Adrian Cohn of Smartling stops by the podcast this week. As the Director of Brand Strategy and Communications at Smartling, a B2B language translation company, Adrian started as an Operations Analyst at Smartling almost 5 years ago. Now he oversees brand and creative for the whole company. We’re going to talk about community’s role in growing a brand, adjusting your community strategy with COVID-19 and much more.
Adrian Cohn of Smartling stops by the podcast this week. As the Director of Brand Strategy and Communications at Smartling, a B2B language translation company, Adrian started as an Operations Analyst at Smartling almost 5 years ago. Now he oversees brand and creative for the whole company. We’re going to talk about community’s role in growing a brand, adjusting your community strategy with COVID-19 and much more.
Who is this episode great for?
B2B, Scaling, In-person Communities
What’s the biggest takeaway?
Adrian dives into how brand strategies as a whole need to adapt in order to survive and thrive in a post COVID-19 world. While in-person events are on the backburner a longer term strategy to build community should be put in place. While trying to weather the storm, Adrian believes that companies will make it out on the other side if they focus on planning more creative community strategy, relevant content, adjusted sales tactics and strong customer success teams.
Derek Anderson:
In 2010, I co-founded a company called Startup Grind with one goal, inspiring, educating, and connecting every entrepreneur on the planet. Today, Startup Grind is now in 125 countries and has millions of members along the way. I found the most powerful marketing tool of all time customer to customer marketing. C2C marketing empowers your greatest ambassadors, your customers, to evangelize your brand and grow your community. This is a podcast we wished we'd had when we start building our community a decade ago. Each episode, we talk to the brightest minds and companies on the planet to learn how they build their community and empower their customers. I'm your host, Derek Anderson, and this is the C2C podcast. I'm excited to have our next guest, Adrian Cohn, who is the director of Brand Strategy and Communications at Smartling, a B2B language translation company. Adrian started as an operations analyst at Smartling almost five years ago. Now, he oversees brand and creative for the whole company. We're going to talk about community's role in growing a brand, adjusting your strategy with COVID-19 and much more. Take a listen. Adrian, describe for us what Smartling is and tell us about your community.
Adrian Cohn:
Yeah, I'd be happy to. So Smartling is a language translation company that looks at all of the words that are on your website, on your mobile app, on your web app, in your support center, and we translate those words with professional linguists who are all over the world and we return them to our customers so that our customers can connect with their audience anywhere in the world.
Derek Anderson:
Tell us about the scale and size of the company. Are there any sort of metrics around how many words you translate or anything like that? Just give people a sense of... Or have we interacted with it before? I mean, we probably wouldn't know.
Adrian Cohn:
If you're speaking English, you may not be using Smartling but your counterparts all over the world are. We have customers in the travel and hospitality space. We have customers in the B2B software space, e-commerce companies, automobile companies, transportation companies.
Derek Anderson:
What kinds of metrics are important for driving growth in your community?
Adrian Cohn:
Well, for our community, our customer base, they're most interested in driving revenue for their business, and that of course is an important metric for most companies, is revenue, but the service that we provide unlocks revenue in markets that you previously would not be able to access without language translation. Put it another way. If your product is only available on English, then you are making it pretty close to impossible for a native Spanish speaker or a native Chinese speaker to buy or access your product. So ultimately our customers are interested in the revenue that their users can drive because of translation and localization.
Derek Anderson:
How do you define the community that you have? Is it the customers? Is it the people assisting with translation? What is the community for you?
Adrian Cohn:
We have two different types of communities. Our customer base is one community. Those are typically product managers, localization managers, marketers who work for large or medium-sized businesses. Those are the folks who we are marketing to because we'd like for them to use our service. But the other community that we are also very invested in is the language translators who are all over the world. They are the supplier. So we have two types of communities.
Derek Anderson:
From a values perspective, why is community so important to a business like Smartling?
Adrian Cohn:
Well, without community it would be a lot harder for our customers to learn from one another. That to me is the most important component of our approach to community. We have events that are regionally based and we also have large conferences that are in London and San Francisco. So we're able to drive a lot of interest from our community and at those events.
Derek Anderson:
How has community building been incorporated into your overall brand strategy and how has it helped you drive those overall company goals?
Adrian Cohn:
Well, it's fundamental to the strategy. We've had, for the past five years, annual conferences that I mentioned earlier are in London and San Francisco and we depend on those to bring our people together so that we can talk about our product, they could talk about their implementation or uses of the product. They can meet one another. To give you an example though of how it's part of our brand and marketing strategy, last year we launched a book called Move The World With Words and it's all about the translators, the people who are really the voice and the authors behind global commerce. When we went to release the book, we created events that were completely focused on the translation experience and how to improve language translation quality and how to bridge the gap between customers and translators so that they can improve their business relationship together. So we had an event and strategy that supported our business strategy and our marketing strategy.
Derek Anderson:
When you launch a new city, how do you go about doing that? Do you have email lists, or customer lists, or geotargeting, or methods to kickstart that community locally?
Adrian Cohn:
We typically only launch an event where we have a customer, so we use them as the anchor, which I think is a fair strategy. We often ask them to speak at the event and because our customers are large brands and names, they are able to attract a new audience for us to market to.
Derek Anderson:
One thing that's interesting about your approach to community building, it sounds like it's really deeply tied with the growth of the company, which not a lot of companies are, but the best communities and seemingly best companies are as well. Could you describe just a scenario or example where your community insights directly influenced let's say your product?
Adrian Cohn:
All of these events that we've done either regionally or those larger conferences, we're constantly getting feedback on the product either because we're introducing product features at these events, or because we have product training sessions at these events. Customers share their feedback. We help to shape the roadmap as a result of the information that we learn.
Derek Anderson:
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, we work closely with Duolingo and we've had Laura, who's the head of community there, on the podcast talking about the growth that they've had. It's interesting especially for a company like yours that is so global and just has many different cultures and types of people that are involved in it. Using your community to bring those people together and sort of create. Okay, you have 150 people working at the company, but you have tens of thousands involved in these other areas all over the world speaking all sorts of different languages. The community kind of glues all of that together it seems like.
Adrian Cohn:
Yeah. I mean, it's important to give our customers an opportunity to get to know us on a more personal level. We have Zoom calls with our customers, we're emailing with customers all day, but the opportunity to meet them face-to-face is an important part of our ability to deliver great customer service. It's also an opportunity for us to show the power of our customer base. We hear time and time again that when customers can network with one another, they're able to rethink the way that they approach language translation, and that's something that is in some ways priceless to us because we really do want that community to be stronger.
Derek Anderson:
How has your community program affected customer success experience and the life cycle of your customers?
Adrian Cohn:
Well, as I mentioned, we've had a very strong program for about five years now. I don't have the data off-hand, but I would guess that at least 35 or 40% of attendees return the following year. We've also had a pretty significant amount of growth in our core conferences, so that's always been very helpful, obviously, to the business. In terms of the longterm success of that customer, I think that those events have a nice lasting impact. In many ways, these conferences are the flagship event that the people go to on an annual basis. It might be that one conference that they have budget to go to and for others if they're presenting at the conference, it's a pretty significant opportunity for them to advance their careers. So we definitely take that seriously. We want every attendee to get a lot of value out of our community-based events and we work really hard to deliver that.
Derek Anderson:
How are you adjusting your in-person event strategy with everything going on with COVID-19?
Adrian Cohn:
Well, it's a very different year than we expected. We were planning to expand our global-ready conference series to two new markets and we were planning to double our local event presence worldwide. So we had big plans and aspirations for 2020. This has been a fundamental shift for how we think about managing the community moving forward. For now, all of our of live events are on hold and I think that's understandable. What we've done is we've spun up a number of different digital experiences. They're not virtual events. I wouldn't call it a virtual event. The reality is we created one webinar series, but we're not calling it a webinar series. It's called Translation Isn't Blind and it's meant to be a play on Love Is Blind, the popular Netflix show, so that it's a little bit more marketable. We also are creating a new podcast ourselves called the [Look 00:10:18] Show, which will feature our customers. I think that's actually going to be our number one strategy for growing our community this year, is that new podcast.
Derek Anderson:
Is the expectation internally with all of this happening that, "Look, we still need these events to generate this type of engagement or this level of leads," or whatever those core metrics are? Is the expectation like, "We still expect you to do this. You just need to find another way to do this," and then now the podcast kind of provides that? Or are the expectations totally different? Are there higher expectations, lower expectations? How has that shifted for you?
Adrian Cohn:
Expectations have changed? We had a lot of events that we thought would perform really well for the business and drive pipeline value for our sales team. Those events aren't happening. If you don't have a booth, you don't have people to meet. If you don't have people to meet, you don't have names that you can follow up with. We still need to meet people and the expectation of how we meet those people and when we meet those people is a more long term perspective than it was when we started the year. Just as an example, I think that what we are more focused on than what others may consider is what does the post COVID-19 world look like, and how can we be best positioned to help our customers and the market respond once things stabilize. So we're producing a ton of content, we're engaging with our customers on a daily basis. We have a fantastic customer engagement team that helps our customers be successful and we're getting creative with our community in other ways to enable them to continue doing their great work.
Derek Anderson:
There might be other senior marketing people who want to start a community but aren't sure exactly where to start. What advice would you have to them?
Adrian Cohn:
I would look for organizations that are running compelling programs for community that were introduced before COVID-19 and find a couple people in the industry. They don't even have to be within your business vertical, but people who are also marketers that have a lot of experience building community. The first person who comes to mind for me is a gentleman named Mark Kilens who works over at Drift. He has built communities at HubSpot and now he's doing it at Drift. They have just such a strong group of supporters and people who are adopting their technology and their strategies for conversational marketing. One of the things that they did in 2019 that I think is quite compelling, is they started a certification program and they started a group called the Drift Insiders. Which was originally, and may still be, a paid subscription but gives you access to special content. It gives you access to take a certification course so that you can add a badge to your LinkedIn. Things like that I think are pretty compelling ways to create community, but you have to keep in mind that those were not small initiatives. Probably took Drift six to nine months to launch that, so it's not going to be a quick fix.
Derek Anderson:
All right. As we close out, I'd love to know what a community outside of the one that you're currently building is that you love, and why you love it.
Adrian Cohn:
I think the Drift's community is easily the one that I love most. I've learned so much about marketing from Drift. They have great content. All right, I'll give you one more. Drift is a good one, but their former VP of marketing is now a CMO over Privy. Do you guys know Dave Gerhardt?
Derek Anderson:
No.
Adrian Cohn:
No? He's a very, very talented marketer and he's created a subscription service through Patreon that has 730 marketers subscribed right now. $10 a month, and he posts content literally every single day. Could be [inaudible 00:14:24]. I mean, he just sent one to me, not just to me, but to those 730 people. He says that, "Committees are usually wrong." That's the subject line, by the way. A great piece of copyright there. But he put up a photo of a poster. I don't really know what this is, but he says, "I thought it was a nice opportunity to remind you never do marketing by committee." That's a great marketing and I'm sure people who listen to your show think often about how they're always trying to get buy-in and they're trying to shop ideas. You need to do that to some extent, but you also have to know when to stick with your gut.
Derek Anderson:
Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod, that's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S .com/pod.