Shaheen Samavati - Vera Content

Speaker A: Foreignical Global Marketing Podcast. In each episode, we go deep with the world's leading international marketers and discuss the ideas and processes that make their global marketing strategies a success. Let's get radical.

Speaker B: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Radical Global Marketing Podcast. My name's Steven, one of the regular co hosts. Um, and today I am delighted to be joined by Shaheen Samovati, co founder and CEO of Vera Content and based in Spain. Now, as a former journalist and a talented content marketing specialist, Shaheen now leads her multilingual team, helping brands create engaging content for audiences around the world. And she'll be able to talk about her story and explain what she's all about much better than I can. In just a minute. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. The Radical Global Marketing Podcast is produced in association with Brandigo China. Brandigo's team of local and international marketing talent has been helping multinational brands achieve marketing success in China for almost two decades. This founded on their unique, radically relevant China marketing methodology, built on insight, creativity and flawless execution across multiple China marketing channels. To find out more about Brandigo China and how they can help your brand meet your China business objectives, visit brandigochina.com or contact the Brandigo China team via email and we'll put all of the links in the show notes. Shaheen, good morning. It's great to have you on. How are you today?

Speaker C: Very good. Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker B: And, um, where are you sat right now? You're in Spain, right?

Speaker C: Yes, I'm based in Malaga, Spain, in the south.

Speaker B: Oh, beautiful and lovely weather.

Speaker C: Yes, very nice weather. Yeah. And our company is based in Madrid. I work remotely from. From Malaga.

Speaker B: Sounds very smart and a very nice way of doing it. Well, we're going to get into the company stuff in just a while and I'm excited to hear more about it. But to kick things off a little bit, could you give us a little bit more about your own professional journey and your kind of route towards marketing leadership?

Speaker C: Yeah. So, as you mentioned, I'm co founder and CEO of Vera Content, a, uh, global content marketing agency based in Madrid. And I originally started out in Journal. I'm a. I started out in newspaper journalism, studied journalism, worked in newspapers for four years, and then I moved to Spain to do an mba. And I just loved Spain, wanted to stay here, and I kind of was open to doing anything that would allow me to stay in Spain. So I ended up working in corporate communication and marketing, kind of using those transferable journalism skills and moving to the corporate world and basically I worked in a few different positions, uh, in energy industry actually. So I, and then I moved to a real estate startup where I was in charge of the marketing side of the business and doing growth hacking kind of tactics. And it was actually in that job that I learned, I mean I had to produce really large amounts of content in different languages and I was dealing with freelancers and that combined with my previous experience in more corporate settings, I just saw the need for production of global content and that's basically what led me to creating my own agency. Also after that experience working in a startup, I really saw what went into starting a business, scaling a business and learned how to create content at scale. So I decided to start doing that for other companies essentially. And that's what I'm doing now for the past eight years with Vera Content.

Speaker B: Awesome. Makes sense. Uh, and so you went, I guess I've got a background in, in public relations with a little bit of journalism 20 years ago. So you went to what we would call the dark side eventually in your career? Yeah, I, I went straight to the dark side. I had no qualms. But you did the journalism thing first.

Speaker C: Yeah. Although I do say a lot of the values from journalism I think carry over to what we do now. I mean because uh, we're really focused on the content creat side of things. So it's really, in a way, I mean obviously what we're creating is not exactly journalism, but in a way a lot of it is branded journalism. Like we're really writing from a kind of more, what do you say, neutral perspective. Like we're writing content for the sake of creating good content. It's not like corporate copywriting per se. So we are mostly creating like journalistic style content. So it's very similar to what I did as a journalist, but, but not breaking news. It's more usually evergreen.

Speaker B: I think it's, you know, it's really interesting quite often when I have these discussions. The PR and Journal that I remember from 20 years ago just doesn't exist anymore as an industry. But as you say, some of those skills and some of those values that we developed at that time I think still make you a successful marketer, uh, and communicator now, just as you mentioned.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I think like actually there's so much room for journalists to find jobs. I think there's more work for journalists than ever. It's just that the work isn't in journalism basically. But every company needs people with journalism journalist skills now because every company is a publisher and that's just been the big shift. Like we're no longer, longer depending on media outlets for content. Like everyone's creating content and of course companies are the ones who have the budget to create lots of their own content. So I mean, it's just uh, considered like a standard marketing tactic now. And so every company has their blog, every company has their social media channels and they need to feed those constantly. So of course that's where an agency like mine comes in because, I mean, there are companies who build their internal department for this, but a lot of companies, that's not their core competency and they prefer to work with, uh, a partner on that. And so, yeah, that's really what we do. And doing that in multiple languages, languages, especially working in Europe, there's just a huge need for doing things in different languages to reach the fragmented, diverse European markets.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure, we'll get onto that. I'm interested to dive into that in a little bit more detail a little bit later on, but just to kind of talk a little bit about that early stage of your career when you were working in the initial organizations that you work with, what were some of the biggest challenges that you sort of faced then? So you mentioned the startup role with the property company. There was lots of work with freelancers and things like that. Was that at an international level as well?

Speaker C: Yeah, so that was um, like a kind of long term version of Airbnb. So it was, It's a company called Spot A Home. I was actually started with them at the very beginning. My husband's one of the co founders. So. Nice.

Speaker B: Shout out to Spot A Home. Are they still in operation?

Speaker C: Yes, they are, they are. And uh, they operate all across Europe and beyond. So. Yeah, I mean, when I first started working with them, I was doing all the English content, um, setting up a lot of processes. I mean, I did a little bit of everything there, but I was in charge of the marketing function and a big part of what we did, first of all, creating all the content for the website, creating all the property listings. And at first it was everything in English. And then as we expanded into more markets, we needed to create that content in multiple languages, create landing pages for all those markets, obviously translate the website. So yeah, that was, as I was saying, it was a big learning opportunity for me to see what goes into creating all those processes and figuring, uh, lots of things out.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, and then in terms of kind of from a, at a day to day level, I guess some of the biggest hurdles was around coordinating all of that Working with all of those freelancers, how does that sort of shape, what was your experience of that and how did it shape you moving forward?

Speaker C: Well, yeah, I mean, I'd say like the, the interesting thing about what we did at Spot A Home is, I mean it was because we were entering a lot of markets at the same time. We needed to create a lot, a lot of content. And of course being a venture backed company, like there was a lot of pressure to do things like very quickly and to reach certain targets by certain time. And we see that with a lot of our clients as well. Like, and that's a lot of oftentimes companies outsource the content creation because they need to do it like, they need to scale it up quickly. And so it's, I mean the key behind all of it I think is just having like really solid processes, creating super clear instructions and having some quality control checks and balances in there to make sure you're being consistent in your process across the languages. And then it's like, I think one challenge in our business is, and something that we really work at is paint. Like we have this motto kind of about care. Like, so this is our core values. It spells out care. It's like putting care into everything we do and actually caring about the content we produce. Because I think it's easy to just like churn out content and like nobody's really paying attention to what's being spit out. It's like, okay, we need, we have these SEO terms, we just need to like produce a bunch of content about that. But in um, what I've tried to do in the processes that we've built is like really take like the editorial process. From what I learned as a journalist working in newspapers, having several different touch points and making sure to actually have feedback from your editors to show that like, okay, someone's actually reading what you're producing, someone's giving you feedback. And actually so we have the editor giving feedback and then we have periodically the editors also getting feedback on the level of editing that they're doing. Because I think it's so easy to just spit stuff out. And if you don't feel like anyone's actually paying attention to what you're doing, like obviously you're going to do the minimum. So I think that's really key in like having a quality content creation process.

Speaker B: Of course. And I guess coming from that journalism background that was probably some of the influenced your thinking on that kind of turning around that quality content in a high pressure deadlines and print presses Wait for no man. So having that background, is that fair to say that's been a huge influence on you?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And uh, that was something really like surprising for me. Like moving from newspapers into. Later I mentioned I worked in corporate communication and just like having nobody checking my work. So it was like having like 10 people checking my work and everyone having an opinion and feedback and like trying to make the best possible article to like working in a uh, corporate setting where I was like, hey, I mean it's true if it was like a really important press release, of course people looked at it. But if it was like maybe an article for the website, it was just like, okay, just um, I would just write it and it would get posted. So or so you sort of looking

Speaker B: over your shoulder for an angry sub editor every five minutes.

Speaker C: Exactly. And they weren't there yet. So I noticed that was like. And something that companies just didn't have that process and so yeah, that's something that I kind of recognized. Okay. If companies want to be putting out the same kind of quality that you see from a journalistic publication, they need to have those journalistic processes, those checks and balances, the editing process. Yeah.

Speaker B: So going back then, the role in corporate communications is completely different environment as you just said. Uh, were you working at an international level? How did you find working with the C suite in that environment and what sort of influence did that have on you as a marketing professional?

Speaker C: Yeah, so as I mentioned, I worked in, in corporate communications in a couple of companies. One was a solar panel company and one was like ah, a yeah, renewable wind farm company. I would say I was working uh, on the marketing team. I wasn't like direct. Well, I mean the C suite would come in when I was something in, you know, needed feedback when it was the critically important things like press releases, announcing, announcing some. Something important. Of course, all the earnings. When I worked for a publicly traded company, whenever we did earnings releases and stuff like that.

Speaker B: Yeah, it could be a bit more regimented. I think during the corporate comms with public trading there's like certain milestones throughout the year that you've got to adhere to.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay, so I'm really interested now into the shift behind shift into the current business into Vera content. What was the inspiration for setting up the business? And I think you've hinted at that when you talked about some of having those journalistic processes and checks and balances working on um, behalf of a company. But be interesting to hear that in more detail. I'm curious about the name as well. Where did their name come from?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I mean, Silvera comes from the word true in Latin. And when we were creating the name, of course we knew that we were going to be working across different cultures and also being based on, based in Spain. And we wanted to have a name that was easily understood, uh, across cultures. And so that's how we came up with Vera. But it comes back to that kind of value of being true and accurate and goes back to what I was talking about, about having that level of care and precision in the work that we do.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's really cool. So then what was the inspiration for making that leap and starting up on your own and developing the business?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I had been interested in entrepreneurship for a long time. That actually goes back to when I was working as a journalist because I was working as a business journalist at a daily newspaper in Ohio called the Plain Dealer. And um, one part of my job was about, I did a column called Bright Ideas or like a feature, a weekly feature. So I was always featuring people with entrepreneurs. So I used to interview entrepreneurs and write about them and that was inspirational in terms of like, okay, I was always talking to entrepreneurs and got me interested in trying to start my own thing. But at that time stage I didn't know much about where to start. So I decided to do this MBA program in Spain and wanting to like get some international experience, study abroad. And uh, I went to IE Business school which has a strong focus on entrepreneurship. And I took part in like they have a venture lab program where we like worked on our own startup during the mba. And that was actually my, my first business with that I did with two other students which actually we did pursue a little bit, which was like a travel platform. But long story there, I won't go into it, but it was like maybe for another podcast. Yeah, was for booking tours online. And actually like we did uh, operate that for a little while. Um, but yeah, and then from there I decided to leave that project. Went, got a full time job actually in Malaga. So I was in Malaga before. So yeah, I had been working as a journalist writing about entrepreneurs and that got me really interested in entrepreneurship. And that's why I decided to do this MBA in Spain which had a focus on entrepreneurship. There was actually a venture, what they call the Venture Lab where we worked on a, uh, student project. But when I kind of finished the mba, I wasn't sure exactly what business I wanted to start. So I ended up getting a job in corporate communication like I mentioned. And then I had a chance to Join a startup project which was Spot a Home. And I saw that as an opportunity to learn what it takes to start a business and I definitely did. And it was really cool to work with people who had worked in other startups. So I learned a lot from their experience and it was a really unique opportunity because as I mentioned they raised venture capital and actually was one of the venture capital success stories of Spain, which I totally did not expect when I joined the project. Kind of had low expectations but they ended up raising like tens of millions of dollars or more. I don't even know at this point but it was uh, obviously a very high growth environment. So it was a, like I was really involved in, like I said, setting up lots of processes, learning everything that. And actually I hadn't really worked in marketing before. I had done journalism, corporate communication, but that was my first time in a marketing role where obviously a lot of it was focused on content marketing. So my skills were very relevant. But I was also doing everything, everything we could think of to, to grow traffic to the website. And so I was watching lots of YouTube videos and figuring things out as I, I think it was basically after that experience that I was like, okay, I think I know what I need to know to start my own business now. I always had this idea of doing content creation for companies. I definitely saw that there was a huge need from that especially working in corporates like I mentioned. And I found it difficult to find an agency that really could meet my quality standards. So I thought there was room in the market to do that and that's basically what I decided to do. I left that startup I was working at and I started my own business actually with two business partners. So yeah, and yeah, it's been eight years now and we kind of started small uh, and have been growing over the years and now we're a team of uh, 14 people on our core team and we work with like uh, freelancers all over the world, Europe and the world.

Speaker B: That's amazing. Congratulations. It's a fantastic story. What does a typical client look like for you guys then? I know all clients are always different but take me through that little bit.

Speaker C: Yeah, um, so we work with, with I'd say mid sized companies usually uh, at a growth, growth phase or who are, want to do more content for international markets. So we work with scale up companies like similar to, to like spot a home like I explained. But so companies that are taking things to the next level across multiple, across multiple markets. We also work with some more established uh, corporate brands that Maybe are already, um, doing things in multiple markets and want to centralize. So yeah, like for example, we work with, I mean we work with like an international university, for example. We do all of their web content, social media content. Uh, yeah, we work with several different companies across different industries. A lot of B2C, but we also do some B2B thought leadership content as well for some software companies. So really across the board.

Speaker B: When you, when we were chatting earlier, you mentioned about, uh, kind of some companies, you know, originally wanting you to stuff SEO terms into copy, which actually does more harm than good these days, I think. And um, are there some sort of common misconceptions that when a business comes to work with you at the beginning, do you have to help them overcome that type of misconception or. I guess, how can, how can a company set itself up to be successful working with an agency such as yours from a content point of view?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think it's um, really important to have clear like what angle you want to have and what like unique perspective you're going to bring in your niche. So I think like I said, when you start a new publication of any kind, you need to know who exactly are you targeting and what are you going to bring to the table that's different than other publications. And yeah, it's true from an SEO perspective, maybe you want to target some certain keywords, but that's not a content strategy in itself. It has to be part of a bigger picture and keeping uh, your audience in mind and creating some branding around what you're doing as well. I think if you want to be successful.

Speaker B: And what's your role in the business now day to day? Are you still part of producing content yourself? Because I found in my day job I get to do less of the fun stuff these days, but I love it when I get to write a press release again or write a white paper or something like that. So let me tell me a little bit about, more about your role on a day to day basis.

Speaker C: Yeah, so I'm not super involved in the, in the day to day of content creation anymore, but I. Is that good or bad? I mean, it's been, yeah, it's been a transition. I do really enjoy management as well, so. And I like building the business and I'd say like building the processes is something I get a lot of enjoyment out of because I think that's kind of a big part of what I do is like, okay, what could we do to, to do this better? Or like, okay, you know, we're doing this project this way, let's take the best practices from there and let's apply it across all of our projects. You know, so always doing, looking at that. But yeah, basically my, my day to day is being in lots of meetings so working with uh, our management team. So, so I, you know we have a uh, team of project managers and we, and I also lead like the sales and marketing part of the business. So we have like a head of project management who's working with managers who are the ones running the client projects and then we have head of sales ahead of marketing who report to me as well. And we're working on growing the business. I'd say that's like my biggest focus is like taking our business to the next level.

Speaker B: So uh, of course can you speak to a little bit more about those type of processes that put in place? Because I think that might be something that's useful for listeners to hear. Are you talking like is it a quality assurance process that you guys would have that you want to imprint on the clients or imprint on the, the individual projects? How would that, could you break that down a little bit more for us,

Speaker C: like how our quality assurance process works?

Speaker B: Well, yeah, you spoke about the kind of putting the processes in place. When we spoke about some of the challenges earlier, we mentioned sort of the checks and balances and the values that journalism has and how that translates to what you're doing now. But just from a more specific technical point of view, I think that would be a really interesting insight for you to share.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think for a lot of clients, like I mean our clients are basically marketers working in medium to large companies who maybe have a project that they need to start producing of content in for XYZ markets. And so I think, and a lot of them I think might have already tried like building their own team to do it and have like not had great results. So they come to us and we help them sort it out basically. So it's like, I know, like a challenge. So one solution is, okay, just hire freelancers to do this in each of the market yourselves. That's, that's what we do. But I think like the advantage we have is that we have the experience doing that. So we uh, are constantly hiring freelancers across several different markets and we have, have our processes for first of all vetting them in the first place. So and we're like constantly vetting people for every market. So having, having that process for being able to tell who's the right fit for which project and that they have the skills that are needed. So that's the first step in quality assurance is just having the right people on the project, I'd say. And then uh, once we have them, uh, so we basically have our training processes both for the writers on the project or sometimes translators because we do a lot of localization work as well. Some of it's original content creation. Depending on the project we might create content in one language and translate it into the others. Sometimes it's like required that we create unique content for every market. So it really depends on the project or a mix of both, which is often the case. So yeah. So basically uh, it's a project manager who is in charge of like creating the content calendar and the flow of like how we work in setting up the approval process with the clients and then internally for the actual creation of the content. Like I was mentioning, we have what we call the three step quality process. So basically we have a uh, the original content created by, by the freelancer. We have an editor who's giving them feedback. And so we basically have a standard way that like a checklist that have to follow for doing the editing and, and then they need to give qualitative feedback on every article that they. Or every piece of content that they review. And then we have what we call a random check. So we have another editor who gives feedback to the editor but it's not on every piece of content. It's like every 10 pieces of content. Yeah. So that they, so that the editors are held accountable and make sure that they are actually doing everything that's on their checklist. So. Yeah.

Speaker B: Nice. Really robust as well then um, um, ensuring those standards. So now thinking about the business as a whole, what's your. I'm um, interested to hear what you're sort of where you see opportunities for moving forward and for growing. What sort of short. What the short term, long term goals might be?

Speaker C: The short term, long term goals for Vera content. Yes, our business. Yeah. I mean well obviously we're in a time of like a lot of change in our industry. So we're adapting to the needs of the market. I mean obviously like we're seeing of course the big impact of artificial intelligence on content creation.

Speaker B: I've got another question coming up just about that.

Speaker C: Yeah. And also as you mentioned before, the kind of move away from just like kind of straight SEO content creation like it used to be that that actually could in the past was a fairly effective strategy was just to stuff content with keywords, show up on the top of search Results. And now we're seeing there's just such a proliferation of crap content out there and everybody doing the same thing that if you really want to differentiate, you have to do something a little different and of a higher quality. So, yeah, basically. And we've also realized as a agency that really our bread and butter and what we've been doing since the beginning is written content creation at scale for businesses and in multiple languages. But what we've seen is that when we have a bigger involvement in the strategy, in the content strategy from the beginning, we're able to get our clients better results. So we've really been moving towards becoming more strategic partners with our clients and actually moving upstream. Yeah. Advising them on their content strategy. So. So, and being seen as more of like a multilingual marketing agency, not only a content creation agency. And, uh, that's kind of the direction we're going.

Speaker B: So we kind of alluded at it earlier then. So some of the new technology that's coming into the market, and I guess generative AI is the big elephant in the room for this, for this question. For a business such as yours, are you seeing that as an opportunity? Is it a challenge? Where does it fit in your mindset and your strategy moving forward?

Speaker C: Yeah, so definitely that's something that we've been putting a lot of, um, emphasis on. We have kind of our AI task force internally and been looking at how can we kind of like improve some of our processes, taking advantage of AI, but at the same time, clearly, as, um, as I mentioned, with a focus on quality and strategy, like, we can't. We know we can't rely on it, but it's like, how can we, how can we use it to help speed up and help our team, uh, our linguists? So, and basically there's like a few areas where we've identified that we can, that it's useful for us. As you probably know, any AI is, uh, really great at some things and really bad at others. So it's really only as good. The results you get from an AI tool, at least as of today, is only as good as the input that you give it. So we've been really working on creating standards for our team on the best way to use AI tools and which use cases, uh, we should be using it and which use cases we shouldn't. And then we've also been for specific projects where, for example, like, for example, we have projects where we get a questionnaire, uh, from the client. They have an expert who has filled out a Q and A and Then we need to repurpose that into an article. Well, if you have all that content in a questionnaire, um, you can ask AI to put that into another format for you. So this is something that we've been using for those types of projects where we have some very clear, the format of the output is similar. So AI can really help with repurposing. And then we have of course our human talent revising and making it sound good because, and also checking for accuracy because you can't count on AI for that either.

Speaker B: No, of course.

Speaker C: And then also I found that obviously for idea generation, AI can be really useful, um, for format repurposing is something that we're using as well. And then we're also been working with other types of AI tools for quite a while, even before the whole hubba blue about ChatGPT. Because like uh, for example for transcription, for subtitling, video editing tools, like there's lots of cool AI features now that we've been using. And actually that was one thing I was going to mention as well. Like we started out with our bread and butter of written content creation. We've been expanding into video content creation as well, especially for social media. Like, you know, our strength is like finding the local freelancers in each of the markets. So we do that with writers. Now we've started doing that with um, video content creators as well.

Speaker B: Shaheen, from the client perspective, are you seeing sort of open conversations with them about the use of AI? Are you seeing resistance or encouragement? How would you sum up the feeling from the client side of things?

Speaker C: Yeah, definitely. Clients are very aware of AI. I think that basically since ChatGPT came on the scene and all of the publicity around that like everyone has been asking how can we implement, implement AI into our processes? And clients are definitely, I definitely see our clients having pressure from their bosses. Like I think most of uh, the people that we work directly with, they understand there needs to be that it's not so easy. It's just like, let's ask AI to do this now. But I think there's a lot of pressure from the higher levels to be like, hey, we need to be using AI, we need to be making everything cheaper and faster. And I think that one thing that for I guess like the managers who aren't directly involved in the content creation processes, it's like they maybe don't understand everything that goes into creating the content and how much of it is about, it's not just about the writing itself, it's about like sourcing that information from the team, uh, like getting that, doing the research. I mean like we're talking about the accuracy that needs to be taken into account, um, bringing that unique perspective. All those things that like AI as of today can't do. So AI can help with the actual putting the words together, but it can't do all that like back work for you.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker C: And of course the final quality check. So what we found is, is yes, it's, it can help speed up repurposing and the actual writing. But at the same time our writers were already really fast because we work with writers who, that's like their only job, that's all they do all day long is. Right. So they're quite fast at it already. Um, so we found, yes, it can speed it up, but it's not like day and night difference in terms of like the cost. It's like it can speed us. Basically we're seeing like, okay, we can get maybe a 10 to 20% increase in efficiency by using these tools and we're hoping like we're, we're getting better at and we're hoping we can improve that further. But yeah, basically there's more that goes into it than just spitting out the text. So that's something that we've had to educate clients about and well, at least I think most of the time the people we work with directly, they're involved in the day to day in the project and they understand that, but it's them having to explain that to their bosses and so us trying to help them educate their bosses basically.

Speaker B: Of course.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And um, Shahid, that's been fantastic. Really interesting. Love hearing about the new business. If people want to get in touch with you or, or where can they look, what can they reach out, where can they connect with yourself and the business?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean the best place to find me is our website, veracontent.com um, you can also find me on LinkedIn. We're super active on LinkedIn as well. And Shaheen Samoadi search for me.

Speaker B: We'll put all the links in the show notes once again, really appreciate the time taking the time to chat with me today. It's been a great conversation. Thanks again.

Speaker C: All right, thank you so much. Bye bye.

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Radical Global Marketing podcast past. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed making it. Join us next time for more insight, best practice, case studies and shared experiences from some of the world's most radical global marketing leaders.