Friday Q&As

Author

Crys A.
August 09, 2024

In partnership with

B2B Business Marketing Opportunity

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Q&A’s WITH IBRAHIM

Heyy!

Usually on Fridays, I answer multiple questions, but for today’s issue, I’m going to be answering just one question, which would be a deep dive. Not worry, I’ll answer the pending questions soon via my upcoming Friday Q&As, or via deep dives and nuggets.

Question from Jon Holmes (Founder): I am just starting out on my Ecommerce journey and planning to sell products in the leather goods niche in the UK initially. For marketing should I start by focusing on organic methods first and then take the creatives that perform well and turn them into paid ads, or what might be the best approach in your experience for a new comer? Also what are the best organic methods to start with?

My Response: To answer your first question, that is, in my opinion, the best way to go around is—organic marketing followed by paid media. When a creative performs well organically, it’s highly likely to perform well when you put dollars behind it as well!

To answer your second question, I’d like to dive deep on this one today. Some of these insights were shared with me by a few people that are obsessed with organic social. I actually wanted to share this for my next Wednesday’s deep dive, but I figured it would be appropriate to share it today, so instead, I’ll write something else for Wednesday’s deep dive.

Alright, let’s get into it..

  1. Organic social is very important — it’s not just a “cost center”

First of all, I wanted to say that I personally believe that organic social is still one of the most important departments for any brand. In my opinion, it’s a massive missed opportunity when brands “mail it in” and don’t put enough time, effort, or resources into doing organic social well.

Writing and speaking about DTC online has catalyzed countless new relationships, clients, investments, and other opportunities for me over the past few years.

As anyone who has tried it knows, building a meaningful organic social following is hard, and it takes time. But, if you can stay consistent and provide a ton of value, it can lead to some amazing outcomes for your business or brand.

This means investing in building a proper social team, giving your team the resources to spend where they need to spend, signing up for platforms that help understand analytics or track influencer sales, etc.

Social content is a huge part of owned and earned media, and if you don’t pay enough attention to putting out content, you’ll be paying for the delta in your advertising. Especially with how social platforms have changed today, it’s a no-brainer to invest in building awareness using platforms that don’t charge for impressions.

  1. Building a Great Organic Social Team

There is no “I” in team, especially with social media. You can’t just rely on one person to do everything—content creation, coordinating with creators, sending out product, building surveys, managing ad comments, designing graphics, uploading to stories, responding to DMs and customer complaints, finding and reaching out to influencers, etc. Especially if you’re a brand trying to scale and not just stay a small brand.

But, you probably can do this really well with 2-3 people. The setup I recommend is 1 person who’s focused on making sure the content, brand, and creators attached to the brand are doing what they need to do, and have a second person as a coordinator/assistant to help that person with everything else.

My friend, Michael’s take is that most brands want to find unicorns who can do it all; for the most part, those people don’t exist, and even if they do, they can’t really do everything really well. Instead, more brands should be thinking about building out their organic social media teams, not just trying to hire a single “social media manager” to run the show. Single person works when you start, but not while you’re trying to scale.

In Michael’s view, here’s what a great social media team looks like in 2024:

A Head of Social: This person will oversee the organic social team and operations. Alongside the CMO, they’ll define the overall social strategy, select the channels and mediums your brand should focus on, hire and manage the individual content creators, and oversee all of the content and campaigns for your brand across platforms.

Your social media manager or channel manager: This is the person who actually presses publish on the content and lives inside the brand’s social accounts across platforms. Realistically speaking, a great social media manager or “channel manager” can handle 2-3 platforms at once. Any more than this, and you need to hire more help!

(My side note: If you’re trying to grow on more than 2 platforms to start, you’re doing too much)

Some creators/functional experts: Depending on your brand and needs, you want to think about building capabilities that will allow you to excel at different kinds of content formats and channels online.

Typically that means hiring a mix of graphic designers, video editors, copywriters, and community managers. To decide which creators and staff you want to hire, you’ll need to decide on which channels and mediums you want to pursue as a brand.

Michael didn’t mention this, but one of his specialties is finding underrated talent as designers or illustrators who can help take his briefs up the next two months and turn them into beautiful brand-first posts. You don’t need to hire a fancy agency to execute your social media, as a brand, you just need to find a small circle of people who you can rely on to create the content you need. Whether it’s from UpWork or LinkedIn, you can definitely find this talent from around the world.

  1. How To Pick The Right Channels and Mediums

When a brand is thinking about their “strategy” for social media, what they are really thinking about are the channels and mediums they should be publishing on.

There are so many platforms consumers are constantly scrolling a mile-a-minute on
 which ones should you be on? Should we be on Twitter or Threads? IG or TikTok? YouTube or LinkedIn? Pinterest or Reddit? Should we be creating long form blog posts? Short form text posts? Vertical videos? Professional graphic design images or funny memes? What should we do and how do we know where to invest?

These questions are interesting because there are a lot of tradeoffs to consider. You have to think about your overall budget, your timelines, your strengths and weaknesses as a social team, where your audience spends the most time, what kind of brand voice you hope to build, and what kind of content you are actually excited to make.

The real answer is—it’s very dependent on your consumer. Too often, brands get caught up in what the c-suite wants to see with social, but in reality, if your customer is on Reddit looking for recommendations on your product category with high intent, you should be there. If they’re on YouTube, because they need to see long-form content (like Eight Sleep), then you should be there pumping out as much content as possible.

One thing I’ve found helpful with making sure the social media content stays consistent is playing a game of 73 Questions with VOGUE, but with your brand. I put 19 starting questions on this page you can download, but go even deeper! Once you have the answers written out for that, it’s easy to understand the brand and ideal social presence as an organism, and then use that to cross-check what you believe the social strategy should be for your brand, and which channels/mediums you publish.

  1. Outsourcing Organic Social

One of the hottest topics in 2024 is hiring overseas talent and I think if done well, this can be a huge unlock for organic social teams as well. Obviously, it’s still tough to hire, train, manage, and retain a team regardless of whether they are overseas or not, but the efficiencies can be huge.

Like I mentioned above, I think certain parts of social can absolutely be off-shored, but I think you need to make sure you are leveraging quality talent. A bad hire can cost you 2 months of wasted time. The hard part is typically the strategy, copywriting, and team management to keep your creators focused and outputting high quality, on brand content over time.

Personally, I also think with ChatGPT and tools like Publer, Bard, etc., there is enough resources for someone off-shore to handle your social posting and copywriting. Especially because if the platforms don’t know your brand tone of voice, you can have ChatGPT write in the tone of a brand that has the same voice.

Michael is a little bit more cautious about full outsourcing and I am a little bit more optimistic that it’s doable. Either way, you still need to do all of the same things regarding quality control, strategy, training and management whether your team is outsourced or not.

  1. Understanding Content Pillars

As you think about what kinds of content you want to post, you should start by identifying your content pillars. I recommend checking out JT Barnett’s 50-page PDF, which goes into depth on content pillars. These can be centered around your brand values, your product, the benefits from your products, or around “categories” of content you want to produce.

Not every piece of creative needs to have a sales objective, but you need to know what buckets your posts are falling in. Michael recommends that a certain percentage of posts should be used to educate, entertain or sell. In my opinion and experience, the best content is edutainment—it’s teaching someone something new, but also is good enough to get shared in a group chat.

Are you posting memes to gain awareness and entertain your viewers? Are you posting product education carousels with comparison charts to explain why they should choose your product over another? Or are you posting direct response sales offers and discounts to drive conversions? In all great organic social executions, there should always be a healthy mix of work and play.

Remember again that with the way social platforms are setup to distribute content today, different content will reach different audiences of consumers. You probably have 7-9 different personas that like your content; don’t forget about all of them.

  1. Leveraging UGC

For DTC brands specifically, leveraging UGC and the content that your customers and community create for and about you can be a goldmine for organic social. Anytime your product gets posted by a customer, you should always try to engage.

If you go through Everlane’s Instagram account, you’ll notice their best content is UGC. If you open Liquid Death’s Instagram, it’s exclusively UGC. But the caveat is that UGC has to be what it says: user-generated content. Not paid content. People know the difference.

If you have something that is expensive to ship, UGC is harder to get outside of your customer base. But if you have a beauty, personal care, beverage, snack, or anything that’s easy to ship, you should look at the cost of your product COGS + shipping as an investment for the content you get from it.

Michael recommends reaching out to get as much of the content directly uploaded into Dropbox to preserve the quality of the file, but at the very least, you should be reposting much of it on your own account. It builds social proof, trust, and demonstrates how people use the products in different ways.

When you’re running Meta ads, a huge percentage of interested consumers will swipe over, and if you don’t have your highlights properly merchandised at the top with UGC or customer love, you may miss the opportunity to convert.

It’s a flywheel, too; the larger your brand gets on social, the more customers are excited to post about you which just creates even more UGC. This is also why it’s important to have a beautiful feed—people want to virtue signal who they are, and if you represent something, they will want to be a part of it too.

  1. How Organic Social Plays Into Paid Social

Another great point that Michael made was how organic social plays into paid social. In short, organic social should be seen as a “testing ground” where you can try different formats and concepts cheaply before deciding to run paid.

Obviously, paid is an expensive strategy, but testing 30 different concepts on organic social is not. Use organic social to test and learn, then use paid to promote your top performing posts and turn them into ads.

I agree. I think platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels should be where you test creative. If it outperforms the baseline of views/engagement you normally get, immediately ship it to paid. It’s no secret this style of content does well—sometimes achieving 4-6% CTR with an engaging video.

Think of posting on the short-form platforms as your first $250 in ad budget, where you can test and see if it resonates. If it doesn’t, then why even try to spend money on it? Be smart with your ad budgets.

  1. Organic Social & Customer Service

Lastly, and I talked about how deeply connected organic social is to customer service 2024. For some brands, about 70% of their customer service tickets start on social media. These can be both positive and negative interactions and typically the organic social team is the first line of defense.

Instead of filing a complaint through a traditional system, many customers will just post on social tagging your brand or send a DM via the brand’s handle. Having the right social media manager who is trained to deal with this happening is incredibly important, as well as making sure you have all the right integrations between your customer service platform and social channels.

It is also helpful as a brand to make sure that you have a direct look into what errors are popping up. Often times the first place to realize your checkout is broken, or a discount code isn’t properly working is through organic social. Not paying attention to what is happening from a customer service standpoint can lose you an impactful amount of revenue.

Alright folks, that’s it for today!

Have a great weekend ahead!

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