What’s the one thing your audience should remember after reading your content? If you can’t answer that, don’t ship it. That’s the new standard Kay-Kay Clapp sets for enterprise content teams, and it’s a challenge to everything you think you know about how content works at scale.
Typeform’s Kay-Kay Clapp brings a rare mix of operational discipline and creative empathy to the enterprise content conversation. She pushes back on the idea that process kills innovation. Instead, she shows how strong systems and creative thinking go hand in hand. Drawing on Emily Kramer’s “fuel and engine” model, Kay-Kay explains why you need both: always-on product content to keep the lights on, and expert-driven campaigns to stand out.
If you’re leading content at scale, Kay-Kay’s approach is refreshingly practical. She uses customer surveys to source ideas, builds modular content for agility, and measures success by how engaged her owned audience is not by traffic or MQLs alone. This episode is a must-listen for anyone balancing operational efficiency with creative excellence in a large organization.
About Our Guest: Kay-Kay Clapp
Kay-Kay Clapp is Head of Content & Social at Typeform. She leads a team that covers everything from SEO and influencer programs to employee advocacy and global campaigns. She’s built and scaled content teams at three SaaS companies, including iFixit, where she managed a team of 18, published over 10,000 repair guides, and grew a YouTube channel to over a million subscribers. At Appcues, she launched a full-scale Product Adoption Academy.
What sets Kay-Kay apart is her hands-on experience with both the creative and operational sides of content at scale. She’s faced the real-world challenges of cross-team alignment, keeping quality high at volume, and maintaining a consistent brand voice. Her bold, audience-first campaigns, like singing Valentine’s Day videos for customers, and her ability to turn subject matter experts into content partners make her a rare operator. She knows how enterprise content engines really run and how to make them unforgettable.
Insights and Quotes From This Episode
Kay-Kay’s approach to enterprise content combines hard-won lessons, practical frameworks, and a deep respect for process without sacrificing creativity or audience connection. Here are the key takeaways from the episode:
“You should not ship something, or you shouldn’t even execute an idea if you can’t articulate the one thing that someone should walk away with after consuming that.” (00:00)
This rule shapes every brainstorm and brief. It forces early alignment, cuts down on revisions, and leads to clearer creative ideas. In approval-heavy organizations, this focus on a single takeaway makes content purposeful and memorable, not just more noise.
“Content is the fuel… the engine is the systems in place that get it out into the world.” (09:49)
Borrowing Emily Kramer’s metaphor, Kay-Kay sees her team as the source of strategic messaging (fuel) and partners with growth, product marketing, and brand teams (the engine) for distribution. This clear split helps everyone understand their role and makes content investments more effective.
“We have foundational content debt… then a bigger quarterly push… and the third motion is SME-driven content, first-person experiences are going to be the thing that is very important for everyone.” (10:08–11:21)
Kay-Kay’s three-layer strategy balances evergreen product needs, big campaign pushes, and unique thought leadership from subject matter experts. This structure helps prioritize when resources are stretched, making sure you deliver both consistency and innovation.
“My favorite place to get ideas is actually just asking your audience… If I look back on my career, my favorite campaigns have always started from just asking the audience.” (15:27–16:47)
Instead of guessing, Kay-Kay uses a simple feedback loop—often just a Typeform email—to get instant topic ideas, quotes, and SME leads. This keeps content relevant and defensible, especially as AI-generated noise rises. Real audience input grounds your campaigns in what matters.
“I thought coming into this role, a bigger company with a bigger budget and more resources meant I would ship faster. But that’s really not the case.” (21:37–22:07)
More people means more approvals, tool changes, and politics. Kay-Kay sees slower timelines as a creative constraint, not a problem. She reminds content leaders that patience and process are part of the job at scale.
“Owned audience is the biggest metric we’re rallied around right now.” (23:35–24:33)
Instead of chasing vanity metrics, Kay-Kay focuses on building a database of self-identified prospects who keep coming back. This shifts the team’s mindset from short-term wins to long-term audience growth and loyalty, tying brand building to real revenue impact.
“Good process leaves room for creativity… If you have a good brief and everyone is aligned up front, it makes everything easier in the back half.” (25:45–26:26)
Enterprise work depends on clear briefs. Kay-Kay uses AI to sharpen them, which cuts down on meetings and protects creative time. Balancing process and creativity is the key to standout work at scale.
“You have to have someone that’ll just give you permission to take a big swing and fail… And sometimes it’s going to be cringe. I think you have to be okay with being a little bit cringe.” (29:57–31:16)
Innovation needs psychological safety. Kay-Kay credits leadership buy-in for bold campaigns like rap-style Valentine videos. If you want to try riskier ideas, you need executive support. Without it, big experiments rarely happen in large organizations.
About This Season of the Animalz Podcast: Breaking Down the Walls of Enterprise Content Marketing
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
Links and Resources From the Episode
Typeform: Product-led growth survey and form platform where Kay-Kay leads content and social. Used internally to collect audience ideas and SME quotes.
Appcues: Kay-Kay’s previous employer, where she ran multi-channel content programs across podcast, YouTube, and academy formats.
iFixit: Where Kay-Kay managed 10,000 repair guides and a million-subscriber YouTube channel, showing what large-scale content operations look like.
Webflow: The new CMS for Typeform’s marketing site, which enables faster publishing and more autonomy for the content team.
MKT1 / Emily Kramer: A marketing newsletter, community, and the “Dear Marketer” podcast. MKT1’s fuel/engine framework and SME collaborations inspire Kay-Kay’s work.
Dear Marketer Podcast: Hosted by Emily Kramer; each episode sources audience questions via Typeform.
UiPath: Enterprise automation company where Ty Magnin worked, cited as an example of scaling revenue without perfecting every process.
ActiveCampaign: Co-marketing partner for an ebook launch with Typeform.
Calendly: Another co-marketing partner in the same ebook project with Typeform.
Follow Kay-Kay Clapp on LinkedIn.
Full Episode Transcript
Kay-Kay Clapp (00:00):
You should not ship something, or you shouldn’t even execute an idea if you can’t articulate the one thing that someone should walk away with after consuming that. And if you can rally around that right at the beginning, you will have such a better time brainstorming. People will be bought into your idea and that just makes the entire creative process a lot better.
Ty Magnin (00:21):
Welcome to The Animalz Podcast. I’m Ty Magnan, the CEO at Animalz.
Tim Metz (00:26):
And I’m Tim Metz, the Director of Marketing and Innovation.
Ty Magnin (00:29):
This season we’re focused on peeking behind the corporate curtains of enterprise content marketing teams and exploring how B2B SaaS giants run content operations at scale. Today we’re thrilled to be speaking with Kay-Kay Clapp. She’s the head of content in social at Typeform and a deeply experienced content leader. Kay-Kay previously ran content marketing at my alma mater Appcues. Big shout out to Appcues and the content that they produce and has consistently led teams that create authentic, memorable content that both educates and delights. If you’re like most B2B content marketers, you want to lead the conversation in your industry. At Animalz 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 back links 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 Animalz.co/whitepapers and find out how to set the new benchmark for your industry. Kay-Kay, welcome to the show.
Kay-Kay Clapp (01:42):
Thanks. It’s so wonderful to be here.
Ty Magnin (01:45):
We’re lucky to have you. So Kay-Kay, the first question we ask all of our guests is what content are you consuming lately?
Kay-Kay Clapp (01:52):
Yeah, so I was prepared for this question. I thought about it and I got to be honest, Ty, it actually made me feel a little bit insecure, so I’m going to unpack that for a second. I used to be a pro consumer of content. I was chronically online. I lived on Twitter. I digested so many podcasts, questionably useful. I was in Discord groups. And then last year I had a kid, and then my content consumption habits completely changed. And that is something I’ve kind of had some insecurity about because when you work in content and particularly in social, there is this expectation that you are always on and that you are at the top of the cultural zeitgeist. So you can hop on trends and you can figure out how you can join conversations in a way that’s relevant to your brand. And that has actually been really hard for me.
Kay-Kay Clapp (02:38):
So I’ve had to be very intentional with the content that I am consuming. And so I do follow a lot of marketing and content thought leaders on LinkedIn, but lately I’ve had to be really reliant on my team. So we have a prompt in Slack, what are you watching? What are you consuming? Why? And so that has been really helpful. And then I’ve also really relied on my peers for them to tell me what’s going on. And so yeah, I’ve had this conversation with a few parents that are also kind of in content leadership roles. So I just wanted to say that for anyone that is feeling a little bit insecure like I am, I just wanted to make that point that there are other ways to kind of get that content. So yeah
Ty Magnin (03:18):
Nice. Love it. Yeah, definitely don’t want you to feel insecure about that. For me, a lot of content I’m consuming lately, do you know this TV show or YouTube show?
Kay-Kay Clapp (03:27):
Yes. Because yes, Blippy Bluey, miss Rachel. Yeah, I got those on lock.
Ty Magnin (03:32):
Yeah. That’s content you’re consuming and I actually think you can take some inspiration from some of what they’re doing and pull it into a B2B context.
Kay-Kay Clapp (03:41):
Absolutely. And I will say another thing that I think was unexpected for me this last year was I think there is always this thought that you have to be constantly consuming content, but now that I’ve slowed down a little bit, you consume content to get inspiration. And some of the best inspiration I’ve had is actually completely disconnecting going on long walks with my kid. I’ve had some of my best content ideas just doing that. And so just a reminder to everyone to unplug every once in a while and go for the long walk.
Ty Magnin (04:10):
Yeah, I love that. I mean, Tim’s, I’m not going to say self-proclaimed productivity expert, but someone that’s definitely pretty far in that quadrant of someone that thinks about it and has a startup that he built based on productivity. I agree. I think, and Tim Ki to get your feedback, the best productivity hack for what you do when you’re at your desk is actually optimizing your away from the desk time, long walks, a surf, whatever that is, kid time too, take care of your kids. So you feel like, all right, they’re in a good place. I can really focus.
Tim Metz (04:44):
Yeah, yeah, you need to disconnect. But at the same time, I would also say as soon as I had kids, I used to read one book per week, but since I have kids it like I’m happy if it’s one book per quarter or something.
Ty Magnin (04:54):
We probably read one book every night before bed too. I mean, can we come back?
Kay-Kay Clapp (04:57):
Oh yeah. If we’re counting that, I am crushing the kid book. Yay. I’m just crushing it.
Ty Magnin (05:02):
Yeah. Kay-Kay, one reason I was excited to have you on the show today is you’ve recently made the transition into an enterprise content team or an enterprise in general from more SMB type startups. I mean, Appcues, how many people when you were there?
Kay-Kay Clapp (05:22):
A hundred, maybe a little north a hundred.
Ty Magnin (05:24):
Yeah, figure figured. And how big’s Typeform today?
Kay-Kay Clapp (05:27):
I think we’re shy of 300. Not entirely sure on there, but somewhere around there.
Ty Magnin (05:31):
Okay. But would you say that these companies operate differently with their content programs?
Kay-Kay Clapp (05:37):
Absolutely. Bigger team, more resources, things are very different. But what I will say is I’m not actually sure how you are defining enterprise or what we truly think enterprise is, but Typeform is a series C. So when I interviewed for this role, I was talking to our CR and she had actually described Typeform as something that really stood out to me as an awkward eighth grader. We don’t quite know who we are. We’re trying to figure ourselves out a little bit, but we kind of know who we are and our best years are ahead of us. And I think that is kind of how our content program has operated. Typeform has such a strong PLG motion, but if you think about it, they don’t really have a strong content motion. Whereas at appcues, thank you for the work and the foundation that you laid, there were three distinct content properties.
Kay-Kay Clapp (06:26):
I was running a podcast, a YouTube channel and a full academy, and then I fixed it. I was running a team of 18 people where we had 10,000 repair guides and a YouTube channel with a million subscribers and a huge editorial and advocacy arm that would just generate tons and tons of pickups every year. In that type
form, we actually don’t have that much more of a mature motion in place. So as much as it’s different because the enterprise and there’s more layers and approvals and stakeholders, it’s actually kind of a lot of the same. And so maybe that’s why I feel like yes, it’s enterprise, but also content is content and it just feels very similar.
Ty Magnin (07:05):
And that’s interesting. So your point is it’s not necessarily the headcount. Sometimes a content program is more mature at a smaller earlier stage company than at a later stage company.
Kay-Kay Clapp (07:18):
And I think that’s kind of a common misconception people have, or maybe one that I had like, oh, I am moving into this bigger company, so everything is going to be more mature, everything is going to be more developed. We’re really going to know who we are. And oftentimes that’s not the case. A lot of people I talk to in enterprise organizations
Kay-Kay Clapp (07:33):
It’s so much harder to move fast because there’s so many stakeholders you need to bring along for the ride. And so for example, we were on Contentful, no Shade to Contentful, but that was a really hard CMS for us to be on, and it was really hard to make changes on the fly. And so now we’re in Webflow, which is a lot more self-serve, and it’s empowered the team to make faster decisions. But even changing out a tool like that, that’s a huge rip and replace project. So when you’re in these enterprise organizations, sometimes the processes and tools can be a lot more cumbersome than I expected.
Ty Magnin (08:07):
Yeah, totally. It is funny. I remember the surprise I felt when I started at UiPath, it was like series B 40 million revenue and we scaled to a billion in revenue, and through that whole period, we didn’t have our shit together in every corner. And you kind of assume that the big dogs do, but you can grow really fast and really far without having all your i’s dotted and t’s crossed. You just have to have great product market fit and some semblance of a go-to-market motion working
Kay-Kay Clapp (08:36):
That is so resonant. Just, I don’t know, the more companies I’ve been at, the more I feel like nobody has their shit together. We’re all just figuring it out on the fly, but the best content marketers can embrace that and figure that out and just figure out what lane they can operate in and then just move quickly from there.
Ty Magnin (08:52):
Nice. So that leads to a great question of what’s the role of content in Typeform?
Kay-Kay Clapp (08:59):
So I run content and social and under my purview we have SEO, social influencer and employee advocacy and content. I’ve been thinking a lot about Emily Kramer. I’m currently doing a customer story with her, so she’s really top of mind for me, but she kind of describes content as the fuel. And so she has this idea of fuel and engine. And so the fuel is all of the messages, the words, the visuals, the copy that you really want to get out into the world. And then the engine is the systems in place that get it out into the world. So content is the fuel, and I think that is a really resonant analogy. And that’s kind of what we are at Typeform. So we are providing all of those things across the wider org, and so those things can be used and distributed across all of the different touchpoint.
Ty Magnin (09:49):
Got it. So as you’ve come into this role, what is your first, I mean, how long have you been there now?
Kay-Kay Clapp (09:55):
Not long. So six months.
Ty Magnin (09:57):
Six months.
Kay-Kay Clapp (09:58):
So keep that in mind for all of my answers in this podcast.
Ty Magnin (10:00):
Yeah, well that’s what makes it ripe and interesting, I think. But in terms of through this lens of fuel and engine, where have you focused in the first six months?
Kay-Kay Clapp (10:08):
Yeah, so I would say we actually have a few different content motions in place. We have what I’m calling foundational content debt that I think we just have to do. So to me that is a lot of product led content that maps to our highest impact use cases for the business, and we just don’t have a lot of that right now. So we have that kind of always on motion in the background. And then what we are working towards is having a bigger quarterly push of content. And that can come in any form, like an interactive report, an ebook, something that’s just a lot bigger that we can source a lot of derivative content that can power our content programs. And so we are midstream in a really big campaign right now and that’s happening now. And then the third motion that I’m trying to get off the ground is just SME driven content. I think we’re all looking for ways to be more defensible against AI content and first person experiences are going to be the thing that is very important for everyone. And so that’s just in complete infancy. We’ve mapped out a few SMEs to talk to internally in our community, and that is my next big project after we get this big campaign I’m talking about which will go live in April.
Ty Magnin (11:21):
Nice. Talk to me about your ses. From what I remember, SMEs,
Kay-Kay Clapp (11:27):
Oh, just like what,
Ty Magnin (11:29):
I have a notion that they’re a bigger deal at an enterprise. You have a longer list of them. Have you found that to be true? And then who are they at Typeform? Where do they set?
Kay-Kay Clapp (11:39):
I don’t know. Typeform is a very interesting product because we can have a thousand different use cases, and that’s actually something very different that I haven’t really had that challenge as a content marketer in my previous organizations that were, so here’s the product, here’s what it does. But we have so many use cases. And so for SMEs we have, I like ses. I actually also call UR l Earls and everyone’s like, what are you saying? So I feel you. I don’t necessarily know that we have a longer list of SMEs at just because we are an enterprise, I think potentially we are more connected just because you have more volume of people and people know people, and so you can kind of ping people’s connections. And so your network is just larger. Internally, Typeform is very much for marketers. So I have a team of 30 different marketers on the team, and so we can rely on a lot of those different people.
Kay-Kay Clapp (12:33):
And if you’ve just been in the industry for a while, marketers know marketers. I think Ty, we probably share so many connections. We both worked at appcues, and so that’s kind of where we’re sourcing internally, we’re starting there. And then externally, we’re very lucky that we have a pretty involved community and those are great champions of our product. So that’s another great place that we can start starting with our community champions, looking to our customers that are kind of all star customers that are really in the product and our power users. And then externally from that, we’re honestly figuring it out. So I run the influencer program, which is kind of interesting. A lot of our influencers, when you see their videos, they’re talking about use cases and not because I’m asking them to, but because they are actual Typeform users of the product and this is their use case. And so I also kind of see our influencer arm as SMEs that I am hoping to pull into this motion
Ty Magnin (13:26):
Interesting. So they sit all over the place.
Kay-Kay Clapp (13:28):
Yes.
Ty Magnin (13:29):
You have SMEs that are input to content, right? They’re helping you shape some thought leadership, giving you quotes, that kind of thing. You also have stakeholders within the content org or outside the content org that care about what you’re producing. Kind of gets back to the role of content being in service of other parts of the business. Maybe just give me an overview of who are those stakeholders at Typeform for you?
Kay-Kay Clapp (13:55):
Depending on the size and the magnitude of the project. So if it’s a really large integrated campaign, oftentimes I am brought in early as like, Hey, can you come represent the content, POV, give us some watch outs, how would you shape this? But I by no means have the final call on the direction of that content that belongs to that campaign. But if something originates in my team, so if it’s social first or content first, I have the final call. But as far as other stakeholders, I rely a lot on my boss. So I report directly into brand. And so he’s the senior director of brand. I go to him for a lot of things and he runs kind of like our whole creative arm. And then also working closely with product marketing for product like content, trying to best understand what features or integrations to highlight, and then also working very closely with our growth team. So that’s our best engine. So working closely with them to make sure that our content can have more legs through their distribution channels.
Ty Magnin (14:52):
That’s great. Really interesting. Take me back to the point you made about where ideas come from, right? You said sometimes content ideas come from the content team or social. I’m curious what kinds of ideas, and then you also said when they do, you’re the final sign off on that. I mean, maybe Kevin, shout out to Kevin, he might look at this too, but content’s ultimately responsible for it, but then when there’s a different stakeholder involved like product marketing, they’re signing off on it. Is that correct?
Kay-Kay Clapp (15:20):
Yes.
Ty Magnin (15:21):
So I two questions there at once, but again, where do ideas come from? I think that’s the first question.
Kay-Kay Clapp (15:27):
Sure. So yes, ideas can come from anywhere. Oftentimes we will look at what is trending in our community or what are people asking in our help center? And also being such a product led company, there are a lot of product signals within the product itself that we can look at that see how people are using it and get ideas from there. But my favorite place to get ideas is actually just asking your audience. And I think that’s something that is so underrated that content marketers don’t do enough. If I look back on my career, my favorite campaigns have always started from just asking the audience, and that is what MKT one, Emily Kramer is completely predicated on Every episode of her Dear Marketer podcast starts with a Typeform where she’s asking her audience for ideas as well as her whole temp library that she builds out. She’s asking folks, what should I be building something that was really successful at appcues for me and something that we’re trying to really codify that into our content creation. Here at Typeform, we are the perfect tool to be able to ask our audience for things in a regular manner. And soon you will see a lot of content that is a lot more audience driven that just incorporates a lot more of their words and their ideas. And that’s kind of a big thing that I’m trying to really push the envelope on moving forward.
Ty Magnin (16:47):
That’s
Tim Metz (16:47):
Awesome. And so simple. How difficult is it then to get those ideas to the finish line or get them approved? I can imagine when I think about enterprise, it’s like, oh, there’s a lot of people are going to say, oh, this idea has this problem and this idea doesn’t fit with this guideline and this idea. Is that a reality? And is these you different at the companies you’ve been?
Kay-Kay Clapp (17:09):
Yeah, it’s definitely different at appcues. By the end of it, I was like a content team of one, so I could have an idea and ship it literally the same day, and that was great. And that’s not the reality here. There are a lot of approvals and layers, but again, it’s kind of like how big is the scope of the project? Does it need design? How many layers does it have to go through? And so that really shapes, and it also shapes what projects I want to go after. So I’ve been really big on trying to build essentially modular systems in Webflow since we moved to Webflow. So let’s build all the building blocks so I can go run and make an interactive report after we make our first one. I can keep pulling our audience and I can keep surveying our audience, but then I’m not going to have to rely on our web team or our design team to be able to build me this from scratch.
Kay-Kay Clapp (17:58):
And that’s how we’re building out our web flow instance right now so that we can run with ideas a lot faster. But as far as who green lights, the idea, honestly, I’ve been there six months and I can’t really say there is a hard and fast system or rule in place. In addition to me being there for six months, we have new leadership, so we got a new CEO and a new CRO, and they started about three months ago, and they also kind of have a different flavor. But I think having kind of the always on motion of the use case content that kind of hits on our product and then being able to take these other bigger swings on somewhat of a consistent cadence has been really helpful in just kind of checking all of the boxes for a lot of the different stakeholders so I can make sure that’s like we’re still focused on business meeting customers where they are solving their problems, and then also starting the thought leadership with the SME interviews and then taking the bigger content swings with interactive reports and stuff like that.
Ty Magnin (18:59):
I want to bring back to your little playbook around asking your audience what do they want to hear or what could be helpful. Can you get really tactical there? For me, it sounds simple, go ask your audience, but how do you do that? Are you sending out an email? Are you posting on LinkedIn? What does that actually look like for Typeform or for you in the past?
Kay-Kay Clapp (19:19):
Yeah, it can be all of those things. So at Typeform or at app queues, I literally asked, what kind of content do you want to hear from? And I was so surprised I got back 150 responses of people, and it varies. It could be anything from, oh, they’re clearly stuck on somewhere in the product, or they want to hear more about, I don’t know, some very specific niche thing about onboarding. Like, okay, how do I do more flywheels and make my product more interesting? And so I think it really can be that simple. It’s just we don’t do it, so you can just send it out in email. I’ve had less success with LinkedIn polls. Yeah, honestly, most of it has been just coming from an email and it doesn’t have to be that deep, just ask. And that’s exactly what Emily Kramer does. She puts it in an email. I think she also throws it in her LinkedIn feed, but that’s it. And then I’ve always been so surprised at how willing people are to help and just they want to volunteer information.
Ty Magnin (20:19):
Well then in return, you’re going to help them. If I am an APCU user and want to figure out how to build some growth flywheel with the product, I might be helping you by volunteering the idea or the problem. But then assumingly, you might help me out by answering it.
Kay-Kay Clapp (20:33):
Exactly. And actually, just to go back to our SME conversation really quick, something I did at appcues was I also asked SMEs in our community for quotes in mass. So I was like, Hey, how would you solve this? Or if I had a question where I wanted a quote, I would just pose that in a type forum to the appcues newsletter and I would get back a bunch of people and I would ask different questions. And then I just had a bank of quotes that I could use throughout our content. If something was really interesting, I would ask someone to hop on the phone with me, and then that was another way that we could kind of line up more customers to talk to.
Ty Magnin (21:05):
So practical. Yeah, write that one down. It’s just like that’s something everybody could do today in order to beef up their editorial roadmap.
Kay-Kay Clapp (21:14):
Yeah.
Ty Magnin (21:15):
Nice. Tim, did you write that down?
Tim Metz (21:17):
I literally wrote it down. Yeah. Yeah, we’re going to do
Ty Magnin (21:19):
That. That’s true.
Tim Metz (21:20):
You ask it also before the podcast. It’s like, we have you coming on the podcast, what do you want to know? Things like that.
Ty Magnin (21:25):
That’s cool. Six months in what, if anything, has surprised you that’s in this category of bigger company enterprise content over your onboarding process?
Kay-Kay Clapp (21:37):
Yeah, I think I thought coming into this role, a bigger company with a bigger budget and more resources meant I would ship faster. And that has just, we’ve kind of talked about that, but that’s really not the case. There are more approvals, more layers, more stakeholders, and I just don’t think I was prepared for that. And so I think that has been really the biggest shock. Just more resources, more budget does not mean more work that’s produced.
Ty Magnin (22:07):
Yeah. What do you make of that? Is the outcome improved such as the quality of the piece, or what’s the consequence of that?
Kay-Kay Clapp (22:16):
I think having come from scrappy startups, it was a little bit challenging for me to not ship as fast, and I don’t necessarily think one is better than the other. It’s just very different. I think that creativity is bred in constraints, and when you’re in a scrappy startup, you’re kind of like, oh, I don’t have any money. We’re going to hack this thing together and it’s just going to work and you feel good about that. And I’ve really
kind of just shifted my thinking. This is also a constraint. The constraint is things are going to take longer. You have to include more people. And so I don’t necessarily know if the outcome is necessarily better or worse. It’s just different. And also audiences are different, so it’s really kind of hard to compare apples to oranges
Ty Magnin (22:59):
Fair. Are there any politics at an enterprise that you can speak to that you’ve kind of noticed? Does that feel meaningfully different?
Kay-Kay Clapp (23:08):
I have been pleasantly surprised that I haven’t had to deal with it too much yet. But again, six months in, I still kind of feel like I’m in the honeymoon period. I’m very green and excited and all of these things. I’m like, yeah, I’ll go learn this and do these things. So I don’t think I’ve had to deal with it more so than any other company yet. But if you ask me in six months, that answer might change. Yeah.
Ty Magnin (23:31):
Yeah. Okay. We’ll circle back. How are you KPId?
Kay-Kay Clapp (23:35):
This one’s interesting. So in previous roles, I’ve been a lot more performance focused because I’ve reported either to DemandGen or the VP of marketing directly and now being on the brand side of things, I think it’s different. I do think that part of the reason I was brought in was to establish more of a performance culture in content in addition to just being brand led. And so I am pushing for more revenue driven KPIs and just seeing the full effect of how content is affecting different parts of the funnel. But the other thing that I have reported on both at appcues and now that we’re kind of honing in on as our content North Star, is the idea of an owned audience. And so just looking at folks that are raising their hands saying, we want to engage with you, so when they are ready to buy, we are top of mind for them. I think owned audience is the biggest metric that we’re rallied around right now.
Ty Magnin (24:33):
Ai, are you guys using any AI or how are you thinking about it?
Kay-Kay Clapp (24:37):
Yeah, again, at previous companies, like at Appcues, AI was my best friend because it had to be because I didn’t really have anyone to help me, so I would use it
Ty Magnin (24:45):
For, because you had no other friends there to
Kay-Kay Clapp (24:47):
Go. I had no other friends. What a sad lonely life for Kay-Kay. So previously I used it to write meta descriptions brief, and I would use it as just my content partner, someone to talk to if I got lonely in the day, AI was everything for me. It was really helpful for cutting down clips, finding if we did a YouTube video, getting the transcript, just those types of things. And here, honestly, I sit in meetings for so long in my day that my biggest use of AI right now is just helping me in the briefing process. We have really big briefs that we have to create, and if I’m being honest, I don’t know. Sure. I was frustrated by that process at first because it was so different to me coming from someone who’s like, why am I going to brief this when I can just do it? Why would I spend so much time briefing it when I could just go do this myself? But knowing that there are so many people that need to be involved in something, you really got to get a good brief. If you have a good brief and everyone is aligned up front, it makes everything easier in the back half. So that’s actually my biggest use case of AR right now.
Tim Metz (25:52):
What does the AI do? Does it make the brief or does it summarize the meetings, or can you zoom in on what happens there?
Kay-Kay Clapp (25:59):
Yeah, it kind of just helps me sharpen my thinking and gives me a lot of watch outs to be like, is this clear? Is this the best way to get this point across? Sometimes it’ll help me with structure, but we have kind of a loose briefing process in place and a request process, but I’m always trying to make that better. I think once you do have a good brief, that actually helps eliminate so many of these meetings that I’m talking about in the back half of things.
Ty Magnin (26:26):
You said request process, and I’m nerdy enough about content that I want to hear about this too. This is a request of the content team’s resources on behalf of product marketing or demand gen. Is that correct? Can you tell us? Can you take us through the nuts and bolts there? If so,
Kay-Kay Clapp (26:44):
Sorry. I was actually talking about the request process that I have to go through when I need to request design resources. So that was the request process that I was talking about.
Ty Magnin (26:53):
So do you have assumingly a type form for if demand gen needs something for you, how do they come and approach you and make an ask?
Kay-Kay Clapp (27:02):
This is maybe shocking, but we actually don’t have a formal system in place at this moment.
Ty Magnin (27:07):
Cool.
Kay-Kay Clapp (27:07):
Which is I think a blessing and a curse. Kevin, my boss, has been very big on that content, shouldn’t just be a request based organization and he has put so many guardrails in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. Obviously, it is going to be some friction there if content or if demand gen needs something or if product marketing needs something, how do we negotiate that? What we’re trying to do is just zoom out, look at the bigger picture as a marketing organization, we do planning and H one, H two, and then we try to see what are the initiatives coming up, and then we kind of tackle those one by one together, making sure that we are layering them on top of each other to build more momentum and not necessarily just like we’re so siloed. And it is absolutely not perfect, but I do appreciate that, that I’m not just a request based organization, but right now I’m working on a partner ebook with our partner marketing manager, and it was an opportunity for us to get in front of an audience that was like, we’re working with Active Campaign and Calendly, and that was a great opportunity for us.
Kay-Kay Clapp (28:06):
It had business impact, and so we kind of negotiated that, negotiated resources with design and we’re bringing it to life. And so it’s launching tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Ty Magnin (28:14):
Oh, nice. Yeah, that’s exciting. Okay, so this notion’s really interesting of a request based, and I’ve called it service focused content team versus a strategic one or one that’s not, and the form is kind of the symbol of a more request based or service oriented content team versus one that’s coming up with more ideas on their own and shipping. So I guess one, thank you for that. And then of course, it earns another question. What percentage of the content that your team is producing is request based, even though you don’t have a form, it’s like informally request based versus your ideas. I call it strategic based
Kay-Kay Clapp (28:55):
70 30. 70 US 30 request based.
Ty Magnin (28:58):
All right. Scoring some big points for the content team. Nice.
Kay-Kay Clapp (29:02):
Yeah.
Ty Magnin (29:03):
Can I throw a curve ball?
Kay-Kay Clapp (29:04):
Yes.
Ty Magnin (29:05):
I look at you as a content marketer that has a really creative approach to content marketing. You don’t hire Kay-Kay to write eBooks and white papers and run the same playbook that you’ve seen at old Fangled B2B startups. You hire Kay-Kay to, I don’t know, do some Valentine’s Day card campaign or something that’s more interesting. Maybe you can help articulate this point for the audience with some examples, but I want to get to know what’s at the core of that. And pretty much, it’s probably a lot about just who you are and you have the courage to do these things, but can you help our audience just get a little inspired to think outside the box and sort of the well-trodden path of content marketing and do something more unique or differentiated or authentic to them?
Kay-Kay Clapp (29:57):
That’s not a big question at all. Let me see how I can bring the audience along. So thank you. I think I am someone who is recognized as being kind of a creative. I think it comes down to permission. You have to have someone that’ll just give you permission to take a big swing and fail. I have a lot of things in my portfolio that have not gone the way that I thought they were going to go, and that’s just kind of a part of it. And so you just spoke to a Valentine’s Day campaign. So at one point in nap queues for Valentine’s Day, we wanted to send our customers some love, and we somehow wrangled a lot of different people at the company to send seeing Valentine’s rapping. We did spoken poetry, and I think all of our feeds are just taken up by the same B2B noise especially.
Kay-Kay Clapp (30:49):
And so how do you break that? And sometimes it’s going to be cringe. I think you have to be okay with being a little bit cringe. That’s part of the job of being a creative, and that’s honestly the hardest part. You’re like, oh, man, the day that we launched that, the former director of growth at Appcues is actually the director of growth at Typeform. So we worked together in both places. We were working really closely on that, and we had this moment where we were like, is this too cringe? Are people going to hate this?
Kay-Kay Clapp (31:16):
But people really loved it. If you’re a customer, just think about being a human for two seconds. Do you really want to read an ebook? Yes. But also if you just woke up and your CSM sent you a singing Valentine, you’d be like, what? That’s so random. So cool. So yeah, just that I actually think that good process leaves room for creativity. A good process should enable creativity. And so one of the things that I talk about a lot in my team, and they’re probably sick of it, is just I have this idea that you should not ship something or you shouldn’t even execute an idea if you can’t articulate the one thing that someone should walk away with after consuming that. And if you can rally around that right at the beginning, you will have such a better time brainstorming. People will be bought into your idea, and that just makes the entire creative process a lot better.
Kay-Kay Clapp (32:14):
And that’s just been a very loose framework. And so I’m thinking about a campaign that I ran at I fixit and the biggest barrier for, so I fix, it’s all about self-repair. And the biggest barrier wasn’t necessarily technical ineptitude, but it was people just being scared. People didn’t want to open their devices because it’s scary. They think they’re going to break something. And so that was the goal I wanted. The message was repair is for everyone. We had a brainstorm, had the entire team come in. I wanted a wide variety of ideas. I told them to pull from old ad campaigns, and someone had brought, it was an old Victoria’s Secret campaign of I’m no Angel, or they wanted to represent different people and sizes, and we kind of loved that and ran with it. So I got a bunch of first time fixers to fix something for the first time on camera. And the whole idea was like, anybody could fix something. You don’t have to be a genius because Apple branded at the Genius Bar
Kay-Kay Clapp (33:08):
Fixing is for everyone. And actually when we were filming, one of the girls was like, I asked her to say, I’m no genius. And she was like, no, I am a genius. I just fixed my laptop. And she was so proud of herself. And I was like, yes, that is so much more powerful. So we shifted at the campaign. It was way more empowering. And so things like that, you just have to just open yourself to those ideas and be so, so clear at the message you want to give. And I think that is actually where you can be super creative.
Ty Magnin (33:36):
That was awesome. Thank you for sharing a little peace of your mind, peace of your heart. I do make up though, because I worked with Jackson and the leadership team at FQs as well, and having some alignment or buy-in from that exec team, it’s pretty critical to be able to be a little weird, right? Would you agree with that?
Kay-Kay Clapp (34:00):
Yes, I would.
Tim Metz (34:01):
Was it part of discussions of hiring you in this role, for example, I wonder how much of an asset is it in your career?
Kay-Kay Clapp (34:08):
Yeah, that is actually, that was one of the reasons I got hired at Appcues. I think they looked at my profile and they wanted to make a foray into YouTube. And I think in my case study interview, I talked about Taco Bell content marketing, how I like to make things and splice it up and make a lot of derivative content, but I definitely was kind of build as the creative on the team. And the same thing here. So Kevin hired me because Kevin has a B2C background, and he was like, B2B content is boring. We all think that we need to change it up. We need to take bigger swings and we need to take inspiration from a lot of different places. And so I have been very fortunate that’s every content marketer’s dream. You get to take big swings and you get to work on wild ideas. And one of the ideas that we’re working on, I can’t take credit for it, it was Kevin’s idea. And I think he was actually very much looking for a creative partner to be able to kind of execute on this type of work, but he took inspiration from reality tv. And so our campaign that we’re working on right now definitely has hallmarks of reality TV in it.
Ty Magnin (35:15):
Can’t wait to see what you put out. Yeah. This is exciting for just all the future work that’s going to come out of Typeform. I mean, I think you’ve got a great team there to do some interesting stuff. Kay-Kay, thanks for coming on. It’s great to have you. Where can people follow you?
Kay-Kay Clapp (35:30):
Fortunately, and unfortunately I’m not chronically online anymore. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m not super active there, but I will be eventually.
Ty Magnin (35:37):
Cool. Well, thanks again for coming.
Kay-Kay Clapp (35:39):
Thanks guys. This was great.
Ty Magnin (35:40):
Thanks so much, Tim. I’d had the privilege of chatting with Kay-Kay a few times now. I’m curious what your first impression was.
Tim Metz (35:47):
No, it’s great. It’s very nice. She articulates very clearly how she thinks about things. Very creative, very honest. Also, I was worried that we might see that in the future with other interviews, but that there would be things like, oh, I can’t talk about this, or I feel like, oh, it’s enterprise, it’s very buttoned up. But I thought she was very open about the culture and about how the approval processes and long meetings sometimes and things like that. So yeah, I think it was a good kind of transparent look into how things work. Yeah, a lot of cool ideas actually.
Ty Magnin (36:18):
Totally, yes. She’s got a lot of good campaigns in the hopper. I do think Typeform is interesting because they’re kind of a step further along than SMBs, but they’re not full blown public company enterprise. A lot of the guests we’re going to talk to in the season. So this was for me an interesting bridge episode. I agree. I thought that it was interesting to hear about her. I don’t think she framed it as a frustration, but she’s spending a lot more time in meetings and the importance of a brief becoming elevated versus when you’re operating at a different kind of company. So that was a good takeaway I had that I hadn’t really thought of before. And the other thing that really enlightened me was the idea of not having a request form as a content team at a larger company is quite appealing. It’s like, Hey, what if we just killed this form? What happens then? Could that let us be a little more strategic, a little bit more in control of our roadmap and therefore position less as in service to other parts of the organization?
Tim Metz (37:19):
Yeah, I think so too. And I’ve seen that discussion before somewhere as well where some people are saying, yeah, it has to have a form because otherwise it’s out of control. And some people send out a form, kills everything, all creativity and makes it bureaucracy. Yeah, and I think the form is kind of like a stereotype symbol for enterprise. So I think that’s a good one to hit on and see how others do that. I think the other thing I, we didn’t go very deep on that, but that they switch to web flow and that allows her to actually be more creative and the team and be more agile. And I think that’s also interesting to think about what can you do to empower the team or unlock yourself out of some of the disadvantages that come from being in a bigger organization where if you don’t do that, it’s like, oh, I have to get approval here, or I have to wait for this resource there and how you move things maybe close to the team so that you can keep your agility and your creativity.
Ty Magnin (38:09):
I’m also curious as we talk to companies that maybe focused a little, Typeform has kind of this PLG motion, they sell to, yes, larger companies, but also small companies. I’m curious how target market and also go to market motion has an impact on how the content team is set up, who their stakeholders are, how do they have the request form or not? Those elements,
Tim Metz (38:35):
And what she said also was interesting to maybe as a recurring theme where she was like, when I have a bigger budget and more resources, we’re actually not shipping more content. I think that’s also very interesting and actually kind of makes sense. I can totally see that, that there’s just more stuff to deal with, so things go slower and how people deal with that.
Ty Magnin (38:57):
Definitely from my experience, enterprise content is more accurate because of all the individuals touching it. So the voice and tone is looked at often by someone on content. The product messaging might have product marketing looking at it. And so for me, the outcome is like, okay, it is more accurate, which is a form of quality. One could argue, but it doesn’t mean that the thing is has a better hook and it has more polish on it. It can just mean that it’s better aligned to all these important.
Tim Metz (39:29):
I wonder how much of that can be actually, and put my AI hat on again. How much of that can eventually be sped up with AI where you just have your checks and balances in an agent or something who then it’s like, okay, it’s been checked by the agent from this department, been checked by the agent from this department so that you can get more speed. Yeah, probably some amount of it. Cool. Looking forward to the next one. Same.