In this episode, we’re joined by Rachel Sterling, CMO at Identity Digital. Rachel shares her fascinating and varied career path, from production to marketing, discusses the impact of empathy in marketing, and provides insightful examples of how her unique experiences have shaped her professional approach. She also shares some fascinating insights from recent campaigns, the advantages of non-traditional domain names like .bio versus .com, and how Rachel and her team are tapping into seasonality for greater marketing efficiency.

Guest Quote:

“The reason I love talking about failure is because once you fail once, you never make that same mistake again. I would say my biggest failure was at Twitter. We did some research and we found that only 5 percent of users were creating 90 percent of the content. And so the next question you ask is, why? And the answer was fear. And so what we determined is that fear was a significant barrier to content creation. And we looked at the competitive landscape and we saw that ephemeral products like Instagram and Snapchat stories were hugely popular. And so not rocket science, let's do this too. And so we tested in lots of markets…and you know what we found?   Nobody wanted to use it…So we built something that we wanted. We didn't build the thing that people wanted, and so within eight months it failed. And so if you are building exactly what you want, you run the risk that you are not building for the person that you are trying to convert, and that is a recipe for disaster.”

Episode Breakdown: 

[08:42] Alchemy Unveiled: Building credibility through a non-dotcom domain

Why choose a domain that’s a non-dotcom? For one, they’re available. Rachel’s work focuses on marketing non-dotcom domains to help users understand all of their options for personalization with their websites.

[24:19] Nuggets to Campaign Gold: Failure is valuable

Rachel’s failures have informed something very important: how she approaches work in the future. When we make a mistake, we’re likely to never make that same mistake again. Rachel shares that her failures, alongside her successes, are what make her valuable to any organization.

[35:23] Gold Rush: Rely on the data

Gut instinct is a great place to start but it's not the end all be all. In Rachel’s case, she learned that gut instinct can mean building something users do not want to use. So start with gut instinct but always fall back on the data - what are you users telling you?

Links & Resources:

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