MFG #05: OKRs, Twitter Engagements, Holiday Marketing and more
Making New Year resolutions you'll actually stick to, why you're not getting great engagement on Twitter, and how to do holiday marketing right.
Hi there.
Happy new year! The last few months have been rocky and packed, and I suspect this has been the case for you as well. 2022 was an interesting year for me and I’m working to make sure 2023 beats it.
Let's dive in!
🔑1 Interesting Thing
The new year always comes with new resolutions, many of which are discarded a few months into the year. I only had one resolution for last year — to learn carpentry — and towards the end of the year, I concluded that I had failed to meet it.
However, after doing some reflection in the past month, I realised that my resolution wasn’t actually a total bust. I had taken some steps like buying wooden pallets to make a pallet bed frame for myself, and I had begun the process by sandpapering the pallets, but that was where it ended. I realised it was tough to measure the success of that resolution because I hadn’t set any milestones or outlined clear steps to help me achieve those milestones.
I’m not making the same mistake this year. Rather than setting new year resolutions, I have decided to take a leaf from corporate handbooks and set OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). This year, I will be testing the effectiveness of personal OKRs versus new year resolutions.
I have realised goals can also be more effective when they are shared with other people who can hold you accountable to them. Obviously, I won’t share my personal OKRs here. Instead, I’ll share some of the OKRs I have set for Marketing For Geeks for this year and hope you help me stick to them.
💭3 Insights
#1. The best product feedback you’ll get is from your competitors’ loyalists
Last month, I spent almost two weeks conducting and analysing discovery interviews for a couple products. Interviews like those help me figure out who the ideal customer profile is, what patterns exist in their behaviours, specific pain points they experience, what product features could help solve those pain points, and what messaging would resonate with them the most.
Most of the discovery interviews I had done in the past were for products still in beta or that hadn’t achieved wide adoption. This time, I was conducting interviews for a very widely-known unicorn product, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
By the end of the interviews, I realised the most useful insights I got were from two sections of people: churned users and loyalists of competing products. Even more interesting, those two sections of people largely overlapped — the churned users were driving into the welcoming hands of competitors.
Here’s why this category of people is the best to speak to.
As users of your competitors’ products, they are most likely to fit your ideal customer profile.
They are very aware of the problems they face and have explored solutions to help them solve them.
They can tell you why your product didn’t solve their problem or/and how your competitors help them solve the problem.
They can tell you exactly what your competitor did to make them stay.
P.s. If you want to go a step further, have them do recorded or live tests of your product so you can see your funnel leaks in real-time.
#2. Twitter is the worst (mainstream) social platform for brand engagement
If you’re like me, you might have already noticed many brands run from Twitter and prefer to post content on Instagram and Facebook. Because Twitter is my primary social media platform, I’ve always encouraged brands to expand the scope of their social media content to include Twitter, but it was difficult to make a case for it because brands just don’t get as much engagement on Twitter as they do on other social media platforms.
This was initially surprising to me because virality and engagement are literally built into the way Twitter works. However, after some time, the problem became obvious to me. Twitter is one of the few social media platforms where post interactions have public consequences. When you like, retweet, or comment on a tweet, it is immediately visible on your public profile. On the other hand, on Instagram or TikTok, I can like a post with no real consequence to me — no one can see my liked posts unless I let them — and my comments aren’t visible from my profile.
This means people are a lot more thoughtful about what content they interact with on Twitter. This also means brands need to put a lot more effort into what content they put on Twitter, and most brands just aren’t willing to put in that work. A simple “Happy New Month” visual simply won’t cut it on Twitter because the bar for content and cost of interaction is a lot higher.
#3. No one cares about most holiday messages from brands
Every holiday, people all around the world are flooded with holiday messages from loved ones…and brands. The truth is; no one cares about your “Happy New Year from all of us at xxx” message, and your message will likely get lost in the mix. Holiday wishes are nice if you just want to tick an item off your content list and don’t care about making a meaningful impact on your audience.
However, if you do care about creating useful or impactful content for your audience, then holiday marketing can be an absolute goldmine. The most memorable holiday messages from brands are messages that are useful, meaningful, or personalised. Here’s what I mean:
Useful: Holiday marketing can be great for showing how your product fits naturally into your users’ lives and helps them solve problems. For example, brands like Pocket or Flutterwave (marketplace apps) can create Christmas messaging that includes ideas for Christmas gifts that you can get from their vendors.
Meaningful: Some holidays hold deeper meaning than others and simple surface-level messaging won’t cut it. Even for controversial holidays (e.g. religious holidays), you can find non-controversial meaning to celebrate. Ramadan is about sacrifice and generosity. Christmas is about family. Say Merry Christmas with messaging that harps on these truths. Don’t just say “Happy Women’s Day” or “Happy Pride.” Speak to the truth of these days.
Personalised: Personalisation goes beyond using first names in emails. Your customers will give you so much information about themselves over their lifecycle with your product and you need to personalise their experience to fit this. The most basic example of this is sending a happy birthday message on their birthdays. You can personalise even further. I have a great example from some work I did for a bank’s internal Women’s Day emails in 2021. We crafted tailored emails for their entry-level, mid-level, and senior-level female staff with messages that fit their current work level. It was a hit.
It should go without saying that you can’t possibly celebrate all the holidays. You need to do the work of screening what holidays are meaningful to your customers that intersect with your brand’s values.
⚡5 Pieces of Marketing
#1. New Year email from Zenith Bank👎🏽
#2. New Year email from Notion👍🏽
#3. New Year email from Cowrywise👍🏽
#4. New Year’s Eve email from Alat👎🏽
Great idea, poor execution
#5. New Year email from Air Peace👎🏽
A little about you
I’m on a quest to know more about my subscribers, so every month, I’ll have a random question here to help me know a little about you. Don’t worry, it’s completely anonymous. This month’s question:
What I Read Last Month
How to make yourself, your story and your work more believable? — Tips so your social proof claims are more believable.
Virality is a myth (mostly) — Your content can tick all the boxes on the viral marketing checklist (I shared in a previous issue) and still not go viral. This article tells you why.
How to design your brand to feel safe, or exciting — The structure of your brand designs can determine how it’s perceived.