Rev & Reach Episode 6 Transcript

00:08

LORI: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Rev and Reach. I’m here with Kylie Metcalfe, and we are both on the team at PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC, and we are here to open the curtain and show you what we do that gets us ROI on social media and digital marketing. So, Kylie, today we are talking about the power of your face, and I get a kick out of this because so many people are not about showing their face on social media or in their marketing materials. They feel shy. They don’t want to do that. And I also spent 25 years of my career in video, and we used to try to stay away from the talking head. So it’s kind of a weird thing to learn that, in these days of social media, your face, and a happy face in particular, is one of the most engaging types of social content. Why do you think that is?

01:08

KILEY: I think that a big reason is that people connect with people. So we’ve talked about this before. Your audience, it’s really important to remember that they’re not just, you know, fingers behind the keyboard or people behind a screen. They’re real people that are looking to make purchasing decisions, whatever it is that your brand is selling, right? And inherently and biologically, people respond to feeling connected with other people. So by showing your face, whether it’s talking head videos or selfies or, you know, group photos of the team or real-life testimonials of, you know, real people that have positive experiences with your product, that is such a key and crucial way to build a bridge between the brand and potential customer.

02:00

LORI: Absolutely. I always say we are biological beings pretending to be intellectual beings, right? But we are very biological. And as such, we crave connection. We crave social connection. And so when social media came around, unfortunately, a lot of people have forgotten that it’s meant to be social. We go there to see our people, right? And I’ll tell you a little story. There’s a woman, Brenda Meller, that is an amazing LinkedIn expert and trainer. She’s amazing. She does great work, and she shares all kinds of really interesting information and ways to use the LinkedIn tools. And she has a community that I’ve joined. And we were on a live event. She was presenting, and one of the gentlemen that is just a really, I always think of him as, like, really great on LinkedIn. And he was there to ask Brenda, you know, why? What can I do to get more engagement? Because I post all these different kinds of things. I’m not sure what, you know, what I should be doing. And so she asked him to pull up his LinkedIn posts, and we watched as she went through each one. And I predicted it because we’ve been recognizing it and in our work for our clients for so long, every single post that had his face in it, whether it was a selfie or a video or, you know, even if he was a little off to the side, if he was at an event, those were the ones that people actually clicked, liked, commented on, shared, and so to me, that was a really great confirmation of, you know, lead with your face. And, you know, I had an old friend that used to say her motto for life was, lead with your face and have a bias for action. Isn’t that like the best bit of life advice? So, Kylie, where have you seen this come into play?

0401:

KILEY: I think for me, one of the most glaring examples of, you know, why showing your face is so important is we have, currently on our client roster, two clients that are in the same sort of niche industry, and one of them our, you know, our philosophy when we get into a new client engagement is that, you know, we can’t be in your office every day, right? So in some ways, and you know, in a lot of cases, we rely on our clients to get us that content of their face. And of course, we’re collaborative, and we’re ready to support in any way we can, but that everyday stuff, you’re there, and you know it best. So for us in this industry, we rely heavily on our client to send us photos, and, you know, engage with their team and their staff members to send us the talking head videos and things of that nature. One of our clients is so, so incredibly good at it.

LORI: They are.

KILEY: We’re regularly getting new photos and new videos, and, you know, of a bunch of different people on the team, and you know, things like that. And it makes our- not just our lives easier, but it makes our content so much better. And you can see it in the results. Really, I mean, we’re consistently getting highly qualified leads and high engagement, and our ads do really well, and the ROI is really there for this client.

05:34

On the flip side, the other client that’s in the same industry just isn’t as motivated to do it. And we know, you know, of course, things get busy, and it’s not at the top of your mind and things like that. So for them, we use a lot more graphic content, and we use a lot of stock imagery. And truthfully, the difference is in the ROI, right, for the client that is consistently getting us the, you know, the face-forward content, they’re consistently really happy with their success levels. And you know what, what ROI they are seeing from the resources that I get, that they get us on a consistent basis. And you know, both clients are happy. Both clients stick with us. But it sits in the results. You know, people engage with people. And to be honest, a lot of stock imagery now is obviously stock imagery, right? Like, every now and again, you can get pretty lucky with something that’s pretty candid or fits the point of the post really well, and it’s not terribly obvious, but it’s really hard to come by stuff like that. So it just feels less authentic, I think, to your audience, and people really respond to authenticity.

06:50

LORI: Yep, I think that’s a huge thing. I noticed when we just onboarded a new client at the beginning of May. And what we noticed, you know, what you can see on this account so obviously is that everything that’s there is authentic, the team photos, the doctor interviews, the patient testimonials, every single part of it represents them. And then you look at a lot of other practices in the space, and it’s stock images. It’s, let’s talk about a celebrity. It’s, you know, here’s three tips. And when we are able to create the content that’s 100% your team, your business, your, you know, authentic happening at your place, that’s what resonates with real people. You know, to me, it’s so interesting to see how people, you know, brands, often want to present themselves as something very pristine, right, and high level. And, you know, she just a really beautiful image. Well, to the average consumer, who includes your customers and your patients, that’s maybe not as engaging, it’s not as compelling, it’s fake, yeah, inauthentic. And if it’s inauthentic, yeah, if it’s inauthentic, we’re not attracted to it, right?

08:20

KILEY: I think that’s such a good point you made. That was like, the next thing that kind of came to my mind is with, with those same, that same industry I was just talking about, where we have a couple of clients living with the, with the one example, where they’re getting us stuff consistently, even that took a little bit of trial and error at first to kind of figure out what that talking head video needs to look like to garner those results, right? And what we found was, you know, that that team has somebody on their staff that is a great video editor, super, you know, very, very skilled in that area. So she would take a lot of the video content that we got, and edit it up, make it very pretty and very polished and very professional looking. And, you know, add some title cards and end frames and tags and things like that. And what we actually found is that by removing those and actually just, you know, making life easier and not having to go that extra mile, the videos performed better. So I think if anything really goes to show how important your face is, or your team’s faces are on social, it’s that, like, you don’t need all of the extra bells and whistles. And in fact, in a lot of cases, we’ve seen it kind of take away from the authenticity and just, I think it’s just inherent credibility when you know, speaking of like our dental clients, right? When you have a doctor that is so clearly passionate about what they’re doing and well educated and knows what they’re talking about, all of that extra fluff kind of takes away from. How impressive it is, and how eager a potential patient may be to get to know the doctor, and just simply how engaging they are.

10:11

LORI: Absolutely, I mean, and part of what we sell to our clients is when we’re in, you know, pitching or talking about how we do, what we do is we talk about how we bring your business to life and create a connection with your audience. And the way that you do that is you pull back the curtain, you let them see behind the scenes. You let them see your people. You can be silly. You can be, you know, we had one video that we’ve got in our queue right now, and the doctor puts bunny ears on top, you know, devil horns, whatever that is, on top of the patient’s head at the end of the video. It’s cute. It was funny. It was authentic, and it will warm hearts much more than, you know, a formal, you know, video that was shot by, you know, a corporate video company. The real is, what is, what sells right now, especially on social.

11:07

LORI: And I’ll go back to this, to talking about, if you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t want to show your face, you got to give that up. You really got to give that up. And I know that can be really hard, but to be successful in today’s business community, your personality and your personhood is what people will connect to, people do business with, people they like, and if you, you know, never show who you are or what you do on social media, you’re really missing out on some big value and big ROI on the platform. So, yeah, you know, I think that’s, that’s kind of all I had to say about this subject. Anything else you want to add before we wrap up?

11:50

KILEY: I do just want to build off what you just said, just a little bit, because I think that, you know, that’s something that we see all the time, right? We totally, you know, I don’t always love being on camera, and here we are, right? So we totally understand people like that. We run into so many clients like that, and while we think it’s super important that, particularly like the leaders of a brand and organization, show their faces pretty consistently, even if you’re not terribly comfortable doing it all the time, make a concerted effort to do it sometimes. But it’s also not a bad idea if, you know, you don’t have the time or the energy, or, you know, whatever, whatever it is that’s holding you back from doing it, find somebody really personable on your team that’s willing to do it, that’s, you know, really likable and good behind a camera, right?

Because I think the best news about talking heads being so important and so effective on social is the fact that it’s so easy. I mean, it lives at your fingertips. You do it with your phone, you do a little bit of editing and whatever app. And you know, a lot of the times a free app is good enough, and it gets the job done. So, don’t let your unwillingness, or even if it’s a lack of confidence behind a camera and being unsure of what to say, don’t let that hold you back from really harnessing what social media marketing has to offer, because in this case, it couldn’t be easier. So you don’t want to lose sight of that. I think it’s, I think it’s really important, and I think it’s something that a lot of brands are missing out on right now.

13:23

LORI: Absolutely humanize your brand. Yeah, that’s basically what you’re doing when you put faces, is people do business with the people behind the brand. You know, that’s even a product, there’s people behind the brand. And, you know, I remember I used to work on, I got, I’m just going to throw this out there, I used to work on Depend brand products, and it was a difficult category to be in because incontinence is, you know, stigmatized and everything else, but we had a very dedicated and passionate community on their website that I used to run back in the I don’t know… I think it was like 2012. And what happened? What they asked us for is they asked to talk to the researchers. And so we did an event, and this was way before people were doing live events like this. You know, virtual things we do every day. Now, we did an event, and we had the researchers there that the consumers could ask questions of, and they went bananas. They loved it. They were so appreciative that we heard what they said, took the questions they wanted answers to, brought them to the researchers, and created this event, and then also allowed them to ask questions of the researchers there.

So there’s a real need to create connection by using humanity. You know that it’s kind of part of how it works. So for now, that’s what we’ve got on this lead with your face, you know, face first, that’s kind of how it works, on social and just remind yourself that we are social beings and that that’s, that’s what feeds us and creates engagement and the resulting ROI. So that’s what we’ve got for you. We will be back next week with another episode filled with tips that you can use to ramp up your ROI on your social media and digital marketing. So we’ll see you soon.