The Social-First Strategy Behind $100K in 90 Days — Tessa May Marr | How Organic Social Drives Revenue, How Paid And Organic Work Together, What Social Metrics Really Matter, Why Comments Can Drive Sales, How Customer Data Shapes Your Content (#495)

Please support the show if you liked today's episode:

• If you love the podcast, please get someone else to listen, too!
• If you enjoyed this episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast, please head over to Apple Podcasts, leave a rating, write a review, and subscribe.
• Share the podcast with your family, friends, and co-workers.
• Tag the podcast on Instagram @ecommercecoffeebreak and let me know what you like about it.
• If you like the content and would like to support the podcast, you can buy me a coffee here.
• Become a guest on the show or sponsor an episode.

00:00:00:02 - 00:00:17:13
Unknown
Social media is a little bit of the wild, wild West, and you have to be able to really push the envelope a little bit and really put yourself in your customer's shoes and not just what they care about when they wake up in the morning, but what they care about when they're on social media. And there is a difference there.

00:00:17:15 - 00:00:44:01
Unknown
Hello and welcome to another episode of the E-commerce Coffee Break podcast. For many ecommerce brands, social media feels like constant work posting, filming, growing followers. But there's a problem. Attention doesn't always turn into sales, so why do so many brands stay stuck there? And more importantly, what actually works instead? To answer this question, I'm joined by Tessa May Marr, founder and CEO of Marr Media Group, a social first agency helping DTC brands to an online communities into real growth.

00:00:44:05 - 00:01:00:21
Unknown
Her team recently held the campaign generate over $100,000 in just 90 days by doing things very differently from the usual playbook. So let's find out how. Tessa, great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for having me class. I'm excited to be here. Let's dive right into it. Why do so many ecommerce brands post on social media but see very few sales?

00:01:00:22 - 00:01:17:09
Unknown
It's a very good question. I think there's a couple different key things that we see a lot of the time. First and foremost, I think a lot of times when people are thinking about when they're in marketing, often they come from brand marketing. And so they're really, really concerned with gatekeeping their brand and making sure that it lands in exactly the right way that they want it to.

00:01:17:14 - 00:01:38:18
Unknown
They're often coming from the background of like creative direction or logo design or websites or something like that, all of that. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but social media is a little bit of the wild, wild West, and you have to be able to really push the envelope a little bit and really put yourself in your customer's shoes and not just what they care about when they wake up in the morning, but what they care about when they're on social media.

00:01:38:18 - 00:01:55:00
Unknown
And there is a difference there. I think a lot of times brands take themselves too seriously, and they expect that people are going to respond the same way that they would to web copy that they are going to to a TikTok. And so they're just too afraid. You know what I mean? So ultimately, we're super focused on what actually moves the needle.

00:01:55:00 - 00:02:10:21
Unknown
But you start with the initial metrics around views, shares, those high intent kind of social metrics, then through to traffic and sales. But it takes a while to get there, and you really just have to be able to think outside the box, push the envelope a little bit with what you want to create content wise. Definitely test and play.

00:02:10:23 - 00:02:30:01
Unknown
Whenever we have clients that are like, I don't know, this seems scary. This. I don't know if this is a little bit too, you know, edgy for us. We're like, ultimately, let's let the data tell us what you know, what's going to work and what doesn't work. And I think that's that's probably one of the biggest things that we see from the brands that are successful versus the ones that are not so much.

00:02:30:01 - 00:02:52:07
Unknown
So that would be kind of my biggest consideration. My second kind of follow up to that, I would say, is really thinking about social media as a part of the entire ecosystem. Still still in 2026, a lot of times will be brought on by a brand who has been outsourcing social media to the intern or perhaps to someone in-house who's also doing email or web.

00:02:52:08 - 00:03:22:07
Unknown
And that's perfectly fine. But social is an absolutely relentless industry. We have been actually our agency just celebrated 12 years in business last year, which is insane. I can't even believe social media has been around for 12 years, which is why it's me. But it is constantly changing. It's yeah, I always say it's an absolutely relentless to a career to get into, but I think that's why we've been so successful is because we make it our business to know what's going on social day in, day out, and then how it relates and plays with all of the other channels.

00:03:22:07 - 00:03:44:01
Unknown
So how are you using a borrowed audience on social media to move them to your email list, where there may be more likely to convert? And are you tracking that? Because if so, it's really easy to write social media off as well. Maybe it didn't drive all these direct conversions. Sometimes it does, but it's easy to make that assumption that it's not doing anything beyond likes and follows and things like that, unless you're really thinking about it strategically and mapping all of that data.

00:03:44:02 - 00:04:05:01
Unknown
Perfect. And I think you touched on a lot of very interesting things that I want to dive into a little bit deeper. So in this for 12 years, which in real life is 120 years, with this piece that social media moves, you mentioned a little bit between organic and paid social. Why do you think many brands keep organic and paid social and social media in separate silos?

00:04:05:03 - 00:04:25:14
Unknown
Yeah, I think I think again, I think most people are thinking about them differently. They're thinking of paid as this methodology. I guess that's going to drive real sales and organic as this fun. Somewhat necessary. Still, there's some hesitation, but I think ultimately these days people know that they need some kind of social presence, but it just gets way less of a priority.

00:04:25:14 - 00:04:49:00
Unknown
And they think about it differently. And what we see as a huge win is when you're you're having all of them kind of alluded to it, but when everything is working together. So one of the strategies that we use all the time when we're thinking about paid and organic is we'll actually use organic as kind of our testing ground for different versions of content and see what is capturing those kind of high intent signals saves, shares, traffic, things like that early out of the gate.

00:04:49:00 - 00:05:06:23
Unknown
And then we take those concepts and we move them into paid campaigns. So people are now getting hit more frequently with them. We can obviously retarget the same people that are seeing us in organic, especially based on interest and things like that. Then we start to see what pieces of content are winning from a paid perspective, and we iterate on them.

00:05:06:23 - 00:05:24:21
Unknown
So rather than creating a net new concept, every time we'll take one of those winning creatives and we'll shift the edit, we'll change up the hooks, we'll try a different call to action. Things like that start to see what really, really works and really wins. Move those down into our different levels of our campaign structure, and then we usually even go a step further from that.

00:05:24:22 - 00:05:43:06
Unknown
Take those winning campaigns, bring them to our UGC creators, our influencers, or whoever we're working with, and actually give them winning concepts to create in their own way, in their own style, in their own tone that we can then bring back to both whitelisting within the page sphere and also back into organic. So it really becomes this beautiful cycle of everything working together.

00:05:43:06 - 00:05:58:19
Unknown
And I think that's just the biggest miss. When people keep them separate, they often think of meta Google here like paid and then organic social as just something a little bit more fluffy and fun. But when you pull them together, it's really when you win. An email should be considered a part of that as well, in my opinion.

00:05:58:21 - 00:06:27:07
Unknown
I think you just described a perfect flywheel there, so everything goes hand in hand, and I think that's what you mean with social first strategy to really find out what sticks, what works, and then dive deeper into it and then just scale it on different channels. Now, you mentioned data looking data into it. I think for our listeners, we'll be interesting is to find out what data are you looking into when it comes to evaluate what route to go and what social media strategy works best.

00:06:27:08 - 00:06:44:08
Unknown
Good question. I mean, one thing I always say about working in digital marketing these days is we have so much more data access than we used to in traditional marketing, like think about bus advertisements and billboards and radio. You just get so much less, you know, it would be a miss not to be really studying that and evaluating that.

00:06:44:08 - 00:07:04:14
Unknown
And marketing is part art, part science. So it's never going to be exact. But I think we need to do our very best to sort of track that attribution as best as we can. You want to be looking for, again, specifically with organic social. We want to be looking for that halo effect, because not everything is going to have an exact causation because you posted this one TikTok, you can't necessarily say you drove all these sales.

00:07:04:14 - 00:07:26:01
Unknown
We can do pretty good with things like that, but it's never going to be an exact science. We all know as marketers, anyone out there that's marketing, you know, people are lazy. They need to be served the same kind of style of content and concepts multiple times before they make a move. But yeah, some of the things that we're tracking, I mean, I think some of the most obvious ones, at least today, are definitely impressions and views.

00:07:26:02 - 00:07:50:01
Unknown
That's probably the easiest metric to compare channel to channel, I would say. And also, I think, you know, even maybe three years ago, maybe even two years ago, we were paying a lot more attention to likes and follows. But consumer behavior, user behavior, I should say, has really changed. People are far less likely to double tap and like a post or actually even follow a brand, because the algorithm has gotten so sophisticated that they don't need to.

00:07:50:02 - 00:08:12:10
Unknown
They kind of don't need to indicate that way. It's they're being shown what they're interested in already. So we're looking less for that. And I know when that change started to happen, I think some clients started to panic a little bit and they're like, oh no, likes and follows are down. But you start to see that things like saves and shares are up, which, to be honest, is far more intent and intent and signal than likes and follows anyway.

00:08:12:10 - 00:08:32:04
Unknown
So those are some of the ones we care about really from an organic perspective. Now we're always looking to the back end of the website for sure, to see where organic is pulling traffic as opposed to where or sorry, in addition to where. Of course, pages driving traffic platforms are also going to perform differently, and that's something to understand and expect as well.

00:08:32:06 - 00:08:50:09
Unknown
I hear people all the time being like, Facebook is dead, no one's on Facebook anymore. But every day I log in and I look at my clients performance and they're driving more sales and revenue and website traffic from Facebook than any other channel. Pretty much pretty much. So obviously someone is still there and they're clicking. That's what's happening on Facebook.

00:08:50:10 - 00:09:08:10
Unknown
They're far less likely to like, comment, share on Facebook. You're not going to see that as much. You're going to see views straight down to traffic versus think about Instagram, for example. It's a lot more a lot less traffic because they don't have links built into every post. But you're going to see a lot more of like, community building on Instagram.

00:09:08:10 - 00:09:25:18
Unknown
That's kind of the place to go for that versus TikTok. TikTok is a really big platform for discoverability. Yeah, just like entertainment, I guess. Education as well. People are researching a lot on TikTok, so and building trust, that's also a great place to be using UGC and things like that. So I think it's really important to be looking at your platforms differently.

00:09:25:18 - 00:09:43:09
Unknown
And again, if you're seeing, you know, some numbers super high on one platform and some numbers super low on that platform, maybe not. Super low is a great thing, but you can't necessarily judge them the same way. They have different roles to play in the customer journey and potentially are serving different segments of your customer as well. So that's really like the social specific.

00:09:43:10 - 00:10:01:08
Unknown
Then you move to the website. The last piece I would say is we're really looking at that conversion data and seeing where we're driving the most sales. Now. Again, like I kind of said earlier, you don't always have the ability to exactly track that. This social post drove X, Y, and Z, but we are running organic social campaigns, learning what content is working there.

00:10:01:09 - 00:10:25:23
Unknown
We're moving that content into paid campaigns, retargeting our organic followers. We're often almost always running email acquisition campaigns within paid to build our email list from our current organic social followers, and potentially those that aren't following us organically because that's owned data. And I think that's a really important piece for people to understand, too, is when you're building social channels, hopefully that continues to last forever and ever and ever.

00:10:25:23 - 00:10:46:06
Unknown
But we don't own that. And we've seen some scares with TikTok in the last year or two as well. So it's a really, really crucial strategy to think about how you build that audience and then take them offline, where you can actually communicate with them differently. And the best news about that is people are still, this day and age, more likely to buy from email than they are from organic and and from paid.

00:10:46:09 - 00:11:04:00
Unknown
So organic can help play a part in that. But you should. We should be also tracking how email is converting and looking again for that halo effect. If it's not happening, then where can we go back and do things differently? I'm a big fan of email marketing, so you're speaking from my heart. So very important for our listeners.

00:11:04:00 - 00:11:23:15
Unknown
Always keep growing your email list in the back of your mind. Now what you basically to summarize what you say, set and forget it approach doesn't work. You need to look at every channel separately. You look into the data. And as you said, and I couldn't agree more. It's educated guess as a marketer, but all the all the data helps you to find the right answer.

00:11:23:15 - 00:11:43:23
Unknown
There. Now you're coming. And you mentioned this before, and we mentioned this in the intro from a community point or thing. And you have helped a brand in 90 days up to $100,000. So let's dive a little bit into this. Can you give me an example a case study. How does it work? What results. Did you see how quickly and so on?

00:11:44:00 - 00:11:58:15
Unknown
Yeah for sure. So yeah. The brand that you were talking about is called Carnivore Snacks. We've had the joy of the privilege of being able to work with this brand for about, I think about a year and a half now, maybe 18 months or so. So when we started with them, they have a really strong brand, which is amazing.

00:11:58:15 - 00:12:18:18
Unknown
And they were not doing a bad job at all, but it was kind of piecemeal all over the place. They had different people in their responding to the community, different tones of voice all over the place. They were kind of using the content that came to them, as opposed to being in charge of that, if, if that makes sense, and maybe being a little bit like playing it a little bit safer than, in my opinion, they should.

00:12:18:19 - 00:12:40:00
Unknown
And now the data, the data backs me up on that. So I think it was a really cool opportunity to be able to come into something that was already doing well, but really take their organic, social and level it up. It was just it was starting to soften. I guess the engagement on social was starting to soften. So the approach we took there was to really, you know, talk to them in depth about their brand, who their brand wants to be.

00:12:40:00 - 00:13:04:19
Unknown
And they have a really cool brand where like, it just really lends itself to being bold, I guess. And like, really, I don't know, having a laugh, taking yourself not too seriously and that doesn't say or doesn't doesn't mean we're not talking about their value propositions and things like that that do matter. But we just took the approach of like, let's make it much more light hearted and have a lot of fun with their social and then see what happens.

00:13:04:19 - 00:13:22:16
Unknown
And we also took a very different wash and say very different, but a slightly different approach per platform. So we did kind of talked about this earlier, but we did the Instagram content that was a little bit more shareable, able. I kind of focused on that. TikTok was definitely where we focused on UGC and what we call like snack able moments.

00:13:22:16 - 00:13:44:01
Unknown
So just like really fun, eye catching. Still, thumb stopping is what we say now and then we focus on Facebook to kind of build that visibility and trust a little bit more deeply. So that's kind of where we started. It was really cool to be able to identify some really unique personalities that are quite well known, that we were able to pull in, that are big fans of the brand and kind of work with them on it.

00:13:44:03 - 00:14:04:00
Unknown
We became really intentional about working with affiliates and different UGC creators, who were able to just ultimately show us what they think of the snack itself. And then later on in Q two of last year, that was the quarter that you're talking about. We had a very strong Q2 started to kind of see all this come together. It does take time.

00:14:04:00 - 00:14:19:13
Unknown
It's not organic. Social does not happen right out of the gate. So while you're right about the 90 days, it wasn't our first 90 days I got I got to be honest about that. It does take a bit of time. Then we layered in YouTube shorts and that was about maybe a year ago this month, actually. And YouTube shorts.

00:14:19:13 - 00:14:39:00
Unknown
I'll speak for beyond even just this brand, YouTube shorts probably are maybe our top performing platform across the board right now. For most clients. It's been really interesting to start to layer it in on different brands and see it continue to, you know, quite quickly outperform other channels. So if anyone here is any comment is not playing with YouTube shorts right now.

00:14:39:01 - 00:15:00:22
Unknown
Actually, there was a post on our company, slack today saying that YouTube sources now introduced carousels. So they're really trying to become the next Instagram and like compete in that space. So yeah, just something if you're not doing it already we've seen really good uptick. And you can definitely repurpose content across platforms a little bit. I would play with what you have on Instagram versus what you have on TikTok and see what lands anyway.

00:15:00:23 - 00:15:19:13
Unknown
So we layered in YouTube shorts that really started to bring home and, you know, drive our messaging and yeah, within 90 days organic social alone. Now they do paid as well. So again we it's all part of the flywheel. Organic social alone drove over $100,000 in revenue for them, which I mean we're not as expensive as that. So it's a good ROI for them.

00:15:19:13 - 00:15:32:15
Unknown
And you can't always prove that. That's why I like working with DTC brands and product brands, because you actually get to see that come through. So yeah, it's been pretty successful and huge kudos to them and their brand as well, because I think, you know, it's not just the agency, it's the brand that they give you to work with.

00:15:32:19 - 00:15:53:18
Unknown
Yeah. Funny that you mentioned YouTube shorts. We're using them a lot and that they have carousels as new for me. So that's something I will dive right into later today. But repurposing and using different angles on different platforms makes total sense. Now one thing I want to talk about is how important it is to reply to comments and build a real community.

00:15:53:19 - 00:16:09:08
Unknown
Yeah, I think it's absolutely crucial. And to be honest, over the last many, many years, that's probably the biggest missed opportunity that I have seen for brands like when we enter a, you know, an initial like sales conversation with a brand, we usually see if we can kind of get in there and take a look at what's working for them and what's not.

00:16:09:08 - 00:16:28:17
Unknown
Sometimes what happens after we kick off and we'll see, like unread messages from people asking to like, how to how do I buy, you know, or I have a question that I want to make a purchase and they go to and it's like, that is truly money on the table that you are leaving here by not paying attention like it's it's just it's amazing to me.

00:16:28:17 - 00:16:45:19
Unknown
And I think when I got into social media, when I really saw that there was an opportunity for brands and businesses, it goes back to our kind of like founding story. I really noticed how, remember back in the day when people used to write in a letter to a business, whether it was a complaint or praise, like actually write in a handwritten letter.

00:16:45:19 - 00:17:12:15
Unknown
And if they ever got responses, they talked about it forever. And I feel like even if it was negative, they got a response that made them feel seen and heard. They praised that brand forever. And this is like that on steroids, I guess. So it's it's almost like at least when it started, it almost becomes this like ability to someone's like your 15 minutes of fame where this brand that you know and love that could be huge is actually responding to you personally and so quickly and things like that.

00:17:12:15 - 00:17:38:05
Unknown
So I think it's probably the most powerful part. And I think what we see too, I mean, this is even algorithmically true, that if you are just posting and you are not engaging as a user on social media, your reach will be far, far less so. It's not even just the customer service. Which piece, which I think is super important, but you have to actually be going out there and creating conversations, liking other posts, looking at other stories, things like that.

00:17:38:06 - 00:17:54:08
Unknown
So we actually have a full time community manager who does a community for all of our brands. She's like very well trained in their different voices. We only had her start full time in the last year, and it's been really cool to see. Sometimes you'll actually get. Actually, the brand I was talking about is a really good example.

00:17:54:09 - 00:18:13:21
Unknown
Sometimes you'll actually get like a negative comment about pricing or something like that. She'll go in where the client has given us green light to be cheeky in our responses. So we'll go in with a very cheeky reply. And she has multiple examples of where she can turn the customer around, and they think it's so funny that they end up buying and they write that in there and they're like, oh my gosh, okay, you won me over.

00:18:13:21 - 00:18:37:04
Unknown
I just purchased and it's like such a win. So yeah, I just think, I think it's such a huge opportunity. And I think over the 12 years I've been working in social, everyone tries to automate it because obviously it's super time consuming, like it's super manual, it's super time consuming. Trust me, I get it. I did it for years, but to me it's just not something I'm rushing to automate anytime soon.

00:18:37:06 - 00:19:11:09
Unknown
You know, maybe some customer service fix? Sure, I'm okay with that, but I think you missed that opportunity for that human to human interaction. And people know people know that it's being automated. And so then what's the point? It's not very social anymore. Is it a very good tip for our listeners there? I think commenting replying to messages is the fastest way to turn anyone, either a fan that you already have or somebody who actually complained into a super fan, because I think it's right what you said that people are just used to get a reply or something automated and they are like super surprised when they get a real message that sounds coming from

00:19:11:09 - 00:19:41:20
Unknown
a real person. I have this in my own business, and it is just such a strong way to to talk to a potential customer and to turn them into revenue at the end of the day. Yeah, especially these days with AI for sure. Totally. Yeah. So do you have a tip for I, a store owner on Shopify or on WooCommerce, wherever they are running a DTC brand, what's the first thing they should look into when they want to start a new or scale their social media strategy?

00:19:41:22 - 00:20:04:01
Unknown
So many things we look at. Okay. I mean, depending on what stage they're at, something that we do fairly in-depth here, obviously we're not we're not brand strategists necessarily, but obviously going social, we have to we have to understand their brand and their target market. And that's something I see often missed in or Mr. like skimmed over, I guess a little bit in social strategies is who we are talking to.

00:20:04:02 - 00:20:23:12
Unknown
And again I kind of mentioned this earlier on, but who they are. But then what they're doing on social media at that moment in time because that's so important. Like I said, you know, when they're visiting a website to to potentially shop or to think about or evaluate competitors, that's a different, you know, that's a different headspace that you're in.

00:20:23:13 - 00:20:42:09
Unknown
You're usually doing that desktop or it's just it's just a different experience. When you're sitting at 8:00 at night with a glass of wine in your hand, scrolling through TikTok for entertainment, that's not what you're after. And that doesn't mean a brand can't have an impact. In fact, they can have the biggest impact there, potentially. But is your customer looking for a laugh at that moment in time?

00:20:42:11 - 00:21:00:09
Unknown
Maybe. So is your is your customer what TV shows are your customers watching right now? Like we're. I always joke that I have to watch Love Island for work, because it's just so relevant to what's going on in social media, but really thinking about that, like what sporting events are they paying attention to? I think people just assume on social media have to be playing with trends all the time.

00:21:00:09 - 00:21:18:14
Unknown
And I, I do think that's important. I mean, we talk about trends nonstop, but it's really important to understand which trends make sense for your brand. And you can't just blast trends just because they're popular. It's not going to land. So I think that's a that's probably the biggest thing is I would get into your consumer data as deep as possible.

00:21:18:14 - 00:21:32:23
Unknown
And like we actually have a couple actresses on our team. And I always say I can tell why they're so good at marketing because they really, truly can sit there like, you know, I've got a couple of younger women on my team who can sit there and be like, if I was an arborist, what would I care about?

00:21:32:23 - 00:21:52:12
Unknown
And they spend the time learning about these people and about their experiences in life, and then they're able to market them super well. But that's a really, really important part. And like, like I said, I just think that's the biggest mistake. Or one of the biggest mistakes that brands make is they take themselves too seriously and they assume that social media is a boardroom, or they're presenting to a bunch of executives and it's not.

00:21:52:13 - 00:22:15:01
Unknown
That's where the cocktail party of marketing, like we're supposed to have had a drink or two and be networking and have fun and, you know, all of that. So but yeah, bringing it all back to the consumer data and just like really understanding again where that traffic is coming from, that's another thing I would say is sometimes we've worked with brands who were looking at their Google Analytics, and there's traffic coming from a platform that are not even on.

00:22:15:03 - 00:22:40:21
Unknown
So that's really interesting as well. And that's a really good early signal for what platforms they should be investing in. On that note, who's your perfect customer? Would brands do you work with? Yeah, direct to consumer brands kind of in kind of two different segments I guess in terms of products and then services. So we definitely work with a lot of e-commerce brands, CPG brands, things like that, anywhere where consumers are the ones being entertained by our content and eventually moving through the funnel is amazing for us.

00:22:41:00 - 00:22:59:06
Unknown
And then we also work with services and hotels, things like that, which is really exciting as well. I think travel is a really fun marketing space to be in for sure. And again, it's just all about showing the consumer the experience that they will get. But I get starting from that top of funnel social way of doing things and then mapping it all the way down.

00:22:59:08 - 00:23:14:20
Unknown
Walk me through the typical onboarding process of a new client. What steps are involved? How long does it take? Do they need to do any kind of homework before. Yeah. So we always say our three three uniques are that we're social first, which you mentioned. We are strategy forward. So we do not start working without a strategy. And we're fun to work with.

00:23:14:21 - 00:23:29:23
Unknown
Again, we're social media. We're supposed to be the meeting that you look forward to. You know, it's not rocket science. It's supposed to be exciting. So yeah, strategy is a really big part of it. So we spend an entire month in that space generally when we're working with new client. So we have a kickoff call. We kind of walk them through our process.

00:23:29:23 - 00:23:44:00
Unknown
What to expect. Also, the way we work as an agency, I always like to set our expectations for like how we do things around here and then give them the floor to tell us how they do things. Because in agency you have to be agile, you know, and kind of like fit in with different businesses all the time.

00:23:44:00 - 00:24:02:02
Unknown
So I like to talk about that up front. Then we send them away with some homework. Access is the biggest pain in the butt and it shouldn't be hard, but sometimes it is. So just making sure we have access to all the things that we can make the right recommendations and and decisions. And then the strategy process, we send them a questionnaire that they fill out that gives us a lot of information about their brand.

00:24:02:03 - 00:24:23:19
Unknown
Send us all your brand guidelines, any assets they have, things like that. And then our team goes into like deep research mode, then into brainstorming mode. And usually in that, you know, on our team will assign a primary account manager and a primary social media coordinator, then a community manager for the brainstorm. This is where I think you get the power of the agency, because we have regular meetings that we go through where the whole team will actually, you know, get in on that.

00:24:23:19 - 00:24:40:03
Unknown
And I think that's when I have the ability to attend those meetings. They're the most special and the most valuable, in my opinion, to them. Client. So yeah, we spend quite a bit of time there. And that's where, like I said, we really spent time talking about their personas and then taking into step further to what are they doing and where on social.

00:24:40:05 - 00:24:59:10
Unknown
And then we present that back to the client, walk through all of that. As part of that, we're doing graphic templates. We're putting together a bit of a mood board, a content strategy, you know, all that type of thing as well as the key metrics to success. Because I think that's super important to define collectively too, is, you know, we might think that we have an opinion about.

00:24:59:14 - 00:25:15:11
Unknown
I mean, of course, we have an opinion about what success looks like on social, but I think it's really important to align with the with your client in advance about what they think success looks like to and maybe levels that like, maybe they're, you know, they might be like, yeah, my goal is to gain 100,000 new followers in the first 90 days.

00:25:15:11 - 00:25:32:13
Unknown
And I'm like, oh, interesting. So number one, probably not. And number two. Why do you want that? Like what is your real end goal. Because they might not know that. And that's not their job to know. It's my job to know that, you know these days follow people aren't following as much anymore. So it sure it matters a little bit from a clout perspective.

00:25:32:13 - 00:25:48:09
Unknown
But like there's other ways to help. We can help you achieve that goal. So I think it's I think it's just a really important conversation to have in any partnership is really defining success and making sure we understand each other. No, totally no big question. And background is always what's your pricing? How do you charge? Yeah. Good question.

00:25:48:10 - 00:26:06:11
Unknown
So we always charge on retainer. We have no set contracts, but we do just have a, you know, a defined notice period. Now we say with all of our clients this is definitely, like I mentioned earlier, short term, especially organic. It's not an immediate success. It does take some time. So we're always looking for those partnerships that like, you know, they're here to say they want to put in the effort.

00:26:06:11 - 00:26:23:17
Unknown
It's it's more effort for all of us upfront. So really we all want to, you know, find our bit of our sweet spot there. So yeah, that's essentially how we price we, you know, work with you on something custom. But usually it's like organic. And then if you're adding on email paid influencers. UGC some of those different pieces within that we have a scope.

00:26:23:17 - 00:26:48:18
Unknown
It's always a bit variable in terms of like number of posts and things like that. And I'm really passionate about that actually, because I think a good social strategy doesn't lock you into an exact science, because ultimately nobody knows what that's going to be out of the gate. And what it is today is going to be different than what it is three months from now and a year from now, etc. I also think in 2026, there's so much noise in the world, and I'm fully aware that social is a big part of that.

00:26:48:18 - 00:27:06:16
Unknown
So I believe in only making noise when it matters and not just making noise to make noise, if that makes sense. I don't think that now, not to say that quantity doesn't play a part of a regular posting cadence matters, but I never want to post just a post for any brands, I don't think. I don't think that's a useful, you know, I'm a business owner too.

00:27:06:17 - 00:27:24:22
Unknown
There's you can do that, but it's going to take you a lot more time, which is going to cost you a lot more money. And like, let's be strategic with our money instead of just blowing it. So yeah. So that's essentially how we how we manage it. We have biweekly meetings with our clients. We do quarterly strategic planning session with them, which is a lot more in-depth, where we take a look at, you know, what's working as a whole.

00:27:24:22 - 00:27:44:01
Unknown
Where do we need to tweak the strategy? What new platforms should we be considering? What's working, what's not all that just yeah, I totally get it. You need to have a good understanding of the brand and the goal, which is very important. I think, as you said, just having a number of followers doesn't really count nowadays anymore. There is other goals that you should have in mind and then work towards these.

00:27:44:02 - 00:28:01:10
Unknown
Now before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? I mean, I'm sure I could have more specific tips, but I think the biggest thing I would say is just don't overlook the power of organic. Just don't let it sit in a silo. I just think it's such a waste when you don't connect the dots.

00:28:01:11 - 00:28:26:04
Unknown
I mean, we talked about a lot of things here, but we also didn't talk about pulling sentiment. So that's another thing we're doing is not just on social platforms, specially with the power of AI. Now we just built this incredible new custom AI dashboard that gives us all this data, which I can't believe exists in this year. But so yeah, really, I mean, our community manager, I talked about that she'll often when she's in there doing all of the commenting responses, be like, hey, these are the some of the things that I'm seeing, we're talking about.

00:28:26:04 - 00:28:49:13
Unknown
Here's what competitors are talking about. Here's some pain points I'm noticing. Why don't you guys use that when you're building your content planners in your content strategy and actually start to answer those, you know, address those pain points up front, which I think is really powerful for consumers. And that information should be translated not only to this organic social team, but also to paid, but also to email, but also to web, you know, in order for it to improve its real value.

00:28:49:13 - 00:29:10:13
Unknown
So that's what I would say. Don't forget it. And don't don't leave it in a silo. If I were running a brand, I would I would probably also run a quarterly session with my if I had separate agencies or if I had a mix of in-house and agency, I would probably run a quarterly meeting with all of them at the same time to share findings, which we don't always do.

00:29:10:14 - 00:29:27:10
Unknown
I often suggest it, but it's ultimately up to them. But that's something we would participate in because we would learn so much from other channels, and we always ask for the results, at least to be able to be shared with us. I don't know how often our results are shared, we always encourage it. But I just think that's, you know, huge opportunity to to get everything going in the same direction.

00:29:27:11 - 00:29:44:16
Unknown
Yeah, that's a very good tip. Communication is really key there. And you should not be in a silo and do your social media and the other one do the paid ads, and you do whatever you do, or bring them together on a table and exchange the findings, and you probably will get a better result at the end of the day.

00:29:44:18 - 00:30:05:00
Unknown
Thanks so much for your time today. Where can people go and find out more about you? You can definitely connect me on LinkedIn. Just my name. Tesla are pretty easy to find or on Instagram as well. That's kind of the other place that I tend to be active. Also, the same name cast member and we as a company are also quite active on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok.

00:30:05:00 - 00:30:21:17
Unknown
So follow us there if you're looking for any other tips. We do try and share educational things, but also pretty fun, interesting, funny things that delight you in the evening when you're sitting there with that glass of wine. Perfect. I will put the links in the show notes as always. Then you just will be one click away. Thanks so much for your time today.

00:30:21:20 - 00:30:33:02
Unknown
I think there was a ton of gold nuggets in there. I hope that a lot of our listeners will reach out to you and get a better strategy for their social media, and then see good results. Thanks so much. Thanks.