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Special guest blog by Shaun Chavis of Zemplee

AgeTech startups and entrepreneurs are deeply familiar with how challenging it can be to build trust among potential customers, especially older adults who are open to new solutions but are hesitant to embrace new technologies. But guest contributor Shaun Chavis, Content Marketing Strategist at Zemplee — an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant — outlines a powerful remedy for this problem: using owned media as a tool for customer education, community-building and company credibility. She also offers practical guidance on how startups can use platforms like Substack to create lasting relationships with older adults and those who support them. Let’s take a closer look!

As a startup team, part of finding product-market fit is developing trust with your customers. Optimizing product-market fit is about meeting a pressing need — for example, delivering a pain-relieving pill, not just a fortifying vitamin. People not only need to know you’re creating that pill; they also need to trust that your pill is going to work for them.

Trust develops through a process. When your prospective customers are making a purchase, they’re moving through stages: awareness, interest, consideration and evaluation before finally converting. (These are stages in the marketing funnel model.) 

Through those stages, people need information to help them make choices they feel good about. You win their trust when the information they get addresses those informational needs with convincing answers.

What are those information needs, and how do you meet them?

The Information Your Prospective Customers Need

Let’s start with what kinds of information customers need. A “user needs” model helps identify what those needs are, and you can (and should) customize the model for your target customers. I like starting with the user needs model originally developed at BBC by the journalists who eventually started the content analytics company SmartOcto. User needs can include:

• Knowledge and facts (keep me engaged, update me)

• Context (educate me, give me perspective) 

• Emotional needs (inspire me, divert me)

• Action-driven needs (connect me, help me) 

When you invest in meeting these information needs, you’re cultivating trust that moves customers toward conversion. You’re also positioning your company as a credible, authoritative resource. The trust you create can develop a valuable relationship that leads to purchases and agreements, word-of-mouth referrals, brand ambassadors and even better customer lifetime value.

How you meet these needs is a job for marketing. Channels like ads, PR and press releases are useful tools, but when it comes to creating trust, owned media is the way to go.

• Ads reach people, but they don’t convince people.

• PR and press releases can get you one-time coverage, but there’s no follow up for the target audience, and your message may be filtered by the journalists who publish your story. (There are situations where your press release might be published online word-for-word — but press releases tend to be announcement-driven.)

Ads, PR and press releases can take people from awareness to interest. But owned media is the ecosystem that can support the rest of the marketing funnel — consideration and evaluation — leading people to conversion. 

You can shape your owned media experience for your customers. Cultivating trust with an inquisitive or even skeptical audience requires showing up consistently — something ads and PR can’t do alone.

What Is Owned Media?

Here’s a quick primer on different media channels you can use to connect with your customers:

• Owned media are the marketing platforms you control. This includes your website, your blog, email newsletters, apps and organic social media.

• Paid media is the outreach you buy. Ads, sponsorships and advertorials fall into this category. A brand ambassador program is a combination of paid and owned. 

• Earned media is the exposure that others generate for you — you can’t buy it, and you typically have little control over it. Press coverage, online reviews, word-of-mouth, social media shares and the less-frequent viral posts, and unpaid endorsements from influencers are examples of earned media.

 When you think about developing and implementing a strategy designed to build trust in technology, owned media has a clear advantage: You can create a tailored educational experience that meets people’s needs.

Using Substack as Your Owned Media Platform to Reach Older Adults

There are a range of options you can use to create your owned media system, but Substack is emerging as one of the best platforms for brand engagement, customer relationships and community-building.

Substack started as a newsletter publishing platform that’s since expanded into multimedia, including livestreaming and podcasting. Every newsletter and podcast can have a home page (much like a blog) and a chat. Substack also has its own internal social media platform, Notes.

You can use Substack for free, and you can publish content that readers can access for free or that is only available behind a paywall. Substack makes its money from subscriptions — it takes 10% of earnings from your newsletter income. Because Substack’s revenue comes from subscriptions, the algorithm is designed to encourage long-term relationships. And this is why Substack is a great platform for a company that wants to build valuable, ongoing customer relationships. 

There’s one more benefit for AgeTech companies: Reach. Older adults are embracing Substack — 46 percent of Substack users are 45 or older, according to SimilarWeb.

Crafting an Experience that Builds Trust

Incorporate these principles into content you create to cultivate trust:

• Demystify terms and technology using plain language. Remember that most people read at an 8th grade level. (I recommend Writing for Busy Readers as a modern guide to keeping language simple. If you’re in health, check out the CDC’s Plain Language resources to help put medical terms in simpler language.)

• Feature real users and their perspectives. This keeps the content relatable. You can host livestream events with users to talk about their experiences, and then use the replay and excerpts in your marketing. (Be sure to secure releases, and be mindful of regulations and compensation if you use any testimonials in paid ads.)

• Be transparent about limitations, pros and cons, and how to use technology appropriately. People who are hesitant to adopt technology want to know what it honestly can and can’t do. You’ll win their trust if you’re honest about that and can explain it in a way that’s easy and quick to get.

Then, begin crafting content:

• Offer technology education—and explore the possibility that not all of it may be directly about your company’s product or service. Think about the technology lessons that would be an immediate benefit to your target audience’s lives and how that intersects with what you do. Your goals are to create trust in technology and establish your company as a credible source of information.

• Offer community. On Substack, use the chat available with every newsletter, livestream or podcast. You can post prompts in the community to promote learning. A great example of this is Wendy MacNaughton’s Draw Together. She uses the chat to announce lessons and encourage people to share what they’re drawing. A moderator — the “art auntie” — keeps the community going.

• Create a library or encyclopedia. Give people a resource they can go to anytime to learn specifically about key topics in your field. You can use Notion, you can create a YouTube series, or you can build a digital encyclopedia into your website. (A great example of this: Clue, the women’s health company, has an encyclopedia in their website’s main nav.) This will build trust and boost your digital credibility. For AI optimization, be sure that your library or encyclopedia gives your company’s unique perspective — quote your case studies and white papers, or get your experts to give quotes and perspectives that can’t be found anywhere else online.

• Use inclusive language. Incorporate inclusive language into your company’s style guide. Mindfully curating how you use words and which images you use can help create a welcoming space that helps people feel comfortable trusting you. Some resources for inclusive language include AARP’s Language of Aging, the Diversity Style Guide and the Associated Press Stylebook (paid).

As you create your content strategy on Substack, decide whether you want to use a free content strategy, a paid strategy or a blend of both: 

• With a free content strategy on Substack, you publish content, such as a newsletter or a podcast, that people don’t have to pay to access. There’s no paywall. The chat associated with your newsletter or podcast is available to all of your subscribers. 

• Paid content strategies earn money, and there are several ways to approach a paid strategy:

  • Offer a subscription. The minimum Substack allows is $5 per month. Substack takes 10% of your revenue. Your content is behind a paywall. 

  • Ask subscribers for contributions. Your content is available to anyone for free, but you offer a subscription for people who would like to support your work. 

• A blended strategy: You can choose to offer a mix of free and paid content, or to use free content as the marketing funnel leading toward paid offerings.

  • Some people post twice a week where one post is free while another is paywalled. One of the best examples I’ve seen: Cookbookery Collective publishes a free newsletter for cookbook lovers and a paid newsletter for culinary and publishing industry professionals. 

  • You can paywall your chat — so only paid subscribers can access it. This is helpful if you want to create a safer space for subscribers to discuss sensitive topics or if you want to limit the kind of access people have to you. 

  • You can paywall a podcast or a livestream event. One of my clients, GenXpertise, uses paywalled livestream events for group coaching sessions. I have another client who is developing an educational series; the first unit for each topic will be free, and then the following units will be behind a paywall.

Next Steps

Before you start crafting content for an owned media strategy to build trust, evaluate these considerations:

• Who has the trust gap? Is it professional caregivers, family caregivers and loved ones, older adults, or organizational administrators?

• What is the trust gap? Lean on your customer discovery findings to understand what people are comfortable with and where they are uncertain, skeptical or underinformed. This is where you start customizing the user needs model for your company. 

• What do you already have to say that isn’t getting heard? You might start by repackaging content you already have and promoting it.

• What's the minimum viable commitment for your company — and who owns it? Think about publishing cadence, who’s writing or creating the content and the resources you need to create content and promote it. You’ll also need to think about resources to monitor a community and respond to learners.

Remember that you can start small — and for free. Try a short series, a partnership with another Substack publisher or with a pilot audience. 

Shaun Chavis is an owned media and content marketing strategist who specializes in helping companies incorporate Substack into their brand and marketing strategies. Learn more at braveevelyn.com, and reach her at shaun@braveevelyn.com.

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