Anna Parker-Naples is a best-selling author, award-winning voicover actress, and online guru who has an ingenious method for segmenting her potential customers using her quiz. Listen in as she shares her method with all of us.
Check out Anna’s quiz at https://annaparkernaples.co.uk/
Episode Transcript
Josh Haynam:
Hi, everyone. I am here with Anna Parker Naples. She’s an entrepreneur and podcasting expert, like a real, real expert with just a ton of experience, and we’ll get into that. Thanks for being here, Anna.
Anna Parker-Naples:
Hey, nice to be here, Josh. I was delighted to be asked to come and talk about the quiz that I created.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah, yeah. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. We chatted a little bit before we hit record, but tell everybody what your background is, where you come from, how you got to where you are now.
Anna Parker-Naples:
Right now I help people, entrepreneurs and creatives, people with big missions and stories, that want to transform people’s lives in some way, to get their message out there. Part of that is really to be seen, to be heard and to be remembered. That’s kind of been a funny old journey to get where I am because most of that is now through the power of podcasting. I believe it is the fastest growing and most influential platform on the planet.
Anna Parker-Naples:
Three years ago, I had a massive audio background, and I thought I was leaving all of that behind me to help other people realize how successful they could be. A lot of that is mindset based. So I thought three years ago, as I came into this online entrepreneurial space, that it was about the mindset piece. How could I teach people to be successful with how they think?
Anna Parker-Naples:
What became obvious to me was that people were struggling to get their message out there. At the same time, this massive industry of podcasting is growing at a phenomenal rate, and I kept reading books about podcasting because if I’m passionate about something, I’ll go all in. I’ll go all in with the knowledge. I kept reading books that just felt like they were missing vital components of information that entrepreneurs needed. I only knew that because my background is as a multi award winning voice actor. I’ve won lots of awards in Hollywood for my work on audio books and radio dramas and all sorts of things.
Anna Parker-Naples:
I’d never really intended to follow an audio path, all those years ago. It happened because I was told that I would potentially never walk again, 10 years ago. As Josh is looking at me now, he can see that I’m in a studio, a proper studio, at least that’s how it looks. It actually was our airing cupboard, our laundry cupboard, and it was the only space in the house that my wheelchair used to fit. So audio and voice became this massive catalyst for me as an actor, as a mom who thought she was going to never walk again, to be able to have that sense that I could still be recognized in the world as a performer at this point and get my message out there and be seen on a world class level.
Anna Parker-Naples:
It’s interesting that I always framed my voice work, my voiceover work, in that way, not having a clue where that journey was going to take me, to Hollywood and then to massive stages, particularly in the UK, and that I’ve gone on to become a best-selling author about the journey from being no one, being a nobody, to visibility. My book is called Get Visible, and my podcast is Entrepreneurs Get Visible. I’m really passionate about helping people who feel like they have a message or feel like they have a mission in some way, to get that message out there. Podcasting is absolutely crucial to that.
Josh Haynam:
That’s incredible.
Anna Parker-Naples:
Quite a story.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah, quite a story. What’s your focus now? What’s your world look like today?
Anna Parker-Naples:
My world, I help people to get their podcasts started properly, started with the knowledge I wish I had had three years ago when I started podcasting. That first podcast I did, I didn’t know how to launch. I didn’t know how to get out there. I had a podcast because I understood about audio, but I didn’t understand the mechanics or how it could work for my business. So I now help people through the podcast membership to start and launch podcasts properly so that they can then learn how to grow and monetize them.
Anna Parker-Naples:
Yes, I’ve got all the audio knowledge, but actually there’s a deeper meaning. It’s about getting your message out there, and you’ve got to do that in the right way. It’s got to be strategic. I think podcasting can change the world because we can hit one person at a time, by having thousands of people who listen to us. You can sell your books, you can get on stages, you can sell your products, and that’s powerful.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah. It’s an audience and a connection that’s a little bit different. How did you make that transition from, you have all this experience doing audio work, now you learned how to do podcasting yourself? What did it look like to turn that into a membership, into something that other people could do at a broader scale?
Anna Parker-Naples:
I literally sat in my parents’ back garden in August this year. Which, I’m talking now, we’re talking at the end of April. I’ve been thinking in the back of my mind, I’m already coaching people on how to become visible, how to use social media marketing, how to feel more confident, how to get out there, how to get on stages, package all of that up. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking at some point I’ll teach about podcasting. At some point I will, but not yet.
Anna Parker-Naples:
I ordered a book off Amazon that I was going to take away on vacation, or holiday as I call it. It was about podcasts, and it was someone in my network. I didn’t know them personally, but they were in my network. The book was so shoddy, so lacking that it made me really angry. When I examined, why do I feel annoyed by this, that I’ve spent 11 pounds 99 on this book? Why has it really triggered me here? And actually it was because I know that I was sitting on 15 years of experience of getting great quality audio out there that I wasn’t monetizing. But more than that, I wasn’t helping other people to do it.
Anna Parker-Naples:
So I decided literally there and then, I am going to run a great program. Within two days, I’d had 45 inquiries, and that was fairly astonishing. I then was on holiday. I was away for two and a half weeks. I couldn’t action it, but I had so much interest. So I came home, and I ran an eight week program, literally teaching everything I know as we went. Of course I had a structure, I knew what I wanted to teach, but I delivered it live and I recorded all of the content.
Anna Parker-Naples:
My plan had been that I was going to relaunch it, but I had this part of me that felt I don’t necessarily want to keep this back to have a high end program, that will come and that is part of my offering as well, higher level consultancy for podcasting, but actually I want those people right at the start of their journey, like I had been three years before, to have enough of the knowledge to make an impact when they launch. Because if you get the launch wrong, your podcast won’t work because, well, it just doesn’t.
Anna Parker-Naples:
So that’s when I decided that I would add lots more material to what I’d done in the first place, and I would make it a membership. When I launched, we had a phenomenal launch. I’d reached my year end target within the first 24 hours, and every single person who has launched so far, that was only two and a half months ago, every single podcast who was launched so far has become an international top ranking podcast. I’m pretty proud of that. It feels really good.
Josh Haynam:
That’s amazing results. The proof is in the pudding, and that’s some pretty solid proof. That’s incredible, that you’ve been able to make that shift over. I think a lot of folks are in that same position that I’ve spoken with, where you have all this knowledge from just a lifetime of experience, and your goal is to move that over and create a membership, create something that’s recurring, and now you’ve done it. That’s really very impressive because it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s sort of the background of Interact as well, is moving things from one to one into a broader scale. So we understand that difficulty as well. Where does the quiz fit into all of that, and how did it help facilitate that process?
Anna Parker-Naples:
So there’s two parts to my messaging, but they kind of fit into the same thing. One is about visibility, and one is about the being heard, the podcasting. I’ve had launch after launch after launch for six months. I launched a book that became a best seller. I launched a podcast that became number one. That takes work, as it does for the book as well. I launched the membership. I launched another couple of programs that I was doing. I was kind of feeling, not burnt out, but I don’t want to be launching for a while.
Anna Parker-Naples:
Then I lost somebody close to me, just as we were going into isolation and lockdown. I knew that I needed to kind of back off a little bit. I’ve written a book about podcasting that will go out in the next probably six weeks. I think we’re still being locked down when that gets launched. But I knew that I wanted to use this time, instead of doing another launch and another launch and another launch, to sit back and build my list.
Anna Parker-Naples:
So what’s the first thing you do? You do research. Okay, now I’ve finally got this time and space to build it. What are the best ways right now to do it? I knew that I wanted to create a quiz. I’ve got some other entrepreneurial friends who’d done quizzes, and they’d got really good results. I don’t know. I played around. Shall I do it? Should I not? Then I thought, no, the list building, if I want the next launch to be more successful than my first, it’s got to be about the list. It’s got to be about who is on your email list. Everywhere I went, everyone was talking about try Interact, and that’s how we met.
Anna Parker-Naples:
My first quiz that I created was for a podcasting audience, and the quiz is called Is Podcasting Right For Your Business? This is intended to be an evergreen quiz that goes on my website. I have used it on social media, as well. I saw that I got good results from it, but I knew that it wasn’t necessarily urgent enough, if that makes sense. It’s great. It’s one on my website for my podcast membership. I get all their details. People give me loads of information. It’s fabulous.
Anna Parker-Naples:
But I decided that the bigger thing is about visibility. If I could speak to people’s fears right now: are they doing enough to keep that business going? We know that in a recession, the people who continue to market, who continue to show up and get visible, are the ones who pull through. Historically, we know that. A lot of entrepreneurs in this new space that’s online, that’s about doing your lives, about doing your podcast, about showing up every day in your email sequences. A lot of people have that worry that they’re not doing enough. So I thought, well how can I tap into what that is now, to drive urgency to take my quiz?
Anna Parker-Naples:
So I duplicated the original quiz, because some of the questions are kind of the same, and I made some amendments. I made it much more about visibility. Within three hours, I had had hundreds of people go through the quiz because it spoke to them. That was through I think three posts, one on LinkedIn, one on the Facebook page, and one on my Facebook profile. That was just organic, before I did any ads. The ads will start going out this week. That quiz is titled Are You Visible Enough to Thrive or Survive? So it speaks to lots of things, right? There’s that visibility, everybody kind of is talking about it, and it’s also that immediacy, about why you should take it now. And I think it’s that, that’s made a really big difference.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah. I think you hit on something really key there, which is matching up to what people are thinking about, or what their current struggle is. How did you go about crafting this quiz? I know that you have two that are fairly similar. How did you go about the process of honing in on what it is that people want to know the answer to, and then getting your quiz to actually give them a helpful answer?
Anna Parker-Naples:
I think I kind of started at the other end, Josh, with what is it I want them to realize? What do I want them to realize that I can teach them? What do I want them to acknowledge for themselves, that they haven’t done enough of? Because then I can come in with the solution. I was also quite aware that I didn’t want the answers to be bleak. I wanted everything that they did to be fairly hopeful at the end. I don’t want someone going, “Oh my god, I’m not feasible enough. My business is going to crash and burn.” I wanted everything that I put out there to be quite positive, that it’s okay because now you know this and now you accept this. You know you’re ready, you know you want to, and that’s where I come in.
Anna Parker-Naples:
So I thought about that first. What were the answers that I wanted? I had four answers for both quizzes. Each of those, I wanted to feel kind of supportive with them and to celebrate. I knew most people would fall into the middle brackets. I kind of knew that that would happen. What I’ve really enjoyed about the quizzes, though, one, I felt it was really handy that at the beginning there’s sort of mini tutorials, use the image quiz questions because they will get a better response. Actually, the amount of people who’ve said to me, “I love the layout, I love that it was pictures.” I made the pictures kind of quirky and a bit the humorous.
Anna Parker-Naples:
And I liked that fact that I could kind of take people on a journey of also educating them through the questions. What things could they be doing to get out there more? What things could they be doing to build their business? So that it didn’t just feel like a yes or no. It was kind of giving people clues. Like if you’re not podcasting, if you’re not doing live video, if you’re not emailing your list three times a week, or you haven’t spoken to them in a blue moon, then actually these are prompts for you to up your game.
Anna Parker-Naples:
So that’s kind of how I crafted it. I thought it would be harder to come up with those ideas, but actually I think I did the whole thing, including connecting it to active campaign, in about two and a half hours. I’m no technical person, so I was pretty pleased with that. Way quicker than designing a lead magnet PDF and getting all of those landing pages done.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah. What made it so easy? One concept that has been kind of emerging is that you’re able to just ask people the same questions that you would ask them if you were actually talking to them. Did you feel like that was the case for you?
Anna Parker-Naples:
I think the simpler the questions, the better. That’s quite appealing. It doesn’t have to be complex. It just has to be to the point. A lot of my questions, I could find out so much detail about the people who then see the quiz. I could find out have they written a book? Have they been on stages? Do they dream of being on stages? Do they dream of being an author? Do they guest on podcasts? Have they ever listened to a podcast? Have they connected with influencers in their field?
Anna Parker-Naples:
Because of how they answer those questions, I have so much knowledge about who’s really on my list. That was pretty exciting, as I started to understand the depth to which I could connect it with my tagging system inside active campaign. It became really fun, to work out how I was going to glean that information for my own purposes later on.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah, I like that. It’s like you know what to do, if they want to be an author, or if they want to be on stage, or whichever case it is, right?
Anna Parker-Naples:
I know what my products later on are coming, that I’ve not even announced to the world yet. I know now who’s going to want what.
Josh Haynam:
Oh, that’s amazing. So do you tag them based on how they answer the questions?
Anna Parker-Naples:
Yes, exactly that. I connected it through the API with active campaign. Now for anyone who isn’t technologically minded, it was so easy. Basically I could set the tags in the quiz, so I didn’t even have to go into active campaign once the connection had been made. I could just tag them there: not an author, an aspiring author, wants to be on stage, never wants to be on stage. So I now have all this information that when I need it, and it won’t be yet, it may be in six months time, for different things I’ll be offering, I can speak to them straight away.
Josh Haynam:
That’s amazing.
Anna Parker-Naples:
For me, in my business, knowing what I’m planning to bring out later on, that’s invaluable.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah, that’s so useful. So then you can take those tags and make a list out of all the people that are tagged, aspiring author, right? They may not even be aware of it yet, but in the future if you launch a product. Do you also think about it from the perspective of which products you should launch in the future?
Anna Parker-Naples:
It’s definitely given me some ideas. Definitely given me some ideas on which one of those I will work on, after I have more firmly established myself within the podcasting field, because I’ve got the information sitting there now.
Josh Haynam:
Wow. That’s so cool. Now I’m excited for you. This is the best.
Anna Parker-Naples:
It feels like power. You’ve given me power, Josh.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah, that’s amazing. You can speak to people as they are, which I think is really the thing that stands out. It’s like you can speak to people where they’re at, instead of sending a message that’s totally off. It just changes the conversation. You’re just being helpful.
Anna Parker-Naples:
And I think even in the first hour that I was creating the quiz, I had this concept that I would just have whichever answers they got at the end of the quiz. I would have four different automations, and then they would all go into my main list. They’d have one email that was specific to their answers, and then they’d all go into the same list. But when I realized that I could, in the future, segment them in that level of detail, it became really powerful. It’s really pushed me to get the quiz out there more and more, because of the depth of information I can get.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah. That’s allowing you to kind of segment out people in a really simple way, that’s very easy. I know this from our own personal experience: this stuff is not that easy to do. So that’s very, very cool.
Anna Parker-Naples:
Yeah. I’m so pleased I did it. I’ve put lead magnets out there in different formats, audios and PDFs and guides and checklists, and those things can take hours to design, hours to design and brand. Literally I sat down and did this for less than three hours, to get, within minutes, 300 people on my list.
Josh Haynam:
That’s crazy. Yeah. Let’s talk about that. How has the launch compared to other lead magnets you’ve done in the past?
Anna Parker-Naples:
Well, I’m not in launch yet. I’m not in launch yet. It’s certainly the fastest growing lead magnet that I’ve ever had. I’m not in launch. This period, where we’re in lockdown, I am taking the whole period to test different things, to grow my list as much as I can, because I feel that that way I can communicate with more people so that the next launch idea is going to be that much more impactful.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah, just gearing up, getting all those tags set up, getting the different segments. Then you’ve got all the tools in the arsenal, and you’re just ready to go.
Anna Parker-Naples:
Yeah. So I think in many ways, this period, as challenging as it is for people, it has so much opportunity if you use it.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah. Speak to that for just a quick moment, if you have any advice for people, just in a few minutes. What are a few things that people can be doing during this time, to try to adapt and remain as visible as possible?
Anna Parker-Naples:
Get on podcasts. Podcast hosts are batch recording like there’s no tomorrow, and you will probably be able to access authors and speakers that you wouldn’t normally be able to access, because they are intentionally using Zoom, or whatever other platform you can record with, to connect with others.
Anna Parker-Naples:
One of my top tips I’ve been sharing with my audience is, if you’re going to be someone influential in your field, you need a book, and you need one sooner rather than later. The book that I’ve just written is called Podcasts With Impact, that will be out shortly. A lot of that I’ve spoken out loud while I’ve been out walking the dog, and then I’ve had it transcribed. I’ve used an app called author.ai. You get up to 600 minutes free per month. By no means has the whole book been written that way, but I would say probably 50% of my ideas were captured that way and already transcribed and documented immediately, for me to then put into a rough manuscript to reshape.
Anna Parker-Naples:
So if you know that you’ve got a book in you, and maybe you’re writing blogs or you’re doing podcasts, or you know that you can speak things out loud, then consider that as a way to get content out there. Because f you want to be someone in your industry, if you have that behind you, we come out of however long we’re in lockdown, and you come out with a book, or the foundations of a book, you are way ahead of the game. So that’s my top tip. Create your book using author.ai, and get on podcasts.
Josh Haynam:
And go on walks.
Anna Parker-Naples:
And go on walks. Yes, get out the house.
Josh Haynam:
I liked that a lot. Well, we’re coming up on time, but before we jump off, what advice do you have for other creators, other experts, who are wanting to do this quiz thing, but maybe it feels a little scary, maybe there’s just some big question marks there? What would you say to them?
Anna Parker-Naples:
I think if you know that you want any lead magnet and you know who your client is and you know what’s going on for them and you know what you offer, you’ve got to know those things, if you’re building your list. Instead of spending hours thinking about your lead magnet, the design, and all of those complicated things that can go into the branding process, start on a quiz. Because it will probably do better quicker, and if it’s not quite right, you can tweak it.
Anna Parker-Naples:
That’s what I liked as well, that I can come back and think, that question doesn’t work, or I don’t quite like the way I phrased that. It wasn’t trapped. It wasn’t … What’s the phrase? Set in stone. That’s the phrase going through my head. It isn’t set in stone. You can make amendments whenever you need to and still get good results. So give it a go. I’m really glad I did.
Josh Haynam:
Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. This has been amazing. I feel like I’ve learned a lot. I’m going to take some of these things. Maybe I’ll go write a book now, who knows? But I really appreciate you coming on in, Anna.
Anna Parker-Naples:
A pleasure. Thanks for having me.