Here is a transcript generated by Otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with VeraContent’s Kyler Canastra and Mickael Bensass and Vikrant Agrawa from greatcontent, on how to create meaningful content:

Kyler Canastra 0:13
Hi, everyone, I’m Kyler from The Content Mix. And I’m excited to be here with Mickael Bensassi and Vik Agarwal from Berlin based greatcontent, a global leader in the field of multilingual, SEO and e commerce content creation. Welcome, Mickael and Vikrant, and thank you so much for joining us.

Vikrant Agrawal 0:32
Thank you for having us.

Hi.

Kyler Canastra 0:35
No, it’s great to connect with you guys. And it’s there’s Yeah, as I said before, they’re tuning in from Berlin and I’m based in Madrid. So it’s really cool that you can connect, even if it’s in a virtual platform. But just to get the interview started, I want to start with Mikael. And can you just tell us a bit more about your background? And basically how you got into marketing?

Mickael Bensassi 0:53
Yeah, sure.

Some French as you can hear, probably. And, yeah, I studied marketing, basically with a specialization during my studies and my master degree back at the back in Dijon, the Burgundy School of Business, and then you had this interest in marketing got me into the travel industry where I worked for different hotel groups in Europe, and it was winter immediately. So just to name a few Radisson or Rotana. And then I moved to Berlin five years ago, and I moved to the travel tech field before joining great content a little bit more than a year ago.

Kyler Canastra 1:37
That’s great. So you like to travel? Which has been something difficult in the past of months. You can’t do it, but hopefully…. Yes. And what about you, Vik? Can you tell? Did you need to know each other before great content? or How did you guys meet?

Vikrant Agrawal 1:53
I was actually, I also joined greatcontent a year aago, I guess I joined two months before Mickael and yeah, so Mickael was actually my first hire. So that’s how we got in, let me tell you the awkward telephone interview because obviously COVID was pretty new, at that point. And then we also had to figure out that I think we felt was also the first person to be on boarded fully remote, and we actually only met a person in summer than yeah. Yeah, sometimes, you know, when it was allowed to meet.

Kyler Canastra 2:31
And it’s like, you know,

Vikrant Agrawal 2:33
so I actually know Mikhail, more or less only, like, This

Kyler Canastra 2:37
is crazy. I after we’ve had that, too my experiences, people will come in and now and you’re just meeting them online. And it’s just so strange that you have all these relationships with people that you don’t know, you don’t know in person. But it’s also cool, that we’re able to connect and kind of sad because we kill

Vikrant Agrawal 2:53
Mickael is actually really good cook. So and while in the office, he always brings something awesome to eat and especially baking is also one of his great assets.

Mickael Bensassi 3:04
Yeah, everybody needs my banana bread in the office.

Kyler Canastra 3:09
One day soon. Banana Bread?

Vikrant Agrawal 3:14
Yeah, so So yeah, as I said, I also joined the greatcontent, year ago, and at like Mickael I’ve also specialized in marketing. I am German. So I studied in in the University of Mannheim. And then I went to Sydney to do the tech part. And well, my way towards content marketing is a bit different. And it’s a more entrepreneurial view on the whole thing. So I was already in university, I started different companies, and continued doing that after university. And while it was always around digital marketing, and connected to digital marketing, of course, so I’m doing this almost since 20 years, but it was also agencies, which I joined, which started companies over there. And my last station, for example, was media based, and I sold that company to ProSiebenSat.1, which is big German TV. Yeah, actually the broadcast company. But yes, and I did that for three years then. And now I wanted to do something else, which was a little bit more between creativity. And let’s see the comments on media. And that’s how I found out actually to my network, about greatcontent and joined as co CEO in March. Awesome.

Kyler Canastra 4:41
So you guys, both, as you mentioned before, work at a company called greatcontent. And can you explain a bit more about what the company does and who is your main audience?

Vikrant Agrawal 4:51
Right. So greatcontent is an online platform, and it’s one of the leaders in you know, the creation of SEO ecommerce content. And yeah, actually any b2b content. And what we do is, I was trying to explain it, we have a network of 30,000 linguists we call them so the linguists for us are freelancers who write, edit, or translate text, and what, and they do that in 30 languages, right. So that’s, that’s what what we do. And we offer the access to this, either as a self service model where our platform, or what we also help you to create content with our project managers, which is absolutely not mandatory, right. And so what we, what we also offer next to the access to linguists, and let’s say the knowledge how to do it is is a software, which is very focused on creating a lot of content. So if you create a lot of content, a lot of content pieces, you have very specific needs, and you need to brief them out, you need to make sure that the status is correctly mapped that you know, who’s working on what content, right, of course, you want to do some quality checks. And at the end is, yeah, as you know, has different variables. So we also you can also, you know, see whether all the keywords are in there, which you want to have in there for an SEO professional, or when this is applied your [inaudible] text. And this is all what’s taken care of.

Kyler Canastra 6:32
Fantastic, and especially, you know, having that talent database, right that we have all these people very 30,000 is mentioned, or, you know, working in the target markets, in all native speakers, you’re offering a really great service for companies that don’t have access, or they don’t have those resources. That seems fantastic.

Vikrant Agrawal 6:48
Now, exactly. And they might also need this access all the time, right. So this is what I’m in. And, as I said, we’re also so we just actually really have launched the self service model really new. That’s something we did during during the pandemic, because also, obviously, business on some branches, slow down your back, for example, the tourism industry, which we are ready. So we use the time to really work on our platform. And what we really now are focusing on is to educate people how to use a content platform, how to create content, not only produce it,

Kyler Canastra 7:27
for sure, and Mickael to explain a bit more about the tourism industry, you guys work a lot with that what kind of clients do you work with?

Mickael Bensassi 7:37
It can vary from hotel groups or online, online booking platforms were, which are so promoting destinations, hotel venues, or any other camping sites. Now with your so big trend for the last year with homes, which are used more as accommodation for the tourism industry, rather than the classic hotel rooms. So that is the way that I also discovered because I was mainly focusing on hotels before I also discovered new type of tourism actors. And yeah, I think… I think we see as well, that it’s they’re preparing the bounce back. And hopefully we can, because we ever saw a lot of linguists very passionate about very enthusiastic, but writing this kind of content. So we hope for both sides, and also for us that, yeah, we’ll see more of this in the future.

Kyler Canastra 8:35
And I was just gonna say that, you know, less of an interesting past year with the tourism industry and kind of I don’t know how you guys adapted to that, or, you know, I think a lot of things have shifted within the industry itself and how we’re approaching travel now. Any comments about that?

Vikrant Agrawal 8:50
Yeah, well,

I mean, obviously, I think some some some actors will be will be hit differently and by also long term by by the pandemic and the other so my personal views, obviously, that first of all, private travel will bounce back because people want to travel want to explore the world. Yeah. And if you want to see differentiate, differentiated in that field, for sure that so that currently people are focusing on domestic holidays. So we have a lot of, you know, people asking to do Spanish content in Spanish for Spanish people and sharing your content in Germany, and not so much international travel, but I mean, domestic European travelers definitely got to bounce back first. And which nobody can gauge what’s going to happen with travel. So these are the clients which well are taking a risk probably and in the business model now. And that’s going to be how they are going to deal with us because I mean, obviously we’re doing this interview like this now this is also

Kyler Canastra 9:58
changing has gone Yeah. But also the demand definitely gonna be here. I think we’re all been cooped up praying for so long that we’re all like, as soon as we can travel, we’re gonna go Yeah,

Vikrant Agrawal 10:08
I think I don’t I don’t know how many travels you planned this year, I think I’m already planning my fourth travel, which is not happening. But should happen

Kyler Canastra 10:16
I hope only traveling I’ve done is to the US. Only place really I can go and then within Spain, you can’t really move around. It’s kind of it’s been interesting. We can’t leave the province or region of Madrid, right. It’s kind of Yeah, it’s been bizarre. But we’re hoping soon to get that, you know, up and running. And, you know, tourism so much. It’s great. It’s an important part of European countries. I’m hoping that

Vikrant Agrawal 10:38
yeah, I mean, in fact, we were having a booth on the ITB, which is the biggest tourism fair. And we weren’t really prepared to go there. And that was actually I think, three days before the big lockdown started or so to stop it. And then you were sitting on a lot of merchandise.

Kyler Canastra 10:59
And little did we know, yeah, there was a big lockdown, we thought maybe was a couple of weeks. And it turned into what we are now. But we’ll get back. And it’s great that we’ve had the time to really fine tune a lot of different things and make sure that in your case to have the content’s great and ready to go. Once the world reopens, but kind of to shift gears now. I’m curious to hear more about Mickael and your role as a marketing manager. What is your day to day life, like working in a constant agency?

Mickael Bensassi 11:25
Well,

it’s hard to it’s hard to describe because as you can imagine also greatcontent, as many as a companies, I presume. We had opted very early in the COVID crisis and agile structure, which means that for Yeah, for a while I was going by Vik, the Swiss knife, because I was with my experience in a different fields I was trying to help are so different departments. And now we’ll set a typical typical day that my main focus has been, for example, the management of the inbound, so very focused on lead generation experience that I also gained before. And yeah, making sure that people who are requesting our help potential customer, we find a way to answer them, and we find a way to bring them the right offer. And so yeah, to provide those to them the right content. And for that, we have our website, and we have a blog in different languages such as French, English, and German, of course,

and um yeah

of the other one of the other takss had been working was finding opportunities to put greatcontent on the spotlight. So thank you, thanks to the recompense, for instance, having this very, very interesting interview. And yeah, as we said, we recent beginning of the year will relaunch our new platform, and also together with with this new platform, the websites, which is brand new. And yeah, the idea was to of course, organize immigration of all the content from the old old website to the new one, creating new content, content, sorry, and items, trying to identify accurately our target audience, and so on and so forth. So there was there was very, very big diversity in the test have been, I’ve been I’ve been having in the last last months, so

Kyler Canastra 13:27
difficult challenges, but there Yeah,

Mickael Bensassi 13:30
and I prefer that than, than a routine of like, know what I’m gonna do in the morning, I know what I’m going to do. In the afternoon, I prefer the spontaneity of that I can have at greatcontent.

Kyler Canastra 13:40
I agree, you know, especially now things are so stagnant, it’s good to have some snacks in the, in the workplace, but also for the listeners, if you haven’t checked out their website, definitely do it. Fantastic. And kind of comparing now, your role as a marketing manager to the role of the CEO, could you explain a bit more about your day to day tasks? as CEO?

Vikrant Agrawal 14:00
Yeah, so first of all, I have to say I’m not the only CEO of greatcontent. So we’re we’re splitting the responsibilities. So I have a great colleague, Danny who’s taking care of the product and finance side quite unique normally, people need to find a schedule to the product, but we have like this. And that is that is of course a great help because it enables me to focus on on the other parts of the business, which mainly are marketing sales, and the project management and the customer success on the platform, right. So so this is this is the these are the main areas I am responsible for. And yeah, so I have I have a routine part of the day, and I have the rest of the day, which is about routine and my routine part is Yeah, it’s the time between nine and 1130. And after, I’m actually really flexible on what I’m doing. So in the first part of the day, I actually do dailies with the teams as because already said, we have an HR structure. So because not only do Swiss knife is actually a French knife is nice too. And and so what we have done is we have that it’s actually more or less a matrix organization. So we have squads, and we have, we have chapters. So in chapters, we have the people who have like the same background in education or skills. But in the squads, they are more focused around what they are doing. So we have, for example, one squad, which is taking care of the activation and success of the well, anybody who’s visiting the platform, right. On the other hand, we have people who are making sure that there’s traffic coming in and onto the platform. And then we have other people who are helping actually really working on this project, then these are the teams I have meetings with in the mornings. And then after that, well after that I really try to work on the company and not in the company.

Which is

well, it’s it’s pretty damn diverse. I mean, obviously we do a lot in marketing at the moment. Also in understanding how to make the platform easier to use, which is really hard, because you’re using the day to day, so you find it easy. So it’s always that back and have a look at it and look from an external point of view of what can you really do better? And that’s what we’re focusing on.

Kyler Canastra 16:36
That’s great. And yeah, it’s totally true. Once you’re so used to using something and trying to explain somebody else, it seems so easy to you, but it could be quite difficult for somebody else who has no idea. It’s just like science, right? When scientists explain things, it’s like for them, it’s so easy to understand.

Vikrant Agrawal 16:52
Our kids, I try to look at the things like like a four year old, I attempted to let my kids play with the platform.

Kyler Canastra 16:57
Yeah, just to see how it works right with them. Kids are always the best judge right? And things always very honest. And just kind of speaking about the platform like say, I want to use the platform, can you explain to me a bit how it works? And kind of what makes it different?

Vikrant Agrawal 17:12
Sure, so so well, first of all, maybe to understand what we offer. So we offer kind of services, we offer content creation, and we offer translation. And what we’ve done with now with the new version is to really make content creation super easy. And we can translate any content in again in other languages with with our network as well. And what we’ve done now is we have broken down the process of consecration in its success factors. And factors of good consecration are having the right person, which writes the text and making them and they should be also available, which is another thing, of course. And then the second, the second success factor is telling or making clear what you want, yeah, in a way, obviously you do with everything, but even that has to somehow work. The third factor is mainly to let as much as possible be checked by a system and not by yourself or by anyone. That’s obviously [inaudible]. So what we do is, and this is what the platform actually enables you to do. So we have, well, we have a lot of different briefing formats, you can choose based on what you need, which of this practice, which will always adapt, and we can actually help you to create a good briefing, we have that up linguist groups, so not finding the right linguists, but finding the right group of these again, I mean, they’re linguists right, what’s the level might not be available. So we try to have a group of people who know you and who can actually interact with you. That’s what the platform enables you to do. And choose yourself and also manage that great. The third part is making sure that you get what you want. That is you can actually specify a specific layout to say, I want to do a blog article. And I want to do it out of an SEO focus, I can make sure that it really has the headline sub headline or the bullet points. And this is where the author can fill in the stuff. And also make sure that as I said that the text is really original, it’s checked against plagiarism in the internal database and an external database also checked against keywords, which really gets tricky if you’re doing it for European languages, right because the keywords in languages are not just the words, but are actually stems with status. Obviously checks the grammar and, and all the other things which you know, just make a great text and fantastic.

Kyler Canastra 19:56
And yeah, so it’s kind of interesting to hear how like the All the different facets know the platform and how it works. And yeah, it’s really like a lot of collaboration that really fosters a lot between the client and between the linguist and there’s a lot of different things that you cover. It’s really interesting and something that’s really, you know, in demand in the content marketing industry, especially when you’re working in multiple languages, for sure. But kind of to learn more about, like a campaign or anything that you’ve worked on that’s really being successful. Miguel, could you explain maybe a situation or client or success story that you think went really well, that worked really well with the platform?

Mickael Bensassi 20:32
Yeah, of course, Well, again, something that we focus on the relaunch with relaunch of the new new platform that we, we officially did the beginning of beginning of the year, February. So we decided or so beforehand, to, to, to look at our client bae, past customer, existing customers, and also potential customers. And we did a big mailing campaign in four languages. And the idea was, of course not not to be too sales pushy, because we know that, especially in those times, that’s not the right message that you want to send, but more. That’s the Hey, we, we’ve been working a lot during this COVID trying to make our platform easier to use. Just please connect, use it. Feel free to ask us I was providing a lot of onboarding during that time, because we had a lot of Yeah, also past customers being just curious, but the innovation and that, that brings me to the to this point that despite the services, people are still Yeah, still willing to discover new things. Even if the budget, I’m not here today, still trying to keep up to date with the new technology in the content marketing, field and yeah. I mean, the audience says, well, we’ll come to the platform, we get a lot of feedback. So it was not only a marketing sales oriented campaign, but there’s so far it didn’t that was very interesting to get the feedback for from the users. And then that’s how you can basically, yeah, improve. Improve platform is not being focused on yourself in what you think is good, but also listening to what other people think and see your products. So yeah, this campaign around the platform

Kyler Canastra 22:18
is fantastic. The add

Vikrant Agrawal 22:19
on this. So what happened now after they have used it is that we have actually quite big online shops, which are already moved to the new platform, really leading ones in, in Germany, and also France. And we also obviously, have really tapped into different markets. But I mean, we’re really strong in tourism. And you’re also going to stay strong as tourism fingers crossed. And we also are really strong in e commerce. And but we have really also tapped into new market, which is blog writing, and let’s say services to b2b companies, or any company who needs a company blog, right. And, and they could see, I mean, obviously, if you have, if you have a big online shop, and you’re in constant demand of of content, that’s something you can also just give to an agency, you can also just give to, to us and run it by the platform, obviously, and or you have also the right personnel to create high volume contents, right. So these servers are really, really mature in their content needs. And we were catering them, either because they have the expertise, or because they had so much more than that. They could just give you the whole project constantly. And now we have, we also have a lot of clients which are in need of professional content, but do not do either do not need it all the time on actually just sporadic, you know, or just want to have low content bodies, but really wants to still do themselves. Brand new market we’re tapping into and that’s really working extremely well. I mean, it has its, you know, keeping problems. Yeah, so let’s say, let’s say the first two, three better clients who went on the platform covered a lot of bugs for us. In February, we did a soft launch then. And but thanks. Not only we not only our marketing teams are working a job. I mean, of course the tech times tech teams are working awesome. Hmm. We have a very big tech team. And, and they iron out the bugs really fast, which was I was really impressed by this. I mean, we’re talking one day half a day, which is I never saw things like that. And before and so now we really we really focus on enabling these kind of people. So anyone who’s listening, listening, so on the platform, you will be approached by most likely Mickael your onboarding Have a look at demos and let us also know your feedback.

Kyler Canastra 25:02
That’s fantastic. It seems

like yeah, you have all your you’ve checked all the boxes now with the tech team and all the different things that you’re looking at, and really focusing on the client, which is fantastic. But you guys mentioned blog posts and SEO. And that’s something that, you know, I think it’s great. And it’s organic marketing. And a lot of people don’t realize how powerful a blog post can be for a company. Do you guys have any tips on how getting how to get Seo right? I think a lot of people are worried about, you know, what is SEO and kind of how we can use this tool to really help bring traffic to our website, and I kind of want to see if he has any tips or advice?

Vikrant Agrawal 25:37
Absolutely, I mean, you’re working with so many SEO guys out there. But I believe that our marketing guy can answer this question.

Mickael Bensassi 25:44
Yeah, sure. But you will probably add at some some stuff, which I do not worry about that. I think that you’re right. Well, there is never any perfect recipe. I always believe, and I think that’s a rule that everybody will agree with, that you always need to answer questions to your audience when it comes to content marketing. And not only keywords should be the focus or the priority any longer. So we saw in the past, we saw at greatcontent, people are doing briefing and requesting to add a lot of keywords. And that’s also our job to tell them now this is maybe not the right direction you want to go as marketing and SEO experts. But yeah, we see a trend which is more built around the what we call “a content hub.” So we basically think that any company should cover a topic with a main piece of content, something that is very expert oriented. And then having this piece of content being as a hub, as an airport, and connecting to and mapping towards shorter content, which also answer some questions to this main topic. So it’s all about having content which is connected to each other with a strong piece made by an expert. And for that we have expert linguists, for instance. And yeah, for the rest, I invite you to read our blog, because we launched new blog posts on our website, where we try to address and take care of every, yeah, every trend of SEO marketing for different industries, because SEO can also vary from one industry to another one. So again, there is no recipe but at least that’s the advice I can that I can provide.

Kyler Canastra 27:39
Great, yeah, definitely. Yeah. For people that want to learn more about SEO, check out their blog, I’m sure it has great information. And it’s kind of a confusing world, for people that don’t understand it the beginning, but once you get it, you can see how powerful this tool is. So what skills do you think are most important for marketers these days? Especially now? We’re kind of navigating unforeseen waters?

Vikrant Agrawal 28:01
No one? Absolutely, I think, I think when we can see it, with our own team, and also well, with all the people we’re talking with, because a lot of marketers are actually asking us finally for content. And so I think the role of marketing has or marketing has really evolved during during a pandemic. And it means that it has really moved even more to the digital world. Right. So I think even more consumers and companies alike are relying on internet to discover new things. I mean, that’s basically the only place you can discover closed, right. And but even for a business person, I mean, the fairs are closed, you know, face to face meet ups, you know, the, I don’t know, just just just meeting someone for lunch. That’s really complicated nowadays. And so, they all turn to the internet, right? So a solid understanding of digital marketing is probably the most important skill which marketing needs to have. And, and digital itself is a very, very big field. Right. So right. I think that the question is whether you want to have a broad understanding of everything a bit, or whether you want to have understanding or something. No, let’s say let’s say I mean, the three fields I I know are really, really important currently are to understand advertising and trafficking for paid paid marketing campaigns or in the SEO part, which is the organic part which you have to invest on today, but you only reap the fruits three to six months from now. And so the content side or even knowing then what to do when when the leads come in because once they come in, they usually do not come in like one by one they know you have a long period, but nobody Coming in, and then suddenly a lot of people coming to me. You have to have a good CRM and technology backbone. This this inbox. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so, so having a solid understanding of how all these things are working together, I guess that’s the most important skill of marketing needs to have these days,

Kyler Canastra 30:24
for sure. And it seems like from what I got from that was adaptability, right, being able to adapt, being able to adapt, having a high demand to low demand, but also to adapting to the times and kind of what, no adapting to what people want, or looking for in the moment. Something that we’ve learned a lot. Last year.

Vikrant Agrawal 30:41
Yeah, absolutely. back, I guess. I mean, if you want to, if you want to go that route, I think adaptability is a good entry anyway. And you can also say that last year, because of something but I guess everybody has said that all the time. Nowadays, for

Kyler Canastra 30:59
sure. We can’t resist change. Clearly, we can’t Mickael what do you think some companies are getting wrong when it comes to marketing?

Mickael Bensassi 31:10
Yeah, I think just these questions can have, I can come back to the previous point I mentioned and explained. My experience, I saw some times when my previous job people were very only focusing on the the traffic, which which I think is wrong, because at the end of the day, I think, especially marketing, it says when we say that you have to work together, it means that you want to have you want to have to you want to have quality leads versus big amount of traffic, right, briefly to the point of stuffing, stuffing with keywords and stuff like that are not the priority. And what you want to do is to answer the right questions to the right audience, because you don’t want to be overwhelmed by non interesting audience. So as I said, again, as I said before, story, it’s about having a meaningful, insightful, big piece of content written by an expert, and making sure that the your blog or your website is well connected with different pieces of content, which answer all of the concerns of, of your existing customers, which is important, but also the potential. But I’m sure ones that you could attract

Kyler Canastra 32:29
exactly, there’s no one way to do it, it’s kind of more you have to be you have to listen to the client, the customer get their brand and also listen to the market and see what’s in demand. Instead of being easy to get like, you know, to the bottleneck and kind of think about one thing get siloed about Yeah, thinking about Okay, this is I’m going to do this for every client or every post that I do, or every campaign I work on, it’s kind of a big, I guess people fail sometimes when their campaigns because they think that way, but you have to think about your skill, which is so important. And Vik, kind of for those who are just starting out in this industry, you know, content marketing, a lot of people that haven’t heard about it before, but are interested in it, what advice would you give them? Or someone who’s just starting out?

Vikrant Agrawal 33:14
Well, well, somebody starting out, I would give them the advice. First of all, I tell them, it’s a great, great time to start out now. Right? And because what happened is, during the pandemic is actually people have got more accessible. Yeah. So it’s really easy to get into contact with anyone. I mean, you just reached out to the like, fine. I mean, yeah, a video conference. I mean, how many people would technically be able to do this before the right now. Even even grandmothers can do and are doing this. Yeah. Yeah. Not so technically at that. But grandmother’s really good. I found out

and

Kyler Canastra 33:57
not mine. but sine, yes, are tech saavy.

Vikrant Agrawal 34:04
And so literally, everybody’s just a video meeting aware. I mean, it’s, it’s, you know, you don’t have to go somewhere, just noticed just a click, and you can talk to someone. And it’s an interesting connection, just based off and

Kyler Canastra 34:19
our access to talent is incredible. Now, we have talent, you can connect with anywhere, but

Vikrant Agrawal 34:23
also also expertise. Right. So and it works both ways. Right. So so I’ve been contacted by a lot of entrepreneurs to give them feedback on ideas. I asked a lot of people for valuable feedback, which I think, you know, just to answer the question I currently have. And so the great tip would be to start asking away. Yeah, I mean, just just you want to talk to and I mean, if you think I can answer a question, feel free to contact me as well.

Kyler Canastra 34:56
For sure. It’s all about kind of networking and putting yourself out there. No, it’s To see and learning from each other and contacting people who are experts in the field, and learning firsthand.

Vikrant Agrawal 35:05
Yeah, for sure. I would not. I think you asked us also, what are the what are good recommendations, right? for books and for content, but one thing you also have to take care of is not to over research stuff, right. And you know, the pure amount of content out there. I know that into say, here for content company, could also kill you. So, I mean, or just inhibit you to do anything else. Yeah. Because you just have a lot of people who are just reading, reading, reading,

Kyler Canastra 35:40
right? And I have to get

Vikrant Agrawal 35:42
the information, right. But at the end, I’m not focusing on doing stuff. So I guess, I guess that’s, that’s one thing you should not forget. So asking people is a great way to get starting because it’s in between, right. So right? Something you ask people, and then you do so to get away from this content is probably a good idea just to ask people and

Kyler Canastra 36:04
interact with people. So important. Yeah, kind of finding a balance between you know, the theory, but also the practice of doing so important to practice and make mistakes, I think it’s so important that we make mistakes, and we kind of learn from this better. And that’s how we become experts, right in our fields is by learning and learning on the go. And you mentioned, yeah, so for our listeners, we always like to ask our guests know about their recommendations about different things, because you know, people here for knowledge sharing kind of want to learn more about how they can improve. And I think one big thing we’ve all learned in the pandemic was daily habits, and how to make good daily habits to keep us motivated and to have success, whether it’s in our careers or personal lives. And I want to see from both of you kind of what kind of daily habits you incorporate in their lives that you think help you become more successful.

Vikrant Agrawal 36:54
Well Mickael you want to go first? Yeah,

Mickael Bensassi 36:57
well, in the greatcontent, we had the chance to go to the office during last summer, but it didn’t last long, unfortunately. But since then, that’s really nice, because we have all of those meetings online. So we never, never, we never lose the connection with with the rest of the team. We are very open regarding this. And we continued as much as we could, doing some event gathering. So we’re not physically gathering. But like yesterday, we did a pop quiz, for example. So we tried to keep this tradition of adding some small team events, even though this is online, and there were tons of opportunities. So yeah, I think that that’s one of the key to keep the team spirit to, at least for us. It worked. So important.

Kyler Canastra 37:45
Yeah, we did that a lot too. In our lockdown here in Spain, a lot of we had coffee breaks, and we did yoga during like a 15 minute yoga session just to it’s really important, even though we’re not physically together to keep that bond and to keep that interaction during the work day. And for you Vik?

Vikrant Agrawal 38:02
Well, I mean, business on the business side, because absolutely right. So we try to be have as much as many interactions as as possible, even also with clients. And I mean, they do feel the same way, right? I mean, the other person is winning, either their stress sitting at home because they have a lot of children or whatever going on. And everybody’s trying to manage that. Or they’re there. They’re really alone. Yeah, alone sitting alone. I mean, I’m, I have a family of three kids and wonderful wife. So the three boys are 6, 4, and 1. So it’s always life in my house. So you probably heard that during the call so well, that’s life. And so so it’s also important for them, it’s also important to have a daily routine. So you know, obviously, having daily stuff and just continuing days over

Kyler Canastra 38:58
and right. Yeah. And for me, I was alone for three months, when we were locked down in Spain it was quite strict and helped me so much having a routine continue with exercise and working and you know, making sure I scheduled things and that makes sure that like my life wasn’t just you know, Groundhog Day repeating over and over again. Which it’s very easy to do. Right.

Vikrant Agrawal 39:17
That’s a great,

Kyler Canastra 39:19
great recommendations. And and then in terms of apps and tools and platforms or books that you guys use, do you have any recommendations that you’d like to share with our audience, whether it be about marketing, or we just said “Groundhog Day”, that’s something different, but anything a bit more personal? What tools do

Mickael Bensassi 39:38
Mickael? Sure.

Well, things that work pretty well for us. I mean, nothing. Nothing. So so new, I guess yeah , we use Slack, Google Suite of course, and Freshdesk. And I think we try to keep it simple and that with content at least then things are working and everybody’s able to work with this tool very efficiently. And the

Kyler Canastra 40:06
Having efficient tools are some fine.

Vikrant Agrawal 40:09
Yeah, but at the same time keeping it simple. So yeah, try out a lot of different other tools. I mean, I don’t recommend one to the other, but just try not to create a zoo of tools. Yeah,

Kyler Canastra 40:20
yeah, you don’t want too many.

Vikrant Agrawal 40:22
Now, because because you will, like you will also spread out communication and attention around them. So so that’s what we’re trying to we try to have a healthy diet on tools as well.

Kyler Canastra 40:34
Sure. How about any platforms you recommend?

Vikrant Agrawal 40:39
Well, well, I recommend, of course, greatcontent. But I guess that’s not the question you asked. Hey, it’s

Kyler Canastra 40:47
It’s an answer. Right?

Vikrant Agrawal 40:50
I have to say that right. being spoken platform is you want to learn how to create content. But you know, it really depends on what you want to do. I mean, YouTube is a great platform, which you put on anything. Yeah,

Kyler Canastra 41:05
yeah, we have a whole wealth of knowledge on

Vikrant Agrawal 41:07
that. And from your something different to just watch the video for a while. But yeah, I mean, we I think Mickael you’re doing an HubSpot course. Right? Currently.

Mickael Bensassi 41:20
Not was more last year I did, right? Did Yeah. Over the last two years. I did a lot of HubSpot certification you have for content marketing, inbound, lead generation and email marketing. So yeah, I really like the format because there are videos in a very easy to understand English and then you have some more exercise, you also have a lot of takeaways such as use spreadsheet or stuff like that to get some practice in the in the real life, which I did to build nests in my previous company. So here with greatcontent Yeah, it’s, it brings

Vikrant Agrawal 42:02
what you want to learn, right? I mean, all the big platforms have great courses. Right? Certifications… Amazon has quite interesting certification if you want to get into so there’s, I mean, there’s a lot of skills skill building platforms out there, I guess.

Kyler Canastra 42:16
Yeah. It’s kind of like the world’s our oyster now. So amazing. All like, yeah, especially looking online courses, you can learn anything which is fantastic.

Vikrant Agrawal 42:24
Literally the other day, some colleagues showed me how to do origami, because they learned it on a platform that’s like, really specific, but I really appreciate it, appreciate

Kyler Canastra 42:34
it. Yeah, we can learn any skill we want.

Vikrant Agrawal 42:36
Absolutely.

Kyler Canastra 42:37
So we’re coming to the end of our interview. Unfortunately, I really enjoyed our conversation today. But I wanted to ask both of you any parting advice or final takeaways you’d like to share with our listeners?

Vikrant Agrawal 42:50
So I’ll start now right?

Kyler Canastra 42:54
Either way, doesn’t matter.

Vikrant Agrawal 42:57
All right. So I think literally, I think I already said it. So I’m just going to say it again, because repetition is very important in marketing. And that is because you’re asking us for some inspiration and we always get asked Okay, what is what is the quote what is source of inspiration success? Right? And, and I think it’s super important to just get doing stuff. Yeah. And another thing which I also noticed is not to look too much to the left or to the right, who’s doing what Yeah, so it’s good to get an inspiration but then really do your own thing and really also continue doing that and especially if you can’t go out and get lost on social media that So yeah, I think it is bad or good but if you are doing something also try to take really not too serious who’s doing what in your field and who’s doing something else and who’s criticizing you just just keep on doing it because at the end having the failure or having the experiences you’re on the first hand is something which no inspirational content or any content can

Kyler Canastra 44:07
kind of like be your own inspiration.

Vikrant Agrawal 44:09
Absolutely

Kyler Canastra 44:10
And you, Mickael?

Mickael Bensassi 44:13
well no nothing much to add a prime cream Yeah, share pretty much the same vision as Vik, as Vik, sorry. Yeah, challenging yourself. And yeah. Bringing dedication to what you do and you can never be wrong if you if you try I mean we tried with Vik together so many so many [inaudible] in our structure over the last year, young things failed. It was and I’m younger with less experienced than Vik. Of course I was sometimes hard to to accept for me but yeah, it’s always like that, it’s only like that. That’s you you can move forward and now I think we have so fun, a very efficient structure or most after a year. We tried this new implementation so can take time sometimes. But yeah, if you go for it, then it Yeah,

Kyler Canastra 45:06
If you’re consistent and stick to your goals. It might take time. But hey, good things take time. There’s a payback Rome wasn’t built in a day. And a question I’m sure we’re gonna get an answer for our listeners now is that how do we get in touch with you? What’s the best way to connect or to keep in touch? Well,

Mickael Bensassi 45:25
LinkedIn, on LinkedIn, we have the our personal account or so the great content LinkedIn accounts, or of course, you can always sign up for our blog, on our web site. Fantastic.

Kyler Canastra 45:40
And yeah, is now the end of the interview. I want to thank you both so so much for taking the time to share your insights with us on The Content Mix. And I want to thank everyone for listening. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out thecontentmix.com and keep tuning to the podcasts for daily interviews with content experts, and we’ll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai