Rev & Reach Episode 14 – The Compass Effect: How Strategy Powers Digital Marketing

00:08

LORI: Hello everybody, and welcome to this episode of Rev and Reach from PopSpeed Digital LLC. I’m Lori Jo Vest, and with me is Kiley Metcalfe.
KILEY: Hi everybody.
LORI: We’re going to talk about social and digital strategy today, and there’s a lot more to it than you might think. As people who do social media every single day—well, maybe not on the weekends—we’re deep into what it takes to create effective social and digital campaigns. I want to bring something up because I think it’s just awesome: HOP WTR. Who else has discovered HOP WTR? Kiley, have you discovered HOP WTR?
KILEY: It’s just not my thing. I’ve never been into it. It’s kind of beery, right?
LORI: No, it’s fizzy, watery… it’s just like water. It doesn’t have alcohol in it. I love it because, at the grocery store this weekend, they had the eight packs on sale for $1.47. But then they had them on the shelf for $8.99, and we’re looking in the cart going, did something happen to these? They looked fine. So I picked up five or six of them. I think HOP WTR would be an awesome sponsor for the Rev and Reach podcast, right? It’s unique, it’s different. If you like fizzy water, it’s fizzy water with an actual flavor instead of just a scent. Are you a fizzy water drinker?
KILEY: Not really. I like my lemon water and stuff like that sometimes, but I’m pretty boring with my beverages.
LORI: That’s funny. I heard someone say once that the flavored fizzy waters you get from—oh gosh, I can’t even think of the brands right now. There are three or four big brands—
KILEY: LaCroix. That’s the big one I can think of.
LORI: LaCroix is huge. That the strawberry flavor tastes like it might have spent a few hours in a room with a strawberry once.
KILEY: That is exactly how I would describe my feelings towards fizzy water.
LORI: It has a scent. Well, HOP WTR has a flavor. It was a couple of guys, I guess, that had kids, got into family life, were doing business things, and decided they couldn’t do the beer every night. So they took the hops and made this fizzy water. It’s got more of a flavor than traditional fizzy water, as opposed to just a scent. It’s not real hoppy, it doesn’t taste like beer, just a really unique flavor, and it’s got adaptogens and nootropics in it, so it’s supposed to calm you down. It’s got L-theanine and something else in it. I think they’d be a great sponsor for the podcast, so I thought I’d bring that up today, just for grins. You never know. We’ll be looking for sponsors someday—not quite ready for that yet, but we will be. So Kiley, what are you working on this week that you can talk about?

03:13
KILEY: Oh my goodness, one of the big things on the docket for this week—we kind of talked about it a lot this morning—I’m getting ready for my maternity leave. So we’re getting all our ducks in a row and figuring out who’s going to pick up my slack and where it needs to be picked up. I’m working on pulling some things together and getting a bit ahead. Hopefully, since we’re on the topic of strategy, we have some more of those coming in soon that we can dive into beforehand.
LORI: We’re going to let Kiley go off and become a mom and hang out with her baby, and then let us know what she wants to do and how she wants to come back. That’s happening in late August, predictably, but maybe… who knows, right? Two weeks early, two weeks late. If the doctor tells you it’s only going to be a few days, don’t believe them, because that just sets you up to go another two weeks. That’s how it works. So don’t get excited about it, because baby’s going to do what baby’s going to do.
Jumping into strategy—we named this one the Compass Effect because if you don’t plan the direction you’re going, you’re not going to get where you want to go. When we’re doing digital marketing or social media strategy for clients, we’re always looking to figure out what they want to accomplish, what’s their end goal, where do they want to go with their digital marketing, and then we work backwards to plan the strategy to get them there. It can take 60 to 90 days to ramp up to get real results, and we want to set expectations for that—a lot of times, things don’t happen immediately. They may happen quicker than we expect, but it’s good to be a bit patient. We usually start with KPIs and goals. KPIs are key performance indicators, and that’s what’s going to tell you if you’re meeting your goals. So your goals are where you want to go, and your KPIs are how you’re going to measure if you got there or not. Kiley, how do we usually set those goals? Tell us a little bit about that.

05:36
KILEY: The beginning of that process is really digging deep with these new clients, or even if we’re adjusting strategy for existing clients, and seeing what it is they want from digital marketing. Is it more leads? Obviously everyone wants increased revenue and profits, so it’s what does it take to get there? A lot of times, we’ll see that that’s leads, follower growth, community growth, increased email signups, donors, fundraisers, event attendees—things of that nature. It’s never consistent across the board when we’re working on separate strategies.
I’d say that’s step one: deciphering what ROI looks like for any given client, and then translating that into what that looks like from a digital marketing perspective. For us, the end result—leads—is always a great example. So what key performance indicators signal we’re increasing qualified leads? It could be follower growth, website clicks, form submissions, things like that. It’s about getting into the nitty gritty of the indicators that show we’re inching toward or meeting those goals.

07:26
LORI: Absolutely. Recently, we had an example with a nonprofit that we do social, email, and blogs for—they might write them, or we may put them up. It’s a collaborative effort. We also do their website and email, social, blogging, all that for them. Their KPIs are very different. They can be donations since they’re a nonprofit, but also program participants, even though the program is free. They’re reaching families that have had someone die, have children, and are looking for support, which is very niche. We also recruit volunteers for them. This year, we had so many more volunteers we were able to expand their grief camp for the summer, because our volunteer recruitment went so well. That furthers their mission of supporting these kids who’ve experienced loss.
Goals and KPIs usually come from the client, working with us collaboratively. What is it you want to see happen? We set that up, and it goes into the strategy document, though it might evolve over time. That can change—like, we have a client we’re working with right now where we originally had applications filled out on the website as a KPI, and turns out that’s not working. So we’re moving to a landing page and turning it into a lead gen effort, so we can actually talk to the leads and tell them more about the program instead of expecting them to just fill out the application cold. KPIs and goals can change. A strategy should be evolving, updating with new information and as priorities shift. You may have new services. But we want to start with, at least for the moment, what we want to accomplish and how we want to achieve it. From there, we go into research. Who is their audience, what are they about, and where do we get that information, Kiley?

09:50
KILEY: We use a lot of sources to collect audience information. We talk at length with our clients about who their ideal candidate, prospect, or customer is—what do they look like, age range, gender, socioeconomic status, education, geography, interests. We collaborate to get that baseline. We’ve mentioned it on Rev and Reach before: Answer the Public is a great source to gain insights on your audience, and we’ll turn to that platform every now and again to build up audience insights. General Google searches can be really helpful as well. The social media and digital marketing environment is constantly evolving, so staying up to date with studies and additional research from credible sources like HubSpot and HootSuite—those are two we use most often. Social media studies can help us see what demographics are on which platforms and how consumer behavior is changing.
We also look back at what content previously worked for the client if we’re not starting from scratch, who viewed it, when, and why. It’s about being everywhere online to figure out audiences. As Lori said, and this is true for every stage of a strategy, audiences are constantly changing, but that initial compass—the baseline and foundation—gives you direction. Then it’s continuous work to keep up with how your audiences evolve. That’s especially important if you have several different niche audiences. For the nonprofit Lori mentioned, we have some content targeted to parents and families, but also to teachers and counselors, since grief follows kids to school. Stage one of audience development is figuring out how many audiences you’re reaching, and then diving deep into who they are, where they’re living online, and what they’re doing.

13:06
LORI: I’d also throw in that ChatGPT can be an excellent source for research. For example, we have a client targeting automotive engineers, which is niche and technical. When we were researching strategy for this global organization, we found research another agency had done: a survey of automotive engineers about where they get their information. Social media was fourth. First was email marketing. Second, website white papers and reports. Third was YouTube, and then social.
So, we reprioritized and put emphasis on YouTube and website content, research papers, and we’re getting better results this year. That’s how research should work. Find out who your people are, where they’re playing online, are they on YouTube, on TikTok? I read this morning that 13% of TikTok users are over 45, so for a dental implant client with an older audience, should we focus on TikTok? Probably not. They do get some younger patients, but it’s not a priority because of time. You’re looking at all those variables, pulling them together, and spelling out your audience: Who are they, how old, what jobs, income, geography. You can reach a global audience easily on LinkedIn, especially for B2B.

As you research, you’ll see which companies are credible—sign up for their email lists. It’s really helpful. So, from there, we look at what type of content moves your audience into action. Kiley, what do they need, what are they lacking, what are they asking for on Answer the Public? I used ChatGPT the other day, asked what type of information automotive engineers need most, got a whole bunch of options and pulled those together, then checked if we had that info on the client website. If not, we create it.
It gave me a very basic chart we can now put out for engineers just entering the field—especially those under 35 who need background info. It’s fascinating how you can use these tools to figure out what your audience needs. As part of the strategy, we tell you: if you only promote your content, you will not succeed. You have to provide helpful, useful, non-promotional content that builds a relationship with your audience and helps them understand you are the expert, the specialist, the go-to. Kiley, what can you add?

18:36
KILEY: Absolutely, I think what you said is spot on. There’s an intentional way to go about every single type of content. Does straight-up sales content have its place? Yes, now and then, people get that you need to sell. But with content planning and your social strategy, everything should have a purpose. That doesn’t mean filling your feed with goofy content that doesn’t serve your brand. If something fun happens, go ahead and throw it on your story, but it shouldn’t be a key part of your strategy.
Helpful, useful content not only builds credibility but also builds a connection because you’re truly providing information that helps your audience. By doing that, you’re building a bridge between your brand and the consumer. When they have that issue, or a reason to be interested in your brand comes up, you’re the first person they think of because you already helped them once without them even asking.

20:14
LORI: Right. They used to call that top-of-mind awareness. You’d try to do it in traditional advertising with reach and frequency—they would say someone has to see something five times to remember it. On social, if you can draw them in with helpful information, you can keep them for a while and become even more connected than with print or TV ads. Social allows you to create that community connection, which is harder with traditional media.
We always love to do audits—part of our strategy process is auditing the client’s social media: what have they done in the past, what worked, what didn’t, and how could we make it better? Sometimes what they’re doing is okay, but add a few tweaks and it becomes powerful content that gets results. We always look at competitors as well. If you’re a dentist, for example, look at other dentists but also aestheticians or beauty spas—related industries for ideas and insights. Kiley, you do a ton of our audits. Tell us what you see.

21:59
KILEY: Internal audits are the most interesting to me. We see so many mistakes repeated over and over by brands doing their own social—like not using channels properly, repeating the same content, not following a brand image, not building recognizability. It’s eye-opening how many people are doing it wrong, and it allows us to come in and use our expertise to make a difference, even with small tweaks. Then we go 10 steps further and take things to the next level, aiming for real ROI. I love internal audits for that reason.
For competitive audits, as you said Lori, it’s important not to just look at your direct competition but adjacent industries. We’re not looking at competitors to copy them—we’re looking to see what we never want to do, and what we could make our own. For example, Dana Farber Cancer Center had a really engaging Instagram channel a few years ago, with happy patient faces and stories that performed well. It was something we could adapt—not copying, but inspired by seeing what works in the space.

25:25
KILEY: There’s human error and limitations in any social media marketing, because we’re all just human—you can’t possibly think of every creative idea out there. Sometimes, business owners are proud and feel like they shouldn’t borrow ideas from someone else, but there’s nothing wrong with inspiration. If we’re not staying up to date with what’s working for others, even in adjacent industries, we could miss great opportunities. We’ll always create our own ideas, but looking at how competitors and big players approach things is smart.
LORI: Right, and you can see which competitors are most effective, how many followers they have, what kind of engagement they’re getting. Looking at big players in your space is great—they have high-level, expensive marketing departments, so if you’re a smaller company, you can learn a lot just by seeing what they do. Even if you try to copy something exactly, you can’t. Different team, different brand. You’re not copying; you’re being inspired and looking to see what works.
KILEY: On the flip side, if you notice a competitor’s idea isn’t working—say another restaurant is doing a Taco Tuesday promotion or an Instagram mural and it’s getting no engagement—it’s a good indicator to avoid it. Saves you from wasting time or effort on something that isn’t resonating in your shared market.
LORI: Exactly. The next step is content planning. Once we’ve done the research and know what people need, we plan content buckets that meet those needs and support your brand. For example, if you’re selling pull-up potty training drawers, you want to know what mothers of toddlers need—maybe potty training tips, but also other topics like keeping a toddler busy when it’s raining. For an attorney, we provide tips about divorce planning or how to help family members immigrate. Your content buckets might include instructional info, adjacent how-tos, one for straight promotions, and others depending on the client.
KILEY: It definitely depends on the client, but client- or customer-led content always works—testimonials, branded graphics of positive Google reviews, or better yet, a video of a happy client or influencer sharing their positive experience. Partnering with customers to get content from them is powerful because it’s the most trustworthy. When real people endorse your brand, it carries weight.
Also, just because you have certain content buckets doesn’t mean you’re stuck. Social isn’t rigid—agility and flexibility are key. Follow your plan as long as it’s working, but layer in new content or trends when you see fit. That “fun” content should still serve a purpose. One thing we see often: brands who only talk about themselves. When you’re building content buckets, focus on your consumer—not yourself. We’ve talked about the book Building a StoryBrand, and too often brands put out content to serve themselves. In reality, going back to Lori’s example, a mom potty training her toddler will scroll right past a promo ad—but if you provide helpful tips or self-care advice, she’ll engage.

37:01
LORI: Agreed. You should always approach things with a serving mindset. You mentioned StoryBrand—the most important part of strategy is messaging: how are you going to tell your story and explain what you do and what your customers get from you? Spend time on that so you have consistent, easy-to-understand messaging. We should do an episode just on messaging and StoryBrand. There’s no excuse for unclear messaging these days. Be clear who you are, who you serve, and the benefits to customers. Besides that, we always do hashtag research, though hashtags are in a weird place right now—some still relevant, but a lot of people say keywords are more important. We’ll dig into that in a future episode. What else do we wrap up with, Kiley, or have we covered it?
KILEY: I’d say that’s the majority of what goes into a strategy. We always wrap up with hashtag research, but as you said, things are shifting. One thing we always stress when presenting a strategy: agility is important. You want to give a strategy enough time to work; when you change things—either starting from scratch or reinventing—building up an effort takes time. Increasing followers, getting ads up, all that doesn’t happen overnight. We recommend about 90 days before reevaluating. Maybe a certain content type wasn’t as strong, or gathering that content was too much for the business. You need that trial run to find out and then pivot, but don’t stray from strategy too early—that’s like shooting yourself in the foot. If you don’t give a strategy time, it simply won’t work.

40:32
LORI: Some business owners can be a little ADHD; we’ll do a strategy and then suddenly, they want to switch everything up after two weeks. Let it work! It’s like making a stew—you don’t just pull it off after half an hour, you let it go for three hours so it’s really good. Don’t turn away from your strategy after just a few weeks. It can take longer to see results.

I’m going to wrap us up on this episode. We’ve shared all kinds of information—this is one of our longer episodes. We’ll be back soon with more helpful, useful info to help you get more ROI from your social and digital marketing efforts.
If you want to know more about us, connect with Kiley and me on LinkedIn. We’d love to network with you. We also have a website at popsdigital.com where you can learn more and fill out a contact form if you’d like us to get in touch. That’s it for now. We’ll see you soon. Thanks, everyone.