Three Examples of Qualitative vs Quantitative Marketing
CaJu’s ‘Fresh Picks’ 11 Newsletter - November 15th, 2024
A Housekeeping Mea Culpa
First and foremost, sorry for allowing some cobwebs to gather on this newsletter and I appreciate your patience with us while we get it back up and running at its previous cadence.
Recently we came to the United States with dual purposes in mind: Soliciting some clients and also visiting my parents.
For the entirety of CaJu’s existence, we’ve been based in Brazil. For the past couple of months, we’ve been speaking with small business owners around the Central Valley of California and there does seem to be a real need for marketing services here. Plenty of marketing is being done, but many of the local business owners I’ve spoken to feel as though they’re just going through the same motions as everybody else with their ad spends. Many have billboards, and most if not all purchase online ads, but very few feel as though they’re able to really let their story shine through their marketing spends. One real estate agent I spoke to recently said they feel a very serious animosity towards many others in their field because almost everyone they know is trying the same thing and getting the same results - almost nothing - and that forces them to fight over the small opportunities like rival starving hyenas fighting over bones.
The philosophy we’ve been trying to develop seeks to break through stagnation like this. Our approach to marketing centers around deviating from the norm and taking the time to weigh everything at someone’s disposal before crafting a strategy. The nice thing about a field where everyone seems to be doing the same thing is that any little bit of creativity can immediately set you apart from the rest and thoughtful, creative solutions are our bread and butter.
Today, to get you, our dear subscribers, up to speed on what we’ve had going on lately, I want to explore three things we’ve done lately that illustrate this approach to marketing. Simple and relatively easy things a person can do to make a big difference in their efforts with just a little bit of theory and half an hour’s worth of forethought.
Podcasts as Content Generators
Here was our problem: Being a two-person marketing company in its first year is not easy. We wear so many hats, I have recurring dreams about being a haberdasher. Seriously.
What that means is we are each an accountant, a sales representative, a social media manager, a CEO, a CMO, a CFO, etc. For a young business, the most important thing is outreach, and we didn’t want to let our brand identity stagnate on social media while we were focused on logistics.
What we needed was a way to very quickly generate a lot of content for social media which would help us elevate our brand as a source for educational marketing content as well as help organically advertise the business. We decided it was finally time to put our mouths where our money was and start a podcast.
I’ve mentioned this in previous newsletters, but one of my (Casey) previous careers was in podcast production. Writing, producing, editing, and selling podcasts is where the bulk of my experience lies. Podcasts are one of the best ways to establish yourself as a thought leader while at the same time increasing your brand loyalty through authenticity and, in the process, generating dozens of pieces of content for social media through a single hour-long conversation.
With that said, I’d like to introduce you to CaJually an as-of-yet YouTube-exclusive video podcast that discusses our company’s content pillars of Digital Marketing, Content Production, and Data Analysis in a casual (Get it?) and laid-back format that is both entertaining and educational.
Every episode consists of both Júlia and myself bringing a conversational topic to the table. So each episode you get a prepared and off-the-cuff reaction to two different topics. You can check out our episodes above! The first episode explored a little bit of our career background as well as what we see as the difference between active and passive social media use. The latest episode covers practical tips for creatives in full-time positions as well as how to know when you and a potential client are a good match.
Not to give you one more thing to subscribe to, but if you enjoy this newsletter, you’ll almost certainly enjoy the podcast as well.
A Qualitative Approach to Business Cards
As mentioned, while here in the Central Valley, we decided to not waste the opportunity and to try soliciting some local businesses to see if any were a good fit for our unique perspective on marketing.
We wanted to be able to hand out more than just business cards to potential clients. We wanted something that objectified our ethos and our approach to semiotic storytelling. Something someone could look at that conveyed that we are thoughtful without needing to do too much talking.
Enter the seed envelope. First, I’ll tell you exactly what it is, then I’ll tell you the thinking behind its design, and then I’ll tell you what it is supposed to unconsciously convey.
First, its form. Each envelope is a small coin envelope only slightly larger than a standard business card. Using square stickers, we placed our logo on one side and a tagline along with a QR code to our website on the reverse side. Upon opening the envelope, one gets a standard business card containing our contact information, but someone who opens the envelope will also discover a handful of wildflower seeds.
We wanted the aesthetics of the envelope to match the location we’re in. The Central Valley of California is a world-renowned agricultural production area. When you look at the small shops and restaurants in the area, they reflect those themes. Rustic, farm-related objects adorn the walls of cafes and bars and the area boasts a huge Mexican-American cultural inheritance. Before coming to the design table, these are the aspects we wanted to keep in mind.
The texture of the envelope is a rustic shade of brown and the wildflowers not only speak to the agricultural mode of the area but also symbolically our eagerness to create something with our clients. They also have the added bonus of giving the envelopes themselves a delightful noise when shaken. The seeds themselves are a small investment, but one that powerfully illustrates our point and one the people we handed the envelopes to really seemed to appreciate even if they didn’t end up giving us a call right away.
We’ve had a really good response to the envelopes and we also think they’re an amazing example of a simple elevation of a traditional concept that takes the original to a higher conceptual level without a ton of additional labor. Our wheelhouse.
The envelopes serve to symbolically illustrate our marketing philosophy while at the same time nudging the receiver into further action. Not only have we given them a gift for free, we’re urging them to learn more. A closed envelope begs to be opened. Rejecting our business card would involve throwing away the gift of the seeds, something most are not likely to do. In giving them a small task (the planting of the seeds), a receiver is obliged to do one of two things. A: Throw away/ ignore the envelope or B: Plant the seeds. If A, no problem. People throw away business cards all the time and we think the inclusion of seeds on the inside reduces the probability per card of it getting thrown away. If B, then the action of planting the seeds increases the chances of a receiver remembering our interaction. If the plants take and grow, then every time they see the plants, they will think of us and our interaction.
I once heard it said that the best way to get to know your neighbors is to ask them for a favor. It’s an interaction dictated on your terms, but which begs further interaction as favors begat favors. Giving away a little something for free has been a bedrock of marketing for 100 years. Why? Because it similarly begs further interaction. See Claude C. Hopkins’ “Scientific Advertising.” Someone given something for free does feel a small debt that needs to be repaid. Or at the very least are more likely to interact further than someone not given something for free.
It’s still too early to tell yet if the envelopes will be a long-run success, but just based on recent anecdotal feedback, they’re already paying off in brand awareness and brand priority reinforcement for only a slight increase to the costs compared to traditional business cards. Statistically, if $30 buys you 300 business cards and they give you a 1% call-back rate, then the $45 spent for the seed envelopes + business cards for a 10% call-back rate seems worth it.
Again, just a small amount of increased theoretical consideration is enough to increase the quality of your output as opposed to paying more money in order to increase quantity. It’s the eternal battle of time vs money. Right now we prefer to put the extra work in, that might not always be the most efficient option, but it’s right for us currently.
Any marketer will tell you, all marketing is purely a numbers game. You can either try to increase the quantity of your outreach or the quality. We’ve opted for the latter here.
Our Data Analysis Explainer Series
Lastly, I wanted to mention that we’re starting a new educational video series on Data Analysis on Instagram and TikTok that will have launched by the time this newsletter is released.
Our plan with these videos is to educate on some of the simple ways in which data analysis can make small businesses more efficient and teach owners about their customers and their customer’s preferences without a ton of effort.
At the same time, a great additional bonus of organic content is not only giving our followers on social media something that will help them with their businesses for free (See above section for the benefits of free gifts) but also reinforcing CaJu Creative’s services while positioning us as experts in the field.
That is why we lean so heavily into content marketing. You can spend a ton of time, effort, and money building amazing ads and promoting them on social media, and most people are still going to scroll past them because most people don’t enjoy being sold to. If you place the same advertising proposals inside of useful content, people will listen to what you have to say and consider your products and services for much longer than they’ll willingly watch an ad, assuming said content gives them something for free e.g. education.
I’ve personally already invested in learning and honing my Data Analysis skills in yet another of my previous careers. While taking stock of everything at our disposal before starting our business, those skills were very much at play. That’s why education is such a versatile investment. The value of the labor expended on that education carries forward into the value of your future labor. Even being able to talk about the skills themselves as opposed to performing the skills is an asset. It can often be a lucrative content strategy converting that educational or skillset investment into a more calcified piece of content.
All that to say it is possible to convert a service skillset into a series of digital products through the power of content production. For example, a plumber or an electrician sells a service. They’re only paid when they perform that service. This, per hour, is typically more expensive than, say, mass-produced products, but that premium comes at the expense of time. Content Production is one of the few ways in which it is relatively easy to take those services that require performance and convert them into products that provide value autonomously. The plumber and the electrician, for example, can create courses and educational content in which they educate or explain why their services are so important. The products then promote the services and the services promote the products in turn. They do this by simply discussing the services they’ve already invested in educating themselves on. That education has already increased the value of their services and through Content Production that value can be further congealed into digital products which create additional value without further time or monetary investment.
The bottom line is that organic branded content needs to ultimately give the viewer/listener something they can take away for free. That’s the transaction. In exchange for their time, they learn about Data Analysis from us. It’s important that whatever information a viewer is being offered is worth at least the amount of time they spend consuming it, otherwise they may feel cheated. If it’s worthwhile, when they think about Data Analysis from then on, they’ll think of us. We get something and they get something. The viewer also gets the better end of the deal as it takes comparably much less labor to watch a video than it takes to create one - but they don’t need to know that. They also don’t need to spend the time researching their own education or money paying for courses, we’ve fronted both those monetary and temporal costs.
They might even watch our video and then say to themselves “Wow, Data Analysis seems useful, but I don’t have the time to invest in educating myself further on it.” Rather than spend a lot of time and money learning it, they’ll save time and money simply by hiring someone they know is knowledgeable in Data Analysis to do it for them; someone they know is knowledgeable, someone top of mind, someone like us.
So make sure that you’re subscribed to CaJu Creative on Instagram and TikTok so you don’t miss any of the videos we have planned for that educational series.
I guarantee you’ll learn something, or the video is free!
Until next time, stay fresh.
- Casey