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Rethink Your Marketing

I know a lot of you are working in small solo preneurs or smaller businesses that are still on the growth path to that size. So I wanted to bring in someone who works in content marketing right now at us as growing business. Um I'm bringing up my friend and um uh Partner, Joanna Lie, who is the director of marketing for abide christian meditation app. Mhm. So let's talk, going to talk about how to rethink your marketing. Um let's talk about a bite and what you do there. Um Tell me about what the app is and then tell me about your role there. Yeah, so abide is a mobile app and it's a christian meditation um and we offer audio guided meditations. Um if you have heard of calmer head space, it's in that vein. Um and we cater to a faith based audience and my role there is Director of marketing, so I lead content marketing there and all the other marketing channels to and our team is really small, it's six people. Um so if your solo entrepreneur on a really small team, I definitely um unders...

tand the challenges you face and not having that many resources. Um so yeah, and our team, a lot of us to be used to work at google and we just wanted to use our business and technology skills to build something that's more aligned with our values. How do you define the customer you serve? You said faith based audience. How else do you talk about or think about who your customer is? Um yeah, so um, uh like as at abide, our mission is to help people experience peace through meditation. So our audience is really um Anyone who can use the product and do that, but what we've noticed in terms of our target audience and who are gravitates towards a lot of it is female. It's I would say 70% female, 30% male. Um ages like 35-54 lives in the flower states or the South. So, you know, we really delved into the analytics and looked at that. Um, and honestly a lot of the issues or the challenges they encounter are stress, anxiety, insomnia, depression and that's why they are coming to our app. So, um, we, as a company, we, we really want to create a product and service that helps address those pain points. That that's the most important thing. That's kind of what I wanted to ask is. So it's nice. You've said your mission is to sort of create peace in these people's lives. The approach is the way you think about the problem you exist to solve through that limbs like depression, all of the peace, peaceful emotion. Yeah, I think, I mean really our bosses, the customer like we are there to serve the customer. So we take any insights that they give us. And um for example if we create a suite of different meditation, all content it's like well which one is getting the most click throughs like which which content is resonating the most. And um yeah we definitely put the customer first and um we we look at their problems and you know we do surveys or we just you know do any analysis whether it's um you know running an email uh like a B. Test and we say hey which which topic are you most interested in your present two options. And then they tell us that. So what the customer tells us they have um challenges with. We create products for that because we ultimately were there to serve them. Um How do you think about the transformation that you exist to help them solve? Like what does that process or journey look like in your experience of people? Yeah. I um so a lot of times when they come to us, um I'll take one example, a lot of people um they have problems with sleep and insomnia and that's actually pretty common with a lot of people. Uh and um how we like they come to us and they can't sleep and we're like, all right, we need to create content that then, or um you know, audio guided meditations that can help them fall asleep at night and um hearing that transformation from them and being like, all right, you're having issues with this. Like how can we package our content in such a way that uh would resonate with you? And we get feedback from them too. So we'll put out something and then they say like oh that was too much talking or that is not enough talking. Like we don't we actually don't want to think that heavily before we're gonna bet they don't like put all these like very deep questions, like sometimes people just want a story or they just want to listen to like declarative is over you that are like oh you're doing well or you know, here's something to think about and um that's really the transformation that we lead them through and uh yeah, it's really gratifying actually, I really enjoy it because when you can change people's lives and like we just hear testimonies on the app reviews or um you know, people email us and just say like, oh your app is like the one thing I listened to in the morning and it helps get me on the right page or like without your app, I can't fall asleep. Like I play it for two hours at night. I'm like, that's great to be able to work on a product and solve an actual pain point that people deal with. It's interesting that you're in a situation where your content is, where the product is actually, it's actually very media driven. Yeah. So how do you think about the difference between like product content and content marketing? Yeah, it's really interesting because or is there a difference? Yeah, because so I do marketing, but then there's actually a director of content on our team, so he focuses on actually creating the meditations. But then as a marketer, I think of how can I create content that gives people a taste of what's inside the app in which challenging is because it is audio app. Um sometimes I need to give them that experience. So I realized like maybe blogging or doing things like that, it wasn't as effective because unless you experience listening to something you're not going to know. Um so it's really creating the content and finding channels where people are looking for that that you can distribute it on. So I'll give an example, Youtube. A lot of people go onto Youtube to search for meditation, a laura mindfulness content. So we created videos and I did this on a very like low string budget. So like, like I would just like outsource this and like, you know, I'm not, I don't have video skills, but I would ask someone to put something together and then I would launch it on our Youtube channel and initially drive a lot of traffic through our own audience. And then with Youtube, the great thing about Youtube is it's very s ceo oriented and like just organic, you can drive traffic there. Um so I would put meditation videos on Youtube because people were already searching for that. And that was also a good way to test of like what topics are people looking for. And by far like our insomnia sleep video, it got it's got in the most views and like that, like our Youtube channel within a few months had like over a million views and insomnia was over half of those. So for me, like I view content is how can I package something that can give them a taste of what's in the app? And then we also, um in addition to Youtube, like we'll create, you know, web players where you can just go to your Internet Explorer or, you know, chrome and type in a link and then experience um, the, the meditation. So it's creating a similar experience, which is giving people like a little bit of relief. Right? So they can see like this thing would actually help my yeah. Yeah, for sure. How did you first learn that? Sleep was the problem for people I'm interested in? Were you doing customer research? Was it just feedback that people gave in the app reviews? Yeah. So I think a lot of it is, um, feedback from the surveys, but we can also view when people use the app. Like you look at those analytics and um, so sleep is one. So you see a spike in the evenings and we also see a spike in the morning. So a lot of times people use it in the morning and in the evenings. Um, but then you also look at, um, so I know you mentioned competitors, but just know what are like calm that app. It's very focused on sleeve and um, just looking at the landscape as well and you just view user behavior in their trends and whether it's through surveys or looking at analytics. Um, and how do you know what's working? And one of the metrics that you pay attention to a lot of views on Youtube thing? Yeah. Um, well actually it's interesting because as a marketer, um, for an app, I do care about growth and like, you know, app installs. But more than that, our company metric is, um, time spent meditating like that. That is what we care about because who cares if you have a product and you're able to get someone to download it or sign up if they aren't actually using it, like you want to be able to engage with them. So across our company, we we say like, okay there in the product, but how much time have they spent using it? And um yeah, like we want people, we want to create a useful product that actually engages with people. So um yeah, that's our company wide metric. Yeah. And we'll talk in a minute about how I'm I'm constantly beating the drum of marketers, get your metrics to be around growth of engaged customers, not just growth, because growth by itself actually doesn't get you anywhere and you can get there and you can get the you can hack those numbers and still end up in a really bad place, and if you as a marketer can drive the growth of engaged customers. Yeah. You're in really good shape. That is like some real yeah, actually influence within an organization to see how marketing can influence the content and it's really exciting. Yeah. Anything else you would say to like a solo preneurs or really small business as a piece of advice for starting a content marketing program? Yeah, I would say to uh first, just don't let perfection get in the way, and just to put yourself out there. That's my advice for anything in general if you're solo premier, because sometimes for me, I would just, you know, spend hours like writing a blog or something, but is there a quick version that you can get out and don't spend so much time on content if you if you're not even sure that your audience really needs, that, like run a quick A B test quickly. So for example, instead of writing a book about a topic, send an email to your list and say um like two copies of two potential book titles and see which ones get the higher click through rates, and then like have that drive your content. Like have the audience insights drive your content and just launch really quick experiments so you don't you're not spending so much time creating something that you're not even sure the customer really wants. Yeah, awesome so much. Thank you. What join us talking about right now is something that I kind of call lean marketing strategy where you're actually just doing a lot of tests by putting content in front of customers and seeing how they react to it. And the best story that I remember about this comes from tim Ferriss. I'm sure you guys know who he is. His way back book, the four hour workweek. He talks about how the original title for that book was something like selling cocaine for fun and profit or something like totally out there that the publisher was publisher was like we're not publishing that book with that title. So he talks about how he actually ran a test by just running running a bunch of google adsense ads that clicked through to nothing. He didn't even have a site built or anything. He just ran a bunch of ads and spent 30 or 50 bucks or something to see who clicked on which most. And that's how he got the title of the four hour workweek. So I'm not suggesting that you should have tests that click through to nothing. But I am suggesting that like join us as you can use subject lines in people's reaction to them as sort of an indicator of customer interest in um a content, a program that's a deeper investment or a product feature. So again we're talking about rethinking your marketing um and it not being big beautiful stories about your brand instead the rethink is that your content and marketing should be high value content that fuels your customer's journey, right? So the rethink is should not be beautiful stories about your brand. It should be high value content that fuels your customer's journey. When I say high value and when I say content that feels your customer's journey, I am not intending to communicate that the content has to be strictly like utilitarian how to that is not the case. They can be soaring lee inspirational, beautiful customer success stories. Um They can be just super creative. Like many movies. Actually, the Headspace app has a bunch of really powerful little animations that are just little movies that teach you lessons about meditations and basics. The whole point of it is that the content needs to help drive the transformation your customer is trying to get out by working with you. It is not that it can't be beautiful, right? But it does have to be transformational. All right. So the first thing that we're gonna do is the first step of making this rethink of your marketing is to try to shift your focus and your metrics from growth to engagement. So this is the thing I was just talking about and this is really like a career development point for marketers in particular when it comes time to set KPI S when it comes time to set your quarterly or yearly goals when you're pitching a program. Um you should be arguing for a set of goals that maybe there's one growth goal like one goal about follower building or how many people are going, you know, you'll reach with something, but you should be making sure that you are measured for your success on engagement. Either on the growth of engaged customers, on how many people actually like, like it, watch it, read it, share it. Um If you're given that if you are handed a set of goals that only include growth, this is the moment in time when you should learn how to make the business case right? You have to get to a place where So I see so much frustration on the point of marketers who are like, well, you know, we're just not doing the right things right, But the people who are telling you to do those things often won't know that things are not the right things if you're not telling them that back. So you can use a lot of the data that we've talked about today and just the fundamental truth that a business that fails to engage its customers over and over again, It's not a sustainable business to start arguing for your metrics to include your success metrics in your copies to include growth of engaged customers or engagement on your content. Um And yes, this takes practice. But if you can do it and start to show how you're marketing and content programs drive customer engagement with the product. You actually gain so much more influence and so much more access to resources than if you're just the marketer who make sure that you get a big twitter following but never is, you know, is not driving engagement on that following. Alright. Rethink you're marketing step number two is to shift your stories and your content from being about you two being for them and for their journey. Um The I want to I want to give an example a couple of examples around success stories and we're going to drill down into how to translate customer journey into the success story strategy and just a bit but take a look at various stories. They just have a bunch of features where they just made little mini movies about a bunch of people, not even people who fit their capital, see customer definition, right? Not necessarily people who buy from Ari I don't know that maybe they do, maybe they don't, but there are people who enjoy the outdoors deeply and there different kinds of people than we've seen enjoy the outdoors. There's one guy who's like 70 and runs ultra marathons and there's like a really a really round person who just runs a lot and you're like, wow, that girl is getting it. You know what I mean? And so there are these really soaring inspirational, like customer stories um that do help facilitate, you know, their customer journey, Remember we talked about earlier is about getting people to enjoy the great outdoors. So it does help remove some of the intimidation and um that's not for me type obstacles and objections that people have to getting into the great outdoors. Uh the third step is to to use and this is a step we're gonna drill way down into use your customer journey insights that we just distilled out of customer research for content, for marketing and for product via some rules of engagement. I'm going to share with you now. So I hope I'm being super clear that the entire point of this conversation is to engage your customers with content that makes their transformational journey easier. Right? That's context. This was the fog behavior model for how you create behavior change in order to in order to help remove resistance points and trigger progress on someone's transformational journey. You do have to know a little bit about behavior change. Um and the fog behavior model says that you can create behavior change by increasing motivation, which is super hard to do really, really hard, like maybe don't try um by increasing ability, which means you can help make something easier for them. Take a knowledge, you know, roadblock away, make something cheaper for them to do. Um Or you can put a hot trigger in their path, right? You can give them a notification or a push or an email or a signal or something that says do that thing you wanted to do already now now is the time to do it an alarm. So I've come away from working with Fox behavior model and a number of digital products and working with content strategy on a bunch of different brands and hearing customers say the same thing over and over about wanting their content to educate and wanting their content to motivate that. Before we get into the specific rules of content engagement, I want to do just like a really basic here's what your content Canon should do and here's what your content Canton should not do. And by doing this, I kind of hoped to eliminate like maybe a decade of trial and error off of your life. Okay, so here we go. Um the whole power, the whole power of understanding your customers journey and understanding the micro moments, moments in time at which they're asking questions. I want to know, I want to go, I want to do, I want to buy um where they're asking those questions and of whom they're asking those questions. The whole power of that material and having done that work is that, you know, you already equips you to know where the people who are already motivated and the people who already want to do the thing that you're trying to help people do are and what questions they're asking at what time. So you can just place your problem solving content right there for them. Okay, that is the whole point. You don't need to use content and marketing to try to tell people about how great you are and educate them about how great you are and educate them that you exist or educate them, that the problem is important. So I will tell you in the health and wellness and finance industries, I hear that a lot we have to teach people that this problem is really important. You can do that if you want to, but people have a lot of problems in their lives already. It's really hard to get someone to realize that a new problem to them should rank on there, right? And scale of problems that they care about. On the other hand, there's already a bunch of people out there that are probably trying to solve the problem that you exist to solve. So find them. Same with motivate right motivation is such a challenging thing. The best way to get it is to let life bring it to you. Trying to create X from the outside for people is almost impossible. If you could. There would be. I mean the whole industry of, remember we talked about the guy earlier who was diagnosed as pre diabetic and then had dessert that night. Like that would never happen if it was easy to motivate people. And as a marketer, you're never going to have the motivational power that say a doctor or a diagnosis of prediabetes does and that doesn't even work. But again, there's already a bunch of people out there in the world that are motivated to solve the problem that you exist to solve. So like let's find them right and put the right content in front of them on the flip side. What content can do is increase their ability, remember ability from fog behavior model can increase their ability to do something, can make it way easier for them to do something that they already want to do. That's what I think of as facilitating. Um, it can activate them. It can put a hot trigger in the path of people who are already motivated. And in fact, many people think that's the easiest for digital products in particular. They're like that's where the money is. Put a trigger and already motivated people's path. The reason we all have that instant reaction internally when we Get a push notification on our phone or check a thing to text that is hot trigger in the path that we've been trained essentially. We've been conditioned to know that that means we should pay attention to something, right? And that is a behavior change. Remember? Like human beings didn't have these devices like 20 years ago. So we've had like a whole human species behavior change based on just putting a hot trigger in the path. Imagine what one might do with that if you were trying to trigger, say healthy behavior um which people do, many health apps have push notification that says, hey, you haven't meditated yet this morning. Did you want to I think you might have wanted to write like that. And then translating, translating goes back to that Stewart butterfield post about how it's our job to make sure that we're building products that actually do help people solve the problems they want to solve and that we're using marketing to translate the product into terms that they already care about. So that if people don't know, they need a group chat solution, we shouldn't be marketing them a group chat solution. What people do know is they want to be more productive or more collaborative or more creative or they want to, you know, be more efficient with their work time right here. Even I might imagine creative life, right? People want to be more creative, people want to be more innovative, they want to be more productive, they want to be more fulfilled in their work, people want self expression, those are all things that creative life actually does a pretty good job of like messaging in their in their marketing. But that's translating is instead of talking about your product the way you've been thinking about your product, putting it into words and that click open your customers mental frames for things I already care about