What Lentil Soup Taught Me About Marketing
Most people don’t start their own businesses because they’re pumped about learning marketing, but it’s completely necessary to find success. Luckily, there are marketing lessons hiding around just about every corner, even in the kitchen.
My mom hates to cook. She’ll happily be the first to admit this you. When I was growing up, if anything was cooked beyond boiled water or a spin in the microwave, it was done by my dad.
And while I never considered myself a “rebel” in the traditional sense, I have always liked to buck traditions and put in the work to show that I can be different if I put my mind to it. (That’s the secret about a lot of entrepreneurs/business owners/freelancers I think).
So I cook.
In fact, now that I work for myself, I cook all three meals at home most days. (Except when a poke bowl is calling my name...or a donut).
I’m by no means a master chef (I couldn’t even cut it on Masterchef Junior -- those kids are intense) but I like it and it brings me a specific type of joy to be able to create nutritious meals for me and my husband.
So naturally, as I was whirring up some tomato soup the other day I started to think about how I could leverage this for content share my experiences to help my audience.
And it occurred to me that learning to cook isn’t all that different from learning marketing.
Allow me to present: lessons I’ve learned in the kitchen that have made me a better marketer.
Bon Appetit!
Start With Simple Stuff
I don’t remember the first thing I ever cooked but I remember the first ‘complicated’ thing I ever cooked and it was this lentil soup. It was delicious, but I spent what was probably half of my checking account on saffron threads which was...dumb.
When it comes to marketing your business, you don’t have to start with a recipe that has you frantically googling what Swiss chard looks like. For instance, you don’t have to build a complex marketing funnel before you’ve sold your first product and you don’t have to buy the most sophisticated automation software.
You can start with a grilled cheese or a simple pesto, which in this case might be writing a blog post, using the free version of MailChimp, or just setting up social accounts for your business.
To mix metaphors, you don’t have to dive into the deep end to learn to swim and if you do, you’re a lot more likely to drown AKA get super overwhelmed.
It’s OK to Use Recipes
There’s some common wisdom that if you use recipes, you don’t really know how to cook or you’re not a good cook.
I use recipes all the damn time and nobody is complaining about my pizza dough or vegetarian chili.
Business owners are creative risk-takers, and we tend to build a lot of our identity around those descriptors. Sometimes that translates to “I have to come up with a fresh new idea every time I do something, otherwise I’m a fraud!”
For your marketing to be effective, you don’t have to create your strategies from scratch. You can start from successful recipes, whether you find them on a blog, in a course, or just kinda crib them (the strategy, NOT the content) from other successful people.
Once you get more experience (and data) under your belt, you’ll be a lot better equipped to make tweaks, changes, and even create your own brand new, fresh-to-death strategies that work for your business.
Memorize Your Favorites
I think it was Ina Garten (or maybe Martha?) who said you should have a handful of really good recipes memorized to be a good cook.
I don’t know how to make coq a vin or beef bourguignon and I would be completely lost if you tried to get me make a souffle.
But I can throw together a pizza dough, tomato soup, some homemade naan, and a juicy roast chicken from memory. If I want the other stuff, I can go to a restaurant.
Maybe you’re really amazing at writing blog posts but you suck at in-person events (what, no, this isn’t based on me, of course not). Maybe you’re superb on camera but sitting down to write marketing emails makes you want to scream.
Play to your strengths. Get good at what you want to be good at. Of course you want to take on new challenges and learn new things, but you can do that once you get really good at your favorites. And you can always go a restaurant AKA a professional service provider for the stuff you don’t get yet or don’t care to learn .
Learn Your Tools
When I first learned about oven thermometers I was absolutely floored. You mean to tell me that there’s a chance my oven temperature doesn’t match up exactly to the number on the knob on the front?
You don’t have to hang a thermometer in your oven every time you bake, but whenever you start cooking with a new one, it can make a huge difference to know what temperature your oven actually is.
Whether you know it or not, you already have a kitchen full of marketing tools at your disposal. It might be your personal narrative, an extremely unique product, or a deep and unrelenting knowledge of your target market.
How do you know how effective your tools are? You start using them.
Share your story on social or write blog posts about the topics your target market really cares about. Track your results, try again. Repeat.
There’s no oven thermometer for marketing, but there are plenty of analytics that can help you. But you gotta start trying things.
You Can Leave Some Things Out
When I made that lentil soup so many years ago and spent like $40 on saffron I hadn’t learned one of the most important cooking lessons out there: you can leave stuff out.
I wouldn’t try to make a lentil soup without, you know, lentils, but leaving out a garnish, a topping, a drizzle, a spice won’t turn something delicious into something gross.
Want to launch a promotional campaign but you haven’t had a professional photo session yet? Eh, skip it.
Have a blog post itching to get our but you haven’t finished your lead generating content upgrade yet? Just publish.
Your business and your marketing will never move forward if you’re waiting to get every single piece perfect. You’ve got to put yourself out there and start trying things to figure out what works for you. Even if you don’t have and za’atar or arugula isn’t in season.
Results May Vary
You only have to take a short scroll down to any online recipe comment section to learn that a recipe that yields incredible results for one cook is a total disaster for another.
It could be the aforementioned oven temperature thing, but it could also be humidity, altitude, utensils, or the phase of the moon. Who really knows.
The point is that this can also happen with your marketing strategy.
You can copy a successful launch exactly or follow all the steps your favorite marketing expert has laid out for you and you might not see the same results. By the same token, you can try something completely different and new -- or something that goes against conventional wisdom -- and you’ll see great results.
I mean, what do you think the first person who tried to make milk out of oats was going on? At just look how that turned out.
What you Take the Time to Learn Today Will Feed You Forever
This is a little hokey, but the truth is that if you dive into marketing your business and get good at it, it will feed you for the rest of your life. Even if you shutter your business, move on to other opportunities, start a non-profit -- knowing how to promote, sell, persuade, and add value for customers will never go out of style. The skills you’re learning and practicing will stay with you in any kitchen and you’ll only get batter. I mean, better.
2019 is the Year You Finally Fix Your Homepage. Here's How.
It’s not about constantly poking and prodding your homepage because you’re never satisfied with what’s there -- it’s about optimizing how your site performs for your most urgent business goals. And those are always changing.
When clients come to me needing homepage help, they typically fall into one of three categories:
Brand new business that has no website or one that was quickly put together with copy from the company’s founder/whoever it was in the office who had the best writing skills. They want something that performs better.
Legacy business with legacy website that looks dated (and they know it) and they’re looking for a full refresh. These businesses typically have at least one competitor site that they will keep referring to for what they want. They want something that looks competitive.
Small business who is looking for assistance with another marketing project and “likes” their homepage/website but has no idea how it performs and is doing nothing to track or optimize their site -- they just have it because, you know, everyone needs a website. They don’t really know what they want.
The last category is shockingly common and that’s absolutely fine. But if you fall into that category, it can be a long road between that first conversation and admitting that you have a homepage problem. I’m hoping this post can make that road a little bit shorter.
As a digital native (internet addict?) who spends way too many waking minutes online (especially for someone who lives so close to the beach) it’s easy for me to forget that most people, even business owners, don’t really care about the latest web design trends, CRO, or how a SaaS company 80000x’d the traffic to their blog.
Most people start businesses because they want to help people, not because they want to learn digital marketing.
I want to help people, too. I just want to do it with digital marketing and copywriting.
Building out a homepage that attracts the right people and gives them reason enough to continue engaging with your business doesn’t mean you have to read every single digital marketing book, article, and Twitter thread to learn how to do every single piece of it perfectly the first time.
But it does mean having the right mindset and some foundational understanding of what makes a homepage engaging in 2019.
How Much Time Should You Spend on Your Homepage?
You know you need some type of website and that your website will have some type of homepage. It’ll be where people land when they type in your URL or maybe when they google your company name.
But depending on your marketing strategy, most of your traffic isn’t going to be filtered through your homepage. Instead, you’re directing people to incredible content, optimized landing pages, and the most beautifully produced explainer videos that your visitors have ever seen.
So why even bother with the time and effort it takes to write and build an amazing, optimized homepage?
Counterpoint: Why bother with any of this? Life is pain.
Indeed, when the news site Quartz first launched, Kevin Delaney, editor in chief and cofounder, told Fast Company that “It didn’t make sense for us to devote resources to the homepage: design resources, development resources, or editor resources to maintain it.”
As a result, the homepage looked virtually indistinguishable from an article page. That was in 2014.
Check out what the qz.com homepage looks like today as compared to an article page:
It’s pretty different. Like they invested the resources in it.
I don’t work for Quartz or have access to their metrics. There are probably a lot reasons that they decided to change directions on this particular issue, but the important thing is, they did.
The fact is that even if your traffic isn’t starting there, at some point, many of your visitors are going to end up on your homepage.
People that consume your content and like it but don’t take immediate action will often come back through the homepage. Because as Tom Wilde from personalization provider Cxense told MarTech Today, “when you give a good experience through a side door, they come back through the homepage.”
Not to mention your homepage is often the entry point for potential investors, new recruits, journalists, and your mom who just types your http into the online.
Ultimately, there will be a page that acts as your homepage, whether you call it that or not.
Something will live at YOURCOMPANY.biz.
If you take the time to write and design a high-converting homepage, you’ll not only be establishing your brand as one that gives a shit about what their homepage looks like, you’ll be giving yourself that many more opportunities to convert new customers and continue offering a high-quality experience to the ones you already have.
What Does a Standout Homepage Look Like in 2019?
So you have been convinced that your homepage is important enough to spend time on.
Congrats, the first step is admitting you have a problem.
But having just any old homepage is not enough to have a measurable impact on your business. You have to have a good one.
88% of online consumers have said are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience and 75% of consumers will judge a company’s credibility based on its website.
But what does that even look like in 2019? How can you make a website that’s not only builds your company’s credibility but also keeps people engaged and wanting more from you?
A Standout Homepage is Personalized
Way back in 1998, Jeff Bezos told the Washington Post "If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn't have one store, we should have 4.5 million stores." (Today Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, but I digress).
Even way back then, Bezos knew that personalization based on user data was key to growth. And that is just as true today as it was then. The range of people that come to your homepage all have different needs and the better you can cater to them, the more likely they are to stick around.
The investor that wants to know if you’re a legit operation has a whole different set of needs than a returning visitor who bounced on the pricing page last time but wants to check things out again because they’ve got a bigger budget this quarter.
So you should create a bunch of different homepage sections that address every visitors concerns and questions and let them select the right pages for themselves, right?
I mean, you can do that but it’s not the best use of your resources and your homepage will quickly end up looking cluttered and confusing.
A better option is to track your visitor behavior and show them what they’re looking for right off the bat. Show them that you know who they are and what they care about by personalizing your homepage.
Optimizely offered a helluva a case study on the Moz blog, noting that their fully optimized (duh) homepage that was being shown to all visitors performed noticeably worse that their personalized attempts.
With the personalization, they saw:
1.5% increase in engagement,
113% increase in conversions to Solutions page
117% increase in conversions on “Test it Out” CTA to start account creation process
Which is to say nothing of the positive feedback and brand cache they earned with the experiment.
One of the cool things about the Optimizely case study is that for some of the personalized pages, the only thing they needed to know was the time of day it was. That small, personalized indicator had a huge impact on conversions because it made people pay attention and feel understood.
Of course, if you’re just building out your website and don’t have a ton of traffic (or any at all), you may not be able to offer personalization just yet and that’s okay. There are still things you can do to make your homepage standout.
A Standout Homepage Offers a Unique Experience
A lot of the chatter around the idea of the death of the homepage started back in 2014 when Buzzfeed published a leaked New York Times chart of their homepage’s performance, which had dropped off precipitously.
If you weren’t keeping tabs, this is what nytimes.com looked like in 2014 as compared to 2019:
The differences are subtle with the current homepage still paying homage to the print edition layout. But instead of directly mimicking the while making other sections more accessible and highlighting popular stories rather than sticking with static headlines.
Going to the New York Times website is now a different experience that picking up the physical paper. It takes into account how people use the internet, even if they’re using it to consume the same news they would get from a paperboy tossing it on their doorstep.
In addition to personalized content, the best homepages in 2019 offer a unique experience. Reading the paper is a simple one, but other sites take a more innovative approach.
Women’s health app Clue offers its visitors an experience that’s much different from most app-based websites. Rather than create a simple landing page that directs people to the App Store, Clue focuses on high-quality, science-backed content about sexual health, reproduction, and other issues that are important to their user base.
By doing this, they are not only offering visitors a unique experience, they are building customer loyalty by demonstrating a deep knowledge of what their users care about the most.
A unique homepage experience does not have to be a major undertaking with animations, videos, games, and sophisticated personalization algorithms -- it can be as simple as creating a homepage that shows you know your customers.
A Standout Homepage Has Evolving Design & Content
If you truly want your company to stand out online, you have to leave behind the days of investing in a brand new website and leaving it as it is for 3 to 5 years until it looks outdated and you start the cycle over.
Even if you go the extra mile of optimizing your homepage today, your needs and your customer needs change much more quickly than that. And your homepage needs to change with them.
You can optimize it for your needs today and those needs may be hugely different in 12 or 18 months.
For example, as your business grows, more and more potential customers will know who you are and what you do. With brand recognition, you’ll have to spend less real estate on your homepage explaining what you do.
The Slack website featured much different messaging in 2013, when it launched, versus 2019, when its brand recognition is MUCH different:
But brand recognition is not the only reason your homepage may need to evolve over time. The audience that comes to your site may also change -- you might go on a hiring spree and want to focus your homepage on employer branding, you may decide that your best customers don’t match the marketing avatar you initially launched with and therefore your brand voice needs to be updated.
That last one happened recently to gym management app Glofox.
The company’s founder notes that “the voice we had developed internally was making an important connection with our customers, it wasn’t coming through in our overall brand. We needed to put the customer at the center of who we are as a company,” they redesigned their site and language:
Again, you can see that brand recognition has driven the homepage messaging away from a clear explanation and towards addressing what they know are the concerns of their current and future customers.
It’s not about constantly poking and prodding your homepage because you’re never satisfied with what’s there -- it’s about optimizing how your site performs for your most urgent business goals. And those are always changing.
How to Start Optimizing Your Homepage
Whether you already have a site that is underperforming or are building one from scratch, there are a few ways to make sure that you’re headed down the right path when it comes to building a homepage that stands out and more importantly, a homepage that converts.
It starts with learning.
Start by Learning
You can’t know what to change about your homepage unless you know what’s working.
You’ll want to start by gathering as much data as you can about how people are already using your site. How are they getting to your homepage? How much time do they spend there? What do they click -- or not click -- while they’re on the page?
The list of data you can collect is virtually endless but if you start with these basics you can get a good idea of where you’re starting from.
Aside from analytics tools, you can also conduct user research, having people that don’t know your site try to navigate through it and seeing where they get stuck and how they perceive your messaging.
There’s a lot more to be said about testing and data collection than I’m going to get into here, but suffice to say, it’s an essential step of creating a homepage that works.
Don’t have a site yet? That’s okay. Aside from making sure you have analytics tools in place to learn about your site’s performance when it does go live, you can also use this time to collect valuable information about your target customers. Who are they and what do they care about?
This information will help to inform every choice you make about your business, not just your homepage.
Test, Iterate, Repeat
Once you have the data to work with, you can start making changes. Depending on what you found in your data, you might start with something as simple as rewriting a headline to be more clear about what you do and who your product or service is for. As Neil Patel says, “the first headline your visitor sees is the most important copy you’ll write” so you’d be surprised what a big difference this small change can make.
But just because you rewrite the headline doesn’t mean you’re done with optimizing your homepage.
As you make changes to your homepage (based on your data, of course), you’ll be able to find out what works and what doesn’t. Then make more changes. And on and on.
That’s what makes some homepages stand out and see conversion rates go up and up and some stagnate. Constant testing and improvement.
Not all the changes you make will be good. But the more you test and iterate, the better you will get at making good choices and improving the performance of your homepage.
Consider Your Copy First
As conversion optimization expert Talia Wolf puts it, “If you’re going to do a redesign, you need a strategy and a process.”
A lot people start the process with design. And it’s true that the design of your site can have a major influence on how people perceive your brand and how much time they’re willing to spend engaging with your site.
But without copy that works seamlessly with the design, you’re going to miss out on huge conversion opportunities.
If you aren’t paying attention to the copy that’s going to persuade people to stick around, you’re going to end up with a lot of pretty boxes that a sad copywriter is going to have to cram all her brilliant ideas into. IT’S NOT A GOOD SITUATION AND YOUR COPYWRITER MIGHT QUIT SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE HERE.
It’s not at all that copy is inherently more important than design, it’s that they’ve got to work together. A conversion copywriter who takes user data into account and has experience working alongside designers to create an optimized site can help here. But even if you go in-house for your copy, be sure that writers and designers are collaborating from the beginning to give yourself the best chance of improving conversions and having a homepage that works.
Conclusions
In 2019 your homepage is no longer the unavoidable foyer to the mansion that is your company’s online presence, but that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant.
Having a homepage that clearly demonstrates how much you know and care about your customers is a highly effective way to convert new visitors and maintain customer loyalty.
It’s worth making the effort to build a homepage that stands out from your competitors and engages your users with content and messaging that’s important to them. That’s what keeps them coming back, gets them to share your brand with others, and ultimately helps your business to grow and grow.
Need help fixing your homepage? I’ll take a look at it for free.
20 Health & Wellness Business USPs: From the Superfit to the Sluggish
No matter how cool your business sounds, it’s not going to get very far if you can’t explain what it is and who it’s for pretty quick (unless you have a hook like you’re Beyoncé or something. Wait, are you Beyoncé? OMG it’s an honor to have you here!)
I’m on a mission to get out of my house more. As a work from home solopreneur, I spend a whole lot of time alone. Which by and large is fine (people, who needs ‘em?). But then I find myself stammering through a salad order like it’s the first day of 6th grade and I’m like “I need to talk to more people in the real life person flesh space."
As part of this mission, I’m on a lot of email lists for local networking events and other mix n’ mingle kind of things. I got an invite the other day to one hosted by the mega brand Create & Cultivate and this was how the event was described:
What the hell does any of this mean?
I posited the question on instagram and no one else seemed to have any idea either.
It sounds kind of cool? I guess? Rep real? Push new??
Do I want it?
Is it for me? Or is it for younger, skinnier, happier, snapchattier women?
I honestly could not tell you. And I didn’t go to the event. Even though they promised snacks.
But this got me to thinking about how important -- and tragically overlooked -- the power of a THIS IS WHAT WE ARE statement (AKA a USP) is to all businesses.
No matter how cool your business sounds, it’s not going to get very far if you can’t explain what it is and who it’s for pretty fuckin’ quick (unless you have a hook like you’re Beyoncé or something. Wait, are you Beyoncé? OMG it’s an honor to have you here!)
This is why your wellness brand needs a USP.
Even if the brand is just you.
Even if you think everyone that lands on your website already knows who you are.
Your Unique Sales Proposition (USP) is a clear, concise descriptor (it could be a sentence or a *very* short paragraph) that reassures people they want what you’ve got and they’re in the right place.
Your USP should be obvious and it should be on your homepage.
Because, like Joanna Wiebe says, “your home page should help people understand that they’ve come to the right spot and then move them quickly along to the right next page for their needs.”
If people don’t understand that they’re in the right spot, they’ll be more than happy to click away to one of the 80 bazillion other things available to them on the internet.
Hell, it’s taking all my self control not to click away from this blog post and see what’s in the sale section at Sephora. And this is MY OWN BLOG.
But I digress.
Also important to note is the fact that different pages on your website may have different USPs. For instance, if you’re hiring and have a jobs page, what appeals to potential employees is going to be different from what differentiates you to potential customers. This post is only about the USP you present to your potential customers. On your homepage.
You’d be surprised how many businesses either don’t have a USP or bury it on their site. In fact, I found a lot of the ones below hidden on the company “About” page. That’s...less than ideal.
Don’t make your customers hunt for a reason to be interested. Most of them won’t do it.
So if having a USP is soooo important, every big health & wellness brand should have that on lock, right?
You would think.
But as you’ll see below, even the big brands struggle with this.
I believe it’s worth getting right, so to help you out, I spent a few hours combing through websites for health and wellness companies -- from the huge to the teeny -- to collect these USPs.
Some of ‘em are amazing. Some are confusing. And some are...wait, where are they? Oh yeah, some don’t seem to exist at all.
I’ve divided the companies that I examined into the following categories (click to skip down):
- Fitness
- Fashion (all athletics/health based brands)
- Beauty (all natural, organic types)
- Wellness (which includes health coaches)
Not only should this list give you some inspiration, it should hopefully boost your spirits if you’re on the struggle bus with your own USP.
PS: want to download this in a pdf to check it out later or, I don’t know, print it I guess? You can do that.
FITNESS
Company: Peloton
USP: Ride with the best instructors live from NYC.
When I first heard of Peloton I thought it was some type of dance music.
But going to their website, I see that it’s actually extremely clear what they do and who it’s for.
Notably, Peloton has a couple of other USPs that are buried on their about page:
A world-class indoor cycling studio experience on your time, and in the comfort of your own home.
A cutting edge fitness experience that makes working out at home a viable, exciting option.
Yeah, I think they’ve put a little bit of thought into this.
Company: FitBit
USP: Fitbit motivates you to reach your health and fitness goals by tracking your activity, exercise, sleep, weight and more.
In 2018, FitBit has the benefit that most of solopreneurs and small businesses don’t: basically everybody already knows what they sell.
Instead of describing their product, they can use their central USP to convey user benefits, which is a fit bit of delicious conversion copywriting.
Still, since there are a number of entrants in the wearable fitness trackers market by now, I think they could go a bit further in differentiating themselves from other companies (e.g., by honing in on how they were the first, how they've shown better results, or whatever it is that makes them really unique).
Company: Equinox
USP: Unrivaled fitness classes. Unparalleled personal training. Studios that inspire you to perform and luxury amenities that keep you at your peak. It’s more than a fitness club. It’s life.
Equinox is a gym. It has weights and treadmills and locker rooms. But doesn’t its whole brand -- including its USP -- just drip with luxury? Or is that just me coveting those eucalyptus towels?
While I definitely already wanted to join Equinox (this is a personal flaw), the USP could actually lean a bit further towards specificity. What makes its classes unrivaled? Are the more difficult? Burn more calories? More class times?
The more specific you can be in a concise USP, the more compelling it becomes for your target market.
Company: PopPhysique
USP: A specialized class designed to sculpt and tone the entire body in just one hour.
If you live in one of the cities where PopPhysique has locations, you’ve probably seen their marketing. It’s hard to miss.
Butt (hahaHA) I have to say, their USP is a little lacking. Sure, if I’m looking to tone and sculpt I guess it does the job, but do I have to be good at dance? At choreography? Do I have to already have a skinny butt? Do I have to own between 3-5 pairs of American Apparel 80s-inspired leggings? It’s unclear.
FASHION
Company: Bandier
USP: Curated collection of the world’s best activewear
Mmmm, yes, please curate things for me! Don’t make me go to 8,000 websites to find a pair of chic leggings! Thank you, Bandier, can I have another??
Company: Mission Statement
USP: Clothing that supports women who want to be stylish, in every aspect of their life.
Like some of the other brands featured here, Mission Statement buries its USP on the About page and when I found it, I kinda went ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
It’s nice that Hilary Swank wants me to be stylish but how is this, you know, unique?
BEAUTY
Company: Dry Bar
USP: No Cuts. No Color. Just Blow Outs.
Dry Bar is not necessarily a health or wellness brand but wow do I like their USP. It’s so clear and great and just *chef’s kiss*
Here we can go ahead and note that a USP and a tagline are not USUALLY the same thing. But in this case, the totally unique Dry Bar offering didn’t need more than a tagline to convey why they’re so special.
Company: Herbivore
USP: Truly natural, cruelty free skincare that provides results you can see and feel.
I mean, first of all, what does sensorial mean? Weird choice in the headline. But beyond that, it’s clear that Herbivore wants us to know their products are NATURAL, like TRULY NATURAL. So I guess that’s...a benefit…?
Look, if someone comes to this site because their top concern is that their skincare is natural (whatever that means), then they'll find this USP compelling. But I would argue that the influx of natural products on the market means this isn't particularly unique.
Ok, natural has lost all meaning for me as word so I'm going to move on.
Company: Welleco
USP: Dietary supplements designed by leading nutritional doctors using carefully formulated ingredients derived from wholefoods. In easily absorbable powder form, they are designed to nourish the body’s 11 systems from the inside out.
I’m not going to pretend that I know what the body’s 11 systems are but I sure as hell can’t argue that this isn’t unique.
Company: Supergoop!
USP: SPF is the most important thing you can do for your skin. Every. Single. Day.™ That’s why we’re constantly creating new products that you’ll love, so wearing SPF isn’t a chore, but a ritual. Not to mention it should be fun too.
Tagline: The Best SPF Under the Sun
Supergoop! offers a good example of how a USP and tagline can work together. The USP, which is not particularly concise, offers that the Supergoop! difference is that wearing their sunscreen isn’t a chore and is even fun.
As someone who live in California and sunscreens every single day, this is an important and unique difference!
WELLNESS
Company: Care/Of
USP: Build a personalized daily vitamin pack with honest guidance and better ingredients.
What’s it about? Vitamins! How’s it different? Personalized! Guided! Ingredients! #greatjob
Company: Ritual
USP: The only daily vitamin you need -- delivered directly to your doorstep.
There are a few different aspects of the Ritual USP. A daily vitamin delivered to your doorstep is somewhat unique (although not if you asked Care/Of) but you really have to read through the whole site to get a grasp on how they are really different (essential, open-source ingredients, developed by and for women, obsessively researched).
If you take the time to go through the whole homepage, it is comprehensive and fairly persuasive, but they could be a bit more clear and bold in the statement of their USP right up front.
Company: Forward
USP: Personalized primary care, combining world-class doctors with advanced medical technology including genetics, cancer screening & wellness tracking.
While Forward may be able to go a little further into how their process works (e.g., isn’t all primary care personalized?) this is pretty compelling as far as USPs go.
Company: Sakara
USP: 100% plant-based, organic, ready-to-eat meals. Delivered to you.
It doesn’t get much clearer than this, to be honest. Do you want organic, plant-based meal delivery? Congrats, you found it.
The weird part of this is where it’s hidden -- in the page title. The USP appears in your browser tab, but not on the actual site itself. I'm sure this is useful for SEO, but I think it might also be useful for visitors to see in big, bold print.
Company: Sun Potion
USP: We are proud to offer the highest quality tonic herbs and superfoods, always organic or wildcrafted, consciously sourced from around the world.
Tagline: Transformational foods for a high vibration, holistic lifestyle.
This is another really good USP. It’s clear (maybe I should use the word “clear” one more time? What do you think?) on what the company is all about and how it’s different (consciously sourced, organic, wildcrafted). And it’s right there on the homepage thank god.
Company: Urban Remedy
USP: Fresh organic, ready-to-eat meals, juices and snacks delivered to your door
While Urban Remedy isn't the only company on this list offering meal delivery, organic and ready-to-eat plus the addition of snacks and juices is a compelling and unique selling point.
Company: LoveWellness
USP: We make wellness and personal care easy by providing natural, organic solutions for vaginal health, balancing your cycle, metabolism, #mood, and more.
I’m aching from the missed opportunity in that “All Products” headline but aside from that, a pretty decent USP.
Company: LoveYourselfFit
USP: My vision is to provide you a place of support and connection to reach your goals and get you loving yourself.
This is not a diet – LYF Plans are different from all the rest. I provide you with the support, knowledge and tools to Love your Body, Love your Mind and Love Yourself.
Despite reading every page of this site I can’t say with 100% confidence that I know what this company/coach does. I know it’s not a diet! I know it comes with support, knowledge and tools! Buuuut...what is it?
Company: Maria Marlowe
USP: I help busy women lose weight or clear up their acne by developing healthier eating habits, based on whole, unprocessed, mostly plant-based foods.
My main complaint with this USP is that it’s buried on the about page. It’s clear that real thought went into it and it tells me everything I need to know about who this coach is.
Company: Eating Bird Food
USP: An online destination for those who love simple, healthy eating and living a lifestyle that supports it.
Yeah, ok. I’m good with this one. It certainly lets people know where they've landed. And if these particular topics are interesting to them, they're likely to stick around.
So what did we learn from this exercise?
Your USP is important. It keeps people on your site and gets them to your next goal for them, whether that's signing up for your email list or downloading a piece of content.
USPs aren't a given, even for big brands. It's easy to get seduced by a headline that's cute, clever, funny, sexy, shiny new. But if you choose to have something in your headline that isn't your USP, you had better be sure that it's good enough to keep people reading until they get to your USP.
Also, please don't hide your USP on your About page. Just don't.
Trash-Proof Your Wellness Business Emails
A few tips to make your emails better, watch your open rates climb, and rise from the trash folder like the beautiful marketing phoenix you are.
“I don’t see email as a problem in my life. I actually very much enjoy email. I look at it as a form of entertainment… maybe I’m sick and I need some sort of therapy around that.”
Anecdotally, most people don't feel like Mitch.
I have a friend who has literally over 10,000 unread, unarchived emails in his inbox.
I have another who I have to text every time an email needs her attention because she just stopped checking it one day.
That many unread emails makes the Virgo in me want to scream into a bottomless pit and the marketer in me want to cry and hop the first plane to an ashram with no wifi.
And as a businessowner, I'm sure you have your fair share of email stories that make you feel a little bit crazy, too.
According to MailChimp, for the health and wellness industry, an open rate around 20% is about average for emails. While that might look pretty good all things considered, it still means that 40% of people that get your emails don't even bother to open them.
You pour your blood, sweat, and precious time into every email you write just for them be thrown in the trash like yesterday's kombucha.
Ouch.
But with more than 4 billion email users expected by 2021 and email marketing still being shown as the most effective digital marketing channel, you can't exactly just ignore email marketing altogether and hope for the best.
Instead, you can make your emails better, watch your open rates climb, and rise from the trash folder like the beautiful marketing phoenix you are.
Heya -- don't have time to do the whole reading thing right now? No prob.
Download my Really Basic and Not at All Patronizing Guide to Email Marketing for Wellness Brands.
Read at your leisure.
Whaddya Got?
"I'll do more with email marketing when I have a bigger list."
"I don't have time for email right now. It's my busy season."
"I've got plenty of clients, I don't need to doing email marketing right now."
It's just you and me here. Tell me...have you ever said any of these?
Or thought them to yourself as you filled another hour with social media? (It's got it's place but we both know that social media marketing time can quickly and seamlessly morph into puppy and cake frosting video time.)
The fact is you should always have email campaigns running. Whether it's a follow-up sequence to an opt-in you haven't promoted in a while or a re-engagement campaign for customers you haven't heard from in a while, the right time to be working on your email strategy is approximately *looks at invisible watch* now.
With email marketing as with so many other aspect of our businesses, it's way too easy to wait for the perfect time when everything is in place and you're absolutely sure it's going to go perfectly aaaaand oh would you look at that you're dead from waiting.
The perfect time is now.
Don't have a huge list? Start with the one you've got and strategize to grow it even bigger.
Have a list that hasn't heard from you in a while? It's not too late to get them re-engaged, to reintroduce yourself to them and add value to their lives.
If want to trash-proof your emails, you have to actually send 'em out.
Who Are You Even Talking To?
The key to making sure that your emails get opened is RELEVANCE.
*one more time for the people in the back*
How you make sure that your emails are relevant takes a little bit of practice and a lot of listening.
Chances are that you have more than one type of ideal customer and those customers have differing (although perhaps overlapping) interests and needs. As soon as someone gets on your email list, they should be categorized and tagged based on what you know about them.
Then, rather than send one email out to your entire list, you can send emails that are specific to different segments.
The best way to learn what kind of content your customers actually want from you is to ask them. You can send out a post on social channels, ask them in an email, or reach out to your best customers individually and find out how you can help.
The more value you can provide that is relevant and helpful to your customers, the less likely they are put your emails in the trash.
Always Be Connecting
Successful email marketing is about making personal connections. It might not feel that way when you're loading your email copy into MailChimp but in fact every email you send out is a piece of you. And the more you share of yourself, the more effective your email marketing is going to be.
The list that you spent all that time building (or that you're still working on) isn't a way for you to make constant sales pitches, it's a way for people to get to know you, what you offer, and how you can help them.
Switch it Up
No matter how long you've been at this, you have more to learn. You, your business, and your customers are going to change and grow over time.
Example -- I signed up for an email list a few months back. It was a message I was interested in at the time but I didn't hear from them for weeks and weeks. When I finally did, the subject line was READ NOW. A dutiful email reader, I did!
It was a newsletter. No particular value, just notifying me about a new blog post.
Hm.
Then I got another email the next week with the same subject line. "Really?" I thought and opened it again. Same low-value content.
Eventually, even though the subject lines changed, I was so annoyed by the lazy tactics of the first handful I got that I stopped opening anything from the sender.
But I would bet a lot that that first email had phenomenal open rates! And the third or fourth one had rates that may as well have been negative.
Your list can quickly get used to tricks and tactics. Strive to stand out and don't fall into patterns. What works for your first month, quarter, year, won't work forever.
Luckily, the data that you can collect on your emails -- open rates, click throughs, unsubscribes -- can all help you to be better day after day and send after send.
I get it, email marketing can feel more than a little overwhelming. If you still have questions, I've got a few options for you:
(1) Download my Really Basic and Not at All Patronizing Guide to Email Marketing for Wellness Brands
(2) Schedule 15 minutes with me to go over your current email strategy
(3) Take a nap (seriously, this always helps me). When you wake up, shoot me an email with any questions you have.
Photo by Adam Solomon on Unsplash
Why We're So Obsessed with Morning Routines
I'm completely obsessed with how other people spend those precious moments in the morning. But why?
I subscribe to a weekly email called My Morning Routine (#notsponsored).
And I wish it were daily.
To me, it’s literally the most exciting email I get every week and I always open it and read it as soon as it appears in my inbox.
The premise is pretty self-explanatory -- they survey successful people (writers, athletes, CEOs, founders) with the same set of questions about what they do every morning. What time do they eat breakfast? Do they workout in the morning? When do they first look at their phone?
I’m obsessed and I know I’m not the only one, because otherwise this newsletter wouldn’t exist. Also because just about every other Medium post that gets delivered in my daily digest is about what three things you need to do before 8AM if you want to be successful or how a morning meditation routine will give you superpowers or what have you.
Why are we so obsessed with these routines? Why are we all looking to lifehack our way into success by replacing our first cup of coffee with lemon water? (seriously, how many people are going to tell me that drinking lemon water first thing in the morning is going to “jumpstart my metabolism” because, no.)
Routine = Comfort
This is kind of a no-brainer but human beings fucking love routines. Part of it is biological -- we get up with the sun, go to bed when it’s dark, that’s just what our bodies want to do.
But it’s a psychological thing, too (and if you want to come at me with psychology is biological or brain science or bulletproof coffee just know that it's not even 7AM when I'm writing this and I just can't and will not).
The more you do something, the better you get at it. That’s true whether you’re talking about playing a concerto on the violin or making an omelette every morning or even sitting quietly with your thoughts for five minutes before you turn on your phone. When you create a routine, you eventually become an expert at that routine.
It’s important to mention here that not all morning routines are actually helpful or healthy. Even if you have a cigarette before you jump in the shower or look at Instagram for 45 minutes and feel bad about your lack of abs before you have your first cup of coffee, you’re still crafting a routine and becoming an expert at it. You’re comfortable doing the things that you do every day. This is the definition of a “comfort zone.” It can be stifling, for some, but it can also be a source of peace and calm that can be used as a jumping off point for the rest of your day.
Social Proof
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a 9-to-5er with a side hustle, or a busy mom who has to get a kid or two out the door at a certain time, we want to know that what we’re doing is the right thing. If we start the day with that cup of coffee we want to hear that Arianna Huffington also drinks coffee (SHE DOES). If we like to start our day with a brisk jog (uh, this is not me) we want to hear that former Olympians are also strapping on their Nikes first thing in the morning.
I liken this to what the marketing gurus (wait that's me...is that me?) call “social proof.” If someone else is doing it -- especially someone that has what we want, like financial success, creative success, a hot husband, Instagram-ready kids -- that acts as reinforcement for our own choices and it makes us feel good.
Are we looking for new ideas for our morning routine? To improve, optimize, streamline?
I mean, sure, to some extent. But more often than not we comb through looking for things we’re already doing as supporting evidence for our existing choices.
Reclaiming Our Time
For many people, especially women, those first moments that we awake are some of the only ones that we get to control. I don’t have children of my own but I still have my days scheduled out from about 7AM to 9PM (time blocking, get into it). Some of those things are work meetings, some are self-care like gym time and lunch, but the fact is that it’s all laid out there. I have to do all those things on my calendar, in that order, so that I make a living, maintain sanity, get fed, get swole, and keep my dog alive.
In the morning, when it’s still getting light, my 14-year-old pupper is still snoring and my husband is starting his own morning activities, I can decide what I need to do in that warm, quiet moment. I can stay in bed for five more minutes, go out onto our balcony for mindful meditation, start stretching in bed or move over to the yoga mat that I keep folded up by my nightstand. I can go at my own pace and not feel obligated to do any one thing for any perfect span of time. It’s only for me (even though the happiness I cultivate during these early morning moments definitely have a positive impact on those around me).
That might not sound like a routine, but it is. It’s basically a build-your-own routine that gives me some flexibility so that I can start my day on the right foot no matter what my circumstances are for that day.
Should You Have a Morning Routine?
If you’re reading this, my guess is that you already have one. It may be one that you’ve developed after research, testing, and personal growth -- or it might just be hopping out of bed, grabbing a coffee, and walking the dog.
The morning hours before we have to start work, before we have to do anything, can be extremely powerful. If you’re waking up every day to the blaring of an alarm clock and never feel ready to get up, it’s worth trying to make a change.
Photo by Andrew Small on Unsplash