Thoughts

The Rule That Guides Everything I Build

My guiding star for impactful implementations and communications.

I once grew a social media channel for an oil drain valve company from 1K to 100K followers in just under 3 months, with 80%+ of that growth coming organically.

And I did it by editing and reposting a video that not only already lived on the channel for years, but was already pinned as the top post.

When we released the edit, sales immediately doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, and ultimately settled around three times their previous level, forcing our three-person DTC team to send all shipping operations to the west coast B2B team.

The rule? It’s simple to understand and, for some reason, hard for many teams to do: stay close to your audience (because when you do, the work naturally shows you where to go next).

Here’s the story of how this came to be and why I live by this rule in everything I create.

Getting Familiar with People, Not Personas

At the time, I had already been of the opinion that no one cares about your company, your logo, your positioning, or how much you pander about how great you are.

People care about solving their problems so they can go back to attempting to enjoy life.

Before this moment of going “viral” (I really hated that time in marketing, btw!), I’d spent months figuring out how people were finding out about the valves, which led me to the forums they were in.

I spent weeks reading forum after forum, trying to understand how people saw the product.

What I learned instead was that understanding how they saw themselves mattered far more. In fact, how they saw themselves is what would influence the behaviors that would inevitably lead them to conversations that would, in turn, lead to the awareness of the product.

And once they had that moment, it was essentially a slam dunk for the brand.

After a few weeks of this “research,” I started to notice a pattern. People would show up on forums unaware the product even existed, posting about an oil drain issue (thread wear, pan problems, hot oil on their arms, etc.), another user would mention the product, and a few days later, the original poster would be back telling everyone in the thread about how happy they were with the valve.

In other cases, someone would be reading along as the product was being explained through posts but it wasn’t until someone posted a photo that it would really click for them.

You could almost feel the room rumble from the aftershock of their mind being blown. They had no idea this existed before this moment. And they wanted it immediately!

This kind of thing is what kept sales steady. But we wanted to grow. People clearly loved the product, which was great because marketing when product-market fit is weak or missing is the absolute worst. Fortunately, that wasn’t a part of this equation.

The deeper I got into how our target audience operated (beyond oil changes; just life), the more evident it became that maintaining that connection was important.

Identifying Confusion and Creating Clarity

As the solo marketer in the team, I was tasked with revamping every touchpoint, and the more time I spent observing our target audience in their native environment (they would go to forums, so that’s where I spent my time) and connecting with customers (I would call people to see if they’ve installed yet, how they felt about it, and if they ran into any issues), the more I realized how busy our communications were, while still missing the mark on some of the basics.

For example, the website had tools to find the valve you need based on your vehicle. But there was an inherent problem in the way in which we would deliver those search results. Search results were matched with the vehicle’s known thread dimensions. If your drain pan had X thread size, you’d be matched with valves at X thread size.

And while that was the only criteria you would need to match a valve with a drain pan (and make the sale), it wasn’t the only criteria you would need to make a customer feel this was a smart, safe, and exciting purchase (which is the most important feeling you could give them).

You see, some valves were short and stubby, the perfect choice if you wanted something with a low profile. Some had a long nipple at the end that would allow you to attach a hose directly to it so you could route your oil for disposal.

Others had a short nipple, that would give you the best of both worlds but required an adapter to be able to attach the hose.

There were also vehicle spec considerations because some pans had thread diameters that were large like the ones used on heavy machinery. So the search might tell you that your little European sedan was compatible with a valve that you’d only want to put on heavy machinery. Why? Same thread diameter!

There were also considerations in pan configuration and personal setup. If you had a lowered vehicle, you’d have way more to consider than someone with the same vehicle who hadn’t lowered theirs.

What if your drain plug is facing the ground? Adding a valve to that pan, even with the most compact variant, decreases the clearance between your drain pan and the ground, which means it could potentially break off if you did something as simple as drive over a speed bump (again, if your vehicle is lowered).

It’s better to inform someone of this and lose that sale (but gain their trust!) than to gain the sale and have them bottom out, break the valve, and potentially blow their engine.

Because I was in forums and answering emails and picking up phones, I knew what people were confused about most. So it just made sense that the next step in our “marketing” was actually not to message more on more channels, but to focus on improving the user experience (UX) to drive growth from the website.

Doing so would then lead to:

This is what I mean when I say you need to stay connected. If they want to be helpful and they love your product, give them the tools to be your evangelists where they already are!

And where they already are matters. I’ve seen countless companies get this wrong by:

  1. Not making it easy for people to be your evangelists and
  2. Trying to tell people where to do it

It was conversations with people that led me to realize where the next hurdle was and, therefore, what we should do next. Through conversation and observation, it came to my attention that there were so many people who heard about the product on a forum, got to the website and met confusion, and only months later finalized their purchase.

And these were the people who actually came back.

How many purchases had this confusion killed ?!

These are the almost invisible things that matter. These little things cost companies real money. These are the types of things that the deepest analytics sometimes don’t uncover.

So, if we know that confusion delays purchases by months, then it’s pretty safe to assume that it’s also killed sales, which means that it’s probably a smart investment to spend time working on eliminating that confusion in order to create a smoother end-to-end process and lose less sales.

For a week, I took inventory of communications my co-worker and I had via phone and email. If it was something we had been asked before, it went onto the list. If it was something that took us a long time to explain to a customer, it went on the list.

In all, we ended up with a list of about 65 topics that would need to be addressed to provide clarity over the entire experience. So we implemented a knowledge base into the website, I wrote about 65 short articles, and we immediately started sending them in email communications and added relevant links to product pages.

While we would typically walk into the office with 20 or 30+ customer service emails per day, we were just above single digits by week 3.

This was the change that then freed us up to think about what was next and how we would grow. Slightly more money was being made with less friction. But again, this was when marketing was all about going “viral” (!!!!) and so, it seemed like the job wasn’t done until that happened.

And honestly, I felt I could do it solely because of how much people loved the product.

You Need to Be Clear, Not Clever

So there we are, in the office, taking inventory of digital assets. And pinned to the top of the Facebook page is this 4-minute long video. It’s corporate to the gills. It’s got the logo and lots of polished visuals and… no one cares.

It’s been there for years and has like 20+ likes.

And, for the record, things don’t need to be massively loved to be impactful, but the lack of excitement here that existed in forums told me that the right people just didn’t know we’re here. And they were already on Facebook (the demo just makes sense, I didn’t investigate this), we just needed to get their attention.

By this point, I had spent countless hours on phone calls and forums to feel like I had a good feel for the audience.

They were:

These were straight shooters. They just wanted value. And many of them said they’d invented this product in their heads decades ago. To them, it felt like such a no-brainer to purchase!

But how do we get their attention?

At this point in time, we had enough analytics built into Facebook to identify the drop-off (I can’t remember if it was 3 seconds back then, too) and we knew the exact window of time we had to communicate value before someone, typically, scrolls past whatever you post.

That’s when it started to click.

If we have 3 seconds to impress them, but the first 3 seconds of the video barely gets the logo out of the way and shows some guy dressed up like a window salesman, we’re not giving them any reason to stop. We’re just giving them another ad to swipe away from.

But remember the room rumble I could practically feel from someone’s mind being blown once they saw a photo of the valve on someone’s vehicle?

If I could feel the electricity from reading that comment and all they saw was a photo, I figured a video that skips all the foreplay and just gets to the action should have that same effect.

So I asked my boss to send the video to my iPhone. I opened up iMovie, and removed everything except the 15-second clip that showed a hand opening the drain valve and oil pouring out.

When I suggested this is what we post, I still remember the almost flat affect on my boss’ face. He was… underwhelmed. But it’s social media, so we don’t need to pay to post it. And that whole big production had already been paid for and didn’t prove to be significant.

So we posted it and left for lunch.

I got back to the office about 20 minutes after the post went out. I’m sitting at my desk showing my Chipotle burrito how I get down when my boss walks in his pants on metaphorical fire.

“Have you seen the post?!”

I hadn’t, mainly because I was trying to figure out where the guacamole in my burrito was hiding.

“It’s going viral!”

I expected it to be a good post, with maybe 30 or 60 likes. I remember questioning if that’s what he calls viral.

What I didn’t expect was that 20+ minutes after posting, it already had 300 likes and over 20 comments. And those numbers kept climbing as the hours went by.

A few hours later, we shut down for the day. But when we returned the next morning, it was a madhouse. We get inbox alerts when new orders are made. Our inboxes were packed!

And this kept going on until we had to move shipping everything to the west coast team because we just couldn’t keep up with the volume.

And this made all of the work that was done prior to this moment worth it because without that tight customer connection:

It was far better to have these things taken care of before the hit came. Don’t you think?

While that’s the end of the story, it’s not the end of what I want to share here.

Marketing Isn’t the Hard Part. Listening Is.

There are countless teams that think marketing starts with analytics. They’ll skip connecting with the target audience and customers start hacking analytics.

They’ll dig into keywords and trends and do all kinds of deep dive analyses on what competitors are doing. And months later, things are still falling flat.

It pains me that, with all that we know to be true in human existence and social interactions, we throw a massive amount of that knowledge out of the window once we put on our marketing hats.

When we have our marketing hats on, we start with our “positioning” and “the message” that we need to “drive home” to our “target personas” and before we know it, we’re marketing in a way that feels good because we’re propping up the brand, saying all the things, and putting the logo on every communication, but ultimately, we’re failing at the most important piece: connection.

But after months or years of doing this, we come to realize we’ve sent out thousands of emails and posted consistently on social and… no one seems to care. So how do you turn this around?

My answer is to do the hard thing; the thing that doesn’t scale with templates and automation and yet another piece of software: you talk to people.

I’m convinced that one of the hardest parts of marketing — the thing that stands in the way of success — is putting humans, not the playbook, first.

Because the same things that attract people to us in-person are the same things that will bring them to us digitally. And it’s really that simple. The hard part, again, is turning marketing brain off.

This is sometimes hard to negotiate internally, especially for teams that think effective marketing is a matter of quantity, tools, workflows, repeatability, and scalability.

And, yes, those things matter. But they don’t matter more than providing real-world value and having a clear message.

Scaling a broken message is just very busy, very frustrating work that never pays off.

I sometimes think of the need to double and triple down and bombard your way into people’s inboxes as insecurity about what you’re offering.

And I think that sort of insecurity stems from not being truly connected with your target audience.

Because when you don’t have a deep connection with your target audience, you start doing things you think they should care about. You start communicating things you want them to care about and do.

And that’s a hard hill to climb. And when the wins don’t come, the frustration builds. So teams answer it with even MORE, thinking that they just haven’t scaled it enough.

And this perpetuates the problem.

At some point, we made it taboo to slow down. We’ve convinced ourselves that growth only comes from doing more, faster, yesterday. And for a small number of companies, given the right market and timing, that can work.

But most companies don’t need that. More often, what’s missing isn’t speed, but clarity. Sometimes it’s worth slowing down long enough to question a few things before building or shipping anything at all.

Some questions that help me course-correct, in both product and marketing:

Next time you find yourself stuck and asking “what’s next,” maybe use it as a moment to walk away from the computer and reconnect to get plugged in.

There’s a time for efficiency, and there’s a time to do things that don’t scale. Knowing which moment you’re in matters more than just perpetually moving fast.