You Can’t Sell Yourself Until You Know Yourself
For the past three years, we’ve been creating videos, podcasts, written pieces, and monthly newsletters to try and raise awareness of Stoked in the public eye. But honestly, it wasn’t getting us anywhere. No new leads, very few subscribers, no new partnerships, etc. So there we were with years of quality content and no one looking at it. We needed to radically overhaul the way we were marketing ourselves.
Operating with Neither Expertise nor Strategy
As the fall of 2019 rolled around, it was apparent our marketing strategy was basically like throwing wet spaghetti against a wall to see what would stick. Turns out, not much was sticking. So I started to think seriously about Stoked’s brand and how we communicate with the world.
We love the power of storytelling. Whether it was showing how to take good care of yourself so you can do better work or chronicling our toughest year and how we came together as a team to survive it! Plus, it seemed like there was no one else in the design thinking space creating compelling content. It tended to be dry and not so human-centered. We thought we could improve upon that!
Even though people reported that they loved our content, we had no idea how to grow a YouTube channel or build a devoted podcast audience. Our socials were attracting people, but it didn’t convert into traffic to our site. We loathed the idea of being one of those content creators that continually asks you to “subscribe and like” everything they make. We still wanted to be ourselves but also grow our business.
Since we really didn’t know where we were going, we figured we could at least start by looking at where we were. I dug into the metrics, grabbing all our stats from our website, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube. And the results were kind of depressing. Traffic stats were consistently low with a bump every now and then from a few users watching a new piece of content we released. We just weren’t getting any traction that could justify the effort of maintaining content creation and the maintenance required for up-to-date socials. It’s so hard to quantify the effect that branding and marketing have on our business or its reputation in the world.
Armed with the numbers, next I did what design thinkers do best. I asked our clients some questions. I interviewed a few past clients who told me that our website looked awesome. But they also said it essentially said nothing. The problem was clear: It wasn’t clear who Stoked was or what we offered.
Here’s What We Did
With the help of some friends in the marketing world, I came up with a plan. Stoked’s first marketing plan ever. And let me be ultra-clear here: I have NO marketing background. I know nothing about branding or communications. All I had was a set of designerly tools, a curious mindset, and a vested interest in making our public-facing content so much better.
Our plan was simple, didn’t require a huge budget, and we could execute it in six months. The plan was to build a new website listing our services (which we’d surprisingly never done before) using clear language to detail how we help our clients. We wanted to say who Stoked is and what we stand for.
My partner Anna and I took a look at my cobbled approach and gave it the ole thumbs up. We were off!
Our friends at FoxFuel Creative introduced us to Love and Science. This was a game-changer. Love and Science provided a full-on digital business strategy and content visibility report so we could have a good idea of what people were looking for when they found us and how we could optimize our content to stand out in new ways.
I hired New Unity to redesign our website, Love and Science to continue their digital forensics work, and Communications Bureau to create some PR.
From the jump, all of these vendors (such a dirty word, we consider them all dear friends) started asking us basic questions that we weren’t quite sure how to answer. They asked things like, “What exactly do you offer your clients?” “What do you believe in as a company?” “Why do your past clients know and love you?”
These were all things we mostly knew in our heads and hearts, but we’d never put them on paper. Our team sat down and started writing copy. Lots and lots of copy. This took significant time and energy because Anna articulates things differently than I do, and I explain things differently than Barb, and Barb doesn’t see things exactly the way Brent does. It was an intense and collaborative effort on everyone’s part to say something we knew but had never made clear to each other.
As we moved closer to the end of our website redesign, we brought in Kate Parrish to rearrange and edit all that copy so that humans without a design thinking background could understand it.
Then I kicked my feet up and waited for the new business to start rolling in. (Not really, but that’s what I hoped would happen.) In reality, all that was rolling in by that time was a global pandemic and economic depression. The likes of which the world hasn’t seen since the 1930s.
And on a personal note, this had been a huge project of mine and so of course I wanted to see some early wins to assure my teammates that this was a smart use of time and resources. I felt like my neck was on the line here!
So here we are ten months later. We have a new website that explains Stoked and our offerings more clearly than ever. We continue to create and optimize content that we hope others find helpful in their work. And hopefully, we can raise awareness of Stoked at the same time.
A New ROI
I spent more time and money than I budgeted for on our marketing efforts. Not surprising since I’ve never done any of this before. And the outcome is looking good, despite a COVID-era rollout. Our stats are going up and to the right.
Overall, we feel good about all this work. We’ve put down a solid foundation where there was none. And although we assumed the results of this work would be organizations reaching out to request our killer work, the big payoff has been how much clearer our entire team is on our mission, vision, and ways of working. We are, for the first time ever, aligned on the services we offer and the direction we’re heading. There’s more clarity around what we don’t do and who we don’t want to work with. This kind of lucidity is hard to come by, and that’s my point here. We believed engaging in this process would result in more incoming leads for our services, more visibility for our content, and new opportunities as we let the world know all about how Stoked can support their goals.
I’m told we’re playing the long game though — that there are rarely short-term, bottom-line gains from creating and launching a marketing plan for creative services businesses like ours. And we’re confident that the short-term gains we made around alignment and clarity have prepared us for more good work to come our way.
We gave ourselves over to the process. We tried to loosen the grip on our predetermined outcomes and be guided in a new direction. We stayed open to unexpected results. And we found value in the surprising payoffs that came from making up a new ROI outside of financial and efficiency gains. It hasn’t been what we expected. It’s been so much more.
