You are reading contentfolks—a monthly(ish) blend of sticky notes, big marketing ideas, and small practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio
Hey there 👋
Today, I am going to ask you to spend 3 minutes of your time doing me a favour. Specifically, I will ask you to click on a link at the bottom of this issue and answer a single question: how did you get here?
But first, let me tell you why.
There are a few marketing things I can be stubborn about, and one of them is this: when you need to learn something about your audience or customers, the best thing you can do is to ask them.
For example: to understand how prospects learn about your product or brand, you don’t always need fancy multi-touch attribution software. You can start by asking a single question during the sales or signup process, like this:
The answers often help confirm the ‘known knowns’, aka the places you already expected your brand to appear in.1 But they may also highlight some ‘unknown unknowns’ that were absolutely not on your radar—things like private Discord groups you’ve never heard of, an obscure YouTube video with 17 total views, a throwaway line in a podcast from two years ago.
Not all of these curveball answers to a survey or user research interview are actionable or scalable, but that’s not the point. The reason they are so valuable is that they remind you of a core truth: as a marketer, you are never fully in control. You may think you are, but brands have a life of their own that you cannot limit or even fully know. Same with your audience: you may think you know what drives their actions and behaviours, but all it takes is a couple of unpredictable answers to reveal just how narrow your mental picture is.
…which brings me to the favour I’d like to ask you for.
If you can spare 3 minutes, I’d love for you to tell me a story of how you got to this newsletter. It can be the real story, if you remember it, or just one that sounds realistic enough. Was it a comment thread in LinkedIn from someone you started following a few years back, when you wanted to change careers? Did you read a recommendation in an obscure Slack group for disgruntled marketers you joined to try to make sense of this AI noise? Or were you just bored on a random Tuesday morning, started looking through Substack recommendations, and followed a link trail all the way here?
I didn’t add a character limit to the survey, so you can go wild—the more detail you add, the happier I will be 🤩
And to thank you for your answer, I promise to do absolutely nothing with it. I won’t suddenly start advertising in places you frequent or try to show up on the podcasts you listen to or even sneak into your Slack group with an exclusive offer of some sort. Nah, I really am just curious to find out the paths people follow to get here in the first place.
Will you tell me? Here’s the link.
And yes, sure, these answers will never be 100% complete or accurate; admittedly, I have no idea where or how I heard about most of the products I use or newsletters I subscribe to. But there are some plausible places I might have encountered them in, which is still a valuable answer—and that’s the spirit I usually review these surveys with.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.