Hey, everyone. On today's episode of UGC for b two b, I'm gonna sit down with Taylor Walls. She's one of the marketers at Design Convera Systems. DCS has done a really good job over the past three and four years to move away from doing an agency style campaign and really embracing community generated content. They do a great job of featuring a variety of their team members in their videos so people can understand what does each department do, what is it like to work for DCS, what is that culture like. They've done a great job building out two series that they do on a regular basis. They started off with Day in the Life that really highlights a different department, a different member. Each episode follows their progression. And another one that's a new series that they do monthly called Coffee Break. This is where they pull aside someone from their team, usually in engineering or the more technical side, and they do a deep dive into a question people have for the industry. So I'm gonna sit down with Taylor Walls and talk to her about the inspiration of these different series. Taylor, let's get started. What inspired your series Coffee Break? Yeah. So, honestly, I was just looking for something new and something that was short form content, that wouldn't take people long to watch or to read. You know, we have a lot of blogs that we do, and we have, like, longer social posts and white papers and such that we do. Short form and could easily be posted to our social media channels. And it wasn't something that took a long time out of your day. So it's, you know, it gets straight to the point. It's just a couple of minutes long and we have our subject matter experts on that talk about something specific. They answer the question and we just move on from there. And keeping it so sure you are able to share it natively on LinkedIn, which is good just to get people to watch the full video. They don't have to go to a separate page or anything like that. So sometimes keeping it shorter is actually better. But, you know, how does this kind of series help you highlight different members of the team that don't always get to be highlighted either on your social or if through any of your content? Yeah. So it honestly helps a lot because, you know, as a a company that is selling something specific, we are constantly on our sales team or on our business development team, and they are always the face of our companies. They're the ones that are at the trade shows. They're the ones talking directly to the customers, projects. So whenever we're able to do these coffee break videos, we're able to pull in like someone from engineering or someone from the solution side that's not necessarily able to pick their brain and really get them in front of the camera and have a new face on our LinkedIn page or YouTube or wherever it is posted. Yeah. No. I love that answer. And you really hit on something that Mark has always tries to talk about is every company has a plethora of subject matter experts who really don't get to participate in the content, don't really get to participate in those customer conversations. So just trying to tap into that sometimes helps customers better understand, you know, what the product is or why certain features are the way they are and just kind of helps with that industry knowledge. So what has been some of your creative process as you've done different episodes of the Coffee Break series? Yeah. I think one of the main things that I always try to think about whenever I create our content calendar is diversifying our content in general and the personnel that's in each piece of content. You know, a lot of times the sales develop or sales department is very heavy, on the front end of our company and they're the first ones that are to be seen by customers or vendors or clients. So I like to try to pull in, you know, someone from engineering or someone from project management different perspective and it's a new face that can talk about a different subject. You know, our engineers can speak about something different than our sales team. And so having diverse, content in general, it just helps to pull different people in and it you know, we get to expand upon the content that we're posting. And I mostly focus this conversation on the coffee break video, but you also have a day in the life series video. You've also done different series highlighting your product, datum, and everything it can do. How does episodic content or having different series help you, have an easier time creating a content calendar or putting structure to a content calendar? Yeah. I think it just gives a lot of diversity to our content. You know, we can focus on Datum every single day. We could post about it every single day, but what makes up our company is our culture. And so taking that day in the life video, it does give, like, very structural of what goes on every single day, but it also is able to highlight the culture behind it and the person behind that video. It's, you know, you can see someone's personality throughout that video and it just kinda gives a break in the content that it's not so industry focused, but it's rather it's open and it's, you know, lighthearted, and it engages a lot of our customers, it engages a lot of our vendors. You know, it's fun to see the salesperson that presented to you yesterday. Well, here's a video of him, and he's walking through his day and it's more laid back and more relaxed. So just diversifying our content has been a huge plus for us and it just, you know, we're able to talk to more people within our company, we're able to highlight more subjects. You can never have enough content, and so diversifying and always having something different posted, it does really well for us in our engagement. There's never gonna be enough content. Always more and more and more. How do you see Coffee Break, evolving over time? Are there new ideas that you want to try? Yeah. There definitely are. I mean, you could never go wrong with social media and, you know, always just trying something new and seeing what works for your company. I think long term, we kinda wanna get into the more longer of it, so our longer videos. So more, you know, it is like catching those key points of a topic and keeping it to one topic, but really diving deeper into, those subjects. You know, we also have a podcast that we utilize that does a much longer conversation and a much broader topic. But just having the coffee break video, we're able to just dive into something specific, And I can just see it being a very long term, you know, campaign for us because there's never going to be, a short of topics that we need to discuss. So Yeah. And I can't believe I haven't talked about the podcast, but you've done four seasons of the podcast. So you've really kept that going. And have gotten a lot of people involved because there are a few people we've had on the podcast multiple times. I would say most everyone has really just been featured on it once. So you've done a great job of getting different faces in front of the camera and in front of different customers. What advice would you have for other marketers, other businesses that want to give episodic content a try? I say just go for it. I mean, you never know what something will do for your company unless you try. Everything's ever evolving. You know, algorithms are always different. Keywords are always gonna be different. Like, you cannot get stuck on a specific piece of content or a specific form of content. Have to see, you know, what's gonna what else is going to work. I think it's really important that, you know, you just diversify your your content in general and so that you're not always posting blogs or you're not always posting graphics, but you have a mix of graphics, of blogs, of videos, white papers, case studies, customer quotes, like, you know, just doing all the different types of content is going to be so much more beneficial for a company than just one specific form of content. I can't agree with that anymore. You know, how has this been valuable to DCS? Do you have any fun, stories of just about how it's been received? Yeah. I I think it's a lot of fun. One of the best ones that we've gotten is we, highlighted our supplier development team. And in that video on LinkedIn, it got so much traction and, you know, they're all laughing at, oh, that's why you didn't answer my phone call. You you, you know, you were having fun video and, or I saw you yesterday on LinkedIn's post and you were doing your day in the life. So it's a lot of fun to see, like, the vendors interact or customers interact on our post in general, but then it also goes back into it makes that relationship even better. Like, you know, if you if you're a salesperson and you're seen on LinkedIn and you are not so straightforward with your sales presentation, but you're doing a day in the life or you're doing a coffee break or you're doing a blog or a podcast and you're a little bit more relaxed and you're having fun with the content. You know, our customers are seeing it, our clients are seeing it, our vendors are seeing it, and they enjoy to bring that up in the conversations back whenever we are talking true business, and it just kinda makes that connection better. You know, it just you really have human to you. You know, you're not just so salesy and straightforward with business. Yeah. No. You hit on it. Don't be so salesy. People wanna see the human side of your company, and they've done a really good job of showcasing that culture at DCS. Thank you. Yes.
