Education Initiative
Punchmark's 6th platform build came with a complete interface redesign, many new capabilities, and a focus on emerging marketing tactics. While attending a jewelry trade show, I spoke with many clients and realized that many were using only a tiny portion of the platform's capabilities. Upon further research and consumer interviews, I learned that most were unaware of the new capabilities and were intimidated by the redesigned UI.
I sought to educate our clients on these new features through the production of an educational livestream series, a podcast on digital marketing in the jewelry industry (In the Loupe), and a technically written knowledge base on the Punchmark platform.
Livestream Production
I have long been a fan of watching video game livestreams on Youtube & Twitch, as I found them to be a marvelous way to learn passively while engaged in other activities. In 2019, I researched how to host, promote, and edit educational livestream videos.
The production aspect eventually grew to involve many other members of the team, with a strict weekly schedule. Punctuality, stream & audio production quality, and engaging hosting were my biggest focuses to set us apart from other educational content in the industry. After being streamed live on Zoom, the recordings were edited and uploaded to youtube for hosting on our educational database, located in SiteManager. While there, clients could watch back the videos at their leisure.
In the Loupe Podcast
Podcasting is one of the fastest growing verticals in business, and in 2020, I was shocked by the lack of podcasts for the jewelry industry. I worked with Punchmark's partner company, The Smithee Group, to create a weekly podcast that centered around Digital Marketing techniques and tools, Social Marketing strategy, and insight into the jewelry industry.
In the Loupe has offered a unique touchpoint for the Punchmark brand, as it allows for our team members to establish themselves as thought leaders, and to create a deeper connection with our clients and prospects by engaging in new type of business relationship and trust.
We developed a unique brand voice for the podcast that was centered around hip hop, lo-fi animation, and host confidence to help our podcast stand out in the stuffy jewelry industry and to lean Punchmark's branding as a while.
Podcast Marketing
The In the Loupe listener base is composed of >90% jewelry store owners, which offered a unique marketing channel for B2B businesses that existed in the jewelry industry, as there were no other jewelry-centric podcasts like In the Loupe. This has resulted in over $20,000 in sponsorships revenue in only 40 episodes. I worked with sponsors to write ad copy for episode ad reads, landing pages for promotions, and additional marketing material.
To accelerate growth, we ran limited time offers for sponsoring brands, competitive giveaways, and leveraged the Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn platforms to reach our audience.
Learn more about In the Loupe here. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube.
Punchmark Knowledge Base
Although the educational livestreams were helpful in encouraging users to interact with the platform more, the Punchmark Customer Success team found that they were explaining granular UI actions frequently to clients, costing time.
The solution was to hire a team of freelance technical writers to create a knowledge base in Confluence for the SiteManager UI, and other platform features. I coordinated with the writers to create a uniform instruction manual for every interface in the platform so that CS members could provide links to the article instead of writing out instructions themselves.
The creation of this tool is still ongoing, but has already improved the workflow for the CS team.
View the site here.