Meet Team Kinsta: Head of Content Matteo Duò

If you've ever read a blog post on kinsta.com or watched a YouTube video on our channel, then you've seen Matteo Duò's hard work in action. As our Head of Content, Matteo oversees a major part of Kinsta's marketing efforts- and he has tons of actionable tips to share for anyone looking to improve (or even just begin!) their content marketing strategy.

Keep reading to learn his 4 pillars of content marketing, see how he took our YouTube channel from 0-12,000+ subscribers, and more...

Tell us about your Kinsta journey: how did you get started in tech, and what brought you here??

I started working in tech because I’ve always been interested in how people communicate, how they express themselves, and more broadly, how they share their thoughts and ideas. It was 2006 when I started working as a Content Manager for a company. And guess what- that company used WordPress (it was version 2.0 )! Coming from a non-developer background (I have an MA in Philosophy of Language), that software opened a new world before my eyes.

Using it on a daily basis to publish articles and playing around with plugins and editing code on my personal websites, I felt truly empowered by the freedom. I felt I could create anything I wanted.

As a side gig at that time, I was a freelance tech journalist, which allowed me to be closer to the publishing world and experience the day-to-day “frenzy” of newsrooms. Years later, I decided to jump on the entrepreneurial bandwagon and bring my content-related experience to companies, helping them craft copy, optimize for SEO, streamline their content creation process, and the like.

Fast forward to 2014, when I was attending WordCamp Sofia and where I randomly met with a small group of 3 super nice people and we talked about how to grow traffic, how to deal with demanding clients, SEO, and an idea they had in mind. Who would have thought that that idea would later become Kinsta? ??

I joined Kinsta in 2019 as our very first Editor-in-Chief and today I’m Head of Content. I'm still passionate about how people express and share their ideas, but with a key plot twist: I’m now more interested in sharing tips that could help entrepreneurs and developers do their job better. ?? If you’d like to get these in your inbox, you can subscribe to our newsletter and to our YouTube channel .

What are the main responsibilities of your role??

As Head of Content, I’m part of the Marketing department here at Kinsta. Because of this, I’m involved in many projects on an ongoing basis. Specifically, I’m responsible for our written, audio, and video content, which means I supervise and manage work for our website, mainly our blog and knowledgebase section, and our YouTube channel.

What’s been the best part about working at Kinsta??

Getting to my 3rd Kinsta-versary fills me with joy! I really feel my experience is making a true difference. I’m lucky to be working every day of the week with people who are specialists in their field, and I always learn something new from them.

With the diverse content production I’m involved in here, I feel I have a blank canvas before me that I get to paint with the help of other people, whether they be my teammates or freelancers. There aren’t many people I know of who could say they could “create anything they want” knowing that their company is backing them up. I’m able to say that and there’s no single day that goes by that I don't realize how lucky I am for this.

Kinsta has been able to build a strong company culture where everyone, regardless of their personal opinions, and thoughts, takes on life events, feels welcomed, listened to, and part of a group of real people all working together towards a common goal. This might sound simplistic but it’s one of the most important differentiators in today’s working force.

You oversee a LOT of content- walk us through the creation process from brainstorming to getting that final blog post or video pushed live. How do you stay organized and inspired?

How much time do we have? This could probably fit in a Content Marketing 101 class over a whole semester. ?? Joking aside, as Head of Content, I’m involved in anything that falls under the “Content” umbrella. This means our written content, mainly the Kinsta blog and knowledge base section, and our video content on Kinsta’s YouTube channel.

With so many differences and requirements for each of these content formats, I see my role as responsible for 4 common aspects. These are:?

1. Strategy
2. Production
3. Growth
4. Optimization

There can’t be any marketing campaign or even a simple initiative without a strategy. What would you like to achieve? How would you like to achieve that? Why are you considering that strategy against other potential strategies? The most-read article on Hacker News, a viral video on YouTube, your most-downloaded podcast episode- all are nice to have, sure. But they are one-off events. If they’re not part of a long-term plan, where every piece falls into place, you won’t be able to measure your success, nor improve when things don’t go as planned.

If the strategy gives you the opportunity to plan your future marketing initiatives, then you’ll need to actually create those pieces of content. The topics we usually create content around come from different places: requests we receive in support and/or sales, broad topics we have experience with such as managed hosting , WordPress performance , SEO , web development , and more.

After we’ve created the strategy and lined up some key topics we’d like to produce content around, it’s a matter of igniting the “content machine” and making it run at full speed. This means working with in-house Editors and multimedia content specialists and also working with third-party providers to help us scale our output.

While doing all of this, I’m always on the lookout for new ways to optimize our work. For example, we regularly update old blog posts with more recent data, new internal links, new sections, and overall re-optimize them for stronger SEO. We do the same thing for video: we always keep our descriptions up-to-date to improve our YouTube SEO, we play around with different types and placements of links within the videos, in our descriptions, and so on. Optimization also occurs for our own internal procedures and workflows. Can we automate something to get faster turnaround times? What documentation can we create to allow new team members to take care of that task?

In short, there’s no successful marketing without paying attention to these 4 areas.?

Why is content marketing so valuable? Do you have any tips for companies just getting started with content marketing??

Every company has its own needs, goals, and budget that create a unique starting point. But there’s one thing that’s true regardless of where you're starting: every company knows what their customers are happy with and what they have issues with. My suggestion would be to pick one distribution channel and start building your presence there. Is it your website/blog? A YouTube channel? LinkedIn? Medium.com? Dev.to? It doesn’t matter as long as you’re producing valuable tips for the customers you’d like to acquire. Sure, my suggestion would be to start with an owned channel, like your blog, so that you’ll also have a link to spread around on other platforms in the future. But that’s also true for a YouTube channel. Go and create tutorials, show demos, plan Q&As with users interested in hearing more about your product. And do that for 6 months. Then think of a way to re-use what you have in another format or channel and add that to your marketing plan... but make sure it won’t disrupt your core channel.?

In the past year +, Kinsta has moved from written content to audio content to visual content. How did you feel about taking on new mediums, and is there anything you’ve learned as we’ve expanded to these new channels??

Being directly involved in strategizing and producing different content formats for different distribution channels strengthened two principles I knew already were working for written content.?

1. Consistency is the currency for growth: the more you put in, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to gain traction and build on that.
2. Style guides, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and documentation are vital for managing and scaling your team. Thanks to these documents, you can get aligned with your goals, standardize tone & voice, and have all subjects involved work in a cohesive marketing campaign, whether they're in-house team members or third-party providers.

When you’re not at work, what are you doing for fun??

When I’m not working I’ll try to spend as much time as I can doing things that help me “unplug” and recharge. Some of these are: playing tennis and squash, reading, walking while listening to music or comedians, and traveling as much as I can.

What’s something you accomplished recently that you’re proud of?

As a person with no experience in video production, I’m really happy to see how my team was able to grow Kinsta’s YouTube channel from 0 subscribers to now more than 12,000 and counting in a year and a half! We have a streamlined video production schedule that makes me proud of the work we’re doing and we’re able to engage and help a whole lot of people who are more into video content than reading articles.