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!