S2E8 | What Can I Cut Out Of My Marketing Effort?

Have you found yourself managing two personas, one of an entrepreneur and the other of a coach? Or are you wondering if you should be present on all the major platforms or maybe choose quality over quantity and stick to what’s relevant? In this episode of Damn Good Marketing Podcast Hasita and Subha walk you through the dilemmas small business owners face when they have to be efficient entrepreneurs and decide if creating teams would be better than doing things themselves since the resources are limited.

They discuss the fact that business owners often wear different hats, first of entrepreneurs and a little later of coaches, and also that it can be a difficult choice wanting to continue doing that, making you ask the questions of if it’s worth it or should you drop it.

Discussion Topics: What can I cut out of my marketing effort?

• Challenges doing too many things in marketing
• Handling multiple identities
• Branded house vs house of brands
• When to invest on a single aspect and when to diversify
• How to make the separation between roles
• What worked for others might not work for you
• Focus on where the audience is
• Don’t over-focus on the metrics
• Balance between topical and timeless content
• You needn’t market everything

Transcript: What can I cut out of my marketing effort?

Subha: Hey, Hasita you know, I’ve come to you with a bit of a dilemma today, I think I’ve done something that I need to maybe undo a bit of, I’ve created two personas in terms of everything digital that I’m doing. So I’m finding that I’m having to manage in a way two brands, and then all the associated social media and digital presence for each brand. And I think I’m doing way too much. And I don’t really know what to do about it. And is there like too much? I mean, you know, what we keep hearing is that, oh, some people like to read and some people like to watch and some people like to listen. And so shouldn’t I be all over the place?

Hasita: Yeah, that’s a great Subha, and in fact one that, as you know, I’m also grappling with, because you find that you do one thing and then to distribute that you have to do other things as well. Like, if you do a podcast, you better be on LinkedIn as well. And then if you’re on LinkedIn, then you do a newsletter as well. And when is enough, because we have lives to live and businesses to run. Let’s dive in.

Welcome to the Damn Good Marketing Podcast. Today, let’s really deconstruct how much is too much of doing things in the context of marketing, especially for small businesses where we run with a limited number of resources and limited time, limited budget. So what do you do and what do you not do beyond the point that’s the question we are going to be answering today.

Subha: Yay, because I really need some answers and I think, not just small businesses, but maybe individuals who are their own brand, and also larger businesses who are struggling, how to give the brief to this person that they brought on as either a marketing executive internally, or even if they’re outsourcing to an agency. I think the brief becomes more challenging, or the brief is really poor quality because there is just too much happening. And you don’t know who you are, and then on what platform you are. So we’re really looking forward to deconstructing this.

Hasita: So in fact, this interesting problem of I think, how much is enough, especially as you’re growing, you want to be doing more things because that’s how you tap into a new audience, like through one medium, I may have found and X number of people, but if I have to 2X that then I have to find people on other media and other channels where they hang out. And a lot of in fact, very large companies are now kind of building their own agencies in-house, and what I mean is they’re hiring their own copy content performance folk because sometimes it’s not easy to delegate, like you said, and if someone knows the business context, it’s just so much easier.

But of course, as small businesses, we don’t have that luxury, because expertise does come at a certain price point and a certain amount of time investment. So I think, let’s really break it down. And I would look at it not so much as an execution problem because that comes much later. But as an identity issue. So Subha, in saying that, you know, I have a RainKraft handle, and I have work that’s happening there. And then I have a coach handle, and there’s work that’s happening there what in your mind is the separation between the two? How are they different from each other?

Subha: Yeah, and I think like you said, identity because, like many businesses, I didn’t really start out with multiple identities, so I started out with a brand RainKraft under which I was doing multiple things. And over the years as that work has gone in divergent ways and then found consolidation and then now, there’s a new identity that has just evolved on its own.

So I find myself as coach Subha in many situations where me being the coach is what’s important, and whether I have my own firm and whether there is a RainKraft, etc. is not so critical to really put out there. And so on its own this coach Subha persona has given birth. And like you said, it’s still very much a part of RainKraft, but it can exist on its own also. So now the challenge is done. I let it grow on its own and then now I have two things to manage or do I keep reminding the audience that Hey, we are actually one, Hey, we’re actually one which is tedious in itself.

Hasita: Yeah, so I was in a webinar the other day Subha, with somebody that I consider a brand strategist of great repute, and incidentally, his was the first webinar I attended when the pandemic hit. And the fact that I’m still continuing to attend says something about him, his name is Mark Ritson. And he talks about this very famous concept in brand strategy, which is Branded House and House of Brands. And those are the exact opposite of each other and a Branded House is one entity under which you do whatever it is that you want to do.

A good example of that is probably Apple. So whether it’s a Mac, whether it’s Apple TV, whether it’s something else, finally, whether they’re selling services, products, hardware, the whole thing is Apple, that’s a Branded House and a House of Brands is something like your FMCG Companies like Unilever has multiple brands within it. And each brand kind of takes on a life of its own. For small businesses, I think it’s very important to focus and zero down on the Branded House side of things, and build as much as possible into one entity.

And I see the kind of temptation to kind of do multiple things because the question also comes up that if there is something that is not RainKraft specific, where do I put that? Where do I be a public figure without the context of RainKraft, I think in the early days, it’s important to invest in one thing.

Now that said, it’s not early days for you. You’ve been doing a lot of marketing work for five, six years at this point, which is why in your use case, I see the benefit of that separation, because now you can talk about the books that you’re reading, podcasts that you’re listening to, what is it that makes you a good coach, is the focus of the Subha coach identity, and the work you do is part of the RainKraft identity.

But if you’re starting from scratch today, I think I would advise that you stick to RainKraft, and do just that. Subha being a coach is a product of RainKraft. So, that’s I think a distinction that a lot of us could benefit from. Because in my work in the brand workshops, as well, I’ve seen a lot of people trying to birth these new brands, give them a logo, and give them an identity. And in their heads, I see the difference.

They see it as them doing multiple different things. But a lot of times it’s actually the same thing. Finally, the story is singular. The purpose behind doing that is very unilateral. And the disadvantage of diluting that effort is that now you have to strengthen three brands, or four brands at the same time, instead of doing just one and being able to throw all your energy into that.

Subha: No, it is very, very time-consuming. And not just in terms of the execution phase where you have to think of where you want to put what and how do you put it, and what’s the, in a way who’s speaking. So as you said, if I am giving a book recommendation, then the way that even that caption is written is different from if RainKraft is giving a book recommendation.

So definitely there is more effort. And it came from a genuine place of the kind of building the credibility of the individual. And I think that’s where small businesses feel the need, because at some point, you know, people say, Hey, the founder has to be known, or the founder has to have credibility in that space in which the entity is working.

And so this kind of second persona slowly emerges. But I think it’s a good tip to keep consolidating to the extent possible, while I let the other one also live on but not kind of branch out too much because I don’t have the bandwidth.

Hasita: Yeah, because you want to be able to repurpose thoughts from one place to the other because finally, you’re one individual, and also one handy tactic for anyone kind of grappling with the same thing I would say, is to go about thinking about it in terms of where is the separation. So if the product that I’m selling or the services that I’m offering, is not explainable in one sentence. Say, Hey, I’m a baker.

Now that tells you exactly what I do. But Hey, I’m a brand strategist is not that evocative. Like, what can I do for you, I can’t bake cakes, obviously. So what else can I do the moment there is more complexity in what you do, it helps to streamline even further, because you want all of these things to finally contribute to that identity so that people can discover you for who you are, fundamentally, so what you do if it’s simple, if you can explain it in one sentence, then you can diversify as much as you want as early as you want.

But the more complicated it gets, and there are some of my friends who run toy brands that have very specific characteristics to them, so they’re not A toy brands, they are free play-based toy brands. Now, that doesn’t evoke something for me immediately. So it’s important that my entire identity also reflects that side of things.

Subha: Correct, correct. No, it’s true because we are now more and more and the generations that are coming into the workplace and being the actual consumers today are looking to identify with the people behind the brands also.

So like you said, if somebody is running a free-play kind of brand, I’m wanting to know who the founder is and does he or she believes in sustainability and unschooling, and you know, all of the things that I would maybe associate with free play. So I think, yeah, it gives me a few things to think about and to kind of rework and also, maybe, in kindness to myself, it is a journey. So, the discovery happens, because you try out many things.

So there was a time, not so far back where I would, as you said, if you have to describe yourself, struggle like, leadership coach, executive coach, performance coach, and because that space itself is so muddled with terminology. And today, over a period of time, I have realised, okay, all of that converged to the career space. And so I’m happy to just say, career growth coach. So that also was a journey where I was a career coach, and that meant different things to different people. So I am not a career coach who’s going to help you find a university abroad.

So I’m not a career counselor. So then that evolved to say, career growth coach. So it’s about you’re already doing something and how you get better at it, and how do you improve your performance, but yeah, that journey comes because you put yourself out in many channels, and you get some kind of feedback on how the audience sees you.

Hasita: Which is where, I think the execution piece is also birthed, finally. Like, I had the opportunity to speak to the Brand Manager of BlissClub, the leggings brand, which I love. By the way, I totally endorse it. I love those leggings; I could live in them. And I kind of asked her how did you go about getting her first 5,000 customers because they are D2C and D2C is a space that’s a little harder to kind of succeed in and differentiation is hard.

Finally, you’re selling leggings. And she gave me three-pointers, which are performance campaigns and running ads, the other was communities and the third was influencers. And she got into the details of how. That’s the playbook of how BlissClub got to. Now can you take it and implement it even as a D2C brand, even in apparel can you take the exact same thing and run with it? 90% of the time, probably not.

Because say I am not a community builder, for example, I don’t identify that way at this point in time. So for me to say, Okay, I will put myself through the lathe machine of building communities, it’s probably not going to end very well. So how many of these things are we doing because the world is telling us that, you know, and we saw that with Instagram reels quite a bit because suddenly, every content creator felt pressured to build short format content.

Subha: Correct. And the good thing is, I mean, I just read Mark Zuckerberg’s earnings note that he put out this morning where he is saying that he will continue to invest in reels because it’s really growing at a phenomenal pace. And interestingly, for him, he’s not making any money on the reels, because we’re just swiping from one reel to the other.

And now he’s going to try and figure out I think, how to put a little ad in there somewhere because the ads are in the feed, and I’m spending less time on the feed, and just quickly swiping through 50 reels, and he hasn’t shown me any ad, and he hasn’t made any money. But yes, it’s a struggle that we said, oh, now there’s one more medium, how do I get there? There are so many people who approached both of us, I know saying, hey, you know, you guys are doing a great job, maybe I should also start a podcast.

Hasita: But you know and I know that there have been days when we’ve doubted this medium as well. And the only reason we’ve been able to keep going is because we fundamentally like it. We are in a studio right now, and enjoying these fancy mics and clicking pictures, because we like it. And that’s the curiosity that somewhere net-net has to drive any amount of content effort. I have found myself outside of the podcast also gravitating more towards LinkedIn than Instagram, and I think that’s also coming from my natural tendency towards doing more long format, honestly.

I’m not a let’s condense this into a 2 or 10 character I have realised that about myself and I’m okay to not be. So that’s where I’ve chosen and said okay, for now, it’s going to be the podcast and it’s going to be LinkedIn. Maybe I’ll start making some videos and listen to our producer for once, but it still seems like a bit of a distant dream to me.

Subha: I get you. So I think what I’m hearing you say is that one, don’t overcomplicate it so at early stages, stick to that branded house as much as you can because, you know, God knows there’s any way, so much work to be done so why do you want to split that across multiple houses. So stick to a branded house and then yes, we will all experiment with different ways to execute. But do what gives you comfort, but more important than that, I think, shouldn’t focus on where my audience is sitting.

Hasita: That’s a great question. So that’s where I think the supply-demand has to kind of start matching because I have to ask myself, what capabilities do I either have or I’m able to bring naturally because we have friends who are able to do that for us or there are so many different ways. Like if my best friend was a performance marketer, why would I not kind of use that capability.

So I think sometimes we underestimate the real-world implications of somebody else’s playbook. In their success were things that even they may sometimes not be aware of, in terms of why it worked exactly the way it worked. So that I would say, is the supply side. So make a list of what are the different capabilities, can I do blogs more easily or can I do LinkedIn content more easily, can I do a podcast more easily it could be right, you come from that space and it’s just easier you.

Then comes the demand side of things, which is, as you said, the audience, which is also what I think I had asked you a while ago, my audience was finally, the workshops in the consulting work that I do hanging out on LinkedIn. And we said we don’t know. And that’s still a fair enough hypothesis and a good place to start because I don’t know what is a better place.

Subha: And I think that not just gut, but the information, the feedback loops that are coming back to us they do tell you that they’re not on the reels. So it’s not an investment of time and energy that you should be making now. So LinkedIn is where you should be hanging out and producing good content or sharing very relevant stories.

Hasita: To me, that seems to be the case for the industry that I’m operating in. It’s a noisy industry, like there’s enough and more and good content out there. So people need to already sift and sort through so much, might as well be where they are, and they seem to be on LinkedIn at this point in time. So that makes sense.

But again, I think it differs from context to context. We are working with clients in the EIML space right now. And for them, the right platforms would have been LinkedIn and Twitter. But Twitter as we know, is kind of in a, I mean, does a brand want to invest in Twitter at this point in time, it’s a bit of a risk to take and therefore, again, the net-net of their effort is coming back to LinkedIn.

But it could be that for a different audience in a different company, the audience could be on TikTok for all you know because Duolingo of all apps has the strongest persona on TikTok. Duolingo’s TikTok is a case study in and of itself. So how did they figure that out? They figured it out by trying and being excited enough about it. And finally, that’s what it comes down to.

So what we’ve actually started implementing with a lot of clients is that 90 days print model of doing things, you try it for 90 days, if it’s not working, and I don’t mean not working from an external, it’s not about four people coming and liking the post, it’s about my end goal, what is my lagging metric for success? And for whatever reason, if that metric is not being met, then it’s time to change.

Subha: That’s interesting. So what do some of these lagging metrics look like? Because I think that’s where as business owners, we struggle because we’ve put ourselves out there, we don’t really know what we’re looking for. And then most likely, at the end of 90 days, I’m thinking, I don’t think I got anything out of this. Why don’t I just stop and do something else?

Hasita: No, sometimes I’ve begun to realise that even failure in that sense of the word is the signal, because finally, we dug deep with one of the clients that we were working with, and we realise that their problem is not lead generation, but retaining the customers that they were getting into the system.

So churn was a problem. It wasn’t lead gen at all, because that’s the knee-jerk reaction. It says, Oh, I don’t have enough money rotating through the system so let me generate leads. But I think what was going wrong for them is that a lot of people that were coming into the cycle, were not being able to retain them in the system.

So in identifying that your lagging metric then becomes over a six-month period, how much retention have I achieved? And that’s not going to come from my LinkedIn posts. That’s going to come from me who did the pre-sales and the sales also being there when things are not working out. So it’s a more systemic problem that has to be addressed.

In the context of offline events, especially it’s top of mind right now because we’re doing that for one of the clients. Actually, the day this episode comes out that event ends as well. And for us honestly Subha, the lagging metric is how many conversations they’re able to have in the next six months. We have zero visibility until then.

So you can ask me then how does the 90 days print work? Because you’re saying six months, and then you’re saying 90 days. So then we use the leading indicators to tell us, you know, how many new people came and visited them during the event, that’s a great sign for us because this is the only way they would have heard about them. How many placements were we able to get?

Because there was an exciting story first and foremost, and therefore people saw it, and they got excited, they wanted to cover it. That’s a leading indicator because I know that all of this in six months is going to contribute towards something.

Subha: And I think that’s also a good lesson in not overdoing the focus on metrics. Today, you go to a digital marketer or an agency and it’s their job to do it. So it’s not really the onus is not on me. But then there’s Google Analytics, and then I could look at Hot Chart and see how people are moving across my website, and I could look at all the podcast listens, and how many minutes and how many seconds.

So there’s this lot of information out there, we should also know how to read it, because otherwise one, it can be very depressing sometimes. And you can just walk away with the wrong output in a way.

Hasita: I think incremental progress really gets lost in the obsession with metrics a lot of times, because your first three, or four, LinkedIn posts are going to do nothing. People are watching, people are saying, Hey, here’s somebody new, he’s got ideas, he or she, and they’re putting themselves out there. I don’t know if I like it. And frankly, how many of us are geniuses from our first post onwards, God knows, we’ve all evolved.

So what you have to really track, and this has been true for us and a lot of clients that we work with also, is to say, am I meeting my end goal, are people seeing me differently because I put myself out there, are people knowing what to come to me for because I put myself out there. That’s the success metric. I will have posts that get zero attention.

I mean, people are welcome to kind of go scroll through my LinkedIn feed and find all the posts that got nothing. And finally, my poor dad goes and likes it, because he’s feeling sorry for me. But if I were to use that as a reference point for what I produce, or what I don’t produce, then I’m honestly doing myself a disservice.

Subha: That’s very true, and sometimes, even whatever we’ve created, it takes the world time to find it in some strange way. I mean, the podcast has been a revelation in that it’s taken for me like season four, or at least from three onwards to really then hit an audience and hit a loyal listening audience. And the medium is such that I should be expecting only loyalty.

It’s not a medium where I’m going to go very wide. And I should understand that, okay, my expectations also have to be in line with what I’m putting out there. And then, as you said, there are some, like, blog posts that were written two years back, and then suddenly this, everybody’s reading them. It came up in some search result or something and suddenly, everybody’s reading them, which, every time that happens, reminds me that, hey, there is so much stuff already there, why am I not reusing it?

Hasita: And also, there is that element of I think, topicality to some extent. So there will be content that’s timeless, and you don’t want to keep rehashing it updated from time to time, let it do what it’s doing. But finally, if something is happening in my industry, and it needs to be said, it needs to be said then, it can’t wait for my content, calendar, and my programming to kind of kick in.

So that’s where I think what we were speaking about earlier, in terms of what to delegate and what to retain finally, if you’re running a personal profile, if you’re running a company handle, it’s your company handle, it’s your personal profile, right? What people can help with is the muscle and the drive to keep pushing. And finally, you will have to show your face or you will have to put your voice out there, and you have to make sure that you are there when it matters.

Subha: That is hugely important. I think even with the small team that supports me, including you, the more I’m able to give you direction or the more I’ve thought through what I want for the month the output is it just goes up so many fold. And that’s only fair. You’ve hired somebody like you said to be the muscle, not the mind reader.

Hasita: You said it maybe there’s a T-shirt there that wears your muscle not your mind reader. You heard it first on the Damn Good Marketing Podcast.

Subha: Hey, Hasita, did you hear the breaking news? Apparently, Adit Chopra is a natural person, it’s not a rumor.

Hasita: First TV interview in 28 years Subha, can you imagine, the son of Yash Raj Films, he could have been a ghost for.

Subha: And I’m just thinking that it really appends everything that we have talked about that you have to keep marketing yourself and create a brand and be a persona. I mean that dude, like even today people are saying, does he exist?

Hasita: But clearly, if you have a good product, it can do its own marketing which is what most Yash Raj films are.

Subha: Yeah, I read an interesting line the other day that DDLJ is actually a love story between a theatre and a movie. Since 1995, at the Maratha mandir and there’s a cute little series on some OTT channel of postcards from Maharashtra, and it shows a lot of these very simple middle-class folks they just, you know, on an odd day they have a few hours to spare they just go in and watch DDLJ.

Hasita: Yeah. And in fact, on the Netflix trailer for The Romantics, which is now streaming on Netflix, there was one user who commented on the reason for Adit Chopra’s vision or even Yash Chopra who came before him. The reason it worked is because they had a Shahrukh also come out. Because who else could be so unabashedly romantic, like finally he shows up in an action movie and we’re all cheering for him, we are rooting for him.

And I like David Letterman’s fact that 50% of the world knows Shahrukh Khan. Can you imagine being known by one in two people it’s not easy in this day and age.  Yeah, a good product that I think speaks for itself. But what I really do like also is that to be timeless, you have to keep reinventing yourself. I think that’s the message because finally, after doing the Shahrukh, you know, set of films, Adit Chopra had to experiment with Ranveer Singh. He had to take a chance to see where that would go.

Subha: Such a chance that even Ranveer says, I don’t know why he chose me.

Hasita: So I think to be relevant is to keep adapting, and maybe that’s what he did. He kept himself busy adapting and he didn’t really worry too much about am I seen. Am I known? Am I heard?

Subha: Should I be on Instagram? And should I do interviews? I’m guessing that gave him a lot of time to do the really good stuff. But having said that, yes he’s literally quietly behind the scenes, he’s taken chances on a lot of people. on a lot of kinds of movies, and experimented and some have worked, and some haven’t. But maybe because fundamentally, the focus was that hey, I want to entertain. So having that focus or knowing that, hey, why am I doing what I’m doing, then guides a lot of your decisions, maybe it makes it more accessible.

Hasita: And allows you to do it for longer, because you’re not questioning some of those choices anymore. You’re just keeping at it for the fun of it. And that’s all there is to it finally, in any case, and kudos to Netflix for finding all these interesting angles on different things. I mean, only Netflix is capable of.

Subha: Yeah, there are a lot of really interesting documentaries out there, which they’ve taken the dullness out of the concept of documentary. Imagine like, I don’t know, 10 years back if you said you’re watching a documentary or like the nerdiest or dullest person on Earth, now you should be watching the Elephant Whispers and you should be watching Harry and Megan and you should be watching Pamela Anderson’s love story, which is I heard her on the Dax Shepard podcast and that’s the story there, man, that’s a real person.

Hasita: Just for that angle sometimes it’s worth getting to do some of these stories. So I’m going off to watch the remaining episodes on the Romantics and admire Shahrukh Khan. Maybe get him on this podcast, Universe I’m putting it out there and I’m just letting you know.

Subha: Yes, Universe, please know she’s put Priyanka Chopra and Shahrukh Khan out there and Tanmay Bhat also. How do you come up with that combination? Anyway, that’s for another time.

Hasita: Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of the professionally done Damn Good Marketing Podcast. Not that we were unprofessional earlier but now we’re like super things are getting real people. Can you feel it?

Subha: Studio level real.

Hasita: Thank you and see you next time.

Subha: And look out for the Motley Crew page for pictures from this studio.