Content Immersion
Shaan Puri lost ~$250k in 72 hours.
Some of you might know Shaan as the guest host of My First Million…a podcast covering all kinds of stuff related to entrepreneurship, unique business models, and go-to marketing strategies that have made people millionaires.
He’s been in tech for a long time (notably Bebo and Twitch.)
More recently, he started (and as of last week, sold) a crypto newsletter called The Milk Road.
In describing the year-long journey from ideation to acquisition in a Twitter thread last week, Puri noted that he knew they needed a hook early on in order for the newsletter to take off. There was already so much crypto content out there, how could they be different right off the bat?
Puri's Twitter thread on building and selling The Milk Road.
Puri's Twitter thread on building and selling The Milk Road.
He called it a “stunt”, but what Puri did was something that folks in the media and journalism industries refer to as “immersion.”
Rather than simply covering a subject, you get involved in the subject.
You move to the town where you’re covering the football coach in order to immerse yourself in the community. You get to know coaches, parents, the smell of that restaurant that all of the football players go to after the games.
You invest (and lose 70% of) $1,000,000 into a crypto wallet so others can follow along with your investments in your newsletter. They get to know your thought process through real-time decision-making, see how those decisions impact your investments, etc.
It’s a massively effective way of both building and engaging an audience, not to mention establishing authority around a given subject.
It’s worked in traditional media forever.
It also works in business…
Puri's video on losing money for the newsletter helped them break through.
Puri's video on losing money for the newsletter helped them break through.
(Here’s the video Shaan referenced in the above Tweet.)
Besides losing $1M (😅), how else can we practice immersion in the content we create as brands and individuals?
Let’s get into it.
***
So yeah, let's call this out––most of us don't have $1M to lose in the name of a content marketing play.
But, you don't have to go broke in order to practice Content Immersion.
Immersion is ultimately about getting to know people and subjects more intimately than anyone else. Yes, you can do this by investing your own money in order to learn and report on a subject more definitively, but it can also be done in other ways...
Put some skin in the game
There are fewer things more engaging to a reader/viewer/listener than knowing the subject has something to lose.
Puri invested $1M in Crypto.
Wistia worked with an ad agency and spent $1k, $10k, and $100k on 3 different ads to document the impact and correlation that budget has to production value.
With skin in the game, you raise the stakes for your audience. And because so few are willing to go as far as these examples, you face little competition and are that much more likely to stand out.
Content Prompt: How can you raise the stakes in order to create buzz and intrigue around the content you create? How can you invest, quite literally, in the content you create? And, most importantly, how would that help to inform and ultimately improve your content?
Don't observe. Participate.
Last year I was coaching a SaaS company in the user onboarding/product demo space that was in the process of launching a podcast as a central part of its content strategy. They wanted to bounce some ideas off of me.
Most sounded flat, like every other interview show out there.
“Your product helps software companies create walk-throughs and onboarding sequences, yeah? So, what if you signed up for 100 free trials and analyze the experiences of each one, one by one?”
Not only is it a unique show premise, but they’d also collect a ton of qualitative data that could inform numerous other content projects. Better yet, most of the subjects of each episode would also be ideal customers.
Immersion is about getting into the water rather than observing it from the shore. It's about rolling your sleeves up, getting your hands dirty, and getting to know the topic/subject by participating in it.
Drift did this early on while they were still firming up its conversational marketing messaging.
Members of Drift's marketing team went out and manually filled out 433 sales/demo request forms and reported on their experience. The kicker? Only 7% of sales team responded in 5 minutes or less.
Not only did that make for a good report, but Drift used that data point across various marketing assets to help support its "no forms" movement and overall brand positioning around, "the way people buy is broken."
The Drift team could have just written about the subject. Instead, they rolled up their collective sleeves and filled out 433 sales/lead forms.
Content Prompt: What manual work can you do today to inform your content that most other teams would be unwilling to do? Not because it's necessarily hard, but because it may be tedious and time-consuming?
Become the community
When Buzz Bissinger was writing Friday Night Lights, he picked up and moved his family from Philadelphia to Odessa, Texas in order to capture the "three dimensional truth" behind the story.
He needed to be there to really document the experience. His kids went to the local schools. His wife shopped at the local supermarket. Bissinger got to spend meaningful time with players, coaches, parents, and the community at large. Bissinger, and his family, became part of the community. As a result, he was in a much better position to document the full story.
Friday Night Lights went on to become a bestseller that also spawned a major motion picture and popular television series of the same name.
You and I may relocate for content, but the lesson here is to go beyond the standard interview and/or Google search to get to know the people and subjects you cover.
How can you become part of the proverbial community?
Content Prompt: How can you spend more meaningful time where your community/audience is? How can you develop more meaningful relationships, "shop at the local supermarket" so to speak, and be better equipped to create content that really resonates?
***
This is the last issue of Good Content! for 2022.
I want to thank every one of you who has read, shared, or replied to any of these emails. The response after 6 issues has been both validating and motivating.
I can't wait to continue writing for you in just a few short weeks.
Happy Holidays to you all. I hope you find some time to relax and reflect on the meaningful work you've done and are doing.
We need you out here. Keep going.
Talk soon.
- John
If you're trying to grow through content, here are some ways I can help:
Work with me 1:1 to build out and/or improve your content strategy and distribution.
Get access to 100+ resources, including some of the frameworks/processes I've used, and learn from 700+ content marketers in the Some Good Content community.
Promote your company or content to 2k+ marketers in this newsletter. (Currently booking for January 2023.) Just reply to this email to inquire.
