Discussing Common Collaboration Challenges With Bohumil Pokstefl

with Shane Barker

Host Shane Barker reconnects with Kontentino CEO Bo Pokstefl to address collaboration challenges in agency-brand partnerships. They discuss the benefits of transparent workflows and centralized platforms to overcome miscommunication in social media content creation. Bo details the shortcomings of outdated tools and emphasizes clear role definitions and real-time updates for streamlined creative processes. Their conversation delivers actionable insights for optimizing client relationships and boosting efficiency.

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A man with short hair and a beard, wearing a black t-shirt, smiles while sitting with his arms resting in front of him. The background is plain white.

Today's guest...

Bohumil Pokstefl

Bohumil Pokstefl is the Co-founder and CEO of Kontentino, a social media management platform that helps marketing teams collaborate, schedule, and analyze content seamlessly. He has guided Kontentino’s growth from a local startup to a global solution used by agencies, brands, and social media managers worldwide.

A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Bohumil blends strategic thinking with creative problem-solving from his background in digital marketing and business development. He frequently shares best practices on social trends and team collaboration at industry events, helping marketers streamline processes and achieve measurable results.

Committed to advancing martech, Bohumil refines Kontentino’s capabilities for a shifting social media landscape. Emphasizing innovation, adaptability, and user-centric design, he fosters continuous improvement and collaboration. His vision of empowering marketers aligns with Kontentino’s mission: simplify workflow, amplify outcomes, and deliver lasting impact. He remains a vocal advocate for data-driven approaches to sustainable business growth and robust brand-building strategies worldwide.

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Episode Show Notes

In this episode of The Marketing Growth Podcast with host Shane Barker, Shane reconnects with Bo Pokstefl, CEO of Kontentino, to dive into common collaboration challenges between agencies and brands. They discuss the importance of a transparent workflow that assigns roles and deadlines, ensuring everyone knows who is responsible at each stage of social media content creation. Bo explains how traditional methods like emails or disjointed tools such as Asana and Trello often lead to miscommunication, delays, and confusion in the creative process.

Bo highlights that using a centralized platform like Kontentino not only streamlines the process but also minimizes operational stress by providing real-time notifications and a live preview of content. This transparency is essential when managing multiple clients, as it allows teams to maintain clarity on task progress and prevent overlapping responsibilities. The conversation also touches on the benefits of specialized tools in optimizing SEO strategies, with a nod to Ahrefs and an SEO offer from H Revs, demonstrating how efficiency in collaboration can boost overall marketing success.

Brands mentioned

Ahrefs
H Revs
Kontentino
Asana
Trello
IKEA
VML
Asahi

Speaker 1

00:06-01:05

Welcome to the Marketing Growth Podcast. This podcast episode is sponsored by Ahrefs. I’m your host, Shane Barker, and I have with me again today, Bo Pokstefl, the Chief Executive Officer of Kontentino. On the last episode, we discussed what it takes for a startup in the tech space to succeed. He also touched upon Kontentino Evolution during the last four years. Let’s pick up the conversation right where we left off. I’m excited to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes at Kontentino before we begin.

I just wanted to remind my listeners that if you’re looking to take your SEO strategy to the next level, you can check out Ahrefs. It’s the one tool you’ll need in your toolkit for effective keyword research, backlink analysis, and competitive research. Currently, they have a special offer—a seven-day trial for only $7. You can sign up at ahrefs.com. Their YouTube channel also has detailed SEO tutorials for anyone looking to learn about the tool, so be sure to check it out after listening to the podcast episode.

Alright, then it’s time to get this episode started.

Speaker 1

01:07-01:42

So what I want to talk about today is, because of your expertise and everything you’ve done, I want to talk about social media management. We talk about the process of brands and agencies working together, and you guys being the answer to the social media workflow. I wanted to kind of talk about what your opinion is. Obviously, you built this software and have almost 4,500 clients. We talk about workflows and social media when it comes to brands and agencies. Can you give us some details on what you guys have found and the reason why you built the software to fulfill that need?

Bohumil Pokstefl

Speaker 2

01:44-03:10

Well, when you think about it, the usual size of the agency or team working on content is at least five people, which is quite a lot when you think about it, and you need to know exactly who is doing what. The transparency in that process—the workflow—is such a crucial thing, because this is what was happening without using collaboration software. Or, for example, let’s not talk about content; let’s talk about Asana or Trello. Those are collaboration tools that really help you understand who is doing what and when it’s going to be delivered. It’s about knowing the statuses of posts, especially in social media planning. You want to know what posts are coming up, what’s being scheduled for today, whether they’re approved or still in progress. You need to know what tasks are waiting for you or for the graphic designer, and whether you should push them or not. That transparency in the workflow is a real stress reliever.

Speaker 1

03:11-04:29

Crazy relief. Yeah, it’s like stress—it takes it out. I mean, I think that’s the, and I agree with you. I think the problem with it is people have to know when you do what you do, when it stops with you, and when it goes to the next person. And having that process—because, you know, we found this historically: we send an email to two people and say, “Hey, what do you guys think?” Then this person is like, “Am I supposed to say something? Are they supposed to say something?” So it becomes a situation of, “Hey, let’s… it goes to copy.”

Now it goes to the graphic designer, then to whoever is next—the person that’s going to schedule it—so you understand where it goes to the next person, and then to the next. That helps with the workflow; you know, at what point is it off your table, off your plate, and goes to the next person. I agree. I think that the workflow is important, and understanding everybody’s roles and their task is going to be important.

And I know—we talk about five people being involved with the content process, and it being obviously very time-intensive and expensive. I do want to talk about content, and I want to talk about how you guys help streamline that process, because that’s really the gold of what you’ve created. It’s that idea of, “Hey, there’s this process,” and how you made it easy for these brands and agencies to work together.

Bohumil Pokstefl

Speaker 2

04:30-06:08

So, I don’t want to get into too many details, but what do we do? We create transparency in the workflow. For example, the idea workflow looks like this: You get a brief from the client, then someone is responsible for brainstorming and creating some ideas. Once the ideas are made, you’re going to create drafts for the posts or ads. You go to Kontentino, create the drafts, and then once you have a draft ready, you’re going to send it. You’ll assign tasks to the graphic designer to create a visual, and once the graphic designer finishes the task, you get a notification that it’s ready. It’s a combination of notifications and transparency—you see everything in one place. So you see the live preview of the post, right, and you see the whole workflow right next to it—the whole conversation. You see if the graphic designer is still working on it or if it’s done; you see the status—whether it’s waiting for approval, approved, or scheduled—and it’s right next to the live post preview, which gives you the exact idea of how it’s going to look before it goes live to the public. This is the key element of content—you never miss anything, and you have complete transparency in communication.

Speaker 1

06:08-06:26

And I think that helps people work together better, too, right? Because then you see everything—you see that whole process and you see where people are at. I guess my other question is: can you do multiple clients? Can you have multiple clients on the software? Because imagine that—there are going to be some companies that have 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 clients. How do you guys work with multiple clients?

Bohumil Pokstefl

Speaker 2

06:27-08:48

Yes, this is a key. You have what we call profile groups. Basically, you can cluster the social media pages of different clients into one, so you can organize your clients very well. Also, what’s really important is that you assign people to certain pages or clients, so the agency teams see only the clients they’re supposed to. This prevents them from messing up anyone else’s content plans. And it’s the same on the client side. Clients see only their own content, and from the brand side, they can only comment, review, and approve the content. They cannot create content, because when clients were too enthusiastic about creating content and making changes, it created a lot of mess. So they have a set of rules for what they can do within the product and what they cannot. For example, we created a feature for clients where they can create “inspirations.” These aren’t posts but inspirations and ideas that they can show to the agency, and then the agency takes those inspirations to make posts. And when it comes to managing multiple clients, we also have a module tailored for international brands. We built it together with IKEA. We first started solving their problem, but we figured out that this problem is common for many international brands—especially when a brand has multiple agencies on board. For example, IKEA Central Europe, Central and Eastern Europe—if I recall correctly—they have seven or eight agencies working on their content. You need to have an overview of what’s going on and control over the localization of the content so that these countries adopt the global content properly. Content is a big help in that process.

Speaker 1

08:49-10:00

I mean, just imagine that. If we say an average agency has five people working on a client, and you have eight agencies, that’s 40 people. If you’re working with 40 people, I can pretty much tell you that your content might not ever get out—it might not ever happen without it. I mean, can you imagine getting 40 people to agree on anything? I’m not saying it’s not possible, but we call it, “The more, the more chefs in the kitchen.” Everybody’s telling you what to do, but nobody’s doing anything. I’m not saying these people weren’t doing anything, but the point is, if you have five people, it’s hard to agree on something. With 40 people, that obviously makes it extremely difficult. And I love the fact that you guys were able to work with IKEA and go in there to figure out how to get our content out—get that approval process going, get people happy about it, and get that machine running. It’s not that you don’t have enough people on the team or that you don’t have intelligent people; it’s about getting that approval, putting it out there, and having transparency to see it all happen. So, I mean, it sounds like IKEA is a huge story. That’s awesome. Do you guys have any other good client success stories from other big companies you’ve worked with? I know you work with a lot of international brands.

Bohumil Pokstefl

Speaker 2

10:01-11:29

We have plenty of them—go to VML, Asahi, for example. We have several success studies and cases. I can name two. One is Social Media Help, a Dutch agency based in the Netherlands. When they started with Kontentino, they had 50 clients on board, and right now they have over 200 clients. You would think that when they had 50 clients, they had around 15 to 20 people in their agency, and if you quadruple the number of clients, you would need to quadruple the number of team members.

But the thing is, they didn’t need to quadruple their team. Thanks to Kontentino, they just worked more effectively, and I think they only doubled the team. This is interesting—some might think social media managers would have no job because you’re automating everything, but not really. You’re basically making the work more effective so you can focus on creativity and the important tasks, rather than wasting time with bullshit, random operational tasks.

Speaker 1

11:29-12:05

You’re not losing jobs—you’re helping with communication so that things get done. It comes down to not having more people on your team to cluster things up, but rather, how do we make this process seamless and easy? I look at it from an agency standpoint—because I have an agency—and I want to figure out how to bring on more clients without having to hire as many employees. That way, I maintain a good profit margin and ensure better communication with the brands we’re working with. Clear communication and getting stuff out on time equal client renewals. In other words, happy clients. And that really should be the goal.

Speaker 1

12:07-12:35

Thanks, Bo, it’s been a very insightful conversation. I’m sure that brands and agencies are taking notes on how they can change their processes and develop a seamless workflow. There’s a lot more that I want to discuss with you, but we’ll save that for the next episode for now. I just wanted to remind my listeners that you can also reach out to my team if you need help with content creation, social media marketing, PR services, SEO, or influencer marketing—we can work together to take your business to the next level. Thanks for tuning in to the Marketing Growth Podcast. We’ll be back soon with another episode.