<aside> 📱 In @Casey Means first 2 years at Levels, she executed the Levels Growth, Editorial, and Partnership strategies which resulted in her appearing on over 100 podcasts on behalf of Levels, appearing in almost every Tier 1 media outlet, and garnering over 2M cumulative views on YouTube from her podcasts. Casey emerged as a growth lever for Levels and as her Chief of Staff - I (@Sonja) led a process to experiment with building systems and processes in notion, figma, and loom to increase the amount of Levels content being re-shared through her channels. Throughout this process, we amassed a number of learnings and developed a playbook that we are now applying to the Levels owned channels.

This is a resource document about experiments, learnings, and best practices adapted from a broader Levels internal memo entitled: ‣

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• Table of contents

Alignment on terms and nomenclature

There are a few new terms defined here such as brand and brand personality. This is also a quick refresher on the difference between digital media and digital marketing (reminder: first comes digital media, then that media is marketed!)

Before we dive in, let’s align on some nomenclature. Some terms used were previously outlined in the ‣, including:

• Digital media - “Media” is one category of the entire Digital Marketing stack. Digital Media (content) at Levels is made up of four types of assets:
  • ✍️ Written
  • 🎧 Audio
  • 📺 Video
  • 📷 Photo
• Digital marketing - First comes digital media, and then comes digital marketing of that media! Digital is a wide category of marketing. Unlike traditional marketing and media (TV, Print, and Radio, amongst others), it involves a number of categories – Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Email Distribution, Search Engine Marketing, Performance Marketing, and Social Media Distribution – each of which requires specific expertise and attention to execute well. Currently, we have some areas of Digital that we are pursuing, and others which we aren’t, due to company stage and strategy.

Some other terms used throughout the memo - and defined here for the first time - include:

• Brand - an identifier that conjures up thoughts and feelings about a company, product or person. The benefits of having a strong brand include: memory aid, proxy for quality, basis for differentiation, driver of emotion, and even creating price premiums.
• Brand Personality - identifiers built around a person reflecting uniquely human personality traits, interests and values (more flexible to experiment with than a company brand). Some notes:
  • Personal brands, when thoughtfully tied with company brands, can be very synergistic. Nielsen data shows that consumers are more likely to trust influencers than they are brand content. 92% of consumers trust recommendations from others, even people they don’t know, over branded content.
  • The most successful brand spokespeople must also have a brand personality (e.g., Dave Asprey = Bulletproof, Robin Arzon = Peloton, Jessica Alba = Honest Beauty, Whitney Wolf Herd = Bumble, Emily Wiess = Glossier, Robin Berzin = Parsley Health, Elon = Tesla, Sara Blakely = Spanx)
  • As outlined in ‣, the value of having brand spokespeople includes:
    • Brand awareness – exposure for the Levels brand
    • Market education – long-form education on the problem we’re solving, our mission, and the role of biosensors
    • Growth / revenue – podcast interviews have been large sales drivers; long-term, if someone like Casey has a brand personality the size of Mark Hyman’s, she will contribute significantly to driving conversions
    • Recruiting – many of our hires discovered Levels through podcast interviews (or cited them during the interview process)
• Company Brand - identifiers built around a company or product, reflecting the company’s values and mission (less flexible to experiment with than a brand personality)

Learnings and results from 3 months of digital media & digital marketing experimentation

This section of the memo outlines the 3 factors that led to Casey’s 43% Instagram growth in 3 months: building systems, applying industry learnings, and experimentation. Within this section, 5 tactics for growth that were applied to Casey’s accounts are broken down, as well as 5 learnings from experimentation.

Overview of growth from May - July, 2022

When @Sonja started in April, 2022 - she spent part of her time (~40%) for 3 months focused on increasing visibility of content Casey was involved in, and learning how to build a playbook for optimizing content distribution. While this was a significant chunk of time, a majority of Casey’s time is spent creating content generation for Levels across mediums (written, audio, video), and so optimizing distribution was a key part in scaling Casey’s time and impact. Moving forward, Sonja now spends significantly less time scaling digital media content across platforms as systems and delegation opportunities are optimized.

The learnings from building a system for Casey and from experimenting with various tactics can be leveraged for other Levels brand personalities and for the Levels company account.

One of the positive byproducts of the functional goals of content, editorial, and growth has been Casey’s brand has organically grown. Then, with relatively minimal investment over the last 3 months, we’ve seen significant growth.

Over the last 3 months, Casey’s channel has experienced a 43% growth rate, and as of August 3, 2022 she has 69K followers (November 13, 2022 it’s at 91K)