Growth Newsletter #100

Would you rather win a trip to Hawaii? Or a ✨mystery prize✨ of the same value?

Turns out that people are more motivated by a mystery prize than they are when they know what the prize is.

People love to dream. 

Beyoncé knew this when she released her album, Renaissance, this past summer. She gave people the option to buy a $40 "mystery box."

People were generally told what was inside: 

• Collectible box
• CD
• 4-Panel Softpak
• T-shirt
• Photo booklet
• Mini poster

They also had the option of choosing between four different "poses." This was Beyoncé's pose on the T-shirt—but there was no way of knowing what that meant!

What could a loyal Beyoncé fan do but to buy all four?

That means loyal fans ended up buying four copies of her album for $160, when her album normally sells for just $18. That's a 9x increase in order value.

She sold out of all of her mystery boxes in under two days. And the album ended up being one of the biggest of the year, and one of her biggest of all time.

Use mystery to motivate your customers.

We did this with our course, Un-Ignorable. During the early bird sale, we promised a "mystery bonus." And we sold out 50+ seats for the course in less than an hour.

200 podcasts in five years. That's how many Casey Hill booked for him and his team. 

The result? According to them, $1,080,000 in revenue and dozens of sales every month.

Why does this work? A few reasons.

Reason one brings us to one of my favorite phenomena: The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (or the frequency illusion/bias).

Imagine you just hear of someone. Then you start seeing them on LinkedIn. Then Twitter. A friend brings them up. Then they're speaking on your favorite podcast.

"WOW, this person is EVERYWHERE! They must be huge."

After you notice something for the first time, you're more likely to take note of it the second time, then more likely the third time, and so on. You believe it must be getting more and more popular or common when in reality, you're increasingly tuned to noticing what was already there.

For example, you'll never see so many motorcycles until you start riding motorcycles.

When the Bonjoro team was on 200 podcasts across the industry, it became increasingly hard for a podcast listener to not notice them. And once they did, they started noticing them across every podcast in the industry.

"Wow, who are these guys?"

Podcasts are also excellent affinity builders. Listening to someone speak for 60 minutes is way more impactful than casually reading their social posts for months.

Check out Casey's LinkedIn post where he breaks down his process for getting on podcasts.

Content marketing of the past:

1. Do keyword research.
2. Create an article for those keywords.
3. Wait and repeat.
4. (Plus link to the article in a tweet and send it to your newsletter.)

Content marketing now:

1. Do audience research (SparkToro, perusing social, subreddits, etc).
2. Create an article targeting that audience.
3. Share the article in your newsletter.
4. Create 5+ tweets, LinkedIn posts, TikTok videos/Instagram reels/YouTube Shorts.
5. Drive users to your newsletter.
6. Engage with commenters.
7. See which posts get the most engagement and look for frequently asked questions.
8. Create an article based on those, and repeat.

In short, turn every piece of content into numerous smaller pieces and re-use them across channels—tailored to that specific medium and audience.

Drive those people back to your newsletter. You own your email list. It isn't gated by algorithms. It can't be taken away if you were to get banned or if the social network becomes less popular (imagine having a huge Facebook audience!).