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May Li, Head of Content Marketing
Interviews 25 Jan 2021  ■2 Comments

May Li, Head of Content Marketing

May Li Leow is the Head of Content Marketing based at our LottieFiles Kuala Lumpur headquarters. Having joined LottieFiles when our team was just under 10 people, this Malaysian-British-Irish firecracker took on the challenge of single-handedly managing our content and marketing to help get the word about LottieFiles out there. In this, May Li give us a bit of insight into her role at LottieFiles and what drives her to do what she does.

Tell us about your role at LottieFiles. How would you describe it?

After being headhunted, I initially joined LottieFiles as Head of Marketing where I started off doing a bit of everything: from marketing, social media, and community management, to copywriting to helping consult on UI/UX design. I found it wasn’t necessarily about experience, but rather, it all came down to what I perceive as common sense.

Today as the team has grown, we have hired individuals to take on various responsibilities, and therefore as individuals have found our own roles evolving to become more specialized (we find ourselves wearing multiple hats less and less). For me, this has meant veering more coherently into the role of Head of Content Marketing.

A lot of my time at LottieFiles is spent with my ear to the ground, listening to what users have to say about us, their Lottie challenges and their Lottie achievements, as well as uncovering the needs of those who don’t yet use Lottie or LottieFiles to understand better how we as a platform can better cater to them. The community is so important, and without them, LottieFiles is nothing but an empty shell, and what I feel most brands forget when they put out their content is that they are talking to real people. It’s easy to put out any old content, but it is a conscious effort to actually listen to the people you are speaking to. Real empathy for people is perhaps the most important ingredient in how I work. It is a quality product, plus prioritisation of its users that make a brilliant brand.

I keep this meme close by at all times to send to people who ask me how to grow their brand. I really do struggle to understand how some cannot see the correlation between content and following.

Whether companies want to believe it or not, second to product is how you communicate its value with your users, how you make an effort to educate and provide value. And the best way to do this is through the content you put out there and the story you tell. So I guess that is what I keep at the front of my mind with any type of content I work to put out there. I like to try and figure out how to strike a balance between informative and entertaining. We are all bombarded with things out there online by brands trying to get our attention, and the thing I noticed is a lot of them sound the same, there’s no distinct personality anymore, there’s a dryness out there that bores me and I don’t want to foresee LottieFiles as just another one of them.

What do you think is an important element to consider when it comes to content marketing?

With my background in English literature and creative writing, I have always understood the importance of story and the emotion that can illicit. After University in the UK, I worked on film sets and found myself immersed even further in the realm of storytelling as I would watch the actors and directors at work. It’s an art, that more often than such does not get the recognition it deserves as many seem to view it as an arbitrary medium purely for entertainment.

My time in film really taught me a lot about the importance of story, and its role in crafting an environment ripe for audiences to connect better with the characters they were watching on screen.

Stumbling into marketing, I never viewed it as about selling to people, but rather I perceived the role of marketing as being responsible for educating people on why your product is valuable and how it can help them. When I joined LottieFiles, I was relieved that here was a product that wasn’t out to make money out of people, it was something that could actually help people and provide multiple workflow solutions, all I needed to figure out was how to communicate that to people who didn’t know it yet.

Managed to secure my previous company YouTube's golden play button after growing their subscribers to 1 million in less than a year.

What got you interested in marketing/content marketing?

I never had a conscious pull towards marketing but if I was to put a finger on what appeals to me about it now, I would have to say it was a combination of the various elements of creative problem solving and the fascination I have with deconstructing how people work and why they do what they do.

The world around us holds so much inspiration, and I'm just naturally curious and observant in nature. This shot was taken on one of the most memorable trips of my life so far in Toyko; the inspiration you can find in the streets and from meeting the people there is limitless!

On my off days, I often find myself sitting comfortably in some cafe looking out the window people-watching. I have always loved puzzles and humans are complex puzzles driven by various emotions, and finding out what makes them tick is really intriguing.

Right now, I live on an island in Malaysia called Penang; and I'm not complaining, working remotely really has its perks.

What got you interested in working at LottieFiles?

This was the first official photo of me after I joined LottieFiles.

When I first joined, the role at LottieFiles spanned a wide field of things, which meant that I could learn and experiment with no rules or restrictions. That’s one of my favourite ways to learn, and learning in a space where you’re not held back by the rules of the trade, allows you to find new and innovative avenues that people haven’t bothered to explore before. When you work outside the claims that things must be done a certain way, you’re not inhibited and will more often than not find yourself exploring routes that most people would have otherwise written off. The way I see it is like this, if following all these rules was a sure-fire way to success, then every brand would already be successful. I believe that the brands that do make it, find their success, not along the same paths already taken by many, but rather by new routes they’ve carved out for themselves.

Busy filming videos at LottieFiles. With only a few of us in the team, a lot of us have had to take on multiple roles. Here you can see our CTO as human teleprompter, while I take a stab at being a video host.

I also believe that the people you surround yourself with are important because we learn so much from those around us. Before LottieFiles, I was interviewing with Google, because I knew I wanted to be in a place where I could grow among some of the smartest and most innovative people out there, and for me, Google was this place.

Needless to say, LottieFiles got to me first, and it was the caliber of people there and the way their minds worked that enticed me to sign on the dotted line. I wanted to be in a place where people questioned things, where they weren’t content with just accepting the status quo because they knew there had to be ways to make them better. It was this drive and passion that I saw in everyone working there that I had been craving.

Want to join the LottieFiles team? Check out our open roles and send your CV our way!

MayLi Leow

https://www.linkedin.com/in/may-li-leow
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