“AI is a leveler for better or worse… it’s lifted new marketers up, but it’s pushed the bar even higher for the good ones.” In this episode, you’ll learn from Kirti Sharma why trying to make content “for everyone” is a mistake. You’ll also see what it takes to stand out when AI is everywhere.
Kirti Sharma runs marketing for Adobe Learning Manager and Captivate and brings twenty years of experience in B2B SaaS. She blends product marketing with day-to-day content work and starts every plan with clear positioning, not channels. Kirti’s playbook relies on original, first-party research. She sees this as the only way to create content that AI can’t copy and that real buyers will reference.
Kirti’s team applies a two-tier system: Use AI tools like Copilot and Firefly to speed up drafts and design for lower-priority content, and keep high-impact thought leadership human-led. She also points out a shift in how teams measure content. Instead of focusing only on keyword rankings, look at “soft signals” like brand mentions in large language models, event engagement, and influencer conversations. When those signals spark, you’ll know your story landed.
About Our Guest: Kirti Sharma
Kirti Sharma is Director of Product Marketing for Adobe Learning Manager and Captivate. She leads product, demand, and content marketing for a 250-person business unit at Adobe.
Before joining Adobe, Kirti created a scalable content strategy that helped Whatfix win early SEO. At Sprinklr, she built and led a 25-person content and design team serving a global SaaS company.
Kirti is known for combining SEO with thought leadership. She rejects the idea that these are separate tracks. Every content initiative ties back to business impact, from product adoption to customer retention. Her hands-on leadership with AI, modular content, and cross-functional workflows at Adobe gives her an inside view of how the enterprise content engine works and how to make it better for scale, relevance, and results.
Insights and Quotes From This Episode
Kirti’s conversation gives you an honest look at how the enterprise content engine is changing. She covers product marketing insights, the realities of AI, SEO, and the need for real personalization. Here are the most practical takeaways and memorable quotes from the episode:
“Product marketing insights can be your sixth sense for your product.” (13:35)
Kirti treats research like a compass, not a report. Last year, she surveyed 2,000 US and EU managers to learn why digital learning stalls. The answers rewired her roadmap, shaped a new benchmark study, and fueled every talk track her team pushed to market. Follow that lead: run your own survey, mine the gaps, then let that “sixth sense” steer product, content, and events before you touch channel plans.
“Our view of technology is biased… we assume tech adoption is standard across industries, it’s not.” (17:06)
She has seen factories still rely on paper logs while SaaS startups live in Slack. That gap kills relevance. Kirti now audits each industry’s real digital habits before a single headline is written — sometimes swapping “AI-powered” for “mobile-ready” when speaking to field teams. Do the same homework, and your copy will feel like it was written inside your reader’s office, not from a tech bubble.
“At Whatfix it was a classic example of getting that early SEO advantage… even today if you search, Whatfix is still among the top three.” (19:55)
Back in 2016, her team published ten laser-focused guides around “Salesforce walkthrough” and similar high-intent terms. The pages still rank and feed pipeline years later, proving that one tight keyword cluster, done well, can compound long after budgets move on. Pick a niche, answer it better than anyone else, and let search engines keep paying you.
“Content is getting stretched on both ends… the very top end is borderline entertainment and the very low end has to be powered by your unique insights.” (26:43)
Kirti sees a barbell. TikTok-style shorts win attention up top; heavyweight research wins trust down low. The mid-funnel listicle gets swallowed by AI answers. Her team now pairs playful reels with 50-page benchmark reports, skipping the mushy middle entirely. If your calendar still churns out “10 tips” blogs, expect to be squeezed.
“You will always hear people saying, ‘We need to grow brand awareness,’ but when it comes to making those bets, we hesitate.” (28:28)
Everyone cheers for brand awareness until the financial sheet lands on the table. Kirti locks funds early and tracks softer signals, e.g., LLM citations, analyst shout-outs, and live-event chatter, to prove momentum before revenue lags catch up. Her message is either budget small but steady brand plays each quarter, or keep buying demand at full price forever.
“AI is a leveler for better or worse… it has easily brought new marketers here, but for the marketers that were already here the bar is even higher.” (31:44)
Kirti sees generative AI as both helpful and challenging. Junior hires now spin a draft in minutes. To stay ahead, senior marketers must shift from typing fast to thinking fresh — bringing new data, sharper positioning, and ideas AI can’t predict. Coasting means parity; inventing means edge.
“Think of content in two tiers… Tier 2 you can draft with Copilot; Tier 1 has to be more human-involved.” (32:35)
Kirti shares a simple way to use AI. Copilot handles low-stakes, repeatable content like FAQs, meeting notes, and emails. Humans own high-impact, strategic pieces like vision decks, analyst briefs, and the research report’s first 500 words. This lets you scale your team’s work without losing quality where it matters most.
“If your learning is meant for everyone, it’s meant for no one.” (35:21)
Generic training dies fast. Adobe Learning Manager now tags every course by role, region, and skill gap so each learner’s dashboard feels handpicked. Kirti’s advice is simple: carve a clear audience slice, speak to it by name, and watch completion and retention climb.
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
Adobe Learning Manager (13:07): The enterprise learning management system that Kirti markets, central to Adobe’s B2B training platform strategy.
Adobe Captivate (17:50): Content-creation tool paired with Learning Manager, enabling the development of interactive learning experiences.
Whatfix (13:07): Digital adoption platform where Kirti was the first Product Marketer and Head of Content. Discussed as a case study in early-stage SEO and category creation.
Sprinklr (10:05): US-listed social-listening SaaS where Kirti built a 25-person India-based content organization focused on global content operations.
Freshworks (07:18–07:25): Indian SaaS unicorn where Kirti previously worked in marketing, providing early exposure to enterprise content marketing.
WalkMe (17:25): Incumbent digital adoption vendor mentioned for category context and competitive landscape insights.
Microsoft Copilot (11:48): Generative-AI tool used for first-draft writing and research in enterprise content workflows.
Adobe Firefly (41:54): Generative-image tool used by the team for creative prototypes and visual content experimentation.
Rand Fishkin (07:18): Industry thought leader whom Kirti follows closely on LinkedIn for insights on content, SEO, and marketing trends.
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity (07:22): Non-business book currently influencing Kirti’s thinking on longevity and “health-span.”
G2 & Software Advice (29:15): Review sites that Kirti monitors to gather brand perception signals and customer feedback.
Scrunch (38:52): AI search-visibility tool Ty recommends for tracking Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) placement.
peak.ai (39:25): Another tool mentioned for monitoring LLM (large language model) visibility and AI-driven search performance.
Gartner (12:19): Analyst firm whose relations team remained US-based while Kirti ran Sprinklr’s India content organization.
Follow Kirti Sharma on LinkedIn.
Full Episode Transcript
Kirti Sharma [00:00:00]:
I think AI is a leveler, for better or worse, right? Marketers that were here, AI has easily brought them here. But for the marketers that were already here, the bar is even higher, right? So you’re a new marketer, you don’t know the space. You have a lot of tools thanks to, you know, these LLMs to really level up your game, right? But it has become so much harder for good marketers because the bar is now higher for them.
Ty Magnin [00:00:24]:
Welcome to the Animals Podcast. I’m Ty Magnan. And I’m Tim S. This season on the Animals 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. Hear from content leaders of some of the biggest names in SaaS sharing the systems they built, the battles they fought, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. Today we’re chatting with Kurtis Sharma. She’s the director of Product marketing at Adobe. Before this, she worked at sprinklr, where she led a large content team.
Ty Magnin [00:00:57]:
She’s also run product marketing, then content at what fix? Also SignEasy. Today we chat about how Curti’s background in product marketing has informed the way she does content marketing. We talked about the differences between startup and an enterprise pretty directly, and we got a sense for how they’re using AI at Adobe within her organization to help accelerate content production. It’s a great episode. I think there are some interesting points that you all will enjoy as you continue on your journey learning about enterprise content marketing machines with us. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kirti Sharma. Welcome, Kurti. Thanks for joining us today.
Ty Magnin [00:01:40]:
We’d love if you could give an intro to our audience for those that don’t know you. And of course we always ask our guests, what content are you consuming lately.
Keerti Sharma [00:01:49]:
All right. I’m Keerti. I head marketing for Adobe Learning Manager, one of Adobe’s products in digital learning space. I’ve been in B2B tech for nearly 20 years now. Worked with brands like what Faith, Sprinklr, Freshworks, and now Adobe. What content I’m consuming these days? I’m reading a book. So my books are typically not businessy books, they’re books which are escapes from work. So I’m reading a book called Outlive, which is really, I think, not a suited title because the person, it’s written by a doctor and he talks about healthspan rather than lifespan.
Keerti Sharma [00:02:25]:
And very, very interesting deep dives into several aspects of health in there and on LinkedIn I’m, you know, really religiously following what Rand Fishkin is up to. He’s really, you know, out there thinking far out ahead of anyone else, very, you know, whip sharp. So that’s that, that’s the person I’m pursuing following on LinkedIn.
Ty Magnin [00:02:47]:
I’m curious to ask something cultural if I may, because you’ve been a part of some of the biggest brands in my perception, the biggest brands that have come out of India, you know, B2B SaaS wise, right? What fix Freshworks? What does it take culturally to break through as an Indian software company into the like US global market, you know, brand wise?
Keerti Sharma [00:03:12]:
That’s an amazing question. So I think business wise, what I have seen these companies do in a non negotiable way is that really strong customer focus. And in many of these companies I’ve seen the CEO align all the teams, right. So their mantra is that customer satisfaction, customer happiness is not only seen sales job or not only customer success job, it’s everyone’s job. So I think that is also sort of overcompensating because for any B2B SaaS company, you’re selling majorly to US customers and that distance, that physical cultural distance is the thing, right? So you need to sort of overcompensate in that way by assuring customers constantly that we are here for you and we know what you’re doing. So that, that would be the biggest, biggest thing that is true for freshworks. What fix all of these other companies.
Ty Magnin [00:04:10]:
Awesome. And how does that trickle down into content? Like how does that approach inform your process?
Keerti Sharma [00:04:18]:
I was going going to get into that type, but very interesting question because I have been in a unique situation. So in sprinklr, I was hired to head content marketing and I think I may not say that it’s the first time something like this happened, but it is very rare for a US publicly listed company to have a content team that’s headed out of India. Right? And it was a big challenge because there is language nuance when it comes to India versus us. It is not our native language. Right. So there was a lot of apprehension. First of all, there was a decision to build this content team out of India, 25 people big and designers and content marketers out of India. But then there was a lot of naysayers as well who were constantly on the lookout as where are they going to falter? The Indian English is going to jump out of the content.
Keerti Sharma [00:05:12]:
Right. So that was interesting. It was stressful, right? But I took that as a challenge and I Said what are the common pitfalls? Where you know that Indian English is going to jump out in the content. So, and it, it is true. It is a thing like in, in the way we could form sentences sometimes in grammar, right. Sometimes the, our native language jumps out of the way we create sentences in English. Right. So I, I, I got hold of, you know, what are the common pitfalls and I trained the team entirely on it.
Keerti Sharma [00:05:45]:
I hired two very ruthless, very relentless editors and I did a lot of editing myself. So I think we were sorted. And then back in 2023, ChatGPT came along and that was a huge help for us. You know, if we did for writing it said, please edit this for us, for American English. And that really helped us. So I think that that’s a big cultural nuance.
Tim Metz [00:06:09]:
I would also think there’s like, operationally it also seems like quite a challenge probably, right? Like not just the language, but also like being completely so far away from each other. Like, were there other operational challenges that you had to, had to solve to make that work?
Keerti Sharma [00:06:24]:
Yes, I think a lot of these people like influencers that they were trying to work through. A lot of the analysts that we worked with, for example, for Gartner, all of these people, they were in the U.S. right? So there was a limitation in physical distance, but that wasn’t a huge thing because we did have people who were aligned to amnest relations, who were aligned to brand, to communication departments that were still in the US So I wouldn’t say there was yeah, much else.
Tim Metz [00:06:52]:
Great. Should we get into Adobe?
Ty Magnin [00:06:53]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bringing it up to present day, tell us more about your role at Adobe. Um, you have a product marketing title which is a little different for you. What have you been doing? Where do you sit in the organization? Help give the audience some context there.
Keerti Sharma [00:07:08]:
Sure, sure. So I in fact started out in product marketing ties. So in fact my switch to content marketing happened in what Fix? When I was in 2015, 16, can’t believe it’s been 10 years. And I was hired as a first product marketer there. Basically, you know the space. Right. It was digital adoption. Software was an upand cominging category, but it was already crowded.
Keerti Sharma [00:07:36]:
What Fix was an early entrant, but there were many, many small players and just one big player, I think. So there was a lot of many vendors making many different kinds of claims. Right. So what Fix realized earlier on that we need to put a stick in the ground and say this is our strength, this is our niche and this is where we are unbeatable. And they needed a product marketing person to do that. So I was hired to look into where are we winning consistently, where are we delivering undeniable value, right. And then make sure that everything we do is aligned to that. In sales, in marketing, in customer success, in partnerships.
Keerti Sharma [00:08:15]:
Right. So that is where it started. So as you can imagine, content is a very important part of that, right? So once you have your messaging, your positioning, it needs to reflect in everything. So that’s when I started getting a little bit more involved in content. And gradually the CEO asked me to, he said, you know, everything should have your eyes on it before it goes out, anything critical. And then just one day he asked me if I would like to get more, you know, fully involved in content. So I was nervous about that for a day. I thought about it and then I said yes, because it’s, it’s a good opportunity.
Keerti Sharma [00:08:49]:
And I’ve done that a few times in my career where I’ve said, okay, this is an adjacent function. It’s clear in my head what skill I could apply in what way to help elevate this team, right? Sometimes it’s fallen flat, sometimes it’s worked out. This was an example of it working out. I think the rule is when you go in, you have to be very clear about what value you are bringing into this adjacent function, right? And you have to be very clear on what you’re going to deliver because you’re going into an unknown space and you don’t know what it is going to be like and you may minimize the challenges in your mind. So it’s very important to yourself and your managers to say, this is what I’m joining the team for and this is how I will help. So that was it. And then the. I think the most amazing thing that I remember about this transition is I did a cold outreach back then to some of the very well known people in the space of content.
Keerti Sharma [00:09:45]:
You know, their companies stood out in the kind of content they’re doing. I did a cold outreach to them and I said, I want to learn. And I can’t believe so many people, you know, offered to speak to me. I spoke to quite a few of them. I said, I want to learn from your experience. Unrelated industries, of course. That’s why I didn’t reach out to you, Ty. But they willingly gave 30 minutes to talk about how they went about thinking about content.
Keerti Sharma [00:10:08]:
What are the do’s and don’ts, what is the model? You know, how big a team do you need, when to outsource, when to not Outsource. So that’s, that’s how that transition happened.
Ty Magnin [00:10:18]:
Interesting. Well, it sounds like two things went really right there for you guys. I mean, first it was, you know, what Fix. So okay, for context, I worked at AppCues for a long while, which was also in the digital adoption platform space, kind of like physician a little differently. What Fix came in and really like went in a direction which was like all in on digital adoption and grew rapidly from kind of like the point on where they kind of went like when they chose digital adoption beyond what AppCues did at the time. A lot of success came from that positioning, I think, or at least that’s my interpretation. There was a sort of incumbent WalkMe which like publicly traded, you know, doing really well and like, you know what Fix has kind of caught up to them or is catching up to them still. So that was big.
Ty Magnin [00:11:06]:
And then content became a huge growth lever for you all. Like that was the growth engine, at least from the outside, as I understood it. Absolutely impressive to see those two things come together. We didn’t get to Adobe yet. So I do want to hear still like about what you’re up to.
Keerti Sharma [00:11:23]:
Yes. So I had marketing there for this platform called Adobe Learning Manager and Captivate, which is a content creation tool. So I had a team that does not just product marketing really, it’s demand plus product marketing. So it’s content, events and of course growth in Adobe as a product. We are in a very unique situation because of course everyone knows Adobe for the creative suite of solutions, Photoshop, Illustrators and whatnot and Firefly. Now they know it for, you know, the B2B side of things, which is Marketo AM sites and so on. But there is not so much awareness about a learning management platform that Adobe has and understandably so it’s a new product, you know, that’s, that’s just, you know, come out in the market eight to nine years ago. So the problem is unique because I want to be able to extend that Adobe’s brand association to learning management systems.
Keerti Sharma [00:12:20]:
Right. And that’s where product marketing and a mix of content marketing becomes very important. Why? Because LMS is a very beaten to death space. It has existed forever. It’s not a new category and hence it’s pretty commoditized and it’s so difficult to stand out here. So that’s. So the kind of things that we’re doing here is you will often see me asking my team questions like what is the positioning for this event? Right. So earlier on they were scratching their Heads and maybe hating me for asking such questions.
Keerti Sharma [00:12:51]:
But the point is people have 100 events to go to. Why should they come to our event, Right? So everything needs to be determined from the way you are envisioning the product at the top. I’ll give you a content example. What I want to talk about is the advantage that comes from bringing your product marketing insights into your content engine. Meaning there’s no dearth of content, right? To be honest, even before Genai came into picture, there was a lot of content everywhere. It was all about the doing that one SEO hack and trying to displace your competitors from the rankings. So we’ve all done that. Yes, we’ve all done that.
Keerti Sharma [00:13:29]:
So there was no dearth of me to content. It’s about standing out in that crowd. And I think that product marketing insights can be your sixth sense for your product. And I’ll tell you how. So for example, last year we decided we need to do original firsthand research, right? Because everything else ChatGPT can answer for you, copilot can answer for you, right? What it cannot answer is, what it cannot DO is survey 2,000 people in the US in, in, in Europe and surface insights, things that they are themselves telling us, right? So there were different directions we could take obviously. But I, I wanted to achieve two goals with it. One is really figure out what our target audience is thinking about right now. What do they want to know more about? And second is while we’re at it, let’s learn something that can then also bubble up into the product, right? What are the insights we can get that can become as a set of capabilities or features into the product? And as we thought about it, as I researched it more with the Genai wave, there was a lot of AI anxiety in people, right? And these LLD decision makers for us, you know, learning and development, corporate training heads, they wanted to understand what’s going on in our learners heads, where is their headspace at? And the other thing is, it’s a very well known problem that all of these learning platforms, learners only come to them when they are mandated to finish a compliance training.
Keerti Sharma [00:14:59]:
They do not necessarily come out of their own will to these learning platforms because they’d much rather prefer a YouTube. And now, you know, LLMs, that is where we said okay, this makes sense. Also there was a wide gap when I, when I looked at the existing studies in the market concerning learning and development. There was a lot of studies on challenges of L and D leaders. You know, how do you spend your budgets? What are you trying to fix, etc. But there was no learner’s viewpoint, at least not to that, that depth. So that’s the study we undertook. We engaged in agency, they did a fantastic job and we asked what do learners want? Very simple, you know, what are your learners not telling you? And that research landed very well in the age of Genai, I think by sheer downloads numbers, it did very well.
Keerti Sharma [00:15:46]:
It has been a great conversation starter for us in discussions. It has been a great key asset in roundtable discussions that we do where we bring about L and D leaders and talk about what’s top of mind for you. So I think marrying these two, your product marketing insights with your content marketing strategy is, is I think that’s where success is.
Tim Metz [00:16:10]:
Right now I would like to zoom in a bit on the product marketing part because I find it really fascinating, like I hear you say, positioning and kind of really understanding the mind of your customer. Like are there other things that you take from your product marketing experience that you find that content marketers often overlook or don’t think about? Like what are other important things, principles, let’s say for product marketing that content marketers should think about.
Keerti Sharma [00:16:37]:
So yes, there are different flavors of content that you could be doing. So just about last year we were running a series of roundtables that where, which were very industry centric. All right. So we wanted to do a roundtable where we bring in decision makers from let’s say tech and then from manufacturing and then from healthcare and then from bfsi. And this is actually a project that we execute executed. So here we are from tech. Right. And I think Ty, you would have experienced it yourself.
Keerti Sharma [00:17:06]:
Our view of technology is always biased. We somehow always assume that the tech savvy or tech adoption is standard across industries. Right. So many times when you’re trying to cater to these other not tech heavy industries like manufacturing, HCP and all, we need to take a step back and see we’re saying all of these buzzwords. But are they really mainstream for these people? Right. Is it equally mainstream for another industry? So, and that is where I used ChatGPT a lot and asked actually Copilot, we use Copilot in Adobe a lot. And I asked ChatGPT, this is a roundtable topic that I’m thinking for a manufacturing audience, do you think this is going to resonate? Right. And how do you make it resonate? Assuming it is a training manager who is responsible for the training of factory staff.
Keerti Sharma [00:17:58]:
Right. You know, the manufacturing plant. And this kind of output that came was interesting to me. Because one is, of course, it validated what I was thinking. Right. We’re saying all of these buzzwords like microlearning, learning the flow of work and they’re like, they may pretend that, yeah, it makes absolute sense, but it is not so mainstream for them. So we have to go to where their comfort is with technology and its understanding and its use and talk at that level. So those things are very, very critical because if we are not talking that language, we’re alienating them.
Keerti Sharma [00:18:29]:
All of that effort for nothing.
Tim Metz [00:18:31]:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Ty Magnin [00:18:32]:
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. Yeah, I wanted to ask about, you know, we’re kind of talking back at your what fixed experience and some more startup experience that you’ve had. What’s the main difference for you in running content or product marketing programs at startups versus at Adobe, which is like gigantic. I mean, how many employees are in Adobe too, just for scale as a.
Keerti Sharma [00:19:29]:
Company, there’s 20,000 or so employees.
Ty Magnin [00:19:32]:
Crazy. And then how many are focused on the Adobe Learning Manager solution?
Keerti Sharma [00:19:39]:
Yeah. As a business unit, it’s to the tune of 250, 50 to 100 employees.
Ty Magnin [00:19:44]:
Yeah, okay.
Keerti Sharma [00:19:44]:
Yeah, okay. Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:19:45]:
But still, startups versus enterprise, how do you see the differences?
Keerti Sharma [00:19:49]:
It is wildly different, Wildly, wildly different. Especially when it comes to content. So for example, at what fix, you know, it was a classic example of getting that early SEO advantage, right? So starting with long tail keywords, putting out content there, gradually building authority, and then, you know, chasing those commercial keywords like salesforce, adoption, workday adoption, HRMs adoption and things like that. Even when you go there today, you know, and you know, even if you do a Google search now, what fix is still amongst the top three? And the credit is entirely to the team. Very simple, very straightforward. That in Adobe it is very, very different. And I give this example always, whenever I’m not so happy with the processes that in sprinklr, you know, when I was heading content just before Adobe, I would be like, I simply had to send a Slack message to the designer with the copy and they would send me the, you know, the design link back. All right.
Keerti Sharma [00:20:49]:
And then I just had to review that and I had to send it on Slack to the web developer and they’ll just get it done, right? Adobe, of course different for all the good reasons, right. It’s one of the most well known, well loved brands in the world. A huge brand equity to, you know, sustainability. So but there’s a lot of processes. There’s, there’s a intake process, there’s a system to intake web web requests. A lot of different teams get involved and there’s a copywriting team, there’s a studio team. So it is a lot of planning ahead and of course it’s worth everything because the output is exponentially better visually and copywise. It’s amazing.
Keerti Sharma [00:21:30]:
But I think where the problem is, where it becomes a problem for me particularly is we are trying to apply the same strategy to all different products, right? So these giant companies are always multi product companies and not all products are at the same stage of their growth, right? So something that works for a very mature product will obviously not work for a small product. In that case, it becomes a lot about, you know, creating a solid business case for saying this is why we want to do this. Right? And there are of course many times when you don’t have the time to do that where you say, okay, I have to choose my battles and you take a different route on a more flexible channel or a more creative channel. So for example, right now we are doing a lot of content on YouTube. We are trying a lot of things on social media. So we said we are going to, you know, change tracks for certain things and try to grow up, rank that. So that’s one thing. But for what it’s worth, the content game is changing as well.
Keerti Sharma [00:22:31]:
Ty and I think you would agree there’s a lot of non SEO things that have become important and these things were important in the past as well, but now they are just disproportionately important things like what are your customers saying about you, what are your reviews on G2 on software advice looking like? Right. What are influencers saying about you? How much exposure are you giving to your brand on, you know, podcasts like these, right? So all of these things that you don’t control, which I think it essentially boils down to what are others saying about you? I think that has become a lot more important with all of these LLMs coming in. You know, all of these buzzwords like generative engine optimization Uncertain optimization. If I’m right about that, very early to.
Ty Magnin [00:23:19]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keerti Sharma [00:23:19]:
So very early to. Very early to say what’s how it’s going to land, but I think it’s time to change tracks anyways.
Ty Magnin [00:23:27]:
Yeah, totally with you on that. Be curious if you guys are doing anything around this, but. But I also know you’ve built teams where SEO and thought leadership are together. Like a lot of organizations, especially like Adobe scale teams tend to separate out SEO and thought leadership. But I believe you have this philosophy that they should live together. Why is that?
Keerti Sharma [00:23:52]:
So I’ll give you another example maybe of Sprinklr, right? So sprinklr has one product, really, which is the bread and butter in the. So four different products in that space, which is in the game of social listening, right. What are people saying about you? One of these different platforms, how do you bring in that unstructured data and put it it inside, put it into insights that your marketers can use. So sprinklr has always been a very outbound heavy company, right. So it’s a bit counterintuitive because a lot of the other companies that I worked at, like freshworks, they start with SMB and then they grow onto, they try to grow upstreams into bigger companies. Sprinklr on the other hand, started with Outbound and most of their customers were Fortune 500 companies, right. So there was no really a need for a very strong content engine. But that had to change if they had to continue growing.
Keerti Sharma [00:24:51]:
Right. And that’s where content became important. I think what I did there was we didn’t chase, I didn’t ask the team to apply any SEO hacks and try to serve up in the rankings, but I asked the team to do is just pour our knowledge of the space and create content that will people will find helpful. So the goal was when people look for social listening, how to view and measure your brand equity, how to do social media monitoring, brand crisis management, all of these keywords, you know, these are rightfully owned by sprinklr because it is so far and out ahead of some of the other products that are out there. You know, at least when it comes to serving up the needs of enterprises with businesses in 160 countries, you know, at that scale. So that is what I did. And once you do that, I think once you mix, pour your knowledge of the industry and also, you know, do the paired bonds checklist of SEO, it it helps.
Tim Metz [00:25:47]:
Do you see that changing or do you think that still, that philosophy still holds now that we get more answers to LLMs and other channels.
Keerti Sharma [00:25:55]:
I think it’s even more important now, Tim, because for all the informational queries, you know, LLMs are out there. Like I’ll give you an example. My, I wanted to tell my son about global warming, so I asked him to do a search on ChatGPT, ask it what is global warming? He got an answer, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to him at his age. So I asked him to prompt ChatGPT and say, what is global warming? Explain it to a 10 year old. And the answer was glorious. It said things like imagine Earth is covered by a blanket and that blanket is made up of carbon dioxide which comes from, know your cars and you know, trees felling and things like that. And that blanket is getting thicker. So it’s definitely far ahead out of us, you know, far ahead of us in answering these informational queries.
Keerti Sharma [00:26:42]:
I think content is getting stretched on both ends. And what I mean by that is on the very top end, right where it used to be awareness content, it is almost entertainment content now. Right? And your previous guest hiker, she’s doing such a wonderful job of it crystallizing all of that know how into entertaining videos and just growing her brand and Microsoft’s brand through that. Right? So on the one hand there, there is that change and on the last end which is, you know, we what which we call bottom of the funnel content there, it has become more about what is so unique about your product, right? That, that is more technical, more product specific, value specific, problem solving kind of content. So I think these two ends will remain relevant. You know, the very top end, which is borderline entertainment and the very low end which has to be powered by, you know, your unique insights of the space, which I believe is thought leadership content.
Ty Magnin [00:27:41]:
How do you think about measuring content in this new environment where people are doing, you know, these different levels of content? AEO I, I think is going to drive even fewer clicks. So people are gonna come maybe still to your website, but via direct, less so via organic search clicks. You know, I guess one, just like, yeah, how are you, how are you measuring content performance today? And two, do you see any changes in how that goes?
Keerti Sharma [00:28:10]:
I think that’s a very difficult question. Ty. See, the impact of content was always difficult to pinpoint. You know, we have all of these tools, but ultimately what has it led to? Right? And the funny thing is in any company, you know, as in a startup or in a big company, you will always hear people telling you we need to grow our brand awareness. Right. But when it comes to making those bets, we always hesitate, right? Because we know that any dollars that go into creating awareness are not going to show up in a one year horizon, in a two year horizon even maybe. So that’s a really difficult question to answer. But I think for now we’re relying on a lot of, apart from whatever the tools like ahrefs are telling us, what we’re relying on are soft signals.
Keerti Sharma [00:29:00]:
We’re going to an event, are we seeing more proactive footfalls on our booth? So for instance, how are we tracking on social media? How are people engaging with the content that we are doing? So these are really the soft signals. And of course we’re actively tracking how we’re doing on AIO views on Google. And there are other things that we’re trying to fix. For example, how are we featuring in LLMs? Right. Every now and then we’ll go and ask, you know, chatgpt question on the best learning management systems and things like that. And I think what I’m learning about the space is that it has become a lot about two, three things, right? It has become a lot about having consistent mentions of your brand, meaning whenever a mention of your product comes, what is it in context of? So for example, in case of learning management, Adobe Learning Manager, the product that I’m responsible for, I wanted to always say it is an experience led platform that, you know, helps learners and administrators create more engaging learning experiences, something like that, right? So it’s a lot about having those consistent mentions. The second thing, it’s about having stuff out there about what customers are saying. So for example, any case studies that you’re putting out, you know, and case studies are big in B2B SaaS.
Keerti Sharma [00:30:17]:
Any, any mentions that are happening in case studies, they have to talk about the same benefits, they have to go the extra length and quantify those benefits. These are the ways in, in which it is changing. And I can’t claim that, you know, I know what to measure right now. Right. Except you know, those hearsay things of are we getting better at these things?
Ty Magnin [00:30:37]:
I might encourage you to check out a couple tools around AI search visibility. We’re using scrunch, we’ve just standardized or started to standardize on that. There’s so many and maybe you’ve played around with some, but it kind of takes it from like manually querying, you know, to see how you’re showing up to having some sort of automated process that’s querying every couple days or every day and then you can Get a sense for how often you’re showing up there for different queries over time.
Keerti Sharma [00:31:09]:
Sure, sure. I’ve heard a couple of tools like that. I think peak AI is another one where you can keep a track on how we’re improving. I guess there’s no recommendations on what you could be doing actively to improve.
Ty Magnin [00:31:22]:
Yeah, yeah, it definitely starts to open up that door too. Into like. All right, well, how should this inform the roadmap of content we create?
Tim Metz [00:31:29]:
We’re getting to the AI topic, so I’m getting excited. How are you currently using AI with your team? What other tools and things are you applying?
Keerti Sharma [00:31:38]:
Yes, yes, that’s the most important question. I think AI is a leveler, for better or worse, Right. What that basically means is for marketers that were here, AI has easily brought them here, Right? But for the marketers that were already here, the bar is room higher. Right. So you’re a new marketer, you don’t know the space. You have a lot of tools thanks to, you know, these LLMs to really level up your game. Right. But it has become so much harder for good marketers because the bar is now higher for them.
Keerti Sharma [00:32:11]:
So I think the way we are thinking about AI in my team is what are the gaps and can AI come in and plug those gaps for us in a reasonable way? Right. So one, for example, one is of course always content velocity. Right. What are the things that we want to do more of but have not had the bandwidth? So that’s one in terms of, for example, copywriting. And I’ve said to the team, think of content in two tiers, Tier 1 and Tier 2. Tier 1 content is go ahead and draft it out with copilot, do a human editing, and that’s about it. Right. So there are tier 2 content areas, like webinar follow throughs.
Keerti Sharma [00:32:49]:
Right? You did a webinar, you want to send them a recording of it. That’s the tier 2 content. But then there’s tier 1 content, which has to be more human involved. So there again, I asked people to create a first draft, and then I have a designated editor on the team who basically humanizes that content. And I hate that word, but I don’t have a better word for it. So basically making it resonate more, putting in our human emotions and making sure that it stands out. Right? Because ChatGPT is here, you know, Copilot is here, but we want our content to be here. So with that, we use a lot of that.
Keerti Sharma [00:33:26]:
The other gap that we had was on the creative side coming up with good creatives takes a lot of time. And with the agency that we work with, it’s always an iterative process. We communicate to them what we want and it’s a few iterations. So there as well. I’ve asked the team to use Firefly a lot more to create prototypes, to put what is in their head to put it into that tool and create something which then becomes a very solid jumping off point for the agency. So that has really, you know, made our process faster. Another way is deep research. Really.
Keerti Sharma [00:34:05]:
And you’d be surprised the kind of research, you know, copilot can do. If you give it a topic good enough problem statement, it can generate a proper report. And, you know, that again becomes a jumping off point for you. Let’s say you’re thinking about what are the agentic AI capabilities that I can build out in my lms, right? You give it that prompt, it’ll ask you a few questions. And that draft that comes out is pretty sound, right? It’s. It is. It really, you know, summarizes whatever how everyone else is thinking about agentic, for example.
Tim Metz [00:34:35]:
Yeah, it’s pretty amazing, the capabilities of the deep research. Ty, what did you want to ask?
Ty Magnin [00:34:41]:
Yeah, the Firefly example, are the use cases for that. Like, are you doing infographic ideation with that or is it more about illustration? I. I just, I guess I’ve been imagining in my head that Firefly was more for like I kind of attach it to like Photoshop and Illustrator and like these beautiful images. But actually you could probably use it for simple like prototyping.
Keerti Sharma [00:35:03]:
Yes, yes.
Ty Magnin [00:35:05]:
Interesting. Is that prototype. So give us an example of what do you mean by prototyping?
Keerti Sharma [00:35:09]:
Let’s say we’re doing the report that we talked about earlier, right? So, for example, we’re talking about that report and we want to do a promotional banner on LinkedIn for that ad, right? We have a central idea that if your learning is meant for everyone, it’s meant for no one. So basically the concept is that it needs to be personalized, right? So that is the idea. And then there’ll be a certain way in which we would be thinking about that concept, right? So we would just give it a few prompts and say create the visual of a crowd where, you know, everybody else is in white and this silhouette of one person is in pink and show me what that looks like. Right? So that then becomes a concept, sort of a mood board for us that we can then relate to the agency that. Can you think of variants of this concept? Right. So that Saves us a lot of time.
Ty Magnin [00:36:00]:
Yeah, that’s great. It’s really interesting. And a good little Adobe plug too for one of your sister products. Listen, while we have you, you have been a customer of Animals a few different times. So at what fix and at SignEasy I don’t think I’m missing any but at least there, if you don’t mind, what was your experience like working with animals?
Keerti Sharma [00:36:21]:
Definitely very happy to talk about that. It’s been a few years and Animals as an agency is. It stands out from the others because all of the four or five people that I worked with, you know, in Animals in the past, they always knew their stuff. They were very, very technically sound when it came to SEO. They were very, very lucid when it came to writing and they had very good research. You guys had very good research when it came to thought leadership content. So I think, you know, Animals always over delivered and I think that is your strength. Right.
Keerti Sharma [00:36:56]:
B2B SaaS is where you particularly excel and I think AppCustai you were saying earlier was, was a client as well and that shone through. Right when I was at what fixed. We were constantly on your website, on your blog because the website was beautiful by the way and the blog was exceptional because you literally own that space of user onboarding and we were like they really know their stuff. And this is where we have to get to when it comes to thought leadership and lucidity in our writing.
Ty Magnin [00:37:28]:
Thanks for saying that and sharing it.
Keerti Sharma [00:37:30]:
Yep.
Ty Magnin [00:37:31]:
Where can people stay in touch with you? Follow along. Are you active on LinkedIn or any other social platforms?
Keerti Sharma [00:37:37]:
Yes, pretty active on LinkedIn. If anybody wants to connect, I’m there on LinkedIn.
Tim Metz [00:37:42]:
And where specifically if you want to find the content that you’re putting out or some of the work you’re doing for Adobe Learning, where should they check that out?
Keerti Sharma [00:37:52]:
We have a LinkedIn page specifically for Learning Manager. I’ll be happy to share that link with you as well.
Ty Magnin [00:37:57]:
Okay, awesome, that’s great. Thanks so much for joining us.
Keerti Sharma [00:38:00]:
Thank you.
Ty Magnin [00:38:01]:
Tim?
Tim Metz [00:38:01]:
Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:38:02]:
What were your takeaways from today?
Tim Metz [00:38:04]:
I really think and I had this on my mind for a while. I think we’ve talked about it before because it come up maybe with Heike or with somebody else, I can’t remember which one of the previous guests but like this idea that product market, that content marketers just think more like a product marketer and I felt like in talking to Keith that she actually really is almost the opposite. Like I felt the whole time she, she’s thinking like A product marketer, because almost in many of her answers, that idea came back of like, what is our positioning? Like, what’s, what’s, you know, what’s the message we’re trying to bring across here? How are we positioning against the other product? What is really. What’s the target audience really cares about? Like, what’s the problem that they have? What are the benefits? Right. So, I mean, it’s kind of like you kind of know these things, but I think as a content marketer, it’s easy to kind of forget it. And I felt in several of her answers that came back, so she really has that mindset. And I think it’s actually. Yeah, I think content marketers should study more about what product marketing is and what product marketers do, because I think it’s super important because ultimately most content is in the end trying to position or sell or create awareness for products.
Tim Metz [00:39:04]:
So, like, a lot of those principles apply. And I felt that that came back in a lot of her answers that she. She thinks in that way, naturally, because that’s her starting point, basically.
Ty Magnin [00:39:11]:
Yeah. And, you know, she mentioned that it can be in the Sixth sense for content marketers, I think is the quote.
Tim Metz [00:39:16]:
Yeah, yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:39:17]:
When I think what she means by that is like, product marketing needs. Yeah. Like you just said, needs to be baked into content for it to really pull its weight. You know, the first question we asked her was about. It was the cultural one, right. About like, how do you create these breakthrough companies from the Indian market into the global? And her answer is basically something like, I’m, you know, taking an audience first approach, like really prioritizing the customer. And I thought that was really brilliant. Like, you know, in her example of asking content leaders for time just to learn about how they’re doing things and get a feel for it is a good example of that just cold outreach that it might require to start to get a pulse on.
Ty Magnin [00:39:56]:
For her, it was actually how content marketers are working, but also how your audience behaves, what they’re struggling with. I think there’s another level you can gain from being more intentional about that cold outreach. What questions you ask on those calls in order to have that pulse on the market and be more of an authentic brand.
Tim Metz [00:40:18]:
Yeah, definitely. And the other thing, she didn’t literally say that, but I think that came through also in that first part was like, we have to work harder to earn the trust. I don’t know if she said it was in a raw at Sprinkler or at Freshworks, but she was like, it was kind of. Or at what fix, but that it was kind of a controversial decision to put the content in India, and that because of that, there were, you know, she. She kind of. Again, she didn’t say literally, but it kind of was like, we had to work, like, extra hard to prove ourselves. So that’s also interesting. Like, I think there’s a lot of, like, energy and motivation there to just do a better job and.
Tim Metz [00:40:51]:
And work harder to win over the customer. I think that’s also interesting.
Ty Magnin [00:40:55]:
I kind of like that chip on your shoulder mentality. Right. And. And I guess that’s what I’m getting at and kind of, like, energized by is, you know, it’s easy to just, like, assume that you got it, assume you have that pulse on customers because, like, you know, they live down the street from me. Or assume that your content’s gonna resonate and not sound a little off for the same reason. But, like, I like the chip on your shoulder mentality and just paying a little, Finding what that is for you and paying a little more attention.
Tim Metz [00:41:29]:
We should have dug a bit deeper there. But what I also found interesting, and maybe there’s a lesson there as well, is that because she actually also owns events, she mentioned as a metric that she looks at was like, what did you call it? Like, food.
Ty Magnin [00:41:43]:
Foot traffic to the booth.
Tim Metz [00:41:45]:
Food track to the booth. Right. And I mean, this is one example. But I do think that’s kind of cool. I think there are more of those kind of metrics, and especially if you have the full picture, that’s kind of interesting to measure, like, in a place where you don’t expect it, but where you could actually, indeed, you know, get more of a sense of, like, is this campaign working or are we getting more awareness or whatever. So that’s interesting.
Ty Magnin [00:42:05]:
Yeah, that might be our best KPI as. As AEO starts eating away.
Tim Metz [00:42:10]:
Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:42:11]:
It’s like clicks. It’s like, what can we measure content’s effectiveness on? Just last week, we talked with Kate from Dropbox, and Kate talked a lot about how engagement metrics were the content KPIs for her. And so I’m joking. Like, foot traffic from the booth. But maybe that is kind of where things have to head. It’s less about the volume and more about how are people actually spending time on these assets, interacting with them, et cetera.
Tim Metz [00:42:36]:
No, I think the last thing was. I mean, it’s simple, but I think it’s kind of nice. And maybe we’ve touched on it before, but I like this idea of having tiers for what can be generated by AI and then who should be involved. I think we talked about it maybe also recently with Kate from Drawbox about. And you have that philosophy also of, like. But there it’s more about, like, which content goes to an agency, which goes to, like, which we do in house. But indeed it makes also sense. Or, like, what can, like, go, like, 80% or whatever, like, through AI? What can be a little bit AI assisted and what, like, maybe needs to be done, like, completely by humans?
Ty Magnin [00:43:12]:
Yes. I think that is like a critical framework for enterprise, and it’s probably time for enterprises to, like, yeah, rejigger it based on what they think is most aiable. And I also like the tiering framework because it sees things on the spectrum. Right. Like, there’s not these extremes of, like, this, you know, all this goes to AI or like, you know, all this is done by hand. It’s like, okay, well, let’s be realistic here. You know, some of these pieces are higher stakes. Some of these pieces are just more aiable, and other pieces just are less so.
Ty Magnin [00:43:44]:
And so therefore, like, put them on the spectrum and then tier it out from there.
Tim Metz [00:43:47]:
Thanks for listening.
Ty Magnin [00:43:48]:
Yeah, thanks for listening. See you again in a week.