Spark & Ignite Your Marketing
Welcome to Spark & Ignite Your Marketing with Beverly Cornell
Tired of the same business advice? Spark & Ignite Your Marketing is where purpose-driven solopreneurs get real about the wins, the missteps, and what it actually takes to build something that matters. Hosted by Beverly Cornell, this podcast goes beyond marketing adviceâitâs a space to share stories that celebrate each step, reminding us that every success and every mistake gets us closer to our dreams. Here, we embrace our humanness, knowing that our courage and authenticity are what make our journeys worth sharing.
What Youâll Hear
Each week, Spark & Ignite Your Marketing with Beverly Cornell brings you two types of episodes designed to inspire and empower purpose-driven solopreneurs:
- Tuesdays are for Interview Episodes, where we dive into raw, unfiltered conversations with entrepreneurs who share the real stories behind their businesses. These arenât just polished success tales; theyâre honest accounts filled with laughter, hard-won lessons, and sometimes a few tears. We explore marketing strategies that truly connect, the surprising wisdom that mistakes can bring, and those sparks of inspiration that keep our purpose alive. We even take a trip back in time to revisit the kids we once wereâthe dreamers with big possibilitiesâand offer them a little advice for the road ahead. And for some fun, thereâs a lightning round with quirky questions like, âIf your business were an animal, what would it be?â
- Thursdays bring 10-Minute Solo Episodes to cut through the overwhelm of marketing. These episodes are made for creative, purpose-driven service businesses, breaking down one clear idea with one doable action you can take today to grow your impact and connect more meaningfully with your audience. No jargon, no fluffâjust practical, human advice to help you build a brand that feels true to you.
As your host, Beverly creates a safe, inclusive space welcoming every voice. Diversity, inclusion, and genuine connection are at the heart of Spark & Ignite Your Marketing, making it a place where all stories are celebrated.
Who This is For
If youâre a purpose-driven solopreneur in a service-based business, passionate about bringing more kindness, joy, and wellness into the world, this is your space. Spark & Ignite Your Marketing is for those who believe in making a real impact, even when the journey is uncertain.
Why Tune In
This isnât just a marketing podcast; itâs a community of dreamers, doers, and storytellers embracing every laugh, every lesson, and those tear-filled moments that remind us why we started. So tune in, get comfortable, and letâs light up this journey togetherâone story at a time.
If you want to be a guest, visit here: https://bcassociatesmarketing.com/marketing-resources/small-business-marketing-podcast/ to sign up for our application.
Visit https://bcassociatesmarketing.com/ for all your branding and digital marketing needs.
Your support matters and helps ensure we continue to produce this podcast. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2295030/support.
Spark & Ignite Your Marketing
How Simplifying Your Marketing Drives Big Results with Chirag Nijjer Part 1
Does your marketing feel chaotic? In this Part 1 episode of Spark & Ignite Your Marketing, Beverly Cornell dives into the art of simplifying marketing strategies with Chirag Niger, a renowned speaker and advisor at Google. Chirag shares his journey from growing up in a family business to becoming a thought leader in marketing clarity, helping brands worldwide cut through the noise and achieve extraordinary results.
Three Key Takeaways:
- Simplify to Amplify: Overcomplicating your messaging dilutes your brand's impact. Chirag emphasizes the importance of being intentional about the words you want people to use when describing your business.
- Outcome-Driven Strategy: Stop obsessing over perfect processes. Focus on outcomes first, then refine the process. Chirag's "quantity for the sake of quality" approach encourages entrepreneurs to take action, learn, and evolve instead of being stuck in analysis paralysis.
- Customer Journey Matters: Mapping the customer journey is essential. By breaking down each step and identifying where customers are dropping off, businesses can eliminate friction, answer questions, and create a seamless experience that drives conversions.
Follow Chirag Nijjer:
Chirag Speaks - Marketing & Branding Speaker
Chirag Nijjer | LinkedIn
Get The Customer Journey & Experience Map Worksheet.
P.S. Ready to spark your unique opportunities and ignite your marketing?
Here are 3 ways to work with us:
- đ Schedule a Complimentary Call and letâs dive into your goals and answer any questions you may have.
- đ Read Beverlyâs book Marketing For Entrepreneurs a quick guide filled with actionable steps to help make your brand and business shine even brighter. đď¸Or listen to Beverlyâs Podcast where she interviews entrepreneurs to get inspired and gain new business and marketing insights.
- đ Learn more about marketing and Enroll in Our Courses designed to bring clarity to your business efforts. Theyâre easy-to-understand and self-paced, perfect for busy entrepreneurs like you.
Did you know that simplifying complex concepts can drastically improve a brand's effectiveness, leading to a higher customer engagement and way better results. Welcome to another enlightening episode of Sparking Nightmare Marketing. I'm your host, Beverly Cornell, and today we have the pleasure of introducing Chidag Niger, a dynamic Speaker, advisor, and expert in marketing simplification. Through his platform, Chirag Speaks, and his role at Google, Chirag has helped hundreds of businesses worldwide move from chaos to action with his proprietary methods and marketing strategies. I love marketing stuff, Chirag. I'm so excited to have you here.
Chirag:I'm excited to be here. I'm very excited.
Beverly:Anytime I get to speak with other marketing Can I call you a nerd?
Chirag:No, please.
Beverly:No,
Chirag:absolutely. Absolutely. Beverly is my friend. And the thing is, you rarely find friends who are into it, right? It's like everyone loves the occasional story, but it's always when it gets to the, okay, Chirag, you need to stop now, right? These stories are like for example, every time we go to a restaurant, like I love a fancy restaurant here in New York City. I always point out how the, there's no currency symbols on the menu, right? Cause studies have shown when you see currency symbols, right? You, you see them as actual prices as opposed to just numbers. Or like the second or third wine on the menu is going to be, the first one's going to be the most expensive and the second or third is going to be the one they really want to drive you to, right? Cause the first one sets the tone. So you choose the second or third. Like these little tiny stories, I nerd out, I geek out about them. And I'm sure my friends are just sick and tired of me at this point. So Beverly, when I get a chance to talk to a fellow marketer who also nerds out about this stuff,
Beverly:Oh, I'm super excited. Okay. So talk a little bit about, you have such an interesting story where your family is from entrepreneurial background from your family side to like where you are today, talk a little bit about. How you came to be Chidag Speaks versus a nine to five. Like you have all these different complexities to your story. So talk a little bit about your journey.
Chirag:Yeah, no, appreciate it. So I think the biggest thing is my family came from Punjab, India, right? My parents their first generation immigrants here in the U S and while I was born and raised here in the U S they had clothing stores. And I literally grew up at the clothing stores. My crib was there. My first toy was my dad's credit card machine, right? And as beautiful and as amazing as that entire experience is I got to learn public speaking, how to say do sales and all that kind of stuff. You also were very aware from a young age that there was something called a rent payment, right? And I remember we used to be across the street from a Modell's and McDonald's, like all these like big, like at the time there were these big brands. And they always had a line in front of them. But for some reason, our little clothing store never, I had never really seen a line necessarily, right? And I just remember constantly thinking that until one day when my dad goes he put out a, at the time, leather jackets were the big craze in New York City and Manhattan, right? And my father put out a rack of leather jackets. And he marked it for 99 instead of a hundred. I'm in my mind, right? I'm a kid. I'm like, I didn't understand what was going on. Obviously at the time now I know like certain psychology, right? This is a loss leader. There's the 99 seems less a lot less money than maybe a hundred dollars might. And all this sort of psychology that goes behind it. But for the first time I actually saw a rush, right? And then that got me really fascinated into what is this marketing and branding thing? Suddenly there's a way for me to control my destiny. if I can figure out the right words to share with people or the right message to get along. But then since then, I've had the fortune of essentially going off to during my college years, I got to learn a bunch of stuff in the academia. There was so much research and content out there, books that people never borrowed from the the library that like, I was sitting there with just 20 books around me of the best business books I could have ever imagined in my life. Yeah. I've ever really I'm sitting there. I'm just like, I'm salivating practically. I'm like this is great. This is what I've always wanted. But I realized the information is useless if I'm not sharing it. So I started sharing this content. We started doing local workshops for small businesses and all. Eventually we started putting the content online. We've grown to an audience of about 60, 000 followers across social media. And that in of itself has turned into my own sort of, like we were mentioning the methods and all, they've got this thing called the brand clarity framework. And then from there that's turned into its own sort of speaking career. And I've been very fortunate where I say in addition to my nine to five, so I'm over at at the moment, currently over at Google my job I'm a customer success lead, which is half proactive problem solving, half crisis management, but I get the pleasure of working with some of the world's largest advertisers in the world, right? Sort of going through their Google ads, ecosystem support experience. And then on the side, like my five to nine is I get to travel the nation, giving talks about marketing and branding to businesses that quite frankly resemble my other family, like the business my family had when we were growing up. For me, I always tell people, it's I want to be that sort of, I, this finally makes sense to me and it would have helped us back then. I'm hoping it'll help people now. And then along the way, one of the cool fun things we were talking about earlier is the history channel. Has a mini docuseries called the mega brands that built America. A really good series that talks about some of the biggest brands in American history. And in season two, I've had the opportunity and the pleasure to come on as a commentator throughout the season, which has been in of itself, just an absolute blessing and amazing experience.
Beverly:I think that covers
Chirag:everything I've done so
Beverly:far. Yeah, and I think it's pretty cool that you have rubbed elbows with Gary Vee, because I just am such a fangirl. So you said that you really went into help Other businesses like your mom and dad's clothing store, right? The fashion store talk about how this concept of simplify marketing for others, because it's something that's really near and dear to our heart. It's all about clarity. A lot of entrepreneurs do what they love, but they don't understand how to communicate that to their customer in a way that is super clear. And so many small businesses have. Limited resources and they can't just pray and hope for the best. And all of that, like you need to be really strategic about how you use the resources you have. And if you're not clear and focused it's essentially putting money down the drain. So talk a little bit about that. Cause that is you are speaking my language when you talk about clarity and simplification. So talk a little bit about that process.
Chirag:And I know Beverly, from what I'm hearing, that's a big pillar of your brand as well, right? Helping your clients figure out how to build clarity into their frameworks, or into their like processes. And I think at the end of the day, the thing I always tell people is Beverly, how long have you been doing this, the spark and ignite podcast?
Beverly:This podcast only since January, but I've been podcasting since 2007,
Chirag:but even let's just take the, this what is it? Six months now? You said since January, right? I always tell people your work, what you've done in six months, your baby, the amount of countless hours you've put into this if you are lucky, we'll one day get summarized in maybe three or four sentences. I have a conversation with with a buddy of mine, right? Someone goes, Oh, I saw you were on that podcast, right? With Beverly, what was that like? I'll say, Oh yeah, the Beverly does XYZ thing. Beverly has this podcast. This is how the podcast went. Oh, if you want to check it out, here's a link,
right?
Chirag:Or send your, everything you've ever done reduced down to four sentences. And one foot and that's the reality for every single brand that's out there. You are. But maybe a minute and 30 seconds of a thought for any one of your customers on a given day, because they have millions of things going on, right? And one fortune, what we tend to do in marketing and branding is we allow the audience to decide what words. You are relying on me having a good mood, remembering you properly, thinking of the things you've said reality. That's not most people are stressed out. They've got a million things going on. And so my big philosophy when it comes to the clarity is I want you to be in very clear about the words that you want people to use. Because your brand is essentially what people are saying, right? About you. I want you to be very intentional about the words you want. I won't get too much into detail. I'm happy to chat, but we call it these brand echoes, right? Can you fixate, be very clear for yourself and your team on what those words are? And then just find fun ways to remind people over and over. So eventually when someone asks me, hey, how was Spark and Ignite? How about, how was Beverly?
I'm
Chirag:simply echoing back the words you've given me. So when I, when you were your question to me what do we mean by clarity? What I mean is literally doing the work of going. These are the things we want to be known for these four things, maybe that we want to be known for. And now I'm just going to find fun ways to remind people, which for a brand is a lot easier than thinking of 18 different content pillars or millions of different strategies. It's I've just got four words. I've just, my website should have those four words.
My
Chirag:content should have those four words. My Instagram bio should have those four words. My, it just, when I'm of these pamphlets or when I'm out and speaking about the product, it should include these four words. You become, it becomes a lot easier for you to manage your market. Pausing there, Beverly.
Beverly:But there's even like this concept of the power of three, right? Like we said, we say three. So when you have three choices of what you're supposed to do versus 12 choices of what you're supposed to do, you can almost overwhelm someone with indecision by giving them too many choices. What brought you to that? What brought you to, to Shidog speaks in the sense of like the simplification and having your own. Is it just the education? It was working with the hundreds of companies. What, how did you get there? What was the, was there a moment? Was there a spark that created that?
Chirag:Yeah. Beverly, I'm a middle child. I crave the attention. That is it. People tend to ask, right? It's no I think the, that's the sort of joke answer I give people, right? Is one day I got on stage and realized, oh, wow, people are paying attention. If I start saying something, I better find something useful to say. But in reality, actually, when it came down to my spark moment was seeing my father get see at the time when we started off early on we were learning things like the typical marketing things that you learn in any basic more one on one class, right? The four P's of marketing, the ADA marketing funnel, things like that. And as I was learning these things, I reached out to my father. Now, Indian immigrant doesn't have an MBA or anything, been an entrepreneur his entire life, run like dozens of different businesses and different industries and in my mind, this is an individual who's going to look at what I'm saying, think it's too simplistic, and move on. But I was like, as long as I can teach you it, then I know that I've learned it enough.
To
Chirag:my surprise, he calls me back a few weeks later and goes, Hey, I used that thing that you were talking about, and it actually helped me just take what was in my mind and put it on paper. And that's when it hit me, right? It was like, whoa, wait a second, if an individual that I thought would never entertain this would see me as literally his kid, right? Who he's taught all this stuff to but if he's getting it, then maybe this can actually help people. So then that became my spark, right? As you started, we started posting what really helped, I think, Beverly, when you're asking about getting down to the nitty gritty of is putting the content online. Right on so we started, we grew on tick tock at first that was the first platform where we went viral. I think the first video that went viral was about, it's done 1. 7 million views. And in it, I think part of the clarity thing is I'm explaining the difference between consumer versus customer in using the example of Barbie, right? But while I'm doing that the video itself is of me speaking at an event. Alright so talking about intentionality and clarity is it became very clear early on for me that if I wanted to be a speaker and that was my business and I wanted people to use the word, okay, yeah, oh, that's strong, that's a speaker to just put out content of literally me speaking. And then for me, it happened to be the one that helped me that went viral and did really well from there it's been, honestly, the beginning has been a lot of, it was early on was just going and reaching out to a bunch of colleagues and saying, Hey, look, like I have a stuff I can talk about. Let me come in and speak at your entrepreneurship center. So I could build up a ton of content, right? I was like, Oh, I'll do this for free in exchange. Allow me to film myself doing this. They were all okay with it. I would take the clip, start putting it on social media. And eventually it started growing into then conference hosts, reaching out businesses, reaching out. And now fortunately enough where I've had a chance during the pandemic, I got to work with hundreds of businesses on one sessions, which was a great experience.
Beverly:And
Chirag:now it's a lot of conferences and in house stuff pausing there.
Beverly:So what do you think is the biggest thing that has changed since you, like, how have you transformed? What are the way you made decisions before versus the way you make decisions now? What's been the biggest evolution in that process?
Chirag:Being outcome driven as opposed to process driven. I think early on it was an individual who constantly if you told me we sell. Okay, cool. It drug, you need to start making videos of you speaking. Originally, I think early on, I focused very heavily on the process. Everything needs to be scalable. So right from the start, it was okay. We're going to mount the lights this way so that I can turn them on in less In two minutes we're gonna have the camera constantly stationed here. What camera should we get? Let's research the camera for 20 minutes or like for two hours. Actually more, or like it. The mic needs to be here. Okay. Are we gonna do this? Am I gonna set up a studio here? Am I gonna do it there? Everything was step by oh. It has to be some sort of process to it. Some sense to it. So that I can scale from day one to day 10. Day 1, I'll do 1. Day 10, I'll be able to do 10, right? And that approach, unfortunately, gets you really stuck in the detail. And what you quickly find is it's almost like saying, Okay, cool, we're going to go from New York to California, and you just start driving, right? And you're like, ah, that you end up getting stuck, right? At every turn, you're asking yourself, Should I take a right or left here? You're going to be way off base. As opposed to just being outcome driven, right? Which was, okay, cool. I need to make a video. Let me just grab whatever camera's in front of me. Grab whatever mic's in front of me. Let me just sit down and make a video. And I think that was the big, or Hey, cool. I want to go speak at XYZ college, right? First, it used to be this huge. Okay. Let me get a list of all these colleges and email marketing list. We're going to reach out. And eventually it became cool. I want to speak at that college. That's my outcome. Let me just go reach out to whoever the the executive director is for their entrepreneurship center, send them my speaker packet. I think that has been the intentionality being clear and where my outcome lies. What I really want has been the big sort of change that has happened. Things don't have to be sustainable at first. They don't have to be scalable at first. Do it, get the outcome you're looking for. And then tweak, I always tell people it's a not quantity versus quality. It's quantity for the sake of getting the quality.
Beverly:And I love this because of so many reasons. I think for, as a, as an only child, who's a perfectionist because all the things are on the one child, I oftentimes had gotten in my own way, like I can't do that because it has to be perfect. Like it has to be perfect. And before I know it, like you said, like one. One step of it's taking me now 10 days versus just, so I I think we were talking a little bit before I was wanting to do a podcast and within three weeks I made it happen. I decided that I will figure it out. Like I'll do it and I'll figure it out. And it may not be, I strive for excellence, not perfection, but this idea of, What we think is perf, what I think is really good is probably really good to other people.
Chirag:Bang. Exactly. Exactly. It's a typical Fowzer, right? The more you know about what you do, right? The more everything seems, Oh, this is too simple. Oh, this is too. But for most people that you're, most of your audience is going to be people who are trusting you to have done the we always look at marketing one on one classes. Like now I look back at marketing one on one classes and I'm like, Oh, these are, this is too simple. This is too basic. But if I took a friend of mine and put them in the class, they'd sit there and be like, I'm learning so much. He becomes aware. It's like most you are allowed to be simple. You are allowed to start small. You are allowed to start unsustainably putting this initial pressure on yourself.
Beverly:And it's not allowed. It's not going to allow you to create what you want to create. It's going to inhibit. Your true gift, I believe, at the end of the day, because you have a gift that's supposed to be for the world, whatever that is, whatever your industry is, whatever your thing, your passion is, and if you are so concerned about all those details, that gift cannot fully flourish. Love that concept of outcome versus process. Process is important. Having the system and all that super important. But looking at the outcome first of let's get it done and get it out there and then we can. Yeah,
Chirag:it also becomes, I think, one of the most frustrating things you'll ever find. People who focus on the process will probably relate to this is you said all this time, setting up the process get one outcome. And then you're sitting there going, Oh, I actually didn't even care about this. Like I actually, I don't like doing this. Like I, you always have a good on you. I think, there's some statistic where it's 90 or 80 percent of podcasts don't get past episode like 10 or something. Some ridiculous statistic like that. And I think, so anytime a client reaches out and says, Hey, I want to I'm like, okay, don't buy any equipment, go on zoom and record yourself. Just having a podcast, right? Let's just do the simplest version of this, right? Or someone who says, oh, I want to start a clothing brand. It's okay, let's first start off with Shopify drop. Like you print on demand, right? I do that for two weeks. See if you actually enjoy this, or if you just enjoy the idea of this. Because then we can always build out the systems and the processes, everything we can turn a sustainable over time. But first just find the simplest, sorry the simplest version of what you're trying to do. And just do it, and see if you enjoy it. See if you actually want to keep doing that. If you'd like that as your identity. And then from there, we'll just find tweaks along the way to fix it.
Beverly:I was talking to my assistant, Michelle, the other day, and I feel like we have some really great foundational stuff. And I said, now it's just it's like the magic tweaking that makes it amazing. And actually that's the really fun part where you're like, yeah,
Chirag:cause you get to obsess. You get to go into it. No one really notices it except you, but you notice it to the point where you're like, it's almost like you get to tweak things to the point where, like they always say, right? The best process is the one that people don't even realize exists. Because it's just seamlessly working, the reason it's seamlessly working is because I spent I got to really go into the nitty. Yes.
Beverly:And that is the fun part. Like when it's like magic, there's like little bits of magic in it. And it's and she loves it too. She's Oh yeah, that's amazing. Like that one little, but once you have the process in place and you have it working and you love it. I love this podcast and talking to people, hearing their stories, seeing it, I'm inspired and I learned something every single time. So I love this. You have a favorite tool or theory called hum.
Chirag:The hum. Yes. The hum or the echo theory. Yes. Yes. So we used to call it Yes. It was it's gone through iterations of its own. Okay. Take an exam to talk about again, talk about getting something out there and then fixing it. But it's what I was talking about earlier. Okay. This idea of focusing on your echoes at the time we used to call it Hum. I was trying to figure out a way to be able to explain this in a way where it said. Like you don't always remember the song, but you do, you can hum the melody. So it's cool. If I'm, if you're people, aren't going to remember every little part of your brand what is the, what do you want them to hum? Think about the bare bones, the simplest the hum, the tune is often the simplest part. It's so important. It's so intentional and it sets the tone. But it's the simplest part for people to grasp. Similarly, can you find the most simple words, the simple terms that you want people to grasp and hold on to so that when they are thinking about you, they're like, Oh, there's that one, there's that one podcast spot spots, but same way, like Howard hum, there's a song that goes, Oh spark and ignite. Okay, cool. Go. I'll go for it.
Yeah.
Chirag:Yeah, but that's I'm a big fan. It's, you'll be surprised by everything. No, actually you won't, but I know you do this really well with your clients. It's often not a lack of options. It's often overabundance of them. People often think, okay, if I'm focusing on one thing, then I'm limiting myself, right? You're not, you're focusing, right? You're not limiting. You're focusing is the key word here when you and I say simplicity and clarity, we're not saying dumb it down. We're not saying lose the magic, right? That's the biggest feedback we always get, right? It's oh, but I feel like I'm not unique or creative. No, I just want you to be consistent. I want you to, when you go into a conversation and you're talking people are asking you, what do you do? You're not sitting there word vomiting, right? I want you to be intentional about the four sentences you say. I
Beverly:think this power of storytelling too, which I think you are also an advocate of is super important. One thing that we say, we have the sparking night and blaze services that we say, I say I'm like a firework because I want people to immediately associate that. With me in my wording. So I'm like a firework that helps spark your marketing and helps your business ignite to, unbelievable growth or whatever. But I think people think when you think focus, they think small and they don't think that you can still be a revolutionary brand. And be focused.
Chirag:Absolutely.
Beverly:If you want to be a revolutionary brand, you need to be even more focused. And I think Steve jobs was one of those people that was extremely focused. You look at the businesses that were really singularly focused and that's what made them have way more impact in their reach and everything. It's based on that focus.
Chirag:A good example to toss out there as well is Richard Branson, right? Virgin airlines and everything. You would imagine a man who has like dozens of brands under his umbrella somehow, despite all that, he's still if you see any news coverage on him, you'll always see the word adventurer. Or adventure thrown out. And I started noticing that weird trend coming out. So in my talks, I often talk about Richard Branson in the sense of despite there being, he's doing hundreds of different things every on any given day, he has this huge, massive brand, but still the word adventure consistently comes out. And you realize it's because his team is very intentional about it. So even in the Virgin a website where they have like a section talking about him, there's one paragraph where they use the word adventure. And then Almost eight times in a singular, a paragraph or two paragraphs. And you're sitting there being like, Oh what if I like focus on one thing and I bore my audience. And it's you have literally one of the largest over expanding brands in the world understanding this message of, look, we want to over index on this word adventure. So we're literally going to over index on it. I remember early on, I used to do anything and everything. So it was like, Oh, I'll go interview a bunch of people. I'll do a bunch of podcast stuff. I'll go help X, Y, Z people. And then I remember someone reaching out to me and going, this is a person, someone I've really wanted to work with. Okay. Almost manifestation in a way. She reaches out to her team. She goes, I love your content. My problem is truck. I've been scrolling on your Instagram for the last five minutes, and I don't really know what you do. This is about two years ago, just sitting there. I was like, wow, right? Talk about not being able to take my own advice. And so since then, it's been a lot of literally shifting. I switched over to the handle. Chirag speaks. com. Literally putting speaks in the word itself. A lot of my content nowadays tends to be showing me speaking and stuff. Just again, reinforce that message over
and over. It
Chirag:doesn't limit what I can do. I can still do a million trends. But I have to always make sure that I'm focusing on that idea of
Beverly:let's talk a little bit about the marketing you do. So you are on TikTok, you're on social media, you have this very large following of, is social media like your favorite tactic? What's
Chirag:your
Beverly:favorite one?
Chirag:Yeah. I think it comes back to knowing where your audience is. And I think I often tell people is be act like an idiot and let the data tell you. So I remember when I first started posting content on Tik TOK, I really thought that my audience was going to be a lot of business owners reaching out, which now it is right. Cause I think we've been intentional for the last six to eight months. But before that the surprising thing was it was a lot of marketing students, right? Yeah. So the comments on some of my most viral videos, to my surprise, weren't people going, Oh, I'm going to use this in my business. Some small subset, majority of them was, Oh, my professor was trying to teach me this. I didn't get it. Or like people DMing me going, Hey, I actually use that example. You told us in the video. In my in my exam when I was like giving as an example for my paper or something for marketing students now, and that's great and that's phenomenal. But I think I was creating content for business owners.
It was
Chirag:reaching an audience of marketing students. And at that time, there was a pivot to be made, right? Should I be creating content that's a lot more marketing student centric? But then I also realized that if I'm a speaker and my audience, my core audience, it is great to have the 50, 60, 000 followers on social media. But that audience isn't necessarily my converting audience. That audience allows me to test my stuff out. It becomes my credibility marker. It becomes this sort of community of people who are just like me, Fascinated about marketing and branding. But if I'm a speaker, my customer, so those are my users, my customer, the people actually paying me will be the ones that are our conference hosts, for example or the directors at colleges would bring me in to speak where for them, not a lot of them are on Tik TOK where I found actually LinkedIn was a lot better for that, where I had a smaller subset, but I was able to reach out to people or like for them to see my content and be like, Oh, wow. We want to hear more about your speaking. So the question, I think when you say my favorite sort of social media, I think has been a great credibility marker, a great way to test ideas out, but being intentional about where your audience is for me, LinkedIn, and then word of mouth for a lot of conference hosts, right? For them, there is a tight network. They have a lot of pressure on them. They don't often have a lot of time to be able to vet the speakers. So if you come with like a referral for word of mouth, I think that's a big, powerful helper there.
Beverly:Talk about, I don't want to use the word testimonial, but an experience Of how you've helped transform a person's business or idea of marketing or like a feel good story. Should I like,
Chirag:yeah, no. So we had a, someone who was working on this, you had this consumer apparel started consumer package, good company, it was a sporting's good sporting goods. She was a college student who had started a six figure business, and when it comes to the product design to actually building this out, putting it out on into the world, her marketing and branding, however, when it came to the tweaking, she struggled with because she was viewing everything as this big, holistic chunk, right? For example, she's looking at Instagram and TikTok. She goes, I have a smaller audience on Instagram, a bigger audience on TikTok. I'm going to focus on TikTok. Or we're not seeing a lot of sales come in, blah, blah, blah. And all that, what I ended up walking with her was just, let's just map out the user journey. Someone sees your content, they go on your profile, they click onto your website, they go on the homepage, they go on the product page. Check out purchase confirmation, right? Let's map out these seven or eight steps and let's just look at the data, right? When we started looking at the data, what we realized was that a large percentage of people were coming over from Instagram, but for some reason we kept losing them on the homepage. So we tweak the homepage, right? We start fixing it. That's not really working for her. Eventually we're just like, let's just get rid of the homepage. And now what happens is all of a sudden people were going straight to the product page, sales skyrocket. What we realized was on Instagram, the type of content she was putting out there was showing the product in action. People were already convinced they'd already built affinity. They just wanted to go in and purchase. They didn't want to get distracted by the millions of other things that are on our home. And I think that for me also was an eyeopening moment of just how simple some of these can be. We overcomplicate it. We view it this huge, holistic chunk, break it down into little steps and your job is essentially just to go. Step by step and see where people are getting stuck and then figure out why they are getting stuck. Either solve for it or get rid of that step out of their way. And I think for her, that was a really easy, she was able to take that philosophy to everything she was building out the products, designing them to supply chain and all that, right? Look at things on the granular level, right? Step by step.
Beverly:Great advice and a great example of how, like one thing that is super obvious, but yet
once you looked
Beverly:at the outcome, like there it is, like right there, yeah, they use the user experience. She didn't need to convince anybody anymore. So they were ready to buy and you put friction in that process. That's not going to help whatsoever.
Chirag:Yeah.
Beverly:But what is your longterm vision for what you're doing? What's the legacy going to be for you?
Hello, you just wrapped up part one of this episode of Spark Ignite Your Marketing. I hope it fired up some new ideas for you, but guess what? We're not done yet. We've got even more sparks to ignite in part two, dropping next Tuesday. You won't want to miss it. Trust me on that. So make sure you're subscribed to our newsletter because we'll shoot you a quick heads up as soon as the episode goes live. No FOMO here. Until then, keep that marketing flame burning.