There’s a common resigned exhale by both brands and marketers alike sometimes, even often, that there isn’t an audience for their story or it’s not compelling enough. But a good story doesn’t have to be grand, it doesn’t have to be cinema and certainly doesn’t have to appeal to the masses. That’s the wonderful and beautiful thing about marketing. You only need to create something that resonates with your audience. In fact, the more specific you can be the better.
Make It Personal
Sarah Hernholm was an elementary school teacher until 2009 when she realized something was lacking in the education system – the ability for students to properly train to be entrepreneurs. So she became one herself and created WIT, the first platform in the country to offer college credit entrepreneurship and leadership courses for high school teens.
Fast forward almost fifteen years later and their hackathons have attracted big names like Google and even more services to not only helps tweens and teens around the world create and launch businesses, non-profits, social movements but it also provides college-credit courses now on financial literacy that covers topics including: Financial Life Cycle, Credit & Methods of Payment, Budgeting & Financial Statements, Insurance, Taxes, Investments. The goal is to make sure WIT entrepreneurs are prepared to manage not only their business finances but personal finances, too.
They are also currently partnering with Frigo’s Build A Bright Future campaign to provide $150,000 in entrepreneurship grants to kids ages 8-15 to help build out amazing ideas.
Be A Good Listener
A new study by Experian concluded that over two-thirds of Americans experience or have experienced financial trauma – negative thoughts and anxiety when dealing with financial issues.
This number was even higher with Gen Z (73%) and Millennials (77%).
What was this due? The research concluded that not having discussions in the home about finances growing up and limited access to trustworthy information were strong factors. “Small steps can make a big difference in helping consumers feel less financially stressed and live more financially empowered lives,” said Christina Roman, Consumer Education and Advocacy Manager at Experian. “Our goal is to normalize conversations about money and financial stress and connect consumers with the financial education and resources necessary to help bring financial power to all.”
The future of payments is changing and there need to be free tools and resources to make sure people can proactively reduce their financial stress. Experian partners with the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC) which has 1,200 certified financial counselors across America that can provide one-on-one financial support, education and create debt relief plans.
Experian has listened to the market and made a collective push over the past few years to keep adding resources that make establishing and maintaining wealth easier and more equitable. Experian Boost now lets people add things like rental payments and streaming service bills to give more people access to credit. And last month they launched the Experian Smart Money Debit Card which allows people to link to a digital checking account and build credit without a credit card.
Make Complicated Subjects Feel Easy
It’s a gift when you can make new things like the metaverse, AI or spatial computing click for people. Everything is going to run on large amounts of data. Companies face a ton of challenges when it comes to data connectivity. There are data silos, networks are unreliable, they can’t get data in real-time, the data comes from varied sources, and the whole system is difficult to unify. HiveMQ has built a brand on being the central nervous system for the Internet of Things, giving companies a way to overcome all of these obstacles with a platform built on MQTT so they can do more with their data. Companies are using MQTT as the de facto standard for IoT messaging because it requires minimal resources and is lightweight and efficient, can scale to millions of devices, and works well over unreliable networks.
They work with huge names like BMW, Mercedes Benz, SiriusXM, Moen and more to make every day things more productive and efficient. So the car door opens in sub one second instead of 30, the drone gets the medical sample to the hospital 75% faster, and the dishwasher tells the owner when the detergent is empty. HiveMQ powers all of these use cases with the scalable, secure and reliable delivery of data. Both their execution for brands and their storytelling align in simplifying things that would otherwise seem complicated or impossible.
Provide A Credible Alternative
In 2020 Google took action to disrupt the college degree. College can leave students anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000 in debt. It’s true for any form of education and especially film school. This is why Stage 32 is doing the same to offer career certifications to film students at a fraction of the cost.
Over the last 7 years the Stage 32 team spoke with executives from over 100 film commissions, executives from streamers, various guilds and production companies, and film students and graduates – many saddled with enormous student loan debt. They discussed the changing environment of global production and expansion, the dearth of quality people to fill available jobs on set, and the overwhelming need to find skilled workers available around the world available to work right now.
The result of all these conversations led to a solution that teaches below the line skills helpful in landing opportunities, post-graduation opportunities to secure work and a focused database accessible by film commissions, streamers, production companies and other organizations that are ready to hire through this portal and have input on the skills required.
Give People The Power To Grow
Some business models are here to stay and growing, like subscriptions. But others are meant to change. At a time when the mortgage industry is down, Canopy Mortgage is one of Inc’s Fastest Growing Companies in America. They are on pace to close $7 billion in loan volume by 2025. The simplified version of their story is lower rates and better tech but there’s more to it.
They built their own loan technology, Nano, that helps power loan officers all over the country. And while it’s become 275% more expensive over the past decade to prepare and produce a loan, they are still over 100 basis points lower than their peers. That equals out to 1% which is a big difference when we are talking loan percentages.
It’s helped them recruit and retain solo loan officers all over the country that have built and grown their own practices free of large overhead. Rocket, UWM and others spend a lot on marketing to attract consumers but that cost gets passed down. Canopy allows loan officers to be more competitive in every situation with better margins.
A lot of your storytelling strategy may be dictated by what your product does and who your audience is but that makes it easier, not harder. Play to your strengths, make an easy and compelling contrast and look to improve upon what was done in the past.
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