Marketing Happy Hour - Small Business Marketing 101 | Karen Danudjaja of Blume

Starting point is 00:00:00 you're listening to the marketing happy hour podcast where we discuss career and industry insights with our peers in marketing we're here to talk about it all like the ups and downs of working in social media how to build authentic relationships in the influencer and pr space managing a nine-to-five and a side hustle at the same time, how to be productive in your life and career without losing your sanity, and more. Ultimately, we're here to build a community with you because we're all trying to navigate the world of marketing together. Are you ready? Grab your favorite drink and join your hosts, Cassie and Erica, for this week's episode.

Starting point is 00:00:56 This week, we're excited for you to meet Karen Danagia, the founder of Bloom, a wellness brand born out of a need for better, healthier alternatives to traditional coffee drinks. In her conversation with Erica, Karen shares the inspiring story behind Bloom's mission, the importance of test and learn tactics in digital marketing, effective email campaign strategies, community-driven business approaches, and her favorite Bloom blends for the young professional lifestyle.

Starting point is 00:01:19 Tune in to discover how Bloom is revolutionizing wellness one latte at a time and using digital marketing to amplify their mission. You know the drill, grab your favorite drink and let's dive into this week's episode. Hi, Karen. How are you? Good. Hi, Erica. Thanks for having me. So excited that you're here. I'm a big fan of the brand, so I'm excited to hear your insights today. But before we get started, I do have an important question that we ask all of our guests, and that is, what is in your glass this afternoon? It is marketing happy hour after all.

Starting point is 00:01:57 Right now, I've got a mix of coffee and our Reishi hot chocolate, which is one of my favorite products it's like a mocha so delicious I'm also sipping on a bloom uh latte blend here it's the turmeric one and it is actually divine I have been looking for a good source of turmeric and there's just like not a whole lot of options out there unless you want to buy the exact ingredient and try to make a concoction yourself. So I love that I found this. So that is the original blend. So the blend that started it all. Yeah, I love it. Well, I can't speak highly enough about it. It's actually really great. So thank you for creating that. So we are excited to dive into your story today, but first, could you just tell us a bit about your background and how the brand came to be? Sure.

Starting point is 00:02:49 So, um, my name is Karen Danagia. I originally am from Brampton, Ontario, but I moved out to BC, um, to go to the Sauter School of Business and studied real estate finance, which, um, I mean, by the end of this call, you'll know me well enough to be like, why did you ever think that was a good idea for you? But, you know, I grew up in an Asian household and it was kind of like, do something practical, get a job, find a ladder to climb. And so when I graduated, I got into commercial real estate where I was doing like property management, project management, and I pretty much hated it right away.

Starting point is 00:03:27 Like I loved the company that I worked for and had an amazing boss, but the work itself really didn't inspire me. And so I spent five years there, but while I was there, I was like really in coffee culture. So, you know, meetings for coffee, coffee in the morning, coffee, mid afternoon. The only reason you get up from your desk is to have a coffee. And I think the combination of doing work that didn't light me up, like I wasn't feeling passionate and, um, how much caffeine I was really drinking that like the combination of those two things, I just like, wasn't in a good space.

Starting point is 00:04:06 I wasn't good. I had anxiety, all that sort of stuff. And so I loved the coffee shop setting. I think they're centers of our community, a great place to connect. Like I love meeting my friends for a coffee, but I just found that there was nothing on that menu that was really working for what I needed.

Starting point is 00:04:25 And so that's really where the first product was born. So the turmeric latte, which you have on your desk there in your cup was kind of my solution for myself, you know, started by experimenting with different superfoods at home, trying to find something that was caffeine free, but satisfying, and then started bringing it to coffee shops because I thought others would want it too. And now today, Bloom is in over 4,000 stores, including Target, Whole Foods, we're in Loblaws, Real Canadian Superstore, thousands of independents, Indigo. And the lineup has really expanded. And the mission has expanded to, you know, going from just being about coffee alternatives to more like creating a space for kindness and wellness that is without punishment and a little easier and fun.

Starting point is 00:05:14 So, so yeah, that's what I've been working on. So cool. I love that. And you are speaking my language with the coffee shop thing, because I, for about seven years ran a coffee shop blog that was just highlighting all the fun coffee shops across the country so I am with you there I love coffee shops and all that my eventual goal yeah my eventual goal one day is to open one myself so we will see I would love to do that too a bloom cafe that. That's definitely on the list. Oh, I love that.

Starting point is 00:05:45 And I also love, I saw earlier today that you guys had gotten to Target and I am so excited. Next time I go to Target, I will be looking out for you guys. But could you just really quickly chat through some test and learn tactics that your team is employing at Bloom?

Starting point is 00:06:00 You know, why is testing and learning so important to the digital marketing strategy that you guys have? Well, marketing is one of those very frustrating areas of the business where you're never really done, right? There's always more you can do. You can always refine messaging. You could always amplify it louder. You could always take it somewhere else to a different space. And the space is constantly changing. So testing and learning, you know, the whole iterative process and has become really ingrained in how we tackle any new projects. In the sense that, you know, Bloom's a small business, we don't have enormous budgets and anything that we're doing,

Starting point is 00:06:40 we have to really quickly learn from and iterate to move forward. Otherwise, we just won't be competitive. Like that's the reality of where we are kind of in the market. Like on top of that, the last few years, the landscape has changed insanely. So, you know, originally when Bloom was founded, this is like pre-pandemic. It's all about brick and mortar, getting into stores. Then there's this period where e-com explodes. It's about, you know, how quickly can you scale through digital ads really is like the focus for the business. And now with meta being different, you know, the cost of acquisition continuing to go up. Now it's all about like retention, community building back to brick and mortar, and it changed again and it's kind of like how do you go omni-channel so um throughout that process we're constantly trying different

Starting point is 00:07:32 tactics and what we do internally is that any project that we put forward kind of has to get like the go-ahead the approval do we have the resources is this you know in keeping with our strategic mission are these is this a fly-in project or is this something that we actually ahead, the approval, do we have the resources? Is this, you know, in keeping with our strategic mission or these, is this a fly-in project or is this something that we actually need to do to hit our strategic goals? Because I think, you know, everybody talks about the 80-20 rule, but it's really hard to actually apply in practice because you want to do everything. At least that's how my team is. It's like, that's a great idea. We should definitely do that.

Starting point is 00:08:06 And you just, all of a sudden, your to-do list quadruples. And what happens is like the quality goes down. So as a practice, what we're trying to do is really stick to what our strategic focuses are and test and learn within them. So an example for us would be, social is a really big part

Starting point is 00:08:25 of our strategy and it's not necessarily for everybody, right? Like a service-based company might not prioritize, you know, TikTok or Pinterest the way that we do. And so for us, instead of us being like, okay, let's layer in YouTube. Okay. Let's add in, you know, there are all these like new apps all the time, like that you could try and move the needle on. Instead, we want to like go deep in the few channels where our audience, our customer is sitting and test, you know, different types of content, different length of content, different times of day that you're posting different styles of caption to really understand what moves the needle the most. And so I think we could always be doing that better. Like the importance of like actually collecting that post-mortem, like did it actually do what you intended to do? Is this worth doing

Starting point is 00:09:18 again? I think when you're moving fast, it's really easy to skip that step, but it's something that we're trying to get better and better at. Oh, absolutely. And I love hearing your perspective on testing and learning because, you know, we hear it every day just from our individualized roles. So say you're in social, you're talking about testing and learning. Say you're on the email side, you're talking about A-B testing and all of that stuff. But it's interesting to hear from kind of the top level of how that trickles down throughout the entire marketing scheme, really just testing and learning and figuring out what actually works

Starting point is 00:09:52 for your team is so important. And you guys are doing a great job. So I want to touch on really quickly email marketing. What are some of the key elements of an effective email campaign in your opinion? Well, I mean, I think that for our email marketing, we really try and use it as an education platform. So the emails that I hate the most are the ones that are 100% conversion focused. And of course, there's a time for that. There's a time for it where it's Black Friday. That's not really where you're spending a lot of time in education necessarily. You're really communicating a deal. But for us, our main goal with email is that there's one key takeaway that a customer can hold onto and resonate with. So our goal with every email is that when, if someone just skims it, just the headlines, just, you know, reads a couple sentences,

Starting point is 00:10:52 they're walking away with one piece of tangible information they didn't have before about the brand. And really trying for that piece of information to tap into a pain point. So maybe it's cost of having a coffee outside, maybe it's energy and more function driven, but that's really like the goals that we have within an email that it's built for skimmers, if that makes sense. And kind of takes the reality of how people ingest this kind of information into account and the way we, we put it out into the world. Oh, I really like that built for skimmers. That's great. How are you guys kind of fostering relationships and things like that with your consumer over email? You know, you talked

Starting point is 00:11:36 about touching like pain points and things like that. Is there anything that you're doing that really speaks to someone on the consumer level that's, you know, inviting them into your community and, and figuring out, you know, what their needs are and, and kind of valuing that. We, what we're trying to do is really make it like a holistic environment. So if you're, if you're touching base with us in social, if you're tucking, touching base with us in email, you're seeing consistent messages in all the channels. Because again, we think sending that one email, somebody is like carefully reading every line and absorbing everything. We're carefully going through it. But the reality is that's not necessarily always the

Starting point is 00:12:15 case. Like you'll always have those super users, but there's a lot of people who aren't super users yet. And so we do try and encourage people to interact with us in different parts of like different areas of our marketing. So connect with us on social, we'll have virtual events, we'll have education sessions, we'll do free gifts that educate. So we'll never do like free, what's an example, free plastic water bottle, kind of like, you know, something that's like not free pen, you know, it's gotta be something that's, you know, environmentally conscious speaks to wellness, speaks to our core consumer. We, we really try our best that in every way that you engage with the brand, that we're consistent to the core values and that that's how we're inviting them in by being consistent, by showing up the way that we say we're going to show up so that no matter where you engage with us, you're getting

Starting point is 00:13:14 the same brand. And I think that's really hard when you've got a small team and people are often working, you know, in silos, our team is 100% remote. So the importance of having clear brand statement, clear brand taglines, clear, you know, values that you're aren't just like written and tucked away, but are something that you're referencing consistently, so that everyone's speaking the same language and working to row in the same direction. I love that. And it just speaks to the holistic, you know, nature of a great brand story and just a great interaction with your consumer. I think I noticed on your website that you do have like a consumer community. Could you tell us a little bit about that and kind of how that plays into the community that you're having across the board? Yeah, like an example is right now

Starting point is 00:14:06 Bloom's doing this program called 21 Kind. So we saw on TikTok a program called 75 Hard. For those that aren't familiar with it, it was really strict. It's like exercise twice a day for 45 minutes, drinking liters of water. And if you don't hit certain, if you don't complete a full day, then you're back to the beginning, you restart to the 75 days. And, you know, it's great. It's great that there's challenges, but it just didn't align with our values in the sense that we want to have more kindness, more forgiveness, nobody's perfect. And instead we launched the 21 kind challenge. And within the first day, we had 700 people sign up for, to participate in this challenge, which is really about us supporting each other, sharing the wins, doing something nice for yourself every day, and like a gentler introduction to a challenge like that.

Starting point is 00:15:02 And so we do things like this around quarterly ideas, like ways to engage, ways to educate on the brand, and most importantly, ways to support our customers solve pain points. Because I think a lot of brands forget that that's what our original focus, that is why we exist, right? The business shouldn't exist unless it's solving a pain point, a problem. And so those challenges are ways for us to engage the community, get them interacting with each other, get them experiencing the products in a way where they're learning if it does solve that pain point for them. And for us to like work back to that overarching mission. I love that.

Starting point is 00:15:45 I think that's incredible that you guys are doing that, you know, quarterly to really engage with your consumer. I think that's so smart and more brands should be doing things like that because it really, you know, makes the consumer feel connected to the brand and they have a reason to keep coming back and buying your new products and things like that as they come out. Even though that's not 100% the goal of fostering the community in the first place, that's a nice little perk that comes with it. I love that.

Starting point is 00:16:11 If I could just like add on to that, I think so often we talk about being like conversion focused marketing. So, you know, you're thinking about this funnel and you're thinking really about the end of the funnel. You're like, how do we get them to convert and buy a product? And what my learning has been really recently, honestly, in the last few months is like, do we spend enough time prospecting? Do we spend enough time like fostering? Do we spend enough time educating? And very few people, including myself, make a purchase instantly like that. Maybe I've

Starting point is 00:16:46 had a glass of wine and I'm on TikTok and I see something really convincing. I might do it. But for the most part, I'm really careful about the decisions I make and the brands I want to buy into, especially online when you don't necessarily know them. And so we recently just did this exercise where we divided up our spend, our projects, our efforts, our resources, like our team resources into the funnel. So, you know, how much are we doing for the prospecting level? How much are we doing kind of like this middle intent level? How much are we doing for the conversion?

Starting point is 00:17:19 And we found that, you know, 70 to 80% was really focused at the bottom. And so who are you converting? You know, who are you converting if you're not saying it really should be the opposite. And so I'm not talking like specifically in digital ads, although I think it's true for that as well, but it's in everything you do, like in emails you send, how much of them are like, buy one now today versus, um, Hey, this could help you. Like, are you having trouble sleeping here? This is why you're having trouble sleeping. Have you, um, like these are things that could help you, um, sleep better. And this is why sleep is important, you know? Um, so yeah,

Starting point is 00:18:02 it's like the learning that we're working on and it's really hard when brands have like revenue goals they need to hit today. They have, it's very easy to get sucked into like the short term. But we're trying as a company to take a step back. We're not here to make our annual plan. We're here to be like a movement in space. And that means that we have to start thinking about it in a longer horizon. Oh, so good. That was like just a gem of advice. Just even thinking about some of our listeners and our community members that we have at Marketing Happy Hour, they're always asking questions about this because they hear us say, you know, we, Cassie and I both say that relationships are literally the key to any business. And they're

Starting point is 00:18:47 always asking, you know, how can I focus on that when I'm being asked to do XYZ to drive sales to like hit numbers and things like that. So I love that you said that and I will be passing this episode along to everyone who asked those questions because I think that's, that's incredible. Really quickly, because we love wellness here on the show and your mission is to become your best friend in wellness. We just have to get your thoughts on what your favorite bloom blends are for the young professional lifestyle, you know, especially if we're trying to steer clear of coffee or find some good alternatives there. Well, you know, everyone is so different. And the thing about the bloom flavor profiles is not all of them are for everyone. Like we've got like

Starting point is 00:19:31 floral ones where you either love lavender or you don't. I would say our number one bestseller always is matcha. We've got a matcha coconut that has greens mixed in. So I use it in smoothies. I'll put it in my oatmeal or I'll just make like a matcha latte with it, hot or iced. So that has greens mixed in. So I use it in smoothies. I'll put it in my oatmeal or I'll just make like a matcha latte with it, hot or iced. So that has since basically the day that it launched being our number one skew. And then I would say the one that is always like really sneaky in terms of people's favorites is the turmeric and the beetroot. So it's not the one that necessarily people buy the first time that they come to the brand. Like they're buying the flavors they know,

Starting point is 00:20:08 caramel, pumpkin spice, things like really driven by function, but they end up with kind of these like core flavors that are super versatile. Like they're great in a bunch of different recipes. So yeah, I would, you know, we are launching a quiz actually on our website as a way to help navigate which blend is best for you. But the whole premise of bloom

Starting point is 00:20:31 is that, you know, when you walk the supplement aisle, it's very clinical, you know, lots of olive branches and, you know, single ingredient, um, single ingredient products where to make a smoothie, you're like adding a bit of maca, adding cocoa, adding protein powder. Like it's all, you know, kind of like DIY and super like stodgy almost like there's no love there and no fun. And it's not something you want to share. It's just like what you do for yourself. And so with Bloom, we really want to create wellness rituals that you indulge in that are a not something you want to share. It's just like what you do for yourself. And so with Bloom, we really want to create wellness rituals that you indulge in, that are a treat that you want to share with a friend that you feel like if you have a friend over at night and you want to make a blue lavender latte, like it's like a special thing

Starting point is 00:21:16 to do together. Like, because we believe that rituals won't stick unless you, A, love how they taste and B, like create a moment around them. And that these small changes build over time. Like they build, um, it's kind of like that James clear quote, right. Where, you know, you making a healthy choice today doesn't necessarily do anything, but it stacks over 10 years. And so I like Bloom believes that in their core. So it's going to have having one matcha latte going to change your life. No, it's not going to change your whole life, but doing this one intentional thing daily, taking time for yourself, being meditative,

Starting point is 00:21:56 being purposeful in the choices that you make through Bloom or other wellness choices that you make throughout the day. Yeah. That will definitely have an impact on you over time. And it's, um, and we hope we can make that choice simple. So good. I love that. Um, so really quickly too, we wanted to chat a little bit about career. Um, we love to ask this question on the show and that is just, what do you know now that you wish you knew earlier on in your career? I'm still navigating this, but I think that like perfectionism is sort of like a trap and not real. Those five years that I was working in a job that really didn't light me up with passion, I didn't think I had the perfect idea. I didn't have the experience. I didn't, I wasn't like, you know, the ideas weren't worthy. I wasn't worthy. Like it was this idea that all this like limiting belief and being trapped in the idea of

Starting point is 00:22:50 perfectionism. And now I think that, you know, having talked to other founders who've like made it like, you know, sold their businesses for millions of dollars, like nobody's perfect. Whatever you see on social media is like a construct and everybody suffers from, you know, limiting beliefs, setbacks, failures. And it's more about perseverance and adaptability than it is about perfectionism. So, you know, going back five years, I thought, how could I be a wellness founder? You know, I'm not a nutritionist. That wasn't

Starting point is 00:23:26 my background. You know, I was working in finance. How could that be me? And the reality is, is like life is what you make of it. And what has been way more useful to me is believing that you can find the answers that you don't need to be perfect and that it's more about the pursuit of betterment than it is about the pursuit of perfection such a good and encouraging you know answer to that question we hear a lot of times people say the same thing like not everyone has it as figured out as you would think so by looking at their social media by browsing their, you know, career history and things like that. So I love hearing that from you. Thank you so much for that.

Starting point is 00:24:10 Well, this has been such a good conversation. I know there's a lot of nuggets that our listeners will pull out and absolutely adore. So thank you for joining us, but I want to let everyone know where they can find you follow along with what you're up to and what the brand is up to online yeah so we're at its bloom so or you can connect with me on linkedin karen danadrya um we're right now doing kind of like a road show to support target and doing some really cool um vlogs about what it's actually like to launch in a retailer like that for a small brand and we're really trying to share the highs and the lows. So connect with us on social and you can find the products at itsbloom.com. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been so great. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Marketing Happy Hour podcast.

Starting point is 00:25:07 If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe, rate, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. If you want more of Marketing Happy Hour, but don't know where to start, we invite you to download our free Marketing Happy Hour starter kit at marketinghappyhr.com forward slash starter dash kit. This interactive magazine style PDF walks through who we are, includes helpful resources like a marketing term glossary and the printable daily planner sheet that we actually use ourselves and contains clickable links to our episode recommendations by subject area. Not to mention all the fun extras like a quiz, the link to our Marketing Happy Hour Insiders Facebook group, a word search, a playlist, a goal setting guide, content inspo by month, and more. It's our hope that you'll dive into

Starting point is 00:25:58 this resource and walk away more confident in your career journey with a group of industry pals that you can lean on for advice and support. Snag your free starter kit today at marketinghappyhr.com forward slash starter dash kit for all of the info you need to become a Marketing Happy Hour Insider.

Marketing Happy Hour - Small Business Marketing 101 | Karen Danudjaja of Blume

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.