Sell 60,000 tickets and you fill a stadium for an afternoon. Create 60,000 memories and you'll fill a stadium forever.
Experiences become memories, memories become traditions and experiential marketing is the way to create an emotional bond with customers that pulls them back to your brand over the competition again and again.
Pro sports teams live and die not by their teams’ records, but by their ability to create experiences that begin long before kickoff and continue way after the stadium has emptied. They create fans, not customers.
We’re here to say that experiential marketing is for every industry. While your marketing will be specific to your brand, we’ve pulled three principles from pro sports marketing to help you convert customers into loyal brand fans.
In this guide, we’ll break down experiential marketing in sports examples drawn from real teams and brands, then show how those same strategies can be applied across industries.
At its core, experiential marketing works because it creates emotion, not just awareness. And no industry understands that better than pro sports.
Sports teams don’t market products; they market moments. Every touchpoint in sports marketing is designed to make fans feel something and feel it together. The shared emotion is what turns a single experience into a lasting memory, and a memory into long-term loyalty.
The strongest experiential marketing examples in sports are immersive and interactive. They invite fans to get up out of their seats and participate. They reward attention, amplify momentum, and extend the experience far beyond the physical event through digital channels and social conversation.
This is why experiential marketing in sports examples translate so well to other industries. When brands focus on how people feel before, during, and after an interaction, they learn more about their audience to improve their experience the next time they interact. This is the advantage sports marketers have been playing for years.
What translates isn't the tactic — it's the principle underneath it. The medium you choose — the event, the touchpoint, the format — communicates something before your audience reads a single word. Udi Ledergor, former CMO at Gong, invokes Marshall McLuhan's idea with a sharp marketing application: most brands are obsessing over what to say while ignoring the signal their channel selection is already sending. This short video breaks down why the medium isn't a delivery vehicle — it's the message itself.
Here are seven experiential marketing examples in sports that show how experiences turn audiences into lifelong fans.
Before changing a single seat or concession stand, the Utah Jazz spent a year listening to what fans actually wanted. By grounding the experience in real fan insight, the team transformed the arena into a space designed for making lasting, brand-loyal memories.
After the Utah Jazz’s $125M arena renovation, Bart Sharp, CMO at the Utah Jazz, shared that his team spent an entire year researching what Jazz fans wanted beyond the court before making any renovation plans. Their research showed a strong desire among their fans for more premium options, ice cream (yes, Utahns love their ice cream), and Instagrammable photo opps. With these findings, the Jazz transformed their arena to provide fans unforgettable experiences.
Built Bar shows that experiential marketing can happen far beyond the venue. By placing customer service directly under marketing, the brand turns real-time feedback into responsive experiences that make customers feel heard and valued.
BuiltBar has a unique way of ensuring their customers are heard and that feedback gets injected directly into their marketing campaigns. “We’ve actually put the customer service team under marketing leadership. That way we can pivot and change quickly without going through multiple channels,” said Colleen Ferrier, VP of Marketing at Built Bar. “So we’re hearing as leaders directly what the customers love, what they don’t love, what they’re liking, what they’re not liking. And we as a team can shift and change quickly for them.”
By directly listening, learning, and responding to customers, Built Bar’s marketing team has the ammunition they need to generate more value for their customers.
As marketers, we must prioritize listening before campaign creation. We should never assume we know why someone came to our websites or their purposes for joining in the experience. Every time we make assumptions, we limit ourselves and miss opportunities for our customers, putting time and energy in the wrong places.
Do This: Customer feedback/research surveys always endear customers to you—show you care and learn from your most important audience. Also, consider moving Customer Service under Marketing to close the customer feedback loop.
When momentum strikes, great experiential marketing captures it instantly. The Suns turned a split-second, game-winning play into a physical product almost overnight, allowing fans to own a piece of the moment while the emotion was still fresh.
With only .9 on the clock, Deandre Ayton scored a game-winning alley-oop against the Clippers during the Suns’ 2020-2021 season. Being hyper-engaged on social media, the Suns’ social media team quickly recognized an opportunity to capitalize on the excitement surrounding the play. New “Valley-Oop” shirts were announced on their social channels that night and available for purchase the very next day. No one could have predicted the alley-oop, let alone prepare t-shirt designs. But the Suns were ready—they took an awesome on-court experience and memorialized it for the fans.
Marketing teams have to find ways to monitor momentum. Bart Sharp shares how this is a key principle they follow within their marketing strategy. “I’ve learned in this industry you’ve got to be very nimble because things can change very fast. In an instant, we have to shift our focus and find ways to capture that momentum.” Sometimes the team is playing really well and there’s a story there. Sometimes there’s not. In pro sports (and really in just about any industry) you can’t predict how the seasons will go. You can have an idea based on data you’ve gathered (players on the team, how we compare to competition, injury reports, etc.) and that informs direction. But if things get going and you notice momentum is building somewhere else, you’ve got to make that pivot.
Marketers may be the best planners in the world, but following the momentum inherently means that marketers must be ready to abandon their plans—which is frankly really hard to do! What if the Suns chose to just stick to their content calendar? They would’ve missed out on a huge opportunity for the brand to bond with fans.
Not all experiential marketing examples happen inside a stadium. Oreo’s now-famous “dunk in the dark” response during the Super Bowl blackout shows how brands can insert themselves into shared cultural experiences by acting quickly and understanding the moment.
We all remember the classic example of Oreo capitalizing on the power outage in the 2013 Superbowl with a tweet about “dunking in the dark.” The brand acted quickly around a current event, which was only possible because they were aware of what their audience was doing and how to appeal to them in that moment.
It doesn’t take a huge team or expensive software to interact with your audience. Plan all you want, but be ready to strike when the opportunities arrive.
Do This: Marketers can’t capitalize on momentum if they aren’t looking for it, if they don’t have a supportive infrastructure, or if they don’t have the green light from leadership.
Experiential marketing doesn’t always require large-scale activations. Real Salt Lake demonstrates how thoughtful, personal interactions on social media can become powerful micro-experiences that deepen fan loyalty.
Tyler Gibbons, VP of Marketing at Real Salt Lake (RSL), shares how seriously they take online interactions with their fans. “When someone shares wearing a team jersey and you respond back to them on social, you probably made that person's day. You're going to have a fan for life.” In their case, RSL is extremely careful about who on their team has the permission to dialogue with fans—they don’t underestimate the power of these micro-experiences.
Creating an experience doesn’t mean that you need a full event or production. Experiences can be small and individualized for your specific audience. Hubspot emphasizes that even when you give your audience a tangible experience, there must still be an online dialogue happening. Dialogue is especially crucial to industries where the experiences are largely digital. It’s those conversations that become a major part of audience-brand bonding.
Not every fan can sit courtside. Geography, cost, and capacity make that impossible. The Warriors decided to redesign that reality.
By experimenting with virtual reality, the Warriors created a way for fans to experience games from a courtside perspective without ever stepping foot in the arena. Using VR technology, fans could feel closer to the action, immersed in the sights and sounds of game day, even if they were watching from hundreds or thousands of miles away.
This is a strong example of experiential marketing because it expands access instead of limiting it. The experience isn’t just about watching basketball, but about giving fans a story to tell. Now, fans can feel like they were courtside, even if they technically weren’t.
The takeaway here isn’t that every brand needs VR. It’s that the best experiential marketing examples use technology to remove barriers and deepen emotional connection.
AT&T Stadium is massive. Iconic. And, it’s intentionally designed to be experienced even when no game is being played.
The Cowboys have turned their stadium into a year-round experiential marketing engine through immersive tours that give fans behind-the-scenes access. Visitors can walk the field, explore locker rooms, learn the architectural story of the venue, and see how one of the most recognizable franchises in sports operates from the inside.
This is a masterclass of storytelling at scale. The Dallas Cowboys’ stadium has become a physical brand expression, reinforcing the Cowboys’ identity as larger-than-life, premium, and deeply rooted in sports culture.
What makes this one of the strongest experiential marketing examples is its longevity. The experience doesn’t rely on a single event or even a game; it creates value every day, for fans who may not even attend a game, but still leave feeling closer to the brand.
Look at the interactions happening with your target audience. Is there a way to build an online element into a tangible experience? Are you keeping a dialogue going on and offline?
A major sign of marketing maturity in an organization is the level of experience they place in customer-facing roles (such as social media managers, customer experience, etc.). Unfortunately, many brands put their “greenest” people in these roles—preventing organizations from fully capturing their audience’s feedback and preventing audiences from an elevated experience.
There’s a reason why pro sports teams pull in top talent for game-day coverage. Inside the NBA, for example, features the beloved Charles Barkley and Shaq. College GameDay utilizes former athletes, coaches, and other experts to talk about the football games. Both shows have subject matter experts in charge of the dialogue, giving this dialogue the best people to engage audiences.
So don’t put your least experienced employees in charge of all the digital dialogue for your brand. Make sure that whoever is helping to create that dialogue knows and understands your company’s offering, your values, and how to interact with your audience in a way that is meaningful to them.
Do This: Don’t hire entry-level for audience-facing positions.
Pro sports marketers have an obvious edge in creating customer experiences—their product is literally an experience—but their playbook is written for every brand in every industry. A stronger focus on experiential marketing truly can turn your brand observers into lifetime, loyal fans.
If you’re ready to take inspiration from these experiential marketing in sports examples and apply them to your own brand, we’re here to help.
At 97th Floor, we partner with teams who want to create experiences people remember. If you’re ready to build experiential marketing that connects, converts, and lasts, let’s build together.
Want more expert marketing content sent right to your inbox?
Join our newsletter and never miss a beat.
Revolutionary branding can change how customers perceive an entire industry, but few companies are willing to take that step in the dark. Uncharted territory comes with a lack of data and research to back your efforts—it takes guts.
Moz said it best. “Playing it too safe is...a great way to remain somewhere in the middle. Almost everyone likes the middle. Nobody loses their job in the middle. Customers come and go at a steady rate in the middle. Nobody boycotts the middle.”
This article explores creative marketing tactics that can help you move beyond the middle. From purpose-driven messaging to playful brand voices, these tactics show how bold ideas inspire attention, spark loyalty, and fuel growth. Whether you’re a small challenger or a large enterprise, you’ll find practical tips you can apply to give your brand the refresh it needs.
Creative marketing tactics are unconventional strategies that brands use to capture attention, spark emotion, and differentiate themselves in crowded markets. Unlike traditional campaigns that rely on predictable playbooks, these approaches focus on being memorable and connecting with audiences on a deeper level.
Think of them as creative marketing ideas that shift perception. They can be bold visuals, unexpected partnerships, purpose-driven messages, or even playful responses to criticism. At their core, creative marketing tactics prove that playing it safe is rarely the way to stand out.
We’ve curated five tips to show you how to put these ideas into practice, along with real-world examples. #1 Be Unapologetically Interesting
“If you always just try to sell, then you’re predictable. You’re every other brand and company out there.” —Michael Lee, Oatly Creative Director. Oatly stands out—we all saw the controversial SuperBowl commercial. The alternative dairy brand embraces unapologetic fun while still communicating its core values.
Part of what makes Oatly so appealing is its contrast with other milk brands. Picture any other dairy brand—the homepage likely has a perfectly composed stock photo complete with a heartwarming description of the product. Swap the milk out with any other household item, like Windex or Clorox, and you don’t have to change a thing.
Oatly stands way, way out with a cartoony, playful, almost handmade aesthetic website. When photos are included, they’re messy and candid — almost like a friend took them. The copy has an unpolished, almost rambling feeling that is nothing like its competitors' carefully crafted, “clean” taglines.
Oatly doesn’t use industry competitors as models for what they should become. While other brands fill their website with recipes to sell more product, Oatly's recipes are only a fraction of the available content. The bulk of Oatly’s content is dedicated to being interesting. The brand even has a section dedicated entirely to "Things we do" that has unique content to make audiences smile.
Lee revealed the core of Oatly’s branding strategy: “Don’t try to sell anything — just be interesting. If you’re interesting, people will pay attention to you and they’ll be interested in what you do next.”
How do they do it though? Oatly takes an unstructured approach. The creative team chats about content that would be fun to create and then they make it a reality. Lee explains, “We produce our own work, and we prove our own work. There’s no filter, no checkpoint meetings with the sales guys, no half way meetings with marketing managers.” This method allows content to land with it’s full creative potential preventing leadership from watering it down. Creating without gatekeepers is a terrifying prospect for many companies, but Oatly doesn’t let this hold them back.
Do This: Trust in creative teams and whatever you do, don’t be content in the middle ground.
Is the strategy of simply being interesting paying off? Oatly is claimed to be the world’s largest oat milk company and 2020 saw a 106.5% increase in reported revenue. Oatly is Starbucks’ oat milk of choice, and there was even a time when people were selling their supply of Oatly for over $200 on Amazon.
Yep, being unapologetically interesting works.
SaaS companies are infamous for ambiguous copy and visuals that all look the same. When every solution looks the same, customers quickly lose interest and have a difficult time keeping track of the unique value each solution offers. Gong, a revenue intelligence software is...different.
The pressure to stand out just got more urgent. Former Slack CMO Bill Macaitis breaks down why lean AI-native startups are now achieving the same ARR with a fraction of the headcount — and what traditional SaaS companies need to do to stay competitive. This short video captures why the window to adapt is closing fast.
Let’s take a look at the websites of some other sales platforms. This industry is ruled by clean designs, cool colors, futuristic gradients, and flat illustrations.
Then there’s Gong with fun stock photos, bright colors, and a playful pooch as its chatbot representative. The smooth UX and attention to quality (albeit stock photo quality) allow the brand to take risks in an otherwise streamlined market.
While some may not enjoy the cheesy nature of its aesthetic, Gong doesn’t really care. CMO Udi Ledergor acknowledged, “If you’re pleasing everybody, you’re not exciting anybody.”
Ledger defines Gong’s brand as “whimsical and authoritative” — two adjectives you wouldn’t normally think go together. They’ve combined seemingly unrelated, opposing elements to craft a brand voice that fits perfectly.
Do this: Carve out your own identity and carry your voice throughout every piece of content.
Ledger continues “When you read our content, when you hear one of our amazing speakers at a conference, when you look at our website, when you go to our LinkedIn content, you see that whimsy coming through everything we do."
This commitment to a consistent voice allows Gong’s audience to instantly recognize every piece of content they create. More importantly, audiences can differentiate Gong from the sea of other software companies who are pushing the same message.
As of June 2021, Gong raised $250 million in funding and ranked top-50 in outstanding growth within SaaS companies—not bad for high-fives and fist pumps.
Billie was the first to push the boundaries in the women's razors market by using body hair in images and fighting against the pink tax. In an interview, Billie Cofounder Georgina Gooley shared the inspiration behind the brand’s identity. “We knew we couldn’t just sell a better product at a better price — we wanted to reinvent the category’s relationship with women.”
For decades, razor brands have depicted the ideal version of a woman. Women were told that their body hair was something to be ashamed of, something needing to be removed. “We've always wanted to put our audience ahead of our product, so emphasizing the importance of choice has always been core to what we believe.”
Billie’s competitors have quickly followed suit. As Gooley points out,“The fact that a new, challenger brand like Billie could change the way women are represented in a century-old category shows that even the newest players have the power to create change.”
Although Billie’s competitors have slightly adapted their imagery, their core branding has stuck closely to the refined, spa feeling we’re used to seeing from razor companies. Billie takes a bold approach to branding with bright colors, body-inclusive models, and 90s throwback styling.
Beyond bold visuals, sticking closely to strong values is what sets Billie apart from other brands.
While overthrowing the pink tax by charging less and offering rebates means smaller margins for Billie, audiences see the dedication to a cause and become lifelong fans. While other companies say they’re committed to women, Billie actually backs up their statements.
Do this: Permeate purpose-driven values at every level of the organization. Put your brand’s purpose before your product to attract customers and open up doors to other creative marketing tactics.
You’ve never met a more hardcore water brand than Liquid Death. The company’s energy-drink-inspired branding is a complete 180 from the peaceful, flowing springs used to market other water brands. The tagline “MURDER YOUR THIRST” seems a little contradictory when selling the most essential-to-life product on earth, but that contradiction is exactly what makes it unforgettable.
CEO and founder Mike Cessario explained that the core idea for the brand was inspired by the hilarious, random marketing in the junk food market. “Liquid Death was a way of taking the healthiest food you can drink and brand it and market it in a way where you can compete with all the crazy marketing of junk food.” Liquid Death is unique because it’s not really competing with other water brands.
And Liquid Death thrives on this bold persona. When social media trolls flood their comments with hate, the brand doesn’t hide or delete. Instead, they double down by turning those insults into music albums (punk tracks with screamed lyrics pulled straight from negative online comments).
Founder Mike Cessario summed it up best: “Hard work is a waste of time if your idea sucks. Figure out how you have a great idea first before you then start putting all the blood, sweat and tears into it.” Liquid Death has that great idea, and they’re not afraid to make it louder by amplifying even their harshest critics.
Do This: Don’t run from criticism. Use it. Turning negativity into content not only disarms haters but also strengthens loyalty among your core fans.
Of course, the irreverence goes beyond the jokes. Liquid Death pairs its over-the-top branding with real values, pledging “death to plastic” by offering a sustainable alternative to bottled water. That combination of humor and purpose has built them a cult following and fueled 126% growth last year.
Liquid Death proves that the boldest creative marketing tactic isn’t just to be different, it’s to take what others fear and flip it into your loudest megaphone.
3M isn’t just trying to stand out in its industry, it’s trying to stand out from itself. A quick look back at the 3M website reveals that its messaging has transformed from a focus on innovative technology to applied science and connecting with the people who use 3M products. Over the years, technology imagery has given way to people-centric visuals.
3M has countless products in various industries, but you probably know them best for their tape. Despite consumer business being the least profitable sector at 3M, this is an area that the brand focuses a lot of marketing effort on.
By focusing on individual consumers, 3M is able to focus on messaging that resonates with people. Because at the end of the day, B2B and B2G customers are just people.
Do this: See your audience as humans—market to them as humans.
Making science fun and accessible to all is at the heart of 3M’s marketing strategy. CMO Remi Kent explained, “We really wanted to show that creativity of how you might use our products in a nontraditional way, but in a way that could provide your family with an outlet for fun.”
Bold marketing doesn’t always require a complete rebrand or a viral stunt. These creative marketing tactics can be tested quickly and scaled when they work.
Pairing up with a brand outside your category can stop audiences in their tracks. Think Taco Bell and Doritos, or Lego and IKEA. Unexpected pairings spark curiosity and open the door to new markets. The key is to choose a partner that shares your values, even if your products are worlds apart.
Guerrilla marketing is all about disrupting the ordinary. It could be sidewalk chalk art, a flash performance, or a surprising outdoor installation. When executed well, these activations feel more like cultural moments than ads. They generate buzz precisely because they break away from traditional formats.
Your audience often creates content that feels more authentic than polished brand campaigns. Starbucks’ #RedCupContest and Calvin Klein’s #MyCalvins are great examples of customers becoming co-creators. UGC lowers production costs and builds trust because real people represent the brand.
Nostalgia taps into emotions that go deeper than product features. Brands like Pokémon and Nintendo have built entire second lives by reimagining their classics for a new generation. A 90s throwback or retro design element instantly sparks connection because it reminds people of when they first loved your category.
Events, whether virtual or in-person, allow customers to experience your brand in a new way. Red Bull’s Flugtag competitions and Adobe’s creative conferences show how experiences can become brand-defining. Even smaller brands can use pop-ups, live streams, or interactive workshops to create memorable touchpoints.
When brands participate in cultural conversations, they show audiences they’re paying attention. Oreo’s “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark” tweet during the Super Bowl blackout is one of the most famous examples. These tie-ins succeed when they feel natural and timely, so monitor trends and move quickly when opportunities arise.
Supporting a meaningful cause is more than philanthropy; it’s strategy. Patagonia’s environmental stance and Billie’s fight against the pink tax show how brands can build lasting loyalty by aligning with movements their customers care about. The important step is following through with real action, not empty statements.
Sometimes creativity comes from changing how a product is packaged or presented. Heinz’s upside-down ketchup bottle and Reese’s seasonal shapes prove that even small tweaks can make a big impact when they surprise customers. These changes keep products fresh in categories that rarely evolve.
Digital marketing can go far beyond static ads. Interactive quizzes, AR filters, or gamified experiences turn audiences into participants. Spotify Wrapped is a perfect example: it celebrates users while transforming them into promoters who share their results with the world.
Many brands stand out because of how they speak. Wendy’s Twitter roasting competitors on Instagram or Duolingo’s cheeky TikTok presence are proof that tone can capture attention as much as visuals or products. An unexpected voice gives audiences a reason to pay attention in an endless feed of sameness.
Creative marketing ideas are exciting, but they only matter if you put them into motion. Start by defining clear goals for your campaign (ex., awareness, engagement, or loyalty). Choose one or two tactics that align with your brand values, and launch them on a small scale to see how your audience responds. Measure the results, refine your approach, and expand the campaigns that prove effective. The path to standing out begins with a bold step.
When you’re ready to push beyond safe strategies, 97th Floor brings the expertise and creativity to make it happen. Our team has helped brands break free from the middle ground by designing campaigns that capture attention, spark emotion, and deliver results. We’ll partner with you to find the tactics that set your brand apart.
See how an audience-first approach translates to bottom-line results.
Barbara Walters said it best: Taylor Swift is the music industry. However, in celebrating the greatness of her artistry, we often forget to give her praise for her marketing intelligence, business acumen, and pure hard work. Work that placed her on Forbes’ 2021 list of America’s self-made women with an estimated net worth of $550 million.
What goes into it? She’s a business giant, there’s no doubt, but when you compare her to many of her peers, she doesn’t have many of the side hustles that you come to expect from the modern pop star. Take a glance at Forbes’ list of highest-paid musicians and you’ll find that most of them make the majority of their money through non-musical means — clothing lines, shoe deals, perfumes, movie and television show production credits, even streaming services and headphones. By comparison — and it might seem weird to say it — Taylor’s business ventures are relatively humble. And most of it comes back to, you guessed it, content marketing.
Taylor Swift is a powerful brand, and she is incredibly careful with how and where she uses her name. Corporate endorsements include Keds, Diet Coke, CoverGirl, Capital One, and Apple. But this brand didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Ask someone in 2005 who Taylor Swift was and they would likely give you some answer about semi-trucks. How she built this brand is a case study in content marketing itself.
Any customer-focused marketing strategy today is bound to include social media in some shape or form. But in 2005 it was all but unheard of. An early adopter of social media, Taylor Swift started a MySpace blog that would run for years, where she provided content for her growing fanbase that they couldn’t get anywhere else.
Taylor Swift (2006)
7x Platinum
5,750,000 copies sold
157 weeks in the Billboard 200 — longest of any album in the 2000s decade
This early approach to personalized marketing would set the tone for the rest of her career. The growing star would not only post intimate blogs that gave unique insider insights to her followers, but she would also engage with them and encouraged the growth of a community both inside and outside of the platform. In her acceptance speech for a CMT music award for Breakthrough Artist of the Year in 2008, Taylor dedicated it to her special club: “This is for my Myspace people and everybody who voted.” At this point, she had accumulated more than 650,000 “friends” on the platform, but each one of them could have felt she was talking directly to them.
Meeting fans where they are is something that Taylor herself has talked about. In an interview with BBC Radio 1, she mentioned the persistence required at the beginning of her career when it came to convincing her label and management that she needed to engage and use the internet — a strategy that paid off in the form of millions of streams of her music. She also talked of the importance of adapting to changing times. And time and again she’s done exactly that.
She meets fans where they are, and speaks their language
“You just never know what’s gonna happen...every new album release is different because there’s always a new platform, there’s always a new...way to have people experience your music. I just find it interesting, I’m not gonna sit here and ever be the person that’s like ‘it was only good the way it was when I started’...I like the fact that people can experience music in whatever way fits their life.”
Taylor Swift is on TikTok. A seemingly insignificant fact on the surface, but a single glance at Ahrefs’ content explorer shows just how big of a deal it was.
Witness the volume of shared and linked-to content featuring the words “Taylor Swift TikTok” on August 23rd, the day Taylor posted her first TikTok video (a search that yielded over 400 results), and consider that the dress that she was wearing sold out in minutes.
While it is not surprising for a public figure to join a social platform that boasts hundreds of millions of active users, it is yet more proof of Swift’s smart marketing acumen. Her fans are on TikTok, and so Taylor Swift is on TikTok.
The same logic applies to B2B marketing — but most companies still haven't made the shift. Former Slack and Zendesk CMO Bill Macaitis calls out why white papers and analyst relations aren't enough anymore, and where your buyers are actually waiting for you. This short video captures exactly why B2B marketers need to modernize their channel strategy now.
And for Taylor Swift, meeting fans where they are involves more than just being on a platform. Rather than falling into the trap of hiring a team to cross-post the same content on every platform, Taylor...well, tailors her content specifically to the audience on each one — and continues to add a level of authenticity carried over from her MySpace days.
This isn’t the first time she has done this, either — moving from MySpace to the likes of Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and now TikTok — Taylor continues to meet her fans where they are, and speak their language.
However, to reduce Taylor Swift’s content marketing brilliance down to social media would be doing a disservice. In fact, look at how she has used Twitter in recent years — a platform where engagement thrives off of large amounts of content:
According to SocialBlade’s record of the top 10 most followed users on Twitter, Taylor maintains an A++ engagement grade, despite a mere fraction of the tweets and despite following no one. How does she accomplish it? Well, it would be easy to say that once you have more than 88 million followers, engagement is pretty much a given. But one glance at her followers tells you that they are continuing to grow daily.
The Taylor Swift brand is thriving, and doesn’t look like slowing any time soon. So much so, that her presence continues to grow even on platforms like Twitter where she is not spending much time. Given, she did spend years building up a Twitter following, and still has a team tweeting regularly through her more corporate account; but to maintain such a prominent place at the top of the Twitter hierarchy indicates a great deal of lasting power and influence. How has she accomplished it?
In case you haven’t figured it out by now: Taylor Swift is the world’s best content marketer. Why? Because she produces some dang good content.
Whether you are a fan of her music or not, the proof of her songwriting caliber is evident in both her critical and commercial acclaim. She is the most awarded artist in AMAs history and is tied with only four other performers for the most Album of the Year Grammy Awards with four. She has also part of an elite group that has sold over 200 million albums, and just recently became the only artist to log 7 albums simultaneously in the Rolling Stone 200 a total of 20 times.
When your content is good, it can have the ability to promote itself. But Taylor Swift — being the world’s greatest content marketer — doesn’t rest on her laurels. And her promotion of her music is second to none. Taylor Swift’s album promotion cycles have been well documented over the years, from lucrative partnerships to exclusive merch deals and even secret listening parties at her own homes.
Yet even when 2020 hit and Taylor released a surprise album in a time of social distancing and isolation, her promotion remained top notch. Taylor’s key collaborator Aaron Dessner has described how her record label was only notified of the album’s existence mere hours before it was released. A true last-minute drop, she could easily be forgiven for forgoing promotion altogether. What we experienced instead was a masterclass in quick strategy. As soon as the announcement was made, her store was equipped with digital and physical copies of the album, available for pre-order — including 8 different versions of the vinyl copy, encouraging fans to collect them all.
Knowing when and where to ramp up promotion is a key skill, and it’s one that Taylor has mastered over the years. We have already discussed her social media prowess, and it’s no coincidence that Taylor’s fan engagement and the frequency of her social posts both increase around the time of a big announcement or new album release. She got to work liking and engaging with her excited followers’ posts, and a number of branded hashtags were also ready to go on Twitter.
The online store was also stocked, with new items cycled in and out as new songs were released. Taylor Swift is a master of employing the marketing tactic of scarcity — bonus songs are available only on physical albums, Target exclusives provide the opportunity to get a unique copy of each album, and fans well know that merch will only be available for a limited time before being replaced with something new.
For some, these kinds of techniques could seem like cash grabs and have the opposite effect to the one intended. But for Taylor, it comes across as added value to her vast fanbase. In short, all of this works because of the place where we started: Taylor Swift knows her audience. Back in 2014, on the release of 1989, she stated:
“I think that what we need to start doing is catering our release plans to our own career, to our own fans, and really get in tune with them. I've been on the internet for hours every single night figuring out what these people want from me. And when it came time to put out an album, I knew exactly what to do.”
In that instance, adding unique polaroids to physical albums was a way to connect with fans, and we have seen this process echoed time and again to this day. At the time of writing, Taylor is busy releasing new recordings of her past albums. And once again, she is exceeding expectations by promoting each one as though it’s brand new. This includes:
The albums also include a number of fresh tracks “From the Vault” including ones that have deep roots in fandom lore. By the time each album is released, you could be forgiven for forgetting that half of it has technically been heard before. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) shot to number one in just about every chart, and smashed a number of records in the process.
<table style="border-collapse: collapse; table-layout: fixed; margin-left: auto
2020 is an unusual year. Nothing can be assumed, and shopping trends are no exception. We at 97th Floor commissioned a study that dove into all of the newest trends in Black Friday and holiday shopping. Our objective: to help marketers prepare for this unusual season. In this post we’ll look more closely at some of the most interesting data points specifically around email, and how they might affect your marketing strategy.
This year, shoppers are getting a head start on their holiday lists. 54% of shoppers say they want to do their holiday shopping by early November to avoid crowds, and 68% of shoppers say they’ll be moving online. As marketers, we need to meet our customers where they are. This year, that means online and early.
Because shoppers want to get their shopping done earlier, you should consider emailing them earlier too. Don’t be afraid to email more consistently during the holiday season; shoppers expect to see more emails this time of year, so it’s a great time to take advantage of that as an opportunity to push your brand’s value and story.
Ultimately, the end goal of any email track is to lead your contacts on a journey. You can use email to tell your story, and to explain your value. Use your email marketing this holiday season to build a story for your products. Like J. Peterman’s famous catalog illustrates (pun intended), the way that you present your products must be more than an explanation: it needs to be a story. Best case scenario, even your presentation will be a kind of art. Don’t underestimate the importance of this. Email is a great way to control the way your product is positioned and presented.
Email marketing is the way you’ll be able to take people with casual interest in your products and turn them into true fans. This holiday season, treat all your email contacts like they are at least mild fans of the product (a safe assumption as they did give you their email) and turn them into mega-fans of your brand.
Our stats say that 81% of shoppers aren’t sure they’d head to brick and mortar locations even if the retailers offered great in-store experiences for the holidays. In fact, 88% of parents even say they won’t let their kids sit on Santa’s lap this year. Yet we know that experience is everything. So this holiday season marketers need to turn their attention to the digital sphere.
Be sure that all of the content you put out this season, including your email, provides an enjoyable experience for the user. This includes your website and landing pages. Take a look at the ease of use on your site — can users easily navigate your site to find what they need?
Get inventive with the way you use email as a part of an experience. Create amazing digital experiences and use email to share the opportunities with your audiences. For example, share social media campaigns your audiences can interact with, like zoom calls with Santa, an interactive about how your business works, or whatever the digital experience is that fits best with your business goals. Consider building out a multi-part, text-based experience for your email marketing, something that your audience will look forward to engaging with on day 1, but also day 3, 5, and 9. A story (see below) is one option, but any content that can be broken up in a linear fashion can be turned into an email experience.
Email is an effective way to spread the word about--and create--the experiences you have going on this holiday season; be sure you make the most of it.
Consider which metrics are most important for you, and then track them diligently. For brands just starting on their email marketing, your open rate might be your top priority. More mature email marketers will probably want to make their top priority either CTR (click through rate) or CToR (click to open rate).
The important thing is that you don’t just launch your emails out into the world like fledgling birds where they will either fly or die. Pay attention to performance, experiment, and continually tweak things to see how it affects outcomes. As an agency, we spend a lot of time measuring performance -- it’s our lifeblood. If we aren’t producing results, we lose your trust and your business. For you, in your business, you can afford nothing less.
The age of impersonal email is long behind us. There are many simple, easy ways to make your email copy individualized for your audiences, and they are common enough that they have become expected best practices, not only from savvy marketers, but the everyday consumer. When getting ready for a large-volume push with many different email tracks, it can be easy to want to cut corners, talk generally, and forget what your audiences really want to see.
Use your list’s first names in the email greetings, and choose the email track you put your contacts in based on their specific interests and issues. This will be a busy season, so everyone is about to get busy inboxes. If you want your emails to stand out, get personal. Put in the extra effort, use the research and data you have on your contacts and put it to good use.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of personalization-for-personalization’s-sake. We don’t personalize just because we can, but because it works. However this comes with a risk, too. If you’re not careful, personalization can come across as smarmy, too familiar without cause. This can turn off customers and lose business. The solution is simple: use personalization as a way to show respect for your customers, to demonstrate that you are thinking of them not as a patsy or a mark, but as a valued individual. Use personalization not to manipulate your audience, but to humanize them. Do it because you truly do value and respect them. It’ll show -- and it will help your bottom line.
If you’re not doing email marketing today, now is a great time to get started. Don’t wait until you have every single piece nailed down, even a moderate effort can be valuable. If you are doing email marketing already, now’s the time to ramp up your efforts and improve your process. Get personal, pay attention to your metrics, make it an experience, and build a story. Yes, it’s hard work, but it’s worth it (and we can help!).
May your holidays be bright with email marketing success.
COVID-19 cancelled a lot of plans in 2020. Teachers. Doctors. CEOs. Politicians. Parents. Children. Travelers. They’ve all had to adapt to The New Normal. With Black Friday approaching, we’ll add retailers to that list.
Most retailers rely on Black Friday doorbusters to make their year profitable, and this year Black Friday is even more important to many retailers as they’ve suffered with shutdowns, lockdowns, and letdowns.
97th Floor has helped hundreds of brands find success during their holiday marketing push, but we’ve never done it in a year as unique as 2020. We wanted to know how shoppers would react to these changing times, so we commissioned an independent research study of 1,000 US shoppers to understand their hopes, fears, and behaviors when it comes to crowded malls, bustling stores, and online shopping this holiday season.
We’ve put together some of the most interesting insights in this article, but all the data can be seen in the PDF download attached to this article.
It’s true that this has been a difficult year for business. However, there are steps that you can take to safeguard your own sales as the holiday season approaches. Our advice? Focus your efforts online. 97th Floor will be releasing a small series of in-depth articles covering these topics deeper.
Sign up for our monthly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss one.
Some SEO tactics take months to see results, but the holiday shopping season is already upon us. So, this year we’d recommend finding that sweet spot between SEO that works for ecommerce sites and the SEO practices that yield results quickly. A few “quick wins” you should look at to increase the readability and user-friendliness of your site are product schema markup, proper rel=canonical for duplicate product pages (for holiday special prices for example), appropriate redirects, claim unlinked brand mentions, strategic internal links, and title tag adjustments.
Many brands can expect an influx of traffic during the next two months, so this could be a good time to roll out some testing in order to capture revenue from as much of that traffic as possible. Small changes can make a big difference on your site — one of our clients saw a 29% increase in revenue in just 18 days, without any increase in traffic at all. Imagine the possibilities as traffic does increase this holiday season. Our advice? Get started testing as quickly as you can. That way, when traffic really starts to peak, you know you’re getting that traffic to the most optimized versions of your pages.
It’s difficult to predict what will happen with ad auctions and CPCs during the holidays, but it’s certain prices will go up. Perhaps more this year than any other year since so many brands are hoping to make up for poor performance in previous quarters. Work to get more traffic right now, so that you can form remarketing campaigns later, which will be cheaper and more effective than cold ads. This might mean getting ads out the door earlier than you may have planned. Additionally, get all of the pixels you can active on your site. Even if you are only running Facebook Ads right now, still include pixels for Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google if appropriate. Doing this will allow you to quickly pilot to new platforms if rising prices caused by holiday influxes on your platform of choice push you out. This will help you keep a steady ROAS.
Keep in mind that people are more likely to try a new product or business during the holidays, so if gaining new customers is a focus for your business, this is your time to shine. Monitor all of your channels closely, as well as CPM and CPC. Become hyper-aware so that you don’t end up paying more than you’d like per ad. Also, build your remarketing pool earlier and be ready to pivot.
Email is a channel that deserves more attention this holiday season. Work on more specific segmentation, increase your email frequency. A greater volume of emails is much more acceptable by most users this time of year, so it’s a great time to show them all the value you can), and be sure to keep it personal. There are little things you can do to add personalization to your emails, such as personalization in both copy and context, that make a big difference to those on the receiving end. Email your contacts based on their interactions with you, as well as the information you already know about them. When the situation is more specific, your emails are more likely to be effective.
There is no doubt that this holiday season will look different than any that has preceded it. Yet, even in 2020, there is still room for success when you plan strategically. Strive to work with the times rather than against them. The data collected in this study can be used to help tell a more accurate story this holiday season. And, taking to heart these suggestions, you can be armed to take this challenge head on — and hopefully see incredible results in the process. We’re going to be dropping more specific articles on our blog throughout this season, so be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss a thing!
Political campaigns are some of the most visible, wide-reaching, and polarizing marketing campaigns. They operate off of enormous budgets with highly condensed timelines, and digital strategy has become an increasing priority as audiences shift online. But even Presidential marketing has its oversights and faux pas.
At 97th Floor, we were curious about how these two campaigns were tackling digital, so we decided to utilize our expertise in performing large-scale audits for both the Biden and Trump 2020 campaigns. We have the best specialists in all of these fields, and we asked our teams to treat these campaigns just as they would a client, auditing every inch that they could.
After pulling thousands of digital ads, reviewing millions of dollars in ad spend, pouring over scores of website pages, reading hundreds of emails, and scouring mobile apps and social media accounts, we found hoards of fascinating insights. It’s a drama-- massive oversights, well-timed reactions, wasted dollars-- but I’ll step aside and let the data tell the story.
After combing through both audits we cherry-picked and pulled the most engrossing snippets into the final version on GetThatVote.com. Read ahead here to see just a few of those highlights.
On a grand scale, the Trump campaign acts as one might expect: big budgets, pushy messaging, and dated tactics. But, while wasted budget is never a pro, the Trump campaign seems to understand its core audience. The campaign’s focus and budget, as well as messaging, are highly targeted to dyed in the wool, red “Patriots.” Team Trump’s digital tactics mirror that of the entire campaign — braggadocious — largely catering to those who are already his fans. Additionally, the Trump campaign presses much harder for donations, which could be one explanation for its ability to outspend the Biden campaign at every turn.
In contrast, Biden’s team hones in on the fringes and the undecided — those who have been historically election-determining, an obvious audience for this (and every) election. This showcases itself in a strong focus on swing states with budget, and a somewhat-humble focus on “togetherness” and “unity” in messaging. The Biden campaign also pushes for a professionalism and issue-based copy that Trump has largely overlooked. A little surprising is the consistently smaller budget from the Biden side, however it’s possible that Team Biden is holding back to increase spending when it matters most, that last month.
Overall, each site caters to the strengths of its candidate. The Biden site emphasizes unity in diversity, with photos of Biden with others rather than alone, and copy that includes words like “together.” Trump’s site leans into the fame of Trump himself. Mentions of specific goals or stances are overtaken by Trump-focused photos and messaging.
As far as general user experience and intuitive flow, Trump’s site takes the cake. Biden’s site overlooks clear messaging in conveying how to volunteer or get involved, and funneling every user into a narrow set of options. The Trump site uses very clear “get involved” messaging in their header, and gives various actions a user could take in order to show support for the campaign. Additionally, Biden’s website feels busy, and lacks an easily navigable hierarchical structure. Trump’s site is well structured, pushing users to either shop or donate.
We also couldn’t help ourselves in looking at the 404 pages. Both perfectly represent their target audience: Biden’s responsible mask-wearers, and Trump’s anti-Bidens.
Neither campaign is leaning into search advertising heavily, with text-based search ads accounting for 11.48% and 10.09% of the Biden and Trump campaign’s Google Ad’s budgets respectively. They both make good use of the video elements of Google’s platforms, which may be based on the fact that video is a more immersive experience for the viewer, however it is unusual to see so little budget devoted to image ads given their ability for cheap, but effective remarketing.
The biggest misstep? The Trump campaign paid for the keyword “how to impeach trump.” One might think that this strategy is fascinating, and indeed it could have been, if paired with the right landing page. But when you look at other terms that received significant clicks, you’ll also find terms like, “speedo swim trunks,” “men’s xxl swim trunks,” “trump is a disaster,” and “trump fraud.” The Trump team was apparently not looking at their own search terms report. This oversight is easily fixable by adding negative search terms to their strategy.
Another key difference in strategy is that Biden’s team is using search to prioritize issues, while Trump’s team is here to sell hats (and other merch). Overall, team Biden is performing better in the Google Ads game. However, this is largely due to the fact that they’ve made fewer obvious blunders rather than their own strength on the platform.
I wasn’t impressed by the Trump campaign’s email strategy. The subject lines are flashy, even misleading, resorting to bait and switch tactics. Trump’s email team is pushing hard for donations. Ironically, however, the Trump campaign falters big time when it neglects to add emails entered into the footer of the website into any sort of followup email funnel.
With an average of 2.7 emails sent per day, one has to wonder about unsubscribe rates on the Trump campaign’s emails. The intended strategy may be to hit the audience hard to get recurring donations before they unsubscribe due to email fatigue.
The Biden campaign, on the other hand, seems to want to turn subscribers into advocates, only occasionally asking for donations. His campaign sends significantly fewer emails than Trump’s, with an average of one email every other day. The Biden campaign keeps the issues of their campaign central, and their subject lines helpful and professional. Overall, Biden’s email strategy has a clear advantage over Trump’s in its use of best practices.
Both candidates are running predictable and moderate social media campaigns. Biden is more active on Instagram than Trump, but it’s still surprising that neither candidate makes greater use of Instagram, considering the app’s large demographic of young, often swing voters.
The campaigns’ followers describe themselves in predictable ways: “she/her,” “feminist,” “activist,” and “liberal” for Biden and “KAG,” “patriot,” “conservative,” and “retired” for Trump. However, with only 1.3% of crossover between followers of these accounts, users are essentially tweeting into a political echochamber. It’s also interesting to note that in an analysis of how Biden and Trump advocates speak on social media found that Trump site visitors are twice as likely to talk about the opposing party compared to Biden site visitors.
The most creative social media push from either the campaigns is the Biden campaign’s podcast. This is new territory for presidential campaigns, and while its success has been mostly negligible (it seems Biden supporters are more likely to engage on other channels) it was a creative effort.
The Trump campaign uses divisive ads, intending to both sow distrust in leaders of the democratic party, and raising funds. These ads often include asking users to take a one-sided survey with titles such as: “Official Democrat Corruption Accountability Survey.” These tactics might be duplicitous, but we’d also give them some credit for stepping outside of the box. Both candidates ask for donations, just with a different focus. It seems likely that Trump is receiving more funds from his tactics, but Biden is likely creating more “ownership” from those who do support him by focusing on specific issues and local state battles.
Both campaigns run well-timed ad campaigns with a focus on state-driven ads, a smart strategy for their specific aims. The Trump team consistently spends more but the Biden team places a greater priority on swing states. The Biden campaign spends more in three of the five top contested states, while Florida gets the most attention from both budgets. And, while the Trump team consistently spends more, the Biden team is moving fast, increasing their spending quickly over the past three months.
Many know that SEO is renowned for its lengthy timeline to see results. So, with a fast-paced campaign like the presidential elections, SEO is, and really should be, a lower priority. However, both campaigns are making some pretty simple SEO mistakes that could be avoided with a simple two-hour audit. And, no matter the priority, easy fixes like that are always worth it.
Currently, the Trump team leads in gross organic searches. This is likely due to the fact that their top keyword “trump” has a 10X lead on the Biden team’s “joe biden.” However, the Biden site has the barebones of a non-branded strategy, with pages for terms like “gun safety” and “immigration.” They also make fewer elementary mistakes (homepage errors, missing H1 and H2 tags, the absence of canonical links, poor meta descriptions). While the Trump site carries more weight at the moment, if the campaign were to run for years rather than months, we’d put our money on the Biden site faring better over time.
A candidate’s logo is the centerpiece of the entire campaign. It reflects the values and strengths of a candidate. Logo design goes to Biden for its ability to be transferred to different colors and backgrounds, but Trump makes better use of logo variations for different subgroups. Their campaign colors match their demographic targets. The Biden team chose a bright navy and candy apple red, imbuing a lively, youthful energy, while the Trump team opts for a dark, rich navy and deep, crimson red to suggest seriousness, and an established foundation.
Looking to the campaign sites as a whole, the Trump site is more intuitively designed. Biden focuses on the human element, with copy like “chip in” and a casual, friendly lifestyle video. Trump’s site makes use of a full-screen design, maximizing on-page real estate and making mobile transition easier.
On the Biden site, the navigation is less intuitive, with a nearly overlapping “menu” title. Trump’s site navigation is more intuitive, and the white text allows for a nice eye flow. However, sometimes the white text runs into readability issues when photographs aren’t dark enough to create proper contrast.
The Trump app is a conversion machine, while the Biden app feels like a bit of an afterthought. Trump’s app holds the hand of the user throughout the entire app experience, with easy navigation, clear calls to action, and incentives for those who donate. Biden uses his app to share his vision, conveying a sense of togetherness and altruicity.
While not an essential part of a campaign, superfans will certainly download and use the campaign apps, so it’s definitely not an avenue to ignore. Both apps could definitely use some attention, but overall, the Trump app makes better use of the unique app format by giving benefits that are only available in the app.
Commercial strategy might be the greatest failing in the Trump team’s digital campaign. Their strategy is largely national, with little attention to specific state markets, including swing states. For example Florida, the state that has the most money going into it from both candidate’s Facebook and Google Ads, is being completely ignored by the Trump campaign. This is hardly strategic, seems more like an oversight.
Visual storytelling is a universal mode of communication that has been in use since the beginning of time. And, through the ages of cave art to silent movies, it has shown itself to be one of the most effective ways of catching not only human attention.
It’s no different in this day and age. From the humble blog article to the Times Square billboard, visual elements tell the story as importantly as copy. No marketing campaign is complete without striking visual elements, and more than likely, that’s what your potential customers will remember.
We’ve compiled 7 storytelling strategies to help elevate your brand:
It takes the average person just 50 milliseconds to form an opinion about a webpage, and 2.6 seconds for their eyes to settle on the most impactful spot. That’s not a lot of time for your brand to make a good impression.
You need to capture people’s attention quickly and slow their scroll down. Even the most avid readers skim webpages. And as people scroll, words get blurred together, losing their impact. If there is no imagery in your storytelling, it’s likely your readers will bounce from your page quickly.
Picture this: a web page advocating a new weight loss method that only includes text, OR a similar ad that includes a striking before-and-after image. Which one are you more likely to stop and look at?
When time is money, getting users to take time out of their day to stop and look at what you have to offer is essential to driving revenue.
Most people remember what they see far better than what they hear. According to some studies, there can be up to a 65% increase in retention if the information is obtained visually. And the best part: images require zero work for the user. Sifting through text is hard, but taking in imagery? That’s fun.
We cling to images in storytelling because they allow us to interpret the information for ourselves, rather than being told how to interpret it. Good images don’t require an explanation. Instead, they tell personal and applicable stories without using words.
Nike’s home page is a great example of this storytelling strategy. Their first fold is an eye-catching video, and their second fold looks like this:
They tell the story of each sport with both text and images, but, as you can see, the text is a very small portion of the story. The majority of the page is taken up by action imagery showing users what playing each sport looks like. And, it looks cool. Can’t you see yourself gearing up for football or playing soccer with the best of them? Most importantly, you could find exactly what you needed from this page without any text at all. And that’s how it should be.
You’ve probably put together an IKEA dresser without reading any of the written instructions. If the visual queues are clear and walk you through the process with baby steps, image-only instructions can be just as effective and a lot less stressful.
Think of the signs that we use in driving. A few have text, but the majority use color, shape, and image to portray their instructions. Similarly, it’s not uncommon to see images in the business world that give customers instructions using no text at all.
How much more enticing is this video on making cheesy potatoes rather than reading a blog post on how to do it? It’s approachable, entertaining, and makes it look easy. Visual instruction is on the rise.
While I wouldn’t recommend doing away with text entirely, I would encourage you to think about how using visuals more strategically could positively change your marketing efforts. Images have the power to instruct your users, which means you have the power to influence what actions they take next.
Take a look at this example from Upright Pose:
This image tells a story, and gives an obvious next step: you’ve been slouching a lot lately, you’re worried about your health, and the solution is to buy Upright Pose. Textual calls to action are important, but they’re also pretty obvious. Imagine the ability to influence a user’s next step without them even realizing they are responding to a call — well-planned and properly placed images have that potential.
Pretend you’re watching a video ad. The camera follows a man getting ready for the day in an average-looking home. Suddenly, he notices a brown paper lunch bag on the kitchen counter. He snatches it up and rushes outside to hand it to a little boy waving goodbye on his way to the bus stop.
Did you need a narrator to tell you that the man is in his own home? That the little is boy his son? Of course not. You followed the context of the story just fine. In fact, having that information spoken would seem silly because it’s so unnecessary.
Take advantage of the human ability to read context in a story. Don’t waste time spelling out information you could give your audience through your images. They’ll pick up the information faster and with more ease, leaving them with a better idea of what you have to offer them, and more energy to move closer towards conversion.
Take a look at this ad from Nikon:
They didn’t need words to let you know that, surrounded by mountains and wilderness, you might find a use for binoculars. Wouldn’t you still feel drawn to the binoculars and the adventure they promise without any words? That’s how the best images use context. They tell an entire story simply through what you see.
Humans are the center of our universe. When we see images, we want to be able to place ourselves within them. We want to know how what you are offering will help us do better or feel better.
So, it’s smart to focus on people when you plan your visual storytelling strategy. Whether that means you show people in your marketing, or whether the implication is implied, the focus needs to be on the humans in the story, not the product.
Look at this visual from Outdoor Voices:
Yes, Outdoor Voices’ products are showcased, but the focus is not on the people. They tell the story of how the product is used and how it makes human lives better. It is the people in the image that make the product notable, not the other way around.
Like we’ve talked about already, the best images tell stories, and the basis of any good story is conflict. So don’t shy away from it! When you can use an image to show potential customers the conflict that your product or service will solve — and not just the conflict, but the solution itself — that is a golden storytelling technique..
Take a look at this advertisement from Home Depot:
In the image, we see a common pain point that Home Depot’s business solves. The messy porch, the leaves on the cement, and the bucket that shares the solution: Home Depot can help you clean up this mess.
People understand conflict, and they crave solutions. Your images can bring out an emotional response from your potential customers that it would take pages of text to convey. Images can speak volumes in a story, so let your images share your conflicts and solutions.
You probably have different colors and styles that you like or don’t like, ones that make you feel good and others that drive you crazy. But designing images for your brand’s story goes beyond preference. Good design can make or break your website, your advertisements, and eventually hurt your revenue numbers.
It’s time to start thinking less like an artist and more like a designer. Artists make things that are beautiful, while designers have a purpose behind their products. Every color or pattern is there for a specific reason. Visually pleasing arrangements (put in place for a specific purpose) are more likely to put your potential customers at ease, tell them your story, assure them of your professionalism, and sell.
Take a look at these two cartons of chocolate milk:
One is a generic brand, the other is a Fairlife product. Fairlife understands that even if they want customers to believe their product is top-notch, their product’s design had better tell that story. The generic brand doesn’t look the part of an elegant, high-end chocolate milk. But it’s not trying to be something it’s not — it’s a generic brand for a reason. So while it may not look “pretty,” its design is telling its own story: run-of-the-mill chocolate milk is 20-40% cheaper and tastes just fine.
Here is another example, this time with websites:
These are both homepages of interior design companies. While both do great work in reality, Amber Interior’s website design intentionally shows users the quality of work they are able to do.
As you can see, the visual storytelling strategies and design of a website or brand truly have the potential to make or break your opinion of them.
It only takes a minute to look at your brand’s visuals with these tips in mind. Evaluate where your brand is succeeding, and where there might be room to improve. Then put a plan in place to optimize your visuals and bring your brand’s game to the next level — increasing your revenue and sales. Remember: a picture is worth a thousand words, so make sure your pictures are saying the right words.
Strong storytelling strategies make your brand stand out and stay memorable. By blending visuals, context, and emotion, you can create stories that connect deeply with your audience and drive measurable results. If you’re ready to elevate your brand through effective storytelling strategies, the team at 97th Floor is here to help.
See how an audience-first approach translates to bottom-line results.
It’s a situation many marketers are familiar with: a great product in a stagnant market. A brand deserving more recognition, fighting for a slice of market share.
This story was certainly relatable for eFileCabinet. But with big marketing goals and a team open to creative solutions, they were ready to implement a strategy that would cement their foothold in the market.
After implementing a multi-pronged campaign — holistic SEO, advertising, content, and email marketing, all wrapped around a creative and expertly executed conference — they were not just seeing results, they were seeing stars.
eFileCabinet makes the champion of document management software. They aim to take the pain out of complex filing and digitizing processes.
While their product was ahead of the curve, they woke up one day to find smaller competitors coming to steal their market share. eFileCabinet needed digital marketing expertise, they needed new approaches, and they needed a team that could ramp up and execute quickly. They found it all with their partnership with 97th Floor.
Our efforts culminated in a campaign so exciting that it not only won multiple awards (and the attention of the press), but also brought in the largest influx of leads eFileCabinet had ever seen.
While it’s fun to smash a few printers, the excitement and attention of a campaign fades, and without the foundation of a well-oiled lead machine, the true potential of that campaign won’t be realized.
In this article I’m covering the ins and outs of this campaign, but if you want to jump to a specific section, go for it!
If you’ve read any similar articles on our blog, highlighting real life marketing wins, you know the first step is typically customer research with the intent to create buyer personas. Audience insights, usually housed in buyer personas, are a critical element necessary before engaging in any campaign. But many marketers (even savvy marketers) underestimate the power of persona creation. Personas are especially crucial when working with an agency. Armed with the insight that only comes via detailed personas you can begin to create marvelous work.
eFileCabinet’s software could serve nearly any business (we all need to organize documents, don’t we?) but when we identified specific audiences that would benefit the most immediately, we were able to refine our customer personas to the most important ones.
The first step in creating personas is always basic market research. eFileCabinet already knew that many of their best customers worked jobs that needed constant document organization. We narrowed down the four most common fields to: HR, accountancy, insurance, and legal.
With four focus audiences in place, we took it one step further, delving deeper into what made these people tick. What were the biggest pain points they encountered in their jobs? Why would they come looking for eFileCabinet?
eFileCabinet introduced their team at 97th Floor to a handful of customers, thus giving us a direct line of communication with our target audience. These in-depth interviews helped shape the final touches on our persona development. Not to mention these interviews made for exceptional case studies down the line.
During the persona discovery process, it became clear to eFileCabinet as well as 97th Floor that our four audiences were not solely document filing drones, but people.
So, instead of marketing to people that live to digitize documents, eFileCabinet changed their strategy to market to humans.
We did a 38-point technical audit and discovered a number of things that were dragging down our rankings. The site was fine, but we were able to clean it up and really make it shine. After all, technical SEO really does lay a foundation for holistic SEO strategy. With a site humming along from a search engine perspective, SEOs could turn their attention to rankings.
Keyword research is an important piece of any SEO campaign, but without personas, keyword research will always be a weak final product. The personas guided the SEOs at 97th Floor in running the keyword research and keyword selection process. We had four different personas, which called for four specific rounds of keyword research. The strategy was to capture these audiences through awareness- and consideration-level keywords specific to their industries.
A collection of product- and market-focused keywords were selected to spearhead the campaign. Originally, eFileCabinet only ranked for about 10,000 keywords, but today they double that, and which contributes to nearly double increase in month over month organic traffic.
Today eFileCabinet ranks for a host of relative market keywords in varying stages of the buyer’s journey, from “going paperless,” to “office management systems,” to “wet signature,” to, “document manager,” to, “hr document filing.” Today, eFileCabinet has effectively transformed into an entirely new SEO force to be reckoned with, picking up 281% more organic leads than the previous year.
Digital advertising can capture an entirely different set of prospects than organic SEO. With our personas in mind, we created a segmented series of campaigns spanning across three platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ads.
Facebook Ads’ detailed demographic targeting gave us the freedom to launch ads that reached a wide but tailored audience. We created targeted ads to those who act like past purchasers, which attracted a new audience of people who behaved like our existing audience. Or in other words, they actually followed through on our CTAs. Facebook is also where we focused retargeting efforts, reminding those who had visited eFileCabinet before what they had left behind.
LinkedIn was instrumental in pinpointing audiences based on job position and industry, which was absolutely critical for our advertising campaign. This allowed us to pinpoint exactly who we wanted to market to, and align that with our constructed personas. Because the targeting was so precise, we were able to build unique ads, copy, landing pages, and lead magnets that were directly tied to any one of our audiences. For example, accountants would see ads about accounting document filing software, while legal assistants would see ads about legal document filing software.
Google Ads allowed us to market to an intent-based audience via keyword targeting. This let us reach people at their stage in the journey, including those with serious intent to buy. Google Ads also worked hand in hand with the SEO strategy. Together with eFileCabinet, we found high-converting keywords, we took that info to our SEO team members and — bringing in the benefits of paid through organic — saving a lot of money in the process.
Testing multiple ad variants was essential in ensuring the different campaigns were attracting the right audiences, and pivoting the ad copy if they were not. In total, hundreds of ad campaigns, with thousands of ad variants were created across the three platforms.
These campaigns brought extraordinary results. We had over 400 MQLs, increased conversion rates on Google Ads by 131% (.54% → 1.25%), with click through rates almost tripling (1.35% → 3.97%). All by simply focusing on the real people behind the job titles, rather than just the jobs themselves.
The secret to great email marketing is a good workflow and customer-centric logic in place. Again, it’s about the people. Email automation platforms, by themselves, lack logic and intelligence. It takes an experienced hand to turn a list of subscribers into leads, leads into customers, and, if you’re lucky, customers into raving fans. The first step, then, is to take full advantage of the email platform and create strategic workflows for each customer persona at each stage of the buyer journey.
Because eFileCabinet’s platform audit uncovered a series of misfiring workflows, overlapping data points, and repetitive offers, the first step in their email marketing strategy was to restructure the entire setup, including campaigns and workflows for each audience.
By creating a dedicated lead nurture experience that hinged on the user’s industry and stage in the customer journey, eFileCabinet could best meet the needs of their users within this channel.
Here’s the thing, everyone talks about the funnel as if it were actually a funnel. Even we are guilty of it. But today’s customers are so savvy that they don’t often progress down the funnel in the direct, linear fashion we want. So having built-in logic to your email campaigns that intelligently delivers what they want (which may not be the next step in the funnel) is imperative to properly nurturing a large and growing list. That’s what we accomplished with eFileCabinet.
I can be honest here, right? Document management software isn’t the most exciting industry in the world. Because of this fact, content needed to be fresh, unique, insightful, and just maybe, a little exciting too.
With the traditional content channels, our efforts encompassed a broad range including ad copy, articles, ebooks, case studies, and email copy. We created four different content campaigns, each pertaining to one of our buyer personas.
The following assets were produced to support the content journey of each of these campaigns:
Sounds like a lot right? It is. That’s the point. Shortcuts in content marketing don't exist. There is only efficiency and experience and, eventually, expertise.
These assets, executed well, and delivered at the right time have created a near-flawless content flywheel, which contributes to perfect adherence to lead nurture goals quarter after quarter.
Squeaky clean SEO, targeted PPC, segmented emails, and persona-driven content left eFileCabinet well on their way to becoming the leading figure in the industry. This would be the time when most brands would queue the fist pumps and pop open the champagne bottles to celebrate.
But eFileCabinet was only getting started. Now was time for the fun stuff.
Everything was humming along nicely digitally, but eFileCabinet had a long-time challenge they wanted to tackle next: Trade shows. Quite a different world than the digital marketing landscape they’d just conquered.
Trade show sponsorships had been lackluster in the past, but they believed there was opportunity still on the table. Together, we dreamed up many ways to get more out of upcoming trade shows. We did countless brainstorming sessions and built decks describing options. It was a battle royale of creativity. When the smoke cleared, one idea stood out as the clear winner: the Rage Cage.
One of the not-so-secret secrets to successful marketing is knowing your audience. Arguably the best way to do this is to create buyer personas.
When we onboard new clients at 97th Floor we always ask for their existing personas, and they often shrug their shoulders and rifle aimlessly through some papers. “I think we had some made about a year or two ago,” they say. But in this age of smart digital marketing, that just won’t fly. The world needs more personas-- and better personas. We at 97th Floor have the expertise, and we’re here to make the internet a better place. So we put this guide together to help you build personas for your business that will bring in consumer insights that will elevate all of your marketing efforts and increase your revenue.
Having a good buyer persona is like having your ideal customer sit next to you while you planned their content campaign. They could remind you of what’s going on in their lives and how that might affect their connection with your ads, blog posts, social media efforts, and emails.
A buyer persona is a fictional depiction of an ideal, individual customer. Creating and applying a buyer persona helps marketers craft campaigns that feel more true and have more impact. A good buyer persona can turbocharge the understanding of your customers, leading to more traffic, higher conversions, and eventually, bigger revenue figures. Who doesn’t want that? So here’s how to make it happen.
The ingredients are simple, and the process is not rocket science. Like baking bread, you already own most ingredients—flour, water, yeast, salt—and the things you don’t already have in your cupboard are easily accessible.
Begin with a little market research. What data do you already have about your customers? What are their current job titles, responsibilities, interests? If you can, use a tool like SparkToro to find out more about what your customers care about. Ask: why would they benefit from your brand? What are their pain points and how does your offer solve them? The more research you can do, the better.
Then add a little speculation. If your persona loves running, you can assume they’ll care about running form or proper running shoes. If they’re a busy mom, you can assume they’re looking for ways to relax and save time. Some assumptions are okay, and even needed, but be sure you don’t get off track.
Once you flesh out your customer with a few assumptions, mix your research and speculation together with a knowledge of the user journey for your product or service. For instance, how do they come in contact with your brand? Will they be eager to buy or will they need a little persuasion? What appeals to them on your site?
Finally, sprinkle a little creativity on top. This is the fun part: make it a story. Be as specific as you possibly can. What is their name? What do they look like? How does an average day in their life flow? Don’t be shy, write it out. Use your imagination. The end result should be fun, spunky, realistic, and easy to remember.
In baking bread, you simply put the dough in an oven. For personas, however, you need something much more rare: objectivity. A good persona requires you to set aside what you think you know about your customers and to see what the data tells you. This is very, very difficult for most businesses, which is why it makes sense to ask someone else to do it for you. When it comes to paying someone to create a customer persona for you, the greater the objectivity, the more you will pay. Spend less, and you will have a few assumptions mixed in with your objective assessments.
However, assumptions, especially when used in the less-critical and less-controversial parts of the buyer persona, are likely a good trade off for many businesses. Not everyone needs to spend $50,000 to get something truly useful.
The personas that we build for our clients at 97th Floor are a mix of strategic assumption and objective research. We are intentional in our approach choosing where we can assume and where to use data. It might not be the right approach for every business, but it’s appropriate for most businesses most of the time.
There are three major parts to buyer personas:
As you might presume, demographic information tells us the external details about the persona. This describes the age, gender, racial identity, socio-economic details, family status, occupation, and such. We glean it from a number of sources: existing customer profiles, analytics data, competitive analyses, etc. We use whatever we can get our hands on.
When we build our personas we use a balance of assumption and evidence. Our stance is that in this area, the information that we infer is good enough for the purpose and the potential mistakes are low-impact ones. But don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t go wild with assumptions here.
There isn’t much value in knowing that your average age customer is 37 rather than 39 or 40. But there is a significant difference in an average age of 30 instead of 45. Be careful that you have enough evidence for the correct ballpark. But don’t waste resources digging into teeny specifics if they aren’t likely to be impactful.
Remember that a buyer persona is different from a target audience. This is not a broad composite, but a fictionalized specific individual. There is value in having a target audience in mind--in knowing a range that describes the whole of your customers--but the value of a buyer persona is to clearly envision one perfect client.
The demographic information describes the external details of the individual, while the psychographic information describes her internal life. We want to know what she likes and dislikes, what makes her excited or nervous, what she reads and who she follows. This is the information that a savvy marketer will prize.
We obtain this through research into tens of thousands of individuals’ web habits. With this information, we can better predict the specific behaviors and biases of a likely customer, but also general principles that describe a lot of people. There are tools out there that will help you to accomplish this task with some confidence--just don’t forget the critical role of objectivity here. We’ve seen clients with personas that only really describe the client themselves. It’s an awkward conversation, “Since you’re just launching Bob’s Widgets, is it realistic that your persona is already a member of the Bob’s Widgets Fan Club?”
When you get the psychographic profile right, it’s almost magic. For example, our research might uncover that people who like your brand also are fans of the Chicago Bulls or the Los Angeles Dodgers. It is probably too specific to know which particular team that they root for, but it is useful to know that your audience are sports fans (as opposed to, say, fans of quilting or politics or tattoos).
Many clients we onboard don’t have personas (or have only target audience information). Others have spent tens of thousands of dollars from specialists to get personas built. These expensive ones are often very slick, visually stunning, but a little impractical. While there is a lot of good stuff in these large personas, the mental strain to use them—and to tell what is most important—is too much. So we developed a convenient method that uses our inherent human neurological strengths to make it memorable.
We tell a story.
Maybe our stories aren’t on par with Shakespeare, but we are not doing this to scratch a creative itch. We are doing this because as humans we remember stories. We also remember songs, but that seemed like a little too much. So we’ve chosen to always tell a story about our persona.
There is no new information in the story. All the data we use for the story is already covered in the demographic and psychographic sections. But when we craft it into a couple of clear, easy-to-read paragraphs to describe the character succinctly, suddenly she is easier to understand and easier to remember. Because of that memorable image, it is easier to keep clearly in mind, and thus easier to create campaigns just for her.
Critically, when we tell a story we have more of the facts in easily accessible memory. Without personas, marketers will create campaigns crafted for one or two of the most obvious customer characteristics, and they generally fall pretty flat. They’re not much better than target audience descriptions. But a good story to anchor our memory allows us to retain a fuller picture of the individual. In turn, our campaigns therefore have more depth, fullness, and richness.They are, simply, more effective campaigns.
Perhaps an illustration would be useful here. Below is a story from a buyer persona that 97th Floor made for a fitness company with unique offering for choosing your goal weight:
Sharon just had her 45th birthday and it wasn’t the happiest day. She felt like everyone there was staring at her thinking of how much weight she’d gained since her second baby was born ten years ago.
She tried to diet and exercise, but her goal seemed so distant. Plus, was it even realistic for her to lose 50 pounds when she barely had time to pee alone before one of her hungry kids found her? She wanted more direction, maybe from a personal trainer or dietician, about what her goal weight should be. But they were so expensive.
She’d tried doing her own research about her BMI and ideal weight. But those gave her wide ranges or goal weights that seemed impossible.
Do you see how this little clip from Sharon’s life makes her a tangible woman? We feel her discomfort at the party. We understand why she is the perfect customer for this fitness company. We even get excited to find marketing strategies that will help Sharon find our client’s company and feel empowered on her next birthday.
Personas that hang around in a company’s back pocket unused aren’t doing anyone any good. A successful buyer persona is one that gets frequently referenced and utilized. The team has read it, talked about it, and knows it. They know that fictionalized individual as well as they know each other. She feels real to them.
Not only should these personas feel real to your team. You should lean on them during planning and writing content. For instance, as you're sitting down to plan out Q2’s content, turn to your personas. Mention, “Taylor (your persona) has young children. During Q2 those children will start summer break. How might that affect the kind of content she wants to access during that time? How might it affect how much time she has to engage?” Use the persona’s name. There’s power in shared vocabulary. Of course “Taylor” won't mean much to those outside this team, but your marketing team should be using your persona’s names. Use the personas to tap into the daily life of your content consumers, and they will feel a more realistic connection to your company.
All of this work might seem like the buyer persona is creating extra work: compressing data into a single point, and then it has to be expanded again when doing the actual marketing. The magic of the buyer persona is that it enables, and even encourages, the marketer to work at an individual level but to have that function at a broad scope. The compress-decompress that the buyer persona facilitates will hone the edge of the campaign. In practice, if it’s done right, it can feel like a superpower.
We create personas for clients as a service, or we upgrade existing ones, but personas are only the launching pad into the deep pool of consumer-facing work. Here are a few examples of great client work powered by a marketing team that understands its audience using the processes we describe above.
eFileCabinet came to us with a goal of increasing their brand visibility. In a fairly stagnant industry, their cutting-edge technology had a hard time gaining the excitement it deserved. Our team came together to define who eFileCabinet’s customers were. Like most businesses, they required multiple personas, but one particularly useful buyer persona portrayed an accountant who was frustrated with endless paper filing and tedious office chores.
Sure, this persona is an accountant, but he was far from boring.
We looked closely at what human emotions and pain points he faced, as well as ways he might enjoy letting off steam. The answer: taking a hammer to the often-frustrating office equipment he sits in front of every day. Enter: the Rage Cage.
So they could live the Office Space dream, our team crafted an experience for an accounting conference that would give them what they really wanted — the chance to smash old office equipment. Then we connected with these individuals to introduce them to the benefits of eFileCabinet’s problem-solving, headache-reducing software. This became an award-winning campaign that brought eFileCabinet the highest influx of MQLs in a single month and 100+ closed deals. None of this would have been possible without concrete, memorable, human buyer personas.
One 97th Floor client, a data service company called Qubole, was facing a long sales cycle that they were eager to tighten. We knew that buyer personas would undoubtedly help Qubole target the most promising potential customers. So we took a closer look at Qubole’s ideal buyers and got to work.
We created a persona who was a data scientist at a growing tech business that needed to scale quickly. We got to know his pain points with bringing on a data company—including security and IT complications. Knowing this information we created a hyper-focused content strategy that was built with him in mind.
With the help of this persona sitting in the driver’s seat of our newly targeted content strategy, Qubole’s traffic and conversions skyrocketed. In fact, 97th Floor's strategy led to a 600% increase in organic traffic and a 300% increase in qualified organic leads. In addition to chopping their buyer’s cycle from 240 days to only 90 days.
As with most NBA teams, the Utah Jazz found themselves struggling to sell their summer season ticket. They came to us with a desire to increase their summer ticket sales and maybe, just maybe, they’d be able to do something never done before: sell out the entire lower bowl for the summer season. As always, we began with the audience and personas.
Because we are from Utah, we knew what a typical Utah Jazz fan looks like, and so we had a good understanding of the audience to begin with. The final version of our persona consisted partially of what we knew from the standard Jazz fan and was merged with the data we had collected about folks who buy low-cost items (like summer season tickets) via Facebook Ads. Once we had our more specific persona, building the campaigns in Facebook Ads came very naturally.
First, we fanned out our ads’ reach to a wide audience of Jazz fans on Facebook. Then, we conducted tests to see which ads were the most effective at increasing sales (this information even informed our personas to make them better for the next round). We found that segmentation, even to a non-Utah Jazz audience, and sales-focused ad copy brought in a positive ROAS, a great achievement for the low budget of their summer season marketing. Our knowledge of the buyer personas of these summer customers gave the Utah Jazz an increase in ticket sales by over 300% MoM.
As these examples show, personas are not reserved for folks in content marketing roles. Entire teams from SEOs to paid media specialists to well, everyone, should be well versed in your buyer personas because a good persona will have insights that influence every decision from every member of a marketing team.
Too often marketers rely on instinct to create content. As a result, content is less engaging and we have to produce more of it to make up for that lack of performance. In this clip from the 2019 ContentTECH Summit, Paxton Gray - VP of Operations at 97th Floor - shares how marketers can access hidden treasure troves of data, which will help them to create content their audience will love.
it can be hard to be aware of the human side of the business while also making sure we’re focused on the business side. when people are the happiest and feeling fulfilled and accomplished in their role, it benefits the whole company.
Welcome to the the 97th Floor Mastermind Interview Series where each week we sit down with one of the makers, thought leaders, and visionaries behind the biggest and/or up-and-coming brands around. We talk about everything from business and marketplace insights to personal journeys and successes, to failures and legacy.
In this episode we’re talking to Miranda Barnard, Vice President of Marketing at Vivint Solar, about the marketing value of understanding your audience, creating sharable messaging, recognizing and employing trends, and more. Using personal experiences and insights, Miranda dials in on what it means to provide a great customer experience, how that focus is changing the world of business, and how leadership in business is adapting.
0:10 About Miranda
2:37 Storytelling
4:28 Communicating with authenticity
7:09 Career changes
8:36 About Vivint Solar
14:15 Onboarding
18:11 Leadership style
19:33 Letting people go
23:09 Creating vs recycling content
25:30 What keeps you up at night
26:30 Handling conflict
29:02 Miranda’s legacy
Learn more about Vivint Solar
Connect with 97th Floor on YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn
Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and get notifications - we’ll drop a new episode every week.
 |
 |
 |
one of the best things we've done at chatbooks is to create a clear set of values; we promote, reward and cut based on these values.
Welcome to the the 97th Floor Mastermind Interview Series where each week we sit down with one of the makers, thought leaders and visionaries behind the biggest and/or up-and-coming brands around. We talk about everything from business and marketplace insights to personal journeys, successes, failures and legacy.
In this episode we’re talking to Chatbooks Chief Marketing Officer, Rachel Hofstetter. Rachel joined Chatbooks in November 2015 and played a pivotal role in creating the video The Real Mom, which has since amassed more than 100 million views. Rachel did this while also overseeing the overall brand that is turning instagram photos into instant coffee table artwork. Prior to Chatbooks, Rachel worked at “O” the Oprah Magazine, Reader’s Digest, wrote a best-selling book Cooking Up a Business and founded a company called guesterly. Her insights in this interview on everything from just getting started on a project or life goal, to failing, to defining your teams’ north star are spectacularly clear and spot on. Let’s jump in!
0:35 An editor, best-selling author and entrepreneur—Rachel Hofstetter's start and journey to Chatbooks.
3:37 Validating an idea, starting a company and getting noticed by Glamour, Real Simple and Procter & Gamble.
6:39 Storytelling and entrepreneurship.
7:14 Chatbooks launch and the story behind the simple idea and brand.
10:58 The process (and myth) behind creating a viral video; collaborating with the Harmon Brothers.
14:58 Creating a clear vision and three objectives of a CMO.
17:27 How to grow an all-star team and defining the 5-points of the Chatbooks north star.
22:55 The remedy to fear of failure.
29:00 Rachel's guiding principle to always improving and growing.
31:37 The art of essentialism and getting the right things done.
33:27 Saying "no" without saying no.
what I give doesn't have to necessarily be what you asked for and it can still be beneficial to you.
36:24 Legacy; what Rachel wants to be remembered for.
39:04 Advice to those figuring out what they want to have, be, do next.
Learn more about Chatbooks | guesterly
Chatbooks "The Real Mom" video
Rachel's book Cooking Up a Business: Lessons from Food Lovers Who Turned Their Passion into a Career -- and How You Can, Too
Connect with 97th Floor on YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn
What’d you think of the episode? The conversation continues in the comments below. Be sure to leave your insights.
If you liked this episode, subscribe to our YouTube channel and get notifications - we’ll drop a new episode every week.
|
|
|
