
Yeah. I think they had to see the numbers though. I think at the time our CMO was, he came from a performance marketing background, so he had that return on ad spend mentality. And this really was catered to. Let's get this into a really quantifiable place to prove the value of content. Because there are so many things outside of even what we've calculated here that content is driving value toward. But we wanted to frame it in these numbers to get his buy in. And finally, when we presented it to him, his response, which I wrote down and having quotes, is, well, with these ROI numbers, tell me why I shouldn't give you advertising's entire budget right now? Which was music to my ears.
Ty Magnin [00:11:50]:
Yeah. And you're like, I mean, what was your answer? Maybe you should do give it to me.
Lane Scott Jones [00:11:55]:
Yeah, exactly. I was like, hand it over, I'm ready. Ready to run with it.
Ty Magnin [00:11:59]:
Yeah, yeah.
Tim Metz [00:12:00]:
I'm also curious about that. Like, what, what, what were you planning to do or what did you do after that? Because then it's like, all right, you get all these more resources. I guess that's what happened. And then where to use what, you know, what was your plan to scale then?
Lane Scott Jones [00:12:13]:
So much of our content team's impact was limited by the amount of content that we could produce. Because we were a relatively small team, we rely a lot on freelancers. So my very first asks for were hiring more and additional budget toward our freelance programs. And then we also established at that time a content operations function so that we could have somebody who was running really focused on the data analysis and finding those pockets where we were experiencing really high ROI or there was a really high opportunity so we could then double down smart. So it was, it was really expanding the content team between the beyond just being a blog team and being seen as a truly strategic operation. So yeah, we got buy in, grew the team. Like I said at that time we were four people now including corporate, all of corporate marketing, we're at 30 but just the content functions. We've expanded beyond blog to include content campaigns, operations and we have a video team now, a dedicated video team that is running YouTube and webinars.
Lane Scott Jones [00:13:14]:
So that's a team of 15.
Ty Magnin [00:13:16]:
If you're like most B2B content marketers, you want to lead the conversation in your industry. At Animals, we help B2B software companies do exactly that by creating standout survey driven, state of the industry type reports that help you grow your brand authority, backlinks and pipeline. In just 12 weeks. We run a process that helps uncover narratives from a unique data set packaged into a beautifully designed flagship content asset that your whole team is going to be proud of. Book a consult now at Animals Co Whitepapers and find out how to set the new benchmark for your industry. And so Lane, it sounds like most of the content team and investment is focused on the PLG model for Zapier. But you also mentioned maybe before we started hitting record that there is this enterprise motion that you maybe are supporting as well. Can you help me understand if you have like $100 to spend on your content team, how many are going towards this PLG motion today versus the enterprise motion?
Lane Scott Jones [00:14:14]:
Yeah, this is a really interesting time at Zapier and it's a time I think every, most companies like us get to eventually which is the switch not from PLG to slg but really starting to shift the balance of our resources from we have these programs, the blog being a great one or a great example where it is running. It's a machine like we know we feed a dollar into it, you know, we get 454% ROI. And that is, that has always been really focused on our PLG motion because prior to the past few years we haven't really had a sales motion at Zapier.
Ty Magnin [00:14:47]:
Right.
Lane Scott Jones [00:14:48]:
But to get to the next level of growth we have introduced that and we're all trying to build the sales LED muscle. So now I have my team divided into the, I guess you might call it plg but in our world it's, we call them builders. So, so they're the people going into Zapier and actually just they're signing up, they're in the product, they're building their automations using AI. That is where a lot of that program is focused. And then of course, now with the introduction of the enterprise sales motion, we've got the buyer and that's where we're starting to think a lot about the thought leadership, enterprise marketing content assets. So, yeah, we're at the place where I think a lot of our creative energy and a lot of our production energy is now turning toward the enterprise motion just because of foundation is been laid so well.
Ty Magnin [00:15:37]:
Yeah. And how would you describe the differences between that enterprise motion you mentioned thought leadership sort of as like a category of content? Are there different mediums? Are there different ways you're distributing it? Are the people you're hiring different for the enterprise focused or the SLG motion, as you call it?
Lane Scott Jones [00:15:55]:
Yeah, it's been a really fun puzzle to start to try and solve or even map out. Because the way that we're looking at it is they are very different mediums. They're different topics for each of our audiences, the builder and the buyer, but they're feeding into one another in this really interesting way because we're imagining our buyer is managing a bunch of builders. And so on the builder side, what we're really trying to do is demonstrate through real life use cases how they can implement AI and automation into their workflows in an actionable way.
Ty Magnin [00:16:30]:
Right.
Lane Scott Jones [00:16:30]:
And that's been a huge focus over the past two quarters. And specifically with this enterprise campaign we just launched, we're doing a 30 use cases in 30 days sprint, where we're just having people within Zapier recording how they're using Zapier and AI to show what we call like AI automation inspiration. This is what it actually looks like for a company to run their entire IT help desk with three people and Zapier, you know, because I think with AI and I felt this myself as a marketer, there's the conceptual, yes, I know I want to be using this and I know it will be really helpful, but how do I actually implement this in a way that feels not just like, oh, that saved me a few minutes, or that is sort of a novelty, but where it becomes a core part of my team's workflows. And I think to do that you need to A, see how other people are doing it and then B, get in there and build it yourself. So that has been the content strategy around builders. So that's sort of Bottoms up. We want to get the critical mass of builders using Zapier, and then at that point, we have some leverage with the buyer. So on the buyer side, I think it's probably a bit more of your classic B2B playbook.
Lane Scott Jones [00:17:42]:
We're doing reports. We just released one on the rise of shadow AI. So it's kind of taking the same topics, but obviously speaking to this different audience. In this case, just as an example, we're talking about how if you are the CEO at a company, you know, the majority of your team is using AI in some capacity. So you might have no oversight, you might have no governance, no control. No governance, yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:18:09]:
And it doesn't get the. It doesn't hit my bottom line. It's like, okay, great, so now Tim's on the beach at Koh Samui in the afternoon because he used AI this morning. But, like, I didn't save anything as a business owner.
Lane Scott Jones [00:18:20]:
Right, Exactly. Yeah. And you've got this sort of massive tech sprawl happening too. So we're speaking to the buyers in more of a. This is happening. You know, everybody is using AI and here's what it looks like to roll out an AI strategy that's focused on roi, you know, where you will be measured by AI roi, rather than having either no oversight or having people using it in a way that is, again, personal productivity, but not driving real revenue.
Ty Magnin [00:18:48]:
Interesting. So it's almost like for enterprise, the topics are different. They're a little more strategic, they're a little more heady, if you will. And like, for your builder audience, it's a little more practical. You know how to achieve this. It's a little more use case oriented. Is that a fair distinction?
Lane Scott Jones [00:19:04]:
Yeah, I think it's a distinction, but it's not a hard line because even if we think about our CEOs, you know, I'll even say Wade, specifically, if Wade was, look, browsing LinkedIn and saw a really cool use case where somebody was using AI and automation. Yeah, he's passing that along. He's passing that down to me or to, you know, my peers on the marketing leadership team. So there is, I think the use case is maybe a unifying thread throughout. It's just that the way we frame it is going to be different for the builder. It's going to be, here's this use case and click into this template. We've got it all set up for you and you can go ahead and set it up and run it yourself right now for the buyer. For our CEO reader, it's Here's a bit more of an inspirational look at how teams like yours are using AI.
Ty Magnin [00:19:50]:
Yep.
Lane Scott Jones [00:19:50]:
For them to then take back to their teams.
Ty Magnin [00:19:52]:
Speaking of which, we actually loved your article about how zapier is. You talked about hack nights and hackathons in order to get more AI adoption and excitement happening internally. We passed that around our leadership team and spent a lot of time chatting about, like, how do we do this in animals, Right. Using them for inspiration. So you got me with that one for sure.
Lane Scott Jones [00:20:12]:
I love to hear that. The AI hackathon. We did the very first one right when all of this was breaking and we were trying to figure out what we were going to do about it. As a company, as a marketing team, we took this week off from our regularly scheduled programming and the imperative to all of us was just play around with AI experiment. Build something, try it out, roll it out. And I can't emphasize how much just having that space and time is so important, because maybe AI as a skill, a marketing skill is the kind of thing that you can read as many articles as you want, you can watch videos, but until you're in there building it and breaking things, I don't think it's really sinking in. And you do need time away from business as usual to play around.
Ty Magnin [00:20:56]:
Yeah, probably right. So 1. Tim, I know you're not sitting on the beach in the afternoon.
Tim Metz [00:21:01]:
After the opposite. I know you're sitting on the beach. I felt. I felt found out.
Ty Magnin [00:21:07]:
I know you're working hard over there, so I just wanted to call that out. But listen, I'm sure, Tim, you've been waiting patiently to ask some questions about AI, so I kind of want to throw the rock over to you.
Tim Metz [00:21:17]:
Well, one thing I want to say, I had it also in the other direction. I posted little zap that I find very useful the other day on LinkedIn. And then I very quickly had like, I don't know, like 15, 20 likes within the first 30 minutes. And then there were like 80% people from Zapier. So everybody was really on top of that. So I can. I don't think Wade was in there, but like there were lots of people and I was like, oh, they're zapier. Oh, they're also Zapier.
Tim Metz [00:21:37]:
So that's funny to see that. Indeed. Everybody's kind of looking at that and paying attention, it seems.
Lane Scott Jones [00:21:42]:
Oh yeah.
Tim Metz [00:21:42]:
But yeah, the other thing I was. So we talked about, like, you know, you have to build or you have to buy it and you kind of, I guess you can Kind of, you know, you can plan that in advance, but what happens when something like let's take mcp, right, Which I think is now very much on your radar, comes along? Like, how's that driven in the organization and when does content get pulled in and what does that look like? That it's much more like a timely, urgent topic. And how do you approach that with the team? I was curious about that.
Lane Scott Jones [00:22:10]:
Well, you're right. I think I'm not the first guest to say we cannot plan that far ahead anymore because who knows what's going to pop up. MCP was a very frantic week for us figuring out. We say this phrase building the plane as we fly it all the time. But it has never felt more real than with some of these new introductions of AI related technologies. I think MCP is a really interesting example of how content plays into overall marketing strategy. We have a zapier MCP offering. So we were launching that at the same time that product marketing was developing the messaging, at the same time as content marketing was being tasked with publishing blog posts both top of funnel and product launch related.
Lane Scott Jones [00:22:53]:
So we didn't really have the luxury of okay, we've got this pristine, perfect messaging document from product marketing. It's got all the use cases, it's got the competitor comparisons. Our content team at that point really acts in a very journalistic way where they're going out, they're doing all this self education on what MCP is and what it means to our readers, our audience, our customers, and they're producing this content at the same time as everything else is rolling out.
Ty Magnin [00:23:20]:
Right.
Lane Scott Jones [00:23:21]:
And I think that is such a testament to having a content marketing team that is tuned in, not just to going back to earlier, the services mentality, where they're waiting to be assigned something. But our blog editors were out there creating this content in advance of most of the other activity happening at the company. Which is really cool for me as a content leader because then when our product folks or Wade comes to me and is like, hey, we really need to publish an article about mcp, I'm like, already done. We've got it. We've actually got a whole list of about a dozen of them that are related to this. One really cool development recently was that we were ranking number one on Google search for what is mcp? Which is a full testament to again, my blog editors and blog team and writers because they jumped on that at a really critical time. And it did mean that they had to drop other things. So that constant prioritization exercise during these fires is the name of the game for us right now.
Ty Magnin [00:24:21]:
Yeah, it's tricky and lane for our audience. What is mcp? I think it's important for folks to understand, especially as it pertains to how Zapier is playing a role in this emerging category.
Lane Scott Jones [00:24:30]:
So MCP stands for Model Context Protocol and Zapier's MCP allows AI models to execute real world actions by integrating seamlessly with Zapier is 8,000 apps that we integrate with. So with MCP, AI can take action on your behalf. Instead of you just interacting with it as a chatbot, it's actually doing things like automating workflows, sending emails, updating CRMs, scheduling meetings. So as you can probably imagine, this is a huge development. And for Zapier particularly, because we have this massive number of integrations, it is a massive opportunity for AI and automation to work together and actually drive that real business outcome that we were talking about.
Ty Magnin [00:25:13]:
Yeah, incredibly cool. I want to shift into discussing how you, as a content team or as a brand team at large, are using AI in your production. So yeah, maybe like, what's your philosophy on using AI? If we want to start there and then what are some practical use cases that you find valuable?
Lane Scott Jones [00:25:30]:
We love AI at Zapier for obvious reasons. I think it has been such a creative, experimental time for us to figure out what AI looks like in our workflows. When it comes to my AI philosophy, especially with the content team, we are fully committed to using AI in our workflows to make our work easier and better. It's deeply embedded across essentially every aspect of the content production and distribution engine now. But we also are very keenly aware of where AI falls short. And we know that the things that people love about Zapier's content and have always loved going back a decade, are that we are writing with this very human voice. And I would have described this quality of Zapier's voice and tone before I started. It was very different to me as I was sort of interviewing and applying even from your standard corporate tech blog, because it is, it is so warm and human in its the value it's giving.
Lane Scott Jones [00:26:26]:
And as Zapier, like a lot of our top performing articles, are almost wire cutter type evaluations of best apps. And the reason that those are so high performing is because we have a human per human who's going through and testing all these apps and telling you this is the best one for your needs.
Ty Magnin [00:26:43]:
Wow.
Lane Scott Jones [00:26:44]:
So how do we bring in AI and all of its best qualities without losing the thing that makes our content valuable and leads to our rankings being so high and is why people love Zapier's blog. So what we've done is really embrace AI across all elements of the pre production workflow research finding opportunities like drafting and outlining, producing structured content and SEO and data insights, but making sure that we're keeping the writing piece of it to the humans where we're able to deliver value and really stay true to Zapier's voice.
Tim Metz [00:27:21]:
Can you give an example of what that then looks like in a workflow? Like, how do you do that?
Lane Scott Jones [00:27:27]:
I've been talking to my team about this and we were just crunching some numbers and by incorporating AI into our workflows, we are already a very high. We produce a lot of content. Our top of funnel blog is producing had been producing 70 blog posts per month. And just by using AI within our workflows, so not using it to actually rate anything, we've been able to increase that by almost 30%. So a couple examples of how this is showing up in our workflows. One is doing content gap analysis. So looking at our entire corpus of work and finding gaps and it's just helping us brainstorm and get the juices flowing. We also use it for small copywriting tasks.
Lane Scott Jones [00:28:07]:
So we have ZAP templates. I was mentioning those earlier, which is, hey, here's an example of how somebody is using Zapier. Click in and actually just try it out. So we do have a chatbot that takes a zap template and writes the copy for the template page. We're writing metadata for blog posts, drafting blurbs for the blog email so you can look at all those tasks as long form writing adjacent tasks that would take up our editor and writer time. And now because we have built these processes using AI to generate those things, we are able to take that short form copy and produce it a lot more quickly. So some more fun examples are creating fake customer data for screenshots. We have a bot that generates using fake businesses based on one of our editor's dogs examples that we can use when we need to anonymize things.
Lane Scott Jones [00:28:54]:
It sometimes is with pop culture references, but they are automatically generating fake leading customer data for us to use in our examples, which is a constant requirement for the types of content we create.
Ty Magnin [00:29:05]:
I feel like that one was developed during the hack week.
Lane Scott Jones [00:29:08]:
It absolutely was. Yeah, yeah, Earth Week. The creative juices were flowing. Another one I love and I think this is all credit to our customer advocacy team who is producing our customer stories and of course, customer stories are driving so much of Zapier's marketing and content marketing. Previously we had a multi hour long process of interviewing the customer, transcribing it, figuring out the best pullback out quotes, working with a writer to create it. Our one of our customer advocacy marketers, it was able to create an entire workflow where she took from the Zoom transcript, she was able to port that into the workflow that she created with AI and automation and take the process from multiple hours to from the transcript, generating a full customer story outline in 30 seconds. And that is really incredible in terms of efficiencies gained, but also because we have at that time one customer advocacy marketer, 2 million customers using Zapier and a constant need like sales is beating down our door to get more and more enterprise customer stories. Especially because that's such a big piece of the way that we're selling.
Lane Scott Jones [00:30:22]:
And so that was an incredible use of AI I think to really scale up what still just one small team can do.
Tim Metz [00:30:30]:
That's an even higher ROI than 450%, I think.
Lane Scott Jones [00:30:34]:
I think so too. Yeah. Once you start thinking about the value of an enterprise deal. Another one I'll share. So I mentioned that the content marketing also includes the video team. And so a big push for Zapier's content marketing program has been using YouTube as a platform first space where we can be creating, recreating the similar success that we saw on the blog with top of funnel, with AI topics, with covering things in real time. And we've seen a lot of really interesting success there and momentum but with any like with anything, with any social post, with any YouTube post, some are successful and some flop. So our head of video growth created this really cool social post and YouTube video grader where he took a couple different elements from engagement views, click through rate and is able to assign each of them an ROI evaluation essentially.
Lane Scott Jones [00:31:28]:
And he uses that because we work with so many influencers. He uses that to inform what our investment is with these different partners. So we're able to look at all the influencers we're working with and using AI and automation automatically give them like a good, great, excellent rating and then immediately use that to drive more or less investment there.
Ty Magnin [00:31:49]:
That's smart. Nice, I really like that. So rumor has it, according to our AI research bot, that there is a lane bot out there that maybe helps with some editing. Can you tell us about that?
Lane Scott Jones [00:32:01]:
Yes, the lanebot. So the lanebot was a hack week innovation for me personally because that first hack week the Next week I was going to Italy. So I mentioned I have been doing the full time travel, taking advantage of remote work for the past three years or so. But this was going to be a pure vacation. I was going to be off slack and off my computer for a week eating pasta and gelato. And so I built a Lane bot. I fed it all of my content marketing pov, our strategy documents, leadership style notes, my readme and set up the lean bot, shared it with my team and said if you have any questions while I'm gone, I will not be available, but the lanebot can answer them. And then of course, as like an added bonus for them to interact with the lanebot, I told them if that they could get her to give them a promotion, that we would look into it when.
Lane Scott Jones [00:32:57]:
So we had a lot of fun interactions that they were keeping in the thread for me. But yeah, the lanebot was really fun and I think I always say that, you know, as a kind of fun novelty. But if folks, either you or folks on your team are looking to play around with AI, I think that's a perfect starter project because you do learn so much about building out the configuration and the instructions and tweaking and fine tuning it. And now I think with agents and with the way that we're able to integrate now with all of these different apps, the lanebot could really grow in power. It could really start actually doing a lot of things for me. I'm a little scared to give her that power though, because she's just like me and I knew it would go to her head.
Tim Metz [00:33:41]:
You can just spend all your time in Italy, just permanently move to Italy.
Ty Magnin [00:33:45]:
There's an upside to that.
Lane Scott Jones [00:33:46]:
I like this plan.
Ty Magnin [00:33:47]:
Maybe it is a happy ending. I want to ask about your AI tech stack too, if we can go. Just one more question there.
Lane Scott Jones [00:33:56]:
Well, a lot of what we're building is built on Zapier. So Zapier has our chatbots. That was sort of one of the first tools we rolled out and now we have Zapier agents, we have Zapier MCP. So typically within that it's working with ChatGPT. But the challenge when we think about AI and when we think about automation is to drink our own champagne. So I just built one of my first agents on Zapier and it was so fun. I actually we did a customer meetup and I went to IT here in Nashville and got to learn how to build an agent. And my starter project was just building an agent to manage my inbox.
Lane Scott Jones [00:34:35]:
And I really loved that hands on experience. I don't know what it's doing, but I really don't get that much email anymore, so it feels like a success. So yeah, we're always experimenting. And again, because Zapier can integrate with so many of our apps, you know, think about the things we're using. On the content side, There's Airtable, there's YouTube. We're just trying to pull from all these different data sources and troubleshoot as we go. But that is the overall goal because also at Zapier we've got things like interfaces where you can build landing pages, we've got tables where you can store data. So keeping it all in the Zapier cinematic universe, for lack of a better term, is the way that we're trying to build our AI tech stack.
Ty Magnin [00:35:16]:
Awesome. Tim, any other questions for Lane?
Tim Metz [00:35:19]:
Where should people follow you if they want to stay up to date?
Lane Scott Jones [00:35:22]:
Follow me on LinkedIn. Lane Scott Jones for my latest on AI and automation and everything we're trying out and experimenting with. And you can follow me on Instagram if you want to see me. My next trip to Italy.
Tim Metz [00:35:35]:
Nice.
Ty Magnin [00:35:36]:
Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you.
Lane Scott Jones [00:35:39]:
Thank you. This is so fun.
Ty Magnin [00:35:40]:
That was awesome.
Tim Metz [00:35:41]:
Yeah, it was great.
Ty Magnin [00:35:43]:
Yeah. I was just thinking about like a plg folk like the role of content in a PLG or like, you know, sort of a high volume organization. It's significantly more important and strategic typically than in an enterprise focused organization because like, as you heard from Lane, like, like the vast majority of her content resources are focused on strategically delivering growth. Right. For the business kind of like on their own end to end, you know, versus an SLG or an enterprise play. Like you're supporting a different motion and therefore it's harder to own those growth metrics outright like she does at Zapier. So it was really cool to get to interview someone that sort of built a large scale PLG machine.
Tim Metz [00:36:28]:
Yeah. But still, even if you like, no matter what kind of organization you're in, I think what I also really like we had this blog post or a guest post from Gareth who was at Parable back then like two years ago where he called it content led product. So whereas like you let the content inform features and things like that, and that's kind of what she was talking about at a much larger scale. Right. And, and I think that is really possible actually if you have your shit together like they clearly seem to do at Zapier. Right. Where you have the intelligence and you have the numbers. And you can feed those kind of back to other parts of the organization where it's like, we're seeing this in content, right? Where this is popular, this is gaining traction.
Tim Metz [00:37:05]:
This is not getting any traction. There is, there is interesting info there that's valuable beyond just the content team. But then you really need to run a good analytics or like a good intelligence. That's, that's not, I think that there's.
Ty Magnin [00:37:18]:
There'S a few different flavors of that, right? So this idea of like content led strategy, like content led company strategy or something, if we wanted to rename it in the moment, you can also use content as research into like point problems that you're trying to learn more about. Right? So it's like, yeah, you know, let's say you're building a content strategy and you want to figure out like, where is this audience that we're trying to target hanging out, like write a blog post of like, you know, the top five communities for product managers, right? And going deep there and participate and listen and like turn that into something of value. And that then is research to inform your. I mean, in this case, I said content strategy, but company strategy to some extent. I've always thought of content informing a product roadmap or company strategy as being like, you know, individual points of research when done well. But what she brought to the table is like, no, like take a step back, you can look at the macro, see the trends and, and use some of that, those numbers to inform the product roadmap or the company strategy.
Tim Metz [00:38:15]:
Yeah, I mean she literally actually said, I wrote it down. She said something like, I want content to be a strategic engine, not a service engine or something, or not a server. And I think that that's, that's a cool way to, to sum it up.
Ty Magnin [00:38:26]:
I've been thinking a lot more about AI, right. Usage for content production. And I am with Lane in that. Having content draft articles, if we're talking about blog articles having content like draft, the thing might not be the best usage of AI. Sorry, Having AI draft the content might not be the best usage because it does take away some of the human elements and like the voice and some of the magic there. But using it at the fringes, like around like all the process around producing a good content asset, I think is a good safe place to implement. Now she's in it. Man, it was really cool and yeah.
Tim Metz [00:39:05]:
But I also felt like inspired in the sense of like, yeah, there's a really lot of cool stuff, but also like, you know, we're not that far behind. It's, like, stuff we're also experimenting with. So it's still early, right? There's still so much to do, and there's still so much opportunity that's also inspiring and motivating.
Ty Magnin [00:39:21]:
Yeah, without a doubt. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of the Animals podcast. We'll return a couple days with another drop from another Enterprise guest.
Tim Metz [00:39:29]:
Yeah. See you soon.
