Everybody learns through stories: A marketing tip from Binar Academy
I was one of million kids who’d like to hear bedtime stories from my parents. I remember how my mom read me stories from an old, floral-covered dusty book with archaic Indonesian spelling which was too confusing for me to read. The book was passed from her mother to her, knowing that she was an avid story-listener who happens to be a talented story-teller. And I happen to get what is in her blood: telling stories. Ngebacot.
As you know, I work for Binar Academy’s marketing team who’s responsible to pass the company’s values to targeted market through various channels. And as the name implies, Binar Academy — a literal academy — educates people to develop mobile apps. And you know what? No matter the subject, offline education is one of the most difficult commodities to sell because it requires enormous time and effort to take. But, here I am, tasked to advertise one of the most difficult commodities to the people who apparently don’t like school either. So, what do I do? I tell them stories….
Content marketing
There’s nothing new about it, actually. Even Benjamin Franklin had successfully boosted his publisher’s sales for 25 years by annually publishing Poor Richard’s Almanack, and Thomas Alva Edison released the Edison Electric Lighting Company Bulletin to spread the word about the benefits of DC-powered lighting, rather than out-inventing his competitor, the AC electrical power. This strategy is still used by the company until today, now under the name of General Electric. Decades later, we all use his invention, don’t we?
“People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.” — Seth Godin
In Binar Academy, the marketing team initially didn’t have anything to begin selling with, except social media. Let alone the marketing budget and fancy marketing channels, we began our journey from scratch — literally and financially. This risky move was done because we’d like to independently maintain our principles and core values: giving unconditional opportunities.
How Binar Academy converts the ugly into story
In the dark age of Binar Academy, we only published boring, hard-selling contents as our marketing attempt. It covered company’s activities, profiles of the team, and event posters. We straightforwardly used company’s jargons to promote our values. A desperate move for a so-called revolutionary educator, wasn’t it?
So, we took a step back and went through our previous communication attempts on Instagram — the channel had the most engagement rate.
Although we had a brilliant graphic designer who produced pretty visuals, we were unable to increase the organic growth rate. Our followers liked our contents, but at some points we could no longer pique their interest. We couldn’t get the growth we needed. When we evaluated what might be wrong, we found that they wouldn’t re-share our contents because our contents were too Binar-centric. There were no benefits for them by doing it — brand loyalty doesn’t work this way.
So, how did we revamp the way we communicate with our audience?
1) Above all else, do research
Which marketer says research doesn’t matter? To assume what’s in the mind of the audience is easy, but to truly put your feet into your audience’s shoes is a different matter. Long story short, we decided to hold an FGD with our followers to explore what they’d like to hear from us.
From several FGD sessions, we finally discovered four things:
- Sadly, our assumptions were true: our content could no longer pique their interest.
- More importantly, only promoting our products didn’t bring excitement.
- Using company jargons and eventual, pop-culture-referencing greetings weren’t essential.
- Binar’s contents weren’t as genuine, educational, and insightful as the brand promised.
2) Turning insights into doable wireframe
The simplest communication model known as the S-R Communication Model says, in order to create the audience’s response we desire, we need the right stimulus. By defining the response, we’d also find the “why” in our communication model. In this case, we aimed to make audience believe in our credibility, and, hopefully, finding it useful, they are encouraged to re-share our contents to their friends.
After finding the “why”, it was the time to redesign the “what” and “how” we communicate. Firstly, we’d like our contents to be educational, hence it must be intuitive and informational enough for the audience.
But, how could we put many information into a single post? We tried several formats, from creating infographics to optimizing the length of captions. However, the attention span on Instagram is limited. Too many text within a caption and a single image wouldn’t get enough attention. So we experimented with carousel posts.
We chose to narrate the theoretical explanation as a step-by-step guide or in “versus” style to make certain topics understandable. Through this formula, we use adequate texts and supporting visuals to reduce its complexity.
3) The results?
It’s safe to say that we made a satisfying progress. Our engagement rate rose to 3% when the benchmark is at 1.2%. Also, our Instagram’s organic growth reached 3% each week, which means, more than 240 new Instagram users organically follow us every week.
Not only by the numbers, the audience seem to like what we’ve done. We’re glad to deliver well-curated, in-depth contents for free that sparked joy and change. Many thanked us for it — some of them wrote academic thesis that was inspired from our contents — and we thanked them for helping us to give more social impact using minimal resource available. Soo happyyy~
4) Maintaining the good work
Was it the end, then? No. Maintaining achievement is a lot harder than obtaining it. So, what should we do to improve our performance? We started to gather more feedback. Some followers criticized the details of the content, such as the use of complex language, improper terms, or little mistakes like typos. We’re actually happy because we can use those critics as retrospective materials to grow as a better team.
To keep posting 7 posts/week using carousel format also generates many challenges. Moreover, with limited manpower we have, we should reorganize the working method too to create consistency in content production. What we did to perfect the work method are basically 5 simple steps:
- Creating a database of reference. It covers a wide range of marketing inspirations, from practical guides, latest trends, creative (well, Japanese) commercials, to absurd cutscenes of cult movies.
- Content bank of tech-related articles. Most of our team have no programming background. Hence, we understood that at least we should enrich ourselves with basic know-how in digital industry. Reading 4 tech articles a day is the compulsory activity before attending standup meeting in the morning.
- Developing a graphic library. Since we don’t subscribe to any graphic source, our graphic designer creates the vectors by himself. And by manually drawing tons of them, he takes the initiative to develop a library of modifiable graphic assets for continuous use. How else can we praise him?
- Restructuring dashboard on Trello. Grouping tasks by their progress is provenly ineffective for us. Using the Kanban principles and calendar add-on, we modified our Trello board into a simple deadline-driven dashboard. Surprisingly though, the revamped method brings us to the new level of productivity.
- Weekly sharing session. As heavily used machines need lubricants, a rapid team also needs freshening stimuli. Therefore, we hold a mini workshop every Friday. The participants are all team members and the speaker is randomly selected in turn. The speaker will share any marketing-related subject to equip other members with new skills. This way, we’ll be reborn as a new person every week.
5) Move on
Binar Academy is growing bigger and new challenges ahead. As Alamanda Shantika said to us, “We’re the marketing team, not a pack of social media admins,” we know that we can’t spend all of our energy only for social media. With new business objectives in hand, it’s time to discover other channels.
And it’s time, to tell more impactful stories…
