May 9, 2021
Understanding Target Audience and Driving User Engagement with Jason Sherman
In episode 67, host Eric Dickmann interviews Jason Sherman. Jason is a successful entrepreneur, award-winning filmmaker, published author, tech startup expert, and journalist. He has been featured by several media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Verge, and ABC News. Jason is fluent in Spanish, is a classically trained violinist, and was a featured speaker on FOX’s Futurist TV Show: Xploration Earth 2050.
Jason runs a web and mobile dev shop and film studio from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He gives guest lectures at area universities, and regularly supports hackathons or tech events as a mentor and judge. His methodologies on entrepreneurship and data-driven decisions are his main source of education to those he helps all around the world. His startup book Strap on your Boots is the culmination of his life’s work to help other entrepreneurs succeed and is the focus of a class he created called Startup Essentials. He originally taught the course as a guest lecturer at area universities, including the Wharton School of Business and now the course is available online for students on Udemy.
For show notes and a list of resources mentioned in this episode, please visit: https://fiveechelon.com/understanding-target-audience-user-engagement-s5e1/
Send us your questions or comments
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Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast.
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I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.
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In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business.
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Hey Jason, welcome to The Virtual CMO Podcast.
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I'm so glad you could join us today.
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Awesome dude.
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I appreciate it.
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And thanks for having me.
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This is awesome.
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I'm excited about today's discussion.
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Although I will tell you I'm feeling a little bit guilty.
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I lived down here in Orlando, Florida.
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I'm looking out my window.
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The blossoms of the tree are falling and clogging up my swimming pool, which I'm really, you know, a little bit annoyed about.
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And yet I'm watching the news and millions of people are without power, there's this blizzard crossing.
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So I just thought I'd throw that out there.
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So remind me, there's a foot of snow out there in ice.
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I actually fell down the stairs the other day
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Oh, no.
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walking my dog, and we're supposed to get hit with more snow.
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So let's just forget about that for now.
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Oh, jeez, what a pain.
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Yeah, it's a crazy year.
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Anybody who thought 2021 was just going to like, you know go smoothly, really add some bad expectations in place.
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2020 was the trailer for the movie.
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Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
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Hey, Jason, as we get going today, I'd love it.
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If you could just give a quick, a bit of background about yourself for the audience and tell them a little bit about what you do and your podcast as well.
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Sure, I kind of dabble in a lot of different industries over the past say 20 years.
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I tried my hand that technology film, writing music, and I ended up you know, entangling all of them and working with all of them together.
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And I found that they are really all the industry's kind of tie in together.
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So what I ended up doing was working in all of them at the same time.
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And so what I do now is I work in technology and film and writing and sometimes music, but mostly content, man you know, content distribution, content creation, because that's where we're at with the pandemic is putting out as much content as possible to help people since we can no longer go in person to these different places to help people.
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So.
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I help people build mobile apps and websites.
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And I'm working on a documentary right now and I have my podcast and my book and my course, and I just finished my audio book, which just went live on ACX Audible.
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So I'm waiting for that to be actually live.
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They posted it on like the European channels, but not America for some reason.
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So any day now it'll be live.
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So yeah, I have a podcast called Strap On Your Boots, the book is also called Strap On Your Boots.
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The course is called Startup Essentials and that's on Udemy, and then the YouTube channel is also called Startup Essential.
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So I have kind of a nice package there to help people succeed in startups or running a business.
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It's a lot of balls in the air at once.
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And it is certainly is an exciting time to be a content creator.
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And I think it's interesting that you have filmmaking as a background because, you know, I'm surprised at the quality of content, you know, that kids are posting on TikTok or Instagram or wherever it may be.
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You know, it used to be that you had to have a lot of professional gear, professional apps to be able to do this, and now the tools that most people are just carrying around in their pocket give you the ability to create some pretty engaging content.
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Do you find that it's at the level up your game as well?
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You know it's, that's a great question.
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And I gotta be honest with you it's blown me away how there's been this paradigm shift from, you know, DSLRs and expensive movie cameras that you had to have in order to be a filmmaker.
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Like one of my first movies I had to use these expensive, bulky, you know, thousands of dollars cameras and microphones and all sorts of equipment, and all these different things.
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And now, like you said, you can use an iPhone and shoot high quality movies that are being shown in film festivals.
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My current documentary, a lot of it, I shot with my iPhone, with lenses on it.
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So, you know, I believe what's happened is what was once meant for Hollywood and for high budget productions, and it was kind of an elite group of people that were allowed to make these movies and be considered professional and be considered artists are now being used by independent filmmakers.
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And now you're seeing a lot more content out there that's really well done with really good stories that don't follow the franchises and the tent pole movies that were you know, so commonly used by Hollywood to generate income.
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Now it's like, Oh, well now I can make, I can write a screenplay with a very simple script, two characters, one location use some smartphones or some, you know, DSLRs as well and shoot some really good content and still get distribution on Netflix and Amazon, because it's really well done.
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So, yeah, I mean, technology's incredible, man.
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The things you can do with smartphones nowadays is mind boggling.
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I get comments all the time.
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People will say what you shot that on your iPhone.
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You know, it's just amazing the quality and you know it's only gonna get better over time.
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I think we're in this era where everybody can be a content creator of some type, but it doesn't change the basics, right?
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You still have to tell a story.
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And one of the things that I really wanted to get in with you today is really talking about companies, whether they're startup companies, whether they're just young companies or maybe existing companies that really have not taken that step to sort of build out their marketing program and take those early stages to building audience engagement.
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And I know your podcast and a lot of your work is focused on startups.
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So this is front and center for nearly every single one of them.
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But when you start to meet with companies and have these discussions about marketing, what do you see are some common pitfalls or problems that these companies are running into, in terms of launching their marketing programs and beginning to build that engagement with an audience?
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The number one mistake I find that entrepreneurs always, they fall into the trap is not defining a target market.
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They always seem to think that their market is everybody, it's just the way it is.
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They always they, you know, they have this pipe dream where they have$1 billion app or$1 billion product or$1 billion idea, and they don't seem to realize that's just not true.
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It's one in a billion that become unicorns.
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They they see the news where companies get funding$100 million in funding and exiting, and getting bought by Facebook and they think, Oh, well, I can do that.
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But they don't see the other 50,000 companies that failed and were not able to raise any money.
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So the number one thing is you have to find out who your actual customer is, your demographic, what's the age range, what are their genders?
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What are their religions even, what are they doing on the internet?
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What are they buying?
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What kind of interests do they have?
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Are they into sports?
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Are they into movies?
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Are they into yoga?
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What is it?
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You know?
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So, that's the number one thing they fall into.The second, number one, I'm sorry, number two mistake they make is, but it's still number one to me because it's the same thing, it's validating your product validating your platform.
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So, you know, finding your market has to do with validating, because if you can find your market and that's why you want to.
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They kind of go hand in hand, although validating your concept goes first, but let's say you have a platform and you're trying to figure out who likes it.
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While you're doing it, you're killing two birds with one stone.
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What you're doing is you're finding out who likes it and then you're finding out what they like about it, and you're cutting out all the fat.
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So like, if you think that your 20 features are going to be the best thing ever, and then you find your market, say it's 25 to 35 year olds in New York City, and that's what you figured out.
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Okay.
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Well then get 500 of those people and start asking them what of these 20 features do you want to use in my platform?
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You don't like these 15, I'm going to cut them out and I'm going to focus on these five.
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Okay.
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Now let's get down to these five.
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What about these five?
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Do you like, let's ask you some questions.
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You know, how much would you pay for one of these features?
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You know, what other features do you think I can do to make these five better, you know, ask the market what it is they want and then build what they want, not what you think is right.
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So that's the, that's another another big one.
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No, I think that's so good that, you know, the first point you mentioned, I sometimes call it a founder FOMO, right?
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It's that fear of missing out by founders, that they think that any business is good business, and if they get too narrow, well, then they're just missing, huge market potential.
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But they don't really understand that if they can be successful in a very narrow niche, and then start to build from there, that's a far more efficient way to go, especially when you're talking about marketing and the amount of money that it costs to sort of put your brand out there.
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It's much easier to go after a very targeted a niche than it is to blanket the whole market.
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And that's actually the third point.
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The third mistake is they don't do enough AB testing and they don't do enough small marketing.
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So one of the things I tell people when they, and I've had this happen many times.
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Entrepreneurs come to me, they say, I'm going to spend$10,000 on this influencer, or I'm going to spend$10,000 on this, you know, this ad agency or whatever it is, right?
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And I say that's the wrong move, right?
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Because what's going to happen is you might get an initial bump, but it's going to fall off.
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The turn rate is going to be horrible.
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So instead take that 10,000 hours, take out 500 of it, just 500 of it, right?
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and do 10 different ads for 50 bucks.
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And figure out which one of those and, you know, do different landing pages, do AB testing through different Facebook ads, do some Instagram ads, 50 bucks per ad, do 10 of them and figure out which one of them did the best.
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And that's the one you can now double down on, put 1000 bucks on that and then see that one just take off.
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And now you spend 1500 bucks instead of 10,000 and you have actionable results, versus the$10,000 you spend and you get maybe an uptick one day and then it falls off.
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And it happens every time it's never failed.
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I think that's very interesting.
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I just finished an episode where we were talking about building out your marketing budget.
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And one of the things that I've seen with many companies is that their marketing plan is actually their marketing budget.
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You know, they work off a spreadsheet and they work off the dollar figures that are allocated to each particular bucket.
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And one of the dangers that I see there is that it's very easy to get into this rinse and repeat mode, right?
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Oh, we did that last quarter so we're going to do it again this quarter.
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Okay, spend another$5,000 on ad-words, okay, great.
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But what's missing there is all the experimentation.
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Have you tried something else to see if you get better results from that?
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Have you modified your programs?
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And many times they don't, they just get into the cycle of repeating the same things oftentimes year to year.
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Plus you have to look at trending topics, you have to look at the market and how it changes.
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What might be hot six months ago might be completely dead today.
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So just dumping more money into the same campaigns doesn't make any sense, you know?
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I've seen it happen a million times.
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They say, Oh, we're just gonna keep dumped.
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Like you said, Google ad words is a culprit.
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They keep dumping it in there, but maybe now it's like, well, Valentine's day just passed, why not do a Valentine's marketing thing?
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or you know, if there's wildfires or something and you want to save the koalas, do something for that.
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Or you know, always look at the trending topics and what's in the news and see how you can kind of get in there and navigate through it and use it to your advantage.
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You know, speaking of which this just came across my radar the other day, maybe you already know about it, but have you seen the website ask the public
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I've heard of it, but I haven't looked into it yet, but I, people have been talking about it.
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Yeah, it's really interesting.
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So you basically just post a question on a specific topic area and it will show you all the permutations of different questions that people are asking on that topic.
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It doesn't necessarily give you sort of keywords statistics and say this is the most popular or not, but it gives you some ideas.
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I couldn't believe what a valuable resource it could be when you're writing blog articles or pushing out content to be able to see what are the questions that people are asking or around a certain topic.
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So you're absolutely right, especially if you get stuck in these routines where you're doing the same thing all the time, and oftentimes what that is it's just talking about your product, right?
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It's not talking about how it's adding value, how it's solving a problem.
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It's just talking about what it does.
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In any startup or any business iteration is key.
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If you don't iterate, you die.
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And people don't understand that they think that they don't have to, a lot of entrepreneurs think they're above that.
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Like they don't need to follow the steps.
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I've been told that I don't need to follow the steps, I can skip all this, I can just go right to the thing.
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And I'm like, the steps are there for a reason, you know, when you go up the stairs, You know, you have to go up each step, you can't skip them.
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You know, so people just don't, they don't want it there, they know everything, right?
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They know it all.
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So that's just how.
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So, you know, when you're a new brand, when you're on unknown commodity out there in the marketplace, and you really want to start generating interest, not only in your brand, but in the products and services underneath that brand, you know?
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You need to build trust, you need to build awareness, so, what are the, some of the steps that you really encourage companies who might not have a huge marketing budget, but need to start that process of engaging with their target audience about their brand?
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What are some things that you recommend that they do?
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I can give you a couple just off the top of my head that I think are very important instead of giving a long list.
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I think the most important one would be engaging with your customer, which is tough during the pandemic, but still, you can talk to people who let's say, for example, you're inventing a new bicycle helmet and you want to save lives because, first of all, bicycle helmets are clunky and you want to build one that's strong, but foldable, okay.
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I had a friend of mine who was building one like that.
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Well, she would go to bicycle people who rode bicycles and ask them questions about their helmets and you know, how could I improve it?
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So boots on the ground, get out there and start talking to people about your product, because you don't have to spend any money to do that.
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You can just talk to people about your website or your product just by asking questions, so definitely reach out to people.
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The second thing, and probably the most important thing is to become an expert in your industry or in the market that you're in.
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So if you're building some website or a mobile app, that does a certain thing, become an expert in that learn the history of that concept or the history of that industry.
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Read the data and the statistics over the past 10 years of that industry or market.
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So becoming an expert in something means really learning the ins and outs of it.
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So that say an investor asks you a question about this industry or this market, you can just spit out numbers really quickly because you know them all.
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So not only knowing the industry and the market and the data's statistics is important, but it'll help you learn how to not only craft a better story.
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So when you're building your website, you'll know like, well, I know what worked in the past and what didn't work in the past.
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So that use it to your advantage, learn from people's mistakes, right?
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And I'd say the third thing you can do to really bolster your brand in the beginning without spending any money is building a simple website with a WordPress blog and creating content that people can learn from.
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A lot of people who create blog posts and other content on medium or whatnot, they always fall into a trap of talking about their company or their product in the articles every single time.
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Like for example, maybe someone's building a website to help construction workers, and they start talking about well, if you look at this construction site, our company would fix this problem because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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That's not the way to do it; because a blog post is not a news article.
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A blog post is an informational piece, which means you need to give people information they can learn from.
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And what happens when they learn from your articles, because you're an expert in this topic now is there going to subscribe to you and follow you and probably download your app because, Hey, I just learned something new that I didn't know today and Google wasn't serving it to me because that's static content.
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This is a new post it's dynamic, it's changing and I'm learning something.
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So, the audience will follow if they're learning from you, it's just like any other, say you watch a show on TV and you learn something from it, you're going to add it to your list and want to watch the rest of the episodes.
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Same thing.
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So I'd say that's probably.
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But all three of them are big, to be honest with you.
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I think that's such an important point that you made because I see that same mistake happening all the time as well, is that companies want to sell, and so they're always inserting those sales messages or information about the company within a blog post without getting into all the technicalities.
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You know one of the things that you really want to do is you want to get backlinks.
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You want to get people who will reference that article, that'll increase the authority of your website and help you drive more organic traffic.
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But nobody's going to link to a sales page that just is not going to be something that they do.
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And I had somebody reach out to me the other day, wanting me to a link to one of their pages on their website, and I looked at it and it was just a sales page for their product.
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I'm not linking to that, there's no value add.
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If you deliver value, you don't have to be afraid of not asking for a sale.
00:17:28.650 --> 00:17:44.200
And I think I see this all the time with website design as well, especially in some pretty simplistic websites is all over that front page, they will have contact us, you know, buy now, subscribe, you know, all these calls to action, which you haven't really done anything yet.
00:17:44.200 --> 00:17:51.279
You haven't given them anything of value, and all of a sudden you're wanting this potential customer to take an immediate action that's to your benefit.
00:17:51.789 --> 00:17:57.970
You've got to get in this mindset of what benefit can I offer my potential customer before you start seeking benefit from them?
00:17:58.629 --> 00:17:59.230
Absolutely.
00:17:59.379 --> 00:18:00.220
I agree 100%.
00:18:00.879 --> 00:18:02.769
Yeah, this is just a common topic.
00:18:02.769 --> 00:18:09.279
And, you know, we harp on this all the time on this podcast, but it's amazing how many times people stumble on this.
00:18:09.519 --> 00:18:18.849
And I also love the idea of, you know, on TV, I think CNBC, they've got this show called Undercover Boss, where the boss goes undercover to see what's really going on in the company.
00:18:19.059 --> 00:18:40.599
And you sorta talked about, you know, having people look at your product or service and give some feedback, and I think that's so important, especially for young companies because you can get so blinded by all the work and effort that you're putting into the product and be so excited about little things that may be meaningful to you, but might not be meaningful at all to the ultimate end user.
00:18:40.839 --> 00:18:48.009
You have to sort of give it to people, let them play around with it, and see if the things that are meaningful to you are also meaningful to them.
00:18:48.970 --> 00:18:49.660
Absolutely.
00:18:49.660 --> 00:18:50.619
It's so important.
00:18:50.650 --> 00:18:54.190
And I think that goes back to the point of iteration.
00:18:55.269 --> 00:19:07.450
A lot of these big companies and the number one question investors will ask a startup is, well, why can't Facebook or why can't Google just build the same product you just built and crush you?
00:19:07.539 --> 00:19:08.500
And you know, Mr.
00:19:08.529 --> 00:19:10.660
Wonderful on shark tanks always says the same thing.
00:19:11.049 --> 00:19:13.269
Why can't I just crush you like the cockroach that you are?
00:19:13.569 --> 00:19:14.470
Well, it's simple.
00:19:14.529 --> 00:19:16.450
We're nimble, we can iterate.
00:19:16.809 --> 00:19:19.450
These big companies, they can't change quickly.
00:19:19.450 --> 00:19:28.210
They have like levels of administration and managers, and you know, CEOs and they gotta make decisions through like multiple departments.
00:19:28.690 --> 00:19:37.839
The advantage that entrepreneurs should take, they should be able to do this is take the feedback you get and iterate quickly, make those changes quickly.
00:19:37.960 --> 00:19:42.879
Don't be so enamored with your product, like you said, people love their product.
00:19:43.089 --> 00:19:46.599
Don't love your product that much, be passionate about it.
00:19:46.629 --> 00:19:56.769
There's a big difference between being passionate about the goal that you're trying to reach, you know if you're trying to change the world in some way, or if you have a vision for what your product can do and society.
00:19:57.229 --> 00:19:59.499
Those things are great, you should definitely tackle that.
00:19:59.769 --> 00:20:03.638
But when it comes to the actual product, do not love your product you know.
00:20:04.058 --> 00:20:15.908
Just be prepared to change it as often as possible, tweak it as much as you can based on the feedback you're getting from the people who are using it because ultimately, they're the ones who matter, not you.
00:20:16.239 --> 00:20:18.009
You're just the vessel, you know?
00:20:18.038 --> 00:20:20.558
You're taking in their feedback and you're pushing it out for them.
00:20:21.219 --> 00:20:22.328
It's so true.
00:20:22.808 --> 00:20:31.148
And especially because many products out in the marketplace truly don't have the differentiators that I think many of their managers, their founders think they do.
00:20:31.358 --> 00:20:39.128
They may have come up with something interesting or a different spin on it, but we say it all the time on the show, there are very few truly revolutionary products out there.
00:20:39.489 --> 00:20:44.709
You know over the past couple of weeks, all I hear about is Clubhouse.
00:20:44.771 --> 00:20:47.318
Everybody's talking about Clubhouse, about getting on Clubhouse, and doing it.
00:20:47.348 --> 00:20:53.318
And it's a pretty cool app, it's fun to get on there, and chat with people from all over the world about various topics.
00:20:53.679 --> 00:20:58.269
But one of the things that I've been reading lately is Facebook has certainly taken notice.
00:20:58.568 --> 00:21:06.308
They've got their guns pointed directly at Clubhouse, and now they've got some skunkworks projects internally to build out a Clubhouse competitor.
00:21:06.638 --> 00:21:10.269
And if you think about that app, what ultimately is so unique about it?
00:21:10.509 --> 00:21:14.439
What are they doing that is truly revolutionary?
00:21:15.138 --> 00:21:16.788
It's audio chat rooms, right?
00:21:16.838 --> 00:21:20.108
And if you look at somebody like Facebook, they've already got the customer base.
00:21:20.318 --> 00:21:24.489
They've already got their group meeting capabilities within Messenger.
00:21:24.969 --> 00:21:31.028
It wouldn't be that hard for somebody like that to come along and completely replicate what these guys have been so successful founding.
00:21:32.048 --> 00:21:39.798
There's a fatal flaw in that though, Facebook has tried many times to replicate a successful.
00:21:40.009 --> 00:21:43.608
Look, they offered three point something billion dollars to Snapchat.
00:21:44.118 --> 00:21:46.098
And Evan Spiegel turned it down.
00:21:46.128 --> 00:21:47.388
What did they do after that?
00:21:47.689 --> 00:21:52.548
They tried to build a Snapchat and then they shut it down because nobody wanted to use it, you know.
00:21:52.548 --> 00:21:55.398
They tried to build a, there was a TikTok, right?
00:21:55.398 --> 00:22:00.739
They built a TikTok clone, and nobody wanted to use it, and Facebook has done this.
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