Experimenting With Experience.

To you, from me, a woman who wants to raise the bar in experience.

Well, it’s been a minute. 

I can’t believe an entire month has flown by since the last time I sent out a newsletter! But, I’ve been up to something with my own brand this month, I’ve done my own little experiment with experience! It’s been fun and I thought I‘d share what I’ve found. I’m purely referring to digital experience here and the experience you create through the content you’re sharing.

But first, let me ask you a question: Do you know when to contribute your voice to the digital world?

Is less more when it comes to pushing out content? 

Or

Is continuous regular content really king when it comes to creating a good digital experience with you? 

And more importantly, how are you measuring this? Through your own goals? 

Or 

Via what other people say you should be sharing? 

It’s important to know what you want to get from a piece of content that’s for sure. Even if that goal is to just simply make people smile or feel good.

So, back to me.

As I said, I’ve been experimenting this past month in order to truly be able to write about this, I’ve done a little bit of a digital test around my own various types of content.

I’ve also been running some tests for my clients. I think it’s good to experiment with experience, because how can you become better and clearer on what you want if you don’t experiment? 

And remember, digital provides us with a perfect arena to experiment. If something doesn’t work for us, we can try something different! So never be afraid of experimenting with digital experience.

Context is important.

It’s especially important to note that we’re living in exceptionally unusual times right now, which can have a huge bearing on how you are received. External happenings undoubtedly have an impact on every single one of us. 

The past month has seen the culmination of the U.S Election, England Lockdown 2.0, multiple potential vaccines developing, Christmas planning in a lot less familiar way, new businesses being born, many businesses closing their doors and a number of industries coming to a complete halt, again. 

You get the idea. There has been a lot for us to contend with and experience in our outer worlds and that’s without any of our own personal experiences on top of that. So it’s fair to say that my observations have been formed during a time that is under very intense and strange external conditions. 

However, I thought I’d share them with you anyway because I think there are some good lessons to learn.

One Monthly Newsletter For November.

So, firstly, you’ll notice that this is my first email communication with you in November, I dropped the mid-month blog for a couple of reasons:

1) I really wanted to see where I felt we were by the middle of the month digitally and I didn’t want to add to what is already feeling very noisy. I think there is a lot of digital fatigue at the moment and I have personally been more drawn towards those who share less frequently and more meaningfully.

I don’t know about you, but my inbox has been filling up with more and more content that seems like for contents sake at the moment (especially over the past month).  

Every day I’m getting more emails trying to sell me something. 

Don’t get me wrong, I know we’re in a pandemic. As business owners we want to still be ‘top of mind’ for our communities and customers. But, when you’re consistently at the ‘top of my inbox’ daily, I’m afraid I’m removing you from my ‘subscribed to list’. 

This isn’t to complain or criticise anyone else’s choices or marketing methods but it’s simply because I wanted to spend the month observing the outer world and really examining the digital space. 

And…

2) I wanted to create something meaningful for you. Something you could learn from. Putting together my newsletters isn’t a 5 minute job for me. I like them to be valuable and to give you something to think about.   

I don’t like to give the same generic advice we see in a lot of places. 

November has been a pretty busy month for me with keynoting a UK social media event, researching an entirely new area of study for a new client, getting a long term client into a MAJOR online global retailer (ahem John Lewis- I’m very proud of this one) and having a number of long form content deadlines to deliver. 

So, I didn’t just want to cobble something together send you something mediocre mid-month! 

My brain has done a lot of heavy work this month and now I’m back with my brain fully focused on this month’s newsletter! There, that’s full transparent truth. 

So, what did I learn from not putting out a mid-month newsletter? 

A few things: 

1) I had more private conversations with my community. People genuinely reached out to me to say they’d missed the mid-month instalment. Thank You! But, asides from feeling the love, the lack of the mid-month newsletter facilitated personal one-to-one conversations around experience.   

Sometimes, less is more, if you create a community that enjoys your content, they might just reach out to your inbox, rather than always trying to be at the top of theirs. It was certainly the case for me! 

2) I missed writing the newsletter. I realised that this newsletter is much more than a newsletter. I knew this anyway, but it solidified to me that this is a much closer and stronger community than a simple exchange of words each month. To all of you here, thank you. 

When you put your heart into writing content, be sure it's meaningful and that it’s not just a way of selling your services to people. When something means something to you, you are truly passionate about it, whether the frequency is once a week, a month, a year or whatever it is, so long as it means something, that’s what matters.

3) I revised my own subscriptions. Quality over quantity. Through fully appreciating the quality of my own newsletter community, I unsubscribed to Newsletters that don’t make me feel a part of something. If a newsletter is only giving me generic advice and sales pitches, they are no more! There are a couple I’ve HAD to keep (you know, the ones that are kind of an obligation) but asides from that. If they were low on quality! Off they went! 

If you’re currently putting out your own newsletter and it’s all you you you and not enough them them them, your balance is wrong. Newsletters should give people something to think about, something to feel enthused by to then take action later, should they wish. It shouldn’t be a ‘here’s what I’ve done’ blow-by blow account or a continuous sales pitch. If you’re in this camp, change it! 

To summarise.

Frequency is less important than quality. It certainly proved to be in my own example. The lack of my newsletter led to even more one-on-one conversations around experience. The more conversations I have, the more customers I convert. So the lack of newsletter, helped me in this goal.

Meaningful conversations are a goal for me. Always have been, always will be. The more meaningful conversations I have, the more people I convert into paying customers (obviously, there are more steps in the process, however, without meaningful conversations, the process doesn't begin.)

I always use meaningful conversations as the key metric above any other digital and social media measurements.

Yours may be entirely different, but it's really important to be clear on what they are.

Try it, and see what works for you with your own goals.

So that’s it for the newsletter findings, I hope they helped you to think about our current cultural context and, what you are putting out for your community and to help you think if your output it’s working towards your own goals.

My next experiment was based around social media posting, in particular, Instagram.

Instagram Content Experiment.

This was slightly the opposite to what I did with the newsletter, I kicked things up a notch or three here! Not for the entire month (I couldn’t bare the time commitment) but, over a few days, I showered my Instagram account with far more posts than I would care to post usually! 

So What Happened? 

Well, this was really interesting for me. 

I usually post to Instagram every couple of days and when I typically post a piece of content, it facilitates 4/5 meaningful inbox conversations (based on what I write). 

Remember, a goal of mine is meaningful conversations so my typical posting style does facilitate this. 

My posts don’t typically get a huge number of likes and comments publicly … but that isn’t my goal, my goal is to facilitate a place where people want to deepen conversations with me. 

Likes and comments are great and I really enjoy conversing publicly with my community, but I love the one-to-one direct conversations that my Instagram posts typically generate.

So, back to my experiment. I shared 2-4 posts a day for a number of days. I also decided to style them a little bit differently. I’m running a new colour theme on my account currently and I plan to continue with colour blocks for the foreseeable. I quite enjoy the new aesthetic, visually. Sometimes is good to just share things because they look nice! I’m certainly keen to do more of that! 

What I did notice though was a drop in direct one-to-one conversations.

Perhaps this is because people felt I was more present publicly and therefore didn’t feel the need to reach out directly and further a conversation with me. Perhaps it was because the content was slightly less meaningful. 

I will never put out content that isn’t meaningful, not ever. So I believe that this content still had depth and plenty that people could learn from, but it was more frequent and perhaps the frequency didn’t allow people the time to want to follow up directly with me. By the time post one of the day had been read … BAM, there was post two and then post three. 

Remember, my goal is for meaningful direct conversations, so it certainly didn’t help in facilitating that particular goal.

What it did do however, was increase public post engagement, generate more post likes and increase my reach to a new accounts. I also gained new followers too! So on balance, there was an upside to trying this out and it did provide positive elements, just not my underlying goal.

My Thoughts.

All of this experimenting has got me thinking, can you ever really provide meaningful value with just consistency in experience? 

There’s an argument for both sides here I think and I think it is purely dependant upon your own business objectives. If putting out a million pieces of content a day works for you, I’m all for it and good on you IF and it’s a big IF, it aligns with your goals.

If your goal is to get more likes and engagement, cool! But WHY? How does that relate back to your business goals.

My own experience this month tells me that people want (and expect) something more meaningful from me. It’s how I’ve run my business for years. Don’t be in a rush to step into the ‘digital consistency shoes’ way of thinking if it’s not for you. 

What I’ve learned is that experience needs to be authentic to you. I felt like I stepped out of my own authentic shoes this month and experimented and I’m thrilled with the findings! 

My email experiment taught me that less can be more and it encouraged more one-to-one personal social interactions. My social experiment taught me that more is actually a bit overbearing and potentially less meaningful although there were benefits from an uplift in likes and audience increase. But content isn’t always king! For me, meaningful, valuable, high quality content (that encourages direct conversations) is! 

So there you have it, take what you need from this! Why not have an experimental month yourself and see how it works for you! 

All I know is that unless experience is authentic to you and aligned with your personal goals, not what you’re told it should be, then it won’t resonate with your audiences, customers and communities and it certainly won’t meet your own objectives. 

Over To You!

So go ahead and experiment. Start with your goals, go from there and see what you find out! And remember, it can all change too! What works for you now, might change next month, that’s the nature of digital, keep experimenting! 

I’d love to hear how you get on! That’s it for this month, I’ll be back next month with ONE monthly email on 20th December to close off 2020 (what a year hey!). 

Then I’ll kick off 2021 with two emails in January (or maybe just the one, we will see, I'm still experimenting ;-)!)

Until next time, try experimenting and keep raising the bar in experience! 

Yours, In Experience,

Victoria. 

P.S : If you would like to join us on the inside and subscribe to my monthly newsletter, you can do that by clicking the link HERE .