Talk Digi To Me March FWD: Ft. Christina Hunte

Welcome to Talk Digi To Me: March Forward – a women-only series in celebration of International Women’s Day. We’re looking at women in the field of marketing and technology, women who make an impact, women who dare to march forward!

Presented by Carlie Robinson from Robinson Creative. 

Today's guest is Christina Hunte, Human-Centred Marketing Specialist at Kreative Edge, coach, speaker, and creative change maker who is passionate about marketing, entrepreneurship, and seeing dreams come true.

Transcript

VOX:

Welcome to Talk Digi to Me, march Forward, a women-only series in celebration of International Women's Day. We're talking to women in the field of marketing, media and technology, women who make an impact, women who dare to march forward. Presented by Carly Robinson from Robinson Creative. 

Carlie:

Welcome to Talk Digi to Me, march Forward. Today's special guest is Christina Hunt, human-centered marketing specialist at Creative Edge. She's a coach, a speaker and creative changemaker who is passionate about marketing, entrepreneurship and making dreams come true. Christina, thank you so much for joining me. I'm going to kick right into it. Of course, it's International Women's Day. It's International Women's Month, right? So I want to know when you were a little girl let's go all the way back to little girl Christina primary school what did you think you were going to become, or what did you want to become?

Christina: 0:59

To be honest, I wanted to be a doctor when I was really really young. That was a dream. I wanted to be a doctor when I was really really young. That was a dream. I was going to be a general doctor, general practitioner, and have my own private practice. I was so clear on that.

Carlie: 1:10

What happened? Because you are not a doctor.

Christina: 1:14

I am not a doctor, not by any means. Sciences are hard, sciences are really hard, and I just decided, you know what, let me keep the business part of the dream and just drop the doctor part. So that's what I did. And in studying business, you know, it started to all unfold and all come together. Yeah, exactly.

Carlie: 1:37

I have to echo that statement because I wanted to be a vet. I am not a vet. Oh you do.

Christina: 1:41

But you have dogs. But I have dogs. I love animals.

Speaker 1: 1:46

You can, but you have dogs but I have dogs, I love animals. You can still kind of balance everything right exactly um. Did you have any female mentors coming up like that maybe helped guide you to where you are today absolutely.

Christina: 1:54

I was inspired to become a doctor by my doctor when I was really young. I mean, she was fantastic, just a wonderful person, so just so loving, made me feel so special anytime I had to visit her and I wanted to be just like her when I grew up. So that's where I got the whole private practice be my own boss and be a doctor thing from. Yeah, still a role model.

Carlie:  2:18

Yeah, definitely. So you ended up segwaying into marketing and entrepreneurship. At what point did that pivot happen? How did that pivot happen?

Christina: 2:26

Yeah, I was studying business in secondary school and we got introduced to marketing and I loved it. I just was so excited Every time we got an opportunity to put on I did like a fundraising event for like graduation or whatever, and then market that event that that just lit up the creative side of my brain and I was just happy. So I, after using that information, learning that information and going out in the real world, I started seeing opportunities for businesses that they had a really good product but nobody knew about it and I was like, yes, I'm gonna use my creative skills and my marketing skills and I I just learned I'm going to help these businesses. That became my goal.

Carlie:  3:10

Yeah, and you've been successful at it. Last year, creative Edge, you celebrated 10 years in business. So like what did you do? Did you do anything special for that? Or like, what's on your mind now that you've hit that 10 year milestone yeah, what's on?

Christina: 3:27

your mind now that you've hit that 10 year milestone. Yeah, I mean 10 years. We literally had a campaign called 10 years in 10 days. We played on a whole, you know, 10 years in 10 days thing and we celebrated. We went hard. We had a whole social media campaign where I was sharing, like a different lesson 10 lessons, 10 business lessons that I learned and um, we just we reintroduced ourselves to the public. So I had the interviews with my team members, I revamped my entire website and made it beautiful. You need to check it out. It's creativeedgeinccom. It is amazing and I feel so proud of it. And I also held a celebratory event for all of the team members who have worked with me over the 10 years, so even like a full time employee or freelancer capacity all of my people. We came together and we had a ball. We had so much fun.

Carlie:  4:21

I mean as you should, because, as you said, 10 years in 10 days that's definitely something to celebrate, thank you.

Carlie:  4:31

So one of the things that you offer at creative edge is market research, and I think that's something that really draws me to you as well, because I find that really exciting. It's nerdy of me to say that, but I find that really exciting. So tell me a little bit about, like, what kinds of market research do you offer and you know, what kind of clients do you have, and tell, tell me a little bit about that. Okay, the business you let's hear it.

Christina: 4:49

I love that you are intrigued by market research Because early on, I you know, when the marketing field started to really pick up in the late 2010s and suddenly everybody wanted to be a marketer, I noticed that the thing that could differentiate me was my market research abilities. So while everybody was talking about, oh, I'll do their social media management for you or I can do campaigns for you, not many people were talking about market research, and I think that's so fundamental to have. Before you start marketing anybody's product or service, you need the understanding, the foundation. So I started to use my market research skills from secondary school and university to help my clients gain a better understanding of the foundation. So I started to use my market research skills from secondary school and university to help my clients gain a better understanding of the market.

Christina: 5:32

So we believe strongly that that's where you need to start by understanding what your customers want, what their frustrations are, understanding what your competitors are doing and what gaps exist in the market. What gaps can you come and fill? That will make your business stand out and give you an edge. Hence the name Creative Edge, right? So we decided to really run with that and focus more on strategy, where everybody else was wanting to focus on flashy campaigns, we think, okay, you know what? Let's take a step back and focus on the foundations.

Carlie:  6:01

And I'm really with you on that, because I feel like it's really important to get a measure of what do people think of this problem, this product or this brand, before we can really tailor a message that works and is effective, correct, right, um so what kinds of market research do you do? Focus groups, surveys, like all of the above?

Christina: 6:21

yeah, so me being the kind of person that I am the intellectual deep thinker. I'm a deep thinker and a deep talker and I think that makes me gravitate towards focus groups more than anything else. I've learned over the course of my career that you get so much more value from doing a focus group than you will from doing a survey. Surveys are quick, efficient. They're effective, yes. However, when you do a focus group, you can get to the heart of the person. You can ask follow-up questions, you can learn their backstory. You can then start to understand your customers so well that when it's time to write your copy for your website or your social media posts, it speaks to their hearts because you've taken the time to really deeply understand them. You can't get that from a survey. So, yes, we do surveys, but I always push people towards focus groups because of the value of the deep information that you get in focus groups.

Carlie:  7:24

I love that. Do you think that enough businesses are thinking about the market research they need to do? Absolutely not. How do we get them there.

Christina: 7:34

You know why Most people are. Just you know, they're obsessed with their idea. Right, and as human beings we make a lot of assumptions. It's natural to make assumptions, because we have to make assumptions in our everyday lives. To go through a day, we have to make a lot of assumptions.

But the problem with doing that in business is that if you don't have a solid understanding of what is out there, what the market comprises, then you're running your business on assumptions and you don't know if people actually want this particular product. So a lot of people will start their business and, just you know, get an idea that feels good and run with it. Fantastic, we feel, great, this is gonna work, you know, yeah, and then in some cases it does work. You know, we've seen businesses that you know just like pop up and just explode. Fantastic, kudos to them.

But what happens is when when, like okay, let's say you get comfortable and you're running your business for 10 years and maybe there are not so many people doing what you do, you have a good market, customer base and you're good, but then a new player comes into the market and all of a sudden they're taking your market share and all of a sudden, you feel threatened and now you feel like you have to do something about it. That's when people start to feel the need for research. That's when they pick up the phone and call me because it's like, oh my gosh, what do we do? We need a strategy, we need a plan and we need to know what to put in that plan.

Carlie:  9:00

That's when they come we've coasted for too long and now, oh shoot, we need to have action, we need to do something, we need knowledge. Yeah, so we talked a little earlier up in the episode about your 10-year anniversary. Um, rosy picture wonderful, but I'm sure that there have been many hurdles along the way. What are some of the hurdles that you may have personally and professionally faced? And I guess backup question to that is what are some of the hurdles that you think women in business face?

Christina: 9:28

Oh my gosh, I was talking about this up to this morning because running a business, you, you will learn quickly. So one of the biggest mistakes that I made back in the day and I made this for way too long, I will admit it was taking on any and everybody as a client.

Carlie:  9:49

I suppose earlier you really wanted to cast that net as wide as possible.

Christina: 9:52

Right, you do. But a mistake I also made was thinking that if I turned a person away it was offensive. Right, I didn't want to offend anybody, but the truth is, now that I can look back on my my journey, I can see how taking any and every client is not the way, and when you take the wrong clients, it will cause severe pain. So the wrong client could be in the form of a client who is not clear on what they want. So therefore, you'll just be floating and just you never get the destination because they're not clear. It could be clients who don't want to pay. It could be clients who have not validated their product or service. So they're just trying to sell something that they think is cool but nobody else does, and you're out here trying to promote something that nobody cares about, yeah, and then when nobody buys, they want to blame you. So I had to learn that not every client is a good client and I don't have to take on everybody that is a difficult pill to swallow.

Carlie:

That is a difficult thing to teach as well.

Carlie:  10:53

Yes, because a lot of people have to go through it to really understand, like how I had to go through it exactly now you can warn others exactly um, how can we help women to march forward like that's the theme, right, we want to march forward as women. What can we do, you and I sitting here? What can we help women to march forward like that's the theme, right, we want to march forward as women. What can we do, you and I sitting here? What can we do to help other women?

Christina: 11:12

that's a really good question, and I think that it starts with understanding what are the challenges that women face specifically, and knowing, understanding that everybody every woman doesn't face the same challenges. However, in my experience as a coach as well because, apart from having an agency, I also am a marketing coach I have noticed that a lot of female entrepreneurs struggle with low self-esteem and confidence issues. So when you show up to a business from that state of being, it affects your business, and so, apart from one finding out what are the challenges that people are struggling with so that we can help them, I definitely have noticed a trend. So how can we march forward? I think supporting each other, hyping each other up, encouraging people to reach out for help, because you will grow quicker when you reach out for help. You'll grow slower when you just keep everything in your head, and I think that actively supporting each other's businesses intentionally is a way that we can all support each other as we march forward this international women's month.

Carlie: : 12:29

I think that is very, very good advice. Um, now you've been working on some other projects. We've talked a lot about your marketing research and so on, but you have other projects going on. Why don't you tell me about those and how they fit into helping women move forward and march forward?

Christina: 12:43

yeah. So, um, you know, you learn and you grow. You know you, all you. We are all evolving beings. We don't stay still forever and we keep learning about ourselves along the journey.

So what I have learned about myself recently is that I really, really enjoy coaching like I really. It gives me life. I love to see people just unlock and uncover and limiting belief and get rid of it so that they can move forward. You know, I love to see people figure out what was holding them back all along and start to make progress. That makes me feel like my time is being spent in a worthwhile manner. So I've started coaching more, I've started putting more energy into my coaching clients and I've developed a program, an eight-week accelerator program to help people to move from unstuck to really building the business of their dream, and it's called the dream builders accelerator. I'm very to the boat because it takes all the knowledge that I learned over the 10 years in business and it packages it into a way that speeds up your progress, and it is fantastic and it's really good that you I really love seeing the look on your face when you're saying that I'm spending my time doing something that I feel fulfilled at.

Carlie: 14:03

That is the dream, really truly yeah right. You want to be doing something you love, that you feel gives you real fulfillment. Apparently, it's not in the medical profession, for you but I think everything worked out in the right way. Before we close, if you were to go back to primary school, Christina, what is the one piece of advice that you would give her?

Christina: 14:27

Excellent question If I were to go back to primary school, christina.

I would tell her it's okay to be weird. I've struggled with that my whole life. Tell me about it.

Carlie: 14:43

I had a whole goth phase short black hair, black nails and everything. I always felt like something was wrong with me because I was weird, and I think that that's why I'm so committed to creating spaces for people who also feel weird, so that they feel less alone and they feel more normal. So, yes, it's okay to be weird. It's okay if you don't have identical interests to everybody else around you. It's OK. You know life is going to turn out OK. Just be you and just just calm down and focus on the right things and you'll be fine. I love it.

Carlie: 15:17

Thank you so much for joining me, christina. It's a very very enriching conversation.

Christina: 15:20

Yeah, this was so much fun, thank you for having me Good, awesome.

Carlie: 15:23

That's a wrap on Talk. Digi to Me, march forward, I'm your host, carly Robinson.

VOX:

Do you have questions about your digital marketing toolkit? Contact Carly directly via WhatsApp at 266-4847, on Instagram at CarlyTalksDigital, or send your email to Carly at MyRobinsonCreativecom. That's C-A-R-L-I-E at myrobinsoncreativecom.