Building a Culture-Defined Content Strategy

Thinking about marketing differently: our road to getting 50% of Algolia employees contributing to our marketing efforts.

This article originally appeared on Algolia Stories. Earlier this year I spoke at the HeavyBit DevGuild Content Strategy conference about how Algolia approaches content creation. You can find the full slides for that talk below.

When I announced I was joining Algolia last year, I had two large initial goals that I wanted to accomplish. The first was to put words to the Algolia brand to create a consistent internal understanding of who “Algolia” is. The second was to figure out how to communicate who we are across different channels — events, product messaging, sales collateral, and, of course, content.

In order to best solve these problems, I first needed to understand what was already being done. Like brand, content is something at Algolia that everyone does, even if it’s not their job. Engineers document their code, and they also write the API documentation & publish blog posts about their work. Our founders have been vocal as well — our CTO publishes an ongoing Inside the Engine series giving insight into how Algolia works the way it does & why we made certain decisions, while our CEO speaks & writes about our company’s values — ?? Grit, ?? Trust, ?? Care, ?? Candor & ?? Humility.

NB: At Algolia, Candor is a means of removing friction in communication, which leads to ?? quicker action. I use ?? because there’s no Humble Pie emoji just yet, so Humble Cake will have to do.

Company culture is the driving factor for nearly everything we do at Algolia — from recruitment decisions to paid advertising messaging, from sales tactics to customer support — which mean that Algolians had already found a way to ?? step up & write, ?? give & ?? receive feedback, ?? sharing what we were doing and ?? the problems we encountered.

Collaboration: The Algolia Way

Traditional startups would look to delegate content to the marketing team, who would be tasked with creating content across a variety of topics — employer brand & company culture, news updates, event recaps, thought leadership across a variety of sectors — but that didn’t seem to me how Algolia would do content, and so I began to think: what if instead of taking ownership over content, the marketing team became the ultimate support function and enabled everyone in the company to communicate their thoughts, experiences & ideas.

Looking at our historical content activity, I saw that anywhere from 10–20% of the company was writing every quarter, with an informal support infrastructure in the form of a #anglophone slack channel. I jumped in and began working with engineers on their articles, and quickly found that with a very minimal framework, the barrier to entry could be reduced and the amount of collaborators could easily double.

I set myself a goal to get to 50% of the company contributing each quarter. By the end of the year, that means as many as 85 team members writing content.

Scaling up Collaboration

Getting to 50% collaboration (and maintaining it as we grow) means treating our content pipeline the same way a SaaS company might treat their self-service customer pipeline. In order to be as successful as possible, we need to do four things:

???? Lower the Barrier to Entry

The quickest way to increase your number of collaborators is to make it as easy as possible to do. There are a number of reasons someone might not write, so let’s address a few of them.

Most people assume that what it takes to write is expertise, and they fear they have nothing to say. I would venture that the opposite is the case: as a journalist, I had no expertise in any of the companies I wrote about, so I relied on them to help me take their knowledge and turn it into a story readers would enjoy. At Algolia, our Content team is constantly on the lookout for a story opportunity. That can come during an All Hands meeting, in the elevator, on a slack channel or in a team email: treating content marketing like journalism, I have become the proverbial stalker at Algolia, always commenting “that would make a great blog post” or popping up in conversations with “you want to write about that?”

When I approach team members for the first time to contribute, the first step is always what I call “the interview.” In this process, I want to accomplish two things:

1. I want to translate their expertise into a story, leveraging my knowledge of the key messages we’re pushing across a variety of marketing efforts, as well as my understanding of ‘what works.’
2. I want to get rid of any potential fear of difficulty — I explain our process, how it won’t take long, and that they shouldn’t be afraid to stop mid-process if their work needs them.

NB: we never push anyone to write any article a certain way — that’s the quickest way to turn someone off from contributing.

Once we’ve settled on an idea, I ask them one of the most important questions: “Can you get this done in under 10 working days?” 10 days (two weeks) is a magic number after which the likelihood of an article getting written drops exponentially. In fact, I encourage people to delete articles (or tasks) that they haven’t completed in 10 days — it’s more a burden than a task at that point, and creative work gets harder the longer it lingers. This helps to eliminate fear of failure (and reduce the potential for failure) because they quickly see whether it’s feasible or not

They draw up a quick bullet-point sketch of their story, turn it into a draft, ignoring all of the ‘storytelling’ parts — title, images, intro, conclusion - as long as possible. In between each step, we make ourselves or other team members available for feedback, checking in periodically to see if they’ve gotten blocked on something.

Generally, there or only two reasons an article fails: work takes precedent, or the article raises a question that the writer isn’t ready to answer. For example, when writing about how we approach a certain PHP weakness in order to have consistency across all APIs, the article stalled because we discovered that we weren’t 100% convinced our solution was the best, so we tabled the article for later.

?? Flexible Deadlines

Besides have a 10-day mindset, there are no hard deadlines for writers. This puts more burden on the Content team to make sure we can anticipate content far enough in advance to have regular publishing rates; however, we can adjust the content pipeline based on average risk of churn to compensate - In short, we put more articles in the pipe than we expect will get published.

??? Open Editorial Strategy

In order to make sure that anyone feels like they can bring something to the conversation, you’ll want your Editorial strategy to be as open as possible. Algolia has two very big advantages here — search applies to all industries, and we’re a transparent company — however, looking at what Stripe & Airbnb have done, content-wise, it is clear that your content is limited only by your ambitions. Broadly speaking, we cover a number of “buckets”

• Search Leadership: various aspects (speed, relevance, design) across various sectors (ecommerce, media, saas), as well as advanced search topics (personalization, security, uptime)
• Life At Algolia: company values, team experiences, events we attend & lessons we learn along the way.
• Community: highlighting individual members of our community and even giving them a voice to share on Algolia Stories

The Content team also owns product messaging — benefits, impact & feature-oriented content — and we look for support from team members to build this content.

With this editorial strategy, we can get recruiters talking about company values, solutions engineers sharing search leadership, sales team members covering sector-focused webinars & engineers sharing features they’re building.

??Align KPIs with their success

Arguably the most important rule is to align content KPIs with the KPIs that matter most to your collaborators. While our Marketing team broadly focuses on how content can drive awareness, acquisition & activation, our Content team is focused on making articles as successful as possible, seen by as many people as possible.

This means that we put ad dollars behind great content, even if it isn’t a direct pitch for why customers should buy Algolia.

This means that we treat team members who published content for the first time the same way we treat sales team members who closed their first big deal — we share articles in our weekly update, give ? on our #celebration Slack channel (where we give praise to other team members for their accomplishments) and make writing a cool thing to do.

Next Steps: Scale

Today, we’re at around 25–30% contribution rate per quarter inside the company, and there are a lot of interesting challenges that we face:

1. What kind of team members do we want to bring onto the Content Team to own the growth of our strategy?
2. How can we make writers autonomous and independent from marketing’s availability to give feedback, publish or promote an article?
3. How can we get more sales team members contributing?
4. How do we distribute 90 articles in a single quarter? Is that too much?
5. Can contributing go beyond the blog to videos/webinars, events & other content-driven initiatives?

Each new problem brings a new opportunity to grow — one of the things I love about Algolia — and hopefully I’ll answer these questions and more between now and the end of the year. I’ll try to share our progress as we do, as I believe that this strategy is thoroughly applicable to any company that would like to create a collaborative content strategy.

If you have questions about our content strategy, how you can apply it to your company, or more nuanced questions around storytelling, feel free to ask them below and I’ll answer (or who knows: maybe another Algolian will!)