3 weeks into my new job

What's been my focus hitting the ground?

In closing the last chapter of Rebel Dreams, I was getting all psyched up and ready to grow this DreamAgain community of rebels.

And then suddenly a job invite came from nowhere, and in about week I accepted. I had known their marketing guy for a couple of years. Cris and I had become friends over my work at SmartCatholics.

The team has proven to be incredible. Small, focused, and active. With regret, I bid my current team good bye, and dived into the usual early phase of triage with the new team. My role is associate marketer.

Based on my own book, I started trying to gather 3 main areas of information: details about our audience, what is the path to action, and how to create engagement.

This will be an ongoing, fluid, sort of thing. But in these first few weeks, I've focused on creating banners, promo graphics for an upcoming summit, a trifold, and hosts of emails. I've been using these projects as concrete starting points to understand the brand, shorten and focus the language, and bring th team into focus.

My loose audit uncovered that:

• Social media is quiet.

• The forums are a ghost town.

• The ‘Netflix’ library of video content is great, but viewing hours could be better.

• Subscribers aren't clear on the point of it all - to create local watch parties and groups.

• The public don'tknow who's working the magic behind the scenes.

• The team struggles a little with brand confusion between the parent brand ‘Catholic Mens Leadership Alliance’ and the child media brand, HeroicMen.

• Our outreach and PR plan is ad hoc, rather than strategic.

• The Mailchimp nurture sequence asked for donations and shares, without giving a strong plan of action.

Perhaps there's more, but these are our focus in the early months.

My approach is to look through the marketing material they've been using, and that they're proud of. It actually revealed a diagnosis of our audience that lit me up. They identified 5 kinds of men who need help.

Since they have a Netflix, their socials should be busting with clips and shareable snippets, inspiring people to sign up and watch content.

Their coaches are their golden geese, and really need more air time. I started scheduling meetings with each one just to ask them about themselves, such as their favorite movies, memorable moments in their lives, and what's the main problem for our target audience.

Each convo has been incredible. During my early interviews with the recruitment team, they asked me what I'd do as soon as I joined. My first recommendation was creating snippets of videos to boost social engagement. since they're a media company.

The second idea was to start a wekly podcast to chat with leadership and team members, to help more people understand the minds and hearts of the company. These convos are proving it to me, because these men are all so real and relatable, and fun to listen to.

For social media, my focus is a hard reset of everything. Visual branding has been all over the place, so my design focus has been to dial in the feel and the visuals.

I've been blending a mix of Netflix's dark and red tones, the edginess of a sports channel, and a cinematic touch that feels heroic and dramatic.

In looking at Instagram and Facebook, they never shared the ‘what' of the company, the basic branding ideas and vision.

So my best friends have become MidJourney and ChatGPT. Midjourney gives me fantastic art, subjects, and backgrounds I can use for thumbnails and illustrations.

ChatGPT takes my landing pages and sales letters, and then rewrites it in new ways. I'll ask it to try rewriting in the style of different successful ad writers, like Ogilvy and Lee Chow. These have shown me how different tones of approach create a different vibe.

For social media, I created a loose structure for daily posts, based on the buzzwords coming out of all the daily meetings. My thinking is to fill a whole month woth daily content by creating 7 streams or series of posts.

There's always the basics - quote graphics. I left those to the end, but plan on grabbing Bible quotes on manhood. I took everything I've made in the last few weeks, and turned them into a series focus on the brand itself and what it does or stands for. I went through all the app testimonials on the App Store and Play Store and created a series of those. A longish prayer was cut up into a 10-part series. Weekly promotions for the upcoming summit. And so on.

I need to teach myself how to get strategic with hashtags and see what happens with engagement, who is showing up. This is an easy way to create a ton of graphics in Canva, and schedule them up very quickly.

ChatGPT has been fantastic for captions. I'll ask it to generate something on a theme, or I'll write out my own caption, and ask it to rewrite it 5 times with different stresses. This allows me to share similar messages without it literally being the same.

The biggest value with this is being under pressure to get things going. Something is better than nothing, and more importantly, we need to get engagement up. Most social followers aren't clear on anything we do and stand for.

I can already see that the coaching slide decks and summit replays will be new sources of content streams. Not to mention the host of videos inside the library.

What's next?

I'm trying to find a fast and easy process for extracting and sharing video snippets on social, to boost our educating and informing aspect of the brand. Possibly templates in WeVideo and Descript.

Next is engagement, teaching our audience to get used to interacting with us and each other. I'm starting with questions and icebreakers on social media.

I'm also using the forum attached to the Netflix to share ideas and ask for peer to peer insights. I rewrote the welcpme text to set clearer expectations, and added a code of conduct. We'll see how that builds over time.

Lastly is equipping men. This is finding the handraisers and connecting them with our coaches. So I plan to start a new series of Meet the Team, sharing their interests and insights, and using those to ask our audience to share what they think. I hope that pretty soon turns into a podcast. These guys are stoked to talk, and have a ton to say. I just need a compelling focus and then get out of the way.

There's probably more going on, but these feel like solid starting points, and the team is happy with our first month.

The key for me is the center to good branding: get clear about your audience, or its segments, let them know what you do, and make it clear what they can do.

More soon, and we'll see how this develops and what I learn. :)