Hey, there!

Thanks for checking out my application to the Head of Marketing role at Steady.

Let me guess:

You’re looking for an experienced marketer and a creative storyteller who knows how to devise a digital strategy that drives awareness, affinity, and conversion.

You’re looking for someone who can weave the tension through and through, and yet, somehow, untangle the knot ever so smoothly.

Someone who believes what you believe: that data without a story is as fruitless as an ocean without water.

Because data doesn’t make you feel anything.

Stories do.

Data doesn’t make you buy products.

Stories do.

Because data doesn’t make you care; data doesn’t inspire you—it doesn't move you. Data doesn’t compel you to act. Data doesn’t even help you become a better version of yourself. No, data isn’t transformational; do you know what is?

A story.

Your story.

The way I see it?

People don’t take action because they want to. They take action because, at that given moment, they felt compelled to do so.

I’m here to help you win that moment and leave them feeling compelled.

I’m here to help you move people into action.

How?

Three words:

  1. Marketing.

  2. Writing.

  3. Storytelling.

Building my own direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand and working in digital marketing at Google and Meta have allowed me to evolve and refine my skills in working through the customer journey to build and test digital strategies that drive both brand awareness and performance.

Writing over 100 research-based articles on philosophy, psychology, and creative thinking has rewarded me with the craftsman’s mastery of seizing attention, and then slowly dispersing it. Within two years, my readership has organically grown to over 30,000 users who visit this blog every month and 5,500+ subscribers to my newsletter. 

And third?

Ah, yes. We come back to it yet again: the magic of a story.

So here I am today, a creative writer and an experienced marketer who’s passionate about helping Steady grow steadily (yes, pun intended) through the strategic use of digital content and storytelling. How? By clarifying your message to your audiences while crafting the right stories to deliver that message effectively.

I look forward to exploring this opportunity further and sharing my ideas with you.

Please see my answers to the three application questions below.

Thanks,
Omar Itani

 

What is it that interests you about Steady and why?

“The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse,” wrote Walt Whitman in his poem “O Me! O Life!”

The way I see it?

We’re now living in a digital-first world where there are two main players: creators and consumers.

Everyone is a consumer by default, but now anyone can be a creator by choice.

If you choose to create, then as the game goes on, so will you be actively weaving into it a thread that is your own. As the play goes on, so will you be contributing a verse.

I’m interested in joining Steady as Head of Marketing for three reasons:

  1. I too am a creator, so I too understand the struggle of monetising your content as a creative. I currently publish content behind paywalls (Medium.com) and within two years of regularly publishing on my site, my SEO traffic has grown to over 30,000 users per month and 5,500+ subscribers to my newsletter. 

  2. This is such an exciting space to be in. The creator economy boasts around 50 million creators, 90% of which are still amateurs and are only getting started on that journey. And if we just consider the newsletter space, the competition continues to grow: Substack, Mailchimp, Revue, ConvertKit, Medium–to name a few. The trajectory, the challenges, but also the opportunity to craft a niche within that space is what makes it all so exciting.

  3. I admire what you do. You’re helping creators get paid doing what they love. This is beautiful. It’s a mission I stand behind and fully support.

How would you increase awareness for Steady amongst creators? Give us one or two examples of successful awareness campaigns you have run in the past?

Awareness is quite a loose term in marketing.

Sure, I can answer this question by saying “this is how we can increase awareness,” but what’s the benefit of that if this awareness strategy doesn’t shift two key metrics?

  1. Metric one: The creator’s familiarity with and understanding of Steady’s value proposition and how it can help them at every step of their journey.

  2. Metric two: Steady’s adoption rate among creators.

Yes, increasing awareness by reaching more potential creators is essential, but that’s only a tiny slice of the equation. If such a strategy doesn’t drive the adoption rate of our product and doesn’t advance the sentiment around brand and product familiarity (and top of mind among competitors), then we’ll certainly have to question the merits of that strategy.

So how do we do this?

We begin by first mapping out the customer journey. This helps us lay out the key problems they are facing along the way. Once we’re clear on the problem we’re trying to solve at each stage of that journey, we can then communicate how Steady can help creators solve their problems.

In other words, we want to identify the transformation we create at each stage of the creator’s journey.

For instance, let’s assume that we have three categories of creators:

  • The Enthusiast: The creator with a 1,000+ following who’s just getting started and incredibly eager to learn how to monetise his work.

  • The Pro Who’s Still Solo: The sole creator with a substantial following who has 1-2 monetisation strategies in place but can further scale.

  • The Master: The creator with a 500,000+ follower base who has various teams in place, along with multiple channels and monetised products.

The problems a master is facing are certainly of a different magnitude than those of an enthusiast. Likewise, their motivations differ.

So when we work on our awareness strategy, we need to answer two questions:

  1. Which group of creators do we want to speak to?

  2. What’s the story we want them to hear (what is the need gap we are addressing and what is the transformation we want to create for them)?

Once we have the answers, we can begin building our awareness campaign.

And what will it look like?

Here’s how we’ll increase awareness among creators:

  1. Sponsorships

  2. Digital Marketing

  3. Content Marketing

I explore each in more detail below:

Sponsorship

People internalise the advice they receive from figures they admire and trust.

People listen intently to the ones they look up to–those whose success they wish to emulate.

So for each of the five categories (podcast, newsletters, Instagram & TikTok, magazines, YouTube), we want to partner with well-established creators in that channel (the pros and the masters).

With these sponsorships we can increase awareness of Steady and offer incentives to drive product adoption (ex: 30-day free trials or 20% off membership for the first six months).

Digital Marketing

Here we want to focus on two fronts:

  1. Paid search.

  2. Storytelling (Video).

Paid search will help us capture the attention of creators who are actively searching for a paywall for their members.

Video, which is now the leading format of engagement on all social channels is how we will use advertising to tell stories. The idea would be to run a sequential video campaign that tackles “the myth of the striving artist.”

This is where we can share the success stories of a long list of creators we’ve worked with to showcase that just because you’re a creator, doesn’t mean you can’t get paid doing what you love.

Social proof works like magic.

I’ve seen this during my time at Google and Meta, as I worked with several brands to help them drive further brand awareness and conversion performance across the funnel.

Content Marketing

This is our organic strategy.

As mentioned earlier, as of now, over 30,000 users visit my blog every month. 99% of that traffic comes from Google organic search results. The other 1% is from referral websites that have linked back to my work.

That’s the power of content marketing, and this must be an integral part of our awareness and acquisition strategy.

Now how will we measure all this?

When it comes to brand awareness, there are four areas we should look at. They’re listed below. And the best way to measure the change in sentiment is by layering our advertising efforts with annual brand lift surveys.

  1. Brand awareness.

  2. Brand familiarity.

  3. Brand recall.

  4. Top of mind awareness.

While the areas above are metrics we want to shift over a longer time period, here are some metrics we would use to evaluate our awareness campaigns in the short-term:

  1. Total reach and total impressions

  2. Brand search volume

  3. Brand engagement

  4. Organic site traffic and traffic channels

  5. Brand share of voice

As Head of Marketing, what metrics would you target the team on and how do you ensure you hit them?

  1. Sales Revenue from marketing. Here we want to break it down to sales revenue by channel, by product, by region, and by customer. When we break down our revenue by marketing channel, we can figure out which ones are the most profitable for us. A region and customer breakdown allows us to categories them into tier 1, 2, and 3 based on their contribution to revenue.

  2. Cost per acquisition. This will differ per market and channel. Some markets will be more costly than others. The same can be said about the channels. We want to identify an overall average cost per acquisition for the business, along with target CPA’s for the core markets.

  3. Return on ad spend (ROAS) and Return on Investment. We’ll use ROAS to measure the effectiveness of our advertising campaigns. We want to aim for a ROAS (ex: 5x) and monitor it month over month. Our ROI will encompass a holistic view of our marketing efforts and how the collective drives revenue.

  4. Customer renewal and retention. If we have a high turnover rate, then we’re either not reaching/converting the right audience or we’re not delivering on our initial promise to them.

  5. Customer lifetime value. The LTV model will allow us to tier our customers and ensure that we’re acquiring the right customer profiles who would have a high LTV for our business. A sub-metric to look at would be the average customer transaction value. Sure, we want to have a high conversion rate on our website (and other marketing channels), but what matters more is the value we’re generating from it.

A Portfolio of My Best Work—Writing

Since 2020, I’ve been consistently publishing articles on this website and other online publications such as Medium, Thrive Global, and Thought Catalogue.

My readership has grown over the passage of time. Currently, over 30,000 users visit my site every month and 5,500+ readers are subscribed to The Optimist, my biweekly newsletter.

Pages that rank 1st 0r 2nd on Google Search:

Other pages that rank on Google’s 1st page for the following keywords:

  • “Life lessons”

  • “Stop overthinking”

  • “Life design”

  • “Amor Fati”

  • “Mindfulness and regret”

Here’s how my site’s organic Google Search traffic has grown over the last two years:

And on Medium, my work reaches about 55,000 people per month:

Reach broken down per article:

Looking for samples of my work?

Here are some of my top-performing articles per category.

Personal Growth:

Entrepreneurship:

Creative Thinking:

For more, please check out this page.

A Portfolio of My Best Work—Brand Building

Lovers of The Sea was a brand inspired by the sea and it was born out of my love for the sea. The journey began in April 2019 as a movement to curb plastic pollution and inspire sustainable living.

My message was simple: Reducing your plastic footprint implies riding yourself of needless plastic, needless waste, unhealthy habits and living a more conscious life–one as natural as the sea. 

I developed the brand identity, brand positioning, marketing mix, and the copy and communication strategy. After 18 months, I closed the project and decided to move into a different direction.