This month in content #5

5 more content examples for your swipe file:

• Clay’s community-run ‘Clay club’ events

• Buffer’s CEO pay transparency blogs

• Hex demonstrating value by sharing how they use their own product

• Synthesia’s library of video templates

• Domo on data

Clay’s community-run ‘Clay club’ events

I’m leaning into community at Ravio currently, so I’ve been scouring for examples of tech companies doing great things with community.

To noone’s surprise, Clay is one of them.

In recent years, Clay has curated a group of Clay experts and creators – customers who use and love Clay, that have been turned into evangelists and influencers to spread the word about how they use Clay in GTM.

‘Clay Club’ events are a natural iteration of this: community-hosted in-person events, bringing Clay enthusiasts together to connect, learn, and grow – all closely connected with Clay’s brand and product. They recently hired several new community leads to build and scale this motion further.

Clay also recently announced a community equity campaign (with an absolutely beautiful landing page – well work a look), offering community members the chance to invest in Clay as an exclusive perk, again highlighting how important the community is to Clay.

Buffer’s CEO pay transparency blogs

Since 2014 social media scheduling platform Buffer has had an open salary system, where all employee salaries are publicly listed on the Buffer website.

As well as the salary database, Buffer’s CEO Joel Gascoigne has also authored blog updates on how salaries at Buffer work and changes made throughout the years. Most recently, an update in January 2024 explains a new evolution of how each individual salary is determined.

On the surface, pay transparency doesn’t have anything to do with Buffer as a brand.

However, transparency is deeply embedded in the company’s values and culture.

Other elements of the business which are typically kept behind closed doors are shared too – like the product roadmap or financial metrics or shareholder updates – and the open salaries are only one part of it.

Whilst that doesn’t directly connect with social media management, it does a great job at showcasing the kind of company Buffer is and the world they want to see come to fruition.

Sharing what the company stands for is great for brand awareness – Buffer is practically synonymous with salary transparency now. It’s also great for Buffer’s employer brand, because it’s no doubt led to some great hires who value openness.

I wrote about Buffer’s approach for a new Ravio series of ‘compensation stories’, looking behind-the-scenes at how leading companies approach employee pay.

Hex demonstrating value by sharing how they use their own product

Data analysis platform Hex recently published a blog titled ‘How we renovated our data warehouse without interruption’.

The article explains that the data team at Hex found themselves with the problem of an unorganised data warehouse, and provides a step-by-step guide on how they used Hex to clean it up and build an improved warehouse for the team.

It acts as a case study or product use case blog – sharing an example of how a team uses the Hex product in real terms, and it just so happens that that team is Hex’s themselves.

I’ve seen other Saas companies do similar, like Clay’s ‘How Clay uses Clay’ case studies.

It makes sense, because in most cases the product is being built to solve a problem that has caused real pain for the company’s founders or leaders.

It’s something we’re exploring at Ravio too, sharing openly about our own approach to compensation and how we use Ravio’s own compensation data to ensure fair pay across the team.

Synthesia’s library of video templates

This month I came across Synthesia’s library of video templates – everything from a CEO’s business update to educational videos to staff onboarding materials.

Templates can be hugely powerful as a content format.

They provide inherent value by offering a starting point for a task that a user needs to complete – which also makes them great for SEO because of the volume of searches around ‘X template’ or ‘X example’.

For Saas companies, they’re also an effective way to bring an audience closer to the product, building templates that showcase a feature of the product or that can be more effectively used within the product.

Synthesia is an AI video generator, so these video templates do exactly that.

They provide value in and of themselves, but they also show what the platform can do – so testing it out feels like a natural next step.

Domo on data

Data platform Domo is harnessing its platform to surface the data stories of PR dreams, with an article series called ‘Domo on data’.

They’re analysing the data behind current events like Sabrina Carpenter’s top 10 streak, the most popular Halloween costumes of all time, an all-time history of Olympic medals, and much more.

It’s fun, and they could definitely get a bunch of PR coverage from this kind of content if they wanted to.

That’s all for this edition of This Month In Content, see you next time!

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