Xenia Muntean, Co-Founder and CEO of Planable, a content collaboration platform, shares some great tips for repurposing content on social media to extend its lifetime, ensuring it remains evergreen and continues to engage audiences after its initial release.
She also discusses the challenges of achieving executive buy-in, how to navigate internal approval processes, and explores the potential impact of AI on social media marketing teams.
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About Planable
Planable is the content collaboration platform that makes marketing teamwork a breeze. It’s the spot where you can create, plan, review, approve, and analyse all your marketing content for social media, blogs, newsletters, press releases. Experience a faster, smoother workflow that helps your team work together like never before.
Started in 2016, Planable is trusted by over 5000 marketing teams behind iconic brands such as Hyundai, Christian Louboutin, Royal Canin, KFC, and SMEG.
About Xenia Muntean
Xenia is the CEO and Co-Founder of Planable, a content review and marketing collaboration platform used by over 10,000 creators behind iconic brands such as Hyundai, Christian Louboutin, Viber, and United Nations. Prior to launching Planable, at 20 years old she built a digital marketing agency and led social for clients such as Coca-Cola.
Xenia Muntean is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Techstars alumna, and Webby Awards judge. She’s also a frequent speaker, startup mentor, and avid runner.
Time Stamps
[00:50:6] – Xenia provides some background to her career and why she founded planable.
[02:06.6] – Xenia discusses the benefits of being based in Europe versus the United States.
[04:33:1] – What does Plannable do? Xenia explains what makes the platform so loved amongst users.
[09:53:6] – Xenia offers some tips on achieving executive buy-in.
[12:03:0] – How to reuse content to extend its lifetime.
[15:18:7] – What role can AI play in content generation?
[21:45:2] – Xenia’s contact details.
Quotes
“When you build a software as a service product, it’s all about the people… building a team that you can resonate with and have less cultural barriers with I think is really important.” Xenia Muntean, Co-Founder and CEO at Planable.
“I think for content it’s all about the distribution, right? So, it’s really important to have really good, really meaningful content, but also to not forget about the second part. How do you get the most out of that content?” Xenia Muntean, Co-Founder and CEO at Planable.
Follow Xenia:
Xenia Muntean on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xeniamuntean/
Planable website: https://planable.io/
Planable on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planable/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Xenia Muntean – Planable
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Xenia Muntean
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology for podcasts from Napier. I’m Mike Maynard and today I’m joined by Xenia Muntean is the co-founder and CEO of a Martech company called Planable. Welcome to the podcast Xenia.
Xenia: Thank you so much for having me here.
Mike: So it’s great to have you on the podcast to start off with, we always like to have people give a little bit of a background as to how their careers developed, and how they’ve ended up in their current roles. So I don’t know if you can just explain, you know, what your career journey was, please?
Xenia: Absolutely, my 90% of my career journey is in Planable. So that’s, that’s where, you know, I built, I built my entire background professionally. But before Planable, I did have a Social Media Marketing Agency. So I was building a lot of content for brands such as Coca Cola, and some other brands locally back in my home country. And I was doing a lot of, you know, besides social, I was doing websites and branding and everything, you know, everything, digital marketing, everything, you know, was wearing a lot of path. And I’ve started building that agency whilst I was still in university. And then I can discover this problem that we’re currently solving at Planable, and specifically, the back and forth that happens behind digital and social media campaigns. And I’ve jumped on board on, you know, solving this, this problem and building bannable. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past eight, nine years, almost. So yeah, so as I mentioned, my entire career has been here, invested in Planable.
Mike: That’s great to hear. And it’s one of those sort of, you know, nine year overnight successes, I guess.
Xenia: Exactly, yes.
Mike: So one of the things you mentioned Sr, which I always find interesting is, you’re based in Europe, you’re running a company that I guess primarily serves American customers, and is also incorporated America. So what do you see as the benefits of being in Europe versus moving across to the States.
Xenia: I think, considering the type of customers that we have, that are very digitally savvy ones that have a very thorough buying process, and the entire product, which is very, very easy to use, and also very easy for users to onboard, it’s a self service process, through our website over zoom. So there’s no point in actually having people on the ground, we do visit our customers, our top customers from time to time for you know, to establish a relationship and for customer success. But other than that, it’s all an advantage, considering obviously, you know, the costs of building something, when you build a software as a service product, it’s all about the people. And obviously, Eastern Europe is a little bit more affordable than North America. So it’s all a big advantage to us. And also culturally, you know, building a team that you can resonate with and have less cultural barriers, I think is really important, especially when the team is quite small, you know, under 100 people, it’s really important to have that sync and have that cultural fit.
Mike: I love it. I think that’s really fascinating to try and build a stronger culture within the business by bringing people together who have a similar background. But that’s a really interesting point. And I think a challenge for a lot of people who try and build international businesses.
Xenia: Yeah, something else that is also very dear to us is our in person culture, which I know is very anti the current trend. But it again, because we’re such a small team, we’re still a start up in terms of how we think and in terms of how we move, again, you know, having a distributed team or having food on the ground and in North America, that will be really hard for us to incorporate in the current very bonded very in person type of culture that we have.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. Moving on. I mean, let’s let’s look at panel itself and the product. Can you give me you know, a little bit more of a description as to what you were trying to solve when you built pluggable?
Xenia: Sure. So when I started building Planable, together with my co founders, I was working on my agency at that point in time and they were working in other digital marketing agencies. And we all kind of stumbled individually into this problem of how do you present work to clients in a really neat and elegant way? And how do you put the work that you’re creating for your clients in the best light at that point? In time, and still, now in the present, I don’t think PowerPoints or spreadsheets or Google Docs are the best way to present moving graphics, you know, very beautiful content that you’re creating for clients, and the entire bank Bonga. And the entire back and forth of that happens over email when you have to discuss that content is also not very efficient. So those are the problems that we stumbled upon, on our own through through the work that we were doing in our agencies. And we did a bit of customer discovery. And we realized that, hey, this is not a problem that we just ourselves are struggling with. But seems like it’s, you know, a larger problem not just in agencies, but also in larger companies in house and not just in Eastern Europe, but all across the world. You know, people collaborate on social media posts, in PowerPoints and spreadsheets, they send it back and forth over email, they discuss it there. And you know, a lot of mistakes can happen, a lot of things can fall through the cracks, when you don’t have a very smooth process. That’s what Planable does. It’s one single space where you can bring everyone who needs to be involved in the process of discussing content for social, from the actual people who are creating good copywriters, and designers and social media managers, but also everybody else who is involved and has a word to say in what that content should look like. Other teams, right? So product teams, may be employer, the Vaca, C teams, HR departments, stakeholders, the leadership, everybody who who has a say in that content or has specific knowledge to inform and build that content, can basically bring everyone on the same page, prototype that content, iterate on it together, discuss it, and then you know, obviously, schedule it, and Cloneable is going to take care of the publishing as well. But it’s really that workflow and that back and forth process that we really shine at.
Mike: And I mean, there’s obviously quite a lot of products out there who do something vaguely similar in terms of presenting content for people to review. You know, you said you really shine a showcase in that content. Can you dig a little bit deeper and unpack you know, exactly why Planable is loved by your users? Yeah.
Xenia: Yeah. So how visual the product is, I think one of the first things that our users see when they discover the product is that oh, wow, you know, it’s really visual, and it looks so good. The interface is so clean Lake, it’s really easy to use. So the interface and the usability are probably the things that people you know, love a lot about the product. And I think that’s really, really important considering that it is a product where you showcase the work and where everybody looks at the work, looks at the content discusses it collaborates around that. So it’s really important to put it in the best light and basically yes to, to do good by that content. And the way we do that is by allowing you to see how the posts are actually going to look like once they’re live. Right. So imPlanable, when you create content, when you create social media posts for your campaign, you can actually see a live markup, a preview of how that content is going to look like on any social media network, right. So if you’re creating content for LinkedIn, you’re gonna see posts as though they’re on LinkedIn already. Right? So for Instagram, the same, you can see the grid on Instagram where everything is going to look together, once the entire campaign is live, you can see the stories and the tech talks and all the posts for every social media platform. Pinterest has the same, you know, native format as a pin. So all of them are kind of destination aware. And you are able to experience it as though it’s live, which is really great for you as a creator. Because you’re working in a more delightful way you can actually see how your work is going to look like. But it’s also very good for everyone who is involved in the process in terms of approving that content, right? It’s very often social media managers work with people who are not very social media savvy, all kinds of stakeholders that don’t know how a specific format of posts is actually going to look like. So you’re taking that friction out of the equation. And people can see the content, no miscommunications, no question, they just get how they’re going to look like. And it’s all a matter of, let’s change this, or let’s improve that part to make the entire process of collaborating and approving contents moves.
Mike: So that’s interesting. I was going to ask you about mistakes that people make. And it sounds like one of the big ones is assuming the audience internally who’s got to review and approve the posts, actually understands the social media network. You know, we’ve got a primarily B2B audience. We probably have a bigger problem with executives not understanding social media, that maybe even consumer people do.
Xenia: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s really important to be able to gather feedback from state encoders in a way that is very easy to them, right. So when you need people to get involved in that process, you really need to make it super easy for them to give you feedback. And I know that from my own experience working with clients, if they need to log in into some tool and learn how that tool works, it’s just not going to happen. They’re gonna call you, they’re gonna email you, they’re gonna give you feedback and some other ways that is more convenient and easier for them. So you need to remove all those barriers to entry when it comes to feedback, right. So you need a tool that is very, very simple to use, where they see everything in a familiar way, right. So if you work with executives on content for LinkedIn, they need to log in. And it needs to look as though it’s actually on LinkedIn. So it makes it super, super easy for them to be able to give feedback and also give feedback in a granular way. Right? So we take feedback to the next level asides plan and ball, kind of like how Google Docs does it rides on in Google Docs, you can give feedback as annotations, right? So you can give feedback on specific words, like the specific words and give feedback, or even do suggestions where you can delete an entire part and rewrite it yourself. So it makes that feedback more specific. And it brings more clarity in that process. And that’s exactly what Planable does, as well, so that there are no mistakes or miscommunications around what needed to be changed, or to what part of the social media post were you referring to? Right. So it’s crystal clear.
Mike: That’s super important. I’ve seen a lot of feedback that’s coming in, that’s a little bit vague. And then the changes that are made are not quite right. And it ends up wasting time for everybody, you know, whether it’s two people within a brand or an agency in a brand, I love that idea of making the feedback, crystal clear. Just moving on now. So one of the things I think a lot of people are looking at is to be able to reuse their content. So maybe that’s across different social platforms, or maybe that’s generating multiple posts around the same topic. I mean, what’s your view on content reuse? And how does Planable you know, help you create a workflow that’s more efficient?
Xenia: I think for content, it’s all about the distribution, right? So it’s really important to make really good, really meaningful content, but also to not forget about the second part, how do you get the most out of that content very often. And I see that inside our team as well, very often, we produce really, really good content, and that we launch it once we promote it once and then it kind of you know, sits somewhere and collects dust to basically, so you need to get as much out of that content as possible. And one way Planable helps with that is by bringing other formats of content inside your calendar. Right? Though very typically, when you look at social media management platforms out there, it’s only focused on social. So we are more focused on the content. And we’re helping you bring newsletters and articles and any other format of content that you can think of into your calendar into your editorial calendar. So you can see it alongside your content. So you can, you know, say that, okay, this, this article can collaborate on it. And then you can you know, trust format, we have a very, very solid integration with open AI and site findable, so you can take an article, and then you can rewrite it and make it into you know, multiple posts that you can use it on LinkedIn, or you know, on any other channel that works best for your audience. So this is really, really helpful in terms of getting the most out of the content piece. But also, we do have an evergreen functionality, right, where, if you have a post that you know, has performed very, very well, maybe you can reuse it and reschedule at you know, every couple of months, so that you can get you know more out of it. And again, customize it, personalize it a little bit so that it’s not always you know, the same single pose, but maybe the concept is the same. And then you tweak it, again, with AI. So you can make things you know, very efficient. And you can get that post on an evergreen schedule. So you can recycle and use that content and in more ways than just one initial launch and then forgetting about it.
Mike: I love and am I right? I mean Planable also has the analytics built in so you can understand which of those posts should be evergreen. Exactly,
Xenia: Exactly, yes. So you look at the performance, we have a snapshot. So we don’t go extraordinary in depth, you can get a lot of data from the platforms themselves, when we give you a snapshot, a real time snapshot of how your page is performing, but also how individual posts are performing. So you can look at what success looks like on your page and what content is successful and gain insights either about producing more content in that direction. Or directly as you mentioned, Mike just taking you know one post and rewriting it, tweaking it and putting it on evergreen schedule. That’s
Mike: perfect. And it sounds like it shortcuts a lot of time because you’ve got everything in one platform, which I think is great. And you mentioned earlier ai ai and the use of AI to rewrite repurpose existing content? I mean, how do you see AI impacting a tool like Planable? In the future? Are you going to have more AI actual origination of posts and images? Or do you think that still needs a human to be creative and write the first draft,
Xenia: you absolutely absolutely needs like you’re meant to be creative AI is a copilot, it’s a tool that helps you either sometimes maybe with inspiration, but also in other times, it helps you make your work a little bit more efficient, but it’s obviously not gonna replace social media managers, I can see that you still need the human touch, you still need that authenticity, someone to understand the brand and to come up with the concepts and the strategies and the creative ideas. And then yes, you can use AI to polish it, you can use AI to rewrite some pieces. But definitely, I can’t see, at least not at the moment, to replace this entire profession, the way we have aI inside Planable is integrated into the creation process. So as I mentioned already, can help you rewrite things, it can help you make it punchy, or short or longer, whatever you need, or you can even give it images and it’s going to create captions out of those images, which you can then you know, Polish and you know, work with them 40% of creators inside Planable use AI and 75% of what they’re getting from the AI is actually being used live in production. So it has, you know, a great acceptance rate when it comes to the the output. So I think you know, it’s a really great tool, but it’s definitely not something that is going to replace the work, you still need genuine connection with your audience and a genuine understanding of your brand and your audience.
Mike: I think that’s great. The really understanding the brand and connecting with the audiences is really good advice. I mean, do you have any other advice for people who are generating social media posts, and I’m thinking particularly of agencies like Napier, that might be generating social media posts for our clients? How can we do a better job?
Xenia: That’s the big question. And that’s a big one, I think it needs to be very much in collaboration with the client, and you need to be very, very close to the business as an agency, right? You need to really understand what the businesses objectives are, kind of what they’re after what the goals are, but also you knew really in depth understanding of the products and the services. And yeah, you really need to be very integrated into into that business. And it sounds like a no brainer, but I think that is where you need to get started. And then all kinds of ideas and problems and solutions appear once you’re very, very close to the business. And in a strong collaboration with a client. I know a lot of agencies are kind of against this entire approval process. And you know, ideally, they just do the work and not have the client involved in the collaboration that you know, they’ve been hired for that. But there is a very big added value to having the client involved in the process. They know so much about the business, they know so much about the brand, that they’re building the product. And I think, you know, if you establish a really strong, really candid relationship with your clients, you can get more out of the content and the services that you’re providing for them.
Mike: Absolutely. I think that’s great advice. And I know, you know, I’ve heard people complaining about the client being involved and the classic brand police complaint. What you said about honesty is absolutely right on if if you’re really candidate, and you’ve talked to a client, I think you can then overcome. And to be honest, from agency’s point of view, I think it’s generally feeling the client is being too cautious, which is then going to impact the results. But I think an agency can be candid, that’s great advice. I love that. So I really appreciate your time Xenia, it’s been really interesting. Before we finish, there’s a couple of questions, we always like to ask people. And the first one is what’s the best piece of marketing advice you’ve ever been given?
Xenia: I had a very good conversation around positioning. And positioning is really important to us, because we’re in a very, very crowded market, you know, B2B technology, but also marketing technology. I don’t know if you’ve seen those marketing technology maps, but they’re gigantic. So it’s really important to understand who your ideal customer is, who is actually getting the most value out of your product and your service, who loves you the most basically, and think about your positioning around that. And I think we should have thought about how we position our brand earlier. I wish we did that earlier. But I think this advice and this, you know, conversation that I had the wrong positioning with someone that was really, really good and I’m happy we finally did it and you know, it clarified a lot of things internally as well.
Mike: think that’s great. That’s really important. I think quite a stir theatric bit of advice as well. The other question we’d like to ask people is around marketers entering the industry. So if you were talking to someone who maybe is just finishing a university degree about to enter marketing as a career, what advice would you give them to help them be successful?
Xenia: I try as many things as possible in the marketing space, I started as a generalist. So I think, you know, if you try a lot of things, you get the occasion to do that, to get the opportunity to actually wear a lot of hats in the marketing space. I think that’s great. I think you expose yourself to a lot of things and you can understand what are the things that interests you the most, what are the things that you’re good at, you know, by getting that really broad exposure to all of the things marketing, you can find? What are the directions that maybe you want to specialize in? Or maybe you want to be, you know, continue as a generalist that, you know, path, a swab. But I hear that a lot of you know, people, especially early in their career, you know, complain a lot about like, Oh, you didn’t, you can see a lot of memes on Tik Tok, as well about all of the hats that you wear as a marketer. And I think that’s great, especially early in your career, I think that kind of exposure, you get to learn a lot from it. And it’s really, really good opportunity. If you want to specialize later on, obviously, you know, you can go into that path. But I think that early exposure, teaches you a lot about the different mixes and parts that are, you know, the world of marketing.
Mike: Thank you. I think that’s awesome advice for anyone starting a career in marketing. So thank you very much. I mean, Sr, I really appreciate your time all the insights you’ve shared, if somebody’s listening to podcasts, they want to find out more about Planable on maybe, you know, ask you some questions about what you’ve said, What’s the best way to do that.
Xenia: So the best way to do that is either to reach out on LinkedIn, and let me know that you’ve heard me in this podcast and absolutely connect with me, I’d be more than happy to talk. And also, if you want to learn more about Planable, you can just go to our website Planable.io. We have a free plan. You can test the product on your own for a month, you can see you know if it’s a problem that you have, and if this solution that we’re building is something that works for you. But yeah, reach out on LinkedIn. And you know, just go to our website if you want to check us out.
Mike: Thanks so much. I really appreciate your time. And thank you for being a guest on marketing B2B technology.
Xenia: Thank you so much for having me here.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
