Content Strategy Is My New BFF! Why It's Essential For Successful eCommerce

well good afternoon and welcome to the e-commerce podcast live recording yes so this is just meme
edmondson saying good afternoon and welcome just to let you know what's going on if you are joining us on the
live stream this bit is always cut out from the actual audio podcast uh but
it's just me to say hello and welcome uh it's great that you're here uh on the live stream watching along
if you want to as we go through the podcast feel free to say hi in the comments feel free to ask your questions
if you have them and we will try our best to answer them with today's guest we are talking with
katie all about content marketing and you're not going to want to miss this katie is a character so we're going
to get into this it's going to be fun uh in a few moments time what is going to happen is i am going to
play some music we are going to start the recording of the podcast so we
record the podcast just in one take in one go and we just live stream the recording uh hence the reason i'm here
just talking about this so hope all of that makes sense uh if you're new to the show if you're a regular welcome it's
good to have you back and always great for you guys to be here so i'm just looking for this on my screen i'm gonna
play some music i'll be back in just a second here we go
welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular interviews tips and tools for
building your business online
[Music] well good afternoon and welcome to the
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are regular to the show and you haven't done so yet please like and subscribe uh if you do
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would certainly appreciate it now on this week's podcast which is why
we're here let's get into it we are going to look at the principles of content strategy and why it is so so
important for your e-commerce business content strategy is a critical part
a critical part of any successful business it might not seem like a big deal at first but when you're trying to
grow and when you're trying to grow your business and make more money content management can be one of the most
challenging tasks on your list especially if you don't have a plan or a system in
place so that's what we're going to get into this week and we've got a great guest this week to
share the expertise in this whole area katie white is is with us and she is going to talk
all about the importance of having and i love this a kick-ass content strategy
and why it's so crucial in e-commerce katie is in vermont uh she started kw
content in which is a global content and social media marketing agency that develops and
launches social content and social media programs for
purpose-driven brands and if that's not enough katie also now runs strong brand
social and we're going to dig into all of that and what that is so without further ado
shall we bring uh the beautiful katie onto the screen here we go katie hey good good afternoon how are you doing
i'm so good so happy to be here matt ah awesome you're happy and i'm happy that that makes for a winning formula i think
here we go buckle up buckle up what's that movie uh buckle up
dorothy also yeah anyway let's not go there so you're in uh vermont right you're uh on the other side of the
atlantic uh and are you a local girl for that from there
uh yes local enough i'm gonna i'm gonna claim it claim it is my own
not managed to escape yet yeah i love it here i grew up in new jersey which is just a little bit south
of here but i've been here for you know years now the green mountain state just
just south of canada sometimes people mistake us for canadians but we're not not so
lucky like that we're not so lucky that's brilliant well it's great that you're here and um we're going to get
into this whole content strategy thing how did you i mean i i like to ask the guest let's start off at the beginning
you know how did you how did you start your journey in content strategy and content marketing
what kind of led you to where you are now sure yeah so um well i started my career at burton
snowboards which i always say means nothing to people if they're not winter people but if you are a skier or
snowboarder you're probably familiar with burton it's the world's biggest snowboarding company um and so i started
there on the ground floor got to work with um the late jake burton carpenter
and he was the ceo at the time founder then i just kind of wiggled my way into
marketing but when i first got there i was just copywriter um and my first
stint in social media marketing really came because our social media manager left and i was the youngest person in
the department and they were like maybe he'll do it so this was years ago
so that was your qualification you were the youngest person in the i think so i mean it wasn't official or
on the record but looking back i feel like that's what happened um and so yeah so it was really more or
less assigned to me um but it was great it's you know for someone who loves writing and loves communication and
loves community um it was a really really great place to end up so the rest is kind of history i started
with one brand at burton by the time i left i was managing three of their brands they have kind of
a burton which is their lifestyle brand burn snowboards and on optics which is their goggle brands um and helmets and
you know accessories um so managing all of those across instagram facebook twitter at the time
we had some pinterest accounts um and a couple of blogs and so that was
a really great crash course in all things and in social media it kind of signed it sounds a bit
full-on if you're doing that across multiple brands on multiple channels right
yeah i was it was a lot yeah yeah but i do like that you you i liked your just your quote there that you wiggled your
way into this yeah yeah that's that's quite impressive and i love the fact that your qualification was you're probably the
youngest in the room and to be honest with you you know what i've been i've been doing coaching for a number of years now and
the amount of times i've gone into a business and they're like we need someone to do social
um and let's say they're or over right because it's probably a good age bracket um and i put myself in that age
bracket to or over and they kind of go we just need someone young who understands that whole thing and that in
their head means you know if you're young you get social media if you're old
you don't do what i mean it's a fascinating process that people go through
and it's been humbling for me because now years later years later i'm not sure exactly i am now you know the
most senior member on my current team hiring women who have been you know who
are in there i think we have a year old on our team a year old on our team and so i you know the the
amount the extent to which i need to lean on them um to keep me up to speed is is pretty
humbling so um you know it's not a given it's not all about age but there is definitely something to be said for
just the the connectedness and the amount of intuition that comes with sort of you know the latest ways of communicating and how
younger generations pick it up and just get it and are speaking the language they do and
for me the thing which has always astounded me when i think about say my own kids i have a child my oldest has
just gone to university is it his second year at university he has not known a life
without really facebook being around whereas i was clearing out my attic at my mum's
house the other day with my with my oldest son and he found a bag like this bag big
massive bag full of letters yeah that were addressed to me from people kind of over the years and i'm
like well that's what i did i i can tell you how to write a letter do you mean and it's just like it was fascinating
they were like i don't even know how to do that yeah it was brilliant and they just sat there reading these letters
going this is just this is just very very unusual you know it's more than characters or whatever it is
and so yeah i think it's fascinating isn't it the age difference is is all for me it's all about what
they've grown up with and what what people have got used to i don't know if you found that yeah i mean a percent you know for
me it's like as we're as we're growing and extending into areas like tick tock you know i'm i'm all set on
instagram and i understand what we need to do on tick tock and when it comes to actually using the platform and the
intuition around it all it's it is it's just you know what and now the rate at
which you know what we grow up with changes is accelerating um but it's all good it's
super interesting and i think you know something you just said about more than characters what's so interesting is
as a copywriter i always think about um you know that that phrase or that saying like if i had taught i would have
made it shorter if i had more time like it's actually so much more challenging to communicate in a meaningful way even
shorter that we come so i think you know it gets it's interesting to watch certain people have a reaction i mean
social media is a mixed bag it's a very complicated topic for so many different reasons um
but in particular thinking about just how one of the things that's so interesting
about it is that great social media looks really simple it looks like something that you just
took five seconds to create and publish um but actually what goes into
communicating a complicated thought or topic or subject in that succinct of a
manner is a pretty you know incredible skill um so
yeah i like that great social media looks really simple i've written i if you're
not if you're following along you're not writing notes there's something wrong with you i'm i've got my pages going already so i'm good i've written that
down great social media uh looks really simple and so this
i i know that you started kw content in and i know that you work with the snowboard company which i'm extremely
jealous of i'm not gonna lie right i mean that just sounds like the the most brilliant job but what do you want to do
i want to go work for a snowboard company all right let's do that um so
let's let's hone it in let's crack on with this topic of social media what is uh social media content uh that we're
talking about content marketing so what is um your definition of content marketing and why is it important for an
e-commerce business let's start with that yeah i mean i think the topic of content marketing is is really vast and i do
think it's yeah it's worth taking a minute to clarify really my area of expertise so content marketing
traditionally is more long-form content and how our website is ranking and seo within search engines
but um you know for us inside of our agency and what we're really focused on is the
content strategy within the realm of social media and how we're bringing people into our brands and nurturing
them there there's absolutely an overlap and an intersection between
what your content strategy for social media should look like and what your content strategy for your website and
seo and all that should look like so i mean when we think about it it's it's the lifeblood it's everything from your
brand awareness your brand growth your brand's equity the intangibles around it
um to you know customer acquisition um you know that's really where the
intersection between certain types of content on social media and our seo strategy lives and then you know the
thing that i don't hear enough people talking about that we're really focused on is community building and loyalty
social media organic social media is an incredible place to nurture our relationships to build community with
our customers and ensure that you know we're not thinking about customers in a one-time fashion we are thinking about
lifelong relationships with them and inviting them to help shape you know the trajectory of our brand and our product
development so let me just clarify that because that sounds like a really important
point you just made so i don't want to miss it um organic social media is a great tool for building lifelong
relationships or community uh with our customers and we that that seems to be something that we
need to hold in our heads as we're thinking about content strategies for our social media certainly our organic
social media um what do you mean by um
well let's let's let's simplify it a lot what do you mean by organic social media yeah so organic so all all brands have
three types of content we have owned earned and paid and within owned right we have
our organic content that we're publishing on our website organic content on social media is just anything
that we're publishing before we put dollars behind it so um you know we do a lot of work you sort of a lot of people
think of social media in two silos it's like our social advertising funnels and
and that those like paid campaigns that are always on and then are organic which is just what we're
publishing on a day to day or a weekly basis i like to think about kind of bringing those two things together and
integrating them a little bit more but so for us organic is really just what's happening on our feeds um and you know the
response we're getting to just the content that we publish to nurture our community versus you know sell through
yeah yeah okay um and so
when we talk then about community let's do let's can we do a deep dive here a little minute because i'm curious about
about what you said when we're talking then about community uh we're talking about people who are interested
uh in at the at the brand we represent right so we're talking about our customers we're talking about potential
customers right that come along and maybe want to check us out on social media before we buy anything
so why is it important then that we use organic search to nurture
relationships with these guys so i mean the most important reason that
i can think of is profitability you know so that'll
um you know customers when they buy from us the second time most of the time spend more money with us
we had a cosmetic client a national cosmetic client um that we came in for
and they had they are already had a digital advertising agency running most of their customer acquisition efforts and um
within days or maybe it was days of us coming in and starting to take over
their feed and apply you know we had done a content strategy process which we can talk about for sure about how we
we really think about the customer journey as we develop our content strategy for even for organic social
which is something that people don't really think about um but so you know within days
their their cart their average cart value was somewhere between and
right it's pretty low and within the first days we saw that um their average order value went up percent
oh wow and that was because we were getting the right content in front of the right people
um you know and driving them back towards the site instead of only focusing on new customer acquisition
right and so that was a really significant impact and something that they knew okay this is this is working
we're going to keep doing this so profitability is is the most important reason and then
otherwise i mean again those those in those levers or
those um sorry things like brand equity like how how we especially in a crowded
market stand out from our competition unless you have a product that is
absolutely in a league of its own and has the brand's recognition of being still
it is your community it is your like community entities it is the social proof if i'm new and i'm thinking about
buying from you and i come to your digital spaces and there's crickets or
there's only comments from spammy looking bots right that's not building my trust if i come and it is like a
freaking party and everybody's invited and there's a ton of action and it feels really good
that is going to push me over the edge to buy from you so much more quickly um so that brand equity piece building
trust social proof setting ourselves apart from a competition with these intangible sort of more personality
driven aspects of our brand is something that is pretty invaluable and can amount to a lot over time yeah i mean
and to be fair that all sounds fantastic i mean i i'm i i'm listening to you talk
and i'm thinking increased profitability obviously and you talk about increasing results by
is that typical um you find or is that like unusual german you hear a lot of
people quoting different stats all over the place and you kind of um i i guess i'm just if i'm if i own an
ecommerce site and let's just you know let's call it what it is my organic social media is just
rubbish i'm kind of thinking well if i get this sorted out yeah is it typical to expect maybe a
increase in cart value in average order value or is it is that kind of the top end but you jeremy and i
i guess i'm just asking that question i would call that stat i just gave you that case study somewhat of a
uh case study that we have i mean it's certainly not what i would would not say is that just
activating on organic social media is going to mean that you achieve results like that but if you do it well and you do it right
um you know we i mean i have never in years and in the last four years
of owning my business i haven't had a single client that we you know we apply the exact same process every time we
work with a client and we've never ever ever had a scenario where numbers either traffic to a website
overall sales or average order value aren't completely on the rise so it's absolutely um
you know uh something that we can expect if we invest properly wow i'm sold katie where do i start now
i i guess um so what's that i mean you talk about the process what is then that process you
know if you don't mind sharing it with is it you know what's your what's the mechanism i i guess i'm just
i'm thinking about the guy sitting there going i'm i'm sold i'm in i'm i could do with that how do how do i go about doing
this yeah so there's i always say there's three phases to you
know building and launching uh content and social media marketing program that's high performance like that and
the first is really strategic but it leans towards the creative side
so it is developing the you know how what are we who are we talking to
what are we saying and what does it look like feel like and sound like um
and that is something where you're wanting to get to know your customer beyond the like household demographics
that we typically look at and really understanding how they use social media and how they consume
content so that we can create a communication framework that meets them
where they are right and this and so a lot of the magic happens in there and we should come back to that part we should
talk about how we construct that because yeah i've got questions
so the second phase though just to kind of jump ahead the second phase is tactical this is where you're saying how
do we get the right message in the right place at the right time so what platform should we be on how frequently should we
post are we doing reels do we have a little bit of a budget to kind of you
know bypass the stupid algorithm and make sure that our message gets out there and that kind of stuff so but what
i see in our field is that that's where everybody starts and that's why so many things fall flat because
just posting every single day is not the answer the answer is wrapping tactics
around a community communication strategy that's really going to resonate with your people and then the third
phase is obviously just pushing it to market and and letting your community give you feedback and tweaking and
optimizing and in forever in perpetuity um but you know that first phase always
we always find that um you know as much as it is a well-researched and educated
hypothesis it usually is a really strong start um because of the you know how
much information we have available to us on these platforms about our customers and how they consume content so we can
really we can really learn a lot before we push a program to market and can you i can you learn a lot if you
um i guess if i've got say followers on instagram i can learn a lot about
those followers but if i'm just starting out and i've got followers on instagram can i still learn that same
information or is that am i stimming a little bit yeah so there's definitely a difference
there for sure that's a hurdle we one of the things that is different about what we do and what we teach is
that if if that is the case then i'm going to recommend that you
instead of posting every single day to followers i'm and you know hit or
miss with hashtags and i do want to caveat this by saying
that strategies can look a little bit different depending on your industry so
for example we have most of the market right now is saying reels or bust right we want we as
long as you can grow organically viral if you're on reels that's not true
for every for every industry it's just not it could be really true for food and beverage or for coaches right but there
are other products that that's just not true so what i'm about to say is for the folks who are not having
going viral with reals right now um so what we recommend is allocate even if it's twenty
to an organic post to promote it it's kind of like a little micro engagement campaign and that has a
ton of benefits one of them is that we're bypassing the algorithm we're bypassing just the followers we have to
send it to a targeted audience to get our message in front of them to understand and get enough of a sample
size enough impressions on that to understand if it's landing or not and if we put you know if we post times in a
month and put behind each right with we can have a ton of information
about the content that we post not only that one of the things you said in your intro
or earlier on really resonated with me which is like whether you're just starting out or you've been here for a
while and in the life cycle of brands you know if you are bootstrapping and you are
starting up and you don't have if you're not like a professional content creator
you probably should there are probably more important things for you to be doing than creating unique posts
every single month so by taking this tack of saying we're going to reduce the volume improve the
quality and put a little bit just a tiny micro budget behind it to get it out there to receive data about it you also
have a longer shelf life on your content and you can be just so much more strategic and drive better results with
that love love that idea i love that concept uh i
guess my my immediate question is um what data then am i looking for right so
i've done my post i've put my bucks behind it i've i've sent that out you know using
whatever um what what sort of data am i looking forward to to do i mean that gives me
the feedback that i need so i love this question because
uh this is where this is where people get confused um because like for example i
hear i hear this all the time katie my every time i talk about my product it doesn't get any engagement so i stopped
like my sales post don't get any engagement so i'm not doing it it's like well but why are you judging the success
of a post that's meant to drive sales by engagement right that's not that doesn't make any sense so we're not going to draw the right conclusion so for us the
way we construct um content strategies we have three pillars and one pillar is for brand growth and
one pillar is for sales and one pillar is for loyalty and so we measure success and we look
you know we establish what we're looking for based on the message first so if it's if we if we're evaluating a pillar
one post we're evaluating things like reach how far did it get we're people tagging and sharing it right we're
looking for engagements like likes comments and shares because that's you know that's what we want for brand growth
if we're looking at um you know a pillar to post which is meant to drive sales or at least consideration
we're looking for link clicks we're looking for sales or an engagement that means more on this level would be saves
because maybe they're not ready to buy right now but we know they're in a consideration phase and then pillar three kind of depends on
the message that's where we're looking for community building so total engagements total interactions there is
really a valuable number i'm not you know whether or not people are commenting or liking it depends on on
the nature of the post um so that's a great question because i think that that's an extremely common
pitfall is that people are just looking at engagements no matter what the message is
and if that's what we're doing we're going to draw the wrong conclusions and then probably take action that isn't actually helping
us so if i'm hearing you right katie what you're saying is uh
you're going to put this post out there you're going to you're going to pay your bucks and then depending on what type of post it
is will then determine you know what it is that you're looking for which you which you've run through and
are all the all the bits of data that i'm looking for proprietary to that social media
platform or is there some kind of other analytics service that i need to be looking at
there there's no i i mean i would love to know what your listeners think but i
have not found the perfect social media reporting tool especially especially like right size to the price
um so you know we we have used tools like later we have used sprout social um you
know we certainly use obviously google analytics when we're measuring check we want to see you know we always want to
see audience growth um website traffic growth and engagement growth like that's
what we're looking for month over month so google analytics is key there but for especially for our smaller
brands that we work with that are trying to be budget savvy we go native analytics within the platform some
sometimes there's discrepancies but they're not huge and they're not going to like impact the decisions we're making bigger companies certainly have
you know i feel like curie or other you know more full
sweet full solution products probably provide better analytics um or just like
easier easier reporting um less manual but you know we're in the
business of helping now smaller brands so that's kind of where we're at that's really interesting so the
in this sort of phase when you talked about the strategic the the what our
what sounds to me like it's basically is research this is where we're doing a lot of research and we're gonna we're gonna
understand um what did you say we're going to understand who we're talking to what
we're saying and how we're going to say it um what sort of cues are you looking for in
that then you know you you you're boosting your posts if you're starting out if you're an established brand you've obviously got a lot of data
there but what sort of cues are you looking for yeah so
you mean cues to to figure out kind of what we're going to go to market with and what he's going to look like so i
like to say that your content strategy is conceived at the intersection of your target persona mindset your unique value
proposition and your competitive white space so you know depending on
depending on what industry you're in it could look really different so the first thing we want to do is understand our
target market through the lens of social media what like are they someone you know are they someone who is on social
media all the time are they are they a content creator in their own right are they constantly publishing and they want
to be a part of that are they a more passive scroller are they a mom who like
literally scrolls through instagram for five minutes at the end of the day when everybody's gone to bed just to decompress and never shares anything or
are they kind of like that but maybe sometimes they just re-share content that resonates with them we want to understand
what what they're looking for out of this platform so that the way we show up nurtures that and meets them there and
immediately resonates with them um and then of course our unique value proposition is really important for us
to understand and the benefits of our product and that pillar too sort of sales spot we want to we want to make
sure that we are communicating about our products in a way that is benefit driven but also socially savvy um so that it's
native and it fits in and it isn't like you know i guess i you know interruptive or
disruptive in a bad way and then um in terms of the competitive white space
this is really where things get interesting if you take an industry like the beauty industry where
you don't think there's any white space right we want to start looking at okay target persona do we have a unique white
space with who we are trying to talk to um and then if not like well what about
the message what are these brands coming to market with what does their content look like how can we stand out and carve
a space are there platforms that others aren't on that we think could be effective with communicating to our
market are there you know is there a cadence is there a format such as reels or whatever so you kind of go down this
hierarchy of looking for white space so that you make sure your content strategy is attacking that white space um and
accounting for it so you're going after the white space you're not going after the general space it i mean you're
the more i'm listening to you talk the more i'm thinking you have and i appreciate this is advice
everybody gives but actually this this is what you're doing isn't it you're taking a broad audience and
you're you're doing this and you're making it smaller and smaller and smaller and you're attacking sort of
attacking the wrong word but you know i mean you're looking for these white spaces you're looking for these real
niche areas it sounds to me that that's very deliberate and intentional
oh yeah for sure i mean there's there's nothing that will get you to think about how to
carve out your own space that like working in social media well there's it feels like every nook and cranny of the
internet is stuffed right so um you know i think it's important to to clarify too
when we're when we're crafting that we're really looking from two angles one
is like what is what is going to resonate with the customer but it's really about
you know how are we showing up with a unique personality and point of view that is going to
fill a space fill a void that hasn't been taken yet it's really you know the purpose of social media if
i could apply like just one reason a brand should be using it profitability
is nice sales is nice customer acquisition is nice but we have other other
you know methods for do accomplishing all of those things social media is number one
for personifying your brand and bringing it to life right and so
you can't do that if you sound corporate or vanilla or like everybody else
even if you have a really distinct personality you will attract many
different types of personalities when you think about your friend group or people that you love in your life right you have a bunch of different
personalities that you're drawn to so what we really want to do is make sure that we are showing up with a distinct
personality a distinct point of view so that we can occupy
a space in our customers minds and really carve out like an emotional connection with them that feels like a
person-to-person connection not a corporate corporation a person connection
so this is what you've done here in just a few short sentences is is gone way beyond
how percent of the people use social media yes
that's what i'm hearing yeah yeah and so um and this this whole process this whole strategy i
take it is just based on what you've discovered over the years and and figuring all of this out and so this is where you think social
media is at this point in time and this is if you want to stand out on social media on organic social media as a brand
as a personality you have to think about these things am i am i hearing that right yes absolutely it's too
crowded to you know that's one of the reasons why i don't advise buying things like social
media templates for copywriting or your design because if you go on social media you'll notice that
there's a lot of sameness and oftentimes the folks that are participating in the
sameness do not have great engagement or growth on their social media so if you want to drive results it's got to be
custom and unique wow okay so so many more questions teddy i hope you
sat down um yeah yeah
so the um so this is we're still in your strategy phase here
aren't we we're still there's a lot of thinking and a lot of planning here so if i let me ask you a question right i come to you um let's
say i want to do it with a podcast you know i want to be better on organic social media how long is this research phase
realistically going to take what kind of energy should i be throwing into it yeah that's a great question it kind of
depends on who's doing the work so you know for i it's been an interesting dynamic for us
because when i first started i was like i want to be a consultant and
i'm going to consult brands to do this for themselves because so much of what we do as an agency is
you have to onboard us to all of your institutional knowledge of your target persona right so if you have an external
partner doing it it's going to take a lot longer if you as a founder or a marketing executive
have been living and breathing a brand and its customers for the last few years it's not going to take you as long
because when you if you're asking the right questions you're going to have the answers to them um but you know in terms
of what i have seen with our students and our agency we recently at our agents
you know we used to have sort of like a month or six week uh research phase we have been shrinking that down because
people don't want to wait that long um and when we're working with our students i mean they can they can do the research
phase in a week or so yeah that's really interesting and so that i mean
yeah and that just rolls off the tongue a week or so i'm thinking goodness me a wee that's a long time because i'm i'm thinking that's hours
right and it's i mean yeah and i was thinking a week like but you have a bunch of other stuff you're probably
doing so not a full hours i don't think um but you know it's it's kind of any
research or you know project that involves um
communication i think is so important to have like your research phase and then your editing phase and your analysis
so it's more important i think to have maybe you spend three hours on it on day one doing a
bunch of just like digging through and understanding the competitive landscape the next day you're spending a couple
hours just getting into the mindset of your customer doing some sleuthing some light stalking that kind of thing
um and then you know days three four five
you're really trying to synthesize that information look for holes and that kind of stuff so maybe you're just doing some lighter
sessions there so maybe not a full hours yeah i mean to be honest with you um katie you know if i
from my own experience when people talk about an e-commerce business right and it mirrors almost perfectly what you've
been talking about someone comes to you and says i want to set up an e-commerce business and and the way of people do it is
they'll go to somewhere like aliexpress or some site like that and they'll get a product which is cheap and they'll think
oh i can sell that for times the amount i'm going to pay for it i can drop ship it from china and away we go
they copy the photos they copy the product description and their website looks like every other website that's out there and lo and behold they don't
make any money and i'm a big i'm a big fan a big proponent of right at the start before
you've done anything to do with a website you spend a chunk of time in research right yeah
and there's there's pl there's there's thinking that goes behind all of that so it's exactly the same here with
social media i guess what i've found is and i appreciate this sounds like a really
obvious statement as i think about it the more time i put into that research the more effective it is in the the long
run you know there's this sort of real trade-off isn't there the sharpening of the saw as stephen covey calls it it's
like the more you can do that there the better the result is going to be but there's always that pain point isn't it
it's like i don't want to do research i just want to crack on and get doing something it's not exciting it's not sexy
it's the opposite of diminishing returns it's increasing returns the more you're willing to like get your hands dirty and
you know we i've worked with several hundred independent brand owners on this and they all it's like
when we're in this phase they're just like i don't feel like things are coming i feel more confused and i'm like that's
good you know you're supposed to be in the mud with it and sit with it because that's how you kind of i mean
that's how you know you're doing the work but yeah i mean there's just no way around the fact that the internet
is is so crowded and becoming more and more crowded and not just every day every
second and so you're not willing to do that um you know you might be barking up the
wrong tree i don't know yeah no totally i agree with you i think it's fascinating because um
again just listening to your talk there my response is if if the guy's going
we're more confused you're like well think how your customer feels if you
can't articulate yeah you know and so many people i meet and i i'm going to put myself in this
category whenever i whenever i talk about my business whenever i talk about my online stuff or whatever it is that
i'm doing and you say to me who do you know who your percentage is i'll go yes of course i do but then if i follow that question up
with well explain it to me actually it becomes much more complicated because i feel like i know
it because i i just feel like i do but i can't necessarily define it
and i think part of what you're talking about in this research process is coming up with some very clear definitions
being able to tell somebody else so they get it in the same way that you do do you find that this research phase this
phase one is is a one-time process or are you constantly going around these sort of three phases
yeah you know i think that it's really important at a certain point to then just focus on
action and then you are in a phase where hopefully you've gotten close enough
that it's more on the execution side how you're bridging the gap between what that
research told you and the point of view that you've developed from that research then there is
that that point and then there's execution and there's a lot of nuance in there um and so hopefully it's that you're
reading metrics and and more focused on the execution piece um but we certainly
i think that you know then the the rest of like do you look back to this research phase i think is more of a
matter of what's happening in your market and your competitive set and you know innovation within your space
that is going to demand how frequently you need to revisit that um but
you know you know most content strategies that we develop can be pretty solid as is for at least a
couple of years with like minor updates to kind of specifics of delivery you know yeah okay
so you've gone from the strategic um and we then moved to the tactical and i i
want to come back to these also i want to come back to these three pillars you talked about brand growth sales and
customer loyalty right um so before we move on to this phase two
can we just touch back on those why those three where did those three come from
so in my field like i just i see people uh they're like you need content pillars
something for every month we have different themes and all of this stuff at least most people i see have five
pillars and for me it's just like it doesn't matter if we're talking about social media or
any store any time we communicate with customers any marketing that we do of any kind
it's it there's we have three jobs we have to grow our brand we have to increase demand and generate demands we
need to close that demand and then we want to nurture people's average lifetime value test right like that's
and i think that it just doesn't it's in nobody's best interest to complicate it beyond that and so
um you know and it's it's but but we love to so no matter no matter what i do i'm trying to align
and then i remember i was reading a industry report probably a couple of years ago and it was like percent of
respondents say you know the the biggest issue they have when it comes to social media is feeling like they understand
how it contributes to business goals so for me i was like okay well i'm just going to make sure that
when we are doing content strategies and we're talking about social media that everything we do is always aligned to a business school um
and so the way we think about what the way i think about this too is bridging the gap between the business goal side
of it and the social side of it is to ask people to say because you know
most brands once when instagram was first kind of coming up it was more like
tic tac people understood that it's like you build audience by just showing up and being social don't sell sell sell to
me now that has completely flipped and you see a lot of brands are just like only selling on social their brand
account isn't growing because of it um and i think what i like to ask people to think about
is you know if you've ever had a person that you needed an introduction to you
wanted to meet right that's like a social situation and you knew they were going to be maybe
you guys were both going to be at the same event and you knew someone was going to be able to give you an introduction and
you're going to start a conversation with them and you need something from them you don't you don't go you don't start
the conversation by talking all about yourself or all about what you need from them right
but what the marketing industry right now talks about with no like and trust like basically is telling people to just
talk about yourself until they trust you right but it's like actually if you only talk about yourself i don't trust you or
you must be obsessed so um you know when i think about what i would
do if i'm talking to someone that i need something from or i need to impress i'm gonna do my research and i'm gonna i'm
gonna find out what our mutual ground is what do we have in common like do we both like this do we both like
snowboarding because if we do i'm definitely starting a conversation there because that is what's going to build trust right and if all else fails like
do we both have kids that's a like we'll start the conversation there right and then slowly
once you can see when you bring something up with someone you've never met that you have in common their eyes
light up right if you're at a conference or at a cocktail or a networking event and you bring something up that's more
social you can see them go from like kind of groggy to like oh yeah i love that too and now we have a conversation
and then slowly they become like more alert to you
and you can slowly bring the conversation closer and closer back to you and that's what those three pillars
do the first pillar is about saying you know what is what is the mutual grounds between my prospective customer
and i that perceives an interest in my product a really low hanging fruit way to
explain this is if you are have a food product like maybe you sell spices online or or you sell cooking
like cooking ware or something like that that mutual ground that perceives an interest in your product is recipes
if i can give you recipes and i i can like put that out in front of you you're going to click on it and i'm going to
introduce myself to you in a way that is not asking you to buy anything from me
um and it's building trust and then slowly though you see my product being used in that recipe or the next time you
think to yourself like wow maybe i'll follow them because that was really cool i've never seen a recipe like that before right and so it's it's all about
the customer on pillar one it's all and and mutual ground then it brings to your product on pillar two and then pillar
three is where i want people to put all the no like and trust stuff like it all only belongs in like of your content
and that's the uh that's the the customer loyalty thing yeah yeah customer loyalty thing sorry to just you
know it's the the i love it
so so that's really i mean that's super helpful i i and i get that and i
understand that so you've got your three pillars and you're you're really clear in where you're communicating and how
you're communicating so you said in in this sort of no like trust this pillar three that's and i appreciate again
this is going to be different for different industries what sort of percentage am i looking at
in in the impiller one the sort of the brand growth pillar yeah so it does depend on you know what
your marketing calendar says but i like to have like a a baseline of and that
just mirrors a you know a marketing funnel right we the percentages game we need to invest
more in demand generation and then we're going to close a certain percentage of it so a baseline that i always use is
but that is gonna change if you have an audience to sell through and you have a new product launch you're gonna
crank you know pillar two way up from to so the baseline is but
then then it's it's like on a dial and you can dial it it adapts throughout yeah so can you i don't know if it can
be as simple as this katie if it can't tell me but can you um give me an example of a post that is
uh brand growth pillar one an example of a post which is maybe pillar number two and an example of a
post which is pillar number three yeah i will use myself as an example so um we have a marketing agency and an
education company and our pillar one is oftentimes we call
we call this type of content you know and there can be a lot of different types of content in your pillars but just in the interest of
giving one example for each we have a type of content we call words of encouragement and they're just these
block quotes that like are supposed to just meet someone where they are which is for us we're thinking
about entrepreneurs um with some you know and the the way we want to make them feel is like we are
their hype man right so it's like on a friday like you know here's all the people who who just like
kept charging through the week or whatever we see you cheers all the hustlers out there that kind of thing it can be like so
incredibly simple and the crowd goes wild on these like we have the most engagement on these it's really simple
and then so that is something that we get the most shares on people share that to their stories so our brand grows
um and then pillar two is to be hey we just launched a holiday marketing guide
it's only lincoln bio to shop now and then pillar is going to be
um anything from you know we are working on launching a scholarship next year to
behind the scenes of my team and how we work together or if i'm a values drip you know driven brand leader i'm going
to talk about what you know what values are important to me and business and that kind of thing awesome
awesome so we're talking in case you've just joined as we're talking about how to create
uh a sort of a social social media content strategy um and we we're getting
into the nitty-gritty of it and i i appreciate we've only just covered phase phase one really i mean to be fair
to a little bit you know the tactical side of things um which you said was the right message
right place at the right time so what are some of the your top content marketing tips or tactics that maybe we
should be thinking about right now generically you know industry-specific society
you know i think that um people are always like what platforms do
we need to be on we need to be on tick tock latest and greatest and it's like you do but you know for better for worse for
percent of brands facebook and instagram are table stakes like some people are going to go check out
your they're going to hear your brand name and they're going to go to see what your instagram looks like before they go to your website in some cases so
really making sure that you have a solid program in place there and resources to support you know the ongoing
life of that is really important to get into place before you start doing more experimental stuff
um i think that the other thing that i would say is that it's really important to
right size the the size of your program your content and social media program to
the life stage of your business and your resources um so really wanting to encourage folks who
are just starting out to not be spinning their wheels on posts a month you know before they have proven
product market fit and a strong you know lever or mac
mechanism for customer acquisition um so i think those are probably my two
tried and true pieces of advice very good very good so
so when it comes to things like tick tock uh i suppose two of the big
questions i've asked a lot at the moment um uh katie tick tock and reels right there the two
big things that everyone's talking about at the moment um and the thing that i i don't even
know if it's still a thing the thing which everyone talked about very briefly it felt like was um youtube shorts uh
jeremy and that sort of i don't know if that's gone now actually i've not seen it as much um
what's your opinion on these things and should i really be thinking about it i mean you've just mentioned obviously i
need to get facebook and instagram sorted before i do but let's assume i've got good engagement there
yeah i think it depends on your brand personality your customer
and your resources right because it really doesn't do you
any good to be on tick tock for example if you know your customer isn't there for one or if
you don't have like savvy content create create um creator
resources right because then it's gonna fall flat um so i think that's that's my opinion and
i think tick tock is an incredible community if your customer is on it it
is the early days of instagram right now you can truly grow you know i think right now with with
instagram you're seeing like i get on because of my fields and i i i cannot navigate more than five seconds
without just being smacked in the face and it feels like all of my reels are are experts telling
me how to go viral with reels and it's like this i just feel like i'm like in a
like whirlwind of prop like instagram propaganda just like that and i feel like
it's the the percentage of people who can go
like viral or grow fast truly organically only on instagram that
percentage is definitely smaller than tick tock there's just there's more space on tick tock if the algorithm is
still you know what with facebook and instagram right now i think the latest dot i read was like your average page
reach organically is like five percent of your audience it's really really small
um so i think that you know tick tock is an incredible place to like to play around
if you have the resources and you have the bandwidth and it's not a shiny object that is detracting like again i
just feel like it's so important for people to think about solving problems in the right order when you're building
a brand and you're building a business the first problem you need to solve is steady consistent sustainable sales and
i'm not sure that any of the you know that any of these social media platforms are kind of there there are probably
these exceptions with really niche sort of brands um or i shouldn't say probably there are
but for percent of brands experimenting with organic content is
probably not the number one way we're going to solve that problem right these are things that we wrap around
our our sustainable sales mechanisms to start to take up more space and separate
ourselves from the pack um so so if we are at that place i think tick
tock is an amazing place to play around i do think reels are fun i just think that in some ways
they've already become like the instagram version of that type of format where it is
already like it's just more salesy and and that's what the the difference between the two communities is like
even though the format of a real looks similar to the format of a tick tock
piece of content reels i'm still on instagram so i'm still getting advertised to every other
post that i see um and so just the whole experience on t talk is so much more organic and i think
that you know its customers aren't feeling like customers on that platform they're feeling more
like rumors of content they're there to connect to think to see discover um and
so it's a really prime time to slip in there and build trust if if you're at
that stage and it's it's the right time for you yeah and like you say if you can actually create the content you can
actually do it well yeah yeah that's that for me is a critical thing can you actually do that can you smack your head
against a desk and put a hoodie on at the same time to a beat of a music i don't know if you can or come but anyway
um [Laughter] so uh that's let's what about pinterest
have you have you got much experience with pinterest marketing because this is probably the most for me
uh the most under talked about platform socially that that
i come across you know everyone's talking pinterest um pinterest instagram facebook everyone's now talking about uh
tick tock what about pinterest yeah i think pinterest you know the user base is significantly smaller than
instagram and facebook i don't have the numbers right off of my head off the top of my head um but it is certainly i mean
i have seen many case studies of incredible success using pinterest it operates more like a
search engine so you know your your content has a really long shelf life
there you know you hear these stories and see these accounts of folks who have a pin from like five years ago that
is still responsible for of your website traffic or something like it's pretty amazing but it just depends on
what you're selling so really thinking about your customer like if we are in that target persona
development phase of our content strategy and we're like yes this person is a homemaker they love decorating or
baking and we know that they spend a lot of time on pinterest pinning for inspiration to try to inform you know
their domestic endeavors for example like we're gonna hit pinterest for sure um so it just depends on you know your
user base and and where we think adding time that's really interesting so the
so the stable like you say the stake at the dining table is is facebook and it's instagram and and do those and do those
as well but you talked about having the resources
um to do those i mean what if i'm a small business owner the the question that's going to pump
straight into my head is what kind of resource are we talking about yeah yeah that's great so
i think let me think about this for a second so i think you know we think about resources in three kind of categories i
think right so we have time money and talent um and so if we're just starting out we
probably have our own time our own talent and very little money and so and so if we're
bootstrapping right so in that instance we're looking to um
establish our brand establish our digital ecosystem so that if people hear about us and they go to check us out
they have what they need while we set up our you know our acquisition mechanics so in
that instance maybe it's a post per week or a couple of posts per week and we want to reduce it to the
type of content that we can create well in a couple of hours a week right so that's like one example i think where i
see a couple of inflection points is around the half a million revenue mark that's where it's like
oh we need th this is starting to build out we want to put some velocity behind our cadence and we want to really be
making sure that this is the right content we're publishing around that like million to five million
revenue mark is where we're like okay we should be hiring a content creator
that's super savvy we want a community manager right we want to make sure that our program is supported with
you know aspects of social advertising and that kind of thing so those are super loose guidelines but i see that
like half million million five million as these inflection points where you're cranking up your social
media program okay and the other question that has come in uh
uh is um if we're if we're starting out yeah what sort of numbers should i be
aiming to get like within the first six you know everyone talks about followers don't they and and let's assume that
actually matters um yeah you know what sort of numbers should i be looking for
in what sort of time frame so this is a really i'm gonna i'm gonna give you some thoughts but i'm also
gonna start it with the unpopular phrase of like there's no there's no real benchmark for audience growth which is
an unpopular opinion but it's not really truthful i totally agree yeah yeah
despite what the ads tell you yeah don't get me started
for those of you listening to the uh audio version of the podcast there was a tremendous role of the eyes there by
katie you can see nothing but white um yeah so
again what you should be expecting for growth depends on what you are
investing so if you are if you are and what i want to encourage people here to do if they're
like i want to hit this hard and i want to see growth you need to pick one strategy and stick with it and see it through for at least a day period so
you see people saying oh i've been hitting real so hard for i did a day challenge and it didn't work it's like if you're investing in reals because if
you're saying my strategy my growth strategy is an organic one the tactics of how i'm going to get the right
the right message in the right place at the right time that that step two is organic then i'm gonna say okay you need
to try to tap into reels and find that niche and produce for that and keep
going with it don't like zigzag and wonder why nothing's working for you um
and then if you are in saying you know what i'm going to post a few times a week i'm going to put you know dollars
behind it you can kind of expect your growth rate to accelerate or decelerate based on how frequently you're posting
and what the budget is you're putting behind it one of the tactics that we haven't discussed yet that i definitely just
want to take a second to talk about if we're if there are small brands on this call is partnerships so
um being able to grow your audience and your community
size without paying money to business manager which is really
appealing to a lot of small businesses so finding other organizations or folks who
share your top target audience and you guys can cross promote is a really awesome way so in that instance um you
know you would be looking for success and what your expectations are around growth would have to do with how big
your partner's community is and how engaged they have been so if you're working with if you're able to you know
as a small brand you don't need to go to someone who has a hundred thousand followers if you have a thousand
followers and you can partner with someone else who has a thousand to twenty five hundred followers
that's that should be percentage-wise a pretty decent boost if
you have a successful promotion in your audience growth so i think it's just about understanding the tactic that
you're using how hard you're hitting it the velocity the budget what have you and then setting your
expectations from there if you boost one post and you're don't expect
tons of followers if you know what i mean so that's a i wish i had a more detailed
answer for you i wish that there were benchmarks for audience growth um if you go to your reels explore page
i'm sure you will find tons of case studies that have blown up their accounts followers in days
seconds probably yeah seconds to followers you know and then you'll be watching them for the
rest of your life as they are right and then you'll never create content because you won't be able to do it
that's brilliant when you talk about partnerships um yeah and i'll i will probably close with this
question because i'm aware of time and i feel like i'm just literally scratching the surface here
um but when we talk when you talk about partnerships for startup brands and for new brands i guess my questions are
is that it actually easy to do and what does that look like
yeah yeah um it's a good and fair question is it easy to do it's it's not
easy um it depends on your network i think the hardest thing that i see
all of the small businesses that i uh consult really love the idea of partnerships and
most of them have had want at least one really successful partnership i think the the most difficult phase is finding
the partner um because that takes time so um the way that it works though and and there's
there is a lot of kind of like administrative or logistical coordination to do
um but it's really great because it's super organic it's good for your your
audience loves it and so the idea behind um a partnership is wanting to first and
foremost make sure that there is total alignment between your two audiences so
what you're looking for is an or a brand or a person but let's say we want to partner with a brand for now
excuse me um we want to look for someone who has who has our target markets attention but has
an in non-competitive product right so perfect scenario would be like a
complimentary product so yeah it's um i don't know maybe it is like
snowboarding and like a backcountry backpack or something like that i don't know um and or maybe it is we've done
for example like if you have a certain food category product and something that would be often paired with that you know
so you're looking for something that makes sense together and you share the target market it's it's
it's adjacent but not competitive and then i mean the most lowest the low most low hanging fruit that we see all of the
time is the type of like contest like hey enter to win and you just decide beforehand are we
looking for social media growth are we looking for email acquisition email acquisition is a tougher ask if you want
to drive really strong email acquisition off of a partnership you need a pretty great
prize because you're asking people to do more than just follow and like so i will
i will set the objective like the objective of the campaign follower growth versus emails for
example needs to be aligned with the size of the incentive in order to make sure that you're going
to drive that participation that you want and then the number one thing that everybody forgets
like percent of times you see people they partner they have this great campaign the crowd goes wild super
engaging and then they don't talk about each other again or they don't you know they don't
welcome the new so we have to remember if we do something for instagram acquisition follower acquisition or
email acquisition like the day after the contest closes don't just thank people for
participating give your newcomers a off code like get them down the funnel
like you just attracted so that's the thing that i see everybody stop short on it's like oop we got we got through it
our we got you know a hundred or a thousand new followers we pat ourselves on the back but if you
don't then work to engage them and bring them into the community all the way to like the level of customer you're gonna
see attrition after that campaign so you really want to make sure that you nurture it all the way through
well again top advice and i feel like that's a good place to end the conversation i
i'm exhausted uh with the different ideas uh no not buzzing through my head
um katie now for those of you listening to the show that wonder how we do all this behind
the scenes there is what we call the pre-call session where a few months ago you and i had a conversation about what
we were going to talk about today on the show just so i know ahead of time and i don't like a complete which is you know a very
real possibility um did i remember it right that you have a
course which you you know if people listening to the podcast thinking man this sounds amazing do you have a course
that people can connect with to find out more about this or did i imagine that
no we definitely do and we we have intentionally made the the place where we recommend that folks start extremely
accessible so if you go to strongbrandsocial.com it'll take you through our strong brand social express product so that's like
minutes of course material super action it kind of gives you the lay of the land of the field super actionable
great workbook all that good stuff um so yeah right and
and will that help me uh you know right back at the beginning of the show we talked about this sort of research phase
is that would that help me with that so that will help you with that it'll help you kind of develop kind of
different aspects of your strategy we have another program called content strategy accelerator which is where we
take you through the exact process that we use inside of our agency when we're working with clients okay
and that's also at strongbrandsocial.com yeah yes that's the well you know we
only have these individual sales pages right now because we're building it as we fly but if you go to stonegradssocial.com or if you have any
questions for our team and like the best product fit for you hello at kwcontent.com
we have an amazing team and we will get you all of the information that you need well you've kind of answered my next
question which is how do people connect with you how do they how do they how do they reach out to you and connect with
you is that the best way that you've just said yeah we have a facebook group that's called strong brand social and that's
free and we have a lot of support in there it's an incredibly supportive and active community um my instagram is kw
content and our email is hello kwcontent.com awesome we will of course put all of kate's links in the show
notes and transcripts uh so uh you know you can get those on the website as well if you forget what they are just head
over to the website ecommercepodcast.net and they will be there katie listen
i have possibly uh not possibly i have positively that's the word i'm looking
for uh positively enjoyed this uh conversation i really appreciate you sharing your insight into all of this so
much learning into uh you know an hour's show so uh i
i appreciate that um genuinely really really appreciate it so uh we're gonna close out the show now um
we will uh just let everybody know we have show notes and transcripts available like i said ecommerce
podcast.net forward slash as this is episode number uh you can get all of
the transcripts and the notes from today's podcast there like i say with all
katie's links so uh katie do you know what's coming up next week you don't do
you [Laughter] which is great i just thought i'd i'd
try and ask the hardest question you've asked me all day yeah i thought what's the question she won't know the answer
to no we make sure you stay subscribed to
obviously everything that's going on because we do have amazing guests like katie and you know come and connect with what's going on uh be great to see you
here again next week thank you so much katie for being with us really do appreciate it have a fantastic week um
and uh i'm gonna play the outro don't you go anywhere because i want to have more of a conversation with you thank you so much to everyone that that
listen this was super fun yeah no great and like i say make sure you connect uh
with katie but from katie and myself have a great week and we'll see you again next week bye for now
you've been listening to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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