Abbie Heslop is MD of AI for a highly experienced tech team building AI assistants and AI agents at EBI.AI. When Abbie first joined the company they had “little to no resources,” she says. “No content we could use, really; no tracking, no SEO engine.” When Natalie joined, working on everything from web copy and email campaigns to social strategy and brand awareness, “we had to work really hard and be nimble and agile to get all this content ready so we could sell our services,” remembers Abbie. “Something that becomes very clear with Nat is she’s able to immediately fit in with a team and run with things.”
Working with Natalie Smithson
B2B SaaS/tech has “a specific set of challenges”
“Dealing with a relatively unknown and unintegrated tooling of AI is challenging,” says Abbie. “You’re targeting a varied and sometimes dynamic and different, growing customer persona; it isn’t always super simple to map out exactly who you’re talking to. A relatively new space with a relatively new product across many different verticals, and a relatively small team, you have to have a bit of gumption and clarity, making sure everyone’s on the same page. We got a great process in place where we worked in sprints to achieve this, producing content for verticals quickly that’s still relevant years later.”
“Anyone would be lucky to work with Nat and share her years and years of knowledge that she’s accumulated ― it’s clear that it’s been accumulated. It’s skills actually; it’s deeper than knowledge. It’s sort of the foundations. It’s so obvious and evident Nat’s been doing this for so long because of the way she tackles tasks.”
Abbie Heslop
You can trust Nat to handle the “founder’s baby”
“Nat’s not one to ever shy away from criticism and takes any sort of critique really well,” notes Abbie, “and that’s always going to be the case when you’re dealing with your founder’s baby. Sometimes with the approvals processes, they wants to be involved and have sign off when copy is highly relevant to the brand, and Nat takes that in her stride.”
“Nat completely understands why a founder will care as much as they do about nuanced subjects that may not seem important to the outside world, but really are to them. That is a challenge, but it isn’t a challenge for Nat. It’s nice knowing I can hand over any piece of copy and she’ll take all the feedback in a pragmatic way and improve on it without fuss or problem, which is the best outcome for everyone.” ~ Abbie Heslop
Positivity shines in tone of voice and brand work
“Nat likes to follow a process and then is extremely independent and takes initiative, but the thing that surprises me is her energy, sustaining a sense of excitement and optimism and eagerness for every new task, even when she’s writing about the same thing over and over. Every piece of content is as important as the one before, which is then really lovely to receive,” says Abbie.
“Nat’s copy and content is always positive. It’s clear. You don’t come away thinking something negative ― ever, which is interesting. This positive outlook’s been instilled throughout all of the tone of voice and brand work she’s done with us, which is important. It gives us that sense of growth and inspiration, which is conveyed in all of Nat’s writing, even though we can be talking about quite mundane things like APIs. The examples she gives are interesting and fun and quirky.”
“If you want a team player that’s going to be aggressive on tasks, work really hard, be autonomous, have all the benefits you’d expect of a freelancer, like dedication, commitment, and time management, but actually be a part of your team and care as much as anyone, you will love to work with Nat.” ~ Abbie Heslop
“You end up wearing lots of different hats when you work for a smaller size business”
“In a relatively new space, with a relatively new product across many different verticals, and a relatively small team, we managed well,” says Abbie. “Nat managed technical SEO to ensure best practices on-site and liaised with the web development and graphic design teams to ensure timely delivery, making our blog the biggest source of traffic.”
- YoY organic search doubled with 50% of web sessions engaged, and time per session and referrals going up
- Engagement time is high for active users, reading for more than a minute on popular pages
- 47% of planned SEO blog posts ranked position 5 or above on Google in the USA, with a quarter of those taking 1st position and/or snippets
- Clicks up 9,000% and impressions up 14,000% over a 16-month period with individual posts up by as much as 83,000%
“Nat’s a proper team player and it’s been amazing to work with her. I think her ability to take feedback and work with founders directly is key. Those are qualities that are sort of ingrained and aren’t things you can learn really, they’re just within you.” ~ Abbie Heslop
Hire Natalie
~ even if you’re pre-launch; now’s the time to hire a copy and comms partner!
Special thanks to Abbie for taking the time to give her feedback. You can follow Abbie on LinkedIn.
