Is your business shrinking?
When a business is shrinking or stagnant, marketers worry. And their worry pushes them into a frenzy, where they start solving different types of problems.
‘Oh, we have a lead generation problem’
‘Oh, we have a conversation rate optimization problem’
‘Oh, it's because we are not stuffing our blogs with SEO’.
Most of the time, these are the wrong problems. The actual problem is - ‘Your business has become a commodity.
In this episode, we talk about how we can convert a commodity business into a brand.
What if we had a system that could help us in creating content that is relevant to our brand and our mission?
The Solar System Content Model helps Creators and Small Business owners come up with content ideas and outlines for their Podcasts, Blogs and Videos. In this episode, we look at the nuts and bolts of this model.
Mike's coffee business was failing. He had tried multiple things to make it work, but all his tactics had failed.
Just when he was about to give up, Mike realized something. He was making the same mistake that most of us do. He was thinking too big!
Mike showed empathy toward a small audience, and today his brand (Death Wish Coffee) has become one of the most prominent coffee brands in the world.
Listen to this episode to hear the complete story.
A great brand story pulls the right people
Instead of pushing our marketing message down their throat, we can pull the right audience towards us. A great story cuts through the noise and gets the attention of the audience. It inspires them. It moves them from inertia. And pulling eventually leads to more profits and better impact.
There is a simple framework that we can use to create this story - The Old Game/New Game framework.
In this episode, I take you through the step-by-step process of creating a brand narrative by using this framework.
Your existing customers are a gold mine. They have a lot of wisdom to share with you... wisdom that will completely transform the way you do Marketing.
Asking the right questions to our customers gives us an insight into -
And so on.
But despite this, we often ignore the customers that we have. Instead of asking them questions, we move on to acquiring new customers.
In this episode, I talk about the questions that you can ask your customers to get valuable insights from them.
Every brand that aspires to build its 1000 true fans, needs a story. A story that pulls the right audience towards the brand.
Building a brand story isn't always easy. And so here are 3 themes that you can use to create your brand story.
1. Good vs. Evil
2. Counter-intuitive thinking
3. Expert view
While Creators and Small businesses want to build an audience, most of them use a traditional vertical funnel to get the job done.
But if you study successful Creators like James Clear, Louis Grenier, Jonathan Stark, and many more... you would realize that their thought process of building an audience is entirely different. They don't depend on the vertical funnel.
Instead, they use a horizontal funnel. And this is what we discuss in this podcast episode.
Great storytellers collect ideas for stories. These are the ideas that they can use later in their stories.
Now, this goes against the traditional image of a prolific storyteller who can pull stories out of thin air. But it’s the truth. Like a chef who keeps his ingredients ready, storytellers keep their ideas ready.
In this episode, we discuss 3 ways in which you can collect ideas for building kickass stories.
In this episode, I talk about a simple storytelling framework that you can use to build your Brand Story as well as other stories that are needed in your content. By taking examples like Harry Potter and Finding Nemo, we explore the nuances of this framework and then also discuss a few other brands who are using this framework for storytelling.
Here's what we cover -
- The simple 3-step framework for storytelling
- How movies use this framework
- Examples of brands that have been successfully using this framework
How should online Creators measure the performance of their Content?
Should they be concerned about the number of Tik-Tok followers?
Should they be looking at their Google Analytics every day?
Should they be creating more Instagram reels?
To find the answer I decided to reach out to a few Creators that I admire.
Here are the 2 questions that I asked -
1. How do you measure the impact of your content?
2. What kind of numbers do you pay attention to?
And here are the Creators I reached out to -
1. Philip Morgan
2. Rochelle Moulton
3. Jonathan Stark
4. Louis Grenier
5. Margo Aaron
6. Jay Acunzo
Their answers were insightful. And this is what I talk about in the podcast.
Recently, I came across an incredibly powerful Twitter thread by Nathan Barry, the CEO of ConvertKit. In this thread, Nathan talks about how he was able to scale from 0 to USD 22 million in ARR. Here's the link to the thread.
In this particular episode, I talk about the 3 lessons that I personally took from this thread.
What are the skills that you need to build as a Creator?
What are the crafts that you should focus on?
In this episode, I talk about the 3 essential skills that a Creator needs to build.
Can we talk about mass marketing, please?
The kind of marketing, where we target almost everyone and end up diluting our story?
Most businesses that I have known, have wanted to focus on a mass market. These businesses have felt the need to target a very broad audience, with the hope of selling more of their products.
But once in a while, there are businesses that decide to focus on the ‘tiny’. These businesses showed courage and battled the self-doubts that usually come up, as a consequence of facing on the tiny.
In this podcast episode, I talk about 5 such brave businesses.
Here are the links that are mentioned in the episode -
2. ConvertKit
3. Upekkha
4. GrowthX
What type of content should you put at the Top of The Funnel?
Should you just chop your big piece of content into smaller pieces and distribute the content?
Or is there something else that you should consider?
According to Shyam, there is.
In this episode, Shyam and I discuss the concept of “Sequence of Beliefs”. Understanding this sequence of beliefs helps you strategize your content much better. Listen now and let me know :)
Talking points -
1. What is a sequence of beliefs?
2. How does a sequence of beliefs apply to social media content?
3. The sequence of beliefs that Shyam uses for his brand
Why won't your clients give you testimonials?
What holds them back?
And even when they do, they send testimonials that are as boring and ineffective.
In this episode, I talk about how you can create a testimonial that is awesome and totally convinces your prospects to buy.
Here’s what I cover in the episode -
1. How to ask for a testimonial from the client, so that he doesn't refuse
2. A testimonial shouldn’t be ready-made. It should be constructed
3. The right questions to ask while constructing the testimonial.
Do you first develop your offer?
Or do you first develop your audience?
Of course, the answer isn’t simple. And has a lot many nuances to consider.
In this episode, Shyam and I explore the pros and cons of both these strategies. Here are a few talking points -
Creators and small businesses want to build an audience. But how many people do we actually need? Should we aim to get a million followers on Instagram?
Or should we listen to legends like Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin, and just focus on building 1000 true fans? In this episode, Shyam and I talk about the drawbacks of chasing a big market and the advantages of obsessing over 1000 true fans.
Talking points -
Who are you writing for? Who is your real audience?
I recently participated in the Copy Workshop by Margo Aaron and I had an aha moment. I realized how my inner demons are holding me back from unleashing my best writing work.
In this episode, Shyam and I discuss how to think about your audience and push everyone else out of your mind, when you are writing copy.
Talking points -
In this episode, Shyam and I discuss the Pros and Cons of having a practice of writing and publishing daily
Talking points -
1. The role of writing in building an audience
2. The difference between writing daily and publishing daily.
3. How writing and publishing on Linkedin got me a couple of clients
4. How writing every day changes you as a person
5. The disadvantages of publishing daily
6. The mindset of a daily publisher
All the parts in your Marketing are inter-connected. It’s a complex system.
Some Marketers foolishly focus on a single part and optimize it. They don’t consider the repercussions of this optimization on the whole system.
Example -
“Oh, the business is low. Let’s see what the problem is. Oh, the Conversion Rate of the Landing Page needs to increase. Currently, it’s at 1.32%. Let’s aim at 2.5%. Because when that happens, the business will improve.”
And then they put all their efforts into improving this conversion rate. They use the best practices in CRO. The Call To Action button is made bigger. The user is given all the information in the first fold.
And sure enough, the number of leads increase. But the quality decreases. And hence, the profit is reduced further.
This is an example of Linear Thinking.
But perhaps, the landing page is not at fault. Perhaps, you need to zoom out further, and you need to step back and look at your business as a whole. This type of zoomed-out thinking is known as ‘Systems Thinking’... and sadly, most of us don’t indulge in it.
In this episode, Shyam and I talk about the difference between these 2 types of thinking.