Chris Norton: 0:04

Welcome back to Embracing Marketing Mistakes. I'm your host, chris Norton, and today's episode is a topic that trips up a lot of brands multilingual marketing. We're joined by Shaheen Samavati, who's the co-founder and CEO of Vera Content, and we chat about marketing to global audiences and why it's so much more than simply translating your tagline. It's about striking the right balance between true to the brand tone of voice and creating content that's culturally relevant. So sit back, relax and let's find out how it's done and how to get it right. Enjoy.

Shaheen Samavati: 0:37

Hi Shaheen. Welcome to the show.

Will Ockenden: 0:39

Hi, thanks for having me.

Chris Norton: 0:42

Hi Shaheen, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. So do you want to tell us a little bit about Vera Content, then, and what it is you do? Do you just want to explain what it is you do?

Shaheen Samavati: 0:53

Yeah, so I'm co-founder and CEO of Vera Content and, in a nutshell, we're a multilingual content marketing agency. We're based in Madrid, spain, and we basically run and manage content channels mainly blogs and social media accounts for international brands across international markets, in different languages.

Chris Norton: 1:11

Wow. So if your client's with you, how many international territories are they in? Is it just as many as you want?

Shaheen Samavati: 1:18

I mean, yeah, we're specialized in European markets, but we've also worked in major world markets outside of Europe, like China, japan. We've worked in Latin America, so it really depends on the needs of the clients. So I mean, some of our clients are like comes to mind, one of our clients is in 17 markets. We do 17 different channels for them.

Will Ockenden: 1:38

So How's the business set up then? I mean that sounds fascinating. You know, let's say a client comes to you and wants it. Is is active in 15 different territories around the globe. Do you have all of those people in-house? Do you have a network of freelancers? Why don't you talk us through sort of how people used to do it and how you guys do it?

Shaheen Samavati: 1:55

Yeah, so our like core team is made up mostly of project managers and then we work with freelancers in the different international markets and so we work with people like on the ground in those markets who really know the trends that are happening there and like how to adapt the content for that local market.

Chris Norton: 2:11

So how does a client go about working with you, shaheen? What's the sort of issue that they're struggling with? That they go right. We need for our content to do X for us. What's sort of the problem that you guys are solving?

Shaheen Samavati: 2:25

we need for our content to do X for us. What's sort of the problem that you guys are solving? Yeah, so we have two different situations that we typically see when clients come to us. One is that they're already in a lot of international markets but they have kind of a mess in terms of the logistics of it. Especially that happens with the social media projects, because we've seen like lots of people who didn't maybe like think so strategically when they were setting up their social media operations and have like lots of different things happening, Somebody in one market doing one thing, somebody in another market doing something else. So a lot of times they come to us because they want to like consolidate and streamline that and make sure that they're being consistent with their branding across the different markets. And then the other situation is a company that's like a growth company that's going into more new markets and they need help like launching new content channels and a lot of times they need a lot of content quickly. So it's helping them scale up those content operations.

Chris Norton: 3:14

So how many people work for you, how many people you've got in your organization, or is it just pulling in freelancers or something from all around the world? Or how does it work? How does your network work?

Shaheen Samavati: 3:27

Yeah, we're about 20 people on our core team, so that's like our management team. The project manager is a couple of sales people. Um, the most of our employees are project managers. That's the biggest team, um, and, like I was saying those, each project manager has their team of freelancers, so the people who are in market are are the freelance teams and and how does ai affect this?

Chris Norton: 3:42

because ai everything. There's a lot of people out there that think AI content isn't that great and I think you know it's getting better, but it's still sort of intern work experience type quality. What's your view on that and how are you embracing that in what you guys do?

Shaheen Samavati: 3:58

Yeah, that's been something that's obviously been transforming our industry and we've been putting a lot of effort into figuring out the best way to like leverage ai without um relying on it too much, I suppose. So we we need to like balance the um, really bringing that value of the human expertise and combining it with the efficiency that ai brings, and like how can we make sure we use those tools in a way that's that's actually like enhancing what we do and not just devaluing it? Essentially, so it's a balance. We've been working on a lot and I found how you use AI can really vary quite a lot and the results you get from it can vary quite a lot. So I think really becoming experts on that and training our team and giving them guidelines on when we should use it, when we shouldn't, how you should use it, which prompts you should use, how you should create the prompts Like we've been doing a ton of work on that.

Chris Norton: 4:47

So you've lived in. Have you lived in the States and in Spain, and how have you used that to sort of influence how you built your company, or was it just by chance that you managed to build your content?

Shaheen Samavati: 5:00

Basically, I did my MBA here. I was working here for a few years in companies and then I kind of yeah, I wanted to create like my. Maybe it had to do with like the work culture in Spain and me wanting to do something that was like more my style. I don't know. I think the fact that I was in Spain basically like led me to start my own company, that I might not have done that if I was in my own country. Um and yeah, and I definitely think being American has been an advantage in Spain, because people think like oh, you're American, you must know about marketing.

Chris Norton: 5:30

Really, Is that how it works? All the American listeners are going yeah, definitely.

Shaheen Samavati: 5:35

I don't know if we have that perception, that reputation, outside of Spain, but definitely here there's yeah, this, uh, okay, like American, like American companies are so good at selling right. The people know so many American brands, so it definitely, I think, helps what is what's um, what, what?

Will Ockenden: 5:53

what are the kind of the main differences from? I mean, I can guess the the work culture perspective, comparing the states with um, with Spain or Europe. You know what, what? What are your observations there?

Shaheen Samavati: 6:02

well, I haven't worked in other parts of Europe so I can't compare, but definitely compared to the US. I don't know if I want to say anything negative about Spain work culture, but, um, yeah, definitely some of the places I work there's definitely this sense of like you spend a lot of hours at work, like, so you end up spending a lot of time there, but I didn't always feel like I was like getting the most productive use of my time. It has its like pros and cons. There's this feeling of like liking to be around your co-workers and in this kind of thing, but it also there's this thing about okay, people stay until really late just to like appear to be at work. Since that was something I didn't really like um, the show's all about mistakes.

Chris Norton: 6:39

what's a mistake? That from your career that keeps you up at night? Then what have have you thought? What mistake have you made that you've had to reflect on? That's what we like to hear, so I wonder if you have any.

Shaheen Samavati: 6:51

Well, I've definitely made a few, but there's like one recent mistake that comes to mind. So in my own agency, we do a lot of influencer marketing for our clients, like, basically, we help them find local influencers and basically expand their audience by amplifying that through other existing channels. So it's something that we were brainstorming internally, like how could we do this for our own brand? And so we basically started looking at marketing newsletters, marketing channels and seeing how we could do some influencer collaboration. And we ended up deciding to go with a really big influencer in our field and we decided the best way to do that would be to do a joint webinar with this person and we basically invited them to be on a webinar and we promoted through his newsletter, through his LinkedIn channel, his other social media channels. For us, linkedin is our kind of focus channel for for our own marketing.

Shaheen Samavati: 7:46

Um, there's a lot of things I learned in this process, which is um, maybe I shouldn't have gone so big on the, on the, because basically we did we hadn't been doing webinars before this we decided to launch the webinar for the purpose of of doing this influencer collaboration. So we did. We did decide to do a couple of smaller webinars before that, but really, like there were some things that the level of promotion we did for the webinar with this influencer was bigger than anything we had ever done before and we were doing a lot of things for the first time. And then, on top of that, the webinar ended up basically happening on the worst possible day for me, because I actually live, even though our agency is based in madrid. I live in malaga, which is in the south of spain, um, and we had these really bad storms and it was uh, like there was flooding and it was like on the international news and everything I saw um it was shocking the cars floating down the street, wasn't it?

Shaheen Samavati: 8:38

yeah that it didn't. That was in valencia, where the cars were floating down the street, but we also had bad also had flooding here, not on the same level, but yeah, but still it was like schools were closed. It was not the best moment to be having a high stakes webinar and also, well, we also had a technical difficulty, which was when we had done the test webinars. We were only two people on the webinar, but because this webinar was going to have me and two other guests on it, one of them being the influencer, we didn't have the seat to have someone else from my team who was supposed to be the one doing all the logistical things. So that was like, oh, no problem, I'll just do the logistical things. This webinar stuff only had three seats for people to be like admin-y in the webinar. So, as you know, things can go wrong when you're kind of like relying on these tools. And basically, it came time for the webinar and we also had agreed with this webinar that we could repurpose all the content from this. So that was like included in his price, which was like a big investment for us as like not a huge company, right? You know, we have the webinar. We actually had over a thousand signups. 350 or so people joined live, so for us it was like a really good result.

Shaheen Samavati: 9:51

Um, only problem was that I didn't hit record on the webinar and we had promised you know all the webinar signups that like if you, if you, couldn't join live, we were going to send the recording. Of course we couldn't do that. We couldn't repurpose all the content for social media which we had paid for the right to do that. So I finished the webinar. I was like, oh my god, like my internet didn't go out, because obviously it was like storming outside. Uh, the storm, you know, didn't like my my electricity didn't go out or anything. I think my electricity did go out like an hour later, um, but it didn't go out during the webinar. It all went fine. I finished I'm like, okay, just need to send the recording to my colleague so she can upload it. And oh, like there's no recording.

Chris Norton: 10:31

And just I was just like, oh my god, I just felt like complete shit so Will, and I do loads of webinars and we've got some new webinar software we're using next month. So my first question is what? What? What platform was it that you were using?

Shaheen Samavati: 10:46

yeah, the platform is get response, um, which has, like this, webinar features like built it. It's like a marketing automation platform that has webinars like built into it, and that was like one reason we chose this software, although there was lots of deliberation on which software we should use. I don't know if we made the right choice, but now we're like all in on get response, so we're sticking with it for the moment yeah, yeah, that's what happens when you use webinar software well, that story gave me heart palpitations, because everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and you can't exactly ask this big ticket influencer to re-record the session with you, can you?

Shaheen Samavati: 11:18

well, we did, we did ask him like, please, please, would you re-record the session? He was like, yeah, sure, if you pay my fee again, but but then he ended up coming around and giving us a discount on the fee, considering it was going to be exactly the same content a second time. That was a big deliberation. What do we do? Because we don't get the asset out of this. We wanted to use it to repurpose for lots of different things and also we just felt like we couldn't make good on our promise for these thousand people who had signed up, so we decided to just, yeah, just do it again. We did it again like three weeks later and then we we sent it the recording of the second webinar to to everyone. But yeah, it's an expensive mistake for us. Well, wow.

Will Ockenden: 11:58

So, um, you mentioned influencers then, actually, and that made me think what? What's the state of influencer marketing globally then? So, obviously, in you know, we know, in, in you know us uk it's, it's very sophisticated and developed. Is that the case everywhere, or are there certain countries that are even more sophisticated, or certain countries that just don't even understand how you can use influencers?

Shaheen Samavati: 12:20

yeah, definitely in most of the markets that we work in regularly, like influencer marketing is is huge and growing and it's something that has been like our a big focus for us in our agency over the past few years. Like we've really been developing um our our processes there and um that's been like a key role for for the community managers we have in the different countries is like developing those relationships with the, with the influencers, and um making those partnerships with them, and we've there are some projects where that is part of the project and some where it's not, but the results we have when we do, especially on Instagram projects like it's day and night. Like if you want to have like grow a following really quickly, especially on a new account, like you can't it's like takes forever to do it just through organic posting and commenting, like you basically like being able to leverage an existing following and now that you can do these like um collaborative posts, that's like a really quick way to get a lot of exposure yeah, growing instagram channels organically is a nightmare, isn't it?

Will Ockenden: 13:20

and and probably yeah, doing sort of competitions and things or influencer partnerships is the way to do it. And is instagram the kind of the de facto channel you're seeing, where there's getting the kind of lion's share of influencers? Or are you seeing channels like tiktok emerging as a an influential channel, or actually youtube, which is seems to be having a bit of a comeback as well?

Shaheen Samavati: 13:40

yeah, absolutely those. I would say those three channels are where we have the most demand for influencer marketing, especially instagram. That's definitely like our top channel where we have the most demand for that marketing, especially instagram. That's definitely like our top channel where we have the most demand for that. But we've also we've done like cross-channel um promotion with some influencers as well if you've been on the show.

Chris Norton: 13:56

Now, if you were us and you're going to invite somebody else to come on the show and tell us about their mistake that they've made, or somebody that's got a really interesting story to tell in terms of marketing, who would you have us invite, and why?

Shaheen Samavati: 14:08

well, maybe one of our clients, like I would say, like um, like we work with too good to go the the food app.

Shaheen Samavati: 14:15

I don't know if you know them, but they're the ones I was talking about yeah yeah, I think what they're doing is really cool, and they are operating across 17 markets, so they could talk about their. They're the ones I was talking about, though we do all 17 markets with them, and so they could really talk about it from their perspective so if someone's listening to this and they want to get a hold of you, shaheen, how can they do that?

Shaheen Samavati: 14:34

yeah, so well, you can find me on linkedin um and shaheen samobadi, and then also, of course, on our website, veracontentcom. Well, thanks for coming to the show, shaheen. Thank you both for having me. It was great.

Will Ockenden: 14:43

Thank you.