Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Sara Cronsioe, content lead at GetAccept, on creating educational content:

Carlota Pico 0:14
Hi everyone, I’m Carlota Pico from The Content Mix, and I’m excited to be here today with Sara Cronsioe, who is GetAccept’s digital marketer and content lead and has over three years of experience in marketing and communications. Welcome Sara, and thanks so much for joining us today on The Content Mix.

Sara Cronsioe 0:33
Hi, thank you for having me.

Carlota Pico 0:35
It’s a pleasure. Sara, we’re going to jump right into the interview. To get the interview started off, I’d like to learn a little bit about your background and your experience in marketing and communications.

Sara Cronsioe 0:47
Yes, so I have been at GetAccept for almost a year now. And before that, I’ve been working as a global web editor and marketing coordinator. Mainly in Sweden but also from England. But I’ve always been working in a global, a company that works globally.

Carlota Pico 1:09
Okay. And what is GetAccept?

Sara Cronsioe 1:12
Yes, GetAccept is a startup, we started 2015, and we are a sales enablement platform and also a sales tool that helps salespeople to close a deal faster. So we provide this platform, this amazing platform with a lot of features, where we do legally binding e-signatures. There is a lot of features, you can track and you can personalize the whole sales process and you get data. And you can also analyze the sales document, the contracts, the quotes, to see where the deal is getting. So it’s a sales tool, but also a sales enablement platform.

Carlota Pico 2:04
That’s awesome. What do you think are the advantages of working in communications and marketing in a startup as opposed to in a multinational? Because obviously, the way that you’re communicating with your audience is quite different depending on the size of the company, and also the history of the company.

Sara Cronsioe 2:22
Yes, for sure. It’s been an amazing journey since I started. Last year, we went from 25 people to 100.

Carlota Pico 2:31
Wow.

Sara Cronsioe 2:32
We are in Europe and US, and we are in four countries in Europe. So it’s a mix of a culture, people, and the atmosphere is just amazing. And it has been an experience, a nice experience since I started. Of course a challenge, we have meetings early morning and evenings with US, but that’s just the culture and I really like it.

Carlota Pico 2:59
That’s so exciting. I’m always a big fan of learning about how startups are growing and how they’re constantly building their team out and learning throughout the process. We will be diving more into that later into our interview. But to get the interview started, I still would like to learn a little bit about the background of your content marketing strategy at the startup, at GetAccept. What content marketing tools are you using to engage with your audience?

Sara Cronsioe 3:29
So the tools that we’re using… the main tool, I would say is HubSpot.

Carlota Pico 3:34
Okay.

Sara Cronsioe 3:35
And also, as a content creator, I would say pen and paper, but you know, in a digital way, that’s what I do. And then I yeah, I would say HubSpot. That’s the two main things I need to be able to do what I’m doing. And then of course, the whole marketing team, we have Zoom like we’re using now, and there’s a lot of tools that is, you know, great, but I think HubSpot is the main tool that I use.

Carlota Pico 4:03
Okay. You briefly mentioned marketing team. I would like to learn about how that marketing team is structured, and communications team. Do you do all of your work in house? Or do you also rely on agencies and partners to help you translate and localize part of this content?

Sara Cronsioe 4:21
Yes, of course. So we were three in the marketing team, and now we are 11 I think, and we are mainly, like the head office is in Sweden. But we have marketing coordinators in Denmark and Norway, and in the US of course. So when we create content, we also do the translation in house, I would say. And also in the marketing team, we do almost everything in house. We have a marketing, VP of marketing, of course, and then we have a social media manager, someone taking care of all the, you know, apps and also the design and the website. So we have a big but small team, a global team working all over Europe and US.

Carlota Pico 5:11
Wow. Okay, that must be a challenge to manage as well. I would like to talk about the challenges of working in Europe when it comes to marketing and communications. But before we get to that question, I’d like to learn about what markets you’re currently present in. You briefly mentioned Denmark and Norway; what other markets are you present in in Europe?

Sara Cronsioe 5:30
So it’s Sweden, Denmark, Norway and France.

Carlota Pico 5:34
Okay.

Sara Cronsioe 5:36
So that’s where we have offices but then we have customers all over Europe.

Carlota Pico 5:40
Are you also targeting those customers in their native languages and according to their culture, or are you primarily pushing out content in the language, and according to the culture of, the four markets where you have offices in?

Sara Cronsioe 5:53
Yes, we do. And so like I said, like in Sweden, we create a lot of, like almost all the content in English, and I create also in Swedish, but then we create content for those three other languages as well. But mainly for the whole Europe market it’s English that we push.

Carlota Pico 6:15
Okay, awesome. So taking that information into account, and obviously taking your role into account, what makes marketing in Europe particularly challenging and also different from marketing in other parts of the world?

Sara Cronsioe 6:32
That’s a nice question, I would say, for me the challenge is to write in English, but still targeting, not one country in Europe, but still targeting the whole of Europe. So creating content that, you know, targets, again, whole Europe basically, even if you translate to some languages. I still need to think about that even if I create in English; I’m not talking to an American, maybe. I talk to, you know, a person in Portugal or Spain. So that’s a challenge for me, to create content that attracts, even if it’s not in the local language.

Carlota Pico 7:18
Right, like valuable content that can attract a global audience, and can engage with a global audience, is particularly challenging when it comes to content creation. Is that a fair summary?

Sara Cronsioe 7:29
Yes.

Carlota Pico 7:30
Okay. What about working in Europe in particular makes it so challenging or so exciting at the same time?

Sara Cronsioe 7:37
I don’t know to be honest, but I think like the, at GetAccept the founders are from Sweden, but it all started in US. So we are quite US involved in the way how we speak. And that works really good in the US, and now we’re trying to warm up the European market with our sales enablement tool, and I think that’s also been one of the biggest challenge for me, even if I’m used to work globally, it’s still like adapting the needs and the cultures that we have in Europe to attract, and like you said, to create value content.

Carlota Pico 8:19
Definitely: culture. So I think it comes down to culture and the different ways that the audience is engaged with content according to their culture and according to their personality.

Sara Cronsioe 8:31
Yes. Yeah.

Carlota Pico 8:32
Amazing. Well, I am going to quote Steve Olenski from CMO Network, who recently—well, not recently, but published an article in Forbes in 2017 about content and its significance. He said that content attracts people rather than interrupts them, and that it’s important to center content around your audience, rather than around your company. And that’s his definition of good content. How are you distributing your content and ensuring that it provides value to your audience versus just advertising your products?

Sara Cronsioe 9:08
So in our content strategy, we always talk about how we are creating inspiring, educational content. So, of course we talk about our product, but we want to talk, we want to educate our audience and the market and we want to inspire, and also want to talk about people or companies that we admire. So that’s more, like I said, in our content strategy, that’s the main focus. And of course, we highlight our products, obviously, but it’s more about educate and to inspire others.

Carlota Pico 9:50
Okay, what mediums are you using to educate and inspire your audience? For example, do you have a blog going, do you use webinars, are you also organizing events?

Sara Cronsioe 9:59
Yeah. So we had a event last autumn, a sales enablement event. And like I said, we’re trying to warm up the European market within sales enablement. It’s quite common in the US, but it’s still quite new in Europe, and especially in Scandinavia. So we have events and we also have a lot of webinars, and webinars we have on the local level. So we have it in the different languages for each country that we are in. And then we have a blog and articles. And we also create a lot of ebooks and white papers to educate and to inspire. And also when we have the webinars, we interview people that we admire.

Carlota Pico 10:43
Okay. I will be moving later on in our interview, into recommendations and about people that you admire, apps that you constantly use, events that you’re always attending, but we’ll leave that towards the end of our interview, as our rapid-fire questions. To finalize this section, I’d like to talk about results, and your content marketing related projects that you’re particularly proud of. So what does that mean? That means that to touch upon a project, a communications or a marketing project that you’ve led, and I’d like to learn about the purpose, the execution, and the results that you achieved. So for example, it could be localizing your current website for more markets and translating it into more languages, what that looked like, why you did that, etc.

Sara Cronsioe 11:39
Yeah, so I think I can, two projects; one is, like you said, translating or taking the websites from global to adapting languages and the cultures. That has been a big challenge and we are still working with that. And also another project for me, working in a startup company is to, starting from three people in the marketing team, and now we are 11. That’s also been a really important project to work as a team and to set our goals, to set our KPIs. So I think that’s the two main projects that I really see. In the beginning, it’s been a challenge but now, you know, I can see the light in the tunnel. So, but creating content, like I said in the beginning, and then from a global website that we still have, of course, but then creating into each language and countries that we are in.

Carlota Pico 12:43
What were some of the factors that you took into consideration when it came to adapting your global website for a local audience?

Sara Cronsioe 12:50
I think that’s going back to numbers, that we could see that people, if we published something for the Norwegian market, we can see that if it’s in Norwegian, people, you know, read and, you know, engage more. That’s all come back to the numbers that we can see, that we need to create content in the local languages to get more reach.

Carlota Pico 13:16
Okay, excellent. Well, I am head of business development at VeraContent, and one of the services that we always offer to our customers is localization and adaptation. Because oftentimes, although, for example, I’m from Spain, but we also work in Latin American markets. And although we speak the same language, our public holidays are completely different, and our culture is also very different. So sometimes we not only need to translate the content, but if the content is already in the local language, we have to adapt the content according to public holidays, according to personalities and culture. And that’s something that oftentimes many local brands ask us to do, because they find it extremely important when it comes to engaging with their local audiences, being able to talk to them according to their cultural personalities and cultural preferences.

Sara Cronsioe 14:14
I agree, I totally agree.

Carlota Pico 14:17
Wonderful. Moving into the last part of our interview, because unfortunately, time is limited. We are going to be looking at rapid-fire questions, which is basically your recommendations for other marketing and communication professionals in Europe. So I’d like to start off this section with a lesser-known app or tool that you can’t live without or that you can’t work without.

Sara Cronsioe 14:39
Going back to HubSpot, but also working with SEMrush and Google Docs. It’s quite basic, but that’s basically what I need as a content creator. But that’s my main tool. And then we work a lot with Slack.

Carlota Pico 14:57
Yeah, we do as well. We use Slack for our internal communications and also our client communications on a daily basis.

Sara Cronsioe 15:06
Yeah, we use it internally. It’s really nice. It’s a good way, also now that we’ve been working remotely, we can see it’s increasing engagement in Slack as well.

Carlota Pico 15:19
Yeah.

Sara Cronsioe 15:20
So it’s a nice way to communicate.

Carlota Pico 15:23
Yeah, us as well. Going back to HubSpot, what makes HubSpot particularly valuable when it comes to your role?

Sara Cronsioe 15:32
We have our blog in HubSpot, for example. So it’s a great tool that, you know, saves me time when I publish articles and blog posts. And also, it’s a great CRM system. I think it’s a, for a company that is growing, HubSpot is really nice, because it’s all gathered in the same platform. So I think it’s good. We have a nice overview, and we get analytics, we get numbers. It’s helping us as a team and as a company to have a base with all the information that we need.

Carlota Pico 16:05
Okay, excellent. What about a marketing influencer in Europe that you follow, or for example a hashtag that you follow, or topics? Stuff that other marketing and communication professionals and, excuse me, marketing and communication professionals in Europe can also follow and engage with?

Sara Cronsioe 16:26
I follow a lot of, the topics would be sales enablement and also SaaS, as we are a SaaS product. So being updated with the latest tech and SaaS news, and also within sales enablement. So I think, it feels like I’m speaking a lot about HubSpot, but HubSpot’s blog, I think it’s a nice place for me to find inspiration for content. And it’s also a nice diversity between the content and in the content. And there’s also a SaaS news site: Breakit. It’s a Swedish one that I follow, and I get the latest updates within the industry. I think that’s the two main I’m following.

Carlota Pico 17:12
And from a personal point of view, where do you find your inspiration? Because oftentimes, I was a former writer, I’m a former journalist, and sometimes I would face blocks, right. And I would need to just stop for a second and read an inspirational story from one of the people that I follow, and that would have really helped me to refocus, gather my thoughts and continue writing valuable content. Is there any leader that you’re currently following that really inspires you to keep on going and keep on growing?

Sara Cronsioe 17:52
To be honest, no.

Carlota Pico 17:54
That’s a fair answer.

Sara Cronsioe 17:55
So I don’t have a specific person, but I have to say that in GetAccept, our founder, and also a colleague of mine, he’s a really good writer and writes really relevant content. So I think working in a startup company, also doing, like I said, interviews and writing blog articles about people and companies that we admire, that gives me a lot of inspiration to share and to take part of others’ journey or experience.

Carlota Pico 18:28
Excellent. Well, we are moving into the last question of today’s interview and that will be a valuable European industry group, association, or event that you constantly attend. It could be digital as well because of coronavirus. So feel free to talk about digital events or digital webinars that provide a lot of value to you.

Sara Cronsioe 18:50
So I do attend some webinars, and it’s also coming back to companies that I admire. So there have been a couple this spring that I follow. There is a Finnish company called Vainu; they have a lot of webinars with sales tips and tricks that I normally listen to. And then I would say an event would be the sales enablement event that we are hosting, hopefully, later after the summer, depending on where we’re heading with the COVID-19. So I haven’t, you know, I’ve been attending to a couple of events, but then COVID came across. So it’s a lot of webinars, I would say.

Carlota Pico 19:34
Okay, wonderful. Well, that was the last question of today’s interview. Those are great insights, Sara. Thank you so much for sharing them with our audience. It was a pleasure to have you.

Sara Cronsioe 19:47
Thank you for having me.

Carlota Pico 19:49
And for everybody listening in to TheContentMix.com, thank you for joining us today. It’s always a pleasure to have you here with us, and for more perspectives on the marketing and communication industry in Europe, please tune in to TheContentMix.com. We’ll be releasing interviews just like this one every week. Thank you again and see you next time. Bye!

Sara Cronsioe 20:15
Thank you, bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai