Simon is an editor of digital media for professionals: from designers and photographers to marketers and entrepreneurs, with over 10 years of experience. At the start of his career, he published and produced unique interactive books at one of the leading design companies in Eastern Europe, Bureau Gorbunov, and now serves as Editor-in-Chief of Mindbox, the region's largest marketing automation platform.
The Mindbox corporate magazine has published such global brands as Burger King, United Colors of Benetton, L'Oréal, KFC, Under Armour, and Crocs. In five years, the magazine has become the media around which all the company's marketing is built and which in recent years has brought the company a third of its million-dollar sales.
Simon explained what the job of a digital media editor is and how modern technologies help to create content that solves business problems.
The editor role is usually synonymous with texts in print media. What really is the role of the editor in business media in 2024?
A business media editor is more like a producer of info products. You see, business and marketing have goals, and info products help achieve those goals, taking into consideration all levels of the funnel, from traffic to sales and retention. With that said info products can be anything from conservative longreads to Twitter memes to podcasts. Accordingly, an editor has to have a good understanding of both the business and the production of info products: he develops content strategy, starts the creative pipeline, and produces visible results. Depending on the scale of the business, the editor can be either a loner or a team leader of dozens of specialists: authors, photographers, cameramen, animators, etc.
How did you join Mindbox? Is working in a large IT company still as creative?
I joined the team in 2019—that was when Mindbox started publishing their cases on the website, which resulted in sales. And it was my job to scale the success by creating an editorial team, establishing a steady release of cases, and growing sales from content marketing.
We started systematically publishing success stories of major international clients: United Colors of Benetton, Under Armour, Crocs, Tefal and others. And this yielded results—business grew rapidly. More than that, cases were also packaged in other formats, such as SEO articles, social media posts and email newsletters.
Over time, they grew into full-fledged outreach events. For example, we organized the largest conference on CRM marketing in Eastern Europe, Mindbox "Helpful Marketing," which is now repeated annually. In 2021, it was attended by 500 people, and in 2023—by 2000.
Do you organize events other than "Helpful Marketing"?
We at "Mindbox" do, and those events are very useful for attracting potential clients. For instance, I have organized a large-scale ROMI-community—a community of marketing managers. Among its participants there are the heads of such international companies as Burger King, METRO, and also many other experts who informally discuss their business experience. More than 700 experts have joined the ROMI-community, and new members continue to arrive.
Another new idea that we implemented is organizing CEO-summits, where CEOs and top managers of companies from different spheres share the results of business development and discuss the most pressing issues. To date, we've held three summits, which attracted thousands of spectators, who work as C-level managers.
Lastly, we upload the recordings of our events to YouTube, which also brings in clients. Moreover, we also post the recordings of "Markdir," which is a podcast where we interview marketing directors. One time, I recorded a special project, which consisted of interviews with C-level managers. There, they shared successful solutions, discussed how to avoid typical fatalities, and talked about their development plans. All in all, the videos have collected hundreds of thousands of views.
Today, content marketing at Mindbox is an effective system for attracting new audiences and converting leads into customers, which brings millions of dollars to the company annually. As for our corporate magazine, it collects over 800,000 views a year.
Do you use non-standard traffic channels? If yes, which ones?
Sure. For example, we share training materials on the Stepik platform. While initially, there were courses on working with Mindbox, later on, we developed high-quality, detailed training on analytics. It has been appreciated by dozens of users and completed by more than 7,000 people.
A training course can be effective for promoting any business: it will widen the funnel and increase the company's visibility.
What role does modern technology play in achieving success? Do you use neural networks and AI?
Yes, and at all stages of work, which AI makes cheaper and faster.
First, it can be used to prepare for the interview, from thinking of more questions to fully expanding on the topic. This is indeed vital, because it is not always possible to ask questions to the interviewee afterwards.
Second, AI visibly speeds up the processing of interviews: it transcribes, sums up, and highlights key points. Previously, this took a lot of expensive editor's time, and this work could not be delegated. Now, the editor just checks the robot's work, selects material, and adds emotion.
Third, AI creates illustrations. Forming queries and giving comments to the AI-generated pictures is more than enough in order to get the desired outcome.
Fourth, it is able to proofread the finished work. Before, the editor had to set the material aside for several days to evaluate it critically with a clear head.
Finally, AI generates ideas for reusing content: it comes up with topics for webinars, posts, reports. Moreover, it even proposes ideas for creative campaigns—all you have to do is choose the most converting one and test it.
Working at Mindbox seems really large-scale, more like a producer's job than an editor's job in the classical sense. What projects did your career start with that helped you become so successful?
I became interested in editing while I was still studying at university—at that time the profession became popular thanks to Bureau Gorbunov, one of the leading design companies in Eastern Europe. The bureau remains one of the flagships of the digital industry, and its portfolio includes many international projects, such as the ones for National Geographic and World Chess. The company's founder, Artem Gorbunov, became known back in the noughties for his projects for BBK, Samsung, and Yandex.
Maxim Ilyakhov, an expert at the bureau at the time, published a book called "Write, Shorten," which is still used by all Russian-speaking editors for learning how to write texts, finding inspiration at the start and getting answers to basic questions. Personally, I was so influenced by the book that I enrolled in the Editors' School at the bureau.
While still studying, I launched my first media, the magazine "Who is a Student": the editorial staff was made up of students from the school. It became extremely popular in the digital industry and, in six years, has collected more than 600 thousand unique views from all over the world.
Then, I worked at Bureau Gorbunov Publishing for a few more years—it was my first real job offer as an editor.
What was your role in the publishing house?
I was a book editor. However, the books I worked on were quite unusual. The bureau invented a unique format of interactive books with "live illustrations" that change during the reading process. Other than that, there also exists a convenient search engine that allows you to quickly find the text fragment you need and tests to check your knowledge. Moreover, this format is also successful from a commercial point of view—the circulation of the books is comparable and even exceeds their paper counterparts in their niche. The books bring the publishing house hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While working there, I edited the books "Japanese Without Fear" and "Car Photography" and produced a series of 5 books on art. The most ambitious book I worked on for several years was Ilya Birman's "Designing Transit Maps." Interestingly, it is the only publication in the world that goes into such detail about creating navigation for transportation. Yet, it is valuable not only for industry workers—any designer who deals with presenting complex data will find useful information there. The book is now available in Russian and English.
