The death of marketing playbooks
The death of marketing playbooks
Marketing Powerups #79: Marc Thomas, Senior Growth Marketer at Podia, shares his RINse and Repeat marketing framework.
Hello, and welcome to Marketing Powerups! šš½
Today's powerups include:
A guide to building content strategy with AI.
10 common storytelling mistakes that you should avoid.
Marc Thomasā anti-playbook āRINse and Repeatā framework.
Ready? Let's go! āļø
š How to delight your customers
Delighting customers is one of those things that are hard to measure. But when you get it right, everything about your business improvesāan increase in word-of-mouth referrals, a boost in retention, and an edge over competitors.
Iāve chatted with marketing, growth, and product leaders at companies like Mailchimp, Zappos, HubSpot, and Chewy, who have seen this firsthand.
Iām sharing everything Iāve learned from those conversations in a webinar about customer delight and innovation Iām hosting with Airfocus. On Thursday, March 21, at 11 am ET, weāll be covering:
Why customer delight is a strategic imperative for success.
The four main principles that underpin customer delight.
Firsthand accounts of teams that have transformed customer delight from a concept into a reality.
Plus, Iām sharing a template to help you delight your customers.
ā Save your spot for this delightful webinar.
Register anyway if you canāt make it, and weāll send you the replay afterward.
āļø Marc Thomas' RINse and Repeat marketing framework
With how quickly things are changing in tech, marketing playbooks are quickly becoming relics.
Just think about itāin the last 12 months alone, we've seen the rise of AI, significant layoffs, the emergence of generative search, and constant tweaks to social media algorithms. It's like trying to hit a moving target with a blindfold!
āItās time to burn your marketing playbooks,ā says Marc Thomas, Senior Growth Marketer at Podia and creator of the Positive Human newsletter.
Heās come up with the RINse and Repeat framework to drive growth and create creative campaigns in this post-playbook era.
1. Relate deeply with customers.
The first critical step is building a rich understanding of your customers and market. Too often, people say you should do customer research but donāt explain how or what to do with the insights.
Marc takes a narrow-to-broad-to-narrow approach. Hereās how that works:
Define a clear scope for your research tied to a business challenge, such as increasing trial signups from email marketing. Then, start quantitatively by surveying customers to segment them on metrics like past email platforms used. This helps identify the most relevant participants for qualitative interviews later.
Conduct open-ended interviews to uncover backstories. Ask wide-ranging questions like āHow did you get started with email marketing?ā and āWhat role does it play in your business now?ā Avoid leading questions. Instead, let customers guide the conversation to uncover unexpected themes.
After interviews with 20+ people, rigorously code transcripts to extract themes and insights. Do this by creating a spreadsheet of potential topics and tallying interviewee quotes and sentiments. See what themes bubble up organically.
Finally, build a survey to validate key qualitative insights across your entire customer base quantitatively. This grounds themes in statistically significant data. Synthesize both data streams into customer reports, fueling messaging and product decisions.
āThis narrow-to-broad-to-narrow approach lets you develop a rich pulse on customersā needs versus superficial pains. It builds real customer intuition through a mix of quantitative and qualitative inputs.ā
2. Ideate creative campaigns.
Armed with the latest customer insights, generate novel ideas for campaigns that capture attention in new ways.
As Marc advised, āDonāt limit yourself to the same worn-out channels because you know their cost-per-click or conversion rates. This is the post-playbook era.ā
Ideation is about breaking through creative blocks to unlock new directions. Marc shared how a joke about "Creative Juice" turned into a sponsored creator. While silly at first, it evolved into an innovative sponsored video with the Plant-Based Cooking Show, a popular YouTube channel and blog, crafting a purple smoothie while discussing Podiaās offering.
This massively increased Podiaās reach and built real affinity with niche audiences far beyond their existing referral traffic.
"You have to get smart and experimental to place yourself in front of net new audiences. Keep pushing creative boundaries to growth-hack attention."
3. Narrate the impact.
Lastly, avoid over-indexing on conversion metrics that often under or overstate campaign success today.
āItās ineffective to ask whether it simply worked or not in a black-and-white way. Instead, build a narrative blended with qualitative quotes and quantitative data at varying confidence levels.ā
For example, with the Creative Juice Smoothie campaign, they shared customer testimonials declaring purchase intent. Supplement with directional metrics like viewers and site visitors. And incorporate any available attribution reporting.
Leaning solely on cost per conversion over-simplifies and misses the mark, given reduced tracking. Holistically nurturing attention and affinity now drives viral lift over time.
Rinse & Repeat
The RINse and Repeat framework is an ongoing process to solve evolving business challenges. Constantly re-immerse yourself in customersā realities. Brainstorm inventive engagements that pierce attention clutter. And tell compelling stories blending signals to illustrate impact. Avoid stagnant playbooks. Instead, keep rinsing and repeating to sustain relevance.
Free powerups cheatsheet š
Iāve created a powerups cheatsheet exclusively for Marketing Powerups subscribers to apply Marc Thomas' RINse and Repeat Marketing Framework.
ā Download and make a copy of it here (a direct link with no email required).
In the latest Marketing Powerups episode, Marc further explains his RINse and repeat framework.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcast and Spotify now, or watch it on YouTube.
āØ Mini powerups
Fun-sized tools, links, and blurbs to boost your marketing.
š ļø For Godās sake, follow the Lean Startup Method (article):
By applying the Lean Startup method to marketing campaigns, you can optimize for learning and iterate your way to success. In this article, Enzo Avigo, founder of June.so, shares the myths about this method and how you can apply it to a startup.
š¤ A guide to building a content strategy with AI (guide):
Cailin Hathaway, Audience and SEO strategist at MVF, built this actionable guide full of ChatGPT prompts and resources to help you create a content strategy using LLMs and AI.
ā 10 mistakes that are killing your story (and how to avoid them) (LinkedIn post):
Nathan Baugh, the creator of the storytelling-focused newsletter World Builders, has made every mistake in the book, from writing fiction to blog post content. He shares the top 10 common ones and how to avoid them in the future.
Thatās all for now, friends!
Have a powered-up day,
Ramli John
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