Olena Samoilova
Content marketer

Please tell us how and when you decided to start your career in internet marketing.

— During my first maternity leave, in 2010 🙂 At that time, my eldest son was 2 years old, and I had just graduated from university with a degree in marketing and intellectual property protection. So, the question arose of when to return to professional activity 🙂

Before maternity leave, I worked as a merchandiser, but I realized that it would be impossible to combine a full-time job with a child. I started looking for remote work options. I found out that you can write and sell texts on special exchanges. Keep in mind, this was 2010. People around me were, to put it mildly, surprised by my work. But I was totally fine with it: I could earn about 600 hryvnia per article. Not bad money for that time. 

Then I left the exchanges and worked in an online store for home goods and at a state-owned enterprise in the heavy machinery industry. Even then, I realized that internet marketing was definitely a promising field and that it was worth staying in it 🙂

What projects have you worked on throughout your career? 

— There were so many of them. I once counted that I had created content for more than 15 different fields. I think it’s more now.

Working at an online store for home goods was truly life-changing. I learned a lot there, understood the principles of SEO promotion and writing texts for people, but for key queries. It was also at this company that I saw with my own eyes that articles sell. Analytics showed that a person who came to read material about chandeliers went to the product cards and bought something phenomenal for thousands of not hryvnias 🙂

In terms of professional growth, working with a call tracking platform, virtual PBX, and analytics also gave me a lot. I learned to see the needs of the business, understand them, and learned a lot about sales and the importance of analytics for the growth of the company.

I should add that I wrote for marketing and travel publications, a software development company for bookmakers, a reproductive technology clinic, payment acceptance platforms, and so on. 

What has been interesting in your work recently? 

— First of all, it was interesting for me to start working at an agency. Somehow, I ended up working more often in product companies, where you write about one or several products. So, an agency is a new experience for me in this regard. After all, you have to constantly switch between projects, which keeps you on your toes and stimulates mental activity 🙂

What do you like most about your job?

— I like that I can earn money doing what I’m good at. Also, content marketing is a way for me to help people in different ways. 

I mentioned earlier that working at an agency helps speed up mental processes. I would add that writing in general has a positive effect on intellectual development. This is not surprising, because in order to write an adequate text, you need to study a lot of information, ideally getting answers or feedback from an expert on the topic. This way, you can learn a lot of new things that will be useful in life. 

Working with texts also teaches you to read very quickly, comprehend what you read, find primary sources of information, and distinguish fake news from real information. These are also useful skills in today’s world.

What is your mission?

— Probably to make the world a better place 🙂 I am truly convinced that content marketing helps people solve the most difficult problems. Because if you look at the big picture, texts are literally everywhere around us.

Need to find out how to get to Europe from Ukraine? We read and watch advertisements. Need to buy household appliances? We read reviews and overviews. There are endless examples like this. 

That’s why I believe my mission is to write in such a way that people get clear, understandable, and truthful answers to their questions.

What are the pros and cons of being a content marketer, in your opinion?

— I’ve already mentioned some of the pros in the sense that this profession teaches you how to process information well. This leads to another advantage: it’s never boring with content marketers because there’s always something to talk about. 

As for the downsides, it’s still a sedentary job. That’s why we need to compensate for the eight hours we spend sitting at our laptops. I don’t even know what else to say about the downsides. 

What is the most difficult thing for you in your work as a content marketer right now?

— Right now, there’s nothing like that. There are times when a new project comes in and you need to set up the process of interacting with the client and get a feel for the right tone of voice (ToV). Usually, this initial period can be less than ideal because there are a lot of revisions.

Tone of voice (ToV) is a brand’s unique way of communicating with its audience. Intonation, sentence structure, characteristic words — everything that allows the reader to recognize the brand’s texts among others. 

The next difficult moment comes when you have been working on a project for a long time. It seems that all the topics have been covered and all the important information has been presented. And you catch yourself writing clichéd phrases, while creating something new is extremely difficult. 

What qualities should a content marketer possess? 

— In addition to the ability to work with information, literacy, adequacy, and the ability to cope with imposter syndrome are required. In reality, it occurs quite frequently, even among talented authors. At such moments, it seems that your writing is below average, not very convincing, and that no one needs your texts. It is important to notice this in time and work through the problem.

A content marketer should also be well versed in the work of special services. For example, for checking texts for SEO parameters, uniqueness, etc.

What were the biggest failures in your practice?

— I wouldn’t say they were failures exactly. But there was a moment when I felt very ashamed and uncomfortable. My company was conducting a rating, and we had to publish the results of the vote first on our website and then in the media. I sent the press release text to all our media partners in advance, and we agreed that they would publish the news after us.

And then it happened. A colleague wrote to me and said that the news had already been published on one portal, while it was not yet on our website. It was, to put it mildly, awkward. I still remember the feeling of blushing, probably up to my ears, and rushing to negotiate with our partner to hide the text until we published it ourselves.

It was a lesson that you have to clarify literally everything, even the time of publication, when it comes to any kind of placement. 

What advice would you give to a beginner who came to you to learn?

— I taught courses for beginner copywriters and prepared a workbook for them. It contained the following phrase:

And finally, let us recall the billionaires who rose from nothing. They focused on what they wanted to do and did not look for old ways, did not think about it. Of course, we cannot know for sure what they were thinking. But if they had gone through all the possible ways known to them, taken courses on how to find the right way, they would never have gotten where they are today. 

So, in our course, you saw only one of the options for development and moving forward. In reality, there are an infinite number of them. Believe in yourself, try, and everything will work out!

Basically, that’s my main advice 🙂

What trends do you see in marketing? 

— I don’t see anything radically new. I notice the deepening of such trends: personalization/customization, end-to-end analytics, tools to simplify communication between the customer and the business.

All of this has been around for a long time. But recent years show that businesses are more willing to invest in analytics, research, new technologies, etc. That is, in tools that allow them not to spend money on blind promotion, but to clearly understand what works and how. 

The hot topic right now is artificial intelligence and its capabilities in content creation. So I will express my opinion. I believe that AI will be used more and more actively in the future, but as a kind of apprentice. Because, as my practice has shown, no AI will be able to write a deep, meaningful article full of numbers and facts in the near future. Therefore, no one should expect to be able to assign a task and get great results almost for free and without the involvement of specialists. 

As a content marketer, what advice would you give to entrepreneurs reading this interview?

— Study your audience, because there is no product or service that is needed by absolutely everyone or no one. Once you know who your customer is, look at your product through their eyes. Then try to provide as much content as possible that will answer all of that person’s potential questions. It doesn’t hurt to do this in different formats: text, audio/video. 

The entrepreneur’s goal with regard to content should be to create a knowledge base for the customer. This allows people to get as much information as possible on their own, without having to contact managers.