Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Jade Lim Maravillas, Global Head of Marketing Enablement and Bernardo Lemgruber, Head of Content and Brand Marketing at VTEX, on creating a content strategy:

Shaheen Samavati 0:00
Hi everyone, I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix. I’m excited to be hosting our second ever multi-guest interview with Jade Maravillas & Bernardo Lengruber, both based in London and they’re both from the company VTEX, which is a cloud based e-commerce platform. Jade is global head of marketing enablement and Bernardo is head of content. Thanks so much both of you for joining us.

Jade Maravillas 0:34
Thanks for having us, Shaheen.

Bernardo Lengruber 0:35
Thank you Shaheen.

Shaheen Samavati 0:37
So can each of you just introduce yourselves in your own words? Maybe we could start with Jade?

Jade Maravillas 0:43
Yeah, hi, I’m Jade Maravillas, I am based in London, I am not from London as you can probably tell by my accent. I am originally from the Philippines and I move everywhere.

Shaheen Samavati 0:59
I would guess you’re American by your accent.

Jade Maravillas 1:02
Oh, I I hope that’s a good thing.

Shaheen Samavati 1:06
Definitely, as an American myself it’s a compliment.

Jade Maravillas 1:09
I take that as a compliment then, I think it’s one of those accents that sounds like an international school accent. You sound like you could be from the US, but then it’s not really American. Anyway I will take it as a compliment. So yeah, I’ve lived in a lot of different places. I now live in London with my husband and my two and a half year old daughter. I’ve been working at VTEX for about a year and a half now. It’s gone really quickly. Prior to that my background has been in, well everything, a lot of it’s in technology but I have also worked in consumer and in music for a long time actually. I was working in record labels at the midpoint of my career.

Bernardo Lengruber 1:56
I didn’t know the music part.

Jade Maravillas 1:58
You didn’t? That was a big chunk of my career. I have a lot of stories to tell, but maybe not for this episode.

Shaheen Samavati 2:08
Maybe a bit later. Bernardo, can you introduce yourself aswell?

Bernardo Lengruber 2:15
Sure, sure. So I’m Bernardo Lengruber, I’m from Brazil which is actually where VTEX is from too. I moved to London last year, actually not London to be fair, I live in St. Albans, but the office we have is in London. I moved during the pandemic so a really crazy move, life move in general. I came here with my wife, I don’t have a two and a half year old daughter.

Jade Maravillas 2:40
Not yet.

Bernardo Lengruber 2:42
But I have a lot of plants now in the garden, which is nice. I’ve been at VTEX for seven years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes and transformations during these years. My main background, especially at VTEX, is with branding. So before leading the content team, which is a new team, I was the head of the branding team and the whole branding and positioning strategy, brand strategy for VTEX.

Jade Maravillas 3:12
He’s responsible for all the pink. If you don’t like pink, blame him, but he loves pink.

Bernardo Lengruber 3:21
Probably, if you don’t love pink, you won’t work with VTEX.

Shaheen Samavati 3:26
But has that always been your brand color?

Bernardo Lengruber 3:30
From VTEX? No we were blue and orange, really boring. It was really boring. The rebranding was in 2017 actually and then a lot of things came afterwards. One of them was the marketing. So VTEX grew a lot without having a marketing position, that was after one year, like a little after.

Jade Maravillas 3:54
Almost exactly one year ago. So fun fact, as Bernardo said, I don’t think a lot of people have heard about VTEX. I would be very surprised if they have. But we are a 20 year old startup, what that means is that we have been around since the year 2000. Started in Brazil, moved to the rest of Latin America where we still command quite a good market share there, but have now really expanded into the US and into Europe. That’s where the whole startup thing comes from. So there’s two reasons why I say startup. One is because in the typical developed markets, we are just starting, we’ve been here for a couple of years, really making a big play for it. But also startup in terms of our culture. So we are a 20 year old startup with 1000 people spread around the world, but we thankfully have kept our flat, lean organizational structure and it’s been great. So another startup is that the marketing function at VTEX has been around for less than one year. So we started at the start of last year’s pandemic, so March. Prior to that there was absolutely no one with the title or no team with the term marketing in it. We’ve gone from zero people in February of 2020 and now we have, I would say, at least 70 to 80 people with the title marketing. So it’s been amazing. It’s been a really nice journey.

Shaheen Samavati 5:39
How were you marketing your services before then? Was it another department responsible for the function of marketing?

Jade Maravillas 5:46
Bernardo do you want to take that on?

Bernardo Lengruber 5:47
Yeah, sure. So what we call today marketing at VTEC before was under the sales teams. So it was a really salesy lead generation only focus, without much strategy, without much long term vision. I think that started to build up. It was a match, the marketing on that silo not working in the long term and the branding also demanding more awareness, this top funnel, top level campaigns, messaging and positioning. Then now we put it all together. Just in addition to that, maybe Jade you can help me with this, is that me and Jade, we are under the marketing enablement function and area. So the way it works is each country or region has its own growth team, which is marketing, sales and CX. We as enablement, we are not responsible for a country, but we are supporting and guiding the countries in their own needs.

Shaheen Samavati 7:07
So you’re providing resources to the sales teams in all the different markets?

Jade Maravillas 7:11
Absolutely.

Bernardo Lengruber 7:11
We’re complimenting the strategy for what they can’t or they’re not seeing.

Jade Maravillas 7:17
Yeah, it’s a very democratic way of doing marketing. So as I always say, we’re not a global marketing team, but we’re the closest to a global marketing team at VTEX. So we still give autonomy to the countries to be able to do their own campaigns and put out their own content. We take the best of the best practices and share them across the globe, really. At the same time, we also define the standards of what is good content and what isn’t. So we’re able to also share the best practices from a knowledge perspective so that they are really writing or producing content that will achieve their goals.

Bernardo Lengruber 8:01
Just a comment on that, I think it’s interesting. Even though we are in this meta area, we are learning what we’re doing and we are actually doing things, we’re not just supporting and guiding and creating the best practices, we are promoting campaigns, we are building the pieces, we are also contributing to the marketing of the company and building the things as we grow.

Shaheen Samavati 8:34
So for context, could you tell us a little bit about what VTEX actually does? Obviously, our audiences aren’t your customers, but just to get a general idea.

Jade Maravillas 8:47
So I’d like to say that VTEX helps brands, retailers and businesses keep up with the pace of their anytime, anywhere customer. It’s your integrated commerce, order management and marketplace platform. What that really means is that, nowadays it’s not enough to undergo digital transformation. It’s not a “good to do” anymore, it’s a “must do”. Especially with the acceleration of this with COVID coming in. For most enterprise businesses, they’ve already been on the web. So it’s not saying, yes go online, although of course, that is another message, that is the base. It’s thinking beyond traditional e-commerce and expanding the horizons of what is possible in that sense. So are you able to go into new markets as quickly as you should be because time is of the essence. Typically, when you talk about monolithic, older generation platforms, is that a project usually takes one and a half, two years. With our technology, we are able to reduce that to our average implementation time of 109 days, which is pretty quick because if you think about it, it’s gone from years to weeks. We’re not talking about startups or SMEs, we’re talking about enterprise enterprises and really big global organizations going through these changes at the maximum time to revenue. At the same time, another thing that we are really advocating now is the possibilities of being your own marketplace. So we all know the importance of marketplaces today, for instance being on Amazon, you can’t be a retail business now and not be on something like Amazon or eBay. The next possibility after that is being your own marketplace and what we mean by that is being able to expand new business lines and reach more audiences through a network, through your own network of you being at the center of that marketplace. You can connect buyers and sellers, and also open up new product lines without actually incurring the risk of taking on that inventory. So that’s really, really exciting for us. We think that technology shouldn’t be a barrier to putting the pieces of your business together.

Shaheen Samavati 11:31
So maybe Bernardo, you can share who’s your target audience when it comes to content marketing and who are your customers typically?

Bernardo Lengruber 11:40
So Jade already mentioned these enterprise brands we work with. The hard part of defining the audience was always that we’re not attached to a specific industry, for instance, like just grocery, or just electronics, or just pharma. We have customers in all all of the segments so that’s not a good way to look at it. Also, the enterprise level, but we also have what we call tier two and three companies using the platform. So it’s not just about the size. Recently, we’ve been through a process of exactly that, defining the audience and we mix the persona approach with the job to be done. We came up with three definitions of audiences for content as you said. So decision makers, so the people who are there on the C-level or more directors, etc, from these enterprises. They are the ones signing the contract, but they are not necessarily using the platform or even sometimes not even senior demo, they just need to be convinced that there is the platform, so they are making decisions. The second audience would be the project owners, the ones who are actually implementing, they’re actually looking after platforms, they are deeply involved in the process. The third would be the users, the people who are everyday managing their orders, or managing the payment gateways or logistics, etc, everything you need for an e commerce operation to run. So we have these three completely different audiences, with completely different daily problems. We are now starting to segment the content to each one of them in different channels. So for instance, the decision makers, they won’t go out of their way, even though we would love to, it’s just not the reality. They won’t go out of their way to enter our blog. They read the Financial Times, they read New York Times, or other traditional media outlets. So what we want to do is we want to be there. We want to be featured on that media that they already read or that they already listen to. The project owners, on the other hand, they are actively looking after solutions. They’re actively researching, they’re actively trying to solve the problems that they live in their daily lives in work. So they will most likely end up reading an article on our blog or having been friends of someone who is already a customer and then they start talking about it. So it’s more about creating relevant content for the questions and the problems they have and addressing the right channels like targeted campaigns or even organic with the blog and then the users. They are not really connected to the buying process. Especially in these big enterprises, they can influence a little bit in the process, but they won’t be directly involved with that. So usually we communicate with them either via their help center, which is a more how to type of content and also internal communications. So the platform has an internal area where we can talk directly to them. Intercom or the product marketing team also launch things directly to our users. So it’s a much more segmented and specific type of communication.

Jade Maravillas 15:34
We’re also experimenting with new content ideas to be able to reach these users. I won’t go into too much detail here because we’re still in the process of thinking and doing it. But when that does happen and we see results, we’d love to share that with you.

Shaheen Samavati 15:54
Awesome, yeah that would be great. So it sounds like with the creation of this new marketing department, you’re putting a lot more emphasis on content marketing. Can you share some of the initiatives that you’ve launched in the past year or so?

Bernardo Lengruber 16:09
Sure. We didn’t have content before, that’s one thing we have to share. As I said earlier, the sales teams were really focused on lead generation, like short term communication. So we were not producing content. So the existence of content in the company is the most successful thing we did last year, at this beginning of marketing. So one of the things I noticed last week, actually, was that we started investing a lot on customer stories. So we write customer stories for the blog, we have case studies, we started having spin offs of customer story. So dedicated interviews, now it’s written, but we have plans for podcasts on that sense. The magic of it, the success metric that no one talks about, is that this year for 2021 all countries and all marketing teams have at least one metric related to creating more customer stars. So from a company that didn’t have any content, after 10 or 11 months working in this area having everyone brought in, creating more customer stories and put them to the market. I would say that’s the most successful thing we did, at least on the content perspective.

Shaheen Samavati 17:41
Yeah that’s an impressive change. I’m curious why there was such a change and how there was such a buy into this? From a company that wasn’t investing in content at all, suddenly saying, okay we really need to double down on this.

Jade Maravillas 17:55
They saw it was effective. They saw it was effective from both a lead generation perspective, but also getting closer to their customers and really getting into the reasons why they have bought into us and not just bought our products. 2020 was about establishing this discipline and now 2021 we have established the discipline, we’ve gotten this changed management approach to the way that we see content in our organization. So now everyone is bought in, it’s part of a country’s grade to produce these customer stories and talk about our success through our customer success. I am a big proponent of assignments and a start with why approach. I don’t know if you’ve come across that already. I think it’s quite an old concept, old in the sense of the internet, right? It’s not that old. I am a lot older than that. But let’s not talk about my age, it’s my birthday on Sunday, another year older. But going back to what I was saying, starting with the why and starting with the intrinsic value that you bring to a customer. It’s great that you can talk about the results from a numbers perspective and how you got there from a product or solution perspective. But why do people actually buy your product? It’s also because they want to achieve something that is not necessarily tangible from a numbers perspective. That is important, but also I would like to prove a point and I just joined this company and I want to make sure that I leave my legacy with the way that things are running. So it’s getting to the heart of why people buy and then talking about the how and then the what. It’s such a mindset shift. We’re not there yet. We’re getting there, we’re starting with our team. It’s a really painful process. A little bit of a tangent but to relate to what I’m saying, we’ve been starting to relook into our website messaging. Like a lot of B2B companies, we talk about ourselves. It’s easy, right? You can say that you are the first and the best, and you do this, and you do that. But what really resonates with your audience is putting them as a protagonist and you as the guide, the Yoda to the Luke Skywalker. Everyone sees themselves as the Luke Skywalker in their own lives, so why would you put yourself as the Luke Skywalker in that person’s life and not have that connection?

Shaheen Samavati 21:12
Yeah, absolutely.

Jade Maravillas 21:12
So that is really the practice that we’re doing, not just from a website perspective, but also in every single piece of content that we’re starting to produce as a team now. Hopefully by the end of 2021, maybe even before that I hope, that trickles down into the way that the rest of the organization thinks.

Shaheen Samavati 21:31
I was curious that this emphasis on content, did it start before or after the pandemic started?

Jade Maravillas 21:38
I think it was around the same, well I would say actually it was before.

Shaheen Samavati 21:46
Obviously now I imagine there’s limitations on other types of marketing that might have been important before. So it obviously makes sense, to emphasize more content and online, digital marketing. I was just curious how that played into it. If it was something that you were preparing and just like happened to be?

Jade Maravillas 22:04
I have my my stories about that or opinions but Bernardo did you want to touch on that?

Bernardo Lengruber 22:09
Yeah, just one thing I just remembered, we don’t talk about that much. But Mariano, one of the cofounders of the company, he always had this understanding that content was important. So you asked that and I went back to 2015, when I was one year old at the company, he put some guy in San Paolo, to start a YouTube channel. That’s like six years ago. The idea was amazing, I remember it was kind of a television show. A set with lights, a table and a professional camera, that type of thing. But to be honest, and in a lot of other attempts after that, I think we never got content right. Creating really useful, insightful, generous content. This is also one of the things I believe and I’m seeing that people get wrong all the time. The content we build now and we want to build from now on is not sales content. We’re not trying to sell you VTEX, we’re telling you the amazing things that people who use VTEX were able to do. This is a completely different approach and we were mentioning before, this dependence of marketing under sales creates this kind of friction. My result is I have to generate leads, I have to drive traffic, I have to deliver more sales in the end. In our new approach we want to generate more conversations. We want to get into that project owner mind and get him talking about what Sony did with VTEX or how Black & Decker was formed, or even better how VTEX was part of Black & Decker transformation. Again we are just one part of the digital transformation these big companies are going through. We are the commerce platform but there’s a whole big change going together. Knowing this and putting ourselves in this place where we can share the experiences and share how they overcome their challenges is much more effective than “Oh, VTEX is amazing, we have the best OMS in the market.” The conversion rate now is 30% higher and people already don’t know VTEX, why would they care about the conversion rate, even though it’s a very good number. Everyone loves conversion rates, I don’t know if I deviated a lot.

Shaheen Samavati 25:05
No, definitely super relevant.

Jade Maravillas 25:08
Let me add to that. So another thing that we have been doing very well as a company is our own branded events. So another fun fact, we run the third largest e commerce event in the world and the largest one in Latin America. So this is called VTEX day. In 2019, which was the last year that we had it live, we had Barack Obama as the guest, keynote speaker. Why would Barack Obama be a keynote speaker at an e commerce technology event in Brazil? That sort of approach dictates the way that we have seen content before, but just from a different medium, it was through physical events, which from a Latin American perspective has been the primary way to do business, it’s always been face to face. Obviously, with the pandemic, everything’s going to digital now. I think from a culture and a mindset perspective, there’s also been something that accelerated this digital content marketing approach. Prior to that, for years and years and years, we didn’t go into 22,000 attendees at a single event from one year, so it’s been years of building that up and the central component to those events, is the content that we have. So throughout the two days of the VTEX day event, attendees are able to join about 30 or 40 different topics or people talking about certain topics in parallel. You have some keynote speakers, but you also have smaller panels, smaller speakers and this is the physical embodiment of the way that we used to see content, or the way that we see content. It’s a very community based type of approach. But obviously, with physical now not being in people’s vocabulary, we are trying to mimic the way that we have done that from physical events and now going into the digital experience.

Shaheen Samavati 27:36
Absolutely that’s a very cool way of thinking about it in terms of the transition. I wanted to ask, you’re a very global company operating all around the world. So how do you create content for all these different geographies?

Bernardo Lengruber 27:54
Well, I would say as we are a small team we have to do a lot of curation. So we gather from all teams, like the sales team, the product marketing team, the sales enablement team, everyone drops a lot of brands they want to talk about and we do this curation. So we have this quarterly planning of what is the product launching that will guide the narrative we want to bring to the market. So market place or handlers, something that gives us this topic to work on that we will prioritize over others. So this is one of the ways we curate. There are two other criterias. One is the brand, so if it’s a global brand that all regions can leverage, amazing that’s top of the list and the second is good results as well. So if we have a good brand, with good results that is using the solution we want to talk about, that’s good. It doesn’t happen always but we usually have at least two of these points addressed. Then the local teams are also creating content. So Brazil for instance, they are creating a lot of content for their customer stories and we are also looking into the stories and globalizing them. So, even if it’s a local brand but it’s a very good marketplace case, then we pick that, adapt a little bit and then launch it to other markets. So it’s kind of both ways.

Shaheen Samavati 29:35
Very cool. So I want to ask you both about your recommendations. In the interviews, I always like to get people’s ideas for resources that would be useful for other marketers. So first of all, either of you can chime in on any of these questions, resources for staying up to date on marketing trends that come to mind?

Jade Maravillas 29:58
I can start off with that. So as I mentioned earlier, I’m a full time mom and a full time working person professional. As with that, you tend to be very busy. So we value the thirst for knowledge in our organization and definitely in our team. So as a team leader myself, what I normally do is in the mornings when I’m doing chores, I tend to listen to podcasts, or look into really interesting videos or download ebooks. Sorry not ebooks, audiobooks. While I’m trying to tidy up or getting my daughter to school, I put my headset on and I’m listening to something. So it kind of kills two birds with one stone, because that’s the only way. The good thing is that Bernardo and I sit in London, where we start our day a little bit earlier than our colleagues in Latin America and the US. So we are able to get some studying time or get some listening time in the mornings.

Bernardo Lengruber 31:09
I kind of hate social media. So I try to get myself out of it a lot. It used to be a huge source for me but now I would say maybe a few newsletters. But honestly, I read more on news, what’s happening in the world. There’s this guy who writes a very good newsletter on marketing. Can I send you the name later?

Shaheen Samavati 31:35
Yeah, I can add it into the blog post. No worries.

Bernardo Lengruber 31:40
It’s not too much newsletters, but he curates one thing and goes deeper into it. I think it’s very good. I use Jade as a curator. So whatever she sends me I read or watch her or listen.

Jade Maravillas 31:56
It’s always good content, right?

Bernardo Lengruber 31:58
Always good content.

Shaheen Samavati 32:02
Yeah, so any other resources in terms of online courses or books or software tools or apps?

Jade Maravillas 32:12
Yeah, so I can start off with that. Personally, I say we because as Bernardo said, I’ve been sharing a lot with my team. But personally, I tend to have certain thought leaders or authors that I go to over and over again. We love Donald Miller. I don’t know if you’ve come across him.

Shaheen Samavati 32:36
Yeah, I have read The Story Brand and it was coming to mind when you were mentioning about Luke Skywalker.

Jade Maravillas 32:42
Yeah, sorry Donald, if you’re ever listening I used one of your references. So there’s a couple of thought leaders that we really respect, a few thought leaders that I really respect. So Donald Miller is one of them, Seth Godin, I’d love to be his best friend, he’s so lovely. Simon Sinek, as I mentioned earlier. Also for me, what really is the most prolific think tank that has been focused on the importance of brand and B2B marketing is the B2B Institute. I don’t know if you’ve come across them before, but they’re a think tank that’s funded by LinkedIn. Every single piece of research and article and video that they’ve come up with, it’s been such a valuable resource for me that I am really taking a lot of what they say not just by heart, but into the organization myself. In fact, because I’m such a fan of Donald Miller and the B2B Institute, we are having our marketing kickoff in March. We are getting them both as keynote speakers for our internal events. So I’m really excited to share those thought leaders I look up to, that we look up to as a team, across the entire organization.

Shaheen Samavati 34:03
By the way, is their event going be online, I guess?

Jade Maravillas 34:06
Yeah, online.

Shaheen Samavati 34:07
I’ll definitely have to check out your events. It sounds like you’ve got some really cool people.

Jade Maravillas 34:13
It’s internal but maybe one day.

Shaheen Samavati 34:19
The event with Barack Obama was internal?

Jade Maravillas 34:22
Oh, no, no, no.

Shaheen Samavati 34:23
That was a big external event?

Jade Maravillas 34:24
That was a big external event but for this one, this is our internal kickoff that’s dedicated to marketing, but we’re not just focusing on marketing attendees. We’re also opening it up to the other departments, especially from a sales, a partner and a cx perspective, but we’re also inviting other people in product and finance to join us and really learn from. It’s one thing to learn from us. I don’t like saying that, but learning from the thought leaders that we really look up to, that was the whole idea of it.

Shaheen Samavati 34:58
Yeah, that sounds like an amazing opportunity for employees. That’s really cool. So we’re getting towards the end of the interview, I did have a question about productivity hacks. I don’t know if you have a quick one, either of you?

Jade Maravillas 35:12
I think I already mentioned mine which is basically multitasking, listening to audio stuff, podcasts, ebooks, while I’m cleaning the toilet or putting my daughter out to school. What about you Bernardo?

Bernardo Lengruber 35:27
Yeah, I’m the opposite, I can’t multitask. So my productivity hack is the opposite. So I read earlier this year, the Deep Work book from Cal Newport, it’s very good. I started leveraging those three hours I earned when I moved to the UK to do deep work. So having the mornings without any meetings apart from today, of course, this is a special event. Apart from today, this is how I get productive and get things done. Usually the afternoons are more like meetings and catch ups etc. So I feel like separating my mornings to do work has been very productive.

Shaheen Samavati 36:25
Very cool. So we’re reaching the end of the interview, I just wanted to give you each the chance for some final parting words or parting advice for other marketers in Europe? We can start with Jade?

Jade Maravillas 36:37
So as I said, we are at the start of our journey. We’re not content experts yet. I don’t think we’ll ever get there, even if you’re going to be doing this for the next 20 years. The thing about our industry and the way the pace of change, of technology is happening and also media consumption, I don’t think anyone can really say that they will ever get there. If they are then they’re lying. So it’s important to note that we’re all at the start of this journey. We were super excited to get on to this podcast for us to share this journey with everyone. So just encouraging people that if you’re not there yet, it’s never too late to start.

Bernardo Lengruber 37:24
From my side it’s just a big shout out for the B2B marketers out there. I know it’s hard. I know it lacks benchmark, but I think we have a very good space to work on. So just a shout-out.

Shaheen Samavati 37:39
All right, great. Well, thank you both so much for sharing your insights with us today on the podcast.

Jade Maravillas 37:44
Thanks, Shaheen.

Bernardo Lengruber 37:45
It’s been a pleasure.

Shaheen Samavati 37:47
Thanks everybody for listening in. For more perspectives on content marketing in Europe, check out veracontent.com/mix and keep tuning into the podcast for more interviews with content experts. See you next time. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai