Rev & Reach Episode 26 Transcript
Google is Dead. Long Live Google.

00:11

Hello, I’m Lori Jo Vest and welcome to this episode of Rev & Reach where PopSpeed Digital Marketing opens up the doors and shows you what we do behind the scenes, what’s important to us right now, what we’re sharing with our clients, how we’re working in the digital marketing space so that you can use what we’ve learned to grow your social media and digital marketing ROI.

So today’s subject is Google is dead, long live Google. And it’s an interesting topic because basically, let’s say one of your potential customers Googles a question. They may never click on a single website, but they could still walk into a sales meeting knowing exactly who you are, what you do and what you charge. That’s not the future. That’s what’s happening right now.

01:00

Welcome to the new reality for search. It’s very different than it used to be. And I’ll give you an example. I just did a quick search for a particular type of business in my own community. And I looked for this type of category of businesses and watched what came up. And I looked at the businesses that were shown under the AI tool were not necessarily the same businesses that were shown under a basic search.

So Google AI is really impacting Google SEO. So what I noticed was three of those agencies that had been quoted in the AI response to the question that I asked had actually created lists on their own websites of the top 10 businesses in their industry and of course put themselves at the top.

01:48

And so when I opened up the AI tool, there was the response. Here’s these different types of companies that do what you’re asking about. And over here on the side were three articles from three of those businesses that said the top 10 types of companies that do this. And three of them were in that.

So I’m like, okay, that’s a learning. Obviously, Google search, when you ask for the best type of business in this area, is looking for those articles, top 10 types of business in this area. So right away, we all need to run out and do a quick article that says that.

And if it mentions your competitors, no problem. AI doesn’t care. AI sees you as a good source for information because you listed those other organizations. Now, you don’t have any links on any of their information. The only links are in your listing in that article. But you mention everybody and talk about them, and that gives the AI tool something to look at.

03:00

So I was really surprised by that because while I know how it’s changing, it’s changing faster than I’d anticipated. So what they say is SEO gets you clicked, GEO gets you quoted. And what GEO is generative engine optimization, and that means when the Google AI overview shows up in those searches, you want to be in there, you want to be included in that listing that the AI tool is giving.

So looking at some statistics here, Google AI overviews now appear in roughly 25% of all Google searches, which is double the rate from just a few months ago. So if you’re a house painter, you want to have a website that has an article that says the 10 best house painters in southeast Michigan, or in rural Virginia, or whatever it is, so that you show up in those Google searches that are AI driven.

So 80% of search users now rely on AI generated summaries for at least 40% of their searches, which is contributing to a 15% drop in traditional SEO website traffic. So think about that. Your website traffic from Google is going down. So all the things that we knew about SEO — it’s all changed.

04:24

Your website is no longer the first stop. And in many cases, it might not even be a stop at all. AI assistance may move your consumer from the question to the comparison to the recommendation without them ever opening another tab. So think about that. It’s really going to be important that we ensure that we show up in AI searches.

So what is actually being referenced in a GEO search, which again is generative engine optimization? So it’s basically AI optimization. It’s just a fun, jargony way to say it. So if traditional SEO is about earning a top spot among the top links, GEO is about earning a place among the top two to seven sources that AI platforms cite in a response.

When an AI engine names your brand in its answer, it’s actually delivering an implicit endorsement that a simple search engine listing could not do. The AI tool is given more credibility than a search that’s just based on keywords. So I find that really interesting.

05:37

So for example, if you were to search ‘best art studio in Troy, Michigan’, and you’re an art studio, how does that referencing actually happen? Well, it happens across AI assistants, social feeds, marketplaces, podcasts, because most podcasts have transcripts. So AI tools can pick those up, and video, not just Google.

So it’s a wider net that they’re throwing out there. And AI engines actually love Reddit. So if you’re not on Reddit, join. Participate in the forums and the discussions that are related to your brand, because your brand’s presence in those Reddit conversations will contribute to you being found in AI search.

So something to think about that we’re all going to have to spend a little bit more time out there in those types of platforms to help the AI tool find us. Right?

07:11

So as a small business or midsize business marketing person, what can you do to get yourself in those AI searches? First things first, audit your current AI presence right now. I need to go on there and say, okay, what questions do my clients have?

So, for example, I could say, how could you solve not getting ROI from social media? How can you get more clicks on your social links? How can you get more email signups? I could ask those questions in two or three of the AI tools.

See what comes back. And again, look at those companies that are referenced. Click through to that content and see what is it. Audit it so that I can understand what is actually gaining the attention in my business category.

Doesn’t cost anything. Takes you about 20 minutes. Well worth the effort to do that. I would also encourage people to go to your AI tool and say, tell me about — and put your business name in there. Tell me about PopSpeed Digital Marketing.

And then see what it says and how it answers that question and work backwards. So if it’s not answering the question in the way you want it to, click that link and find out where it’s getting that information so that you can learn from that audit. Right?

08:55

So the other thing you can do to help AI see your information is keep your content fresh. We hear from people that don’t understand exactly how SEO and GEO work. And they say, well, we have a blog. We don’t really need to put much content up on it. Right? Because it covers the basic topics maybe once a month. Once a month is okay. Once a month is not great. An article that was published in, say, second quarter of 2025 is not going to be seen by the AI tool as having as much value as a newer article with similar information that was published in Q1 of 2026.

So keeping fresh content on your site is going to be really, really important. Make sure your cornerstone content is regularly updated. Your basic information about your organization, how can you amp it up? How can you rewrite it? Maybe quarterly so that what’s there is continually being refreshed, so it’s updated and new, because AI tools love that.

10:00

Create content that answers questions directly. Actually create articles that answer the question. For example, we could do this for PopSpeed: how do you get more ROI out of social media? And that would be the title of the article, would be referred to throughout the article, and really give great information for people who are asking that question.

Structured pages and blog posts around the actual questions that your customers ask, not just keywords. The AI tools actually pull from content that gives clean, direct answers. Make sure your content does that.

So the next piece of advice: show up in more places than just your website. Your website is great, and you need to be on LinkedIn. You need to be in industry directories. You need to have articles that you’ve written or contributed to. You need to be involved in forum discussions.

If your brand shows up in multiple places, the AI tool sees you as being more valuable. If you’re just on your website, meh. But if you’re all over the place, you’re given more credibility by the tool. So make sure that you appear in more places than just your website.

10:41

Next piece of advice is don’t abandon SEO. Layer GEO on top of it. Traditional search rankings still matter. Maybe not as much, but a lot of times the AI tool will pull from the top ranking Google results for the responses.

So you’re not starting over. You’ve done a lot of work on SEO already. Maybe you’ve paid attention and made sure that everything is optimized. Don’t stop doing that. Keep doing that. But now add to it this other layer of the generative AI search results that you want to be in.

So closing this up, the counterintuitive truth about this is big brands are slower to adapt. Visibility no longer depends on posting several times a day. It depends on being credible, useful, understandable, clear. And small businesses that adapt to this reality will gain a serious advantage that you might not even get from advertising.

12:29

It is really important that you look at the progress of AI, even if it’s something that you are not interested in. Get interested in it if you are doing marketing. Because it’s become a really important part of consumer behavior when it comes to search, finding new vendors, finding new products and new services.

So basically, Google isn’t gone. Google has evolved. And we have a lot more Googles out there now. Sure, people use the Google AI tool, but they also use Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT.

So you can’t just focus on Google for search anymore. You’ve got to spread that out. Follow the advice that I’ve given in this podcast and make sure that you are evolving your strategy for the new reality of AI. It’s really, really important.

13:18

So that’s what I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Rev & Reach. I’m Lori Jo Vest, the founder and partner of PopSpeed Digital Marketing, LLC in Birmingham, Michigan.

And we would love to hear from you. If you have a subject you’d like us to discuss or a guest you’d like us to have on, please let us know. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m an open networker there at Lori Jo Vest. I would love to hear from you.

If you’re watching this on YouTube, do me a favor. Please subscribe and hit that like button. We’re hoping to reach more people with this helpful, useful information about how to get more ROI from your digital marketing efforts. Signing off, we’ll see you again soon.

Rev & Reach Episode 25 Transcript
How Tiny Influencers Beat Big Ad Budgets

00:07
Hello. I’m Lori Jo Vest, and thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Rev & Reach from PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC. We create this podcast to share behind the curtain what we do as a digital marketing agency to help our clients get ROI out of their social media, websites, emails and social advertising.

So today what I want to talk about is your best sales people aren’t on your payroll: The Small Business Guide to Micro Influencers. If you are a small business, you need to know about micro influencers, and that’s where serious marketing dollars are moving in 2026, and here’s why. Because micro influencers are in your community. They’re in your neighborhood. Everybody knows them. They are affordable as far as influencers go, and they can really make a difference in your bottom line and bring you new customers.

01:10
So I would ask you, what if your best marketing asset is one of your customers that has 4,000 Instagram followers and she just loves you to pieces? She could be your best sales rep. And I tell you, I don’t know about you, but I buy things online all the time. I cook from things that I see on reels. I’ll see something on reels and go that looks really good, and I’ll start writing down what they’re doing so I can make it for dinner that night.

A lot of us are influenced by the things we see online. In particular, our local influencers often tell us about our local businesses. They’ll go to a restaurant and eat everything there, or they’ll go to a really small antique store, or they’ll go to the pet store. So they’re out in your community engaging with your customers, and they have an audience that you can buy access to. That’s basically what you’re doing. You’re buying access to that influencer’s audience. So forget what you think influencer marketing is. It’s not the Kardashians. It doesn’t have to cost $50,000.

02:16
But micro influencers — and they define a micro influencer as someone who has a following of between 1,000 and 100,000 people — they often have super engaged communities, and their recommendations feel like they’re coming from a trusted friend, so people believe them.

So the engagement math on that is micro influencers see engagement rates of five to ten percent. Creators, larger creators, their engagement may only be one to two percent, like the Kardashian people, the people that are really expensive. So if you’re paying, you’re paying for attention. You want to pay the micro influencers in your community to deliver that high engagement and that really nice authentic connection.

03:05
So here’s what small businesses sometimes get wrong in working with influencers. A lot of times a small business coming into a relationship will have their own preconceived ideas about what that means, and they will look at the big follower counts. “Well, you only have 4,000 followers. You only have 5,000 followers.”

Instead of looking at the fact that that young woman that runs all over town and you know her people, her tribe, follows her as she lives her life and goes to restaurants and goes shopping and dances with her grandmother, is a perfect fit for your audience. It’s really more important that that influencer fits your audience than it is that they have huge follower counts. Because I got to tell you, the follower counts are great, but I would take someone who had 4,000 really engaged followers over someone who had 25,000 that were not so engaged. So the micro influencers are really something to consider.

04:05
A lot of times small businesses will use an influencer and then say, “Well, that didn’t work.” The influencer’s audience may need to see you more than one time to actually create results. They used to say in television advertising that your audience would need to see your commercial five times before they would even remember it.

Now social media is different. It’s a lot more personal, and we don’t get up and go get our drinks and go to the bathroom when the commercials are being shown. We’re usually scrolling by. But if you don’t do more than one post, then you don’t know if it’s going to work. You have to do something strategic. You have to do something that is an investment that is going to be more than just a one hit wonder, because it won’t work. I mean, I can just tell you that right now. So when you say “I did one post and it didn’t work,” you’re right. If you do one post, it won’t work.

05:00
So the other thing is, a lot of businesses think that the influencer is working for them, and that they can tell the influencer what to say and how to say it. Well, they can’t. If you truly want to get the best results from an influencer, you’ll pick somebody who is in your community, your company will do its best providing the service, and then you’ll let them tell the truth.

If you don’t let them tell the truth, it won’t be authentic, it won’t be effective, and most influencers won’t bother because they don’t want to be told by everybody that they work with exactly how to do what they do, because that really degrades their credibility. They should tell you the good, the good, the bad and the ugly. Make sure your business is able to handle business from influencers before you hire one. If you’ve got weak points with your staff, you’ve got people that aren’t going to be able to perform at a level that the influencer will be able to talk positively about, don’t get the influencer on payroll until you have all those bugs worked out.

07:00
Your employees and loyal customers bring an unmatched level of authenticity. They know your company, their experiences are firsthand, and they are genuinely advocating for your organization. So it looks a lot less like a sponsored promotion, and it’s a lot more like something that’s authentically true from a neighbor you know, somebody in your community.

So how do you actually start that engagement? First things first, find creators who are already talking about your niche or your neighborhood. Look for the quality of their comments. Look for a local audience. Watch 10 or 15 of their reels. See what happens. Does the audience engage with them? Do they have a lot of comments? Do they speak in a way that you would be happy to have your product in their feed?

If so, great. And what I would do is when you do a pilot with three different creators, you’re going to see three different results. I would highly recommend it. Again, it’s an investment — three creators, 30 days.

08:17
You tell them what to deliver, whether it’s a post, two videos, three stories, and then you have to track it. You have to track what the influencer does. That could mean they get their own link for placing orders so that they can share that with their audience, and all the sales from that link you know came from them. It could be that it’s a coupon, and there’s three different coupons and each one gets their own coupon.

And it’s not a big budget experience. It really doesn’t have to be a huge budget to make this happen. But watch what happens in those three creators, 30 days of posting, and you will learn so much.

09:03
And I’ll give you an example. There’s an organization called Olipop and they have a huge creator program. They started it with $36 product samples and a 10% performance commission for the influencers, and now that drives 12% of their total sales on an ongoing basis, and the campaign actually brought a 982% ROI. That is crazy.

You can do it with a product sample that you send to that person, a free coupon, an offer to come in and have dinner, those kinds of things so that you get to know the influencers.

09:42
Invite them in for a free dinner. Just say, “I’d like to sit down with you, kind of learn what you do, take a look at your work, hear from you what you think you could do for us.” Do that with three different creators and then see what happens. Do a pilot and measure that ROI. You have to measure the ROI because you have to know if influencer campaigns are going to work for you. If you don’t measure it, you won’t know if it did or didn’t.

But the upside of that too is you can actually negotiate part of the agreement that you get to take the creator content and share it on your social media and in your ads. So it gives you more of what we call UGC, user generated content, which looks like it’s created by a consumer, not the brand. And people love UGC. They love to see what other people are doing and think, “Oh look, she’s making her own bracelet at this really cool store downtown. Let’s go.”

10:54
So make sure this is something that’s on your marketing radar. I’ve got a challenge for you as we wrap up this episode. Identify one happy customer or one local creator influencer this week and send them a direct message or a free product and see what happens. Make it a cool coupon, put it in a fancy envelope, mail it off to your customer or that creator, or DM them a graphic that has that on there. That’s your pilot.

Have them in. Just say you’d like to give them a free dinner and spend some time talking with them. Then watch what shows up on that influencer’s social feed related to your business. That will help you understand if they’re going to be a good fit. Some of them won’t be. I’m going to tell you right now some of them will not be good fits.

11:50
There are a lot of influencers out there right now that think you should pay them thousands and thousands of dollars, and a lot of them aren’t proven. So as you’re looking at who you’re going to hire, even a micro influencer, look for them to be paying attention to the data. Make sure what they give you isn’t just “look at my pretty content,” but “I did this for this restaurant and they got a 20% bump in sales.” So remember, trust sells better than reach ever will, and micro influencers are a really great way to build trust.

So that’s what I’ve got for you today. Again I’m Lori Jo Vest with PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC and you are listening to Rev & Reach. You can find us on all of your favorite podcast channels as well as YouTube. If you are watching on YouTube please subscribe, give us a like, and help us spread the word about how to get marketing ROI from your digital initiatives. Thanks so much, I’ll see you again soon.

Rev & Reach Episode 24 Transcript
Hallucinations: The Hidden Cost of AI Speed

00:00

Hello and thank you for joining me for this episode of Rev & Reach, where PopSpeed Digital Marketing shares our secrets for getting ROI from digital marketing initiatives. I’m Lori Jo Vest, the co-founder of PopSpeed Digital, and I want to talk to you today about AI. There is so much conversation about AI going on right now. It’s February of 2026 when I’m recording this, and a lot of people are using AI with way too much confidence.

00:36

So what I want to talk about is AI and hallucinations. It’s really common, and it’s probably a lot more common than you think. So here’s what it is: a hallucination is when AI hallucinates and puts out confidently false and fabricated information, not because it’s doing it purposefully or there’s anyone out there trying to mess with your work, but because of how it’s built. They predict what comes next based on patterns. They use patterns in the training data, and so it’s not really using verified knowledge in a lot of cases. And when it doesn’t know, it guesses plausibly. That’s from an article from OpenAI — they literally will have the AI guess instead of saying, “I don’t know.” So I wanted to get into it a little bit, because I’ve seen so many people that are super excited about AI and marketing and how wonderful it is. Yeah, it is really, really wonderful. However, there are a lot of cases where people are overly confident in what it tells them, and when that’s the case, you could get yourself in some hot water.

01:47

My husband was reading something on Reddit this weekend about how a marketing team had been uploading their analytics into AI and asking it to summarize those analytics without going back and checking the AI’s findings against their original document. Well, guess what happened? For 90 days, the C-level executives at this company were making business decisions based on AI hallucinations, and this person had just discovered that it happened, and they were in the middle of this huge upset. It happens. And so what we tell people all the time is, when you do research using an AI tool, ask it to provide the source. And don’t just ask it to provide the source — go to the source and look at the source and make sure that the information that it’s pulled is accurate, because it won’t always be. It’s one of those cases where it’ll see some information in an article, assume it makes that conclusion that it’s telling you in the tool, and give you that link. So you’ve got to be really careful.

02:52

And the other thing that they found is that over long conversations, it tends to hallucinate more. So if you’re using your tool and you’ve got one long chat going on and you really think you’re doing great, you may be getting more and more bad data, bad  information, bad recommendations, so be careful about that. And the reason, again, it’s not malicious — it’s not anybody trying to do something negative to the world with AI tools. It’s just that when it can’t generate a concise, fluent answer, over admitting uncertainty, it will choose guessing every time. So think about that. AI guesses. And if you think that in your head when you’re using the tool, you’re much less likely to get caught in a bad situation from using it and having it give you bad data.

04:15

Here’s why this matters for marketers: because when you fabricate data and put it into a proposal or a document or research, or use it to inform your marketing decisions, you could not only lose money, but you could be subject to liability or reputational harm. Things can happen like that. It’s not wrong at random. It is consistently wrong. So it’s not wrong at random. They’re not anomalies. These hallucinations are not anomalies. They’re systemic outcomes of training incentives and the way that AI works with prediction mechanics. So it’s not wrong at random. It’s wrong a lot. Verification is no longer optional. You need to always go back and check what it’s telling you against your original data.

05:10

I was on a call with one of our clients a couple weeks ago, and I got — oh man — I could have gotten my butt handed to me. I had a database that I had downloaded, uploaded into my chat tool, and thought that it would give me accurate information on who was on that list. It actually overstated the specifics of an audience that were really interested by 100%. It said there were 4,000 of these people in our list, when in reality there were only 40 confirmed. And when I went back and asked it why, it said, “Oh well, the patterns — the emails. A lot of people use Gmail for mailing lists, so we assume that some of those are based on patterns.” And it didn’t make any sense. So I asked it to analyze it again, only with the exact data that was in the document, and what came back was completely different. So use the tool if you want to, but be really careful of double-checking your data.

06:09

So a couple things that have happened. Research shows that AI responses degrade, that they give bad, dangerous medical guidance. I would assume, based on that, that they probably give bad guidance on digital marketing as well. So if you’re using ChatGPT as your tool to tell you about Meta and their ad policies and how they’re impacting health-related organizations or something like that, double-check that, because it could give you completely wrong advice. So that’s one of those things that I really want people to understand.

06:45

The other thing people use it a lot for is copy. And what’s happening out there in the ether is people are starting to get really sick of AI copy. It’s very predictable. You can look at it and see the lists of three. It has a tendency to make these long social posts with just way too much information and flowery language. If you’re using AI for your copy, Google actually delists AI-generated copy. They have tools that can tell when it’s AI. Maybe that’ll change eventually, but for right now, if you use AI as a basis for an article, go back in and rewrite it as a human being, because that is what will get you web traffic. That is what will get you good, solid, relatable, authentic content.

07:33

So I guess what this episode is, is more of a warning that, you know, we love AI. We use it a lot for all kinds of things. It’s a great tool for outlining things like articles, podcasts, books. It’s really good for that — for titles, for social content ideas and concepts, for a different way of saying the same thing. One of the things in digital marketing that we all know is we have to learn how to say the exact same thing 27 different ways. AI is a great tool for that. But when it comes to hard data and hard advice that you feel you should follow to be successful, always double-check it.

08:09

So that’s my advice for you today. We’ll be back soon with another episode of Rev & Reach, where we pull back the curtain and show you how we get ROI for our digital marketing clients. Take care. Again, I’m Lori Jo Vest. If you are watching this on YouTube, please subscribe and give us a like. We’re really trying to share this great information about marketing with a much larger audience. We are free with the information. We’d love to hear from you, too. If you have a comment or a suggestion and you’d like to have us answer your question on this podcast, we’d love to hear from you. So take care. We’ll be back again soon.

Rev & Reach Episode 23 – Focus as a Growth Hack

00:00
Hello everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest, here with another episode of Rev & Reach, where those of us here at PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC give you a look behind the curtain at how we do digital marketing so that you can experience more success with your digital marketing efforts and get more ROI.

So today I want to talk about focus. One of the things that we run into frequently is clients who think they have to be everywhere, all at once, all the time. Not true. We have had situations where a client is on one social channel and gets an incredible amount of leads in one month. We also have situations where clients are on all the channels and they just don’t get much. It’s a really interesting balance.

But if you think you should be everywhere, you’re not right on that one. That is one of those things that people believe — that there may be an opportunity there, so they should make sure they’re there. And if you spread yourself too thin, you risk a couple of different things. You risk spending energy trying to reach your audience on a platform where they don’t play. Or maybe you’re on a channel where a certain type of content really performs well, but you don’t have the budget to create that kind of content, so that’s not what you’re sharing — and then you don’t get any results. And, you know, there are a lot of different people saying a lot of different things.

01:38
I always like to remind people that marketing is really subjective. A lot of times you’ve got somebody in the client seat who has some marketing experience, maybe they have no marketing experience, and you hire the experts so they can come in and do the job.

Some things are subjective. If you have a request for your marketing team and they push back, give it some thought. Maybe they’re right, because subjectivity means you could be wrong. I’ve had clients come in — when I worked in video production — and say, “My wife doesn’t like the look of that graphic.” Really? Okay, so should we change it? And they will spend money making changes to things that their wife looked at.

02:24
So it takes all kinds. From the “we’re in the trenches every day” perspective, I will tell you that you can’t listen to everybody. You have to focus in on who you’re going to listen to, follow their advice, and get to the point where you’re succeeding with that advice and that formula — and then maybe add things onto it.

But if you try to do everything all at once, you’re going to dilute your efforts, and it’s also going to make things much more difficult for you and a lot harder to get ROI. And I’ll give you an example.

03:01
We talk a lot about our dental practices because it’s one of the places where we’ve really had great success. And we have a practice that is really good at what they do. They’re not inexpensive. They are probably one of the higher-end practices, and they’re very open about that, because the way they do things is different.

So we put them on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and we really didn’t know where the magic was going to happen. Some of their patients are younger — in their 30s — maybe they had some kind of dental disease, or maybe they were in a car accident and need full dental replacements. Or, more likely, they’re in their 60s, 70s, maybe even 80s, and have lost their teeth and dentures are making them crazy.

So you’ve got a really wide range of audiences. We thought maybe we’d pick some people up on Instagram, and we also prioritized Meta and Facebook because Facebook is a great place to reach an older audience.

04:07
Well, let me tell you — we got a lot of younger people there. It was really surprising. But the focus channel became Facebook, with Meta ads generating leads, because that’s what worked. And that was really pretty easy.

We did a little on Instagram. Never really got us much by way of leads. The client was really excited and told us they wanted to try TikTok. They didn’t have a bigger budget, so they weren’t able to create custom content for TikTok, but we put them there. And basically, we got zero followers, zero views, zero likes. Nothing happened.

And it was because their content wasn’t the right content for TikTok. TikTok likes educational, inspirational, hilarious, fun, entertaining content. Entertaining is the name of the game there if you really want to succeed.

So what I really want to say is: pick three or four things and start with those three or four things and do them really well.

05:53
Maybe you’ve got a great website. You’ve got a great LinkedIn page. You’ve got your executives using LinkedIn. You’re doing some Instagram to reach younger business people who might not be on LinkedIn. And you’ve got some things going on YouTube. That’s a full plate.

If you add three or four more channels, you’re going to dilute the effort. And if you even just do what I described — those particular channels — and focus on doing them really well, you would most likely see results.

So if you think you need to be everywhere all at once, you just don’t. It’s not something you need to do.

07:20
Another piece of advice that fits in here is to figure out where your audience is before you do anything. Strategy is so important, and a lot of people don’t spend enough time researching the audience on these channels before they advertise.

Maybe you’re really comfortable on Instagram, so that’s where you go. Well, if your product isn’t really reaching an audience on Instagram, just because you’re comfortable there doesn’t mean that’s where you should be.

AI is your friend. ChatGPT is your friend. Google is your friend. Do the research. Where does your audience play?

When I talked about dental practices earlier, we had an older audience — retired people, playing digital games, playing cards, happily retired. Those categories are so easy to reach on Meta and Facebook.

Remember: attention is finite. Execution energy is finite. Budgets are finite. So where can you focus that attention to get the best ROI?

The algorithms on all these social channels reward consistency, repeatability, and engagement — not just throwing things up once in a while, but being there consistently, three days a week, engaging with people, sharing other people’s things.

Focus doesn’t limit your growth. It accelerates it.

08:50
If you focus and get really good at one channel, then move on to the next. Do your homework. You cannot be everywhere all at once. Your audience is not everywhere all at once.

They are not on TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook — all at the same time. And if they are, they’re not spending much time on some of those.

So pick one primary channel where you know your audience is already playing. Pick one core message. What problem do you solve best? And pick one success metric. Is it leads? Is it booked calls? Is it sales? Not likes. Not shares. Not followers.

Focus, adjust, optimize. That’s how digital marketing works.

09:25
You do not have to do everything all at once. If you try to, you’ll fail. Start with one channel, one message, one metric. Be strategic. Pay attention. Check in every day. Engage. Measure what happens. Then move on.

I’m an open networker on LinkedIn at Lori Jo Vest — I’d love to hear from you. Let me know that you listen to the podcast when you connect with me.

We also have a website where we keep past episodes, transcripts, and show notes, and there’s a contact form there where you can let me know what topics you’d like us to cover on Rev & Reach. We’re here to help you get more ROI from your digital marketing.

If you’re watching this on YouTube, please hit subscribe, give me a like, maybe even a share, and we’ll see you back in a few weeks with more information to help you get better results from your marketing. Take care.

Rev & Reach Episode 22 – Video Content that Converts

00:08

LORI: Hello everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest, and we are here with another episode of Rev & Reach, the podcast from Pop Speed Digital Marketing, LLC, where we pull back the curtain and talk about what we do for our clients that gets results. With me is Kiley Metcalfe. Kiley is our social media lead. Say hi, Kiley.

KILEY: Hey everybody.

LORI: And I think this is the first episode we’ve actually recorded—and are actually going to run—since Kiley got back from maternity leave.

KILEY: It is. We’ve tried to record before, and it didn’t go so well. So now we’re officially back.

LORI: It is hilarious, having had my son—oh God—27 years ago, to watch Kiley, whose baby was born at the end of August, be the mom that we all knew she would be and also work at the same time while she figures it out. Because baby’s home, Kiley’s home, Kiley’s remote—and it is not easy, right?

KILEY: No, yeah, definitely not easy. I definitely talked a big game about it, like, “Oh, I work from home and my job is super flexible. I’ll be fine.” We’re fine—but fine is about what it is, right? So we’re getting through, slowly figuring it out, but we’ll get there. We’ll definitely get there.

01:31
LORI: Yeah, she’s back part-time for now. And I told her I actually worked part-time until my son was in kindergarten, because you don’t want to miss that extra day if you can get away with it. So we’ll see what happens with childcare and how that all comes together.

Today, we are going to talk about video. I think we’ve talked about it before, but not in the same context that we’re going to cover today. People are really, really tired of AI slop. They are overwhelmed with promotional stuff that comes through their feeds, and there is a reason that video is so popular right now.

What we hope to do with this episode is save you from wasted time, awkward content, and that spin of trying to figure out what you’re going to post. Video still wins in 2026. Platforms still prioritize it. Video is what you could call a trust shortcut in a crowded, AI-heavy social media ecosystem right now.

A lot of brands are using AI. A lot of individuals are using AI. A lot of us think we can still tell when people are using it for visuals—but it’s getting to the point where pretty soon we won’t be able to tell. That’s why video is going to be so important. More than anything else, it’s going to involve real people talking to the camera, sharing their stories—and the more authentic, the better.

03:09
KILEY: Yeah, absolutely. I think AI is a really key example of why video is going to stay as relevant as it has been. I think, Lori, you’d agree that video really took social media marketing by storm with the launch of TikTok. It was good before to be mixed in there, and now it’s everything. If you’re not incorporating video, you’re so behind the curve.

AI, in the last year or so, has become as prevalent in our industry as it has, and exactly what Lori said—there are AI-generated photos now, even some videos, where you really have to have a good eye to tell the difference. You can look in the comment section on something that, to us, is very obviously AI and see a bunch of people treating it like fact. And that’s scary. It’s definitely scary.

We’ve always been of the mindset that real people get results, and people trust people more than promotions—or now AI. Video is going to continue to set itself apart as the most trusted form of content simply because it’s much harder to AI-generate a truly solid, authentic video. Something like this—where Lori and I are just sitting here having a conversation—is significantly more authentic than creating something through AI and expecting your audience to trust it.

04:56
LORI: Yeah, and I think at this point, people have somewhat of an aversion to the amount of slop that’s out there. What makes me laugh is that people think, “I can’t do a video because I don’t have all the lighting, I don’t have the right microphone, I don’t have a studio, I don’t know what to say.”

The reality is, you don’t have to be polished. You just have to be clear about what it is you’re going to express and what you’re talking about. You don’t need a studio—you need some good lighting and a really strong point, and you already know what to say.

How many times, Kiley, do we sit in meetings with clients and they tell us on a Zoom call things about what they do, their product, or their brand, and I’m like, “Oh, that could have been a video for social”?

05:48
KILEY: Exactly. There are so many times—especially in our nonprofit sector or with clients who are launching a business—where the way they speak about what they’re doing is filled with passion, expertise, credibility, and authority. We’ll sit there thinking, “That should be on social.”

With a lot of our clients, we can get them to sit down in a forum like this and repeat themselves in a way that translates into really solid video content. But some people are scared to be in front of the camera. They think, “Is this really going to work? Should we hire a video team?”

But polished isn’t better. Commercialized is not better for social. We’ve heard founders, CEOs, program directors, and marketing team members say things about their organization that absolutely should be on social—and they need to be the one to say it.

07:05
LORI: Another thing I find is that people think they don’t have anything to say, which I think is hilarious. As social media people, we’re used to coming at the same information in several different ways.

If you think you don’t have anything to say, consider this: what questions do your customers ask you? Answer them on video. When you’re in a staff meeting and an interesting topic comes up—especially something that differentiates your brand—get on video and talk about it.

If you have ideas about what a particular industry could do better, or five things people could do right now, those make amazing videos because everyone is looking for solutions. If you show up as the authority with video content, a podcast, or a YouTube channel, you will stand out. You do have things to say.

Honestly, I think you could spend ten minutes on a call with me and Kiley, and we could get you topics for ten videos instantly. That’s just how we think.

So let’s talk about how to make video sustainable, because it can be exhausting—shooting, editing, posting. There’s a lot that goes into it. Kiley, what do you think is the most efficient way to use video?

09:00
KILEY: First, just because video is queen doesn’t mean all of your content has to be video. Carousels still work. Strong imagery still works. Smiling faces still outperform graphic-only content.

Video doesn’t need to be overwhelming. You don’t need to post seven videos a week for it to work. It needs to fit into a system that works for your organization.

One of the biggest benefits of video is repurposing. It’s much easier to customize a video across platforms—LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok—than it is with other types of content. Whether you hire an agency or handle it internally, video is worth the investment because it supports everything else you’re already doing.

11:13
LORI: I love what you said about one video becoming several pieces of content. You record a video, turn the transcript into a blog, post the full video on YouTube, then cut it into clips for YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Short clips often outperform long-form videos by a mile. What we’re seeing work right now are short, confident videos with a strong point of view—an opinion or perspective that’s meaningful to the audience. Caption them, watch for typos, make eye contact with the camera, and remember that imperfect, human delivery beats overproduced every single time.

13:00
KILEY: Authentic beats polished, consistently. You don’t need to constantly record long videos. Do it periodically, then chop them into short-form content.

Our sweet spot is 30 to 90 seconds. Do that once or twice a week, and it’s not nearly as overwhelming as people think.

14:38
LORI: There are tools we use to make this easier, but that’s not the point of today’s episode. What I want to leave you with is this: it’s not about being good on camera. If you’re good in conversation, you can be good on camera. If you’re passionate about what you do, you can be good on camera.

I once watched a very introverted guy do a LinkedIn Live. His graphics weren’t great, he wasn’t polished—but he had about 150 people watching because what he shared was valuable. He was helpful. He was real. That’s what matters.

If people see you as a human, they trust you more than a logo or a still image.

So that’s what we’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll be back soon with more helpful information about digital marketing and how you can get more ROI from your digital marketing spend.

If you’re watching or listening on any platform, do us a favor and hit that like and subscribe button so we can get this kind of information out to more people. We appreciate you, and we’ll see you again soon.

KILEY: Bye, everybody.

Rev & Reach Episode 21 – 3 Marketing Predictions We’re Putting on the Record for 2026

00:08
Hello. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Rev & Reach. What we are talking about today is marketing predictions that we’re putting on the record for the 2026 new year. There are three things that we are seeing that we think will help marketers do better in 2026. These may seem to be obvious, but if you pay close attention and incorporate these into what you do in 2026, I guarantee you will see better results. One of the things that happens this time of year is everybody starts coming out with their marketing predictions—”You know, we’re going to see more of this, less of that…” I really don’t want to do that as much as I want to tell you what we’re already seeing, so that you can take advantage of the trends that are going to make a difference. And these three shifts, I’m pretty sure, will separate brands that grow from the brands that fade.

01:06
Prediction number one: authenticity becomes a differentiator in an AI-heavy world. How much AI slop are you seeing in your social feeds these days? As AI content floods our feeds on all the different channels, human signals are going to become even more important. So let’s talk about that. AI makes volume really easy, but it’s generic in most cases. Audiences are actually developing AI fatigue, so your audience is already tired of seeing AI slop out there in their feeds. Imperfect, specific human stories are going to outperform those polished generics every single time. So in your marketing, you want to use faces, voices, opinions, lived experiences, testimonials—but you want to record those on video or take photos that are really natural and authentic and use the real quotes. Don’t write testimonial quotes or quotes for your founders or your leadership team that sound like AI or sound like corporate speak. Don’t do that. Legit, authentic human connection and conversation are what’s going to sell in the new year.

02:27
And I’ll give you an example. We’ve had several different types of dental clients on our roster, and because of that, I get a ton of dental ads that are geographically targeted to me because I obviously have an interest in dentists. There was a time a few months ago where I was getting three ads from three different practices—and they were probably part of a Dental Group or something—three different practices with the same stock image, the same generic copy. And it was just not compelling in the least. Wasn’t their patient, wasn’t their person, was staged, wasn’t authentic. What we do with dentists is we serve up the real deal. We take pictures of patients. We get that little boy at the toy cart who’s getting the prize for behaving really well and having a great dental hygiene checkup. We get the dentist talking about why they’re passionate about Invisalign and how easy it makes it for them to help correct your bite or really enhance your smile. Those are the things that get people to click and say, “I want to go to this practice,” not generic stock images of a family grinning—and no one knows who they are—and it’s obvious that they’re not real. So more founder voices, more experts, more real employees, more real customers, less stock, fewer vague claims. Say less and mean more. Because another thing that we see with AI is people I know who are not writers—and that I know don’t speak in corporate speak or flowery language—and they’ll be on LinkedIn with a three-paragraph flowery post, and it’s just inauthentic and it’s kind of offensive—like, do you think we’re dumb, that we think that’s you? It’s not, and we know it. So it takes away your credibility when you are inauthentic because you’re relying too heavily on AI. So stop it. Don’t do it. AI is great for ideation, but authenticity rules, and that’s always where you should start: with the real deal. Bring in AI as a tool to help you with titles and maybe series and things like that, but not to create the content itself. It’s just not a good idea. AI is actually raising the floor of content quality and will completely expose anybody who doesn’t really have anything real to say. So keep that in mind. Put a pin in that one.

05:05
So our next prediction: creative will become the new competitive advantage. What I mean is platforms reward engagement. So if you’re creating generic content, it’s not going to work. And then you’ll come back to an agency like mine and say, “Well, we tried social media. It didn’t work.” You know, social does work, but you’ve got to work at it. You’ve got to put the time and effort into it to figure it out. The same tools, the same output, is not effective. Creativity, human interaction, human ideas, human ideation—that’s what really gets great creative to come, and it’s not always pretty, but I can guarantee, if it is effective, it’s clear, it’s a little surprising, and it’s relevant to the audience. It’s the most important thing. Boring brands will pay more for worse results, because we see a ton of really bad creative because somebody says, “Get that out on social.” Don’t ever do your social in a way that’s just “put something out there.” Be strategic—and strategic creative, even better. I have a client that we’ve already decided for next year, a series that we’re going to do that’s going to allow us to cover six different topics with three different posts each. We’ve got 18 posts with a really cool series slogan that we’re going to use next year. And it’ll allow us to be creative, you know, and we can use this campaign—we can have video, we can have carousels and all kinds of different things and put it up on YouTube, and it can be, you know, very YouTube-oriented. It’s important that you spend the time to plan out your creative so that you know it’s what your audience likes, and you know it’s something that they’re going to react to.

06:58
The other thing I will tell you, as far as creative, is strong hooks matter more than perfect funnels. If you can’t get the attention of your consumer right away, I would tell people one of the best ways to make sure that your marketing is clear is to be very brief and to the point; tell them what you want to tell them right away. Don’t bury your lead three sentences down, because you’ve already lost your consumer by then. Tell them what’s exciting immediately. And creative isn’t something that’s just nice to have anymore; it’s a lever. It’s what’s going to help your content perform. Does it stand out in the feed? Is it colorful and unique? Is it—You know, is there a person talking and they’re emotional? Is it, “Guess what? You’re never going to believe what we learned about that”? I mean, is it some kind of hook like that that makes people want to keep listening or keep reading? So creative is not a nice-to-have; it’s a performance lever. Pay attention. I’ll give you one more example before we move on to the next one. Met with a client, and we were talking about all of the different tools that they use to promote the content of one of their clients. The client is very tied in to making sure that they identify with their target audience. The client and the agency know how the audience uses the product. They come into the office, they sit down at their laptop or their computer desk, and they drink their coffee and they log in and they start their day. Well, they created creative for their social content that was like a computer and a cup of coffee, because that’s where they thought the audience would see themselves. Well, they’re not selling computers and they’re not selling coffee, and nowhere in their creative did it say exactly what they did. So you really have to look at your creative, pay close attention to it, and make sure it’s not just “here’s what my audience identifies with,” but here’s something my audience identifies with—it’s really cool or really interesting or really funny, or makes them want to learn more about us. So creative is really important this year.

09:14
Prediction number three: social media keeps splintering, and brands need to adapt with bots. I’ve been on social a lot. I spend my personal time there too. I’ve got lots of friends all over the place, and what I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of bots out there that will come onto a post, attack you or somebody else, and when you go look at who they are, it’s obviously not a real account. It turns off a lot of people, and people are actually kind of signing out—not being on social quite as often. Broken algorithms—algorithms these days are more likely to grab a hold of a post through a filter and say, “Oh, this promotes violence, so we didn’t let you post it. We took it down,” or, “this promotes violence and we shut down your account.” And it’s happening to people that aren’t promoting violence. I mean, we had it happen to a dental post. Dentistry is not violent; we were not saying anything violent, but one of the words we used was in their filter in a totally different context, and it grabbed that post and took it down. So it’s kind of making people angry. I know, as people get restricted on the Meta platforms, they may become more likely to go over to YouTube or to use TikTok or to pay more attention to LinkedIn. So feeds are becoming less personal and more targeted—so there’s a ton of promotion. So, believe it or not, some people are actually going back to the OG platforms like Tumblr. Tumblr is still out there; still got a lot of users. Pinterest is still out there, got a ton of users. They’re targeted to different aspects and different types of consumers, so engagement can be a little harder to read.

11:07
The other thing that’s happening is the platforms are shifting how they reward the content creators: how many likes, how many shares, that kind of thing do you need before you actually get some ROI on your content? And what that means, basically, is the one-size-fits-all strategies just do not work. It never works to take the same content and throw it up on seventeen different social platforms; it’s just not something that’s effective. Pick the social channels that you know your audience is more likely to engage with. If Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn are it for you, stay there. You don’t have to be on Snapchat and, you know, Tumblr and Pinterest and YouTube. Pick a couple of great, really engaging audience platforms that work for your target, and then also build owned audiences. And what that means is your mailing list. Any opportunity you have, take advantage of the ask of “Sign up for our monthly missives,” where you can find special offers and helpful information and news about our industry, or whatever it is that you’re doing that would help people be able to do their jobs better or help them engage with your product better. Get that email list going. If you have twenty-five people on your email list, awesome. You gotta start somewhere, so start your list—and that’s your own list. Those are your people. That’s a list that you can use to send emails out, as long as you’re not crazy and sending them two and three times a week. You can build an audience that’s really impactful for yourself and your brand. YouTube is another great place to build a community. Get some subscribers going, get in there with some really solid content, a lot of really good shorts. Before you know it, you’re going to see comments and your channel grows, and you get more shares and comments and engagement and things like that that you may not have been able to get on, let’s say, Facebook or, you know, Twitter—right? Or X, they call it X now, but we still call it Twitter. But it’s one of those things that you can’t chase every platform, and you really need to pay attention to the idea that you don’t own a lot of the social platforms.

13:32
You can get kicked off the platform, make a mistake and get cut off that channel forever. I’ve had it happen—not to me personally, but I watched a client go through it. She never got her 3,500 followers back, she never got access to all her photo albums that she had on Meta. She fought for months and months and just got no response at all. It was gone. Don’t let that happen to you. Make sure you’ve got an email list and a couple other places that you build strong communities, because that’s what’s going to keep you going if one of your platforms goes sideways. Focus on fewer channels, better content, and build deeper trust. That’s how you do it. You don’t just throw your content out there. You put your content up intentionally, strategically, and you look for ways to engage. And I’ll give you another example. We have a client that promotes to engineers, and in the last six months, we have started doing more really engineering-specific technical information, and it’s targeted to young engineers. We didn’t know really what was going to happen, but we started digging deeper into the technical instead of more generic posts that led them to the article, we started pulling those technical details into the content and then leading to the article. And what’s happened is we’ve gotten lots more comments, lots more engagement, lots more click throughs. Now if we weren’t getting those results, we’d stop doing that. We’d start doing something different. But since we’re seeing that they’re reacting to it, we’re going to keep doing that and keep doing more of it, and that’s going to help us become more memorable on LinkedIn. And that’s what it’s all about—is making sure that people look forward to seeing your content. They know what to expect. They can identify it when they see it, and that it’s human. It’s one of the most important things that you can do these days is be human.

15:32
So what should you do with these predictions? I’ve already told you some of it, but I would suggest you double down on that human voice. When you’re writing your content, read it out loud. Would I say this to someone if I met them on the street? If it’s corporate speak when you talk it out loud, it’s going to sound really awkward. Speak your content so you can determine whether it’s actually something you would say, and if you do find it something that you would normally say, I’m willing to bet it’s more authentic. Keep working on all the different social platforms and build your audience, but also make sure that you’ve got an email list going, because that’s one of your most important assets as a business, and 2026 favors clarity over chaos. So whatever you’re doing, be clear. Be clear, be brief, be engaging, be different, be unique, and most of all, be authentic. So that’s what I’ve got for you. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Rev & Reach today. We will be back in a few weeks, but if you are watching us on YouTube, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button, give me a like, ask a question. We’d love to hear from you. I’m also on LinkedIn as Lori Jo Vest. I’m an open networker there, would love to hear from you. So let me know that you listen to Rev & Reach and head on over to LinkedIn to connect with me. I’d love to hear your ideas on what kinds of content we can provide for you to help you get more ROI from your digital marketing efforts. So, signing off—Lori Jo Vest will be back again soon with more helpful information. Take care.

Rev & Reach Episode 20 – Your Creative Is Cute, But Does It Convert?

00:00

Hello, I’m Lori Jo Vest, and welcome to this episode of Rev & Reach—a podcast created by PopSpeed Digital Marketing to help you get more ROI from your digital marketing efforts. So, getting started: you spent hours making that reel really pretty and crafting a wonderful message that you thought was just perfectly written, and you posted it—and nothing happened. Nobody bought anything. Nobody signed up for your course. Nobody filled out the lead form. Did you know that only 57% of marketers actually measure the ROI of their work? Truly measure, like the results they’re getting—are they hitting the intended targets at the very end of the sales funnel? It always surprises me, because honestly, it’s not that hard. It just takes a little bit of effort and some information that you can get your hands on pretty easily. So we’re going to be talking about why good creative or pretty creative or cute creative isn’t always effective, and how to fix that.

01:24

So there’s a myth that I would love to crush if we could: that marketing has to be pretty. A lot of people in marketing design for other marketers, not for their customers. Many of us are surrounded by people in marketing, so we see marketing, we see visuals that are beautiful, we hear a soundtrack that sounds really good, we listen to a script or read a script and it’s wonderful. But when it comes to digital marketing, that esthetic doesn’t equal performance—it doesn’t equal ROI. You can have the most beautiful setup on your Instagram account. People used to really look at how their wall looked, how it lined up, if the visuals all made sense, if it tracked well. Now they’ve changed the shape of those visuals, and now it doesn’t matter. When people go to your page, they just see a bunch of images and there’s really no rhyme or reason. In fact, for a while there, they were using both square and vertical rectangular as the standard. Some accounts had square, some had rectangular, so it was kind of a mess. The brand perception argument that beauty always matters—it doesn’t. Sometimes the weirdest visuals, the most bizarre messaging, is what will get you results, which will actually get you what you want. In your effort to pretty something up or make it perfect, you might be losing effectiveness because you’re losing authenticity. In today’s AI-fueled online culture, authenticity is truly what sells. I personally predict that’s going to get more and more prominent, that if you can put real people in front of a camera and show them warts and all—imperfections and everything—that’s where you’re going to get your success, because that is part of what’s driving customer confidence.

03:33

So what actually drives conversions? A couple things: Do you have an offer? Do you have something that you’re giving that consumer? Is your audience spelled out? Do you know who you’re talking to, and are you speaking their language? Are you expressing your message in a way that’s really clear, quick, and easy to understand? Here’s a quick example: if you have three sentences before you get to the part where you share the benefit to your consumer, then you’ve got to get rid of those first three sentences. You have to be direct. So is your message not only clear and direct, but is it emotionally relevant? Is there something in it for them? Does it speak to their heart or their need or something that’s lacking that they’re looking for? And your creative—does your creative amplify those first three things so that you’re getting maximum impact for what you’re putting out into the digital ecosystem? Testing beats guessing, and if you have an actual marketing initiative running, testing is pretty easy to do.

04:41

You’re going to start by looking at your back end and seeing what’s happening—digging in and seeing what happens when the traffic goes from your email to your social media, or from your social media to your website, and then what does that consumer do when they get to your website? It’s not that hard to get the data, and with AI tools, you can process the data in a way that is simply amazing. I’ll just give you a quick example—this is a sidebar—but you can upload an audience from LinkedIn. Let’s say you have 10,000 followers there. You download the audience. You don’t get the contact information if you’re a company page or showcase page, but you do get their job positions, their industries, their seniority levels, size of the company, type of company—really good data. You upload that into an AI tool, and it will tell you who your messaging is resonating with, who’s responding the most, where your opportunities are, and even provide some strategies to help you improve on those opportunities. So data is out there. You can set up tests, or you can actually just look at your data and figure out what works.

05:54

I’ll give you an example. This was great. I have a client that targets automotive engineers. What I see with this client is the weirder the creative is—like if it’s some strange diagram that only makes sense to engineers because it’s so technical and has little symbols and things, or it’s a photo from a laboratory that has some weird piece of metal doing something and then something else over here—it will get incredible engagement. I mean, amazing engagement that you would not normally see with organic content that’s not promoted. It’s really interesting, because you start paying attention to that and you do more of that, and your page becomes more valuable to your audience. So you can test, you can look at your data. It’s really important to know the type of content your audience responds to, so that when you have an action you want them to take to move them down that sales funnel, you know what it is that moves them. Metrics that matter—like saves, reach, impressions—they’re great numbers.

07:03

But the things you want to look at even more closely are the click-through rate—how many people are actually choosing to take action, like click through to see the website, or go visit or download some type of a white paper or PDF booklet. What is the cost per lead? If you’re promoting, you really want to make sure you’re following that cost per lead and measuring it against your competitors and your past efforts. The conversion rate—what percentage of people actually decide to make the purchase or submit the lead form or the contact form. And then your ROI, true ROI. We spent this much money, we got this many leads. You divide one by the other—the money by the number of leads—and it gets you the cost. You don’t have to be a data scientist to read the data. 

You need to be able to look into the Meta Ads Manager, the Meta back end. If you’re not a Meta back end person, there are very basic courses out there you can take. I don’t have any—I work in it, so I don’t look into the courses, but they’re out there, I assure you. Look on YouTube. Google Analytics 4—you have to know about UTM tracking and CRM tie-ins, how email can tie into social metrics and website metrics, so they’re all working together. So there’s a little bit of training you might need if you’re going to be doing this yourself, or you hire the experts, which is what we like to do when we get deep into something like SEO for local businesses. To get into the map set and things like that, we call on an expert who does that all the time to do that for us. So you can try to do it yourself, learn—there are tools out there that will get you started—or hire it out. You’ve got to figure out what works for you.

08:55

So, how do you make creative that converts? A couple things. One of the things we see all the time is a lack of clarity. There’s a “4C” kind of thing that we look at: clarity, credibility, contrast, and a call to action. Clarity says you want one message, and you want that consumer to do one thing. Do not put two or three things in one piece of messaging in digital; if it’s a newsletter, maybe you’ve got two stories. Don’t try to cram ten stories in, because one goal, one message is what’s going to stop the consumer from getting overwhelmed by you trying to shove too much down their throat. Clarity is really important. Get to the point quickly. Consumers don’t have a lot of time these days. They don’t take a lot of time to read things that come their way.

09:47

Credibility—real people. I mentioned that earlier: authenticity, real quotes. If the grammar’s not great, that’s okay. If you have a consumer who will go on camera and say, “Oh my gosh, say you’re a dentist. My new smile has me grinning all the time. I got a new job and I have a new boyfriend now, too.” If you can get a testimonial from someone on video, take it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be compelling. And, matter of fact, imperfections help ensure that your content mimics what their friends and family share. I love to remind people that when you’re out on digital—whether it’s emails, your website, or your social media—most importantly, you want to be authentic. People do not want to read business language about a service or product that is used by them personally. They want you to talk to them like they talk to each other. On social media, what resonates is content that mimics what their friends and family share. We do not go to social media to see ads, so when ads pop up, we keep scrolling. Think about that. Be real. Share real results, testimonials, real people.

11:03

Contrast—you want to stand out from what’s out there. So I’m kind of telling you to fit in and at the same time stand out. What I mean by that is, by being really authentic, you will stand out. If you can add color—bright color—if you use text, make it bold and easy to read, few words. Make sure it stands out in their feed in a way that’s compelling and not too commercial. It can be a balance, but there is a way to find that balance. The call to action—always include a call to action. That is a personal preference. You will talk to marketers out there who say you shouldn’t ask for something from your consumer every time you present communication to them. I would say you want to allow those who want to go further, to go further. So if you don’t include a CTA and a link or a way for them to connect to you, you’re taking away the opportunity from those who may want to move forward. So always have a call to action in your content. 

I would actually say, before you launch an ad or piece of content, ask: Is it clear? Is it credible/authentic? Does it stand out—does it have contrast? And is there a CTA? What do you want them to do, and is that CTA really clear? Some of the things you can do in email to test conversion is subject line testing—a lot of the platforms do that. You can do A/B testing with creative. You can do multiple pieces of creative and test them against each other on most of the platforms. That’s another way you can figure out what converts, and make sure your money is going behind the content that converts, not just any content.

12:59

So anyway, that’s what I’ve got for you there. That’s a lot to digest. We typically turn these podcasts into blogs on the website at popspeeddigital.com, so you’ll also find the transcript on our website, and I believe on the podcast platforms as well. So remember: cute gets attention, but clarity gets sales. If you can keep that in mind, that’s going to really help you. I would love it if you would go back to your top-performing ad—this is a challenge for those of you who are actively promoting on social media. Go back to your last ad and ask yourself, Which ones are highest performing, and was it your favorite, or was it your best-performing? Or were they the same thing? Because sometimes what you find is the one you think would do wonderfully fails miserably, and the one that you least expected—in some cases. 

I just had this happen—the ugliest visual. I had the ugliest visual, and I thought, these engineers are going to go wild. We had hundreds of likes on the LinkedIn post from this, what I thought was a rather unattractive image, but they loved it. So, take a look at your ads. See what you think. Give some thought to what we’ve talked about here today. And if you want to know more about PopSpeed Digital Marketing, you can go to our website at popspeeddigital.com, and I am an open networker on LinkedIn, and would love to hear from you. So mention that you listened to Rev & Reach, and I would love to connect there, too. Take care. We will be back with more helpful information to help you get more ROI from your digital marketing very soon. Take care.

Rev & Reach Episode 19 – The Social Sales Funnel

00:00

Hello, I’m Lori Jo Vest. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Rev & Reach by PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC. We are pulling back the curtain on how we do things to help you get more ROI from your digital marketing efforts. So today I want to talk about the social sales funnel and how to build one that actually sells. Because one of the things that we notice is that a lot of people that are using social media are stuck at one place. They’re just out there telling people what they’re doing, and you’ll ask them, “So what do you use social for?” “We tell them what we’re doing.” So most people think social media is about going viral, but the smartest brands, they use it to guide people step by step, from complete lack of awareness of your brand to becoming a loyal customer. So today I’m going to break down how to build a social sales funnel that actually sells without being salesy, because nobody wants to be salesy. I spent 30 years of my career in sales. I do sales every day. I never sell. I simply build strong, positive, connected relationships with people who need what I have to sell, right? What I’m offering, they need. Sales really aren’t necessary. Just awareness and taking them through this funnel is what helps them make the decision to buy.

01:33
So social media isn’t a magic slot machine. You don’t just stick posts in and clients start coming, or customers start coming immediately. That’s not how it works. There are stages to the relationship: awareness, nurturing, conversion—and by the end of this episode, you’ll know how to turn likes into leads and leads into loyal customers using social media. It’s not that hard, but you do have to be strategic about it. So the funnel—defining a funnel—basically, it’s the path that a consumer takes from being completely unaware of you to becoming a loyal fan that recommends you, that engages with you on social, that says, “I tried that, and it was great,” that kind of thing. So in simple language: awareness means, “Hey, I’ve heard of you.” Interest means, “Huh, I might need what you have.” Decision: “I’m ready to buy, make it easy.” Loyalty: “I’m telling all my friends about you, and I know if something goes wrong, you’ve got my back.” So those stages are completely supportable on social media. You can actually bring people through that funnel. By simply going out there and just pushing content out, you won’t be as successful. You will not be as successful.

02:58
We’ve worked with clients where the entire campaign was all about closing, converting, converting, converting. Well, if you show a conversion ad to someone who doesn’t even know who you are as a company or a brand, it just goes right past them. They don’t even bother. So what you need to do is pay attention to every stage of the funnel. Match your content to your intention, and I’ll tell you what that means. Awareness is those “stop the scroll” posts—those little short videos, relatable insights, shareable tips, things that get attention. It might be your CEO, it might be one of your customers sharing a testimonial about how happy they are with your product. It may be a testimonial that’s treated in a really interesting way visually. So awareness is the stop-the-scroll posts. Interest is storytelling and education. At this point in the journey, the customer is not really interested in buying from you. They might have heard your name, they know who you are, but you need to tell them—show them and tell them—why your service exists or your product and who it helps. And the goal of this stage is to build connection. Helpful information is really good here. For example, if you are a dermatologist and you’re targeting women in their 50s who are worried about wrinkles, share skincare tips that really work, not the ones that don’t work, but the ones that you personally recommend to your patients. If you are a social media agency, share tips on how to get better ROI from your social media. It works, let me tell you.

04:47
So at that point in the interest stage, you are building connection and creating a relationship, right? The next stage is decision, and that’s where you’re going to provide proof—proof that you are as good as you say you are. And that can be case studies that have really great results, before and after photos, testimonials—even special offers. If you have, you know, a new customer 40% off deal, that can help people make a decision to actually buy from you. So the decision-making stage is where you’re going to build confidence in that consumer’s mind about you and your product, right? So now, loyalty is after they’ve bought. There are all kinds of things you can do for loyalty. For example, reposting your customers’ content, which we call UGC—it stands for user-generated content. Reposting, paying attention to what’s going on out there, and when you see a customer actually mention you, share it and thank them. Show them that you are paying attention and that you appreciate it. Use those really happy customers as testimonial visuals or testimonial videos. That builds loyalty because it tells the client or the customer that you think they’re so awesome you want to put them in your advertising, and people love that. They really do. Maybe not everybody, but a lot of them do.

06:17
And what it does is it keeps them connected to you. So you want to keep people connected to you. Social media contests can do that. You can run contests with your current followers on social. It’s Halloween time around now—it’s October 27 when I’m recording this—put a big thing of candy up, take a picture of it, let your followers guess how much candy is in the bowl, how many pieces, and send out a $100 Amazon gift card. Generates a little excitement, might get you some new followers, and helps customers understand that you appreciate them and that you’re not, you know, not above a little bit of bribery, right? I mean, people love winning things, so that’s something you can do on a regular basis. So when you are crafting a social post, you should be asking yourself: where are we in the funnel, and what’s the next step I want this consumer to take once they’ve read this? And that’s how you’re going to craft your call to action at the end. So give it thought. Be strategic. Really think while you’re writing your copy and creating it, putting it out on the Internet—give it some serious thought on what sales funnel stage you are in with that particular post, and what you want that consumer that’s in that stage to do next.

07:37
So let’s talk about how to measure your funnel. Every funnel needs data, not just guesses. You don’t just put it out there and say, “Oh, there’s an awareness post, we’re good.” No, you want to measure on your awareness posts. How many people did they reach? Did you get any new followers? Cost per click if you’re doing ads can be really helpful—you know people who are starting to get aware of you will actually act on that awareness with a click, in many cases. The interest stage of the funnel is when a customer saves something. A consumer on social—and a lot of the channels can now save your posts. If they send you direct messages, if you see they’ve spent a lot of time on your website page, you’re getting email opt-ins, then you know people are starting to get interested. You know you’re doing something right. Now, the decision-making stage: when you’re doing those decision-type or conversion posts, you’re going to pay attention to how many times people continue to purchase your product, which would be a repeat purchase rate, you’re going to look for referrals, and you’re going to look at your community engagement. Are people commenting and sharing your content? Loyal customers will share your social and help you get new customers. And one of the things that we’ve learned is that the most effective form of digital marketing is a share from somebody who loves what you do on their personal social media accounts, because that credibility of someone you know—if you’re a follower of that person and you see that post—you know them and they’re really happy with that company or product, maybe you should give it a try. It’s a lot more effective than anything you could do.

09:26
So you want to spend some time, you know, figuring out how to keep that loyalty going with your customers. And there’s a lot of reasons to do it that I don’t need to get into here. Customer service is another one. Referrals—loyalty can bring you referrals. Good customer service can bring you loyalty and referrals. So those are other aspects of your business that you obviously want to pay attention to. So customer service is a part of social too, so make sure your social customer service is really strong. You’ve got community managers checking on content to make sure that any comments get responded to, any complaints get addressed—those are really important. So the tools that you’re going to use to get into the metrics for those sales funnel stages are Meta Insights, Google Analytics; if you’re using MailChimp, Constant Contact, one of the email clients, you want to look at your email open rates, your click-through rates, and your CRM data. Any CRM data that you have that tells you what your customers are doing, how they’re engaging with you out there in the digital ether, are really important. And if you can’t see movement between the stages, if you don’t see more people converting after you’ve gone through and made these kinds of adjustments to your content—your funnel is leaking somewhere. You’re not doing something right. So you want to go back to the beginning, look at all these stages, and see what you can do to optimize for that stage—whether it’s be a little more friendly, whether it’s shorter copy in your content, whether it’s, you know, thank you emails that go out right after someone makes a purchase. You’re going to look at those funnel stages, the content you created for those funnel stages, the metrics that that content creates, and make adjustments for improvement, which I’ll tell you you should be doing anyway.

11:21
I mean, you really should be constantly analyzing, testing, and learning to see in order to get better ROI from your social. So a couple things that people do that are mistakes—mistakes that people make on social when they don’t pay attention to the funnel as much as they should—are posting too much awareness content and actually never giving the consumer the opportunity to learn more. We see a lot of social media content that doesn’t include a CTA. We always put a call to action and a link in the content that we do for our agency clients. And I heard someone with a nonprofit once say: “Don’t make the decision for your consumer. Let them make the decision by giving them the option of learning more,” right? So always include that little step that they can take if they want to move forward. Some people expect followers to buy without trust-building. If you never share testimonials, you never share case studies, you never share anything that really demonstrates the quality of who your company or product is, you’re not going to get followers to buy. It just isn’t going to happen. If you are ignoring remarketing and retargeting—where you’re retargeting people that have gone to your Facebook, then clicked through, gone to your landing page—if you’re not retargeting them, you’re losing out, and you cannot…

12:49
One of the most important things is you cannot treat every follower like they’re ready to buy. They’re not, and if you do that, you’re in your face, you know, in the customer’s space with the sales message—Fast and Furious, coming at them. That’s like expecting, you know, to have sex on the first date. I mean, it really is. You can’t skip foreplay and expect commitment. I mean, you just can’t. So think about that; make sure you’re addressing the stages of the sales funnel in all your social content. I just can’t say that enough. People don’t do it, and then they don’t get the good results that they could get. So, quick wrap-up for you: social media is not about shouting louder. It’s about guiding the consumer through the stages. And when every post has a purpose, your funnel will fill itself. And I know it’s hard to believe, but we are starting to see it ourselves.

13:48
So I’m going to give you a challenge. Check out your last 10 posts. Label every one: Is it awareness, interest, decision, loyalty? Are you balanced, or are you stuck in one particular stage? So that’s something you can do right now, and it can help you do better, more ROI-creating social media moving forward. So that’s what we’ve got for you today. Again, my name is Lori Jo Vest, I’m with PopSpeed Digital Marketing, this is Rev and Reach. And if you are looking for a digital marketing agency to help you with your social media ROI, please look me up on LinkedIn. I am Lori Jo Vest, an open networker there, so just let me know you listened to the podcast and you can reach out to me there. I just had a potential new client reach out to me after hearing the podcast episodes, so it does happen. We are an active agency, accepting new business and growing, and we approach every single client with a mindset toward ROI and giving them our very best, most enthusiastic efforts. So that’s what we’ve got. Thanks so much again, and I’ll be back to share more great information on digital marketing very soon.

Rev & Reach Episode 18 – Local SEO: Why It’s Critical to Hire an Expert

00:08
Hello, I’m Lori Jo Vest. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Rev and Reach where we go behind the curtains and share our secrets on how we get digital marketing ROI for our clients at PopSpeed Digital Marketing. I am the founder and one of the partners at the agency, and let me tell you, there is a lot to know. So we never hesitate to bring in the experts, and I would encourage you to do the same, especially when it comes to local SEO.

00:41
So I’ll tell you what we’ve learned. Most smaller businesses would, and when I say smaller, I mean maybe they’re in one state or they’re in one city, maybe have three or four locations. A lot of small businesses underestimate how much local search can impact your bottom line. And what I mean is, when people are searching for HVAC companies near me, tacos near me, siding companies near me, those people are ready to buy when they put that search in. And it’s not just on Google anymore. It’s across all social media. It’s on maps, voice assistants, AI, all kinds of places. So when someone searches for best whatever service you offer near me, who comes up? The business that does is the one that’s making the money. So will your organization be the one that shows up in that search? Because local SEO is about showing up when people are looking for you geographically.

01:53
So local SEO matters more than ever, and here’s why. Forty-six percent of all Google searches are looking for local information. Not just, you know, how to plant a tree or what to do if my scrambled eggs are runny, but 46%. That’s a huge number, and when people search “near me,” it’s high intent Marketing Gold. I mean, it really is something that you want to focus on to make sure you’re in that search. And it’s not just for restaurants or nail salons, dentists, auto shops, fitness studios, business-to-business organizations. If you are the one that has the best local SEO, you’ll be the one that is not the best-kept secret. You’ll be the one that grows. Because a lot of people don’t understand SEO, and they think they can just put up a website, and poof, there you go, everybody’s going to start searching for it. They’re not, and if they do, they won’t find it.

03:04
So there’s a lot of things that are important. We’re learning this just like everybody else is. I mean, we’re always learning. We have consultants we work with that focus strictly on local SEO to make sure that we’re providing the best, most knowledgeable approach to the business for our clients. When it comes to local SEO, there’s a lot that rides on it. Little things like making sure that every business listing is exactly the same, same address, same name. If one has Inc after it and another has Inc. with a period after it, they all have to have that. If one spells out “Road” in your address listing, they should all spell out “Road.” One shouldn’t use an abbreviation while the other spells the full word out. They all need to match. That’s just one little thing that can happen to mess up your local SEO. So consult the experts, like PopSpeed Digital Marketing, when you’re doing this kind of work, or if you have a company that you know local search is going to be important.

04:06
Now it’s also changing. Google is always going to be important. I can’t see Google going away anytime soon. However, what is happening is the rise of local search on social. So people will go on TikTok, people will go on Facebook, they’ll go on Instagram and look for hashtags like #DetroitEats or #BirminghamMIStylist, and those are now search keywords that people are using. You want to be sure that you’re using searchable, local hashtags in your content. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn posts are now actually indexed for interests and reviews.

04:45
So if you look at local influencers, great advantage to your local SEO to put some local influencers into your digital marketing. They can get so much good attention from the people that you want to reach locally. It’s a really great approach there. A lot of them might be micro-influencers, where they’ve got, you know, they don’t have 100,000 followers, but they might have 10,000 of the right followers that are interested in your restaurant or your business. So influencers are really good key to local SEO. It might not seem like they would be, but they really help when it comes to local. So your customers are searching in new places, you want to make sure that you’re there where they are, and they’re everywhere, so you need to make sure you are in all those places as well.

05:36
So how do you win at local search? Your Google Business profile is the best place to start. Very, very important. You want to claim it, you want to verify it, you want to add photos, products and services, and at least weekly updates. And when I say update, you can actually put a post up on Google Business now, like you would on Facebook or Meta, you know, any of the Meta platforms or LinkedIn, and that’s a really good thing to do, because then you’re actually feeding consistent new information to the algorithm.

06:08
The other thing you want to do is make a huge effort to get reviews from your people. So you may create a little business card with a QR code on it, and when you do business with someone at that last meeting or at your front desk, or you might send a thank you note, you want to put that little card in there and ask them to give you a review. And when they do, you reply to everyone and say thank you. So reply on the Google platform, the Google Business platform, reply to them and thank them for taking that time and pay attention to your reviews. And when bad ones come in, that’s another topic that we can’t talk about now, but when a bad review comes in, make sure you respond to it in a way that is polite, compassionate, and engaging, and actually asks the person to get on the phone with you. Because what happens on a Google review if it’s negative, it can often be managed and the consumer may actually take it down eventually if you handle it properly. So we give that kind of advice in some of our customer service materials that we provide to our clients, but you want to make sure that you ask for those reviews.

07:20
Now, I mentioned this earlier, but they call it “NAP” just in case you see this acronym anywhere: NAP consistency. What NAP consistency means is, you want your name, your address, and your phone number to be identical everywhere it appears. It’s really important for Google, because, again, Google is, you know, zeros and ones. It’s going to just see what it sees, and if it sees a different address, it may not think you’re the same business. So you really want to be consistent, identical across all the platforms that you’re on. You’ll also want to make sure you have local content on your website, things that are blogs and videos, articles that mention the city or the neighborhood. So for example, you might say, “Top five roofing companies in Chicago” or “Top three family activities in Troy.” Now, one of them might be yours, you know, the other two might be friendly competitors. Or maybe you are giving, you know, really helpful, useful information that isn’t just valuable in your city, but you still include that city so that Google sees you as a local resource for those people that are in that geography. Now, your on-site SEO is also really important. So you want to, you know, if you’ve put together your own website or you’ve had, you know, one of your friends or relatives put something together for you on Wix, you might want to rethink that. Because the professionals, when they’re doing websites, they’re actually setting your website up with SEO keywords and descriptions, meta descriptions, all kinds of things that make it more palatable to the Google search algorithm. So consider that if you’re putting up a website, make sure your SEO is done and done well. It’s really important.

09:09
So the other thing that I would do is encourage people to check in and to tag you on their social media, because those types of things actually—the algorithms on all the platforms—if you’re getting, you know, check-ins and tagged posts, you’re going to be seen as having a more active, engaging profile, which helps the algorithms show you to more users of the platform.

So finally, things are changing. We know things are changing, and the future of local visibility is going to be AI driven. People are often getting on their phone saying, “Hey, Siri,” or they’re at home and they say, “Hey, Alexa, find a nearby taco shop.” Now, we always want to think about tacos. I don’t know why, but we’re big on tacos in our family.

10:00
Finally, so, you know, find a taco shop near me. Are you in the AI Discovery Channels? And that can be a challenge, but if you’re doing everything right before you know it, you will get picked up by ChatGPT, Perplexity, you know, the other AI chat agents, so that when someone goes in and does a search on their ChatGPT account, they may come up with your business, and in AI searches, they favor businesses with updated info, with reviews, and a lot of engagement. So all the things that we’ve already talked about are what’s going to help you win on the AI search channels as well. So just remember, local SEO isn’t only about the algorithms. It’s also about being visible, being everywhere, being reliable, and being human and authentic. Because the more authentic you are, the more likely people are to engage with your content across the board. The more they engage with your content, the more the algorithm sees that you are a credible business that they want to send consumers to check out.

11:14
So let’s talk about the big picture. SEO is about being found. Search engine optimization, it’s about optimizing Google’s ability and the other places people search, the ability to find you and your content. Local SEO is about being chosen as a preferred, you know, place they’re going to go for their tacos or to get their vacuum cleaner repaired. And social and AI search are the new front doors. Don’t give up on Google. Google is really important, but social and AI are right behind it, and it’s a triad that you’ll want to make sure you’re feeding all three of the beasts. I know it can be hard, so just remember you cannot sell to people who can’t find you, and if you’re not there, they won’t be able to find you. So I would suggest right now, you Google your business’s name and see what your customers see, because that is going to help you determine how your business shows up locally. And essentially, you can do a really quick SEO audit. How well are you doing? So seriously, think about that. Take some time. I would love to hear from you.

12:31
So if you could DM me or comment on the video, how does your business show up locally? What does it look like? How many search results do you get from your business? And do you show up in any of the searches for the general, like, tacos near me? And if you don’t now, you’ve got some marching orders. Go back and look at the transcript on workmomsays.com, pull out the things that you should be doing, and start doing them. So basically, what I would also say is, remember, showing up isn’t luck, it’s strategy, and you want to be strategic with digital marketing that you do for your business.

13:13
So that’s what I’ve got for you today at PopSpeed Digital Marketing. We are here for you. We specialize in social media, SEO, content, website builds and maintenance, and email marketing. And if we can help you get more ROI, we are here for it. If you want to listen to the show and get your ROI that way, we’re happy to see that as well. If you’re watching this on YouTube, please do me a favor, hit the subscribe button, hit the like button, maybe even leave us a comment and help us grow our following there. We are really trying to get the word out about really great ROI tactics in digital marketing, and we’re here to help. So we will be back soon with more great information. Take care, bye.

Rev & Reach Episode 17 – Building a Brand Community: How-To & Why-To

00:08

LORI: Hello. I’m Lori Jo Vest. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Rev and Reach from PopSpeed Digital Marketing. I am here today to talk to you about community. I am actually wearing my Peloton shirt, because Peloton is one of my absolute favorite communities, and I really love what they’ve done with their brand, and how they use social media and digital not just to sell but to build community.

00:36
Because when your brand becomes a place where people feel like they belong, they’re comfortable. There’s no better way to market. There’s no better marketing for loyal customers and a loyal source of referrals than creating a community. So we’re going to talk about Peloton, we’re going to talk about LEGO Ideas, and we’re going to talk about Glossier and, you know, also some ideas for small local businesses.

01:00
So let’s jump right in with why is community a brand superpower? Well, we are human beings. We have biological needs for connection.People have never been a solo survival, you know, type of being. We have always lived in groups, in tribes, in collaborative efforts. And so community is important to us, even though we don’t really realize it anymore. We kind of, we think we’ve evolved past our biological instincts, but honestly we haven’t.

01:37
And so in marketing terms, what we’re talking about with community is that you’re building a loyal follower community of your customers that have a shared identity, they have a really strong connection, and they love your brand. And the reason that matters is because they’re loyal. They repeat-buy from you, they refer other people to your company, they share your content on social media, they share their experiences with your brand on social media, and they give you real time feedback. They’ll tell you what they like and don’t like, and honestly, it’s really great to hear what they don’t like, so you as a brand can know what you need to change.

02:20
So I would look at it from a traditional marketing lens. There’s what they call push marketing, and what that is is when you take your product and its benefits to the consumer and you push them out there via messaging platforms like broadcast television, billboards, magazines, where you’re basically putting the message in front of as many people as possible, hoping that they will engage and buy your product.

02:46
Now with social media, digital marketing, community… it’s a two-way street. It goes back and forth, and you can connect with that consumer personally pretty easily through your social media team. If you’ve got a strong social media team, which you should have, or if you’re doing it yourself, then you’ve got to be the one to do it. But that two-way engagement is really, really wonderful in the world of marketing, and it’s an easy way to do it on social.

03:12
Let’s talk about a couple of big brand examples. I am huge on Peloton. I think I have now a 250-week streak on the bike. I have always loved their brand. I love the product. It’s beautifully made. I’m not being paid by them—I’m not—but it’s near and dear to me, because when I went through breast cancer treatment, and when I was going through treatment, I was working with this awesome guy, Joe, and Joe’s wife was having a baby, and he was getting her a push present, which was a big piece of jewelry, because, you know, you go through a lot when you have a baby. And I was going through chemotherapy at the time, and I was like, huh, if she can get a push present, then I should be able to get a chemo present, right? And I took that to heart. And I got my Peloton in 2019, and I became a part of a community. I became, you know, somebody that was almost infatuated with the brand at first, wearing the clothes, riding the bike, had my favorite instructors on Instagram, commenting on their things. I mean, I was just really, really into it, and I still am, but just not quite as infatuated as I was.

04:26
But what they have done is, they keep people riding by keeping it interesting. It changes day to day. There’s always new content, there’s always new instructional material for you to engage in. They come at you from a couple different ways. They have the traditional rides with the instructor. They have rides where you go through the countryside in different countries. They have, you know, video game style rides. The instructors are all different kinds of people, from, you know, traditional conservative to, you know, a little wild and, you know, New Age, punk kind of people.

04:58
So it’s a really wonderful, everyone is accepted, you know, “Together We Go Far” community, and they’ve done that in a lot of different ways. When you get the bike and you get into the experience, you start riding, you find your instructors you like. They start telling you, hey, I asked a question on Instagram the other day. Go answer it. And so that pushes you to Instagram to engage with that instructor who is a representative of the brand. They have amazing clothing. So the Peloton community, if you’re a huge fan, you can basically wear all kinds of wonderful clothing that they have released. And when you do your 100th ride, your century ride, you get a century ride t-shirt. I mean, it’s just a nice t-shirt. It has Peloton on it. It feels like you accomplished something when you rode 100 rides when you first get the bike.

05:50
So all those things really pull people together in a community kind of feeling. And even on the rides, if you’re riding, you see everybody else that’s riding at the same time you are. So you can give them high fives. So you’ll go on the bike, and you’ll have 10 people giving you high fives. You can ride with other people, you know. I mean, there’s just all kinds of interesting things you can do there. So, community: Peloton is a stellar example.

06:15
Now, LEGO Ideas: another product, letting their fans take the lead, and what they’re doing is they’re really listening, and they’re allowing the fans to build products and then taking those products and selling them and packaging and making them a part of the line of what they sell. So when you’re listening, and they know you’re listening, not only are you getting incredible market research to help inform your product line, your all of everything that you do, basically, but you’re inspiring loyalty, because when your consumer feels seen, it draws them towards you. I mean, it’s just inevitable.

06:54
Another brand, we’ll just touch on really quickly, is Glossier. They have built their brand around beauty enthusiasts, so enthusiasts and influencers talking to each other about their products, demoing their products, unboxing their products. You know, engaging and actually using the products is much better and much more credible these days, encouraging beauty enthusiasts to talk about the product and letting that be a huge chunk of the content that they share with unboxings, with, you know, just reviews, testimonials, things like that.

07:33
It’s not just the company putting out the story. It’s the consumers putting out the customer experience story. And it’s so much more powerful than anything polished that a brand can do. For example, with AI getting more and more prominent, I don’t know about you, but I’m getting used to seeing AI images in my feed regularly. And when I go to stock image houses, a lot of the places that we get stock images from, they’re using AI. Fortunately, there are some that are dedicated to not using AI, so you can count on whatever it is that you’re showing being actual, real life. AI is going to cause people to not trust what’s perfect and polished, and that will push them more toward what’s authentic and real. And what’s authentic and real is your consumers talking about your product with each other, or, you know, in your content that you put up on the digital platforms.

08:33
So now let’s talk about this: How does this translate to small to mid-sized businesses? Good question. You really don’t need millions of customers to create community. I’ll give you an example. We’ve had a dental practice and have dental clients in our on our client roster for a while now, and there’s one practice out there—I don’t know how they’re doing it, because it’s really hard to do—that actually has an online community on Facebook that’s all about full arch dental implants.

09:03
They’re not dentures. They’re very small bridges. And they are actually—they use posts to put them into the jaw, and they’re very much like your natural teeth, but it’s a huge surgery. I mean, some people end up having all their teeth pulled, or maybe 10 or 12 teeth, which is a lot, and then, you know, you don’t really know how they’re going to feel or fit, and they’re expensive, so is it worth the investment?

09:28
So this one practice that was a competitor of the practice that we were serving about three or three years ago, I think, had the most engaged Facebook community I have ever seen, and they had brand ambassadors that were in there. So what they would do is, when someone came in for a consult, they would say, “Hey, join this Facebook group, and you’ll be able to talk to people who have had this done, and, you know, get their experiences and let them answer your questions.” And in that same group, they had ambassadors, they had five or six people that, to me, were very obviously paid to be there. Now, they were actual patients of the practice, but they were attractive, they were, you know, photogenic, they were outgoing and positive. Well, guess what? Most practices have those people. Most practices have dental patients that are really enthusiastic and really like them—take advantage of that and pay them.

10:29
You can pay them $250 a month for maybe one post a week, or, you know, sharing your content out to their feeds. You can make whatever arrangement you want with them to be ambassadors of your business. So find those happy customers. Ask them if they’ll participate. Ask them if they’re willing to help you in your marketing by sharing their experience on an ongoing basis. And you can do that in Facebook groups. It would be great for a local yoga studio. Maybe in that group, they could share playlists and recipes and just encouragement and oh, if a class got canceled, that could all go into a Facebook group that has all of those yoga studio clients knowing what’s happening and feeling more connected and actually getting more from their experience as a customer at that yoga studio than they might otherwise.

11:19
Another thing that I thought was a really cool idea is nonprofits using Instagram stories to share rituals in their specific area. For example, if you were a, you know, you support cancer patients, maybe you have a weekly gratitude prompt or a weekly health tip or a weekly fact on cancer, something like that that you could put on Instagram, and it becomes something that everyone that follows you relates to, or you ask your audience on Instagram, or whatever channels you’re using, to provide their own rituals. What do you do to get out of a funk when maybe you’re a cancer patient, you know, and you’re just feeling really crappy? What do you do to get yourself back in a better mood, maybe feeling better physically, and get people to share the conversation there on Instagram. And you may have to seed it a little bit. You may have to reach out to some of your fans and say, “Hey, would you mind commenting on this? We’re trying to get some good conversation going so that, you know, there’s some activity.” So again, ambassadors are amazing for doing that. You hire an ambassador for $250 to, you know, $350 a month, you can get participation from them that will really help the effort.

12:33
So it’s about facilitating conversation and belonging. These kinds of things. Community is not about pumping out promotional content to the audience that you build. Community is about creating that commonality in the people that buy your product or service. So how do you build a digital community? This is a kind of a process you’ll need to go through. So you’re going to define your tribe. Who do you connect with? Is it parents? Maybe it’s moms of, you know, kids who play travel hockey? Is it fitness enthusiasts? Is it, you know, 50-year-old women who need to lose 30 pounds, and they’re just so disgusted by menopause. I know someone who serves that audience. Is it people who, you know, their smile is just not making them happy. It’s not white enough. It’s, you know, they have some work they need done. Who are those people? Write that down.

13:28
What is the right platform to interact with them? Our dental clients—Facebook is fantastic. Facebook and Instagram pretty much puts us in the feeds of younger people, older people, and when you do it right, you can kind of customize your message a little bit for one or the other and get really good results with similar content. So pick the right platform. Are you going to be using Facebook groups? Discord is an option. You can create a community over there. The downside of that is that people have to consciously create their own Discord account to participate. Then they have—some of them may have to go there regularly, and they may not go there for any other reason but your community, and that could be a heavy lift. If you have a real techie kind of audience, that may work really well because everybody’s using Discord, maybe an audience of moms, not so much.

14:23
So LinkedIn polls are another way to, you know, continually serve a series-oriented content to a specific audience and get them to engage with you and tell you what they think. So there’s a lot of different ways to do it. You want to encourage participation in all of your social. Ask questions, make challenges, ask people if they will, you know, share a photo of their dog eating your—you know, dog treat that you make at your bakery.

Send people surprise and delight kits. Now, this is really fun. If you have somebody who is always out there sharing photos from your restaurant, or, you know, in the lobby of your dental practice, saying, “Hey, it’s where I’m getting my teeth done today,” you know—people that are there, we call them your top fans, engage with them beyond just, “Oh, thanks for commenting,” or, “Yeah, we really like that you like us.” Go beyond that. Private message that person and once they’ve commented on your content on Facebook—and I think most of the other channels, you can private message them—and ask them if they would mind if you sent them a package.

15:32
I used to work for a bigger agency, and we worked on Kimberly Clark products, and a lot of the products were in the health and wellness space. So when we had five or six people that were always sharing our content and always answering our, you know, polls and everything, we knew who they were. We would put together just, you know—it was very grassroots, it was nothing fancy—buy some fancy boxes off the internet, some that were in the brand’s colors, I think we had pink, and then we would get some nice, you know, film, different colors that matched the brand’s colors, and maybe it’s, you know, the product, some coupons, some related things, like if it’s a fitness brand, maybe you put a fitness band, and you put your product, and some coupons, and some sunscreen, and maybe one of those cooling towels, you know, that also is branded. So—and we call it a surprise and delight—you just reach out to that really intense fan and say, “Hey, we think you’re awesome. Can we send you a little package for how good you are to our brand online?” They will go wild. They’ll do opening videos. They’ll do those unboxing videos and put those up. All their friends will see what you did. A lot of times, people hang out with people in the same demographic that you’re trying to reach.

16:52
So, if you’re trying to reach teachers, and you send a really cool package out to a teacher, she’s going to open it, she’s going to unbox it on her social media, and a lot of her teacher friends are going to see it. So it may be a small thing. It’s not hard to do, it’s not expensive. It takes some effort, and it’s huge when it comes to building community online.

Be present always. Be on your social channels. Be on them at least a couple times a day, drop in and see what’s happening. Is somebody, you know, getting into a little spat over something? Did somebody make a nasty comment? Do you need to answer a complaint about your product? Doing that publicly can be really good for the brand, because it shows that you’re responsive. You can straight off bat say, “That’s not what we want to have happen. We’re so sorry. Can we private message you so that we can get more information and make this right?” And when a consumer sees that and it comes in, you know, half an hour after they posted it, you’re responsive. You’re also showing that that’s not usually how things are done, and that you’re willing to go the extra mile to make it right.

So that’s a really important part of it is community management. You can’t have a community if you’re not out there in it, engaging and commenting and talking to the consumers who post about you or who put things on your content, you know, who post comments and things like that. So always be present. Make your people feel seen. Make those people that comment feel like you appreciate them and you understand and that you’re happy that they decided to take that extra effort to engage with you.

18:34
And the last thing we’ll say about building a digital community is to make sure you reward your community. Make sure what you’re sharing with them is helpful information. Early access to deals: if you’re a dental practice and you have a special offer going out, announce it in the community and give them a couple days to set up their appointments to take advantage of it before you put it out into the general public. And it really does help the people feel special when you share, you know, insider tips, when you give them early access to discounts and special things, and when you simply say, “God, we love you guys. We’re so happy that you have stayed connected to us instead of being a one and done customer, and we’re going to do whatever we can to make sure that our relationship continues to be positive.” Put those kind of gratitude messages in there.

Engage. Start conversation starters that let you and your community get to know each other a little bit better. Try those—you know, “Have you ever, you know, have you ever done this? If so, tell us about in the comments. We’d love to hear.” If you can make it fun, make it funny, that’s even better. New moms—oh my god—new moms are just a huge marketing audience for a lot of different companies, and they have a ton of questions. So if you are a company brand that serves new moms, get into those groups on Facebook. That’s the other thing you can do. Get into those groups and participate as an individual, and you can say, “I represent a brand,” but don’t sell. Just be there, share useful, helpful information and go from there.

Just recently, we took on a project, matter of fact, that was for a resort in Florida, and they’re a—what do you call it? They’re a co-op, I think—no, they’re a timeshare. And as a timeshare, they rarely have openings, and it’s this really cool part of the beach, it’s very, you know, very quiet, and the sunsets are amazing, and you just can’t get in because they’re a timeshare, and the weeks are all purchased by the owners. So they have, I think, a bunch of units coming available in September, October, for just two weeks. And so what our client paid us to do was go in and join all the groups related to and surrounding the city that this resort is in.

21:00
For example, I love Sarasota. The resort is in Sarasota. I love the Lido Keys. You know, there’s all kinds of different groups related to those two topics. And I went into the groups and said, hey guys, as myself, just want to let everybody know, if you have guests coming down or you’re interested in spending time, it’s—they had these two weeks open. It never happens. Get your reservation in now, and posted some beautiful sunset photos. I mean, these photos themselves were worth the look at the post, right? They were stunning. And we got 99 people to go to that resort reservation page, which was pretty impressive for, you know, maybe an hour of work. So you can take advantage of communities by actually creating one. You can also participate in them for more promotional opportunities, as long as you’re not selling too hard.

So to wrap this up, communities are built when brands create a space for people to connect with each other and to share their experiences. It’s not you pushing out content, it’s you interacting and engaging, and it’s a two-way conversation. So I’m going to encourage you to take a look at your own social media, and are you just posting content and just shoving things out there? Or are you creating a two way conversation? I’d love to hear about it. I am an open networker on LinkedIn. If you would like to communicate with me and answer that question—are you just posting, or are you building a place where people want to hang out, where they want to meet other people that are brand enthusiasts?

If you’d like to answer that question, please engage with me on LinkedIn. I’m an open networker there, so thank you for joining me for this episode. I know Kiley is not here. Kiley Metcalfe is usually my partner in crime on this podcast, but she just had a baby. Baby was born healthy. Mama’s healthy. Everything’s fine. It was about a week ago. Everything’s good, and so I’m going to be by myself for as long as she decides she needs to take for maternity leave, which however long that is, I get it. So again, Lori Jo Vest, Rev and Reach. We really appreciate you being here to listen to our marketing tips and the helpful information we share to assist you in getting more ROI from your digital marketing and social media efforts. I’ll be back soon with another episode. Take care!

Rev & Reach Episode 16 – Small But Mighty: Digital Marketing That Works for Small Businesses

00:08 LORI: Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest, and it’s time for another episode of Rev & Reach. I am here with PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC team member Kiley Metcalfe. Say hi, Kiley. KILEY: Hi, everybody. LORI: And we are here to pull back the curtain and show you how we do digital marketing. Today, we want to talk about smaller businesses—and that might mean you haven’t hit, you know, a million dollars yet. Maybe you’re two or three million, in that range—let’s say, like, three million and under—and it can be really difficult to decide how much marketing you need to do, and there never seems to be a budget, right? So what we want to talk about is ways and things you can do to get your business going in the right direction, and use our own agency as an example. Kiley, you do all of our marketing efforts at this point in time. What do you think? KILEY: I think that, I think one of the things that we have learned along the way, and obviously we have an interesting perspective here, right? Because we’re a digital marketing agency that, for a long time—I think it’s fair to say—neglected our own digital marketing, right? LORI: Because it was all referrals. KILEY: Exactly, yeah, exactly. LORI: That was referrals. KILEY: It’s 100% true. So, for a while, we didn’t have a need for it, and then as we kept growing, we were like, Okay, how are we gonna do this and make the time? And it’s so easy for that to get lost in the shuffle, even for us, when it’s the lifeblood of what we do every single day for our clients—and we should be practicing what we preach. It’s very easy to have the “client first” mindset because… LORI: That’s where the money comes from! KILEY: Of course they are, but we need to grow, too. 1:59 KILEY: Exactly. So, one of the things that I think—and I’m sure you would agree, Lori—that we noticed when we really put our feet down and started getting serious about how we were going to promote ourselves, kind of on the side of our clients, is that it takes time. And that’s not something to beat yourself up over, or fear, or anything like that. It’s just the simple fact of life is that, in the nature of our work, our clients come first. When we have time, we work on our own stuff. We make it better; we hone it in. And we’ve been… I don’t—Lori, you’ll have to remind me how many years we’re going on, like, the agency existing. And here we are: digital marketing, and we just started our podcast this year. You know what I mean? 2:53 LORI: Yeah, seven years. Seven years, lucky seven! KILEY: Lucky number seven. Woohoo! But yeah, I think the first thing I’d say is just that it’s going to take time to get to a place that you’re happy with and where you’re doing all of the things that you “should” be doing. And that’s okay. Ultimately, the work that makes you the money is what is going to come first and be the priority, is where I think that conversation should start. 3:22 LORI: But what I noticed with us—which I think is probably based on my experience in business in the past, still relevant—is it’s referrals. If your business’s business all comes from referrals and networking, that is amazing. It’s really good. However, if you really want to grow your business, it’s extremely difficult to grow your business on referrals. There’s a lot to that. And as soon as you get a referral, what is the first thing they do? Go look at your social media. Go look at your website. Go look at your—look at everything. Your presence online. What does it look like? Are you on Google Business? What do your reviews look like? So there’s a lot of things that people are checking digitally before they even call you. So if a referral comes in, you want to make sure that you look good, that your platforms and channels you are on are built out, that you’re posting regularly. But as a small business, I know you can get away with posting a little less regularly—maybe just twice a week. That is very reasonable, right? I mean, Kiley, is that the cadence that we do right now? 4:30 KILEY: Yeah, yeah. We, for us personally, we’re twice a week right now, sometimes three. But you have to keep it manageable, right? Because, especially depending on what your business is, you’re not going to have the time—especially if you have a small team, if you don’t have an agency at the moment, if it’s just simply not in your marketing budget—you have to stay realistic. And I think that two, sometimes three, cadence is good. 5:00 KILEY: Especially what you just said, Lori, in that foundational basis. If you’re super referral-based, and ultimately your goal at this point—as opposed to just really hitting the ground running and growing super fast—is, if right now you’re good with those referrals, you still need that place to send those referrals to get a better idea without having to have a salesy type conversation. Just let them get to know you on their own a little bit. That foundation, that user-friendly website that’s pretty and appealing, that baseline of social content, is so important to make a good first impression. 5:43 LORI: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And what I would also add is that when we started, we started small. We started with social media, we started with blogs. And the blogs were maybe once a month. Social media was, you know, not as frequent as it could have been. And then we added—we used that time with those things to just get into a rhythm, get into a groove. Make it part of your day. Make going to social part of your day. Make creating content a part of your week. Maybe it’s something you do on Friday afternoons when it’s nice and quiet, you plan for the next week, and then, with the newsletter, setting a hard date to send it. We send ours on the first of the month at like 12:05am, and we call it “We Got Here First.” Now, it’s not an original idea. We stole that from an agency that used to use it and doesn’t use it anymore, and that’s not competitive with us, and it has a hard deadline. It’s got to go out on the last day of the month, period. So there’s no excuses. You know? Sometimes that means we’re doing it on that day, but we’re doing it, you know? And we’re developing our list. 6:59 LORI: That’s the best way to develop your list: to have a compelling newsletter or monthly missive that you send out that has useful information for your audience and that builds relationships. In past companies, when I’ve done marketing for different places I’ve worked over the years—I was in sales and marketing, so you’re kind of managing the whole thing—I would get calls after we sent our silly little newsletter. “Hey, you know, I was just thinking of you guys and, hey, I’ve got a bid for you. Do this bid for us.” And I would get work from the newsletter that we did. That was before social media—it’s been a long time—but before social media, we sent one out just once a month, and people would respond, because again, it’s repetitive touch points and it’s top-of-mind awareness. You want to stay in that consumer’s purview, so that they see you in various places. Anything else to add to this? Kiley, what are you thinking? 7:56 KILEY: I think website is on top of that. I think a lot of brands get this right now; I think some still don’t. But just the importance of really investing in your website—I would say social is massively important. Adding a newsletter on top of that can be extremely helpful when you have the time and the resources to do it. But if you’re not investing in your website—for me, this is not research-based, this is personal—but I do think a lot of people would agree, just in the digital age that we’re in, if you don’t have a website that looks somewhat modern, at least a little bit like you took the time or invested in it, or made it a user-friendly experience, it will just instantly turn people off and away from your brand. If you don’t make their experience, or the pathway to learning about your business, easy, no one’s going to do it. And it really is an indicator that, although you might be an industry expert and have every—you know, that small but mighty mindset and really know what you’re doing—a bad website really kind of leads people to think otherwise. 9:19 LORI: They don’t care. Or you just don’t care. KILEY: Yeah, I think not caring is a really good way to put it. So that would be—if your website’s lacking right now, I think that would be a really good place to start to inch your way towards that process of having a real digital marketing effort. I would suggest not stopping there, but if you’re really not thrilled with your website, I think that’s something that should be an immediate change. 9:46 LORI: Absolutely, because it does lead traffic. You know, it helps with search because people do go to Google. Somebody told me the other day that kids 18 and 19 don’t ever use Google. Well, they’re using the other engines, which are social media at this point. KILEY: Yeah, TikTok, YouTube, right? LORI: Yeah, they’ll search everywhere. We’re in a place right now with search engine optimization, where people are just searching everywhere, and TikTok is a huge place where people go to find information. And same thing with Instagram, Facebook, all of them. So if they’re looking for a vendor for something or a service provider, you want to be there. You want to be there and be active so you don’t look like you’ve, you know, stopped posting. Don’t stop posting for two or three months once you start—keep going. Consistency is key, you know, and it makes you look like a longstanding, successful business when you have a nice social media feed, right? KILEY: Absolutely, absolutely, completely agree. 10:49 LORI: Yep. So I think that’s all we’ve got on this topic. This is a short one, and if you’re a small business, we’d love to hear from you. We are one of those agencies that works with both global organizations as well as smaller—we have a charter school client, we have a nonprofit client. We work in a lot of different categories, and we would love to at least talk to you; maybe there’s something we can do to help you with your website and get you started with a social strategy that you can then implement. So there’s a lot of ways we work with customers, and we have small business clients that get great results from what we do. So that’s what we’ve got. Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll be back again soon with some helpful, useful information on how to get more ROI out of your social and digital marketing efforts. Please feel free to connect with Kiley and I on LinkedIn. We’re both open networkers there. We’d love to hear from you. So take care. We’ll see you soon. KILEY: Thanks, everybody.

Rev & Reach Episode 15 – The Compound Effect: How it All Comes Together

00:08

LORI: Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest. Welcome to this episode of Rev & Reach, where the team at PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC pulls the curtain aside and shares with you what we do and how we do it. So I’m here today with Kiley Metcalfe.

KILEY: Hi, everybody.

LORI: Kiley and I are the chief client contact project managers. What do we do? I don’t even know where to begin. So many different things—anything from, yeah, like all of the nitty-gritty in social to a little bit more client-facing to the project management. We wear a lot of hats over here.

KILEY: Yes, absolutely.

LORI: So today we’re going to talk about the compound effect, and what that is: what should you be doing in your digital marketing? Should you just do social media? Should you do a newsletter? Should you do a blog? Should you update your website regularly? And the answer to that is all of the above. This topic reminds me of a call I had the other day with a guy who has an agency—started out in television production, and just has grown and grown and grown. And he said, “I don’t know much about marketing, but I tell my clients, ‘You need to be everywhere because that’s what works.’” And it’s so simple, such a simple way of saying it: you need to be in lots of different places because you need to continue to show up where your potential clients are. Back when all the promotion was done via television commercials, radio spots, billboards, newspapers, and magazines, they said someone would have to see your brand five times in order to remember it. And that’s a big deal, and I don’t think that statistic has really changed. So, Kiley, what are your thoughts on this one?

2:06
KILEY: I think that what you just said is excellent advice, in the sense that your audience lives in various places, right? So you’re never going to reach every single possible customer, client, prospect, lead—you know, whatever the case may be—in one segment. You know what I mean? Everybody lives in different places, whether that’s Google Search, or social media, or different channels on social media, or email, right? So, the best way to really reach everybody and keep yourself—your brand—top of mind for everybody in your audience is to be everywhere. Is it more of an effort? For sure. But a lot of content—and I think a lot of brands maybe don’t necessarily realize this—is reusable.

2:59
LORI: But, you know, it’s really interesting because I do know that some clients either don’t want to spend the time, or don’t want to spend the money on all of those things. And what I would encourage you to think about is, would you cheap out on your dental care? Would you cheap out on painting your house? Would you tell the guy to go ahead and paint it but don’t bother power washing it, don’t bother, you know, pre-coating it? Just, you know, just throw the paint on there and we’re good. You want to do a thorough job to maximize the sale. And you can look at it like, if you were to sell one, you know, client in for a year—say you’re a dental studio and you’re selling one client in for a year—how much money is that? And how many clients can you get by coordinating and putting your efforts together and having multiple touch points, right?

3:59
KILEY: Absolutely. I think, again, we go back to the dental industry a lot. I think it’s such a good category for really talking about all of the ways that the pieces come together. You think about it in terms of—even word of mouth, too, right? In the sense that, if you have a lot of your past loyal patients, and you’re a dental practice, on your email list, and you send out an email about, “Oh, this month, if you book your full arch dental implant procedure or your consultation, we’re taking X amount off of the total price,” right? Of course, somebody that you’ve worked with in the past—that’s not going to appeal to them—but they’re on your list, and they know somebody that might be in the market, they’re going to pass that along. And then again, there’s no guarantee with any social post that one person will see it, right? Or maybe that person’s not on social, or maybe you’re doing something website-specific.

5:05
KILEY: So really, and I think we’ll get into it here, this might be a good time to start that conversation. We have one client in particular—they’re our nonprofit client, the grief support group that we’ve talked about plenty of times on Rev & Reach before—and for them, this is what we do: we are compounded in all of these areas for them, between website updates, their newsletter, and all of their social, as well as their blog on their website. It’s pretty collaborative over there, but we keep it SEO-friendly; we, at the very least, proof and edit any blogs that they give us, if not write it ourselves.
And with them, obviously, it’s a little bit more niche given the specificity of what they do over there, but we have seen the real, tangible evidence of how all of these factors come into play and work together to really secure all of the ROI that a nonprofit like this is looking for, right?

6:14
LORI: Exactly. I mean, it really does. Just to give you an example, like, we always are helping them find volunteers, and it goes in their newsletter, and it goes on social media, and there’s a page on their website. Their website traffic is really high—I mean, there is a lot of traffic going to their website—and we don’t do any Google Display or Google AdWords campaigns at all. They either come from social or they come from search, simply because the site is so dense with grief support for children content, right?
So, another reason to make sure that you are doing many different things: we don’t own the social platforms. When we use the social platforms, you can get shut down. I have seen people’s businesses accidentally get shut down by Meta. So if you don’t have a list and you’re not doing emails and you don’t have a strong website, and you’re not doing blogs, you just lost everything. Because if all you’re doing is Facebook and Instagram, and they boot you off for some unknown, weird reason—which does happen—you have actually lost more than you… you’ve lost everything at that point, if that’s all you’re doing, right?

LORI: Another example would be the way social can feed the newsletter. You can do newsletter-specific promotions to see what happens. You can do social-specific promotions to see what happens. So you can test and see which of them are doing more for you, but know that even if one of them—if social is your strong suit—your email still supports that, right? It supports it. And you can solicit for email signups on your social media. If your content’s strong, they’ll sign up. If you’re offering a gift or some helpful information, people that are your people will sign up—not everybody, but just your people, right?

8:11
KILEY: Right. I think that’s such a good point, too, because—especially, I think there are very rare cases where a brand has just one indicator of ROI, right? And I think this nonprofit we work with is a great example of that. As Lori said, we spend a lot of time on volunteers; we spend, I would say, equally as much time on fundraisers and donors, event attendees, families—families in the community to come and use their resources, campers when they have camp; the list really goes on. And all of those ROI indicators are existing in different places. Whereas finding donors or sponsors of a philanthropic nature might work great on LinkedIn for them, their email list probably isn’t the place to do it. Vice versa, where, you know, finding volunteers—maybe if it’s a demographic of alumni or older people in the community and they’re just not existing on Facebook as much—the email list might be the best place for them to stay informed, right?
So, while all of these things come together, there’s no one-size-fits-all for every single little niche market or demographic that you’re trying to hit. They play together. That’s not to say you’re never going to find a volunteer on Facebook—of course, we do all the time. However, getting really, really involved with your specific community—and that’s going to be those people that are regular openers of your email list—is just as important in that case. So really, using that content—not interchangeably; it needs to be edited depending on where it’s going and what it’s doing—but it doesn’t have to be that complicated for it to be that effective, right?

10:18
You can take a social post that you put up this month about, “This is our volunteer orientation date that’s coming up next,” and edit that post to include in your newsletter and use the same photo of past volunteers, right? There’s no rules in that sense—well, there are efficiencies, but there are efficiencies, yes, exactly. So, while it may cost a little more if you’re working with an agency to have several compounded efforts, or if you’re doing it internally, it might take a little bit more, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming, and it really isn’t if you keep it simple.

11:01
LORI: Absolutely. So, I think that’s probably all we have to talk about today. The one thing I would add, just as a reminder, is: if you’re doing social media, it doesn’t work if you don’t include an ad spend. Yes, some kind of ad spend. So social with an ad spend is what we mean when we say social media marketing, because you have to have an ad spend these days or it’ll get shown to like 10 people, right?
KILEY: Right. Exactly. Not worth it.
LORI: So, and what’s… all right. So that’s what we’ve got for you today. We’ll be back soon with some helpful, useful information on how to get better ROI from your social media and digital marketing efforts. So stay tuned, and we’ll be back soon.
KILEY: Bye, everybody. Thanks!

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.

Rev & Reach Episode 13 – One Message, Five Channels: Tailoring Without Losing the Plot

00:08
LORI: Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jovest, and welcome to another episode of Rev & Reach, created by Pop Speed Digital Marketing to help you get more ROI from your digital marketing efforts. I’m Lori Jovest. I’m here with Kiley Metcalfe. We are the two… I don’t know what you’d call us… the two head women in charge. We are the people that are running this agency and helping our clients on digital channels, with social, YouTube, blogs, websites, emails, creating campaigns and ongoing initiatives that actually get results. And Kiley came up with the subject for today, so I’m going to let her kick us off. So whatcha got?

00:56
KILEY: Yeah, so one of the things we see a lot, whether we’re onboarding new clients or trying to reach new potential ones, is a lot of brands that share the same identical content across the board on all of their channels. And we’ll never tell you that repurposing content is a bad thing… a lot of the time, it’s a very good example of working smarter, not harder.

But the problem with this is, all channels are not created equal. What works on one will not, more often than not, work on another. Every channel is very nuanced. So today, what we want to talk about is tailoring your content to work and cater to the algorithms of each specific channel that you’re on… whether that’s Meta platforms—so Threads, Instagram, Facebook; LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, the list goes on. Of course, a lot of brands are not going to be on every single social channel that exists, but as long as you’re on more than one, the rules of the game change. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

02:06
LORI: Yes, yes. And we’re on this every single day, so we hear about the changes before most people do. Just to give you an example of the kind of changes that happen on these channels: Instagram, just over the last couple of months, went from these really cool little square images that we had all adjusted to… to now, everything’s vertical, and it is a lot harder to create a nice graphic that’s vertical, tall and skinny, especially if you’re used to doing things horizontally or as squares.

So those kinds of things happen on all the channels as well: the sizes of the images that they accept, the size of the files, the video files. You might be able to put a video on Facebook but not be able to put the same one on X because it’s too big, or the wrong aspect ratio. It’s insane. But besides that, there are things about these channels that are very unique.

Starting off with Instagram, everybody loves Instagram, right? I mean, is there anybody we know that doesn’t love Instagram?

KILEY: Exactly. I think it’s my favorite besides TikTok, I guess. Yeah, Instagram’s up there.

LORI: Yeah, it’s right up there. But the thing that you’ll notice on Instagram is you cannot use links in your copy. So they’re not paying attention and they’re putting links in the post copy on Instagram. Nobody is going to copy and paste your link… they’re not going to.

So, you customize that for “link in bio,” and then send them to the bio. You use a linktree, or some type of a multi-link tool… there’s several of them, right? The person clicks on that link, and they see all your links and can go to the article you mention. Nobody’s going to copy and paste. That just doesn’t happen, right?

KILEY: Exactly.

LORI: So let’s talk about some other differences.

03:59
KILEY: I think another big one with Instagram that we see a lot is hashtags. Again, we’ve said it here before, we’ll say it again… the power of hashtags is kind of up in the air at the moment.

Some people are using them. Some people are not at all anymore, and then you’ll find a lot of people like us that have just decreased the amount that they’re using. You used to be able… I believe it was up to about 20 hashtags; was optimal?

LORI: They recommended up to 20.

KILEY: Yeah, optimal on Instagram. That seemingly overnight, maybe a year or so ago, dwindled all the way down to now, I believe, three to eight is more optimal; so that’s kind of where we’re at. The reach of these hashtags is less and less; people are just searching specific hashtags on the platform less frequently.

So, there’s not… controversy is not the word… but there’s a little bit of kind of “to each their own” with the power of hashtags right now on Instagram. However, they are still one of the channels where, you know, you see a post, you see a hashtag. It looks normal. It doesn’t look like somebody doesn’t know what they’re doing because they put a hashtag there, right?

But then, on the flip side… and because they’re both Meta platforms, I guess the misconception is, a lot of people working for brand socials think they work more similarly than they actually do. But…

LORI: On Facebook?

KILEY: Yes, exactly; on Facebook. You’ll see a lot of the same hashtags on Facebook as you do on Instagram. Facebook hashtags are useless. They’re not going to help you. Maybe a vanity hashtag, just something that signals “this is our brand, this is our community”… just more for aesthetic purposes as opposed to actually increasing your reach. It might look a little bit more normal, but that is one of the key things I would say. Similarly to using links on Facebook and then trying to do the exact same thing on Instagram… doesn’t work. Hashtags on Instagram are not going to work on Facebook.

LORI: And if you listened to our last episode, then you already know that hashtags are being replaced with keywords in the copy. So hashtags are losing their relevance for search and for putting those posts in people’s feeds that follow them.

06:59
So what you really want to look at more is interest-based targeting. If someone is interested in grief support, or they’re interested in the benefits of steel, you’ll want to use those keywords instead of hashtags to help drive people and get people to see your content when they search.

So, what other kinds of differences? One thing I see too, which I think is really interesting, is people are on LinkedIn… and I think this is appropriate… but they’re getting more personal. If you were not paying attention, you might not know that LinkedIn isn’t necessarily all business all the time anymore. I follow an influencer that calls it “LinkedIn at night,” and she posts more racy topics, and it’s super fun. And also, just a lot more personal stories… a lot more, “my father died two weeks ago, and here’s how that’s affected me in my daily performance at the office,” or using LinkedIn to let your work or business community know something has happened. You’re not necessarily notifying them, but sharing the story.

That’s getting more popular; but it’s still a place you want to focus more on business overall. And if you do write something up like that, it’s always best to tie it back to business in some way.

What other platforms? TikTok, I think, is a really big difference from the other channels too, right, Kiley? How would you describe it?

08:14
KILEY: I would say so for sure, because the vast majority is video-focused. Now, you can do the sliders, kind of similar to how you can on Instagram, but it is video, video, video… all the time… a little bit more like YouTube in that sense, except it combines that scrolling aspect of Instagram, which I think is why people love it so much, because it’s that quick, mindless scroll, but it’s just videos, and they’re almost always interesting. If they’re not, okay, let me skip it, right?

One of the key things about TikTok that separates it from other channels is, again with the links… I believe, unless this number has been updated, you can’t include links in your copy unless you’re a business page, and not until you have 1,000 followers.

So it is another one of those things where you’ve got to be focused on entertaining to build that audience first. If you’re not entertaining, you’re not going to get there… just the brutally honest truth.

09:38
Another interesting thing to point out about TikTok is that when you create videos using the TikTok app, and use all of their in-app features, once it’s posted, if you try to download that video from your account to repurpose it elsewhere… Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, wherever… it will download with a TikTok watermark, so every other channel knows where it was made and where it came from.

If you take that video with the TikTok watermark and then use it as an Instagram Reel, it will not perform.

LORI: Oh, interesting. Okay, good info.

KILEY: Yes, you absolutely get pinged in the algorithm on Instagram, specifically within Reels, if it’s not created there.

Is TikTok very user-friendly in its video creation resources? It absolutely is. It makes it very easy. If you’re repurposing that content, though, that’s just something to consider. It’s also very easy to do in Instagram or other platforms, so it might be worth it, or it might not… it depends on who’s doing your social, but just something to consider because you might not see the results on other platforms.

11:08
LORI: I’ve seen a lot of TikTok videos over on Instagram, which I find interesting. I haven’t noticed performance on those yet, I’ll have to pay attention, because we usually create our videos in a video editing platform and then put them up. Sometimes we will use the music from Instagram, because I have heard that it will perform better if you put their music on it, and they’ve had some kind of input to that video… it will perform higher in the algorithm.

KILEY: I think that’s true for TikTok as well; the rules there are a little bit different than they are on Instagram. So I’m sure you’ll eventually run into an issue where you maybe can’t use the exact same audio on Instagram and TikTok. If you run into that, that might be an instance where it makes sense to use something from elsewhere if you really want it to be consistent.

But I think on every platform, it does increase reach to select the audio as you’re posting within that platform, because… because of TikTok, audios go viral and they trend, and if people are searching or only watching videos of a given audio, that’s just another place where your content is going to show up that it maybe wouldn’t have otherwise.

12:33
LORI: Yeah, I mean, all these little tips all work together to get you higher up in the algorithm and get you better performance. I want to talk just a little bit about YouTube, too, because we’ve been really digging in over there, and it is pretty amazing what kind of reach you can get on Shorts, which are all vertical.

Honestly, I’m almost not even hesitant to recommend that whatever you’re recording, you record it vertically these days. I don’t like the vertical so much, but all the channels are going to them. Instagram had Reels, then TikTok came along, then YouTube created Shorts, and with a good Short, you can get some really nice reach numbers organically, which is surprising.

Also, I’ve found that YouTube promotion is pretty affordable. It’s really easy to target, and it’s very affordable. So again, if you’re not on YouTube, make sure you start creating assets that can go there for your other channels, because it’s a great place as a support for everything else that you do.

So anything else we want to say about helping people understand the difference in what you post on different channels?

13:59
KILEY: I was going to say, I think just considering audiences is really important, and really distinguishing those differences. We’ve talked about our grief support nonprofit client before, right? So the types of things that work on Facebook, where it’s a lot more community-based and family-oriented, might not work on somewhere like LinkedIn, where maybe we’re talking more specifically to people of a certain career, like childhood therapists, educators, or even funeral homes. It’s a much more business-focused platform; so you kind of tailor it to who you’re speaking to.

And then Pinterest… I know we talked about Pinterest just before this, Lori… is another good example. So many moms, especially millennial moms, are on Pinterest. It’s been part of our lives forever, right? And that’s a great place for resources, family resources, journal prompts, activities to help your grieving children and things like that.

So really taking deep dives when you’re in your strategy creation phase about who lives on what platform and what they’re looking for there, and tailoring your messaging accordingly.

15:32
So once again, is that to say that you can’t post on TikTok and use the same video, if done correctly, on Instagram Reels and Facebook? No, but your copy absolutely needs to be edited to mesh with the person that you’re trying to reach on that given platform. Whether that’s removing links and using them in the bio, editing hashtags, or using slightly different language… still including those keywords, but using language that’s going to resonate with the common audience on each platform.

16:12
LORI: Absolutely. And the one thing I want to add before we wrap up is that video on all of these channels is really, really important. Yeah, specifically on TikTok, however, if you cannot feed that channel three videos a week… would you say Kiley?

KILEY: Yeah. Absolutely minimum.

LORI: Three videos a week, continually, that are meaningful. You can give really good advice, you can be entertaining, you can… okay, can I just out myself? There’s a 1990s home decor show called Design Sense that everybody’s been going bananas for.

KILEY: I love it.

LORI: It’s absolutely hilarious. People go there expecting to be entertained, to laugh, to see something that means something, to be drawn in by content… not to be advertised to. So before you make a decision to go over to TikTok, make sure you are spending some time on that channel to see what will be required and know that like three to five videos a week is what it’s going to take to hit those high numbers and make it worth your while.

KILEY: Absolutely.

LORI: And yes, you can advertise there, but your channel still has to have a lot of followers, have experienced a lot of engagement. There’s got to be strong content there to actually see results.

17:33
KILEY: Absolutely. So I think that’s really important… speaking just to wrap up specifically to TikTok. Another way that it differentiates itself is that, of course, you can advertise there, but because of including links in your bio and captions, because of that rule, it’s so important that you’re at that three-to-five-times-a-week range, and that they’re all high quality, engaging content to grow you as fast as possible.

Because Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook have that little cheat code where you can put a bunch of money into it and build a following of real, interested audience members pretty quickly. You can do that on TikTok, but it’s going to take a little bit longer because it functions so differently.

LORI: It does. There’s not necessarily the “like my page” functionality.

KILEY: Right, exactly… exactly.

LORI: You know, it’s just not there. But if people love what you’re posting, they will follow you, so.

KILEY: Yeah.

LORI: Well, that’s what we’ve got for today. Again, Pop Speed Digital Marketing… we are here for you. We’re both open networkers on LinkedIn. Both Kiley Metcalfe and Lori Jo Vest, happy to talk to you there and also take suggestions for what we should be talking about.

We want to help you get more ROI from your digital marketing and social media efforts. That’s why we’re here. If you’d like to know more about us, check out popspeeddigital.com, and we will see you again with some more helpful advice in a few weeks.

KILEY: Bye, everybody.

Rev & Reach Episode 12 – AI Search is Here: Is Your Marketing Strategy Ready? – Transcript

00:08
LORI: Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jovest. Welcome to this episode of Rev and Reach. I am the founder and partner of Pop Speed Digital Marketing in Troy, Michigan, and with me is our lead social specialist, Kiley Metcalf. Say hi, Kiley.

KILEY: Hi everybody, and we are here today to talk about SEO and some of the crazy changes that are happening in that space and how it might impact your other digital marketing on social media and in other places.

LORI: So, Kiley, what have we noticed?

KILEY: Well, I think, I am sure at this point, everybody’s kind of noticed when you go to Google search or even Safari, if you have, you know, Apple products, when you go to search, the first things that pop up are no longer articles from trusted websites or other sources. It is now AI-generated information that is most often, I would say, accompanied by the leading sources and links there. But one of the things we’ve really noticed with this as it continues to kind of take search by storm, really, is that pretty much across all of our clients, website traffic is decreasing because of it.

And that’s because, if you turn to Google to search for something, you no longer have to click through to any website to get the information that you’re looking for. All you have to do is read the AI response that pretty accurately, I would say most often, gives you the answers that you’re looking for, and then you don’t really have to dig very deep. So is it convenient? Absolutely. Is it good for websites and digital marketing and SEO? No, it’s not.

02:04
LORI: And it is really hard to rank on those searches. So basically, what you’ve got is you’ve got a huge transition from searches leading to website listings to searches now becoming something the question gets answered by AI. They give you the sources along the side, they’ll show like the top three, and then you have to scroll down a little bit to find other ones. So ranking is becoming a lot more difficult.

And what we do? I follow Neil Patel—I think it’s N-E-I-L P-A-T-E-L—and he sends out emails consistently and constantly. And he’s one of the few he could send me an email every day, and I would look at it because his information is so valuable. And what he says is that instead of, like, search engine optimization, now it’s optimization for all channels, so it’s search everywhere. And I thought that was really interesting, because what that points to is that Google is actually pulling up social results, but people are also using the social channels for search.

And we looked at it. We looked at a really interesting grid, right? That had all the different channels on that were searched and where they ranked for probably the last year, or something like that. And Snapchat was ahead of Instagram, which cracked me up. I’m like, “Really, what?” But people are searching TikTok, they’re searching YouTube, they’re searching Meta to look for answers to questions and to search for topics.

So how do we counter that? And Kiley, you and I have talked about this a lot, so I’ll let you take this one.

03:51
KILEY: Yeah, absolutely, one of the key ways to counter it—and it’s something that we’ve kind of been trying to incorporate more into our digital strategies for a few years now, but now it’s more important than ever—is to use keywords in your social, in your copy, in your, I would say, in your assets. It’s a little bit less important, but it helps to get the attention of anybody that might be interested, but primarily in your copy, because that’s where it’ll show up in those searches, right?

It works pretty similarly to how normal SEO on Google used to work, really, in the sense that if your copy includes a, you know, a specific keyword—we’ll go back to our dental clients once again—you know, if it includes “dental implants” or “full arch dental implants,” or “dentures,” or things of that nature that people are searching on social media, you’ll rank higher in people, you know, turning to social platforms to search for that type of content. And, you know, once again, that’s one of those things that’s really easy to kind of work the algorithm when you’re writing SEO-tailored content for Google. It’s just taking that strategy and flipping it into your social, right?

And can that get a little bit awkward if you’re trying too hard sometimes? Sure. But it’s important to get creative, especially now with how difficult, like Lori said, it’s becoming to rank in those Google searches, because I’m pretty sure, Lori correct me if I’m wrong, that in that grid that we spent some time looking at, Google is still number one, and I don’t think it’s close. So because so many websites and brands and companies are starting to lose that juice that AI is stealing, it’s really important to, even though it might get a little bit awkward and even though it might get a little bit tedious, to really make it work and find a way to fit that into your strategy, whether that’s with hashtags, whether that’s making sure that, you know, let’s say you are a dental practice, right, that’s working on dental implant clients—using that language in your copy extremely consistently is going to help bridge that gap with the audience members really that you’re going to start kind of missing now that AI is taking over Google.

06:20
LORI: Yeah, and let me give you an example of what that means. When we say, “use your keywords in your copy,” a lot of us that are creating social content will, you know, we have the phrases we use. If it’s, for example, a dental implant clinic, we might say, “Are you ready for your new smile? We can help. Start here.” Short copy. Maybe it’s a video of one of the docs talking about, you know, why they’re the best, because they’ve been around forever.

And what you would normally say wouldn’t include the word “dental implants” or the phrase “dental implants.” So you would want to include that. And we have a client that promotes the benefits of steel to manufacturers. And one of the things that we’re doing over there is there’s a product called—or a type of steel called—advanced high strength steels. And so instead of just saying AHSS, I’m going to be spelling it out, because that’s what the search is likely to be, or put them both, right? And just make sure you’re consistently using that keyword in your copy, in your posts, repeatedly, so that the search function on that particular social channel will see that you’ve got a ton of content with that particular keyword.

So it’s not hard. It just might sound nicer to just use, you know, to leave it out, or to use an acronym, but try to really look at sources like Answer the Public. Have you ever been on Answer the Public, Kiley?

07:59
KILEY: Yeah, we’ve spent some time there. Yeah, it’s extremely helpful for kind of getting a better gauge and idea of what people are actually asking search platforms and search engines when it comes to, you know, relative to specific brands, right? And that’s not just for Google. I think we’ve seen it, I would say, particularly with YouTube and TikTok in the last several years, increasingly becoming really, really highly used search engines, right? And obviously they’re social platforms.

But you know, I think we’ve said it on Rev and Reach before, that you can learn how to do anything on YouTube, right? And TikTok is really following suit in a shorter form way. So, you know, if you’re, let’s think of an example, if you’re a restaurant and you’re wondering what people in your area are looking for, like what they want to eat, and you know, what it is that’s most important to them when they’re going to spend their dollars at a restaurant on a Friday night, and what they’re searching for and, you know, like menu items and cocktails and things like that—turn to Answer the Public, because it’s a really great way, whether you’re writing for Google or your social channels, to tailor your content to what people are genuinely looking for.

09:23
LORI: Yeah, I love it. It’s a great, great tool. And you know, back to YouTube, if you are not using YouTube as one of your social channels, get on it with YouTube Shorts. You are put into the feeds of people that are following the subject that you talk about, as well as search, and it’s related. YouTube is tied to Google Ads, so you can set everything up in Google Ads and it will use those demographics.

And we’re seeing a really nice low cost per click on Google AdWords right now for some clients and some really interesting results. So search is changing. It’s constantly evolving, just like everything else. If you need a vendor or a digital marketing supplier that is on top of those changes as they occur, it can be difficult if you’re a marketer trying to keep track of all that yourself, right? You can’t be on every webinar and get every email announcement from every type of social or digital channel, right?

So we would love to hear from you. We are happy to network with you. We are open networkers on LinkedIn. If you have questions, reach out to either me or Kiley, and we are here to help. If there’s a topic you’d like us to talk about on Rev and Reach, please get in touch with us, because we’re covering all the different things that we do, how we do them, what’s hot right now, what’s working, what’s not working, so that you can be a better digital marketer. And you know, we’re here to help. So I think that’s all we’ve got for today, right?

KILEY: Yeah, kind of a short and sweet one, but one that’s really important. So, yeah, I would say so.

LORI: So we’ll be back again soon with some more advice on how to get more ROI from your digital marketing. Take care. We’ll talk to you soon.

Rev & Reach Episode 11 – Signal vs. Noise: Decoding Social Media Analytics That Drive ROI Gone Wrong – Transcript

00:08
LORI: Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest, and it is time for episode 11 of Rev and Reach. And today, we’re talking about signal versus noise: decoding social media analytics that drive ROI. Now, analytics for social and ROI are almost two totally separate things, right? Absolutely. Kiley, like, what do we mean by ROI?

00:31
KILEY: Yeah, so, so analytics is exactly how it sounds, right? It’s the numbers behind each post, behind your month, how you did, how things are going, etc., etc. Engagement, clicks, video views, things of that nature. ROI is, you know, whether you have an outside agency like us, or you have an internal social media manager that does all of your business’s marketing on social—it’s whether or not you’re actually seeing your desired results. That’s almost never engagement clicks, website traffic, especially if that website traffic’s not converting. That’s kind of what we mean.

01:13
It’s the difference between those high numbers looking pretty and them actually getting the job done, right. So, yeah, if you’re a restaurant, it’s increasing people, like the actual foot traffic into your restaurant. If you’re a dental clinic, it’s, um, you know, increasing appointments booked and consultation scheduled, and that converting into, you know, real treatments, etc., etc. You know, if you’re retail, it’s increasing sales, things of that nature. Can analytics sometimes be an okay indicator that ROI is coming or that things are working? In some industries, I would say it’s easier than others to make that connection, but not always. It’s kind of the same point as how going viral isn’t ROI, right? Yeah, it’s fun to have high numbers and really high engagement and know that people are interested. But if they’re not taking that desired action, what’s the point, you know?

02:14
LORI: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it’s so funny because, like, we really pay a lot of attention to our analytics. We’re always looking at the back end, how many people engaged with a post? You’ll hear us talk about engagement, and what that means is the number of people that chose to engage with the post, which is like, share, comment, divided by the number of people who saw it. And it’s listed as a percentage. So we use engagement as a way to show that the audience is interested in our content. If nobody ever engages, they’re not interested. We’re not doing it right, and it’s one of those things that we use to determine what content should be promoted.

02:59
For example, one of our dental practices. I, you know, we know the types of content that’s going to perform, but sometimes we’re surprised. Sometimes it’s a little, you know, you’ll see one that really rises above and you can’t really quite put your finger on why. Well, I’ll go in and that one that performed organically, I’ll put money behind it so it gets shown to a lot more people, because I know the audience appreciates it. So engagement is a good way to indicate that it’s content that your audience likes. Right conversion is what happens later. I mean, it’s all the way to the end of the kind of customer process is getting the consumer to either like, click on an application for volunteering, make a donation, print a coupon, and go to the store, you know, those kinds of things.

03:31
So conversion is great. And when we do social media, we’re paying attention to everything. We’re paying attention to followers. We’re paying attention to click-throughs, website traffic. We have a client that’s global, and the most important metric to them is educating their audience about the value of this particular material used in automotive manufacturing. Website traffic is the biggest indicator that we’re providing the information that that audience needs. And we get 10,000 or so a month on that particular website, so it’s a good indicator that we’re doing it right, right? Absolutely. What else do we use analytics for, Kiley?

04:31
KILEY: I mean, the possibilities with analytics really are endless, despite the fact that they don’t directly signal ROI in every case, right? If, you know, your call to action, like Lori said, is to visit the website or to learn more here, or, you know, in this case, you’ll see on our social, you know, in a few weeks, to click on this podcast episode and listen to the full thing, right? So clicks are really important.

05:00
One thing that we will say all the time about links and posts is that you want to give your audience the opportunity to say no. You don’t want to say no for them when it comes to learning more. And to learn more, that almost always includes a link to somewhere else. So I would say clicks are pretty important in regard to it; kind of, if you’re looking for increased website traffic in any regard, whether it’s to a podcast or to make more sales or to learn more or whatever, you know, if people are engaging with that and actually clicking to learn more, it is a signal that they’re interested, and that whether it was your copy or your graphic or your video or your photo, there was an element of your post that was enticing enough that made them think, oh, maybe I am interested. Let me click. You know, we’ve talked about conversion, we’ve talked about engagement.

05:55
I think video views are increasingly more important because, you know, again, you have about two to seven seconds in a video to grip your audience, and if that two to seven seconds really isn’t that interesting, you’ve lost them to the endless mindless scroll, right? Especially in informative and educational videos, because if you’ve used some witty headline or some witty opening comment and then locked them in, they will, you know, retain whatever it is that you’re telling them in the video content. I think that’s one of the reasons videos are so much stronger than photos and graphics, particularly today.

06:40
There are, I mean, truly, there are so many metrics that it’s kind of hard to put as much attention to all of them as you may want to. I would say that, in general, the ones that we probably look at the most as a signal that the content that we’re creating for our audiences is at the very least engaging and keeping you interested are clicks, video views, engagement. I would say reach is important in the sense that you want more people, obviously, to see your content, but if the quality of your audience is there, I would say it matters a little bit less than the other ones. You know, would you agree?

07:26
LORI: Yeah, absolutely. And I know we have some clients that the actual conversion is not necessarily the goal for nine months of the year. We have a social media account that’s a charter school, and what they want to do nine months of the year is communicate with the parents and keep them informed of the wonderful things they’re doing at school, and also get community support. So get the community involved, and it’s a specific charter school focused on a nationality, so we target the audience around so that we get the support of that cultural community, and they know about us, and they know what the school does, and they know how into really promoting and educating the students about their culture it is.

08:19
So the metrics can vary. You know what’s important can vary, and you always want to keep an eye on it because if you’re getting more engagement, more comments, more likes, more shares, it’s going to get shown to significantly more people because the algorithm pays attention to that. The algorithm pays huge, huge attention to what’s going on in the post when it comes to engagement, likes, comments, shares.

08:43
KILEY: Yeah, absolutely. I think that too, there are so many people that we talk to that kind of ignore analytics, right? And I don’t think it’s necessarily something that takes that much effort that it’s justified to ignore it. You know what I mean. I know Lori, for a lot of our clients, we do monthly analytics reporting for each of our clients, and I know Lori, for the ones that she’s super involved in—I would probably actually say, for most of our clients, you’re in there looking every single day.

LORI: I know, I can’t help myself.

KILEY: Right, which is, I mean, it’s, you know, you see so many brands that are completely ignoring their analytics altogether, right? When you’d rather just be in there every day seeing how the day before went?

LORI: It’s not hard.

10:21
KILEY: Exactly, it’s all you have to do is log into your accounts and take a little peek, even, even if it’s once a week, even if you’re just looking month over month at that monthly report that is so easy in every platform to view. I think it’s really important, despite the fact, again, that I’ll say it, that your analytics aren’t a direct signal to ROI. It is so important to get that ROI. That your content is interesting, right? Because if you have really, really poor numbers in your analytics, that ROI is significantly less likely. So, while they’re not directly correlated, one can signal that the other is possible. I think is—I don’t know if that made sense when I said it.

LORI: Absolutely, yes. Your analytics reporting. Yep.

10:23
KILEY: Yes. If you’re seeing dismal results on your social media, you’re not going to see ROI. However, you could be seeing really, really positive analytics and still not seeing that ROI. So that’s where it’s really important to get into because, you know, you could see, you know, in this month, I’ll go back to our dental clients. We did a ton of smile reveals and a ton of before and afters, and our leads skyrocketed. And then the following month, we did less smile reveals and less before and afters, but a lot of, like, still images of our doctors and our team and things like that.

11:01
And our engagement was really high, but we didn’t have any leads. Yeah, right, yep. If you’re not getting the leads, it doesn’t really matter how high your engagement is. So it’s really important to really look between the lines. I think it’s a good way to put that at—okay, yeah, our engagement’s high, but are we getting the desired outcome, right? So to kind of compare the two and understand that high engagement or high clicks or whatever is not necessarily a direct indicator that you’re seeing that ROI, but you don’t know that if you’re not looking, right? You don’t know how anything’s going if you’re not paying attention, absolutely.

11:39
LORI: And I would also add that your analytics can help you determine the best type of content to create moving forward. So we have a couple of different tools. We’ve used Loomly, we’ve used—I use Hootsuite for one client, we use Statusbrew for most of our clients, and you are able to go in there every month and see the top three performing posts. What are the top performing, and those posts are going to tell you that you need to do more of those types of content, right?

12:14
And the other thing is, you can use your numbers to test and learn. Does your audience prefer this type of call to action, or that type of call to action, can you just say, “Learn more,” or does that get you nothing? And if you say, “See how this works,” and put the link, that maybe performs better. So another reason to pay attention to those analytics is so that you can optimize your content, and that’s really the key to driving ROI. So analytics allow you to optimize, which helps you deliver the results you want. So with that, that seems like the perfect place to end. Yeah, right, so that’s how we do it anyway.

12:57
So again, Lori Jo Vest, Kiley Metcalfe, we are two members of the team at PopSpeed Digital Marketing. We help our clients with social, email, website development, SEO, content, and we love what we do. We’re the most enthusiastic people in the room. We are opening the curtain. Here’s how we do it. Here’s what works for us in hopes of spreading the good word about social media. If we can help you with your social, get in touch with us. Both of us are on LinkedIn. We’re open networkers, and we would love to hear from you. So with that, take care, guys.

KILEY: Bye, everybody.

Rev & Reach Episode 10 – When the Wheels Fall Off: Navigating Client Engagements Gone Wrong – Transcript

00:08
LORI: Hello, I’m Lori Jo Vest, and you are welcome to this episode of Rev and Reach. I’m here with Kiley Metcalfe. Say hi, Kiley.

KILEY: Hi, everybody.

LORI: And we are going to have a little fun today talking about client engagements that went wrong, because there’s lessons in here, right? There’s things that we learned, and there’s things that we hope we can teach our other clients, right? So we’re going to start with a story of a restaurant that we worked with, and we were so excited. It was a really cool concept. How would you describe them, Kiley?

KILEY: I would say it was, like, kind of high-end luxury bar food, almost. They had so much fun with their menu, with the types of creative spins they took on everything from burgers to tacos to ice cream to their cocktails and everything in between. It was very creative. It was very different. And, you know, with that, the food is good.

LORI: They were the home of the $20 hamburger, right?

KILEY: Yeah, $20 hamburger.

LORI: So things had to be really good, and really the service had to measure up. It had to be a really great environment in order for them to be successful, right? So we started working with them, and I think we had the account for about nine months, right?

KILEY: That sounds about right.

LORI: Some of the basic things that we know to be true about social media, they didn’t agree with, and that’s where things can get a little crazy. In this particular—we’ll just call it the restaurant—in this situation, with the restaurant, they didn’t believe that they should have to put out much effort or give coupons in order to maximize the results of their social media. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get them to do coupons that were social-only—things like that that let you reward your social media audience and turn them into on-site customers of your restaurant. And we kind of fought with them for a while about it. What do you remember as being the biggest problem with them, Kiley? It’s been a couple of years.

02:25

KILEY: Yeah, I distinctly remember, and they were, you know, to their own credit, they were very upfront at the beginning of engagement that it was really important to them to see tangible ROI from a social effort, which, you know, you’ve heard us say here before, that’s a really difficult thing to do without things like, you know, social media-specific promotions and coupons and contests and discounts and, you know, things of that sort. If you’re not rewarding the audience that is engaging with your marketing, whether that’s social media or email or, you know, Google—even, you know, whatever that looks like—if you’re not rewarding those people that are paying attention, finding that ROI, especially in relation to a restaurant, when you’re not running ads that are leads, right? Of course not. We’re not looking for leads. We’re looking for restaurant patrons, right? They were very upfront about that, and it’s something that, you know, one of the things that I love about us and our company is that we’re not gonna, we’re gonna set realistic expectations from the jump. It doesn’t serve us or our clients if we lie and say, “No, 100%.” You’ll see the direct translation in some industries you can. In this one, it gets a little bit trickier.

So we were, we had that level set very early on where we said, you know, we’ll do what we can, but ultimately, like, we want sales to go up, and that’s the goal here. So it was something we had gone back and forth about a little bit, I would say, throughout the entire engagement. You know, if they had a slow week, “What’s not working on social?” when, you know, it was the week of Fourth of July and everybody’s out of town, of course, it’s going to be slow. Every restaurant’s a little bit slower if you’re not in a tourist town, right? It was little things like that that would just come up pretty regularly. And not to, you know, we’re, we’re always very, like, hand up, “Our bad” if something goes wrong. But to the opposite of that, we’re also very, okay, well, if you’re slow over the week of the Fourth of July, that’s not really something that social media marketing can fix, you know. So, so, yeah, so it was a battle of setting realistic expectations without, you know, kind of achieving that middle ground of, okay, well, you want tangible ROI to be seen from social, then we really need to give our customers something in return to get them in the door here, and to be able to show you that people that see our content are people that are coming in, right?

05:05
LORI: And the thing that I—that I just drove me absolutely nuts about that one—was the fact that the ownership really thought that they were doing everything they could. Why should they have to give a coupon? And it was a real bone of contention. And when you look out into the ecosystem of restaurants on social media, coupons are a huge draw, specials are a huge draw, happy hours with reduced prices are a huge draw. There are ways that you can prove that social media works. For example, you have a happy hour

that has these three to five cocktails that are on special. They’re really awesome, and you’re only going to tell people about it on social media. That means when people come in, they’re going to say, “Hey, I saw it on social media,” or your team is going to be able to say, “Hey, where’d you hear about this?” And you’ll get some solid return. They weren’t willing to do it. It just, and it was a $20 hamburger. And the other issue that we ran into, and this is something that I would recommend all marketers pay attention to, is that their team wasn’t really up to the challenge. They were not excited about being there. They were not excited about Kiley coming in to shoot social media content.

Oh, there was one guy behind the bar that was just so rude. It made it really hard for no reason. And, you know, we kind of figured out that there were some things going on that we were not able to do anything about behind the scenes. You know, things like quality of service that were a problem, but we couldn’t fix it, right? And so with the inability to get really great content with their team, which is an important part of any social media effort, and the fact that they didn’t want to give anything in order to get the returns from social, right? They were like, “Well, we pay you guys. Why should we have to give coupons?” It’s like, well, because you need to entice and draw people in, and then once they come in, your people and the quality of what you’re giving them—I mean, service is so critical in that business—yeah, that’s how you get success on social, right? It’s by a little coupon here and there to reward them.

And the fun thing about that too, which with restaurants is amazing, is the UGC. Now you’ll hear us talk about UGC. I did a great job managing the UGC for this client. User-generated content is when a customer says, “Oh, my God, this is such a great ice cream cone. I want to put a picture of me.” Or, you know, “Food eats first. I went to this restaurant, the food looks so awesome on the plate, they would share it,” and then I would reshare it. So, I mean, how—what was that like?

08:02
KILEYI: Well, I think it was, it was so interesting because you just made so many good points that tie into this. I think their UGC, the amount of content that this restaurant would get tagged in, was like nothing I had seen before, and nothing I’ve seen since. It was daily. It was, I mean, consistently very high-quality content, too. It did not take much to get UGC for this client. And it was easy because there was so much of it to pull from. You know, which, you know, to Kiley’s point before I did, I went into this restaurant pretty often to get that sort of content, to make some TikToks, to have some fun with the staff. And it turned out to not be very fun because nobody was really happy to be doing it.

 

KILEY: Yeah, which, you know, is so funny, because when we describe the vibe of this restaurant, the food and the menu—creative, fun, light-hearted. And the people behind the brand were not feeling that for whatever reason. But then I think that the amount of just sheer, really, really positive UGC that we were able to collect for them not only made up for the lack of, you know, really good, solid content we were able to get when we were in there, which did zero, but it wasn’t as much as I think it should have been, or could have been, right? But it also, I think, spoke to not necessarily the quality of service, but the quality of the product and how cool the vibe of the place was and how good the food was and how creative the menu was and, you know, just the fun atmosphere you’re in when you’re there, even if, you know, your server isn’t of, you know…

LORI: Yeah, maybe your server is a little snarky. A bit disgruntled…

KILEY: Right. Exactly, exactly. So I think that really spoke to how far we could have gone with this client just based on the quality of their product. And if all of those moving pieces that come together to make an atmosphere at a restaurant really, really special could have been pieced together, how strong it would have been. You know?

10:27
LORI: Yeah, it could have been something. It really could have. And in the end, because they weren’t able to prove the value of social media by having, you know, saying, “Here’s, you know, 20 people came in with a coupon last week off of social,” we couldn’t get them that kind of proof because they wouldn’t cooperate. And as a result, they wanted to cut our retainer. And they came to me. They were struggling as a business. They came to me, and, you know, they had a location in an area that wasn’t great, and they also didn’t have great service, so they started to see some declines in the revenue of the business, and wanted us to do the same work for like half the retainer. And based on the fact that they weren’t cooperating, that it was so difficult that we knew the service was never going to change—I mean, they really weren’t going to do anything about it, or so it seemed—we resigned the account, so we fired that client, and as much as I hate to do that, it was one of those things that neither of us was going to win.

They weren’t going to win because they weren’t going to change their service demeanor, and they weren’t going to do the things they needed to do. We weren’t going to win because we were never going to be able to prove that social media could grow their sales, because once someone went in once, don’t have a good experience, might not come back.

11:46
KILEY: I think, I think too that, I think that’s such a good point. And one of the things that, you know, we never want our clients to have to think about, but I think you know, in this regard, and on that, this platform, I think you know, hopefully most of the people listening can relate to this to some degree. When you, when you live in agency land, you don’t have just one client, yeah, and despite the fact that I genuinely had so much fun working on this account, this account was sucking up, I would say, out of a 40-hour work week for me, probably close to 30 to 32 of those hours. So this account became largely my full-time job. I was passing off other clients to other people on our team to make sure that our quality and the work was—it was in-depth. It was a lot. Like Lori said, they had multiple locations. They were expanding. We did a lot of emails. We, you know, we were going there. It was social on multiple channels for multiple accounts and locations. So that gets a little bit difficult. And I’m sure Lori can speak to that, you know, as the business owner, we’re a small team, and if, if we have, you know, one of our team members spending that much time on a single account? Yeah, it makes it a little bit hard to cut your budget without cutting the work, you know?

13:10
LORI: We knew if we cut the work, we would end up cutting our effectiveness. And we knew we were effective. We knew based on what was happening on social that people were really interested in this place and going, they opened a new location. While we were serving them, we were able to get into some, you know, some Facebook groups that were specific to that town and the foodies in that town and start talking about it. We did some promotion for some of their products that were sold nationally, and we saw some hits from that. So things were going well for the marketing. What wasn’t going well was the operations, and that’s something that we can’t fix.

13:54
So, when they asked us to reduce our scope, and I knew that that would mean, you know, basically just paying them, getting more for less. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. So we parted ways with them in as positive a way as possible, and we moved along. But we learned a lot about restaurants and how they work, and how social works, and how you’re able to get UGC, which is extremely effective, and the things that worked, we really got a good handle on what worked in the restaurant space. That’s a win. You can’t really say that’s not a win. And you know, anytime we can learn more about a specific type of industry for social media, the better off we are. So we look at that as a win, even though it sounds like a loss, and the wheels were falling off. And when the wheels fall off, we usually make sure we’re the first ones to walk away, because I don’t want to be hanging on. And we’re not desperate. You know, we have clients. We have a
good stream of revenue coming in. So let’s talk about the client we just fired a few weeks ago. Oh, this is fun. This was in our dental category that we’re so good at, too. So open up the floor on this one. Kiley, go ahead.

15:08
KILEY: So we’ve done an entire—I think our first episode with Rev and Reach was on our dental clients. We have, I would argue, the most experience, proof, results, and success in this category. We can, you know, to incoming clients. We can prove it. We have the numbers to back us. I think, I think we’ve earned our confidence in this category. We have no problem speaking to it, right? So anytime, anytime somebody new, like, within this space or in a space similar comes to us or, you know, enters our orbit. So to say, we get really excited. To some people, that might sound really interesting, because who loves going to the dentist, but we have a formula that really works, and this was our, I would say, first experience in the land of—in the land of dental—out of many people that are firms that we’ve worked with before, where I don’t think that our proof was necessarily what they wanted to see. All they wanted was overnight, instant, not leads, booked appointments with—

LORI: —with ROI seven to ten times ROI within the first two weeks. It was insane.

16:32
KILEY: Which, yeah, I think this is, this is something we talked about on that first episode. We know what type of content works in this category, and in a lot of ways, this one was a little bit different because Lori was able to, you know, be present. It was a little bit more local to where Lori is. A lot of our other ones are, you know, somewhere farther away in different regions of the US. But we rely heavily on these clients to kind of get us those smile reveals and the videos and the day-to-day, like photos of a happy patient with the doctor and things of that nature. So it is collaborative. Absolutely, it’s collaborative.

So when we are very forthcoming about needing, you know, somebody in the office that just a couple of times a week even can make a big difference to send us those photos, videos, you know, whatever, in whichever case, and we’re not getting those, that can make an effort take a little bit longer to take off. That’s not what happened here, which is very interesting. We hit the ground running. We started very quickly. We did a very brief strategy, a little bit less in-depth than what we normally recommend for clients, just to help them save a little bit on the cost, and we hit the ground running without any of that specific type of content. We had no smile reveals. We had not—when we first started, we had not a lot of, you know, patient-doctor content. But we’re like, you know, we’ll get going right away. Let’s get this thing off the ground. And we saw leads instantly.

18:16
LORI: Yeah, we had leads coming in. We had like 20 leads coming in. But what happened? This was so bizarre. I’ve never experienced anything like it. It was two weeks into the engagement, or maybe it was a weekend, but a weekend that, after we had started posting, the dentist had a husband that was retired as a big wig from some global corporation, right? So he was, like, Big Cheese somewhere, and he would retired, and one day she said, “Well, I need you to come in and meet with my husband.” Okay? So I met with him, and he basically said that he needed seven to ten ROI on what we were doing, and he needed it by the end of the month. So this was two weeks in, two weeks left of the month, and we had already had probably 15 leads by then. But when you’re starting to set up a Lead Gen system, it takes a little bit of time to find the right targeting.

You know, they had, for example, a piece they gave us about whitening and actually putting a gem on the tooth. And we did a really fun video about it. We did some promotion behind it. They got a lot of calls that it was too expensive. So what that tells us is, after three or four days, back off, don’t promote that anymore. Wrong type of lead. And then we went with an Invisalign, and the Invisalign got some appointments, the general doctor conversation got some appointments. So by the end of the month, I believe we probably would have had 30 leads total, and probably ten of those would be solid. And one person had already come in and scheduled a treatment, you know, some kind of implant or something. And I went in and met with him, and he acted like nothing was happening. So toward the engagement lasted about three weekends, and at the three-week mark, I looked at the leads coming in, and I said, “I think you can agree with me that we’re headed in a really strong direction. We’d like our invoice paid.” And he said, “I can’t pay your invoice until I get seven to ten ROI.

What? What? And at this point, their front desk person had kind of stopped calling people right away, because she got a little disgruntled over the two or three leads that were just, that’s too much money, and she kind of thought, and I don’t know what happened, but she got a little less interested. And so I said, you know, here are a few things. We need to shore it up. We need to have your front desk call immediately because leads are most likely to close if they’re contacted within two hours of showing up in your system. And so some of the leads she was leaving for a couple of days and things like that. And he came back to me after I sent that email and said, we’re not—you know, this is—we’re following up immediately on everything. I knew that wasn’t true because I could see the spreadsheet and, you know, we’re not getting—this is the wrong targeting, and this is the wrong. And I knew that by the end of the month, especially if you got into 90 days, if you can give your social media 90 days to take off, he would have been, he would have had a significant increase in his patient load. I know they would have, because we were already starting.

And I’m willing to bet three or four of those actually are happening now, in June, but seven to eight ROI within two weeks isn’t going to happen. It’s just not realistic. And while I was expressing to him, this takes a little bit of time and things like that, I think he was kind of one of those mean girl kind of guys, and he just wanted to see me struggle. I mean, it really felt like that’s how he motivates people under his leadership, is to make you struggle and give you goals that were kind of insurmountable, that you would never achieve. And I sent him an email, and after he responded to that one, saying that they weren’t going to pay, with “I’m really sorry, but we’re going to walk away from this engagement. We’re going to walk away from this piece of business because we cannot be held to these standards that are so incredibly unrealistic.” Now, I know we would have gotten him a seven to ten ROI in 90 days, and so he’s so short-sighted, he couldn’t see it. And I wish, I wish I had access to that patient list now, because it would be so cool to see what happened in the last 30 days, right? But I don’t know. There’s a policy we have, Kiley. I’ll let you tell them about it too. We have a policy for our client roster that is really important to me.

23:08
KILEYI: Yeah, it’s our no assholes allowed policy. I know exactly what Lori’s referring to, and I was really glad to because obviously, in this case, with Lori being so much more client-facing than the rest of us, I was glad that she applied it to herself, too, because she was getting beat up bad by this client. But I think that, I think that it, you know, all of these, all of these engagements gone south, or engagements gone wrong, as you know, as Lori said earlier about the restaurant, they teach us something, yes. And I think, like, I think one of the things here, as Lori said it, was, you know, we had a contract signed. We had, you know, our plan in place. We’re not an agency that works, you know, off of, “We got you leads. Now you pay us.” We’re an agency like “We work. You pay us.”

LORI: We’re retainer-based.

KILEY: Yeah. And I think that when you initially kick off an engagement, which, you know, hindsight is 2020 but you kick off an engagement, and within two weeks of actually starting to post content, somebody comes in kind of out of, out of the clear blue, and says, “Well, no, even though a contract is signed and we’ve started working, and we’re posting, and we’ve put all of this effort in, red flag right there.”

Yeah, and I think it’s so true too, because, you know, it’s an industry we’re so confident in, and it’s an industry that we have this—I hate to say it, it sounds so click-baity, but we have this model that really genuinely works in this industry, like time and time again, very consistently. We, I don’t think we’ve had an experience yet when, when we work in the way that we want to within the dental space, that it doesn’t get a significant amount of leads. So I think that, I think that it’s good that it happened recently in this industry because, you know, we know that we can do it. And it’s not to a lack of confidence. It’s to a fear that once we hit that seven to ten ratio, which we know we’re going to do again, once we start receiving that content, once the effort has been built up for more than 5 to 6 weeks, of us coming in and doing our thing, that that will get there, but then still somehow that won’t be enough, you know, like if you can’t let us get in and kind of get our gears turning and do our thing and get there, and then follow up with the leads in the timely manner and the way that we tell you works, you’re never going to be happy, and then we’re never going to be happy, and no one’s going to be happy. And then what’s the point? If it’s not fun, right?

25:48
LORI: It’s true. And if it’s not fun, we don’t want to do it. And if it’s not effective, we don’t want to do it. So let’s talk about that. If it’s not effective, we’re not doing it. And that’s, that’s the thing that I find, I find so revealing about that particular engagement as well. That gentleman—I’ll call him—chased me. Like he came after us a couple of times like, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. I really thought that if anybody could do it, you could do it,” which is that weird love-bombing thing that sometimes people do. And then I finally, I had to tell him, “Please do not contact us anymore. Your front desk has everything. If you have other questions, go directly to Meta. I’m done,” because he kept kind of chasing us. So I got a feeling that it was his style, that that was his style of leadership, and I wasn’t having it. I just, you know, that’s—and we are very collaborative in how we work. We love client input. We love client feedback. We are here to support our clients, but we’re not here to be abused, and that happens sometimes. So we’re fortunate that we are not in a position where we have to take every piece of business. We will never just take any piece of business, and when the wheels fall off, we will learn from that experience. And I think one of the things that we learned is it may be that—and he was one practice, one dental practice, and that that the percentage of our retainer, which was only $2,300, was way too much for them. So what we’re going to be doing moving forward is looking for practices with multiple locations. If you’re a dentist that has a practice with multiple locations, get in touch with us. We can help you. We know how to do it. We’ve done it. We’re doing it now for a bunch of practices in Colorado, and we’re here to help.

So with that, I think we’ll let this one go. It’s always good to talk about the mistakes and the things that happen, and it will change how I onboard people, you know, that specific one will change how I onboard restaurants as well as dental practices, you know, because, again, we learn. So that’s what we’ve got for you today, guys. Thank you, Kiley, for joining me, and we will see you again very soon. Take care.

KILEY: Bye, everybody.

Rev & Reach Episode 9 – From Crickets to Clicks Transcript

00:09

LORI: Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Rev and Reach, where we share our digital marketing secrets and give you a look behind the scenes at how we get results for our clients. I’m Lori Jo Vest with PopSpeed Digital Marketing. I am the co-founder and partner, and Kiley is here. She is a digital marketing specialist and our, I guess, third in command. And today, we are going to talk about some of the basic things that we do that you may not consider that can help you amp up your results on social. So, Kiley, why don’t you get us started?

00:50

KILEY: Yeah, so in kind of, you know, between Lori and I discussing, like, what we wanted to talk about in this episode, there are so many different directions we could take it. And it’s one of those episodes we could probably continue to talk forever about. And I think that, you know, for us, in terms of our, like, general basic tips that really work for us, they’re gonna ultimately come off as really simple. And I think a lot of people will have a lot of, like, aha moments when we kind of start going through these. But ultimately, it’s so common for people to overthink their brand’s social media marketing. It’s one of those things where yes, it is complicated, and it requires a lot of thought and intention and strategy, but ultimately, the type of stuff that works really doesn’t need to be overcomplicated, and it shouldn’t be. As a matter of fact, the overthought, overproduced, overcommercialized stuff really doesn’t work or play well on social anyway. So I think once we start getting into a few of our, like, top tips and, you know, the things that we kind of refer back to pretty often, it’ll be interesting to see how simple it seems, but ultimately, how few people are doing it the way that that it should be done.

02:17

Lori: Yeah, or the way that gets results. I want to start us off really quick with the most amazing piece of advice that we ever got, and it was from a TikTok Workshop. If you’re in the field of social media and digital marketing and you don’t attend workshops like every freaking day, you’re missing out because there are free workshops put on by the scheduling platforms, by HubSpot, by all that, you know, by subject matter experts about social media that give you all kinds of really, really good information on how to use it to get returns. And the one we were on TikTok, I think it was about a year ago, we just grabbed hold of this saying and have kept it with us, you know, I pet it and keep it, you know, pay attention to it, and they talk about it all the time. What it is is that the most important thing you can do on social media is stand out by fitting in. What that means is we do not go to social media to see your ads. We don’t. People do not go to social media to see the ads that we create as good as we are. People don’t do that. They’re not there looking for our ad. We know that. We are a disruption to their desire to connect with people they know. So in order to be a positive disruption, we want to look like what they’re looking for. So that means natural photos, authenticity, selfie videos, talking heads, things that you’d expect to see other people share, not necessarily brands. What that doesn’t mean, or what it means you should not do, is share a bunch of graphics, graphic billboards, and things like that. If you have to share a graphic billboard, make sure it’s interesting, right? Make sure it’s applicable and appealing and interesting, but “stand out by fitting in” is my favorite piece of social media advice to give. How about you, Kiley? What’s your fave?

04:21

KILEY: I think my favorite one is smiling faces. It’s one that we go back to all the time, and we try to convince—convince may not be the right word—but try to really, really, get our clients to understand this one. Smiling faces, specifically smiling faces that have to do with your brand’s community, whether that’s your audience members, happy customers, people you know within the community, staff, volunteers, anybody behind the scenes that’s involved with the brand using their faces and their happy experiences on social is so, so, so effective. I’d be curious to see an updated stat of this. I should have pulled that before we got in here, but I think it was two or three years ago. The statistic was it performs 29% better according to Meta platforms than all other types of content. And so for us, that goes to show that not only do smiling faces really connect with your audience, they display that authenticity and they make your content more trustworthy and engaging. So exactly what Lori said in terms of standing out by fitting in, if you look at nearly anybody’s Instagram or Facebook or any social platform, maybe excluding LinkedIn, a personal page, it’s a highlight reel of the best times of their life, right? It’s going to weddings, it’s going on trips. It’s happy dinners with your best friends, or whatever the case may be. And all it is is smiling faces, whether it’s posed with your friends or a candid shot of you at your favorite restaurant or whatever. And I think that that is like where that connection really lies, is that in the heart of it, it is standing out by fitting in. Also going kind of in relation to what Lori said, it outperforms graphics and it outperforms stock images, and that’s because it’s incredibly more authentic than a stock image. Because a lot of stock images are very obviously just that, it’s very easy to tell what is stock and what is not. You’ll find some good ones, but with trained eyes… 

LORI: Yeah, typically it’s a great big grin!

KILEY: Yeah.

06:49

LORI: Earlier today, I screen-capped some Meta analytics from one of our clients that we’re doing their social. We’re doing what we can. A lot of what they do is organic, and once in a while, they’ll share a real photograph of somebody at the practice, right? I looked at the back end of Meta and saw that the actual photo of their team members was shown to 538 people, while the other stock image content we use for them, because we have no other choice, was shown to 35 or 50 people. What a difference! Ten times as many people saw or responded to the image of their actual team, and it was just a cute little pose of a couple of their people. And it’s appealing because it’s real, and real is what social media is about. 

07:47

So let me get my next one here. My next one is CTA. Always. That’s another one of my favorites. And not everybody in social media will agree with me. They won’t, because some people say that you need to gift your consumer with content that doesn’t require their response sometimes, and that kind of thing, and that it’s a balancing act. And I disagree because I think you can always go down a few lines and say, learn more about us and just add that, skip a line or two and put that there. What that does is it lets the consumer make the decision of whether they want to go deeper or not. If you don’t include a link, you’re not allowing them to go deeper, even if they want to, without having to click to your profile, go to your profile page, click the link there, go to your website… Ooh, that’s a lot of clicks, and honestly, most people will not do that. If it’s not easy, they’re moving along. So CTA always and Kiley, what do you think about that? I mean, just on your personal feelings about it, what do you think?

08:58

KILEY: I completely agree with you. And I think one of the things, because I know a lot of people have mixed feelings about that, I think one of the things that’s important is that a CTA doesn’t always have to look the same. You’ll see us, if you’re one of those people that doesn’t think every post should have a link, generally speaking, we put links to learn more, and I would say 95% of our posts, maybe more. You can also incorporate CTAs that build engagement, right? Like, let us, you know, if you tried this tip, let us know how it worked in the comments, or give us a like, or drop a heart in the comments, or subscribe, or anything like that, give us a follow. Those are still CTAs, even without including a link. So I think that in terms of including CTAs, I don’t see a reason in not doing it, because the worst that’s going to happen is they don’t want to, so they don’t. It’s no harm, no foul, really.

LORI: Yeah, and I’ve been surprised by how many click-throughs I’ve gotten on some of my organic posts on LinkedIn, where all I say is learn more about us if they want to move forward, not expecting anything, and you still get, you know, 10, 12, 15 clicks. Because in a lot of cases, if the post is good, they’ll want to learn more. So anyway, that’s what’s your next favorite one? That’s mine.

10:22

KILEY: One of mine. And it’s- I think for a lot of people watching, it may seem a little patronizing. You would be very surprised how often we see this: stop including links in your post copy on Instagram. We see so many people still doing it, and there’s a lot of reasons why it’s a bad idea. First and most important is that links on Instagram and organic content are not clickable. So what they do is, particularly ones that are not shortened in the copy, they just take up way too many characters, and it looks silly, honestly, because it’s just a bunch of mumble, jumbled letters and figures and symbols that do nothing, because you can’t. 

LORI: People will not. They will not copy and paste. I don’t care what you think, they will not copy and paste.

KILEY: Exactly. It’s just far too much work and far too much to ask of your audience. They’re not going to do it. So our recommendation for kind of fixing that is to include, you know, we’ve used Linktree, link in bio is another one. There are a lot of platforms where you can kind of build your own profile of just your highlighted important links. They get housed there. You put the link to that page in your profile on Instagram, so then in your captions, in your copy, when you have a CTA and you need somebody to click on something, tell them to visit the link in your bio, instead of clouding your copy and making what could be really, you know, well-spoken, pithy, funny copy be clouded by a bunch of random characters that just look silly and annoying and honestly, like you don’t know what you’re doing.

LORI: Like you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s the part. You don’t want to look like you don’t know what you’re doing because real serious people will dismiss you. It’s hilarious that they’ll dismiss you for that, but they’ll think, oh yeah, they don’t know what’s up. And they’ll get going. Yeah, it’s just how it is.

KILEY: Exactly. 

12:35

LORI: Okay. So mine, this next one is hashtags. Hashtags and targeting by the algorithms is in a constant state of evolution, constant. And there are people saying hashtags are going away, and I truly do believe that. They’re not quite gone yet. But what’s replacing it is what they call interest-based targeting. What that is, it’s more like Google, where you’re going to have a keyword, and you want keywords that other people looking for the thing that your company does. If you are a veterinarian, they’re looking for pet health, you’ll want to use those words in your copy. So you won’t want to write two or three sentences and then you go back and look and you didn’t include any of the keywords that people would be searching for. And that’s the thing, you want to consider what people will be searching for and what they follow. So a veterinarian might be, you know, dogs. Dogs of Instagram. It might be, you know, things like that, but you want to mention the keywords in your copy on all the channels, including YouTube, because they’re all veering more toward this interest-based targeting instead of hashtags. People used to search hashtags or follow hashtags, and that was an active way of putting your content in front of them. It’s evolving, and it’ll be more intuitive and more, you know, if you’re a person who regularly or a brand that regularly uses these specific keywords in your post content, then people are going to understand the algorithms are going to understand that people that are interested in that should be fed your content. So it’s a little bit different, but it’s also the same, it’s also very similar. So same thing, only different, right?

KILEY: Right. The same but different, yeah, exactly. 

LORI: As it should be. What else you got? 

14:39

KILEY: My next one is specific to Instagram. We run into a few situations, particularly recently, which has been really interesting, where we are working with clients that are hyper fixated on their grid on Instagram. And you know, while we totally get that aesthetics matter, it shouldn’t be the forefront of an Instagram strategy, and that’s for a few reasons. We’re never going to tell you to post ugly content. We’re never going to tell you to post content that looks bad in your grid. However, when you hyper fixate on building a pretty grid, you lose sight of where people are going to be in taking your content, and that is in their scroll on their homepage. The amount of time that your audience spends there versus just scrolling through old posts on your grid is astronomically more. Honestly, the amount of time people are going to spend looking at your grid is so few and far between. Unless, yeah, unless you’re running a visit our page ad and so you’re getting a bunch of, you know, really timely clicks to one spot. But even then, if you’re prioritizing consistently appealing content, you’re not going to have an ugly grid. We’ve seen this with, you know, those puzzle piece kind of posts that come together on…

LORI: Oh, that used to be such a big deal, didn’t it?

KILEY: It used to be such a thing. And my take on it is that Taylor Swift can do it. You don’t have to. You’re not Taylor Swift. You know what I mean?

Lori: Exactly. Yeah. 

16:21

Kiley: So what something like that does is it clouds your audience’s feed because you have to post it so fast that it’s A, almost annoying, and B, it looks weird. The only way it looks normal is when it comes together and somebody’s looking at your grid. And then, even then, it’s only aligned every three posts to look normal on your grid. So yeah, getting hyper fixated on what your actual page looks like, we just kind of take it as a missed opportunity to really focus on what’s going to get clicks on your audience’s homepage, and that’s ultimately what matters far more than the look and feel of your grid. Should you stick to brand colors? Yes. Should you prioritize good thumbnails? Absolutely. But by trying to make too many things come together that ultimately, you know, once it’s been three weeks since you’ve posted something, nobody’s thinking about it anymore. So it just doesn’t matter how well it fits on your grid anymore. So yeah, it’s interesting because I think that maybe, you know, in past years, I could get behind it a little bit more when those puzzles were, you know, a much more prevalent trend and things like that. But it’s been really interesting how much we’ve run into concerns about the grid this year compared to how little it really matters if you’re doing everything right, generally speaking.

17:51

LORI: Yeah, it is interesting. And the thing that we noticed is that I think they may be through the transition now that Instagram photos are no longer square, they’re now the vertical format, and so it’s virtually impossible to get a beautiful kind of puzzle piece to fit together in the grid. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing that you can do to make your page stand out. And I’ll give you an example. I was working with a cancer center. It was a radiology center about three or four years ago, and we did a bunch of competitive research, and we found that Dana Farber, at that time, Cancer Center, it’s a really well-known cancer center in the US, had actually taken made their Instagram page, smiling patients, and it was just like casual headshots of smiling patients. And when you pulled up their grid, it was almost overwhelming. And how cool it was, because you just look at all these beautiful faces, and I’ve never forgotten that, because that was how you create a beautiful grid that just never is anything but that, right? Yeah. 

KILEY: Well, the thing about that too, is that it also appeals to the scroll, right? Just the random scroll, because it stands out by fitting it. I mean, every tip we’ve covered so far, really, you’re standing out by fitting in because you’re, you know, you’re using those smiling faces and all of that together. There’s a way, exactly what Lori said, there’s ways to make a cohesive, beautiful grid that stands out and gets attention that also works in the algorithms of your audience, in their mid-scroll on their homepage.

19:39

LORI: Yep, absolutely, absolutely, what we tell clients, and this sounds really self-serving, but it’s not, I promise you, is that if you combine social media with a monthly email and regular recurring content on a well-built and well-designed SEOed website, you can’t lose. Those three things work together in a really nice way, and you can repurpose content. So if a newsletter, a monthly newsletter, just sounds like too much, well, consider that social posts make great newsletter stories because they’re short, they’re quick, and they link to somewhere on your website, hopefully, right? And so you want to put regular updates on your website, and we do, for example, we do digital marketing for SandCastles, Henry Ford SandCastles Grief Support. And we do the website, the emails, the social media. And we’ll put a blog article up which turns into, you know, social content, which turns into newsletter content, and it just all flows really well and helps us reach our audience repetitively. Because today, things are not that much different than they were back in the day when they said that a consumer had to see your television commercial five times before they’d even remember your name. So you need to hit them in a lot of different ways to really create that connection and community through your digital marketing. So, yeah, that’s one of my all-time favorites. So go ahead, Kiley, what you got?

21:17

KILEY: My next one is about tailoring your content to different platforms. We’ll see, you know, whenever we go through strategies, we look at all, you know, this long list of competitors for whatever industry we’re creating the strategy for, and we’re constantly looking at what our current clients’ competitors are doing, what works for them, what can we make work for us. And something that I’ve noticed a lot, like, way more than I think that I should with people that are obviously working with digital agencies or have a social media manager, is the amount of brands that keep their content entirely consistent across all channels. And that’s not to say that you can’t repurpose content throughout, right? A lot of what works on Facebook might work on Instagram and etcetera. But when you start getting into YouTube and LinkedIn and formerly Twitter now X, a lot of that content requires a little bit of customization to be really effective on each channel. 

So let’s say, you know, we’ll go, we’ll go back to SandCastles, for example. We just brought them up. If they are recruiting volunteers for an upcoming event, the way they are going to do that throughout and across each channel that they’re on is not the same, right? So, what’s going to get the attention of potentially interested volunteers on Facebook is not going to be the same as if they’re trying to do it on LinkedIn. The audiences across all of these platforms and consumer behaviors are just so vastly different that it’s not to say that you can’t use the majority of your content throughout every channel that you’re on, but by making a few copy tweaks or maybe slightly editing a graphic, or adding a little something to a photo, or using a video on Instagram as a reel, instead, making those little edits and specifications to make it work on individual platforms is so worth the little bit of extra effort that it takes to get the ROI and to really serve the purpose of a specific post or a series of content or a campaign, or whatever the case may be, because otherwise it’s just falling flat. You know, what’s going to work on Facebook, Instagram is not going to work on LinkedIn, is not going to work on YouTube, is not going to work on TikTok. So going that extra mile is super important.

Lori: It looks lazy, too, to me.

Kiley: Yes.

LORI: But on the other hand, the channels will let you do it, right? The one I see the most of is Instagram being posted on Facebook, and it’s got 30 hashtags. And it says link in bio, and it just is… lazy. 

KILEY: Or vice versa, with Facebook and Instagram, and then Instagram having the link exactly. You don’t need a bunch of hashtags on Facebook. You don’t need links on Instagram. Just even something as simple as that, make those little tweaks just to showcase that you’re taking the time to customize for who it is you’re trying to reach on different channels.

24:38

LORI: And here’s my last one, is that if you’re not taking advantage of stories on Instagram, you are making a mistake. And I know how it happens because a lot of us, we schedule our Instagram content through a scheduler. We may respond to comments and questions from Instagram with a scheduling platform that has the community management function, but there’s nothing better than going to Instagram on mobile and sharing those stories with stickers and things like that. You’ll reach so many people that are not your followers, which I love, and it’s an easy way to expand your reach way beyond what you will get simply by posting content on Instagram. And then you can add them to the highlights, and if someone is really interested, they can dig deeper when they get to your page. But I’m really surprised by how many brands miss out on stories, and I think it’s because going to mobile, you know, who wants to use it, but it’s really important, as a community manager, to make sure that you utilize that particular feature of Instagram just to increase your reach.

25:50

KILEY: My last one, don’t overlook your community management on every single platform. The amount of people when we’re doing our audits and looking at competitors that we see that are not responding to comments, not actively going into their messaging platforms and things like that, is alarming because social media is a regular part of so many people’s lives that it should be an accessible point for consumers to reach brands that they engage with, right? When you don’t build that bridge, but then you also expect your consumers to engage with you back on social media, it’s, you know, you’re asking more than you’re willing to give. And that’s not necessarily fair to people who ultimately you’re asking for dollars from in whatever industry. So, even just having somebody regularly go into each platform, once in the morning, once in the evening, just to make sure there’s no questions that need to be answered, or if you get a happy customer review in the comments on a Facebook post, respond to them, make them feel good that you saw it and you’re grateful that they shared their experience and engage with them. It’s a win-win scenario, right? Because by not doing it, you’re making a lot of customers feel ignored, and by doing it, you’re making a lot of customers feel very heard.

LORI: Yeah, and I’ll add, the algorithm loves it. If you talk to, we’ll talk about Brenda Miller, because we love Brenda Miller. So Brenda Miller is our go-to expert on LinkedIn, and she’ll tell you that when anyone comments on your content there, you respond with five or more words to that comment. Don’t just like it. Respond to it with words. The algorithm on LinkedIn loves that. They love the community aspect of that and that content will get shown to more people. So if you log on in the morning and there are 16 comments, spend the time to respond to every single one, it does pay off, huge.

So thank you again for joining us for this episode of Rev and Reach. We really hope to share things that you can do right now to increase the effectiveness of your social media marketing effort. So I’m Lori Jo Vest with Kiley Metcalfe. You can reach us both on LinkedIn. We’re Open Networkers there, and you can also check out our website at popspeeddigital.com to find out more about us, what we do, and get in touch there if we can help you with your digital marketing. Take care, and we’ll be back soon.

Rev & Reach Episode 8 Transcript

00:08

LORI: Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest. Welcome to this episode of Rev and Reach, where we share ways we get ROI using social media and digital marketing for our clients at PopSpeed Digital. So this episode is called “To TikTok or Not: Is TikTok Really Necessary for Your Business?” And I’m here with Kiley Metcalfe. Kiley is our third in charge at PopSpeed Digital Marketing and a social media specialist. So say hi, Kiley.

KILEY: Hi, everybody.

LORI: So we are going to alternate talking about TikTok. So here’s what I think about TikTok. I love TikTok. I try to stay off of it because it’s so addictive, and so many people are on it, creating awesome content. It is really—I mean, are you on TikTok frequently, Kiley?

KILEY: I was. I was on TikTok all the time. I had to get rid of it. The other thing about TikTok, which is true for every social media site, is that you’re inundated with information pertaining to your life.

LORI: Oh, yeah, yep.

KILEY: I’m currently pregnant with my first child. I think I’ve said that, so I was inundated with way too much information. So I’m on TikTok hiatus, personally, but I love it. 

LORI: Good and bad information will come your way. However, in most cases, it will be entertaining, because TikTok is entertaining. Took the world by storm back right around the pandemic, right? So do you need to be there as a brand? Should every business, every brand, every person who wants to promote themselves as an influencer be on TikTok? Well, let’s start with a real basic question. Who’s your audience? If your target market is under 35 years old, you should be on TikTok. If you are selling business to consumer, business to business is still best handled over on LinkedIn. But if you’re B2C, and you’re good at creating the kind of content that TikTok likes, then you absolutely should be there.

However, if you’re not good at creating that kind of content, which we’re going to get into in a little bit, and you can’t be consistent, and you can’t hit the goal of being entertaining or, you know, at least informative in a way that’s really engaging, don’t bother, right? Because there’s a lot to consider. And I’m going to hand this over to Kiley to talk about, it’s not just should you be on TikTok or not, but can you create the right type of content, right?

03:00

KILEY: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s no secret exactly what Lori said, that around the time of the pandemic, I know TikTok started a bit earlier than that, but around the time that COVID hit, everybody’s inside, got nothing to do but watch TV and hang out on their phones. TikTok took the entire social media world by storm and changed the way things are done. We’ve seen since then Instagram Reels pop up, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels. They exist everywhere, and it’s all essentially the same type of content. Do people live on TikTok? Yes. Do people still live on Instagram and Facebook also? Yes. So it’s really about considering that type of content and what it looks like.

It’s those short, hard-hitting, entertaining, engaging videos. Are there some other things you can do on TikTok with the sliding carousels? Yes, but at the heart of it, let’s focus on those videos, right? And that type of content is what is working best on every single other platform presently. Whether you’re talking about YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels—I know LinkedIn even has a scrolling video section now—so it’s everywhere, right? And if you’re able to put together engaging video content in that format, understand how it works and produce it on a consistent basis in a way that really tells your brand story and builds that bridge between you and your audience, you need to not be missing out on the opportunity of TikTok.

And it’s also really good to consider that that type of content is so universal now, so if you’re going to take the time to do it on TikTok, then you’re also giving yourself extra Instagram content, extra Facebook content, extra YouTube Short content, in some cases, maybe some LinkedIn content.

So the reward versus the doubt about whether or not you need to be there can be so great. If you decide to launch a TikTok effort and it doesn’t go your way, or you find that the type of audience that you’re really trying to reach isn’t there, then you kill the effort. You know what I mean? No harm, no foul. But it’s important to look at whether or not you’re going to be there from the lens of is this type of short video content that’s engaging, that catches the eye, that stops an audience member mid-scroll, and gets their attention. If you can produce that, it’s absolutely worth considering.

05:44

LORI: Absolutely, absolutely. And I would say TikTok took all the platforms’ videos to task. Because what used to fly on the other channels will no longer fly. People expect TikTok-level entertainment and engagement, they just expect you to do something that’s going to get their attention. Another thing to consider, if you’re looking at should you be on TikTok, is your brand’s reputation, voice, character? Is it right for TikTok?

And some people will say, you know, you have to be funny, you have to be snarky to make any headway on TikTok, but I’m not sure I agree with that. I think that’s a really great place to go with your content if you can, like Scrub Daddy. I love Scrub Daddy. You’ll always hear me talk about Scrub Daddy’s TikTok. It’s the little scrubby thing with the smiley face. And they do the most hilarious things. They do great stuff. You may find that there’s something you can do that’s appealing on TikTok, that’s not snarky, that’s not funny.

But a really good question to ask is, would your audience trust you more or less after seeing your TikTok content? An example I had, we worked in the dental category frequently, and we were looking at competitors of one of our practices, and this guy is a prosthodontist surgeon, and he had a reel where he was putting teeth he had pulled into a little circle on a tray with bloody stuff hanging off of them. And it was disgusting to me. I wouldn’t trust him more, because I would think he was into cruelty or something, right? I would trust him less.

However, there’s another brand I know of. I can’t say I recall who they are, because I’m not in the market for a private jet. But there’s a company that either sells partial membership, so you kind of share ownership of a private jet, a private jet service, or a company that sells private jets, but they have an executive that’s just a real badass. I mean, he is just out there. He’s got a huge personality, and they follow him around. He happens to be in one of these jets, of course, in the seat, or getting on it, or getting off of it, and he gives really hard-hitting business advice. That is a really cool way to use TikTok and videos. And it’s TikTok-friendly because it’s got some snark to it. It’s got big energy. And it kind of breaks the mold on what you’d expect of an executive giving advice on social.

So if your brand voice can evolve, or there’s something that you do that is entertaining—I mean, let’s talk about the road company that stripes the road. All they have is just video of the stripe being laid down by the machine. And it is mesmerizing, right? So you may have something like that that you do that will let you be a star on TikTok, so consider that before you decide to skip it, right?

09:04

KILEY: Absolutely. I think, moving on to our next point, I think having it really goes to show how important it is to have a team behind you to support an effort, because one of the biggest considerations is the undertaking of TikTok, and whether or not you have the bandwidth for it. I know bandwidth is a buzzword, but it is so important because the algorithm on TikTok is tough. It’s very, very tough, which it has to be, right? There’s a niche for everything, it’s very competitive, billions of people that all have unique interests. And we’re tailoring every person’s “For You” page to exactly what they want to see, right? So it has to be a bit cutthroat, but at the same time, if you’re doing it right, it can be really rewarding.

So if you are not able to consistently, particularly in the beginning, get new content and consistently engaging and solid content on TikTok four to five times a week, I would say at a bare minimum three, you’re not going to see that growth at the rate that you might need to make the effort worth it. You really need to be there on a regular basis. Some people post multiple times a day on TikTok to build their following, so it really is quite the undertaking.

But again, that algorithm can be so rewarding because there are billions of people there, and there is literally, not exaggerating, a niche for everything on TikTok. If your brand is working in any A-through-Z type of industry, obviously, there’s a handful of people there interested in that topic. You’re not the only people in the world that care about what you’re doing.

So I think if you can make that commitment and, you know, put forth a team that is really focused on building that effort, building a following. Because once you get to—I believe the threshold is 1,000 followers on TikTok—then you can start monetizing. Then you can start including links. It makes your advertising dollars a lot more well spent. You’ll see that ROI bit more. So if you can just hit those targets and really put your head down and get there and make that content, you’re going to see worthwhile results there.

And then again, like we said before, you have all of that backlogged content, because you really shouldn’t be posting multiple times a day on Instagram Reels, not really the same type of algorithm. But if you’ve used all that TikTok content, it makes your life a little easier on your other channels when you have that library to pull from.

So is it a lot of work and a massive undertaking? Especially at the beginning? Yes, it is. There’s no other way to slice it. You have to be committed. But is it worth it if your audience is there? Yes, I think so.

12:25
LORI: Absolutely. And I think this is the advice we would give about most channels, however, when we enter a business relationship with a company where we’re serving as their marketing agency, we recommend the standbys, the Instagrams, the YouTubes, Facebook, LinkedIn. TikTok, not so much, because it’s so specific.

If you feel like you really want to give TikTok a shot, make sure you do it right and you give it 60 to 90 days. Don’t expect to see results in two weeks. Do everything you need to do to be successful, including four to five times a week, spend some money. Look at your metrics. Have a landing page or a link or something so you know what’s happening there. Pay attention. Test it and see what happens.

If you make a 90-day commitment and then walk away because you got likes and stuff, but nobody went to your website. You didn’t get anything sold. There was nothing tangible that came from it. Give it up. No harm, no foul. You can walk away from a social channel, just let it go dark and come back later, or don’t come back at all. It’s okay to do that because if it’s not going to work, why spend the energy? You may be better served on a different platform, but if you can find a good angle, you may find TikTok is where you want to be.

So I would give it 60 to 90 days and make sure you strategize and really give it your all for those 60 to 90 days, rather than just kind of throwing it out there to see what happens, and then you’ll know for sure.

14:15

KILEY: I think to build off of that too. Another thing that’s really interesting about TikTok is that it is pretty unpredictable. I would say, in our experience there with our clients, you know, we’ll say over and over again, you can’t just decide one day that you want to go viral and then go viral and virality, ROI, and blah, blah, blah. Is it fun to go viral on TikTok? Yeah, it is. You know, it is what it is, but it’s really interesting.

I remember there’s a client we formerly worked with. We’re not with them anymore, and they were really heavy on TikTok. They had the type of stuff that we could put together for them there was so fitting. And I would say, yeah, it was absolutely worth the grind there for them to be successful there.

But I remember putting together videos for them, and, you know, oh, this one I’m super happy with, and I feel like this is the best one we’ve done yet. And it’d be dismal. It would be like bomb, yeah. I’m like, what is going on? And then there’d be another one that, you know, of course, we’re never putting together bad content, or we’re never going to run with content that we’re not proud of, especially on behalf of our clients, yeah.

But, you know, it’s something maybe we’re less excited about, or I was less proud of than this other one, and it would go crazy. It’d go crazy. A lot of factors work into that. If you’re using audio that’s presently trending, or if you’re jumping on a certain trend and things like that, it ups your chances a little bit. But it’s so funny to see how the algorithm or your viewers pick and choose what’s worth their time and what isn’t.

So it’s another thing—testing versus guessing—because you never really know. You want to see a bit of what works. Maybe, because I know this is—I haven’t looked at Scrub Daddy’s TikTok in a minute, but I know a big thing they used to do all the time was jump on every trend that was fitting, right? Use that trending audio and make it work with their brand. Surprisingly, so many trends did.

If you have a niche like that where your brand is, we’re going to stick with what’s trending and that seems to work for us, then once you try it once and continue down that path, you figure out what works. Particularly in the beginning, I think, kind of using, again, not guessing, but experimenting, because it’s one of those platforms where it might really surprise you what goes really well and what doesn’t go so well.

17:02

LORI: Yep. So make sure you’re trying enough variety in your content. Variety is really important. And the last bit of advice I would have is, if you are considering if you should be there, is to go there, spend time there. Maybe you need to give yourself a limit an hour a day or something because it’s really crazy. However, spend some time on it so that you can see what is happening there. Get familiar with it. Look at what brands are doing. Look up your favorite brands. Look up your competitors. Look up if you’re an accounting firm, look up accounting. Look up tax accounting. See what’s out there before you decide what you are going to do.

You may see some really interesting things that you can make your own and trends that you might be really suited for. You can’t strategize and plan what to do if you don’t spend time on the channel. So I have a timer on my phone that I use once in a while to keep me off.

So that’s what we’ve got for you—TikTok or not, right? We’re going to end with a checklist. Do you think you should be on TikTok or not? Question number one: Do you have a product or service that can be used to create personality-driven, engaging, entertaining, deeply moving content? Are you targeting Gen Z or young millennials? They are there. Can you commit to creating the content that needs to be created? Or will you do two weeks and then you’ll run out of content? You just, you know, you kind of let it float. Don’t do that. That’s not good for anybody.

Do you have someone on your team or a partner agency who can work with you to understand the trends and help you come up with a plan to create and execute that content that really makes a difference for you? If you can say yes to a few of those questions, it might be time to give it a chance. We are here to help you.

Of course, I gotta tell you that at popspeeddigital.com, you can get a hold of us. We do social media, email marketing, website development, and SEO content for websites, and we do it with an ROI focus. So we’re a little bit different than a lot of the digital marketing shops that are out there right now.

You can reach out to either me or Kiley on LinkedIn if you’d like to connect with us there. Suggest a topic that you’d like us to cover. Ask us questions you’d like us to answer in this podcast. We’d love to hear from you. So that’s what we’ve got for you. Thank you so much.

Again, thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you in about a week. Take care.

KILEY: Bye, everybody.

Rev & Reach Episode 7 Transcript

00:08
LORI: Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest. Welcome to this episode of Rev and Reach from PopSpeed Digital Marketing. I’m Lori Jo Vest, and I’m here with Kiley Metcalfe. I am the founding partner of PopSpeed Digital, and Kiley was our first employee. We do social media, all kinds of digital marketing, websites, email marketing, etc., and we are here to share our secrets. How do we get ROI from our efforts for our clients? There’s always something new to talk about, so we’re doing this every week to help you create and get better results from your efforts.

Today, we’re all about organic content. It’s just such a weird thing these days. For those of us who’ve been in social media for 16 or 17 years, organic content used to rule. I mean, Kiley, we would put things out on Facebook, and we would get so many views, and it was basically a free-for-all. You would target different people, and you could target, actually, with your organic posts. You could target a state, you could target audiences.

KILEY: Oh my gosh, I didn’t know that.

LORI: Yeah! And it didn’t cost anything. Over the past, I don’t know, I’d say maybe 10 years, maybe 8 years, all of the channels have decided that if you want to get reach, you’re either gonna need some type of hook that really gets people going and go viral, which is very rare and can never be predicted or expected.

If someone ever says, “Make this go viral,” slap ‘em! It’s not something you can do. We can never guarantee virality. But organic content these days has a much different purpose and a significantly lower reach. So, Kiley, what have you seen?

02:15
KILEY: I think it’s funny because a lot of the time you’ll hear us say that organic content is dead. It’s not dead in the sense that it doesn’t have a place in your content mix. It’s dead in the sense that if you solely rely on organic content, you’re not going to see ROI. So now, in contrast to what it used to be that Lori took us through, organic content is not filler content, but in a way, it is. It should still have an important purpose, it should still send an important message, and it should still be very intentional.

But the point of organic content is to give something for your audience members to see and to look at, and a place to learn more about you once they get there by seeing your promoted content. It’s for those people that see your ads and really want to dive deeper and continue to get to know you better.

03:13
LORI: And I do think, too, depends on the channel, depends on the client. There’s so many variables. And, one example, we have a client, a global client, that targets automotive engineers. And once in a while, we’ll put something up that has, you know it’s always a leader’s face or people at a trade show—it’s always smiling faces. It might get, you know, 700 to 1,000 views. That’s amazing. That’s a great example of organic content getting some nice views. However, the vast majority of the organic content that we share gets 140 to 200 views. While that sounds really disappointing, and yeah it can be, it also gives your people that are new to you, a place to land.

So you’ll see in some of the analytics that we share that there is an analytic called profile views, and that’s when someone sees one of your social posts, goes, “Huh? Who are these people?” and they go to your profile page. And that gives them the opportunity to go through and see all the things that you want them to know about that you have posted about on your page.

However, promoting your key content in one of two ways is critical. Either you take one or two posts a month that are really solid and serve your goals and push those with a lot of money, or you can put a little bit of money on several different posts. That will get all of yours views. All of your engagement. Because what happens too when you promote, you can promote to specific demographics and interests. So you will get higher engagement than you do on just standard organic in most cases. I know sometimes, Kiley, we’ll use organic results to choose the ad that we run. Can you talk a little bit about that?

05:14
KILEY: Absolutely. With a handful of our clients, when there’s not something really timely going on, like if we’re not, you know for our nonprofit clients we don’t have an active fundraiser or we’re not looking for current volunteers or donors or whatever the case may be, what we do then, is really look at what’s performing best organically. That’s a good indicator that people are interested, and that organic engagement is an important signal that more people might be interested beyond who already follows us and engages with us. So that content, paying attention to your analytics in that sense and what’s working organically, is a great benchmark for where to start when you’re choosing promotions.

Whether for our nonprofits, if it’s resources pertaining to the cause that they fundraise for, and spreading the word more about that. And in turn, that gets more people to their website, assuming the ad is successful, and builds their audience. So it’s really a win-win because you’re giving something to your audience and people beyond your currently active audience, and potentially getting those new audience members in return.

And the same goes, really, for any industry, right? We’ll probably, every episode, go back to our dental clients for at least some reason or another. Let’s say, you know, our calendar is full, right? What a great problem to have, but we’re not actively looking to fill slots for free consultations in the month of June. What we might do is promote 101 content about dental hygiene. If we’re engaging enough, and it looks like people are really interested in the random tips that we’re putting out, we’ll promote that to a larger audience, and continue during those slow times when it comes to promoted ads, to build our audience for when we really are looking to fill our books up once again.

And I think that—Lori you said something earlier about how your organic content is like your landing base, like where you want the audience members to land—I think a really important thing to consider, particularly for people starting their social effort from scratch, something that we’ll say anytime we’re building a brand new audience for a client, is we can’t do promotions until you have that base, right?

It’s funny, because we’ve worked with people in the past who are like, “Oh, well, we just started posting. We have two posts on our Instagram. Why are we not promoting yet?” Well, because, why don’t we backlog the page a little bit so- because at that point, the most important thing to do is build up your following, right? So why don’t we build up your page, beef it up a bit with content that kind of explains who you are, what the goals are, what you want the audience to take from the continued effort that we’re going to keep working towards, and then start promoting so they really have the chance to get to know more about you, the brand, the organization, whatever the case may be, and then make more informed decisions, right? Because you want to make it as easy as possible for the consumer. So if they don’t have to leave the platform to learn more, don’t make them. So that organic content? Yeah, it’s really for those audience members that want to learn more but don’t want to work that hard to do it.

09:01
LORI: Now, there is an exception to every rule, right?

KILEY: Yes.

LORI: So let’s talk about the exceptions! The exceptions that I’m noticing lately are specifically related to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. Instagram Reels, when you’re doing organic content, if you put stories or reels out, you will get a significant amount of people that are not your followers as viewers of that content. So if you have the opportunity to put up shorter clips, video clips, and put them into those streams, the YouTube Shorts, or the stories and reels on Instagram, those, if they’re good enough, strong enough, appealing enough, can really shoot up your organic views and engagement. But again, you’ve got to have strong content. You’ve got to have things that are going to really engage the typical audience on those channels in order to push up those views. Because what pushes up views is likes, follows, you know, all the things, all the engagement that people have with your content. That is what tells the big bad algorithm to show your content to more people. So don’t put up boring content, and your organic content will get more reach. I mean, that’s just kind of a fact of life, right?

10:28
KILEY: I think that’s such a misconception too. It’s important to not get lazy with your organic content, and it’s really easy to do as promoted content, paid content, continues to grow and grow and grow, and how necessary it is for building a following, increasing reach, engagement, all of the things. It can get really easy to overlook what it is you’re pushing out organically. And we get that because it’s not going to be necessarily shown to potentially hundreds of thousands of people with money behind it. But again, it goes back to that it’s kind of the foundation of your page and your image. You want people to be interested, and you want to entice people, once they land on your page, to follow you, continue to learn more, interact, maybe comment, share it to somebody that they know that might be more interested in it.

By not being intentional and very, very thoughtful with your organic content, you lose out on that, right? So you could have a great ad that takes somebody to a page that’s kind of clouded with boring or unnecessary or lazy-looking imagery and other content, and then the ad loses all of its spark. So you got the click to the page, great. What did they do when they get there? And that’s where ROI really comes from. So as tempting as it might be to put a ton of extra thought into your ads and a lot less thought into your organic content, it’s a balance, and it’s a really important balance, because, of course, you know, your best content is more than likely going to be your ads, right? What’s most engaging, what’s most important for new people to know about you, but you want to maintain that brand image and kind of harness that loyalty from the new audience members by making it obvious that you know you care about what they think of your brand and your page. Because if you don’t, why should they? Right?

LORI: Exactly, exactly. And the thing is, too, a lot of the like campaigns that we run, and a like campaign is when you are using that ad to push people to like your page, to follow you, and those people end up on your page. So you want to make sure you don’t look like you just got there, right? We just showed up. We have one post, and it’s the post we used to entice you to go here. You want to have a solid base of good, strong content. Because that’s what leads them to hit that like button, which then puts your content, your organic content, in their feed, or is more likely to do so.

I have to say LinkedIn is a lot less algorithm-driven. There are things that you can do to help get your organic content from LinkedIn into people’s streams, like setting up arrangements with your employees where they go in and share the content from the page. And I’ve seen a company do this really well recently, called Anderson Material Handling, and what they’ve done is they’ve got the salespeople going in and sharing Tech Tuesday, so they go in and share a selfie with the text so it appreciates, gives the employee some appreciation, and it shows humanity of the company, and it really grows their organic reach on those posts. So there are things you can do on LinkedIn that are a lot easier than the other channels, right?

14:14
KILEY: I think another thing on LinkedIn too that’s really fun and it matters on other channels, but not as much on LinkedIn, from what we’ve seen, is comments. By getting, like, a lot of comments in your LinkedIn content, it can really start to push it out to more people, because then, you know, if I comment on Lori’s post on LinkedIn, a lot of people that I’m connected with then on LinkedIn will see Lori’s post because they’re connected to me, and I commented on it.

And a really good example of that is a relatively new client to us. They are a young professionals networking group that’s kind of a sub-branch of a larger networking organization specific to certain industries. Pretty quickly after we launched that effort, you know, you hear about that and think like, you know, it might take a bit of time to grow something like that. We pretty quickly built a bit of a following on LinkedIn, simply because the people that we work with were really engaged. When we told them, you know, if we want to build this up quickly, go ahead and comment, tag other people that show up to your events, get senior leadership and board members of the overarching organization to comment, to show it to their networks, and it worked. And they’re still engaged, and they stay commenting, and you get, you know, bigger names in the industry, sharing our stuff.

It’s been really cool to see that because we’re not really heavily doing much besides organic content for them, and so to watch their following, because, in my opinion—Lori, let me know if you agree—I think one of the hardest things on social to do is grow an audience from scratch, create a brand new page, it’s and create a brand new following, kind of out of thin air. And you know, we’re continuing to grow, of course, you know, you never want to stop that growth, but in just a couple of months, by indicating to them the importance of commenting and sharing the content, we’ve built a pretty quick and fast and engaged audience over there.

16:24
LORI: Absolutely. Yeah, that is a really interesting client because it’s difficult to find the content that’s just perfect for them. That gets the attention of the people either trying to get into the industry, or the young people that are in it now that they want to retain because, just like most industries, you’ve got to draw the young employees to keep the industry healthy, right? It’s not easy, but social—it’s another thing that social media can help with. It’s working. So, yeah, so you want to do that when you can. So anything else we want to say about organic content?

17:01
KILEY: I think it might be pretty important to talk about why you can’t only rely on organic content. You know, we’ve talked about how significant ads are, but I think, going back to that follower growth and when you have a specific thing that you need results for, how important those ads are. So, organic content, how do we feel about it? What are we seeing? We’re seeing that building that landing base, that foundation for your page, is really important. But we’re also seeing that it can’t be the only source of content that you run if you want to increase your follower count, if you are a nonprofit and you need a fundraiser, organizers, or attendees, or donors, or volunteers, or if you are a dental practice and you need qualified leads. Relying on organic content isn’t going to get you there. It’s just not. It’s going to get put out to a lot of your current followers, which, depending on your industry, most often, is people that have kind of already gotten what they need from you, right? So you’re not reaching anybody new.

18:09
LORI: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it also has a halo effect on the rest of your content, when you’re paying for ad spend. And I’ll even go as far as to say this, if you are an advertiser on Facebook, you can actually get them on the phone. We had a client that—they do everything organic, and I’m sure they get some results, but we handle the offices that don’t do organic. So we do two of their brands, we do social media for them, and they got locked out of their main Facebook account, and because they weren’t an advertiser, there was nowhere for them to go. As an advertiser, you can figure out how to go into the back end and actually get a human being and have them call you.

So there’s another reason that you want to be, you know, on Meta anyway, you know, it gives you a little bit more pull when you need to talk to somebody. And just the ability to talk to somebody when something goes wrong is really important. So I would recommend even just a little ad spend. $250 can make a difference. $2,000 can make a world of difference. With $2,000 a month, you can have hundreds of thousands of people see your content. With $250, you can have thousands of people see your content, depending on what it is.

19:33
KILEY: Exactly. I think that’s something that scares people away from ads, is that they think they need to have this massive budget to see results, or for it to be worth it. And that’s just not true. There are a handful of clients for us. You know, one of the clients that I work on their ads, they’re $10 a day. I mean, think of it. That’s $365 a year. To a lot of brands, that’s not really that much. And sure, we’ve worked with the clients before that are, you know, giving us $4,000 a month to spend, and is there a difference in the results? For sure, but even that $10 a day budget— I know, Lori, I think it was on LinkedIn you worked with one that was even less than that, and you still see results. So whatever you have to throw at it, try it. I would really, really, really implore brands to give it a try because I don’t think if you’re doing it right, or if your team is doing it right, that you’ll be disappointed with the results that you see at all.

20:30
LORI: No, you will not. You will not. Yeah, and it’s really interesting. Of course, we’re the experts, so we’re happy to help you with that. Meta’s back end is a dumpster fire. You hear us say that all the time in the dumpster fire, but it’s our dumpster fire, and we know how to navigate around it. So if you need help, get in touch.

So that’s what we have for you today around organic content. We could talk social media day and night, 24/7, but we will let you go back to your world, and we’ll be back again in about a week with another episode. But in the meantime, we have a website at popspeeddigital.com, if you’d like to know more about us, and Kiley and I are both open networkers on LinkedIn, so hit us up there if you would like to hear more about what we do as a company or how you can connect to us. Please feel free to reach out to us there as well. So we’ll see you again soon. Thanks for joining us today.

KILEY: Bye, everybody.

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.

Rev & Reach Episode 5 Transcript

00:08

LORI: Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Rev and Reach. I’m Lori Jo Vest. I am the partner and co-founder of PopSpeed Digital Marketing, LLC. I’m here with Kiley Metcalf. Kiley was our first employee besides my husband and I with our little agency here.

And today we want to talk about why we love social media. As if you needed to hear it. It’s getting such a bad rap and I hate it. It drives me absolutely nuts. Because, yes, I think there are a lot of things about social that are kind of ick, but I think you can curate your own experience to make it something wonderful. And it also can be used to do amazing things, and we’re going to tell you about a few of those today too. So say hi, Kiley.

KILEY: Hi everybody. Happy to be back!

LORI: Yeah, we’re excited to start. And Kiley, you ideated this episode and you were talking about our kidney clients, so let’s talk a little bit about that.

KILEY: So I want to say it’s been over two years now. You might have to fact-check me on that, but it’s been a couple of years since we were contacted kind of randomly, kind of out of the blue by somebody who was looking for some assistance. She needed a new kidney, a living kidney donor, and wanted to use social media to find someone. Find somebody willing to get tested, go through the process and donate their kidney to her. And since then we’ve come on at no charge to her, just something that felt really important to us and a really special thing as a team that we could be involved with.

And ever since then we’ve been working on finding her a living kidney donor. And somewhere along the way, we found out that somebody in our network, their husband was in a similar situation, needed a living kidney donor and his situation was a bit more urgent than the original woman that we’re still working with. And so he needed one a bit faster. And with social media and the creation of a website and a place to send people that needed more information, we found him a living kidney donor and now he’s happy and healthy and living life. And it’s just, I mean, it’s crazy. It’s really crazy. 

02:42

But it’s something that I think goes a long way in showing that social media works and the impact that social media can have, not just on building connection and making friends because I know Lori can really speak to that, like with our LinkedIn community, but on saving lives too.

And it’s something that we’ve been so happy to be a part of. We’ve worked with some—I’m sure we’ll touch on them—with some other non-profit clients that we’ve worked for for free and achieved some really great things and been involved in some really great missions that are important to us and we think have really made a difference.

And honestly, in a lot of ways, those are our favorite to work with because it not only is why we love social media, but with corporate America and working in the business realm sometimes it feels—I’m sure many people can relate to this in similar situations—sometimes it feels just all about making money. So to be able to use social media and digital marketing as a tool to really impact people’s lives has been really special to our team.

03:54

LORI: Yeah, it’s huge. It’s absolutely huge. I’ll never forget getting that first call and it was actually Jo’s mother. Jo is the woman, I think it’s hero4jo.com and she has been- she knew she was going to need a kidney so we started working with her and I don’t know what it was, but when I first heard about the situation I was like we need to do this and we just need to do it.

And so we did and we took it on as a client. Not just here’s some stuff but we took her on as a client with a monthly status call and all the things that go with that. And as we got ramped up with her social and her website, one of our good friends that Kiley mentioned called me and she was going to have to do his, what do they call that process they do with-

KILEY: Dialysis? 

LORI: Dialysis, yeah, where they cleanse the blood, that kind of thing at home. So she was going to be his person doing his dialysis and she was getting trained. And I said well guess what, it’s a really weird coincidence. But we’re doing this kidney recruitment, living kidney donor recruitment thing. Join us. And, so, she’s a marketer too. She jumped on with us and we just bounced things around. We worked together and we exchanged assets, we did all kinds of things. Bob, her husband is two years anniversary with his new kidney, I think, just this spring. 

And Jo is to the point where she needs her living kidney donor now, and she has six people that they know about that have gone to the hospital to be tested in the last couple months. So the hospital doesn’t tell you. They’ve had 15 people, they’ve heard that they won’t tell you anything, if people are testing, that’s just their policy. And her mom, Jo’s mom said that six people told them. So they don’t know if there are more that didn’t tell them. So it’s just a really great way to, I think, get into the real positive aspects of social media and use our powers for good. Right? 

KILEY: Yeah, yeah. 

LORI: I mean, seriously. We have a client that we support in Michigan that has a literacy program for boys, black and brown boys three to seven and their families. It’s absolutely amazing. And we’re helping them raise money. So there’s these things that we do, and I highly recommend if you’re a business owner, always have, you know, at least one non-profit fundraising type, you know, give back to the community initiative on your books, no matter what you do. Because it’s good for your team, it’s good for your energy. I really think I tell people where we just do it because we want to pave our way to heaven. You know, we just want the karma that comes back. But there is more to it than that. There’s the, you know, the warm and fuzzy feelings, and the learning. I know so much more about kidney donation than I ever needed to know.

KILEY: Right, right.

LORI: And those skills that we learn and the things that we pick up and the ideas that come through inevitably create something larger down the line. You know, we’re learning things, we’re creating things, we’re enjoying it. You just don’t know where it’s going to lead to, honestly. I mean, that’s part of it. 

07:15

So, let’s talk about why we love social media, beyond how good it can be. What is it about social media that you love, Kiley?

KILEY: Well, I think it’s a great place for connection. You know, I know that we- I know, Lori, you have so many stories of people that you’ve met through LinkedIn that have become like good friends of yours and stuff in real life. I think, you know, the way that social media started- I remember creating my Facebook account and, oh my gosh, I think I was in seventh grade maybe. And oh, all my friends are here and oh, like, you know, my family, my older relatives are here and you know, it was created out of like a necessity to be more connected to the people that you care about. And I think that obviously in the last couple of decades, it’s taken a completely new form.

And, you know, the way that I view it now, working in social media is entirely different on a daily basis. You’ll find if you go to  my personal social media pages, I am not very active on them, which is so funny because I’m, you know, I’m- I live on them every single day. And I log off and I’m just not there. And it’s, it’s weird. But I think that, I think that at its core, the power of social media is good. I know, as Lori said there’s so many ways and obviously so many negatives, I guess, that have taken form since it’s continued to just absolutely skyrocket and take over the world.

But, you know, these kidney donation clients are a great example of, you know, just word of mouth, spreading the word about causes and how much of a difference it can make or, you know, making new friends and, you know, being in a community of people online that you would never be introduced to in the real world because they’re across the country or in a different country or because sometimes we just feel inherently more comfortable sharing things online than we do with people face to face. And, you know, whether, I’m sure there’s arguments that can be made on whether or not that’s a positive or a negative, but that’s the reality of our world right now, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative.

And, you know, so you learn things about people or know that you’re not alone in a certain situation. I think a good example for me is I’m currently pregnant with my first child and being able to search things on social media to find out, oh my God, is this normal? Or, oh, has anybody experienced this? And, you know, things like that can be really helpful.

LORI: Yeah. Absolutely.

KILEY: Yeah. So it’s- I think it’s really good at creating community and creating connection when you allow it. It’s possible to, you know, take that toxic turn. But I think that when you’re in control of the content that you’re seeing and, you know, you’re really able to kind of hone in on what it is that’s important to you, all of those benefits really come to the surface.

10:26

LORI: Yeah, I think so, too. I know that some examples that you mentioned earlier would, I’m sure, also show up in groups.

KILEY: Yeah, absolutely. 

When I had, I went through a breast cancer experience. Yay me. And there was a group of women that had the exact same type of aggressive cancer I had. And these two nurse oncologists ran the group. And this was on Facebook, and everybody in the group had this particular type.

And we could talk to each other and ask questions and support each other and, you know, you’d get scared and then somebody would come in that said, yeah, I’m a 10-year survivor and you’d be okay again. And, you know, I mean, so that’s pretty deep. I mean, that kind of thing is deep.

And you look at- I do mentoring for Imerman’s Angels out of Chicago, which connects survivors to patients just getting diagnosed too. And the first thing we do is connect on Facebook and then I can send rah rah notes. I can say, how you doing? And when they go to treatment and come home and it went okay, I can say yay, I see you. You know, over here cheering you on. So there’s, there’s so many things you can do at that very deep level on social media that we didn’t have as easy access to previously. So that’s another thing.

And that the amount of people that you can connect with that are like-minded. I know over on LinkedIn, we have so many people that we follow in the social media space that are just hilarious. They get it. We feel seen. It feels like a support group when I go over there sometimes. And just to know, again, that you’re not alone in the weirdness of your career choice can be really helpful. 

12:12

So we just wanted to jump on here today, talk about the positive aspects and the positive ways that people use social media. It’s not just a cesspool. If you don’t want to go on Facebook and see a bunch of negative politics or Instagram, unfollow those people, disconnect from those people, curate your feed so that it shows you what you want to see.

And if there’s ads showing up that you don’t want to see, report those or, you know, say, don’t show me these anymore. You know, click those buttons that let you do that. Because it is possible to have a really positive experience on social media on just about all channels. 

And there are times when I am just, you know, sitting on the sofa. Maybe I didn’t have a great day that day. And I’m on reels on Instagram. And I am just cracking up to the point where my husband’s like, what are you looking at? You know, because there’s so much great humor out there too. Right? So Kiley, bring us home.

13:08

KILEY: I think actually—it might take us into a new conversation, so I’m sorry—but I think you just made two key points that are another really, really interesting thing to touch on here. LinkedIn, for example, it’s the professional social media network and it’s all business, all the time.

But if you really take a look at some of the features that LinkedIn has, job postings, getting connected with high-level executives in an industry that you’re interested in looking for work. I can’t even- I know that the job market during, you know, the thick and the height of COVID when a lot of us were being laid off or losing our jobs, it wasn’t a great job market.

But imagine if LinkedIn wasn’t a resource during that time or, you know, if you couldn’t search, you know, nowhere near me is hiring, but I need remote work and somebody’s hiring remote. You’d never find opportunities like that if it weren’t for a platform like LinkedIn, which obviously is totally different than a Facebook or Instagram where you’re more likely keeping up with loved ones or friends.

But that also is just such an important asset to have in your everyday life, particularly during a job search or when you’re looking to advance in your career. And it takes a lot of the guesswork and the stress out of it. Right? Because you can directly interact with the HR team or, you know, depending on your experience level, the CEO, whoever you’d be interacting with. And I think that’s such an overlooked great asset of social media. 

14:38

And then the other one’s YouTube. 

LORI: I love YouTube. 

KILEY: I swear I could talk forever about YouTube. My husband’s go-to quote lately is that you can learn anything on YouTube. And I- he’s so right.

Like we, for example, we got a new two-person board game a couple months ago and I was sitting there reading the directions, trying to figure it out and it was just going so over my head like I do not understand how to do this. And so we went to YouTube to, you know, learn how to play this game. Made so much more sense than reading the directions.

We, you know, we watch YouTube videos as a part of our regular like, oh, what do we want to watch tonight? Oh, let’s see what’s on YouTube. So even for entertainment and learning and education. There really is a channel that does everything that you need it to right at your fingertips, which I think is really cool.

15:38

LORI: Yeah, it’s kind of awesome. We had just a side story- we had an air conditioning for a long time in our house that my husband actually got much joy from keeping this early 1970s era AC unit running. And the way he did it was YouTube. There were people out there that had this exact one. Oh, yeah, ants can get in there and do this. So when the ants get in there, you do this, this and this. And he’s like out there with his phone looking at it. And he kept that thing running until we finally decided we needed to be more energy efficient, you know, and had to replace it.

But it’s just, it’s amazing what you can find. Somebody out there has recorded a video about whatever topic you happen to be thinking about at the moment. I guarantee it. It’s absolutely insane. And it’s fun, you know, there’s so many fun things to do. And again, that’s not the one reason we might not love social media so much, is how addictive it can be. That’s the part that- that’s the downside. It does require you to exercise some self-control.

KILEY: Absolutely.

LORI: Yeah. But that’s what we’ve got for you today. We’d love to hear from you. If you have ideas you’d like us to cover or specific questions you’d like to ask, reach out to me or Kiley on LinkedIn. We’re both open networkers there. We also have a website at popspeeddigital.com. Again, I’m Lori Jo Vest, this is Kiley Metcalfe signing off and we will see you soon.

KILEY: Bye, everybody.

Rev & Reach Episode 4 Transcript

00:08
LORI: Hello everybody, I’m Lori Jo Vest. Thank you so much for joining us for episode four of Rev and Reach. And today’s subject is you versus your customers. And the thing that we find really interesting in that clickbait title is that we run into a lot of situations where clients really want to serve what they want more than serving what their customers or their prospects want when it comes to social media. So they, you know, you might be looking at somebody who, I’ll give you an example and I think this is a really good one: dentists. We love our dental clients and sometimes we have to rein them in because they like to share the things that dentists like to look at.

And some of it’s not so great. You know, the before and after photos where you look at the Instagram feed and all you see is the before photos and it’s a little frightening. We love that transformation. But when it comes to social media, people want to see the finished smile. They want to see how wonderful that person looks now. Then if they want to, they can go peek at how bad they used to look. I guess is what, what I’m going to say here. So Kiley, tell us a little bit more about how, why it’s so important to turn your ego aside and dig into what your customers want.

01:33
KILEY: I think the biggest reason is that it’s obvious and when somebody that’s in your customer base or an audience member has been paying attention, they can tell what content is for them and what content is for you. When you haven’t done your research and when you’re not really paying attention to what type of content it is that your audience wants to see and that they find valuable, you’re losing people, you’re losing followers, you’re losing prospects, you’re losing potential sales.

So doing that research, being very intentional about it and then crafting your content towards what the research says will work what your consumer behaviors indicate is what they’re interested in is so important not just for ROI, but for building that bridge and that connection between you and your audience so they feel valued and like you’re paying attention.

02:30
LORI: Absolutely. And they won’t respond. If you are, for example, a 30 year old woman with young children and the person who’s creating marketing content for you is a 45 year old single man, that can be a little challenging. However, it’s worth the effort. Don’t make assumptions.

We see a lot of cases where you’ve got a marketing team making assumptions about what the audience likes or doesn’t like. In reality, research will tell you what they like and what they don’t like. There’s a lot of digital tools out there you can use and there’s a lot of value in even using some of the AI tools that are out there now to see, you know, what is your audience doing, where are they going, what are they reading, what are they ingesting, what are they really hot about, what trends are they on. So that when you are crafting content for your brand or your company, you are thinking as if you were them, not necessarily, you know, you and what you want to show them. Right?

3:41
KILEY: Exactly. I think a really good example of that that we’ve seen before is, you know, people love content that’s like the faces behind the brands, right? Behind the scenes and things like that. It shouldn’t be the baseline of content and it shouldn’t be the majority of what you’re pushing out. And here’s why.

As fun as it might be to be in charge and have the reins to the brand, social media channels and, you know, like your boss bro brought in donuts today or oh, you know, you’re dressing up for Halloween and how fun, as fun as it might be to share those things, and it is sometimes, you know, like it’s a very easy thing to throw on your Instagram story for extra views, you know, on a given day. It shouldn’t be a part of your regular marketing mix that sort of behind the scenes, you know, oh, like a day in the life with donuts and with, you know, oh, we’re matching and you know, things like that.

Because your audience doesn’t care. It serves them no purpose. It might, you know, if they know you personally. Like Lori’s example of the dental clinics. Oh, you know, oh, that’s my favorite hygienist. And oh, how cute, you know, things like that, it’s fun. It builds that bridge. It helps, you know, kind of connect the audience to what you guys do on a daily basis. However, it does not do anything for inclining a new prospect to choose your brand.

Whatever your industry is, it does not serve any purpose to why a given audience member should choose you. And ultimately that’s how we get ROI by persuading prospective customers and new consumers that you are the best at what you do. You should be their selection and that you’re worth their dollars, your audience’s dollars. Right? Because ultimately, you know, you’re selling something and everybody’s dollars are precious. So why should any audience member trust that what you are offering them will improve their life?

5:45
LORI: Right. I’ve got to say now one of the things- some of the things that we’re referencing here happen more commonly in small to mid sized businesses where social media is still seen as, you know, my college kid’s roommate has a great Instagram channel for their, you know, lure tying business or whatever. And so he should do the social media for our business when in reality, you know—or maybe just the front desk, maybe it’s a doctor’s office and they say, oh, we’ll have the front desk do the social, take a picture of a patient, you know, oh look, we had a, you know, we have this really cool little puppet we use. Or maybe, doesn’t the lobby look pretty today? Look at our Christmas tree—and you have people doing your social media that aren’t marketers. And when you are looking for ROI from digital marketing, you can’t just hand the reins over to the youngest person on the team because they have a really cool Instagram channel for their personal stuff or to someone who is doing it as kind of an afterthought.

Because when you do those two things, you are guaranteeing you will get no ROI from your social media. Because ROI requires thought. And one of the biggest things to think about is what your audience wants to know. What do they want? Not, you know, maybe what they need can be sprinkled in there, but what they want is more important.

07:12
And let’s talk about that, Kiley. One of the things—and you’ll hear us say this over and over because I feel like we’re constantly reminding people—people, your audience is full of human beings that are biologically driven for connection. So right off the bat, smiling faces, right? We have a client right now that’s material handling and we use photos of their technicians. We don’t just show the equipment, we show the people. The sales reps share things. It’s just awesome. It’s all people. So that serves the audience, right?

KILEY: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s a really good point to make and a really important distinction. There is a difference between, oh, you know, the fun donut content that I mentioned earlier and using the faces, using the happy people behind the brand or the happy customers in a way that does serve the audience.

And like Lori said, we’ve said it before, we’ll probably say it in most of our episodes here, that content with smiling faces and not stock images, real smiling faces that are somehow involved in the community of your brand, perform, I mean, so much better than all other types of content. Better than graphic content, stock images, any- anything of the sort. Smiling faces is the way to go. And there’s a way to use those and prioritize them in your regular mix that will serve your audience and will continue to build that bridge, but also indicate to them why whatever it is that you’re selling is something that is gonna improve their life or whatever.

You know, whatever it is that, like- we’ll go back to the dental example, why receiving this new smile will improve their overall quality of life every day for the rest of their life. You know what I mean? There’s so many ways, no matter- you could throw any industry at us, I think, at this point, and we would be able to give you an example of how to build your content in a way that serves your audience versus serving what you think is fun.

Or as Lori said, what the youngest person on your team thinks is trending on TikTok and why. Somebody might think it’s funny, they might think it’s funny, but they’re probably not gonna buy your product or service because you made a funny TikTok. It really is the difference between social and social media marketing, which is another thing that we say pretty regularly.

09:41
LORI: Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna repeat ourselves a lot, but hopefully, you know, we kind of want to spread the word on how to do it right. And one of the reasons that I think it’s so important is because there are so many people that do social media by having just an afterthought or, you know, the college kid or the youngest person on the team or the lowest budget.

When they do that, they come back to us and say, social media doesn’t work. Oh, you aren’t doing it right. And I’m not saying there’s a right way to do it, because there isn’t. There’s a lot of ways to do it. However, there’s a right way to do it for your brand or your product that will help you get results. I’m very confident in saying that. I don’t know any business that I can think of off the top of my head that would be not appropriate on social media because there’s just so much you can do, you know?

10:35
So let’s talk a little bit about the StoryBrand book, Kiley. You mentioned it before we got on this recording, that it’s an amazing book that basically turns you into a person who in your copy and content will look out for your customer as opposed to just providing them with what you think they like. It’s just a- makes a great case. Tell us more about that. We did it in a book club at our company.

KILEY: Yeah, in our, in our company book club. I think it was one of the first books we read actually, it may have been just the second. And it really, I would say it changed the way that I write social media copy and think about social media copy for all of our clients. And I spend a lot of time doing our PopSpeed Digital Marketing’s social media and a lot of our internal marketing, and changed the way I think about that as well. And I think that- it’s Building a StoryBrand, I believe, and I highly, highly recommend it. It’s been one of my favorites that we’ve read, and it basically kind of outlines this template, this step by step process of getting your social media marketing and really your overall digital marketing to a place where you are serving your audience first and foremost.

I won’t spoil the template. You’ll have to read the book. But it really- it does provide a very regimented step by step guide on how to get there, which we all found very helpful. Because it’s so easy for us to sit here and say, right, you know, you need to tailor your content to your audience and you need to pivot how you’re doing A, B and C.

LORI: Blah, blah, blah.

KILEY: Exactly. Without a step by step guide on how to do that, which is not something that we can cover in a 30 minute podcast episode, it’s really hard and it’s really daunting. This book, again, I’ll repeat myself once again, really changed the way that we do things and it changed the way that we view each of our clients’ audiences. Right?

12:34
So for us, it’s a little different than just being an internal social media manager for one specific brand. We have 15 to 20 audiences that we need to think about on a daily basis. So it forced us to pull our brains out of, oh, you know, for today I’m going to write and create content for this particular client. Let me get in their headspace and into their voice. To now, we’re okay, let me get in the frame of mind of their audience as opposed to speaking the voice of the brand, which is important. You know, each brand has a voice, and it’s important to maintain that consistency.

However, now our writing is really tailored and really focused to, okay, based on, you know, what did well last month and what consumers seem to be interested in as of late or what time of year it is, what do we think that our audience needs to hear today? And really using that sort of benchmark in the way that we create content, whether it’s writing or, you know, if we are creating graphics or if we’re planning fundraising events for our nonprofit clients, pretty much from A to Z of the digital marketing work that we do for each of our clients, our—because of that book, I think—our energy and our focus is set towards our audiences now, which I think is so important. And I think we’ve seen big upticks. I think our dental implant client is a prime example that we’ve seen increases in leads, and really qualified leads as well, since we’ve started crafting our content specifically with them in mind.

14:19
Lori alluded to it earlier, I think it’s really important, that client, it’s such an easy example for us to pull from all the time, because It encompasses all of our best tips, in one single industry, really. But for them, it’s- you know, we go back to what we talked about in episode one, where you see so many people, whether it’s dentists or in the healthcare space or, you know, cosmetic or aesthetic surgeries and things of that nature, where if you’re the doctor or if you’re the health care professional, of course you got into it because you’re fascinated by the medical aspect of this. Right? What you need to keep in mind when you’re creating your content is that nobody else is. And the majority of people are probably a little bit grossed out by the behind the scenes of what it is you do every day and don’t care to see it.

What they want to see is the end result that will improve their quality of life. Which I just, you know, again, there’s a million examples and we could pull from any industry, but this one just makes our lives too easy with the connections.

15:26
LORI: Yeah, I’m going to add to this because I think it’s so important. Just the StoryBrand advice, some of it included being a guide for your client to help them get the results that they want. And that piece right there is so important, I would say in marketing, in sales, in customer service. The way you get and keep a client, keep them loyal and happy, is by figuring out what they need and want and guiding them to getting that end result. And that’s what you’re doing.

So for example, if you’re a dentist—we keep talking about them, but again, they’re such an easy example—if you’re a dentist, people want—people who are having problems with their teeth or in pain—they want to know that you know about that. That you know that it’s hard to go to a dentist because you know it’s going to hurt. So you may do some content around pain relief and easing their fears.

They also want to know that what you do is going to be done- that they’re going to be treated well. There’s proof in the form of testimonials, right? They want to know that it’s going to look amazing and that it’s going to be custom for them. That it’s not going to be just something stuck in there that doesn’t look right.
16:45
Again, testimonials, you know, happy smiles of the patient after they’ve had the process. Right? So basically looking at what that customer needs and being able to guide them through the process of getting their desired end result. Not yours, theirs. Yours is that they buy. Theirs is that they get that brand new smile, that they get to have an amazing experience as a volunteer, that they got to contribute with a donation.

I mean, their desires are not the same as yours. So that’s where we get this, you know, you versus your customers or you versus your clients kind of thing. Because in a lot of cases we’ve had—especially, you know, again, small to mid sized businesses—where the ownership may not be tuned in to that, you know, sales and marketing aspect of running a business. Maybe they got into business because they are really good at making, you know, designer suits. Or making- they design suits and do them custom for people. And that’s amazing. And so they are so focused on that that they don’t think they should ever have to do a coupon. They don’t think they should ever have to. And what that is, is that is getting stuck in your ego and that creates that us versus the customer or you versus the customer attitude. And that can’t be there because you want something they have: money.

KILEY: Exactly. Exactly.

LORI: And in order to convince them to give it to you, you’ve got to prove to them that you’re worth it. Right? And that you’re gonna help them.

KILEY: I think that’s such a good point too. And it really ties this whole episode together because it is- your content should, from the rear view, from your point of view, be laid out as a win-win situation.

LORI: Yeah.

KILEY: You’re making money off of your customers. Obviously that’s why any business in the world exists, to make money. We get it. But let your customers know what they are getting out of it. It is about them. So you can make the money on your side.

LORI: Yep, that’s what it is. What I would say is instead of us versus them, you go around to their side and see what you would want from you. You know? In order to get good topics. And also strategy, just going back to the age old advice, your audience research should be a huge part of planning for what you do in social.

19:12
I mean, Kiley, tell us a little bit about the kind of research you do for our strategies because I know you’re deep in that right now. What kind of research do you do and where do you find it?

KILEY: I would say a brunt of the research there, I mean, there’s so much research that goes into a strategy, but the most time consuming aspect is that audience research first and foremost, especially when we’re kind of diving into a new industry that we might not be totally familiar with is we want to know age demographics, we want to know, you know, is it, is it more tailored to males or females? Who’s more likely to be interested? We want to know location- where is it extra hot and where do we really want to target. If, whether that obviously applies to, if it’s not a local business. But things of that nature. Really researching who our target audience is, and then completing the research of what the best ways to reach them are. Whether they’re primarily on Facebook, if it’s a younger audience, maybe they’re mostly on TikTok. Whether or not YouTube will be a good place for them, Twitter, even. But just the right way to reach them and who they are. And then that puts us in a position to build content that not only will reach them, but will entice them.

We’ve been using a new- it’s an AI system, but it’s really good at kind of streamlining the research process and it provides qualified sources and I’ve been using that quite a bit. Honestly, with reputable sources really just putting in the time in Google searches is helpful. Doing research on individual platforms is helpful. Places like HubSpot or Hootsuite very often have great articles on who to reach, why to reach them, where to reach them, everything like that. So it’s time consuming, but I think results speak for themselves. Right? If you put in the time and energy to research your audiences in the strategy phase before you’ve really kind of jumped in headfirst into the content creation standpoint, you’ll be amazed by how much time and stress and, you know, annoyance it’ll save you once you’re in that publishing content phase.

Because you’ve done the work, you know who your audience is, you know how to reach them, you know what they want to see. And of course, will you be pivoting along the way? Yeah, for sure. Could your audience grow? Of course. Will behaviors change? Yeah, they change every day. But when you have that baseline and that foundation of research because you’ve put in the time, it makes the world of a difference to really launch yourself and launch your efforts and initiatives off in that story brand, sort of your audience comes first mindset, as opposed to trying to pivot and get there along the way once you’ve already started.

LORI: Absolutely, yeah. I think there’s a lot to be said for spending that time up front. And then I would add to that, the during phase. Like when you are- don’t just throw the stuff, the content out there and just keep throwing it out there and not going back to see what works and what doesn’t. And always be open to trying new things because your audience may be into some trend right now that you can jump on that could be fun, or they may not. Don’t jump on the wrong trends. But there’s something to be said for having a test and learn to see on an ongoing basis which audiences respond.

23:03
If you’re using Meta, you can target age groups, you can target special interests, that maybe align or are related to your audience. There’s a lot you can do to reach the right people and also kind of change your messaging. Experiment with video versus stills, with carousels, with different calls to action, with different types of art, maybe it’s smiles, maybe it’s really bold, colorful graphics. I mean there’s a lot of different ways to get attention. And pay attention to that back end to see what does better.

And what we found—again, here we go—we have a client that is 100 organic right now. We don’t recommend it. We do not recommend it, right? We’re still working, trying to get them to get a little budget. But what we see is sometimes exponentially like 8 to 10 times more people, impressions, on the content that has photos of their team versus anything else. Testimonial graphics, anything else that we do for them. When it’s real and it’s their people, it gets exponentially more impressions. So those are the kind of things that if you pay attention to them, you will reach more of your audience.

24:17
So I think that’s what we’ve got. We’re coming up on 27 minutes here, Kiley. So we’ve given a lot of information today, which I’m really happy to do. It’s kind of why we’re here. Please know that we are a small agency that is growing and taking on new clients. So if you are interested in hearing more about us, you can visit our website at popspeeddigital.com, there’s a contact form so you can get in touch. I am also an Open Networker on LinkedIn, and I think, Kiley, you are too.

So connect with us there. We’d be happy to do a half hour audit of your social media presence. Just free, no obligations, just to talk through what you’re currently doing and what you might do that would make it better. So that’s what we’ve got for you today. We will talk to you again soon.

Rev & Reach Episode 3 Transcript

00:08
LORI: Hello, I’m Lori Jo Vest. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Rev & Reach, a podcast brought to you by PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC. That’s our digital marketing boutique. We offer all kinds of digital marketing services. And for this podcast, we are here to share our secrets. We’re going to tell you what worked, we’re going to tell you what didn’t work, and ways that you can amp up your ROI to better serve your organization and your brand. Here with me today is Kiley Transit. Kiley is our social media strategist and specialist, and she does all kinds of things. What can I say. But she’s been doing this for a while. She’s been with us for four years. I’ve been doing social media, I think I figured out the other day, for 19 years.

KILEY: Oh my gosh.

LORI: So we kind of know our stuff, wouldn’t you say? We know our stuff.

KILEY: I like to think so.

LORI: But yeah, so I’ll let you get us started, Kiley.

01:06
KILEY: So today we’re going to talk a little bit about the importance of spending money in order to make money. And this can be looked at from so many different angles. The first, and I think what Lori and I would both agree is the most important and obvious is ads on social media, Meta ads, LinkedIn, spending money on Google, you know, things like that. Really, really putting an intentional set aside budget to put your social media marketing content in front of more and more and more people to garner that ROI. And they really do work and it really is worth it and we’ll talk about it. But if you take one thing out of this episode, spend money on social media, it matters.

I think a couple of other examples that really fall under the spending money to make money category are in more, not necessarily just a retail space, but like retail restaurants, you know, online shopping platforms, things like that. Prioritizing discounts and social media-focused discounts. We know for so many clients and for us too, as your digital marketing provider, ROI is everything. It’s the most important metric, as it should be. You put a lot of money and resources and time into your digital marketing, you should see results from it. When it comes to social though, it’s very difficult to directly track ROI in terms of-

LORI: It can be.

02:44
KILEY: Yeah, in terms of sales and, you know, money spent and a real increase in profits directly from a social channel. So a nice way around that to see how effective or not effective your social media marketing is, is social media-specific discounts, coupons, promotions. Really, you know, things to either draw people, your audience to your website or to your store or your shop or your restaurant or whatever the case may be.

LORI: Absolutely. Or in one case, I was just thinking about this one. One example, we have a global client and they market or, you know, promote their research to engineers in the automotive space. And we spent just in the last, I think in the last couple of months, we spent $300 on a LinkedIn ad. And it was, you know, promoting traffic to the blog, which is highly technical and really demonstrates the depth of information that this organization provides. But this got shown to 60,000 people on LinkedIn and 60,000 people around the world and generated some really significant traffic to the website to see that article.

And the thing that’s really interesting to me is people measure ROI in different ways. Sometimes it’s donations, sometimes it’s, you know, if the mission of the organization is not sales, then it’s not necessarily a return on dollar investments. It could be, you know, the investment could return with volunteers, it could return with donations. It could return with downloads of a report with proof of who you are as an organization and why they should trust you. So there’s a lot of different ways that you can measure ROI. We love it when we can measure it with cash. Absolutely.

KILEY: Oh yeah.

04:45
LORI: The grief support group that we talked about in our last episode, there was a local fundraising initiative. In their first year, we were able to get $25,000. And they won several of the little competitions inside the fundraising initiative based on email, social media and boots on the ground, talking to people, making phone calls and asking them to donate on certain days, things like that. So, yes, it does get- you can get ROI, you can sell products. Absolutely.

But you have to invest. You have to invest. You have to go the extra bit and add a budget to that. You know, not just- even if you’re doing it yourself, if you’re doing your own social media and you are not spending any money on ads, good luck. You’re wasting your effort, in my opinion. You know, because you can reach so many more people with just a $250 a month spend. Right?

05:44
KILEY: Yeah. I think that’s a really important point too, is that you don’t- it’s not like your ad budget needs to match, you know, how much you pay your agency or how much you spend in your marketing budget. We have clients that range from as little as $60 a week to Lori just mentioned, we had one that was $300 over the course of a couple of months. And then we’ve worked with clients in the past where we go up to about $4,000 a month. It is completely dependent on the individual brand, client company organization, whatever the case is.

And, you know, what you’re comfortable with, what you’re willing to put into it. And we see results, we see great results with as little as $60 a week, or as Lori said, it was $300 in a couple months and 60,000 people saw it. That’s incredible. And you know, obviously the more you spend, yeah, obviously the more eyeballs are going to see it and the more targeted it can get. But do not, you know- even that $60 a week, even I’m sure $50 a week is better than zero.

LORI: Always.

KILEY: So as much or as little as you’re able to put into it, it is worth your time at the very least to prove it to yourself. You know, to prove it within your marketing team or to your CEO or founder that a little bit of money really does go a long way on social media.
And because, I think I’ll speak specifically to Meta targeting and how specific and nuanced you can get, just continues year after year. As much as Meta is a headache sometimes in the back end, it gets better and better and more specific and really enables you to not just put your content in front of more random eyeballs because, you know, in that case who really cares. But in front of the right ones and the right demographics and people that are really more likely to engage and convert on whatever it is, whatever action it is that you want them to take.

07:54
LORI: I’ll give you an example. For charter school that is focused on maybe a specific ethnicity, you can actually target people that speak that language. Let’s just throw this out. We do this for a school, but I don’t want to reveal who they are. Let’s just say it’s Ukrainian, it’s a Ukrainian school. And we can target on Meta, parents, preschool with preschoolers within a 10 mile or 25 mile radius of the school. We can target people who speak that language within a 10 mile radius of the school. Grandparents within a 10 mile, 20. I mean, it’s amazing how you can really niche down.

And on the other hand, you can also niche up. And one thing I really like is for some of our clients that really need to reach people who are in the highest income levels in a geographical area, you can target geography like let’s say Detroit or Denver metropolitan area. And I want just the top 10% household incomes. There you go. You’ve got that audience and every dime will go toward those people. And Meta has this tool that will also expand on those people to reach more people that are like your buyers and your most engaged audience members. So there’s a lot of tools that can help you. We’ve had some great success with the charter school that I mentioned earlier with a—gotta love this, Kiley—a $75 a month budget.

KILEYI: Yeah. Right.

LORI: But because it’s a school with a small audience and a foreign language, the audience is so engaged, it’s small, but their school is full. Their enrollment is really, really good. As a result, you know, of part of that.

09:51
KILEY: Right. I think that’s a super important point that it’s, you know, I got on my soapbox about, you know, you can spend as little or as much. But I think it is so individual based as well and so specific to a certain company. That client specifically, they don’t need more. They don’t need more than that. Like we- and as, you know, their agency, we never recommend them putting funds that they don’t have into something that is already garnering, you know, significant results. We don’t benefit from it. We want you to see that ROI. And if we think that putting more money into it, you know that, that $4,000 a month client I mentioned earlier, you know, for them. Yeah. You know? If that’s important to you and you have the money to spend.

LORI: We’re starting from scratch.

KILEY: Yep, exactly. Like do it and, and we’ll recommend it. If you’re- I think starting from scratch is a great, great, great point where it might be important to invest a little bit more. But when you have that already engaged and previously existing audience, you don’t need to drop that kind of money on it. You really, really don’t. If you have it and you wanted to, cool, do it like, we’re happy to see what happens, but it’s just it’s not necessary when your audience exists and they’re already engaged and they’re helping spread the word about you anyway with or without more money than $75 a month.
11:25
LORI: And parents are passionate. Parents are passionate. But another type of investment that can be really useful is—speaking of just starting out—is if you are just starting out, you are just launching on social media, you need to put, you know, at least I would think, a couple of thousand dollars a month toward audience growth. And that is growing your audience on Facebook and growing your audience on Instagram, LinkedIn is a little harder. But we’re talking primarily B2C on these Instagram, Facebook, you know, Meta channels. But if you are a B2C company, Meta and Instagram as a combination are very powerful. And you can use ad dollars to send people to your Instagram profile. If you’ve got great, engaging content and you’re targeting the right people, that will grow your following really quickly. Meta the same thing. You can have a call to action on your ad that says follow our page or even join our group. So there’s a lot of really great, not just targeting, but CTAs. You can actually create lead forms.

We do this for a dental client. We have a budget and a certain percent of that budget, the majority of it goes toward lead generation ads on Meta and are shown on both Facebook and Instagram. And we can create whatever we want on the form. We can add things so that people self select out so that if they’re not a candidate for what we’re doing, they can- they won’t fill out the form because we ask questions that lead them to understand if it’s a fit for them or not. So there’s a lot of things you can do with ads.

But moving over to restaurants and other types of B2C businesses, investing in things like contests to grow your platform audience, it can be really important because you don’t just- but you don’t want to buy an audience. Never buy an audience because those people are not your people. I would rather see you have 2000 engaged people on Instagram that love your brand that took us six months to build than 10,000 people that you got in a month and a half by buying something. And when you look at them, they’re all in foreign countries, they don’t care about you. It might look good, but it will not serve you. And there’s really not ROI behind that.

KILEY: Exactly. Exactly.

LORI: You know, there really isn’t. A random audience is not necessarily a good audience. Right?

13:57
KILEY: Yeah. I think that’s super important. We’ve seen, you know, with brands or companies that, that buy their audience, a high follower count is cool. And, you know, we’ve talked about how ROI is the, the most important metric and if it’s not, it should be with social. And, you know, if you want to look at the other ones, engagement is a really, really common one to put a lot of stock into. When you buy your audience, your engagement sucks. Right? Like you’re- the audience-

KILEY: They don’t care.

14:31
LORI: Yeah, they’re not there. So the only thing that looks good or looks like it’s working is that you have a high follower account. If any one person were to go look at the list of followers, it’s so easy to tell that it is bought. So easy. So it’s really, it’s worth—whether that’s ads or contests or giveaways or, you know, random monthly promos that require a follow to a brand—it is so much- it’s so worth the time and energy. It really isn’t just money, but also money put into it to build that engaged audience that is going to convert. Because what’s the point, as Lori said, of having 60,000 followers if none of them are really contributing to your ROI at all? It looks cool, sure, but it doesn’t achieve anything. And then it’s money wasted on buying an audience that’s not getting you anywhere.

I think that for us as an agency, we’ve seen both ends of the spectrum when it comes to clients with, you know, us encouraging them to do giveaways or contests or, you know, random promos that are social media driven. We have one client right now where they just ran a community promo with a couple of other local businesses back in February, like Valentine’s Day themed like a date night for couples. And it was a giveaway and the call to action to join, to be entered, to win that contest was to join their newsletter list, their email list, and correct me if I’m wrong, Lori, but I think that promo, which was only run on social and in their newsletter, garnered over, I think it was between 200 and 250 new email subscribers, which is huge.

KILEY. 500. Okay, yeah, even crazier. I wish I had that stat in front of me, but I mean, significant. And it was driven on social.

LORI: I think it was 500. I think it was 500. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was.

16:53
LORI: And what if- what I thought was really interesting about that example too was it’s a micro resort, like a tiny resort. They’ve got five or six shipping container, beautiful Scandinavian rooms. Cabins, they call them. And to give one of those away for a night is worth a lot of money. And the business owner talked to the city’s downtown area. The best restaurant, the best, I think it was a candle making experience. And so they all donated. And that had to be worth, you know, probably about $1,000.

KILEY: I think it was eight. I think it was $800 was the total. Yep. Exactly.

17:39
LORI: And then I’m going to- I won’t reveal any names, but I have to spout off about one client we had that was a restaurant that they were like, our food is so good. Why should we have to give things away to get people to come in? And they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t do giveaways, they wouldn’t do special social promotions. I would have suggested they do an Instagram wall, a really cool wall that on the way out, people take their picture, you know, those kinds of things. And they just weren’t interested.

And so we, you know, we ended up mutually agreeing to not work together anymore because the way the relationship was going wasn’t very positive. And we, it was kind of holding us back. A lot of things that we wanted to do, we couldn’t do. And fast forward six months. And what do we see on their social now? Coupons. Special offers. Somebody finally got through to them. Maybe it was just a matter of somebody, you know, enough people telling them that that’s part of what you have to do. But it is part of what you have to do. But it’s kind of fun to bring people to your place through social.

We also love to work with really solid influencers. There are some great influencers out there that will- the least they can do is get traffic to your website. And we worked with a company that produced ice cream. They did craft ice cream. And this was super fun. I found a guy on Instagram,@dadbodsnacks. And this guy has a dad bod and he doesn’t care. He just gets snacks from everybody and he does it for free. So we shipped him some ice cream and he wrote a little review. He didn’t even charge us. But there was cost for the product and the shipping and the follow up and all that, you know, and it sent a significant amount of traffic to their website. Well worth it.

KILEY: Yeah, absolutely. And I think those are such good examples because it can be- and that shows the range of the type of company that this type of spending money to make money works for. It’s restaurants, it’s, you know, in store retail shopping, it’s online shopping, it’s, you know, mini resorts or a, you know, normal sized resort or a hotel or a bed and breakfast or, you know, something as big as Airbnb. There’s no limit to who should be considering promos, giveaways and contests.

20:05
And another key, key, key piece that I can’t believe we haven’t mentioned yet. And now it’s, like, all I can think about, of those contests on social is the user-generated content that it provides. So not only are you very likely to, if you’re offering something enticing enough to grow your email list or to grow your followers or to get more people in store on Taco Tuesday to get a great deal on your tacos that taste delicious, but in a lot of cases, when you engage with your social audience in that way and really connect with them and are willing to give things away to them, you’re building a bridge between company and consumer that entices your consumer to want to engage with you back.

And when this happens in the, you know, in the manner of UGC (user generated content), when, you know, let’s stay on the restaurant example. When a patron comes into your restaurant, sits down, orders, let’s go back to Taco Tuesday, orders some delicious tacos and does, you know, the whole, we all know phone eats first, gets a picture of their, you know-

LORI: Phone eats first, I love it.

KILEY: Yeah, right? You’re very appetizing looking tacos, goes on social, posts it, tags you, says they had a great experience, et cetera, you can take that content for one, repost it, tag the creator and it is the number one most trustworthy type of content for other members of your audience. Because it’s a little different than influencers, right? Where a lot of time when you engage with influencers, there’s an incentive for them to give you a good review, whether it’s money or a free meal or product or, you know, whatever. This individual came in, sat down, took a picture, posted to their community about their great experience for no reason other than how good of an experience they had. So others are very much more likely going to trust that with no incentivization on the part of that particular user. And it’s free content. It’s free content for you. So while maybe, you know, they came in because it was 50% off on taco Tuesday and you have to eat that 50% of their meal, that UGC could very likely bring in four other people minimum, depending on how many followers they have or how many people are in their community or how many people saw your post if you reshared it, let’s call it four. I would say in a lot of cases that’s on the low end.

LORI: Yeah, very.

KILEY: But even those four people saw that post and came in are more than making up for that 50% on that one meal that you lost the night before. And I mean, you wouldn’t have had them otherwise come in if they hadn’t seen that little bit of content.

23:08
LORI: If I owned a restaurant, I would actually say- I would have a sign up on the wall that says, post a picture of your experience here on your Instagram account and get a $5 coupon for your next visit.

KILEY: Yep.

LORI: There you go. They show it to you. Hand them the coupon. Life goes on. $5. This place was expensive. They served drinks. They had a $20 hamburger. It was a great hamburger, but it was on the expensive side. So $5 off could entice someone to come in with a friend, they have a couple of drinks and you got a nice check. So the idea that you have to spend money to make money is true, has always been true and will always be true, period.

KILEY: Exactly, exactly. Truly, truly.

23:56
LORI: So I think that’s what we’ve got for you today. Kiley, anything else to add before we drop out?

KILEY: No, I think the two best examples for this are ads and using social to really engage with your community. And I would also say that those are two of the biggest pieces of advice we would offer to any brand ever. So spending money to make money is massive.

LORI: There you go.

KILEY: Yeah. When it comes to effective social media marketing.

LORI: Yeah, absolutely. It is not free. It started out free, there’s no free to it right now.
KILEY. We wish!

LORI: There’s not, so. Anyway. So that’s it for us today. If you have an idea for a topic that you’d like us to cover here on Rev & Reach, Kiley and I are both Open Networkers on LinkedIn. Connect with us there, let us know you’re a listener. We will be back for our next episode soon, and we’ll talk to you then.

KILEY: Bye, everybody!

Rev & Reach Episode 2 Transcript

00:08
LORI: Hello, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Rev & Reach, PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC’s podcast, where we provide you with tips and tricks to amp up your ROI on your social and digital marketing efforts. With me today is Kiley Metcalfe, who is the first real employee of PopSpeed Digital Marketing four or five years ago. And I’m Lori Jo Vest. I’m the founder of the agency with my husband, Ron Wingard, who does our websites.

So we want to get you as much solid information as we can that will help you immediately in your digital marketing efforts. So today, Kiley and I are here to talk about a grief support for children nonprofit that we work with. And we want to treat it kind of as a case study because it’s a really good example of why a nonprofit should have a very solid digital marketing effort going on. If you do not, you are missing out on so much. Right, Kiley?

01:11
KILEY: Yes, absolutely. And this client, this particular group, they’re not the only nonprofit we’ve ever done work for, but they are a great example of what our work looks like in a really all encompassing way. For them we do their newsletter, their social, their website, we take care of their blog. There’s so many different things that we do on behalf of this client. And it’s really a great way of just putting proof in the pudding, honestly, of how a solid, cohesive digital marketing effort can help sustain volunteers, donations, and continued fundraising support for nonprofits.

LORI: So let’s dig into the story of how we got to work with this group. It was right before the pandemic. It was really interesting because they’re part of a huge health network in Metro Detroit, and they work with a development office. And the head of development at that point decided that they really needed this particular nonprofit inside the health system, needed help beyond just, let’s try to raise some money.

They needed to have a social presence. They needed an email initiative. They needed a better website. So they called us in initially just to do the social media. And we started off right before COVID, right? That was crazy. So everybody was, you know, spinning and crazy things were happening.

And it was a difficult time for nonprofits because people were saving their money. A lot of people weren’t working or they couldn’t do their jobs on site because of, you know, the shutdowns. Well, the best part about it was that they ended up raising more money in that year of the pandemic than they had raised in years previous. And that shows you what a good social media effort can do.

So what did we do differently for this particular grief support group that helps them kind of soar above some of their competitors when it comes to fundraising?

03:16
KILEY: Yeah, absolutely. I think that a—and it’s… I wish there was a simple answer for it, I don’t think that there necessarily is one single answer—I think when it comes to non profits in particular, you know, I think about some of our other clients, and in most cases, there’s one single, you know, pinpoint of what ROI looks like. You know? In our last episode, we talked about our dental implant clients. For them, we want leads right? Over and over and over again. For this particular nonprofit, we go into it and there’s almost a new kind of marker for ROI regularly. You know, this given post, we need volunteers. This given post, we need people to sign up for camp. We need, donors, we need fundraisers. The list really goes on and on for what we need to achieve for this client in particular. I think that’s true with a lot of nonprofits as well.

So for us, I think the key, you know, the key thing that we keep in mind on a regular basis is to keep our minds very, very open. It’s a great learning opportunity to go see what competitors are doing and not steal their ideas, but get inspired by them. See how we can turn it around for this particular client and even make it better on a lot of occasions. And it’s different in a lot of ways than you know, just a traditional company or organization because there’s so much more collaboration and freedom and the need for ideas to really garner the attention of prospective donors and say without saying, we’re worthy of your dollars. We’re worthy of your donations and your volunteer hours and your attendance at our fundraisers. And here’s why.

LORI: And matter of fact, what we’re- here’s why, because we’re going to show you a story, an impact story, or several impact stories that are going to help you want to become a part of that organization’s mission. And one of the ways we did it with this grief support group, I got to share the story of the live that we did, it was awesome. And what we did was we got their alumni volunteers. Now, this is a group that supports children who have experienced the death of a loved one. Friend, family, parent. The stories are heartbreaking. And we’re not sure why it works, but it does. There’s a lot of joy in this group.

05:56
So let’s talk about the live event we did for them. This was really cool because it was multi purpose and they are a grief support organization for children. And what has happened over the years, they’ve been around for 20 plus years, is their children that were helped by this program, they experienced the death of a loved one. It could be when they were 5, when they were 10, when they were 15. But a lot of these kids end up growing up and either becoming social workers. One that I talked to was 19 or 20 and he wanted to become a psychologist. And they also come back and volunteer. So there’s an alumni group. They love what the group did for them and how they were supported and the difference it made. And so they come back and volunteer and there’s an alumni group.

And we held a Facebook live about this alumni group and promoted the organization. And they really talked about what it meant to them as a child to walk into a room and thinking that you were the only one that had ever had your dad die or the only one whose grandma died when you were, you know, and everybody else still has their grandma and I don’t, and that’s not fair. And you walk into this room and there’s 20 other kids and they’ve all experienced the same thing. You’re not alone.

So they told these stories of why they came back and what they did. And we recorded them on StreamYard, which is a tool we use for our podcast and other video projects. And we were able to take individual recordings from each of these alumni and let them tell their story and also let them tell the combined stories. And so that impact story is the most amazing tool for fundraising and soliciting, you know, volunteers and other types of involvement, sponsorships, all that kind of stuff. So if you can figure out a way to get those impact stories with faces and voices and, you know, real true authenticity, you will have more impact.

08:09
Another trick that we tell people, and this applies to everybody, not just this grief support group, is faces are what gets attention. Faces sell. And they don’t have to be beautiful, perfect. Matter of fact, the more imperfect, the better. If it looks like I took it or you took it, you know, it was just a flash in the moment, joy or sadness, that’s going to attract that view of that social audience.

That’s part of the story that I wanted to get out there, that if you can get your- the people that you’ve impacted to share their experience over and over and over again. It helps you create that feeling of, I want to be a part of this mission, I want to be a part of this organization. Which is what a donation can be if you handle it correctly and maintain communication.

Let’s talk about the newsletter we do for this group. Kiley, I know that is a part of keeping in touch with those donors as well as volunteers, everybody. Right? What do we do for that every month? Would you share it with us?

09:15
KILEY: Yeah. So we do, I would say, a short newsletter for them would be about five topics. I would say a normal one, maybe six and then a little bit longer we get into 7ish topics per month. Because again you want to, you want to make your—particularly with email communications, I think, just because everybody hates spam. Right?—So when you’re crafting your newsletter, I think particularly, when it comes to a non-profit, when a good chunk of your email list is donors who are like, hey, I’ve given you my money already. If you’re gonna send me emails, make sure they’re worth my time.

That it’s really important to be intentional about what goes in there. And consider that you’re writing for who’s receiving it. Not for yourself, the brand, the non profit, etc. So for us, we like to- we typically include a note from the program manager in, in every edition. That’s how they start. It’s a personal touch. She always has. As Lori said, it’s somehow for a group that really could be clouded by so much sadness. It somehow is a very joyful group and I really believe that that stems from the program manager because of who she is as a person.

LORI: And let me add real quick, her address always has a photo and her signature. Personal. Personal. That’s a big part of it.

KILEY: Exactly. Exactly. It’s very personal. It really connects the audience from the jump of the email with the people behind the organization. And then we follow that with kind of whatever’s hot in the program right now. So on a month by month basis we run a- like an audiogram series. We couldn’t get approval to do a full blown podcast with the group, but we do every month a—we’ll talk about that, sure, in more depth in a little bit—But it’s not a podcast series, but it’s a podcast series. It’s very short episodes month by month on different topics surrounding the group.

So we follow- every newsletter gets a snippet about that, whatever episode came out that month. And then you know, we get into this time of year, we start talking about the fundraisers that are coming up over the summer. Some save the dates. Camp dates.

LORI: Golf outings. Golf outings. Grief camp.

KILEY: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then it’s very seasonal too. Yeah, exactly. And then we run it kind of on a seasonal basis. So around the holidays we’ll talk a lot about topics that are very timely to, you know, grieving, you know, around the holiday season and how to, you know, manage your grief during Christmas or Hanukkah or Thanksgiving or you know, whatever your family’s big holiday is. Because ultimately we know that a lot of the audience that’s going to read the newsletters is parents of grieving children or guardians. A nd so it’s important to cater to what they need too, because in most cases they’re also grieving. Right?

So we kind of- we kind of work towards getting resources and information to support the community and to display to those past donors. You know, kind of reiterate what the impact of the group is as opposed to just every month over month making a direct appeal for more donations. It’s a little bit more important to tailor it to, if you’re a grieving family on our list, here are some resources that can help you this season. If you’re a past donor, oh, look at how, you know, we’re continuing to support these people. We can do it a little bit more with another donation. Very subtle, very subtle, pleas. Yeah.

13:06
LORI: Yeah. And it’s interesting because as we have added more and more video, it’s been the more effective, the impact of the story. When you actually, like I did last year, go to grief camp and you would think, you know- I went the first day once and the kids were all a little anxious and kind of, you know, not sure of themselves. I went the second day this past year and by then they’re all like wilding out, you know, they’re all crazy and having a great time and, and they- there’s so much joy and they meet each other and make those really fast friends and, and when you ask them straight out, what is it that you love about this organization, they always say, I’m not alone. And they spend a lot of time at grief camp learning how to process grief in a healthy way, learning, you know, doing exercise to help them manage their emotions, all kinds of really healthy things that help them when they, when they grow up.

So the video aspect I think of it is really- is also really important. If there’s any way you can find a down and dirty, quick and easy way to capture video—on your phone is fine—do it. Because you never know when you’re going to get that perfect moment that inspires a whole bunch of people to join your list of supporters.

KILEY: I mean I would even argue too—like you say on your phone is fine—I’d argue that it’s better. I mean you look at the- we talked about the live that we did back in, I think it was in December, with the alumni group Lori. And a lot of those, you know, we got so much. I mean it was such an amazing event to talk to, you know, directly to families that are either, you know, young and experiencing it currently, or prospective families that want to join the group. You know, a wide array of people within the community.

But it also gave us a lot of content to work with after the fact. So there are a lot of, like, videos you’ll see on our pages now with little snippets of, you know, this alumni talking about how the program impacted them in this specific way. Right? As an example. And it’s so, you know, authentic. You know, we talk about talking head videos. It’s not, it’s not professionally done. It’s coming directly chopped up from a live event that was on Facebook. It’s not terribly high quality or terribly over polished or professional or formal or anything of the sort, but it’s authentic, and more than what the people in the video, you know, are presenting. Whether it’s a perfect, you know, camera angle or lighting or etc. It’s the content of their words that really matters. And particularly I think with impact stories for on behalf of nonprofits, that’s what matters. We’re not looking for the over commercialized, over professional, super highly edited and treated video content.

We’re looking for, you know, things. Things like this where we’re just sitting here having a conversation, talking about general impact on, on personal lives and even just a cell phone video of, you know, this is why I volunteer with this group. Things like that, I mean, in this case are so, so much more real. And the content of nonprofits and groups like this is just that- it’s things people deal with every day in real life. So why not keep the content real?

LORI: Yeah. What I liked about that too was some of the young people that participated—because these people are people in their 20s, maybe somebody was 30, I don’t know—but they were recording them, a lot of them were on their cell phones. So when we took the video clips, they looked like reels on Instagram or TikTok something on TikTok. They were just like, you did that yourself. But at the same time, because they were talking to each other, it was a very heartfelt, authentic conversation where if you sit somebody in front of a camera and say, okay, say this. It’s not the same. It’s so not the same. So you may not get the perfect sentence or the perfect lighting, but you will get the perfect level of authenticity to create connection. And that’s really what you need to do as a nonprofit, is to create that connection.

17:38
I wanted to mention here, and I talk about it a lot with our nonprofit clients, there’s a model for fundraising out there. It used to be called making more money. Now it’s called Benevon and it’s got a formulaic approach. I’m sure it’s changed with social media and digital marketing, and I’ve not looked into it, but the idea is that you share a huge impact story with your audience, and then once they become connected, you encourage that monthly donation kind of thing so that they’re donating every month and you communicate with them every month and you give them opportunities.

We’re going to stuff backpacks for, you know, kids at the school because we’re an educational organization and we want to demonstrate our commitment. So we’re inviting 50 people to come help us stuff backpacks and, you know, drive them out to the schools. People love that kind of thing. So it’s- as a nonprofit, being involved, creating opportunities to be involved is absolutely critical. And digital marketing is a great way to do it.

I’ll tell you- before we wrap up, I want to tell the story of our pet contest.

KILEY: Oh, yes! Yes, yes, yes.

18:47
LORI: I saw this- oh, gosh, I saw this years ago. And we’re in the process of launching it. So don’t steal it until at least, if you’re going to do it yourself, do it after June, because we’re getting ready to do it, like, March, April, May of 2025. But what we’re doing is we’re offering our followers and supporters the opportunity to have some artwork made of a picture of their pet. And when we say artwork, we’re saying that very loosely because it could be good refrigerator art, or you might get art from, you know, that looks a little nicer, but it’s going to be done by the kids from this grief support agency, the staff of the grief support agency. I might even draw a dog or two. Kiley might have to draw her dog, I don’t know. But they’re going to be refrigerator art.

And it’s a small donation. And what it does is it pulls people into our sphere. It pulls people into this organization’s group, and we’ll show all of them. So we’re going to be able to show on social the before and the after. Here’s what the picture looked like, and here’s what the kid drew. And it’ll be funny and it’ll be cute, you know, and it’s a minor donation, but it creates that connection, which is what you really, really want. There’s a really nice way to balance grassroots fundraising with corporate sponsorships.

And Kiley, do you want to talk a little bit about what we can do or what nonprofits can do and what we’ve done for nonprofits when it comes to creating sponsorable assets?

20:16
KILEY: Yeah, absolutely. I think this client in particular is a great example of that for us. And it’s another- it just kind of goes to show the importance of being creative. Right? So when we think of our general service offerings as an agency for digital marketing, we do a lot of social media, we do a lot of newsletters, we do a lot of websites, SEO, lead gen.

But in this case we got to have a little bit of fun. Because obviously nonprofit is another great way to kind of accept philanthropic dollars is with sponsorships. Right? So for us, we’re like, okay, so if we’re not really doing it at events and things of that nature, how do we create sponsorable assets to be consumed in the digital media space?

So the not podcast podcast that I mentioned earlier that we do for this client on a monthly basis, those are relatively quick. I would say episode lengths kind of span from, I would say shorter ones are about two to three minutes longer ones, I believe the longest we’ve ever done is about 20. And then generally maybe like 8 to 10, I would say is pretty average. So they come out every month. They’re on different topics related to grief and healing and coping and community and you know, finding joy.

LORI: How to be a better ally. I love that one. How to be a better grief ally. We all need to know how to do that, right?

KILEY: Exactly. Yep. That was a great one. Yes, exactly. So really speaking to the entire community, I think—it’s March 2025 right now—this month we did kind of playing into, you know, green being the month or the color of March with St. Patrick’s Day, talking about, you know, the little green monster that comes up, jealousy and envy during grief. So it’s a- that’s a sponsorable asset. It’s an episode that comes out every month. We’ve- I believe we’ve talked before about pitching it to, like, bereavement facilities and funeral homes and things of that nature, you know. Other organizations and companies that are involved in some way or another in grieving. Right?

And that is something that any company can come in, pay a set fee and have, you know, their logo stamped on the audiogram each month and you know, get a shout out in the episode. Right? And then obviously win-win, some marketing for the company and a little bit more money for our nonprofit.

22:53
Another one that we’ve done that is my personal favorite because it’s so fun, is humor. Humor is healing. So it’s a grief support program. And one of the things that this particular client really relies on is humor and finding joy, as we mentioned, in the wake of grief. So we don’t shy away from laughing. We keep things light as often as possible. We tell jokes and really, really cheesy jokes. So it was a little thing that kind of started on our own Instagram page for the most part, with little graphics with little puns and, you know, funny little jokes kind of designed for kids and them being told on just cutesy, fun, colorful graphics. That has now turned into Humorous Healing, becoming its own Instagram page. And it’s just flooded.

LORI: We’re growing it.

KILEY: Yeah. It’s a growth process, absolutely. But it’s just this cute, silly page that’s just flooded with these dumb little punny jokes and

LORI: Dad jokes.

KILEY: Yeah, right. Dad jokes and the cheesiest ones. And it’s so fun and the community loves it because it’s just, you know, what’s your little dad joke today? What’s going to make me laugh today? We take, you know, jokes from the community and highlight those anytime we get them in the next graphic.

And it’s become this very communal thing that again, is a sponsorable asset now that it’s turned into its own Instagram page. In particular, because at any time, you know, this company, this funeral home has sponsored this joke or this week’s jokes. So it’s a great way, I think, to be really creative with how to make an organization that does really, really important work get access to more funds and more resources to be able to do more of that work, you know?

25:01
LORI: Absolutely. They’re 100% supported by donations. And even though they’re part of a healthcare system, they’re actually attached to the hospice aspect of the healthcare system and they support the families coming through as well as free support to all the families in Metro Detroit. It’s absolutely amazing. And there’s a lot of these organizations.

We found out over time that there’s a lot of organizations that help children grieve. So if you are, you know, side note here, if you have a child that has experienced the death of an important person to them, grief support is really important. And what we’ve learned from this is that these kids grow up to be really healthy adults because they’ve had to learn how to process really heavy emotions. And that gives them a solid base for a healthy and successful future. So it is important, you know, so something to think about.

25:57
Anything else we want to talk about with this particular nonprofit? I think we’ve covered everything. Our next episode is going to be about what? What are we talking about? Coming up?

KILEY: Next episode, we are going to be talking about spending money to make money.

LORI: Oh, yeah.

KILEY: And that is not just for nonprofits. That is for all clients across the board. Forever and ever.

LORI: For everybody. So social media is pay to play. That’s what we’re going to talk about next time. But for now, that’s what we’ve got. Again, we are PopSpeed Digital Marketing and we are here to help you bring solid ROI to your social and digital marketing efforts. Check out our website at popspeeddigital.com and we’ll see you soon.