CHAPTER SEVEN
Rethink Your Marketing

Omnia vincit amor. (Love conquers all.)

—VIRGIL, APPROXIMATELY 37 BC

Hark back, if you will, to the very first words of this book. They were written in 1759 by the cultural critic Samuel Johnson. I imagine that shortly after he wrote that most advertising is ignored, the creative director from his ad agency rang him up. “The problem,” the creative director would have said, with eyes intent through his retro-futuristically bold eyewear, “is that we need one big idea. We need to tell a big story about the brand! Something sensual, something emotional. We need to stop worrying so much about selling stuff. Stop worrying about metrics and data. Let’s focus on telling some beautiful brand stories. Yes, it will cost ten million ducats to get started, but trust me—it’s an annuity that will pay off well into the 1800s.”

Most marketing conversations these days center around such terms as “omnichannel” and “programmatic” or such topics as the ever-evolving field of social media channels and the need for brands to produce clicky content. Many more conversations are waving a red flag that we’re possibly approaching Peak Content. According to TrackMaven, brand-produced content was up 35% in 2015, while consumer engagement with that content was down 17%. ¹

Out of the fear of the unknown digital future, and in the thrall of the infinite universe of digital tools, we businesses, brands, and marketers are playing a dangerous game. We are in danger of buying the fallacy that this disengagement issue is a digital one, which will have a digital solution. This argument goes that consumers are overwhelmed by digital, fatigued by Facebook, and exhausted by email. If that is true, it would follow, then the solutions should also be digital. The Next New Social Media Platform will save the day, if you can just get it right.

Or maybe just build an app. Yeah. An app will fix everything. Right?

No. Nope. I am a digital and content marketer. On net, I have mostly worked on digital brands and products. I know digital and believe in digital. And I know the dirty little secret of digital: that apps have an even harder time engaging customers than nondigital products do.

Remember, Samuel Johnson was bemoaning ad overwhelm and Peak Content back in 1759. Before digital was even a thing. This problem of customers failing to engage with marketing content is not a digital issue. Digital did not cause it. And digital will not, on its own, solve it, either.

This is a human issue.

And the solutions? They will be human, too.

Human Clues to the Engagement Solution: Our Eyes, Brains, and Hearts

We humans have three body parts that give us away when something has captured our attention or we care about it a lot: our eyes, our brains, and our hearts. Each one gives us some clues to how we can rethink our marketing to engage and drive change for our customers.

In eye-tracking studies, television viewers avoided over 60% of commercial messages simply by turning their heads. ² This doesn’t even account for time-shifted viewing and the fact that most people no longer even watch broadcast television.

Upshot: people are extremely disengaged from messages about products and about brands.

Neuroscientists have found that well-told, character-driven stories excite many different centers in the brain and cause the release of oxytocin, the same hormone that releases when we bond with our dogs, babies, and sex partners. ³

Upshot: stories engage people like nothing else. Stories in which we are the protagonist, the hero, are the most engaging stories of all.

And now, onto our hearts. Kevin Roberts, then-CEO of the global ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi, wrote the book Lovemarks: The Future beyond Brands (2005). ⁴ He asserted that there is an echelon of companies that transcend brand status, in that their customers are loyal beyond all reason, out of all proportion to the actual usefulness of the product. To become a lovemark, a company must earn the highest levels of their customers’ love and respect.

In Roberts’s lovemark framework, without high love and high respect, a company is just a product (low love, low respect), just a fad (high love, low respect), or just a brand (low love, high respect). ⁵

Even in this era of epidemic disengagement, we all know these companies, these lovemarks. They do exist: there are companies that manage to escape disengagement, companies with customers who are rabidly loyal, deeply devoted, and vocally enamored with their products, to an “irrational” degree, to an emotional degree.

Whole Foods. Starbucks. American Express. Nike.

Roberts said that the sign of a lovemark is this: when customers can’t get their hands on the product of one of their lovemarks, things get out of control. They raise a hue and cry. They protest. They are outraged.

But I always thought this a curious criterion, as success metrics go. If you succeed at building a lovemark, you’ll know it because . . . people will be irate if and when they can’t get your product?

Fortunately, there are lots of other ways brand love shows up in a business, ways that are measurable, that provide clear direction for how we can make it happen and clear direction for course correcting our efforts when they don’t seem to be working. The value of brand love for every business, no matter size or industry, and the way it shows up, is in the form of customer engagement.

Customer engagement translates into all manner of metrics that matter, depending on the type of product or the initiatives of the business you’re looking at (see table 5). Beyond these metrics, there are two high-level customer-engagement metrics that matter to every business, small or large, regardless of what the product is or whether or not they are currently being tracked: word-of-mouth referrals and customer lifetime value. An engaged customer buys more of what you sell over time and tells their friends to buy it, too.

Table 5 How to Quantify the Love of Your Customers for Your Brand, Business, and Offerings: Brand Love / Customer Engagement Metrics, by Type of Product or Channel

Consumer packaged good or paid product

MyFitnessPal grew to over 100 million users with no paid marketing because people who used it loved it and told other people about it. If you are at a larger business, net promoter score (NPS) is probably the best way of tracking how likely your customers are to tell others about your brand or product: this is a critical engagement metric.

Smaller businesses might just ask customers how they learned of the business and try to keep track of trends in word-of-mouth referrals.

Content Engages

There’s one way to engage your customers more frequently and often more emotionally than any product on its own can do: with content.

Think about it: there are only so many people who will ever track their food or their finances consistently. There are only so many times in a day, week, month, or year that people can or will go sit in a workshop or class or buy an item from a given category of consumer goods, whether it’s food, paper products, or apparel.

But there is an activity that Transformational Consumers engage in on a near-constant basis, which creates literally millions of opportunities for brands to connect with them in a way that eases their transformational frictions, inspires them, and exponentially builds brand love even when the product is not in their presence.

Transformational Consumers Read, Watch, and Listen to Content about Their Aspirations, All Day, Every Day

And great content, it turns out, changes lives and drives engagement. The circle of Transformational Consumers who can and will consume well executed content about and for their own Aspirations on any given day is vastly larger than the circle who will engage with a given product or even content about the brand.

This brings us to how, precisely, you must rethink your marketing:

From: Beautiful stories about your brand

To: High-value content about and for your customers and their Aspirations

The Gospel of Content

Shortly after it was announced that MyFitnessPal was being acquired by Under Armour, I flew to Under Armour’s sprawling Baltimore campus to meet my new colleagues and brief them on our app, our community, and our programs.

En route to my first official Under Armour meeting, my tour guide walked me, in my uniform fit-and-flare dress, cashmere cardigan, and metallic sandals, through the company gym. I love a good workout and said so. She took great care to pinpoint the lower floor, to which I could see no access stairs, explaining, “If you want to get in or out, you climb the rope. Be careful to never work out so hard while you’re down there that you can’t get yourself back out.”

Noted.

En route to my first meeting, we entered a low-slung office building, passing the cafeteria and an indoor basketball court (with a game in progress). Next we passed an exact replica of one of the company’s brand stores, complete with the next season’s gear on the racks and Under Armour’s branded scent barely detectable as we walked by.

My guide dropped me off at a conference room, where a dozen gentlemen (all kitted out in Under Armour gear) rose to meet me. Chatting casually while we waited for everyone to arrive, their eyes darted back and forth between our conversation and an NBA game live-streaming on a laptop on the conference table.

To break the ice and start the meeting, someone suggested we go around the room and answer these questions: “What is your favorite piece of creative ever? And what do you love about it?” (To translate for those of you who don’t work in marketing, advertisers often use the term “creative” as a noun, meaning a work of commercial art, such as an ad, a video, or even text: copy.)

We went around the room, and people started telling about the ads they loved in their childhood, such as the “Be like Mike” campaign. Others shared campaigns that resonate strongly with them today, including Under Armour’s own acclaimed “I will what I want” campaign, in which the prima ballerina Misty Copeland reads excerpts from numerous balletschool rejection letters while video rolls showcasing her grace and athletic prowess.

Then it was my turn.

“Hi, guys. I’m Tara. I’m the VP of marketing for MyFitnessPal. Thanks for having me. My favorite piece of creative of all time is the Bible. It contains powerful narrative after powerful narrative, including a series of heroes’ journeys that are perfectly archetypal. I am obsessed with content that drives positive behavior change, and I don’t think there’s another example of a piece of content, copy really, that has driven so much behavior. And yes, some of it is negative, but massive amounts of it have been positive, too. It has inspired some of the greatest acts of mankind, the greatest kindnesses, the greatest personal-growth stories, and the most impactful works of art in human history.

“And it also inspires individual people to live their own hero’s journeys every day, millions and millions of times. Has for thousands of years. That’s a serious shelf life, when it comes to content. From a content perspective, it’s super long but also modular. In my work, we’re always concerned about getting content down to tiny increments, but the fact that this massive, long-form piece of content is able to be broken down into bite-sized bits like the verse ‘Jesus wept’ is really a masterful use of the written word.”

I looked around the room. I saw a lot of wide eyes, one or two puzzled looks, and maybe one or two thoughtful nods. Then I made one final comment: “I also love the ‘Hear What You Want’ ads for Beats by Dre, especially the Serena Williams one.”

Sometimes, you’ve gotta read the room.

Almost exactly one year later, I found myself in an office on the opposite coast of the country and on the opposite end of the look-and-feel spectrum from the Under Armour HQ. From the exterior, Pinterest’s red-brick facade fit more neatly into my mental schema for offices, located as it is right in my neck of the woods: start-up land, aka San Francisco’s South of Market (SOMA) district.

Pinterest is a tech company and like most tech companies has a majoritymale employee base. But the company is fixated on its users, most of whom are women. And everything about the company’s offices reveals that obsession, from the plywood-covered walls that are an ode to its customers’ love for making and DIYing to actual handicrafts of actual users that are showcased throughout the office.

It was there that I sat down to connect with my friend and colleague the Pinterest head of communications Christine Weil Schirmer. I had gone over to Pinterest to talk to Schirmer about a particular finding of our Transformational Consumer research, which revealed that there are a handful of content platforms that are particularly beloved and constantly used by Transformational Consumers. We had taken to calling them the Transformational Platforms, and the complete list went like this: Pinterest, Yelp!, Quora, reddit, Wikipedia, and of course, Google.

I shared our findings with Schirmer, Pinterest’s resident expert on the scale and substance of customer engagement on the platform. Then she shared with me some insight into the Pinterest platform and how Pinners engage with content.

Pinterest, it turns out, is not the Bible. But it does have a few things in common with the Bible, from a content perspective:

   Pinterest content has a crazy-long shelf life. Pinners actively engage with a piece of content on Pinterest for an average of 110 days after it comes onto the site. Contrast this with Twitter, for which the average shelf life of a tweet is closer to 30 minutes. Schirmer suggests that brands learn the characteristics of content that performs well on any platform that they’re going to invest in, before making the investment. Because of Pinterest’s extended shelf life, evergreen content outperforms newsy pins, by a lot.

   The platform has sweeping, global scale. Pinterest has 50 billion pins and one billion boards, and it grows both at the rate of 75%, year over year. So when they talk about what content works, they know of what they speak.

   The most engaging content holds sacred space for users’ real-life problems, dreams, and the things they want to do. The content that engages Pinners is like the most widely known biblical content in that it helps solve what Schirmer calls “meaningful daily problems for everyone on the globe”—content that answers questions that everyday people experience in their everyday lives, such as “What should I wear?” “What should I cook for dinner?” and “What should I do with my kids?” is the content Pinners care about and pin the most. ⁶

How to Create Content That Engages: Start with Your Customer’s Journey

That which matters most should never give way to that which matters the least.

—THE LULULEMON MANIFESTO

Engaging content is content that people care about, content that gets their attention, that captures their interest, and in best case scenarios, that they come back to, time and time again. Engaging content gets shared and goes viral. It causes people to open your emails and to click on the links in them, to read your blog again and again, to click on your Facebook links, to watch your YouTube videos, to like your Instagram posts.

I could write a million pages about how to develop engaging content strategies and how to optimize content for engagement. I won’t be doing that.

But I will provide you with a few principles that every engaging, transformational content strategy I’ve ever worked on, and have ever even seen, adheres to. I call them the Rules of Engagement.

One note before we dive into the Rules: don’t be daunted. Don’t fall prey to thinking you must master the endless parade of new social media channels and content formats in order to understand content marketing. Creating content that engages doesn’t start with the channels or the social media. Those are just the tools, and they come and go. That’s the part that matters the least. What matters the most is your customers and their journey.

Rules of Engagement

Rule #1: Engaging content is not beautiful messages about your brand; content that engages is high-value content that removes resistance and triggers progress along your customers’ journey. To transcend the transactional and create content that truly engages your customers, you must give up one of the most pervasive misconceptions about content and social media. The goal is not to publish stories about your brand, no matter how big, beautiful, or emotional they might be. There is a short list of things people care about, and stories about your brand are not on it.

Instead, create content about your customers and for their journey.

This doesn’t mean that your content can’t be beautiful, emotional, or entertaining. It doesn’t mean that your content can’t be stories about interesting people or places or things. And it doesn’t mean that every social media post, blog post, or video must be educational content and how-to material. In fact, the opposite is true.

It just means that the majority of the content you publish should fall within a story line that either alleviates the frictions your customers are experiencing as they try to create change or inspires and excites them about the possibilities for their lives. Remember, the role you play within your customers’ stories is the role of mentor, adviser, or tool.

It also means that most of your content should be about your customers (including people like them, whether or not they are using your product), their lives, and their issues. Your content should not primarily consist of pieces that tout or promote your product. While there will definitely be times you’ll need to publish blog posts that simply let people know about a new product or feature, my experience is that traffic to those sorts of content posts will get anywhere from 60% to 95% less traffic than high-value content does, when published to the exact same Transformational Consumer audience.

This is hard for some leaders to swallow, the idea that most of your content should not be about your product. But the data show the truth: most people won’t see your promotional content anyway. They don’t care about it, so they won’t click on it.

This doesn’t mean that people never want to hear about your product. It just means that most of your content should be beautifully executed, highvalue content that is effective at helping them on their transformational journeys, in ways that your product implicitly and, occasionally, explicitly facilitates. Think about a story everyone knows: the tale of the Three Little Pigs. No one tells the story from the perspective of the hammer. But the hammer is essential to the story and gets used nonetheless.

Rule #2: Customer journey + resistance and progress triggers + natural language = your evergreen message pillars. Engaging content strategies also feature recurring messages that collectively do two things:

1. They tell the big story of your customers’ transformation.

2. They imply or suggest the role that your brand and product play in that transformation.

I call these recurring messages “message pillars,” because they stay the same for long periods of time, they span across all of your content program, no matter the channel, and they build the foundation for how you or your team will execute individual content programs, campaigns, and even individual blog posts.

Every one of your message pillars should map back to something meaningful about the stages of your customers’ journeys or to some significant category of the things that get them stuck and unstuck. Your message pillars can be declarations, values, or beliefs and should incorporate your company’s broader vision. Think of message pillars as almost like a manifesto of sorts but for your content channels. Be bold and public about them and use them as a decision rule for what content to create and what not to.

One other note: it is ideal for you to incorporate your customers’ natural language into your message pillars and into the content you produce. At the journey-mapping stage, the power of natural language is that it gives you a vivid glimpse into the mental frames that your customers have around the problem you exist to solve and the mental frames they use when they try to solve it. When you’re trying to create message pillars and content, using your customers’ natural language back to them is like flicking an engagement switch in their minds.

My favorite case for using natural language comes from a what-not-to-do example. And this example comes from a grocery-store trip I took with my mom when I was nine or ten years old. As we walked through the produce section, I noticed the placard hanging above the collard greens. In fact, it said, “Collard Greens.” But beneath that, the copy read, “Main ingredient in traditional Black American hot salad.” Whoa. What? I was eight years old then. I am 40 years old now. I have been Black that whole time. And in those 40 years, never have I met a Black American who thinks of collard greens as salad. Collard greens are not salad! Side dish, main dish, even, but salad? Nope. (And I love salad. No offense, salad.)

The disconnect was hilarious then and is hilarious now. You have the luxury of being able to talk to your people and use their language back to them. So do that. If you don’t, trust me: they’ll remember.

Rule #3: Business objectives + micro-moments = which content to put where, when. Micro-moments tell you where online your customers tend to go at the points in their journeys when they want to know, go, do, or buy something to help them achieve their goals. This empowers you to put the right content for those stages of their journeys in the right places to reach them. Micro-moments suggest the nitty-gritty of how to execute your content programs.

This is not the simplest of exercises, in part because there are nearly endless types of content that you can create. Blog posts. Data visualizations, aka infographics. Interactive infographics. Data-based PR stories, such as surveys and study findings. Cities lists. Tips lists. Lists of what not to do. Listicles, generally. User success stories. Influencer posts. Expert thought leadership posts. Unboxing videos. Web video series. eBooks. Trend reports. Podcasts. Microsites. Email newsletters. Pinnable quotes and mantras.

Trust me when I say that I’m just getting started.

There are three fundamental factors that should line up for each piece of content and content campaign: medium, format, and substance:

   The medium (email, social media channels, PR, online portals, even search/seo, print) must be available to you and be one that customers are prone to consuming your type of content on. You can’t and shouldn’t be on every medium or channel, but you can and should try to be on as many as you can do well. It is worse for your brand to publish content lackadaisically or poorly than it is not to be on a channel at all. Also think about what medium you have unique access to, such as an email list or other way of reaching your customers.

   The format of the content should be optimal for the content itself, such as rich pins for your blog posts, blog posts for recipe roundups, and so on.

   The substance itself should solve frictions that your customers are experiencing. It should further specific objectives of the business and should be executed in accordance with high production values, your brand’s voice, and storytelling basics (see sidebar).

The place where all three of these overlap is small but golden: I call it the Transformational Consumer content marketing sweet spot (see figure 1).

Figure 1 The Transformational Consumer content marketing sweet spot

Rule #4: Ongoing listening + real-time content-performance data = engagement marketing. Customer research and online listening are not projects that end when the customer journey map is complete. Make them an ongoing practice. Treat all content marketing as lean marketing and build a discipline around monitoring whether and how your audiences are engaging with every piece of it. Then do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Any natural language patterns you spot will empower your teams to rapidly innovate new content topics and programs.

Rule #5: Content = R&D for product. At MyFitnessPal, our content program hit some remarkable customer-engagement milestones—and fast. We started in April, and by the following January, we had 50 million page views and 10 million unique monthly readers. We were able to increase the number of people who used the app on a given week by 22% and the number of people who used it in a given month by 24%.

We were reactivating around 500,000 lapsed users every week, just with content.

But with all that, the most exciting part of that process was that every team in the entire company was aligned around the same customer journey. So instead of us producing content about things the app couldn’t actually help with, the product and engineering teams built a set of recipe-logging tools, to make it easier for people to track food when they cooked at home. They built restaurant-logging tools to help people track their food (and stay within their nutrition goals) when they ate out. And the business development team spearheaded partnerships with restaurants and menu data sources.

The Power of Obstacle-Removing Content

Content that answers the healthy-living questions that people have is the cornerstone of Thrive Market’s marketing program. “We see content as marketing and marketing as content. They’re ubiquitously the same thing for us,” Gunnar Lovelace, co-CEO of Thrive Market, told me about the rocket-ship start-up’s approach to editorial and social media programs. Lovelace and I had been talking every few months since the Transformational Consumer–focused company launched in 2014, rapidly hitting milestones of scale on its “mission to make healthy living accessible and affordable to everyone.” ¹⁰

Thrive Market is a fee-based ecommerce platform that delivers over 4,000 healthy living, food, and household products to members at a 25%– 50% discount compared with retail. If Costco had a baby with Whole Foods and Amazon, Thrive Market would be the offspring.

In 2016, the company went from launch to $40 million in sales, hit two million site users, booked over 150,000 paid memberships, and gave away 150,000 free memberships to low-income families, students, teachers, and active military through its Thrive Gives program.

“What’s so interesting about health and wellness products is that access is a function of price, geography, and education,” Lovelace explained. To overcome the barrier of education, Lovelace explained, Thrive Market “provides content that informs, inspires, and educates people about health and wellness wherever they are in the conversation. There are consumers that are very educated about health and wellness, but there’s this huge wave of new consumers entering into the health and wellness conversation for the first time. We engage these people with content on more basic levels, with written and recipe and video content.”

Lovelace went on, “We cover things like how to read a label, how do carbs turn into sugar, and why you should care about green-engineered cleaning supplies. Content marketing is the right thing to do as a business, but it’s also the smart thing to do. It’s a huge investment on our part. We’ve got 15 people in our editorial team and hundreds of content creators that we manage. Our content drives a lot of engagement and value to our members. It makes us more than purely a product-based ecommerce platform.” Beyond creating value for members, Lovelace stands by the Thrive Market content program as a strategy that allows the company to connect and engage directly with its beloved customers. “A lot of people don’t know that the largest magazine in the country is Costco, with eight and a half million, in terms of the circulation. With the ability to get our content directly to consumers on the Internet, we’re now able to have conversations with them about issues that would have traditionally been edited, limited, or controlled by the advertiser interests on a traditional publisher network. Today we’re getting 15 million page views a month—and that’s growing very quickly. We expect to be a major voice long term around natural products in a way that helps shape the conversation and a way that protects and serves consumer interests long term.”

The numbers back him up. Thrive Market has, itself, thrived.

Your content and marketing can connect with your customers, too. Make it about them, not your brand, and follow the Rules of Engagement.