Data-Driven Innovation: SEO, AI, and Video in SaaS Marketing

Great to be here. Thanks very much for hosting me.

Yeah, great question. I think over the years, I learned that marketing can’t operate in silos. True alignment comes when marketing deeply understands the business’s core needs. Start to read revenue targets, customer acquisition goals, and overall strategy. At high growth companies like Colossyan, it’s even more critical. We move fast we to write quickly. Marketing needs to be a strategic partner to product, to operations, and to sales, obviously. So not just the execution engine. That means focusing on data Even decision making, consistently testing and optimizing campaigns. For sure.

Yeah, good question. I think for me, it comes down to three things: shared goals, open communication, and mutual respect. At Colossyan, we establish clear OKRs, so objectives and key results that cascade down from company level and ensuring everyone is rowing the same direction. We foster open communication through regular cross-function meetings, shared dashboards, and a culture of transparency. Lastly, we recognize that each department brings its unique expertise to the table, markedly understands the customer voice, product knows the technical capability, business development, and revenue, and identifies strategic opportunities. By leveraging and respecting everyone’s diverse perspectives, we can truly unify growth strategies greater than the sum of their parts.

Yeah, we use Notion. That’s basically how we keep everything up to date. We do our OKRs there. We do a lot of alignment. From a communication perspective and ensuring that we are aligned, that’s a powerful tool. We also use database, so that’s where you unify all of the data. There’s only a single version of the truth. Data cannot be your own. It has always shared. We’re always, in terms of accountability, looking at the same information.

Yeah. The most rewarding part has been indeed the opportunity to apply my experience in a completely new cutting-edge space, AI video creation. At Zoldo, the focus was on business management. I’d worked in a fintech space for a while. I was a rapid, I was a revolut. Previously to that, I’d been a box, which was around content. There was an area that I was very passionate about. But during my time there, AI was very nascent. The opportunity to join Colossian and then work on democratizing video content creation was very exciting.

Yeah, that’s very true. We are in a crowded SaaS market, so standing out requires a multifattish approach. At Colossian, we’re focused on creating high-quality, authoritative content that’s genuine, that feels approachable, and the address specific needs for audience. This includes in-depth guides, tutorials, top leadership pieces that showcase the value of the AI video creation. One of our unique strategies that we’re starting to be effective is focusing on long tail keywords. So addressing specific point points that our users have when it comes to video content creation. We focus on how I create videos for learning and development rather than video creation. Additionally, we leverage our product capabilities, so AI and easy localization as key differentiators on our SEO strategy. An example of that is we created glossaries for AI terms and for video algorithms that are very easy to localize across multiple languages and can drive a lot of traffic. We also focus on things like our webinars, bringing in subject market experts, and then taking those species of content to generate blogs, articles, and also resharing it on social.

It’s about finding the right mix for our specific stage of growth, really, and targeting the right audience. Our CEO is a long-term investment that builds on solid foundations of organic traffic. Paid acquisition, on the other hand, provides more immediate results. It allows us to test different messaging, targeting, and different targeting strategies very quickly. Social media is crucial for brand awareness, engaging our community, and driving traffic to our content. We view this tactics as complementary, not competing. We use data to understand which channels are driving the highest quality leads and adjust our budget allocation accordingly. That’s how we try to approach and balance both strategies.

For sure. I would have to say that when you look at it from a revenue and both pipeline perspective, PPC is still leading the way. Our content and SEO strategies are very fast catching up, but not quite there yet. We’re getting a lot of organic and direct traffic from, for example, mobile, which is super cost-effective. We actually get good traffic from the right audience, but we have very low conversion. While PPC strategy really focuses on your best desktop, and that it happens to convert each higher. From a return on investment, PPC gives it back control of getting the right audience in the right device that drives higher activation and higher conversion to paid.

We’re doing both. We started investing a lot more on PM, so account-based marketing, being very focused and strategic as part of our demand generation overall strategy. I think for us, you always starts with content. Content is the fuel. If you have really good content and you providing value, it makes it a bit easier when you reach an audience, they may not be under a buying or a consideration cycle, and you’re trying to make them aware of the problems that exist. Making them aware of the innovations they are on AI or on video, trying to create this understanding. Then going deeper into the problem. You’re missing out because you’re high cost of video production through the traditional process, and then educating it around the alternative, which is you can do AI video. That’s a long process if you want to do it right because you can’t rush people to just go like, Hey, you’ve never heard of these. Come and do a demo with Colossian. It’s really been two quarters of work all the investments that we put in into demand generation. We are seeing leading in indicators. We’re getting demos, we’re getting high engagement from the audience, but we’re still in the testing and evaluation phase.

Yeah, we recently brought on board the ample market for the outreach, and this is like BDR-led. We are a hotspot house, so all of our campaign starts through there. We started experimenting with Breeze, which I guess it’s the clear data acquisition to do our account mapping and targeting. We use other tools that we’re experimenting with to understand the intent from Zoom info to Arzela and to Clay. The tech stack is not fully finalized. We’re all just doing a lot of testing right now.

Yeah, great question. The answer is it has had a profound impact. On the content of Organizations aside, AI tools help us identify keywords. We’re a big fan of things like surfer, SEO, analyze competitors’ content, use, and even generate content outlines. This allows us to create more relevant and targeted content more efficiently. In terms of discoverability, AI-powered search engines are becoming more sophisticated and understanding user Again, this means we need to focus on creating content that answers users’ questions in a more comprehensive and user-friendly way. AI is also helping us personalize the user experience on our website, so improving engagement and version which has had a positive impact on our SEO.

Yeah, for sure. These may not longer be true, but YouTube used to be the second most popular search engine. People would search Google, and then they would search YouTube. It’s probably been overtaken by TikTok. I Maybe. We invest a lot on YouTube because we are primarily on B2B. We focus on LinkedIn and YouTube. For us, doing YouTube SEO or It’s optimization we do there. For every video that we post, ensuring that we’re optimizing keywords, we’re putting transcripts and so forth. That’s a very important part of our strategy as we are a video company.

Yeah, I’d say PLG and also this content of product-led sales is at the core of what we do. We believe We believe that the best way to demonstrate value is to let users, or we call them creators, experience it first times. Our CEO and content strategies are aligned with this philosophy. Read content that educates users about the benefits of AI video creation, guides them towards our free trial. Then once they are in the product, we provide in-app guidance and resources to help them succeed. Try to get them from sign up to value as quickly as possible and then to continue receiving that value while they’re in the product. This seamless integration between content, SEO, and the product experience is what drives acquisition engagement.

Yeah, for sure. For us, in terms of the customer experience, it really starts when someone convert to pay or becomes a customer. That’s just the beginning. Seo plays a crucial role throughout the entire customer life cycle. While top of the funnel traffic is important for building brand awareness, as you said, attracting users, we also target specific stages on the funnel with our SEO efforts. For example, we create content, they address a specific pain points that users might incur during the evaluation phases, such as comparing different AI platforms, other tools that might actually help them with every new creation process, understanding what a good video looks like. We have a lot of content specific to that. We’ve invested on what we call the Colossyan Bootstrap and our video learning center. That content is really there as a helping hand to get customers and prospects to accelerate their time to value. We also have content that’s tailored to existing users, providing them with tips, best practices, helping not just on the onboarding, but also with retention. Ultimately, we want those customers to become advocates. We want them to share their content or the videos that they create publicly.

We want them to promote the Colossian brand based on what they actually create. That’s the best way that we can drive additional growth is through this concept of the user-generated content.

We always try to listen to our audience is telling us. This could be through understanding support tickets. If they’re having challenges, how can content help? Can we create knowledge-based articles that will answer those questions? Can we improve the in-product experience so they have that information as parts of their journey? Can we update our boot camp and our video learning center? That’s granted there. It’s all these conversations, mother’s from support, but also SDR sales. The customer is always telling us what they need, and that basically guides what we should prioritize to address their claims.

I think bringing it back to our strategy all is growing sustainably. To do that, we love PPC. It helps. As a growth hacker/vfY growth or AdWords, I’ve really been a powerful tool throughout my career, but so is that CEO. It’s very hard often to move from one to invest in the other. One of the biggest challenges that I have right now is the sheer volume of content being produced out there. Everyone’s buying for top spot on search result pages. To overcome this, SaaS companies need to focus on creating truly exceptional content. That’s standard apps from the noise. This means going beyond superficial keywords optimization and creating content that’s insightful, origin, and genuinely helpful to your target audience. That’s why I was always saying that it’s down to what the customer is asking, what challenges they’re your customers, your prospects, people using your product for a share free, they will guide you if you listen. It also means building a strong brand and establishing authority in your niche. We can’t be everything for everyone. We focused in the last year around workplace learning. There was a reason for that. We wanted to understand those specific problems, double down on them to provide value so we’re not just surface-level content.

But yeah, This can only be achieved for a combination of thoughtful thought leadership content, partnerships, and community engaging. For me, the community is every single touch point that anyone that’s interested in your brand engages with you. Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, whatever that may be, could be comments on Reddit or Cora. It doesn’t matter. Listen, engage, and learn.

Great question. I think overall, the metrics that matter in a business at the bottom of the final metrics, which is always going to be revenue, pipeline, you should do in direct sales motion, number of customers, or they’re actually active. But when we’re looking at SEO, then the reality is you need to start at the top of the funnel. We focus a bit on organic traffic. Is it growing? Is it coming down? But we segment that by key regions based on our ICP. We’re investing a lot in the US, the UK, well, the EU region, looking at our keyword rankings. Are we ranking for the right keywords that really drive conversions, or are we looking for keywords that generate a lot of traffic but actually don’t convert? That’s not the strategy. Then we look at backlinks. That’s also important from an authority perspective, but we want to make sure that those are on high reputation sites rather than just having a sheer volume of loads of links. Those are the key things, but always comes down to conversion rates. What is the content that is converting the mode to signups, converting the mode to book a demo, and ensuring that those are then going on and converting to either meetings booked with our AEs or actual revenue in the long term.

Sorry, we’re going to have to do it. Google Analytics, Google Search engine, SCM rush. Those are the key ones that we use for monitoring our SEO performance.

I feel that video is already a major part of the online experience. It’s important in SEO, will only continue to grow. We talked about YouTube, but search engines are getting better understanding video content overall, and users increasingly prefer to consume information for video. I have some younger friends who they do all of their searches basically on TikTok. It’s like, How do I fix? Just because people now watch short, concise content that they don’t have to spend much online reading. At Colossian, we’re seeing these firsthand. Our users are creating videos for a wide range of purposes, for marketing, sales, training, and education. As video creation becomes easier and more accessible, thanks to tools like ours, we’ll see even more video content online. So change in will just have to continue to adapt to this new reality.

Yeah, great question. I think for us, starts with defining our ideal customer profile. We looked at it and we focused on, we wanted to address the problems of mid-market organizations. Why we picked that? Because we felt that that was what we could provide the most value. These are organizations that start having a learning and development team. The team that will basically be responsible for the onboarding of new employees, onboard responsible for training of the employees and their internal mobility of how do they progress, how do they learn skills, how do they get promoted. By focusing on their user needs. What we also did some research was finding that while companies are growing, the budgets for those teams stay stuck. You’re doubling the number of employees, but your budget to onboard the employees is staying the same. So your cost per employee is much lower. How do you create content that those employees are going to be able to consume and be effective at the jobs? The other key The challenge is as Gen Xers run the workforce, the way they consume information is different. They went to college and they graduated doing dual classes rather than in person, for example.

This video experience is now baked in into how they communicate, into how they work, so forth. It’s also something that we need to consider in terms of how they learn. Our hypothesis was like, these are the teams that have a lot of content in terms of PDFs and PowerPoints, but there may be a struggle on getting these employees to actually engage with that content on their own. What if we help these teams convert all of that content into videos? What if we add the interactivity into those videos? That can be quizzes, knowledge checks, it can be branching, which basically translates to build your own story. If you’re going to learn more about something, you click here, the video changes to focus on that area. That’s really how we picked our niche. Then understanding, based on those customers, what are the jobs to be done. They have to create videos. They have to update all of that content, which is hard. If you’re filming, if you have an SME, you need to book a studio, you need to bring that person back, you need to reedit the whole video just to keep updated. What if we could replace all that?

The SME is a avatar. It can still be the same person. We just converted that into a digital twin done based on script, you can update instantly what they’re sending and generate a new video. It changes that dynamic of how those people, those instructional designers, can be empowered. Once we learn all that, the jobs to be done, the pain points, the gains that they’re looking for, which is I want to create the videos faster so that the basic knowledge is passed by video, and then I can have more time to do in person workshops. I can focus more on individual development with these employees. That’s one key example. On our side is what those historical desires need now that we live in a world where the content generation process is different, where the audience is also different, and how they consume content and engage with that content is brand new. We then focus on developing resources to helps through that process. Whether it’s guides, our blogs, and articles, and share content with the other people that have more information than us, I have already created.

I think in terms of the industry is the ones we actually picked. We have a certain amount of focus on the industry. Healthcare, manufacturing, education, retail, and technology. The reason we picked those, especially the first four ones, is that this concept of what we call deskless workers. Or frontline staff. People spend a lot of their time not on desks. If you’re a teacher, you are in front of your students. You have this in the time. If you are in manufacturing, you may be on a manufacturing floor, a factory, and so forth. How do we ramp this workforce? Very quickly. You can come in, you have a set of videos that show you your compliance, your health and safety, and so forth. When he updates, those videos are streamed to those individuals’ mobiles, and they can pick up. That’s our focus, is these industries that have this messless workforce, but then also have these L&D teams that need to create a lot of content for those employees.

I think that’s something that as a marketer, you’re constantly trying to understand and get ahead of it. My feeling is that the future of marketing in SaaS will be driven by personalization. I automation and AI. I don’t know if you ever watched Minority Report. There’s this scene where the main protagonist is running through and there’s all these ads that are personalized and they’re saying his name and so forth. It feels scary, but it’s what people expect. They don’t want to see generic ad messaging, generic ads. It has to be relevant to them. Our customers expect these personalized experiences, and marketing will need to deliver on that. Automation will play a key role in scaling these marketing efforts and efficiency, and the AI will continue to transform the way we create content. As we go through, it’s not this process of you create a campaign brief, you spend time in designing, and those designs are set. The messaging set, I think it will evolve to become dynamic. We want people to receive… You receive an ad that’s specific to you with a specific message to specific use case and pain points, even if it is from the same company.

Is this an adaptive I think other emerging trends to watch is the rise of increased importance of data privacy because there’s this dual competing trend of people want personalization and things are neutral to them, but they also have these needs for privacy. How do you explain both of them?

Sure. Yes, let’s go.

That’s like a difficult question. I think I focus much more on growth. People I’ll say Sean Ellis, for example, from originally Dropblocks. Yeah, so I say Sean Ellis.

Most expected lesson? We’re saying that. We do a lot of experimentation. Every container, we start with a hypothesis where we’re sharing, we want a specific audience, a specific cost per click, cost per click, and so forth. I think the Most, I guess, is more that you constantly have to be open mind, continuously learning. We feel that only about 20% all the campaigns that we run actually achieve the results that we expect. Our failure rate is like 80%, but it’s just basically about learning and not being insistent or letting ego come on the way of How are we going to keep doing this thing to fix it? Like, that. Take every learning because it’s different on every campaign that we do. Certain channels that we put through were 100% sure that it was going to drive more work email signups, and they’re actually more personalized. Yeah, so it’s many. But for me, it’s like put legal ego side and have a open and growth mindset. Take learnings from maybe failure that you do because there are many.

I think from the SEO side, I have ahrefs or like SEMRush. We use both of them, and it would definitely be hard to not have them. Then Colossyan, of course, because we use actually Colossyan for a lot of videos that we use for marketing as well.

Interesting. I think it’s always the end of it because I’m metrics driven. Something like PPC, you can drive result up to a point where you start getting diminishing returns. From a brand perspective, obviously, I’d love to put in an ad on Super Bowl. It’s Only with this budget, he has many eyes on our brand. So yeah, that’ll be the dream.

It’d be a video, obviously, made in Colossyan. I’ll give you an example, my first, my favorite Super Bowl campaigns. It was actually to be where they made this ad where it looked like the Super Bowl game restarted with the ad, and When the channel changes, there’s a mix. I think here’s a reaction of shock. Most people be like, If you started the game and then it changes to to something else. It definitely caused a lot of attention and people are like, What is going on? Anything that drives engagement, everything that drives a reaction, that’s what I’ll try to create.

Exactly. Yeah, it’s something that people will talk about. Even if you made them a tiny bit upset, but then hopefully, you’ll see the funny side of it. Yeah.

Great. It was probably this morning on checking some of my screen up for these calls, which is like, help me make these more interesting.

Boring. Like the last one that I specifically wrote was aimed at creating a value based drip campaign for people that were looking to purchase land. So it was like educating people about selling land in an off market sense. What the values were, what the challenges were, testimonials from other people that have done it. But getting AI to write all of those messages so that we could put it into the app and that people could generate variations of that drip automation themselves and then make some kind of corrective measures to make it their own. So it’s, it’s nothing exciting. I didn’t rewrite Shakespeare with it. I just, you know, it works stuff traditionally.

Thank you. I appreciate it.