The BaseLang Marketing Master Plan Revealed

Today I’m going to take you behind the scenes of the BaseLang marketing team and explain to you exactly how we focus on growing our company.

I’m going to reveal all the little tricks we use to get people to open their wallets and how you too can use them to get filthy rich!

Not.

There are no tricks. There’s no bullshit.

Here’s the entire marketing master plan for BaseLang, “revealed”:

1. Make a service and product so insanely amazing and helpful that people can’t help but tell everyone they know about it
2. Give away content for free that’s better than what others charge for and make sure people looking for that sort of information find it

Notice all the really annoying stuff that you usually find that’s not present here?

• Popups every time you load a new page asking you to give your email
• Fake urgency forcing you to “buy now” when you may not be ready yet
• A million spammy affiliates that haven’t used the product themselves pumping promotion after questionable promotion
• Offering a “discount” when the price will soon go back to “normal”, when the discount is actually normal
• Limited quantity sales on things that definitely don’t have a limited quantity
• Aggressively going after your email because “you have to build a list”, and then bombarding you with emails that don’t actually have any value for you
• Webinars or “web classes” that are just an hour-long sales pitch

If none of these sound familiar, consider yourself lucky. But they are so egregiously common that the fact that we don’t do them is somehow strange.

Here’s a marketing idea: don’t be an asshole.

We actually reply to our emails

At the end of many of the emails I send out, I ask people to hit reply.

Do you have any idea how many people start their email with “let’s see if you actually read these…”? That tells me that most people don’t actually read and reply to these things. That’s mind-boggling to me.

I read and reply to emails not only because I’m in this business because I genuinely want to help people, but because hearing what people’s problems are is exactly what lets me do everything I can to solve them for them.

Here’s a marketing idea: actually care about your customers.

When we say something, it’s actually true

The number of people stretching the truth on the internet to sell you something is obscene.

You get sold the world and then when you use the product and you’re like, “that’s it?”.

Interestingly, the opposite usually happens for us. I get emails all the time along the lines of “you talked this up a fair bit in your emails but you weren’t kidding. I’m only a few days in and I’m blown away. Thank you.”

After each class, our students have the opportunity to leave feedback about the teacher and class. When they hit submit, three things happen:

1. That feedback goes into a channel of our team’s Slack chatroom where we can all read it (and then help teachers improve and ourselves improve from it).
2. That feedback gets added to our website. We don’t delete negative feedback (as you can see on the page). The only feedbacks that don’t get published are (1) profane or rude, (2) extremely short (read: 2-3 words total) and thus not useful for anyone, or (3) requested by the student to not be published.
3. That feedback gets added to a piece of software we built for our teacher training team, categorized into 9 different skills we’ve found our students find important, then teachers get coached on the skills that they need to improve on, and help coach others on the skills they are great at.

This sort of honesty and transparency is so unfortunately not-normal that people still wonder if these feedbacks are made up. Read them – they aren’t. There are over 20,000 feedbacks listed, I’m not even sure we’d be able to come up with that many if we wanted to fake it.

We also have a page where we list every review of BaseLang on the internet that we know about. We say that we include reviews that say things we don’t agree with or that aren’t all rosy. And guess what? That’s true!

Here’s a marketing idea: be completely honest and transparent.

We actually listen to feedback

If you’ve ever talked to us on support, or even to me over email about our email course, you’ve probably noticed that almost everything ends with something along the lines of “let us know if you have any other questions or any feedback.”

We ask for it all the time. This part isn’t uncommon. Lots of companies do that.

But then we actually do stuff with that. We released some updates to our curriculum in February 2018 based on student feedback.

Do you know how the curriculum update got started? We got a long feedback email from a student pointing out all the ways we could be better. Instead of having an ego and thinking he was wrong, we saw that he was right, and that day put everything else on hold and began work on the new version of BaseLang that just released. And we took all the feedback we got and put that into it.

On top of that, we recently released a whole 2.0 version of our platform chock-full of features people had been requesting. And have a few more big features already in the pipeline.

Here’s a marketing idea: listen to your customers and then actually do something with their feedback.

If we screw up, we admit it and fix it

We are not perfect.

We screw up sometimes. That happens.

But when it happens, we admit it, and we make it right. Ask any student who has had to talk to our support team – we’re there for you. We care more about fixing the issue for you than pretending it didn’t happen to save face.

Here’s a marketing idea: be real.

In conclusion

At the end of the day, it’s sad that I even have to write this post. I wish all of it was standard practice. But it’s not, so I needed to let any prospective students know how we do things.