We have interviewed James Rose of Content Snare to spill a few good beans about the product and how the company is doing moving forward.

How’s it going so far with client communication? Are you getting timely responses from content managers in your company?

Did you get a hold of all necessary copy and files? Are they in the correct format?

Whether you’re working for an agency or on the client side, collating content from multiple sources is often slow, tedious, and pushes out deadlines.

Content Snare was built to streamline the process, save you time, and help ensure content is supplied in the correct format.

A quick intro: who are you, what do you do and what’s your background?

That depends on how far you want to go back! If I never discovered the world of creating an internet business, I’d probably still be a Control Systems Engineer.

But that all changed when a friend invited me to an “internet marketing conference”. I joke that was my red-pill moment ala “The Matrix”. That started me down a path of affiliate marketing, creating SEO software, a web design business, creating a bookkeeping data-sync software product (which we sold) and finally to where we are now.

My business partner and I now focus on custom software development and of course, Content Snare.

What is Content Snare and what problem does it solve?

It helps web designers and digital agencies get content from their clients, without the hassle.

Pretty much everyone in the agency space has had to deal with clients taking forever to send in their content. Pretty much everyone has been on the receiving end of a content email barrage.  Clients will regularly send a ton of emails full of massive attachments. When they sent Word documents, they’re full of strange formatting and highlighting.

I know that because we used to cop it all the time. It still brings back bad memories…

We’re trying to make that process a bit easier for other agencies with the same problem.

Where can our readers see Content Snare in action?

We have a number of videos and tutorials on our YouTube channel, including a short intro called Get Website Content from Your Clients that explains how Content Snare works in a just over two minutes.

Who are your ideal customers and what do they love the most about Content Snare?

This is actually a pretty hard question that I really should know the answer to. I’ve always said our ideal clients are digital agencies with 5-10 staff. These form a portion of our user base. I’ve even stopped into a couple of local Brisbane agencies that use Content Snare to say hi.

In reality though, our content marketing and Facebook group have attracted predominantly freelancers. I think that’s just because of the way we’ve been marketing, and this year we’ll be focusing more on agencies.

The thing people seem to love the most are the structured requests. This is really the main part of Content Snare. The key to getting content faster is making it easy for clients. I think the main reason clients tend to send content in strange ways is simply that they just don’t know any better.

In Content Snare, agencies lay out everything they need in a logical structure and provide instructions (both text and images). That way clients can see exactly what they need to do.

There’s also the automatic emails. People like this for two reasons. One… they don’t have to remember to send reminders and two… they can blame the software for the emails instead of worrying what they’ll annoy their clients by emailing too often. Some people choose to do this part manually though and switch off all reminders.

Any plans to integrate Content Snare with WordPress?

We’ve put a lot of thought into this. At first, I was absolutely convinced this was a requirement, and I’ve got some cool ideas for how it would work. However, I’m not yet convinced this would save anyone any time.

For example, if you have a nice homepage with information across different columns, you would have to map each text area or image to a field in Content Snare. That time spent creating mappings would take just as long as putting the real content into that column.

If you reused that website as a template it would definitely save time, but only some of our clients are templating websites to that degree.

It still needs some thought to come up with something that is really effective for people. I don’t want it to be a shiny-toy type of feature. So if anyone has some ideas for this, I’m all ears!

Any tips for anyone who wants to get started with Content Snare? What should they be doing first?

Like most things the best place to start is planning. Having some typical content structures in place makes it really easy to get set up inside Content Snare.

But of course, we don’t expect everyone to have this ready to go. That why we have website templates built in that people can use, modify to fit their own style, and save.

The template system is one of the biggest time savers, so it’s worth spending some time seeing how that works.

You can save templates for requests (e.g. a whole website), tabs (e.g. a contact page) and sections. Some typical examples of templates are:

• Hero header (section)
• Services row (section)
• CTA (section)
• Contact page (tab)
• About page (tab)
• Services page (tab)

Basically, anything that is similar between clients. Once you’ve set these templates up, requesting content is so much easier. You just add the template, modify it for that individual client and hit send.

To conclude, what does the roadmap look like in the next 12 months?

The roadmap is driven by actual users of the software, so it changes regularly. My business partner and I meet every week to decide what features to focus on.

There’s a public roadmap of the major items on the website.

Priorities change based on what features people ask for, how many people will use it and how much work is involved. Right now though, the roadmap looks like:

• UI simplifications (which is ongoing)
• Share content requests without the client having to log in (almost done)
• Repeater fields
• Integrations, starting with Zapier
• Conversations & discussions inside the app
• White labelling