I hardly ever bake. I’ve cooked since seventh grade, but baking has never been my thing. Yet I’ve made five loaves of banana bread since July. I have plans for a sixth as soon as I the bunch on my counter becomes over-ripe and ready to be transformed into baked goods.
That’s about triple my baked output over my 43-odd years of cooking in under five months.
Why the sudden banana-bread-a-palooza? I was home in Louisiana over the summer. The same day I had my near disaster with the newsletter webinar for Laura Michelle Wolf, my Mama had made banana bread.
When I got back to my Dad’s the next day, a bunch of bananas had turned very spotty, very fast. So I thought to myself, “Self, let’s give banana bread a try.”
Fast forward to Sunday and the latest loaf with another recipe tweak when my brain went “HEY! Let’s write about this!”
And here we are together, with a mostly stream-of-consciousness piece. Written on index cards, then edited a wee bit for better organization and to strangle a few darlings before a final GPT edit and spell check.
We’ll get to writing and marketing, I promise.
The Third Loaf
I made two while I was down in Sulphur. Found a recipe online and followed it almost exactly the first time. It was good. The second was as good with a slightly moister texture from adding sour cream.
When some bananas turned on me quickly after I got back home to Baltimore in August, I decided to give it another go: a mashup of the first two recipes.
The Casey Baby, official youngest daughter of Simply Useful Marketing, comes over for supper each week. She had a bite. Looked at me. Had another: “This is better than Mama’s.”
You can cook well just by following the recipe, which is (or at least was) my ex’s cooking style*. My cooking style is more free form — I’ll follow the recipe the first time (except for garlic; one clove? What’s the point?!?! One bulb? Now we’re talkin’!). After the first time; it’s a little of this, a little of that, and sprinkle the flavor in until the spirits of your ancestors tell you to stop.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve rarely baked because you can’t mess with the science.
And here’s where the marketing and writing come in.
Treat Your Content Like My Banana Bread – An Ongoing Experiment
You can have a marketing plan for your business spat out in under 10 minutes with a genAI tool. Little marketing industry not-secret fact: marketing campaigns all have the same basic elements. The reason you outsource marketing is the pros know how to mix and match the right elements. We used the same basic framework across a dozen copier clients, tweaked to each company’s goals.
When you boil it down, marketing “recipes” have common elements – email, ongoing content as a newsletter or blog, maybe some SEO and AdWords, a customer-focused website, and a unique content asset such as a webinar, ebook, or checklist.
What makes it extra tasty is what you bring to the recipe: personal stories, case studies, and unique insights. Those make a generic recipe your own.
Experimentation can also go wrong, as in attempt four. I decided to blend rather than mash the bananas and also added orange extract along with vanilla. Tasted great. The texture . . . not so much. Gummy. Ended up throwing half of it away because the mouthful was blech.
When you begin writing/marketing, stick to the recipes – the basics. Write a list post. Answer customer questions. Just start to create ongoing content. Send emails with offers. Create a drip campaign. Gasp, even use an asset as a funnel to your product/service (still works, even if not as well as a decade ago).
As you master the basics, experiment. Happy accidents will start to happen. For the fifth loaf, I used a banana so overripe it was almost booze. I also added vanilla Greek yogurt and sprinkled some bourbon-flavored sugar in the buttered pan before adding the batter. I also used some sea salt peanuts and cashews because I was out of pecans.
The happy accident was the boozy banana, which I would have thrown away had I had another banana. It added concentrated flavor. The sugar is worth experimenting with again. And while the nuts added a bit of grit, I’ll definitely use them again – roasted peanuts this time (not poured from the end of the container – pretty sure that’s where the grit came from).
Experiment with your marketing too. Change up your usual style (like this thing you’re reading here). Try video. Give a webinar a whirl. Invest in SEO.
Your readers are likely to forgive a worse-than-normal recipe if you’ve been bringing an excellent loaf of banana bread to the potluck for years. They’re more likely to applaud the effort, even a fail like my gummy batch, while giving opinions you can use to improve rather than just saying, “You’re a horrible cook.”
I’m looking forward to my next attempt, which will combine orange and vanilla extract, a brown sugar crust, and at least one extra boozy banana. Adding caramel is on the horizon too.
What have you been thinking about experimenting with? Why haven’t you?
Need a recipe for your newsletter? That’s what Newsletter-in-a-Box is for: strategy, setup, and a structure you can keep using. Tell me where you’re stuck: bryant@simplyusefulmarketing.co.
*An observation, not a critique. She’s a wonderful cook.