Episode 57: Why This Single Word is Everything in Digital Marketing

Context is the secret sauce that's going to make your message hit the way that you intend it to hit. So whether you're selling a product, sharing a story, or just having a conversation with a friend, understanding the environment, the timing, and the people you're talking to can make all of the difference. Welcome to the Start Tiny Podcast. I'm your host, Ali bjork. And in 2019, I launched my first ever tiny offer for $27 and have since generated over $5 million in revenue. After starting an industry wide low ticket revolution, I've been helping other entrepreneurs launch and scale their own tiny offers. And on this podcast, we pull back the curtain on exactly how they're doing it so that you can do it too. What is up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Start Tiny show. And today I am doing a solo episode and I'm going to be diving into one of my favorite words of marketing. And it is a word that I haven't heard taught by anyone else. And I didn't even realize it was so key to everything until I started realizing how often I say this single word. It's impacted my marketing campaigns, it's impacted my sales, it's impacted my relationships. It's the single thing that has helped me to be able to generate millions of dollars on the Internet, right? So this word is really impactful to me. And it was something that I didn't. Now it's almost annoying because I hear how often I say it. It wasn't until somebody on my team pointed it out to me. I was in Florida with one of my team members and we were out to dinner and she made a comment like, oh, I just, I've learned so much working with you. And I was, you know, kind of like, oh, give me all the compliments, right? Like, what have you learned? I want to know what your biggest takeaways are and what, you know, what are you seeing that I'm not seeing? Like many of you, I probably struggle to see my own greatness or struggle to see how anybody could learn anything from me. Right? Like that humble nature. Not imposter syndrome, necessarily. But I think a lot of you maybe understand that if somebody said, oh, I've learned so much from you, you'd be like, what? Really? That's my reaction, too. So I, I was, you know, prodding her a little bit more and I was like, well, like what? What have you learned? I want to know what has stood out? What am I missing? And she said, what? I've learned the most from you since starting to work for you. She started with me in March is she said the power of context. Like, everything is about context. And I sat there and I was, you know, I don't know if any of you have watched Willy Wonka, the new one, where they have, like, the ha moment and then a double huh. We always talk about that on the team. Like, huh? Like, oh, it's a Wonka huh. So I looked at her and I, like, you know, tilted my head and I was like, huh? Really? So then she started explaining it, and I was like, that totally makes sense, because so often when she asks a question, I. The first thing I ask is, well, what is the context? Like, she has a sales question for me or she has a marketing question. The first thing I want is the context. So, like, tell me the where the client was before reaching out to us. Tell us where they're at right now. Like, I want to hear their story. I want to hear where they are with things. I want to hear their thoughts, their fears. Like, what is the context? And I realized after her saying that to me, after Franzi said that to me, and after just listening to myself talk, I was like, oh, my gosh. I say context, like daily. I say it on my coaching calls. I say it with my team, I say it with my family. And it's not just like, what's the context of this person? But it's like, what is the context for the marketing campaign? What is the context for why this is important or why we're creating this? The context. So the very definition of context, I had to look it up just so I could make sure I explain it well. The context is the environment or circumstances that surround an event, a statement or an idea. It's the why and the where behind how something happens. And when it comes to marketing, it's not just what you're saying, but it's where and when you're saying it and who you're saying it to. So when I see campaigns or tiny offers that fall flat, it's because the context is wrong. And it's not what the person needs. It's not saving them time. It's not really speaking to their biggest pain points, because the context is wrong. So the example that I came up with is if you're telling someone they can ditch the diet, like, if you're a health coach and that's your tiny offer, it might be empowering for somebody who's tired of diet culture, right? So that would have to fit your ideal client. But if you say that to someone else, who's maybe recovering from a health scare or where food restrictions were necessary, it might feel like it's insensitive. So context can also change from person to person and it also changes how your message is received. So the reason why context matters so much in the marketing world is because it affects how well your message is going to resonate with your audience. So you can have the best copy in the world, but if it's placed in the wrong context, it's not going to work. And context can also be multi layered. That's where this gets really interesting is because there's the individual context of the person that you're speaking to, but then there's also cultural or societal context and even specific moments in time. That's also a layer of context. So one example of context in marketing is my tiny offer method that I teach. If I were to pitch a $27 offer to a high level business owner with a multimillion dollar company, it's probably not going to land as effectively for what else I could help them accomplish, right? Like when I work with multimillion dollar brands and I've got clients who make $25 million a year, which is when I work with them, they don't want some plug and play templates. They want someone who's going to be an expert in their team and somebody who can come in and just do it for them and make sure that it's done well with the context that I have for having done this for lots of other brands, they're not wasting time, right? So everything, everything, everything is context. The other way you can think about this and understanding why context is so important when you're building your personal brand is that if you want to teach people to sell what they know, which by the way, I'm making a free course about that, you have to be aware of where your audience is currently at. So the context for me for creating a free course about how to sell what you know is that I, I talk to a lot of people in my Instagram DMs, I talk to, you know, I talk to almost everybody. I can can speak to anyone who's around me about tiny offers, but I'm realizing it's not, it doesn't make sense for people if they haven't figured out how to package their thing or how what their expertise even is or what they could monetize online or how they could build a personal brand around what they know. So want to, I'm in this season. Maybe you've seen it. Cause I have A different free course about tiny offers. But I'm in this season of business where I want to make more impact and I want to help more people. And I was just talking to my team about this right before I came on and recorded this podcast that I want. I want to do it for free. And for a while I was anti freebies because I was in a different season. Now I want to make an impact on people, not just to grow my email list, but to save them from spending money on garbage that they don't need because they can learn it from me for free. And when they're ready to, you know, get accountability coaching, they can join my membership or they can join my group coaching program. But I'm going to teach. I'm going to start teaching a lot of tactics for free. I got real pissed off when I saw a lot of the MRR stuff coming out and excuse my language, but I'm going to also start swearing more because I swear in real life. So sorry, but this is authentically me. And. And you know what? That's just what we're going to get. So when I started seeing so many people almost being preyed upon with this MRR stuff, and I say preyed upon because I've spoken to a lot of people on the other side that told me, you know, it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. It was way harder than they made it sound. I feel like I poured all this money into it and I'm just like, I'm not. It's not working and I don't know how to make it work. And I. My heart just broke for people because they were sold something with the right intention. Their goal was they wanted to make a living online. They wanted to be able to sell courses and build a brand and be a digital marketer. And I am a digital marketer. I have been for 15 years, so. Rant. So when I saw people being sold this dream of like, you just have to sell this course and you're a digital marketer and you're going to make all these millions of dollars on the Internet and sell this course and then get other people, you know, it's. It was very disheartening to me to see something that I'm super passionate about, which is digital marketing, feel like it was inauthentic or feel like it was something other than what I've known it to be and what I love it to be. But when I talk to people who bought into MRR and weren't successful and, you know, like we're, we're talking about selling and making money online, having never made a dollar online. My what I wanted to shake people by their shoulders and say is that you need a brand first. You need to start building your personal brand and then use these tools to be able to, you know, package it up and be able to sell something. But if the reason it wasn't working for so many people is because they, they weren't established enough for anyone to even see the things that they were promot promoting, that's the context, right? That's why I didn't like it. So personal brand in context is that you have to be aware of where your, your audience is, is at. So if they're complete beginners who have no idea what their niche is or they're just interested in the idea of making money online, tiny offers aren't going to make sense for those people yet because they need to know what their tiny offer is going to be about. They need to know who they can help, who they can serve. They need to know what they can even package up and sell, right? So I had this idea based on that context to create the sell what you know course that's free and it's going to help people get into this world and figure out, you know, oh, I love gardening. You could create a gardening tiny offer and a brand, oh, I love to make sourdough or I love to do this and like be able to turn what it is that you love and what you know into an online brand and teach that for free so that my other stuff makes sense. So that's coming. I'm excited about that. But back to this word context. Your messaging, your offers and even your tone will change based on the context of who you're speaking with. I said pissed off earlier, right? That's going to turn off people that are offended by swearing. But people who are offended by swearing probably come into my program and at some point I'm going to say something that's maybe swearing or I may have a client in there that's swearing and they're going to be offended and they're not going to be happy to be there. So the context, even on this podcast of me showing up and being authentically me is going to attract clients that are a better fit, that are more in alignment with who I am and who I show up as in my coaching and in my long term client relationships. The more authentic the context is that I will attract people who are, are more likely to enjoy being around me for a long time. Right. If I'm somebody fake online or I'm trying to copy other people's messaging and other people's branding and I'm vanilla and I don't. You like, I'm not the weird, quirky person that I am. There's a lot of boring marketers out there. There's a lot of people teaching this stuff. You know, like, the context is that I'm going to show up and, and hopefully will benefit me in the long run, that I'm going to attract people who are a better fit. So some different real world examples of context in marketing campaigns that you might recognize from the last handful of years. One that I came up with was back in 2019, there was a Peloton holiday ad. And let me know if you guys remember this, because I was super offended by it. Even though it was targeting. I mean, like, I wanted a Peloton at the time. And then I saw the ad and I was so turned off by it that it actually ruined it for me. So this is the story. So Peloton released an ad where a woman is gifted a Peloton bike by her husband for Christmas. And the ads intended, it wanted. The context of what Peloton thought it was creating was that it was going to showcase a fitness journey. But the context of the entire ad was off. So viewers were criticizing the message. They interpreted it that it was implying the woman needed to lose weight or improve herself based on her husband's approval or her husband's desire. And it wasn't the right cultural moment for that type of messaging. There is a ton of body positivity happening and body image. And the backlash for Peloton was huge. So it led to a huge drop in Peloton stock price. It was a sharp drop. And the company failed to consider the social context of how their message might be received, despite their good intentions. So if you think about context, context culturally of the, you know, body positivity movement that was going on and, you know, like even body neutral movement that was going on and then this, this ad being released that like, women need to show up in a certain way so that they're valuable for the men in their lives. Like, it was just so. It was so off and it was, it was reflected in their stock price. So, I mean, that's. That's an example of context, right? So another one was a recent misstep from burger King in 2021 where they had a tweet that said, women belong in the kitchen. Again, these are. I don't know why these are all like female examples, but here we go. So this was part of a campaign to promote female chefs in a male dominated industry. So they wanted to show that women had leadership jobs in, you know, they should have leadership jobs being chefs. But when you take the context of just that tweet of saying women belong in the kitchen, in this movement where we're, you know, people are really sensitive and they're paying attention and they're sometimes taking things out of context and just having that single tweet, it sounded like a super sexist remark. So the rest of the campaign was aimed to address gender inequality and professional kitchens. But the shock value of that opening tweet didn't hit. It wasn't appreciated. And that context, received in isolation, it wasn't considered. And the backlash, it came, it led to an apology and deletion of the tweets. And they totally missed the mark by not thinking about, okay, the context of this campaign is that we're going to start with this tweet and then we're going to, you know, like, blow, blow everything else out of the water and we're going to get attention and they're going to see the whole picture of what we're talking about. But context, people saw that tweet and they freaked out. So when I think about context when it comes to email marketing or even social media marketing or podcasts, everything for me happens in isolation. I'm going to assume when you listen to a podcast, you've never listened to a different podcast of mine. If you see a reel of mine, I'm going to assume you've never seen other context. When you send out an email, assume that is happening in isolation. The context for people who are getting your emails is that they're probably, maybe they're checking their phone in the pickup line, maybe they are, you know, running errands and they just happen to pop their email out up, open while they're standing in line at the grocery store. They're not, they're not sitting there waiting for your email. They're not like, oh, gosh, I hope, I hope this brand emails me today. I can't wait. I hope it. Unless you're like launching and you've teased it appropriately and now people are excited for you to open cart or something, most of the time people don't know your emails coming. So when you email and you create context for them and you say, like, oh, I haven't sent an email in a while, I'm sorry I disappeared. You guys have been so busy. Like, people don't know that you don't need to create that context for them. You just show up and you're excited for them, are excited that they're opening and reading your email. Like you're excited to be connected. That's the context. So there's, there's context in advertising. You could assume people have no idea who you are. There's context in like, everything is a story, everything has to create its own context when it comes to digital marketing because there's so much noise and there's so many opportunities for people to be distracted. So, so I, when I think about every email that I send, it's kind of starting from the top, almost reintroducing the concept of tiny offers and why they're important. And same with reels and same with my ads. Like I'm always thinking about, if someone is meeting me virtually for the first time, is this going to make sense? Am I going to, like, how are they going to know they're in the right place? How are they going to know that I'm the right person for them to help them build funnels or run ads or get leads for free from their ads? Cause they're paying for themselves. Like, how are they going to know that I'm that person for them? And creating that context is like one of the biggest, biggest things that I think I've subconsciously uncovered. And maybe I should write a book called Context. Like, let me know if this is resonating. Like, if you guys think this is interesting, send me a DM if you've ever thought about this, because maybe now you will think about it. But to zoom out and think about real life and you think about how context applies in our real, actual human lives, the IRL version of what we're all doing online, right? When you think about relationships, if you're trying to give advice to a friend who's going through a breakup, for example, the way you phrase things might depend on whether they're still in the middle of the breakup or if they're a few months out from the breakup and starting to heal. So the words you use, the tone you take, even the timing of when you have the entire conversation, you know that context changes everything. So if you say, say you're a parent and I know many of you listening are parents, you know that the way you talk to your 3 year old about picking up their toys is going to be very different than how you talk to your 10 year old about doing it. So again, it's context. Even the action that you want so even if it's cleaning up is the same, you want your 3 year old to pick up their toys or you want your 10 year old to pick up their room. Even if the end result is the same, the cleaning up is the end result, you're going to deliver the message completely differently to a 3 year old than you will to a 10 year old. So think about applying context in your business. Here's your homework. Here's where we get into the action. Taking part of context Back to marketing. When you start thinking more intentionally about the context that you're creating in your business, there are three practical steps that I want to share with you. So if you know your audience's current situation, think about where they are in, in their journey. I'm going to talk to someone who doesn't know what they sell yet a lot differently than the $25 million a year companies that I work with. There's going to be completely different contexts in those scenarios. So a beginner is going to need different messaging than someone who's more advanced. And you can use things like surveys or even conversations and market research to gather this intel. Someone who joins our membership is going to be in a completely different place than someone that is buying our VIP done for you service. So I have to speak to people who are coming into the membership with a lot more encouragement, a lot more empathy, a lot more just love for where they're at in their business. If I talk to someone in that tone or in that like supportive, empowering nature who's already doing, you know, six figures a month, they're going to be like what? Like I feel like you're maybe talking down to me right now. Even though context wise like you, you need the encouragement when you're just trying to start. But it wouldn't feel right, it wouldn't fit right when you're, you're in like super growth scaling mode. So also understanding the cultural context. So stay aware of what's happening in your industry and in the world. If there are shifts in trends, values, societal norms that you need to consider, like even, even global, global, not global, even national weather news, I, that's very top of mind right now because of the hurricanes that just went through Florida. And you have a risk of sounding tone deaf if your clients are, you know, in the middle of a totally terrible disaster and you are trying to email them about business. So the context for them, it's not the right time. I just, I'm in a bunch of real estate groups because I'm also a real estate investor and someone was posting about, about buying houses in the, in like the path of the hurricane. And all the responses were like, dude, this is really insensitive. Like, you need to like, wait, equate a couple weeks before you start trying to gobble these houses up or you're trying to like pitch people on buying their homes. And. But other people, other people were like, yeah, who knows, maybe they don't want to deal with the cleanup and they can just sell it to this guy and he's going to fix it up and they're done, right? So understanding the context of what people are experiencing and knowing that if there are different ways that something can be open for interpretation, you've just got to be prepared to be able to speak to both sides or get backlash from the side that you're not wanting to work with. Finally adjusting for timing in the environment. So timing matters in marketing. So whether you're launching during recession or releasing content during a busy holiday season, you have to remember those things. Especially, you know, we're heading into Thanksgiving and Christmas and you know, like all of the different things that happen at the beginning of the year in January, like people are setting New Year's resolutions, Black Friday's coming up. Timing and marketing really does matter. And retail calendars are set. So if you Google, like, what are the retail calendars for big brands? You can see when they're planning their promotions. And it's kind of interesting as an online business owner to model what they're doing in the brick and mortar space, in the retail space. I think we can learn a lot from how they do it. So making sure that you're adjusting for the timing and the environment that's surrounding your message will change how it's received. So being strategic about when and where you're putting things out is also super important. Important. Okay, so here's the takeaway. Context is the secret sauce that's going to make your message hit the way that you intend it to hit. So whether you're selling a product, sharing a story, or just having a conversation with a friend, understanding the environment, the timing, and the people you're talking to can make all of the difference. So before you hit publish on your next ad or your next piece of content, take a step back and ask yourself, am I considering the context here? Do I have the full picture? Do I know who I'm talking to? Do I understand the before, the during, the after, their environment, their fears, their, you know, what have they tried before? Have they bought courses that made them, you know, spend a bunch of money and then they failed. Like, that's all important context to consider. So think about that. Consider the context for everything in your life. Think about, just think context. Like, I'm. I want to tattoo it on my forehead at this point because it's, it's really affected the way that I interact with people and how I communicate, not just in business but in real life. And I think it's helped me, you know, be more emotionally aware in my relationships as well. So thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Start Tiny show. And of course, if you found any value in today's conversation, I'd love for you to share it with a friend or leave me a review on itunes or follow along on Instagram. It's at Ali Bjork A L L I E B J E R K. And follow along for more insights on scaling your business and your personal brand. All right, until next time. Remember, context is everything. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Start Tiny podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. And you can check out our show notes, which will have links to all of the things we discussed. And of course, if you have any questions for me or you want to tell me what you loved about the episode or anything that stood out, I would love if you'd send me an Instagram message. Overlybjerg. That's where I hang out the most. And if you're interested in learning more about implementing tiny offers inside of your business, make sure to to check out the Start Tiny Society, our membership for tiny offers and all things digital marketing. Don't be a stranger. I'll see you inside of the Start Tiny Society or over on Instagram.