"Nobody is coming to the Klaviyo site specifically for the content unless we are driving them there." Planning distribution first isn’t a new idea, but making it a hard rule is rare. In this episode, Tracey Wallace shows how a channel plan guides every draft, keeps large B2B SaaS teams focused, and turns content into real growth.
Tracey Wallace, Director of Content Strategy at Klaviyo, sets a clear rule: every piece of content must have a plan for how it will get in front of people. She says, “I need to make sure that we have distribution and promotion plans in place before I ever put pen to the page. Otherwise it's a waste of time.” Her team supports eight regions and several internal squads, so loose plans are not an option. A request moves forward only when a channel-specific promotion plan is in place.
Tracey’s team runs on a tight, repeatable rhythm:
This structure keeps projects moving and stops wasted effort.
Tracey Wallace knows how to build content machines at fast-growing SaaS companies. She joined Klaviyo before the IPO and scaled content to serve eight regions and many internal squads. About 70% of each piece uses Klaviyo data, and 80% highlights a customer. This approach turns content into a tool for demand gen, retention, and cross-team alignment.
Tracey is known for speaking honestly about hard topics. In other interviews, she shared how she led teams through layoffs, and challenged the myth of "one-off thought leadership." Her mix of operational discipline and empathy gives you a real look at how enterprise content actually gets done.
This episode shows how an enterprise content machine works. The quotes below reveal Tracey’s distribution-first rule, strict quarterly plans, and cross-team syncs — tools small teams rarely need but big teams can’t live without.
This line sums up a big change in thinking. Startups often write content first and figure out how to share it later. At the enterprise level, teams like Klaviyo’s start with a plan for how they’ll get the content to people. This distribution-first mindset means every piece of content has a clear goal and a path to its audience.
Tracey points out a tough truth for big brands: you can’t count on people stumbling onto your content. Unlike niche brands, enterprise sites don’t attract content-seekers by default. Every article or resource needs a clear promotion plan like email, social, or paid to actually reach people.
This shows how central the content team is inside a large company. Content is the hub for all major marketing channels i.e., lifecycle, social, paid media, and more. The team’s work powers other squads and keeps messaging consistent across the company.
Every new content request gets the same challenge: how will you get this in front of people? This keeps everyone focused on channel alignment from the start. If there’s no clear plan, the work doesn’t move forward.
Tracey points to a classic enterprise challenge: different teams accidentally working on the same thing. Klaviyo’s answer is simple: bi-weekly meetings to share plans and avoid overlap. This keeps everyone aligned and makes sure every piece of content has a clear purpose.
Tracey’s honest about her process. Not having a formal intake system might seem like a problem, but it actually helps reinforce a distribution-first approach. Only projects with real go-to-market support make it onto the roadmap.
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
Klaviyo: Email and SMS marketing platform where Tracey leads content strategy, operating in eight regions. The core enterprise content engine discussed in the episode.
Workweek: The media company that hosts Tracey’s “Contentment” newsletter, supporting a range of business and marketing creators.
Contentment (newsletter): Tracey’s Workweek-hosted newsletter for content marketers, sharing insights and strategies from her experience.
Substack app: Tracey’s preferred “lean-back” reading platform, cited for its user experience and reading habits.
Help Center & Academy teams: Internal Klaviyo teams responsible for technical documentation and educational courses, collaborating closely with marketing content on a bi-weekly basis.
Follow Tracey and Klaviyo:
Learn more about Klaviyo or subscribe to Tracey’s newsletter Contentment.
Ty Magnin [00:00:00]:
Well, Tracey, you've often written about how content marketing is chaos. And if you're listening, I'm doing quote hands. Because, like, I think we've seen that in your newsletter and elsewhere.
Tracey Wallace [00:00:09]:
It is chaos. Do y' all feel like it's organized?
Ty Magnin [00:00:12]:
Well, you're making me feel like it's organized.
Tim Metz [00:00:14]:
Yeah, yeah, it feels right. Yeah. When you're talking, it feels very organized.
Tracey Wallace [00:00:18]:
Oh, my goodness.
Ty Magnin [00:00:19]:
Welcome to the Animals podcast. I'm Ty Magnon, the CEO at Animals.
Tim Metz [00:00:23]:
And I'm Tim Metz, the director of marketing and innovation.
Ty Magnin [00:00:26]:
This season, we're taking you inside how enterprise content marketing teams function. You'll hear from some top content leaders sharing the systems they use, the challenges they faced, and the lessons they've learned along the way. Today we have a great episode with Tracey Wallace. Tracey is the director of Content Strategy at Klaviyo. And in this chat we cover the importance of content distribution and distribution channels. We talk about how to coordinate content across different stakeholders and use them. And we also spend a lot of time unpacking how Tracey creates content roadmaps quarterly with her colleagues. There's a lot in this jam packed EV.
Ty Magnin [00:01:04]:
I hope you enjoy it. 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. Tracey, thanks so much for joining us today on the Animals podcast. One question we like to start out with with all of our guests is what content have you been consuming lately?
Tracey Wallace [00:01:50]:
Oh, my goodness, what content have I been consuming lately? I mean, a lot of Netflix, honestly, other than that, I've been trying to really just get back into reading books, reading a lot of friends newsletters. I really love Subst and even just like the substack app, it feels like I don't. Do y' all remember this was so long ago where there was this concept of like lean forward and lean back content experiences? Probably like a decade or so ago.
Ty Magnin [00:02:19]:
Enlightenment.
Tracey Wallace [00:02:21]:
Yeah, well, so like lean, lean forward were like experiences like at your desktop where like, you know, you're leaning forward, you're reading the concept. There was that things Needed to be shorter versus lean back content is like when you're relaxed, right? And so like you're reading a book, maybe a Kindle and substack feels like my like leaning back content place versus the rest of my day where I feel like I'm very leaned forward and really trying to get stuff in short clips.
Ty Magnin [00:02:52]:
Yeah, I dig that. I mean, sometimes I'll go as far as like printing out a PDF and like bringing it on an airplane or like, you know, putting it on my desk because I'm kind of sick of looking at the screen. That is lean back content. Am I right?
Tracey Wallace [00:03:02]:
That is lean back content. Dang. You're printing out PDFs. I don't have a printer anywhere near me. I love that though. That's amazing.
Tim Metz [00:03:09]:
You will.
Ty Magnin [00:03:09]:
Once your kids get into grade school, you'll have to have a printer.
Tim Metz [00:03:12]:
That's why I have printed too.
Ty Magnin [00:03:13]:
If you can give your short introduction too, for audience, for those that don't know Tracey Wallace yet, that would be great.
Tracey Wallace [00:03:19]:
Awesome. Yeah, I am Tracey Wallace. I head up content strategy over at Klaviyo and have been doing content marketing since 2010, which is wild. I also run a newsletter called Contentment through my friends over at Workweek where I try to help people feel seen. I think, and that this is hard. This industry is changing a lot and that even folks who've been doing this for a while don't really have everything completely figured out.
Ty Magnin [00:03:48]:
Lovely. We'll definitely add a link in the, in the notes to, to. To the newsletter. It's been a consistent one and one that I think is, you know, just like you've got a leading voice in the content industry. So thanks for, for sharing. Yeah. What, what you picked up along the years. Now we're here to talk about enterprise content.
Ty Magnin [00:04:05]:
Right. And you've seen Klaviyo over three and a half years grow from arguably not an enterprise. You know, where we draw the line on this is a little bit arbitrary. I'll, I'll admit it. But like, you know, you're in probably the hundreds of millions in revenue or low hundreds of millions. You guys are much, you know, beyond that now you're a public company, so if you want to know revenue numbers, just look it up. I guess I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey going from startups, you know, pre IPO to post ipo. And what are the big few things that you think have changed along the way?
Tracey Wallace [00:04:36]:
Yeah, I know. So where you define enterprise is arbitrary. I think that's like true for everybody. For me, when I first joined Klaviyo, it still very much was a startup. And then of course going through the IPO process is fun wild. The company changes a lot. Content of course changes a lot. You see leadership change a lot as well.
Tracey Wallace [00:05:00]:
And that of course changes strategies quite a bit for me. What has changed the most from startup to where I'm at now? I mean, you really can't move as fast. It's like that. That's honestly the very first thing in a startup. I can come up with an idea and probably have that idea executed by the end of the week. And that's just not true at large organizations. But, but for lots of really good reasons, like I need to think about my global regions. We, you know, Klaviyo is in the us, the uk, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Singapore.
Tracey Wallace [00:05:40]:
We are not just creating for one site or one language ever. I need to make sure that what I am producing is going to get proper distribution at a startup. Often content creation, I feel like begets distribution. Where I'm at now, distribution begets content, right. So I need to make sure that we have distribution and promotion plans in place before I ever put pin to the page. Otherwise it's a waste of time. Nobody is coming to Klaviyo site specifically for the content unless we are driving them there. And so that's a huge change.
Tracey Wallace [00:06:18]:
Legal, of course, is a huge change. There's a lot of things you can and cannot say and legal is a very big part of the process, as is procurement. So really a lot of it's operational changes ultimately in how you bring things to market. You're working with a larger team and you have to like really be in the dugout with that team on a regular basis.
Ty Magnin [00:06:41]:
Yeah, totally, totally. I've experienced that myself and I'm curious, like, do you think that the output of a content asset from a startup, you know, and it's like, you know, you did it within a week, fewer people were involved. It's that piece. How is it different than the piece that you produce when there are that many stakeholders in the mix? Did the quality change to you? Is it more consistent?
Tracey Wallace [00:07:06]:
Like, I don't know. I mean, I feel like I'm a pretty big stickler for quality all the time. So I wouldn't say that the quality qualities necessarily change. I think the goals are just different in startups and this is just one of the benefits of smaller companies. You're able to spin things up faster, often to react to kind of industry trends and opportunities that you see, right. Larger companies often aren't able to do that. Larger companies often don't need to do that. Right.
Tracey Wallace [00:07:35]:
Like, startups need to get visibility. Like, just having your name included in those conversations is often a reason for creating the content. It's, it's the visibility. Large organizations, again, don't, don't often need that. Or you have prep PR teams completely separate from content that, that are working on that. To me, it's not necessarily the, the quality. Again, I think, I think quality should be standard like this. I can't think of the word, but the same across the board.
Ty Magnin [00:08:04]:
Table stakes.
Tracey Wallace [00:08:05]:
Yeah, thank you. Table stakes. But yes, it's, it's more what the goal is, why you're producing it.
Ty Magnin [00:08:14]:
Yeah.
Tracey Wallace [00:08:15]:
And of course, in enterprises as well. I mean, I would be remiss. There are multiple times where we do need to turn something around in a week, in a couple of days, and we certainly can. But of course there has to be a conversation about what's shifting and you're not just changing plans across a content person or a small team of content people. When we need to turn something around quickly, I mean, we have, you know, different squads involved, socials involved, life cycles involved, webs involved. It's a lot of people that you need to have shift. And so you. It better be worth it.
Ty Magnin [00:08:53]:
Yeah, yeah, of course. And then, yeah, you got to piss some people off or like, get some, you know, communications out. Right. When things do inevitably change.
Tracey Wallace [00:09:00]:
Right.
Ty Magnin [00:09:00]:
I'm curious then, how would you define the role of content at Klaviyo?
Tracey Wallace [00:09:05]:
To me, I feel like content central at Klaviyo. And keep in mind. So I'm content strategy lead, but that's for the marketing org. Klaviyo produces a ton of content. My marketing team produces a ton of content across campaigns, across SEO webinars, different audience segments, different product segments. But then we also have a help team that's producing help documentation and a separate content, like an academy team producing online courses and written courses as well. All of us are doing that across eight regions, I think, right now. So content central, right? We're the, the, I wouldn't even say the storytelling arm.
Tracey Wallace [00:09:47]:
But our PMM team of course creates, you know, product product messaging, documentation frameworks, what that story is, and then we're the ones ultimately bringing that to market, creating content throughout the funnel that the rest of our channels, they have to have content in order to hit their goals. Our lifecycle team needs content. Our social team needs content. Our paid media team needs content. We are, we are at their beck and call. But we're, we're that central org where everything is housed and ultimately the folks who, who know our audience and incredibly well.
Ty Magnin [00:10:22]:
Interesting. So then your relationship to product marketing is they're creating content. Like maybe take me around the horns like product marketing, create some content. What is your involvement there? How about with demand or campaigns?
Tracey Wallace [00:10:34]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so the way I think about it is content's success relies on two really big things that, that at a lot of organizations can really be out of your control. At Klaviyo we're, we're lucky to have a really honed in process but at the input stage we need product marketing documentation. We need to know what is the product, what has changed, how does it compare to competitors, who is it for all all the things. So you need the really good inputs from that product marketing standpoint. And then of course you need a solid web infrastructure. And I'll say that's even a big change from how I thought about startups and startups like you think about web infrastructure but like you just don't have that many pages. So it's like not as big of a deal versus you know, at Klaviyo we have thousands of content pages.
Tracey Wallace [00:11:25]:
That's not even, that's not even everything. So figuring out web infrastructure and then of course a global infrastructure and how it all lives is wildly important. So that's kind of the output. So you need those two things baseline to be successful. Proper inputs and then like the proper place for it to live. And then over here at Klaviyo we work across squads. So we have a small business squad, we have a brand squad. Our web team kind of functions as its own squad, team squad as well.
Tracey Wallace [00:11:55]:
And those organizations are working together and then of course requesting content. So we're looking at promotional calendars, you know, planning quarters out, making sure that we have everything we need to hit all of those audiences. Because I've been over at Klaviyo for about three and a half years and like been through the cycles. I'm often included with a lot of those squad leads and building out those plans again because I also have the performance data. I know how a lot of this has worked if it hasn't worked. But of course I work really closely with our web team and our campaign leads to understand pull through. So like you know, how much traffic did we get? And then of course how much ARR did that generate?
Ty Magnin [00:12:37]:
Got it.
Tracey Wallace [00:12:38]:
Did that help?
Ty Magnin [00:12:39]:
Yeah, yeah, we're getting there. We're getting there.
Tracey Wallace [00:12:41]:
I was like I don't know. Yeah, because I know it sounds comp. It's a machine truly. I see it in my head.
Tim Metz [00:12:47]:
Yeah, I want to go deeper in the machine a little bit. Like how do you, how do you handle the requests and the prioritization? Like when you, when you're planning or like when do, where do the decisions happen is like this person wants this, that department wants that. But then ultimately how do you get things on the roadmap and prioritized?
Tracey Wallace [00:13:02]:
Things are prioritized differently depending on squads. So we have of course our company okrs marketing okrs, like everything, you know, funnels down. But it's our squads that are really helping to determine priority. And we of course have individual squad leads that ultimately say yay or nay in terms of how like content gets prioritized. Any random requests that I might get, I'm gonna tell you right now, I don't have an intake process. People have to come to ask me on Slack for things. My very first question back to them is always, how are you gonna promote it? How are you gonna distribute it?
Ty Magnin [00:13:41]:
Yeah, back to that.
Tracey Wallace [00:13:42]:
And, and also like not having an.
Ty Magnin [00:13:45]:
Intake form, you're like I don't want that shit. You gotta come to me.
Tracey Wallace [00:13:48]:
Well, because, because the vast majority of the content requests that are supported in a strong go to market motion with, with all the channels involved, those are requested in squad meetings with through like large groups. Right?
Ty Magnin [00:14:05]:
Like quarterly.
Tracey Wallace [00:14:06]:
Yeah, quarterly. Right. And so these random one off requests, the answer isn't always no, but it's often no. And it's because there's no promo plan. Somebody wants a piece of content up, likely because they think that like blogs of your still drive a ton of traffic and that folks will see it if we get it up. And that's just not the case. Like we publish a piece of content, no one's going to see it unless we distribute it. And I, I as at least in an enterprise org, I don't have distribution power.
Tracey Wallace [00:14:38]:
That's another difference from startups where like as a content lead or head of marketing at startups I had distribution power. Here I am creating for those channels to distribute that content needs to fit those channel strategies. Me publishing something and bringing it to the lifecycle or my social team means nothing to them if we haven't already agreed on it or of course I can go and say hey so and so, message me. There's some new standards changing in a certain part of the world around XYZ type product. We produce something really quickly to address it. It's approved by legal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Would you get this in a newsletter? And they're like, yes, great.
Tim Metz [00:15:17]:
You have to pitch them.
Ty Magnin [00:15:18]:
Yeah.
Tracey Wallace [00:15:19]:
Yes, exactly. It's pitching them. But like that, that just rarely happens. So there is no intake process. The intake process is quarterly planning. That that's where we put everything on the calendar, map everything out. And again, so much of this is that we need to understand our resources, our budget. And resources here aren't just content resources.
Tracey Wallace [00:15:40]:
Like, can we produce? Do we have enough PMMs to review? Do we have enough web producers to get things live? How do we do this across eight regions? If we're talking about 200 pages, for instance, in a single quarter in one region, that adds up fast. So yes, our intake process is quarterly planning. Other than that, there is no intake process. People slack me. The answer isn't always no, but the very first question is, how will you distribute it? And if there's no good answer, then the answer is no.
Tim Metz [00:16:12]:
I just want to zoom in one more thing on this. Like prioritization by distribution. Like when somebody comes with an ad hoc request, what is good distribution? Does it mean they have buy in from another department? Or does it just mean they have a brilliant id? Like can it also be an original id or is it more about like they have secured buy in from another department? That kind of controls distribution.
Tracey Wallace [00:16:32]:
I mean, there's not like departments that control distribution. But yes, you. You need a squad to distribute content for you. That. That is how things get distributed. That's how things go to market. And if you are coming to Tracey with your content idea, and you haven't already, you haven't talked to a squad about it and figured out if it can be prioritized there, you're barking up the wrong tree. I work with squads.
Tracey Wallace [00:16:56]:
I help support and manage their programs, their goals. And again, we don't produce content that will not be distributed.
Ty Magnin [00:17:03]:
I imagine you didn't land on this model from day one at Klaviyo, right? How did you get here? Like, did things change? There must have been a couple chapters before this, right?
Tracey Wallace [00:17:13]:
Oh, for sure. I mean, yes. I mean, Klaviyo has matured a ton, specifically likely because of our ipo. So of course we didn't used to work in the squad model. When I first joined, we were very startupy. Content also controlled distribution. So my team was.
Ty Magnin [00:17:34]:
There you go.
Tracey Wallace [00:17:35]:
Was coming up with distribution plans, coming up with content to fill those in and out. That worked decently well. It just wasn't scalable. It's Also really challenging. And I know I see this a lot with people responding to my newsletter, especially because working at an enterprise now, I do sometimes feel like I'm so far removed from some of the actual problems a lot of content marketers face where they're like, well, how do I come up with a social campaign? I'm like, I don't know, I don't gotta do that. I used to have to do that. And there were ways that I figured it out. But like, that's just not in my, my remit anymore.
Tracey Wallace [00:18:15]:
Which feels really great and lucky. But. But yeah, it used to be the problem though with content working, like figuring out distribution and also writing content is the amount of content that you create can vastly reduced because figuring out distribution plans and supporting distribution plans rightfully takes 70, 80% of your time. And content people often aren't experts in those channels. That's why these large organizations hire people who are experts in those channels. Yeah, so. So yeah, in this model we can move way faster, we can create a lot more content and we can also be certain that the content we're creating maps back to company priorities because it's going to be distributed through those channels and those channels are not going to distribute something that's not going to get them closer to their goals.
Ty Magnin [00:19:06]:
Interesting. So zooming out a little bit. The content team within Klaviyo sits under what part of the org and then what is your relation to the help team? Right, the team that's writing help articles or the Academy team, if there is any.
Tracey Wallace [00:19:20]:
Yes, there is an academy team and a help team. They both live on our customer support side of house. My team lives on marketing and kind of works within a center of excellence to serve our squads. I have weekly, biweekly, I think they're biweekly now, meetings with our help and Academy leads. We also have a customer experience lead as well who works really closely with both of those teams. So all of us work together a ton. In fact, the last time I went to Boston was for a meeting about on site search where we were all working together to figure that out. But yes, we all live on separate teams.
Tracey Wallace [00:20:02]:
We have separate goals. There's of course a focus more on retention and marketing, of course is focused on acquisition.
Ty Magnin [00:20:09]:
Nice. And is there like any like governance or like what are the things you.
Tracey Wallace [00:20:14]:
Collaborate on across Academy and help?
Ty Magnin [00:20:17]:
Yeah, biweekly is pretty frequent. Right. It's like what are the common topics that you're trying to solve?
Tracey Wallace [00:20:22]:
I mean the main thing we're trying to solve for is don't Duplicate each other's work. That's the primary issue. Our Academy team is phenomenal. I mean they are creating, you know, weekly webinars, these amazing like certificate style courses and even like written content. And so with them we are often trying to figure out, you know, what is the role and purpose of marketing content in terms of like pulling people into the funnel and at what stage are we handing that baton over to Academy where you're getting really into the details of how a product works and educating people there, understanding that like a lot of our Academy content can also be really useful for marketing and vice versa. Especially for Academy when we're educating folks on new products. Help center, their stuff is so super technical. We don't work with them all that much on like specific content.
Tracey Wallace [00:21:24]:
But again, because all three of these orgs have existed for a really long time, we sometimes have duplication issues where maybe our Help center has published something around best practices that we think might live better on the different part of a site or our Help center team is really, really fantastic. I mean they update so much content every single month. Like they are just like on top of it. And so part of it's like, how can we learn how to govern better from y' all? So there's just really a lot of, I think like process exchanges and then of course, yeah, making sure that we aren't duplicating efforts. If Academy is going to create something that would be really useful for marketing, like marketing wants end, let's use it. We don't need to recreate it. We don't need to take any resources. I'm going to go get a squad lead and like show them the water that the Academy teams do it and we're going to get it all set up so it can work for both sides of the organization.
Tim Metz [00:22:21]:
I love that. I feel that feels like such an enterprise problem, you know, that we need to be. To make sure we're not duplicating our work.
Ty Magnin [00:22:29]:
I love it.
Tim Metz [00:22:30]:
I think before we let you go, we just want to zoom in a little bit on the, on the metrics and the measurements, if that's okay.
Tracey Wallace [00:22:35]:
Sure.
Tim Metz [00:22:36]:
And I think you're focused on growing your own audience. What's the, what's the single metric that tells you that a piece is building that owned audience for you?
Tracey Wallace [00:22:45]:
Yeah. So I don't have a single metric. I. My metrics are based on squads. Right. So every piece of content we create is mapped back to very specific goals. So anytime we are creating, you know, content through our web team for SEO or llmo. We are looking, of course, at traffic business visibility in those engines and then conversion rate specifically through those channels.
Tracey Wallace [00:23:10]:
Typically when I'm working with, you know, one of our segments. So like a small business org, we are looking at lead gen, so, you know, con content downloads, webinar registrations, and then of course tracking that all the way through to ARR with help from PMM on enablement and then with our brand team, of course, that's, that's more of a thought leadership play where we are looking for, you know, working with our PR team to help get mentions there and really looking for visibility. We work really closely with our SEO, our social media team on that side too, to track what's driving a bunch of engagement over on social.
Ty Magnin [00:23:46]:
Are you able to bring to the table for these different stakeholders, like, insights in terms of the type of content, the format of content that's worked in the past and you get to steer strategically in that way. I heard that in what you were giving us earlier, but is that true?
Tracey Wallace [00:24:01]:
Yes, yes, for sure. I can go and pull my own metrics. Super helpful because I am across all of the squads and that's not true for every person that works on the marketing team. Some folks are very squad focused, which makes sense. Again, you need to scale because I can often see the full picture. I can, of course, pull through what's working in other channels where we can repurpose things. And in fact, over the last year and a half, one of the things we've gotten really good at is making sure every piece of content across 90% of our content, can be used for every single squad so that we're never in a content deficit. And we of course, just have squads promoting different assets at different times and really increasing the impact of each piece.
Ty Magnin [00:24:44]:
Well, Teresa, you've often written about how content marketing is chaos. And if you're listening, I'm doing quote hands because, like, I think we've seen that in your newsletter and elsewhere.
Tracey Wallace [00:24:53]:
It is chaos. Do y' all feel like it's organized?
Ty Magnin [00:24:56]:
Well, you're making me feel like it's organized.
Tim Metz [00:24:58]:
Yeah, yeah, it feels very. Yeah, when you're talking, it feels very organized.
Tracey Wallace [00:25:01]:
So, like, oh, my goodness. No, I, I mean, it's, it's. I, I guess we can always get better. I mean, I really do feel like over the last year and a half or so, we have made some big strides over here and I feel really proud of, like, where the team's gotten, the collaboration. We have some of the results that we're seeing. Like, it feels very exciting and good. But God, of course there's are always so many areas where you can fix things. I mean, I told you, I don't have an intake process that wasn't by design.
Tracey Wallace [00:25:31]:
That's a bug that turned into a feature. Like, that's great. I love that. But that was not. That was literally because I couldn't find time to do it for a while.
Ty Magnin [00:25:40]:
Yeah.
Tracey Wallace [00:25:41]:
And now I'm just like, yeah, just slack me. Because I figure the answer that you're going to give me is not going to be a great one. And, and if it is a great one, then I'm going to send you to someone else first. So it, it's organized in the strategy. It's organized and how we work. But of course it can always, it can always get better.
Ty Magnin [00:26:00]:
Nice. Well, thanks so much for joining us. Where can people find and follow you?
Tracey Wallace [00:26:04]:
Yeah. Oh goodness. I am on LinkedIn though. I know I told you all earlier, I'm rarely on there, but yes, I am on LinkedIn really though, signing up for contentment and then you can always respond to contentment. I have that email on my phone as well, so I see everything that comes in. That's probably the best place to like talk to me. But I do get on LinkedIn at least like once a week. But I'm trying to, you know, like all mentally healthy people trying to reduce my time on social networks where I can.
Ty Magnin [00:26:36]:
There you go. That's great. Well, thanks so much for joining us.
Tracey Wallace [00:26:39]:
Awesome. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.
Tim Metz [00:26:42]:
Should I ask you first for once?
Tracey Wallace [00:26:43]:
Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:26:44]:
No, I always put you on the spot.
Tim Metz [00:26:46]:
Yeah.
Tracey Wallace [00:26:46]:
Yeah.
Tim Metz [00:26:47]:
What do you think, Ty?
Ty Magnin [00:26:48]:
There are a few things that I'm really taking away. The distribution first mindset. It's like so easy to get away from that. But she's really living that and breathing it. Right. Like if you request content from her and there's no distribution channel or distribution plan built in, she's going to say no or say like, go figure it out with someone else. That's great. Not producing content that doesn't have a distribution plan attached to like critical.
Ty Magnin [00:27:10]:
So like that perspective, I think it's like so easy to kind of deprioritize distribution, but like distribution is kind of the only thing you have as a content team. You kind of have to figure it out. Well, when you're a public company, like you kind of have this stuff figured out and you can't oversaturate it and so why create more content than your distribution channel will allow, you know, What? I mean like you're just going to hit diminishing returns on those channels. We live and breathe this distribution first mindset. Like all of our briefs for clients have distribution channels up at top. Right. And we talk about it all the time with our clients and still somehow like I can feel it once in a while like slipping into the, you know, second tier priority when you're thinking about what content you want to produce. What did you learn? What are you taking away?
Tim Metz [00:27:52]:
No, I mean I wrote that down because I thought, I thought. Yeah, that was like. I think this idea of like prioritization by distribution is really good. It's like if you can't answer the question, like then you just don't have to talk to me. Right. I can totally imagine that that works really well in terms of like an intake and I think, I mean, maybe zooming out a bit, it's a good way to think about like maybe for you, for your org, it's something else. But like what is the key question that actually helps you to filter and prioritize? It's kind of nice. Instead of a form, think of like the essential question that will also get you kind of get rid of like most useless requests.
Tim Metz [00:28:28]:
I think that's kind of cool. Yeah, I was just, I love that answer of like we have to meet to make sure we don't duplicate our work. Yeah, I felt that's just such a big org problem. But I can also see that it's totally true, even on a very small scale. At Animals, I sometimes have somebody on the team say, hey, I would like to write about this. And then I'm like, ah, wait a minute. I think we have written about this in the past, you know, and then, and that's just our little blogs, let's say. So yeah, if you get, you know, if you get this enterprise skill, just like keeping track of everything that's going on and that's been done in the past and what everybody's working on, it's just.
Tim Metz [00:29:03]:
Yeah, there's just tremendous effort.
Ty Magnin [00:29:05]:
One thing we haven't seen folks do within the season yet is, or talk about and maybe we just haven't asked the right questions, but it's the topic of content governance.
Tim Metz [00:29:15]:
Okay. Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:29:16]:
So from, from my experience, having worked in an enterprise, we had to go through a lot of the creation of content standards, of guidelines, terminology, banks and maintain these things so that other content contributors, you know, in the examples she gave are perfect. Right. Like the support team doing help articles, the academy team doing, you know, learning courses, follow those guidelines so that you didn't have people using different terms or you know, you understand the ideas. It sounds like she has that as just kind of informal right now. But I'd be curious if we can dig in with future guests about this topic and see if they have anything more formal set up.
Tim Metz [00:29:53]:
I also like the lean forward and lean back content. I was just thinking like, I think there could be revival there with AI. It's like a lot of AI content is, I think lean forward content. And maybe we need more lean back content. You know, like the books we've been doing with unit 21 and now Moengage. Yeah, like more lean back content. Maybe that's what we need.
Ty Magnin [00:30:16]:
This podcast is a lean back podcast, no doubt.
Tim Metz [00:30:19]:
I hope so.
Ty Magnin [00:30:21]:
Yeah. If you're like sitting there scribbling down notes while you listen to this, I'd love to hear from you, but I think we're more of like a passive learning kind of play here. Right?
Tim Metz [00:30:32]:
Yeah. Shout out if you're taking notes. Let us know. Yeah, for sure.
Ty Magnin [00:30:35]:
Yeah. Can we use those notes for our next blog post? That's it. You know, I, I think onwards and upwards. Like I, I continue to kind of shape my mind at what's, what's normal within an enterprise, what's a little bit different and how to design your operating model according to the kind of environment or context that you're in. So I'm ready to go design some enterprise content strategies and programs and hopefully some, some of you listening are gaining along the way too.
Tim Metz [00:31:02]:
I'm going to consume some lean back content now, I think.
Ty Magnin [00:31:05]:
Yeah, go enjoy it. Get a coffee, have some laid back content hours. We'll see you on the next episode at the Animals Podcast.
Tim Metz [00:31:11]:
Thanks for listening. Bye.
Ty Magnin [00:31:13]:
Bye.
