NOVEMBER 22, 2022

Welcome to The Tilt, a twice-weekly newsletter for content entrepreneurs.

In This Issue: Assess these five CX components and learn about an entrepreneur who works only five hours a week while earning big money.

full tilt

The Customer Experience

What does your customer experience tell your audience?

Multiple studies show a high-quality CX is more likely to prompt someone to buy – making both expensive and impulse purchases.

So take time now to assess the customer experience you’re providing to see what you should keep doing and what needs adjusting to grow your business.

In compiling a list of best customer experience brands, Newsweek and Statista used five categories – quality of communication, professional competence, range of services, customer focus, and accessibility (i.e., availability). While they focused on retail businesses, those generally also work for a content business, too. Let’s explore.

Communication and accessibility: Come up with a list of the top three reasons visitors come to your website or other digital property. Walk through your digital properties for each purpose. How easy is it to find what they’re looking for? How many clicks do they have to make to access their desired content? Do they have to read or listen to all the content to find what they want, or are subheds or time-stamped tables of content there to help? The point is to make it as simple as possible to get to and consume the targeted content.

Finally, evaluate your digital properties to understand how well they’re designed to be accessible to all. Here’s an accessible content checklist from Princeton to help you know what to look for.

Professional competence: Generally, you should have an expertise or special experience that makes you well-suited to create content on this topic. In your bio or about page, showcase your credentials or explain your experiences related to your content tilt.

Specifically, you must make sure all the information conveyed in your content is accurate, attributed, and up to date. Also, remember you don’t always have to be the expert in your content. If you have an angle on a topic but don’t have the experience, think about partnering with another creator to develop something. You also could interview someone who has that expertise.

Range of services: Ask your audience directly and indirectly what products and services they’re most likely to buy. Get their feedback on offerings you’re considering. Even better, look at your analytics – what does their behavior tell you they want?

You also can use the success of your first products or services to inform your next ones.

Customer focus: Everything you do must be done through the lens of the audience. Every time you plan a new content asset, product, etc., ask yourself: Would my audience want this? What would be most relevant or interesting to them? How will they want to consume it? When do they want or need it?

By putting yourself in the shoes of your audience/customer, you can create a better experience that will attract them to your content, encourage them to stick around, and ultimately make a purchase.

– Ann Gynn

Bookmark the full-length version to improve your CX.

we stan Graham Cochrane

Entrepreneur: Graham Cochrane

Biz: The Recording Revolution and Graham Cochrane

Tilt: At-home production of top-notch music

Scene: YouTube (637K) Facebook (116.9K), podcast

Snack Bites:

Graham launched a blog and YouTube channel as a marketing tool for his freelance recording and sound mixer business in 2009. A year later, he realized that marketing could be a money-making business.
His first revenue came from ads and sponsorships. But his more significant revenue streams came from ebooks and online courses.
In 2022, Graham earns $160K a month – $40K from The Record Revolution and $120K from his online business coaching.

Why We Stan: Graham gets how to be an entrepreneur in the creator economy. He advocates having a clear voice in your niche. He also asks for email addresses in exchange for his free guides and other content. It makes it easier to automate the follow-up and outreach process, he says.

– Ann Gynn

Read more about Graham Cochrane.

Know a content creator who’s going full tilt? DM us. Or email [email protected].

things to know

Money

Little real revenue: Some short-form video creators say Meta’s 55% revenue share for product displays at the bottom and ads in between Instagram Reels won’t keep them around. They’re eager to move onto YouTube’s upcoming partner program for Shorts monetization. (PR Week)
Tilt Take: Video creators also should understand where brands want them to be because those sponsorships can be an even better revenue source.
More than the combo: Research firm Omdia says TikTok will attract more than two-thirds of online video ad revenue by 2027 – that’s more than Meta and YouTube combined. (Television Business International)
Tilt Take: That won’t happen if the U.S. bans the TikTok app.

Audiences

Level up: Low-code tech tools give creators the opportunity to monetize a business, and the options are growing almost daily. But it’s critical to migrate the creator’s social media audiences to owned channels where they can buy content products, according to a London School of Business study. (Shopify)
Tilt Take: We agree.
Come back: The most powerful YouTube metric? Returning viewers. (Jay Alto; h/t The Publish Press)
Tilt Take: If your audience comes back to consume your content, you’re well on your way to business success.

Tech and Tools

Credentialed: MrBeast and East Carolina University are developing a credential program to help solve the creator industry’s demand for a skilled workforce pipeline. (East Carolina University)
Tilt Take: It would be nice when your business needs to hire to have some ready-made candidates.
Snap kick: Snapchat is giving the 2022 World Cup a kick with team-based AR filters and new AR-Try-On features (you can see what you’d look like in a team’s uniforms). It also will include live update overlays. (Social Media Today)
Tilt Take: Let Snapchat’s World Cup creativity inspire your own. How can you add features to your offerings to attract or retain your audience?

And Finally

Where are you?: Los Angeles and New York are the top cities for creators, though smaller clusters can be found in Nashville, Miami, Atlanta, Las Vegas, London, Berlin, Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo. (Fast Company)
Tilt Take: Frankly, other than traditional entertainer-type creators, location is no longer a factor for most creators.
Nomination time: Insider wants to know who the rising stars in the creator economy are. Nominations are due Nov. 30. Nominees must be 35 or younger. (Yahoo Finance)
Tilt Take: Don’t wait for someone else to suggest your name. Fill out the form yourself.

the business of content

Thinking about selling your content business? There are four critical things you need to start implementing now. (Content Inc. podcast)
Joe and Robert review Twitter. What’s the business model going to be? Why should content creators care? (This Old Marketing podcast)
How many of these misconceptions do you have about starting a business? (Entrepreneur)
Black startup founders share advice on how to acquire venture capital. (Good Housekeeping)
Lessons learned growing up in a house with 2 entrepreneurs. (The Ascent)

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the tilt team

Your team for this issue: Joe Pulizzi, Pam Pulizzi, Ann Gynn, Laura Kozak, Marc Maxhimer, and Dave Anthony.

Customer Love – November 22, 2022