Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there. It’s Catherine Langman here. Back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success podcast. Today on the episode, I’m really excited to welcome a friend and colleague onto the show. Kate vanderVort has a business called Social Mediology, and her business is all about the content and the community building side of social media. Obviously, in some recent episodes on this show, we’ve been talking about paid advertising as a strategy for using social media, but Kate’s expertise lies in really attracting and building an engaged community through creating the right content that really suits your ideal customer. I think this is a really, really important part of our marketing mix, and it’s something that I see a lot of people really struggle with, and a lot of people get wrong, and end up just throwing content up for the sake of having something on there, as opposed to really using these tools to their advantage.
It’s an amazing episode. It’s something that you are really going to want to have a pen and paper in front of you. Make yourself a cup of tea, pull up a chair, and grab something to write with because Kate shares some absolute gold on this show, some fantastic strategies and ideas that even I learned something, and I’ve been in this whole marketing game for a very long time. So, I’m very, very excited to welcome Kate onto the show. Without further ado, let’s get started.
Catherine Langman:
So welcome to the show Kate, it’s fantastic to have you here.
Kate vanderVoort:
Thank you Catherine, lovely to be here with you.
Catherine Langman:
It’s so good. So obviously today we’re going to be talking all things social media, social media marketing, content, all this good stuff but before we dive into that, I would love for you tell your story a little bit, share your background and what got you into this social mediology business.
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, no worries. So I started out in the not-for-profit sector, I actually did a social work degree, which has one word right, given that social media wasn’t around when I went to university.
So I did my social work degree and pretty quickly realized that that wasn’t the right fit for me, but I worked in the not-for-profit sector for about 15 years and then really thought I’d be better off working on the sector not in it, and started a strategy consulting company but within about three months it was really obvious that social media, which we’re talking 12 years ago now, so it was very early days that the social media was sort of this big black hole for not, just not-for-profits but for businesses as well and that people were really struggling to figure out how to get into these new technologies.
So I pretty quickly specialized in social media and having always been an early adopter and with a bit of a strategic mind and the ability to look at a whole picture and see where the inefficiencies and where are the gaps, and to find ways to pull things together, I just really started specializing social media. And whilst most of that was in the not-for-profit sector to start with, businesses started contacting me and really wanting that help.
So over the last 12 years we’ve been through a couple of different iterations, at first it was about very much being an agency and building a team and I pretty quickly worked out that running a team and doing gum for you was not really where I wanted to be. So I moved more into the consulting space and coaching and training and workshops and conferences and keynotes.
Community’s really always been at the heart of what we do but in the last four of five years we really started to specialize on the growing and activating customer communities on social media. So we do, do some done for you but we only work with brands and businesses who are committed to putting community first.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, oh I love that. Just to hear you share that story and getting into social media, and 12 years ago, just really hit me like a ton of bricks how much social media has changed even in that short… It’s not even a generation. It’s such a short period of time, really.
Kate vanderVoort:
And you know it’s funny because yes, so much has changed and yet so much of the fundamentals is still the same. At the end of the day what social media had done is turned a lot of marketing principles, traditional marketing principles on their head and we’ve moved very much from the broadcast to the relationship model.
And the digital marketing industry has taken some interesting twists and turns during that time but it’s always come back to relationship and to community and that if you don’t have that underpinning everything else that you do, it diminishes the results that you can get. You want a combination of the paid ads and funnels but you really want that relationship and that community to sit underneath all of that.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah absolutely, and I think right now with all the changes that are happening on these platforms thanks to privacy changes and all of that jazz, it’s probably even more crucial and more evident I think, how necessary this is.
The brands that don’t have that in place are the ones that are struggling, aren’t they?
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah absolutely, and I think a lot of people are just cottoning on to that now, and not just small businesses, in fact often small businesses do it better than some of the big brands do because they’re not necessarily quite as agile and quick to adapt to the changes.
But if you really focus at the core of, this is about relationship and this about community then it helps you to ride out all of the constant changes that are happening, because if you’ve built that community, regardless of what the platforms do, you have multiple ways to tap into them if you’ve built that from the start.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, and presumable that community is only going to be there and engaging if there’s something of value for them to engage with.
Kate vanderVoort:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Catherine Langman:
So why is being on social media so vital for building a brand, if we think about that?
Kate vanderVoort:
Social media gives us unprecedented opportunity to tell our story, and really at the heart of brand is, who is this company or who is this business, what sits behind that, what are the values that that brand holds and demonstrates?
And a traditional marketing where we used to do television, radio, flyers, letterbox drops and where there was such a big focus on style guides and colors and fonts and brands and whilst all of that are important, that’s not what people are on social media for, and that’s not what they want to connect with.
And so, this gives us an opportunity to really remove a lot of those layers and show the human side of a business, regardless of the size. I really believe that big corporates need to do a better job of doing that as well.
But if you’re not on social media and some people still choose to not be on social media, that’s absolutely their prerogative but I think if you do it right and if you find the unique voice of your business, and you find where it is that your audience is and you know what it is to share with them and to connect with them, then you’d be hard-pressed to find a better tool to do that with social media. It makes the ability for that to happen on scale much easier.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, definitely. So I guess, when you present it like that it sounds like a no-brainer really, but of course in daily practice it’s quite a big undertaking because I think a lot of listeners, a lot of people that we work with, they definitely find the requirement for the amount of content to come up with is pretty constant and it can feel like a bit of a beast, maybe like a hungry teenager that always need to be fed.
So I know you have some amazing tactics and strategies for creating content that’s going to attract and engage your audience, so would you like to maybe walk us through some of those, share some of those little ideas that you use?
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah of course, I think the first thing before you even think about the types of content and how you’re going to create them, is really why are you doing it in the first place?
So I still see a lot of content that is created for the sake of creating content, and I feel heartbroken for some of these small businesses that you can see are investing so much time and energy in content that it’s missing the mark.
And what a lot of businesses do is they jump on social media and they start doing exactly what I’m talking about, which is telling the story of their business but they completely miss the mark on what it is that their audience wants from them.
There’s a number of different strategies around finding out what it is that your audience wants, but if you don’t understand their pain points, their challenges, their frustrations, you can’t really deliver content that’s going to have an impact on them.
And a lot of the time as a business, we start promoting from the solution and where we really need to start is with the problem because that’s where our potential customers are at the moment, they’re very focused on the problem. And how they describe that problem is probably really different than how we describe the solution and what they’re searching for is language and context around their problem. They may not even know what the solution is yet.
And so taking the time to really understand that is critical. And so we talk about that as the avatar or our ideal customer. And there’s lots of ways to do that.
Some of my favorite ways are finding Facebook groups that are filled with your ideal audience, and there are thousands of them on Facebook, I mean, there are millions of groups on Facebook, but there are thousands where you’ll find your ideal avatar. And women in particular are very good at sharing their challenges and their problems and their frustrations on social media, particularly in these communities where they feel safe and where they can speak up and share what’s going on for them.
And so being able to go in and search for the keywords that best describe your business in those groups and so just to be really clear, this strategy is not about joining these groups so you can go and pitch your business, this strategy is about going into these groups-
Catherine Langman:
No, nothing worse.
Kate vanderVoort:
I know, so many people do it. But going into these groups to truly understand the problems, challenges, frustrations of your ideal avatar and even using some of the language.
So I have someone on my team, their job and they schedule this into their weekly calendar is to go into the top groups that we know our avatar participate in and she goes and she captures the exact questions that are being asked on a day-to-day basis-
Catherine Langman:
Oh, I love that.
Kate vanderVoort:
… about Facebook, about Instagram, about LinkedIn, about social media about strategy and reputation management, all those things that people are asking questions about.
And then once a month, I’ve got a videographer in my business that will do a day of filming with me, and I’ve got my list of 30 or 40 quips that I’ll record, some shorter, some longer depending on the platform. That what I’ve done is I’ve gone out and looked for those, or gotten someone else to go out and look for those topics that people are talking about. So that’s one way that anyone in business can do that process.
Some of the other places, if you go into Amazon and you look for the best-selling books about whatever it is that you do. What you find is that in a lot of the reviews, people have talked about the problem that they had when they went to go get the book.
Catherine Langman:
[crosstalk 00:12:02]. I love that idea.
Kate vanderVoort:
So it might be, “I couldn’t get my baby to sleep for 12 months and I found this book and it changed my life,” and actually using some of the language from those reviews can also be really useful. Google reviews is another place that we’ve just started looking at.
So you find your biggest competitors or the biggest influencers or the biggest businesses in your industry, your area and looking at those Google reviews that can also be… Because often people are saying, “I had this major challenge and then I found this company,” and so they talk about that journey from pain point to solution. So we can learn a lot about how to use that language in our content.
So once you really understand what kind of content you need to be creating then it comes down to, are you doing that in video, or are you doing that in audio or are you doing it visually, is it written?
And that can be tricky too, because sometimes that’s very much about how our avatar want to receive our information, that’s where I would put it firstly. But when I’m working with clients sometimes it’s also about what they feel most comfortable about, and some people are far better off at writing an article than they are about being on video and some are far better at audio.
And so, it’s about finding a balance, what do your audience want and what do you feel most comfortable delivering? And then there’s a whole lot of strategies about batching content that can help you be more efficient and effective in the sectors around that. The whole MasterClass in that question, Catherine.
Catherine Langman:
I’m sure there is, yeah. We might need to break that down. I came across… it was probably an article that I was reading whilst procrastinating doing something else, no doubt but it was really talking about how a lot of businesses and brands will speak about their own business, whether it’s on their website or on social media, and they’ll be using language like, we do XYZ, or we make XYZ products, they won these awards, they’ve been featured in this media, and blah, blah, and it’s not customer focused at all.
And I definitely see this a lot too. I suppose to me, I guess I look at that and my reaction is, well it’s assuming that the customer has already decided that this sort of product is what they need and want and now it’s just about convincing them to buy but that’s not what social media is about at all, is it?
It’s like we need to have this content to start the conversations and really attract and engage those customers far earlier in that buy journey rather than just yeah, trying to sing our praises, I guess.
Kate vanderVoort:
Absolutely, and one of the best books I think I’ve ever read about that is Donald Miller’s StoryBrand, and he talks about-
Catherine Langman:
Ah, I love that one, too. Yeah.
Kate vanderVoort:
… the hero’s journey, and how often as businesses we make ourselves the hero and often it doesn’t leave space for our customers to step into the story.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Kate vanderVoort:
And instead we want to look at our customer as the hero and we are there as the guide to help them on their journey.
And I find that when I’m creating content… And this is why we focus so much on the avatar because if you are speaking directly to Sarah, who is 40 with two children and lives in Sydney and you’re visualizing your avatar, so that you’re actually speaking to a human being, it completely changes the way that you craft your content.
And if Sarah is the hero in the journey and I’m just there as the business to guide her along the way, my whole attitude towards Sarah is completely different than it is when you’re sprouting on about all of the wonderful awards and achievements, which are important but they have their place and it’s generally not the first thing people need to read on the front page of a website.
Catherine Langman:
No, it’s a bit further down, isn’t it, where’s it’s more just trying to establish that kind of trust and added social proof to give people confidence to move forwards.
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, absolutely.
Catherine Langman:
So you hinted just a minute ago about batching, but if we are trying to create content, so you’ve given us some amazing strategies there for finding the sorts of topics and questions that the customers are looking for answers to and, I guess searching for information about.
So how can we then, I guess yeah, use that time most effectively when we are creating these pieces of content?
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, so I think you’re looking for the most efficiency and effectiveness, when you’re creating content and there’s lots of different content types, In our social media success circle, we do a content sprint every month where we, in 90 minutes take our members through planning out a four-month’s worth of content. So we go through each of the content types.
So we always start with trending days because those dates are removable, and I’m not saying that you necessarily go, “Hey, today is World Wetlands Day,” and, “Today is World Fox Day,” if it’s not relevant to your business don’t go on about it. But those things can absolutely be great inspiration for us to share some of what’s meaningful to us as human beings, which can often be a great selling point for conversation.
So we start with trending days, then we look at what are the key business dates, and you want to make those front and foremost because obviously we’re not doing social media just for the fun of it, we’re doing it to drive some kind of objective.
And then we go through all of the different types, education, inspiration, entertainment, user-generated content, then we’ve got long-form content, video content, if you know the types of content that you’re going to be doing each month and you know how many of each type, immediately you can start to break that down in batches. So that if you’re doing inspirational quotes, you sit down for an hour and you do 20 of them, only inspirational quotes that are relevant to your audience, however. Do not share Michael Jordan quotes if you’re selling nursing pads. I can’t tell you some of the mismatches I see in inspirational quotes.
And so if you can break that down you’ll start to get a lot more efficiency, but the other way to batch content is for example, all of the video content that we do, if we’re really particular about accuracy we send it to Rev.com which is humans who will transcribe and you can get it back within between 20 minutes-
Catherine Langman:
Less than a day.
Kate vanderVoort:
… to 24 hours, depending on how busy they are. And that’s I think $1.00 US per minute of video content.
But what a lot of people don’t know is they also own Temi.com, which is T-E-M-I.com and that is machine transcription and that is $0.20 per minute. So for example, our podcast we send them off to Temi.com, we get the transcript back in less than a minute usually.
Catherine Langman:
Oh wow.
Kate vanderVoort:
Because it’s all done by machines. Then you’ve actually got a transcript of that, that you can pull out quotes, you can pull out whole paragraphs, you can turn it into a blog article. If you’re doing video, in fact, what was I just on a moment… Oh, I was on Vimeo uploading a video to something and I’ve just noticed something I hadn’t seen before where you can take a snippet out of videos and turn it into a gif, just with one click.
Catherine Langman:
Oh cool.
Kate vanderVoort:
So you just find all the little bits in your video that have got a cool sort of boomerang type gif type thing in, and pull them out.
So what you want to do, as much as possible be repurposing content. So if you create one video, or one audio file make sure that, that’s transcribed and then create graphics that go with that.
And if you’re doing things like blog articles, if they’re evergreen, if they can be used at anytime of the year, you might create that and then do four or five social posts all at once in the calendar to plan in advance with different images, different headlines or quotes out of the blog. So you’re repurposing that piece of content.
And having a platform, we use Trello for all of our content calendars, but having a platform where you can drag and drop and move things because often some things day-to-day happens in your business, you want to bump the scheduled contents that you had. You’re always creating a pathway ahead of content so they you’re never sitting there scrabbling around looking for, “What am I going to post today?” Because none of us need that stress.
Catherine Langman:
No, totally. I guess as you’re describing all these ideas that we can all employ, I imagine, at least this what I do in my business anyway, is establishing a bit of a system that you always do so that you know the steps and then you can kind of document those steps and train somebody else to do them as well, to help out with executing some of the stuff because otherwise it could be a lot.
If you’re sitting there thinking, every single time you’ve got to create some content, “Oh, what are the options that I could go through with this piece of content?”
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right, setting up some kind of system and picking the parts that are easily transferrable to somebody else. I see day in, day out, businesses who’ve gone, “I’ve done the PA thing, I’ve tried this, I’ve tried that,” and what they’ve done is dumped and ran in the hope that someone else is going to pick up their social media and do it as well as they would have, and it’s just not possible.
So the strategy that we use for what you’ve just talked about, we use Trello heavily in our company and anytime that I’m briefing somebody on what to do, I first record a loom video, which is just an extension on Google Chrome, and I will show them on the screen with a little loom video and I drop that into a card on Trello. So we’ve got operations manuals in Trello where every little step is a little video and so before I even start to train somebody, I’ve actually mapped out in my head what all of the steps are and I’ve created videos.
So if I’m training someone today and they’re not with me in six months time, next time there’s actually a full operations manual that’s there for the next person.
Catherine Langman:
Ah, that’s brilliant.
Kate vanderVoort:
And so whatever you put in place with your social media strategy and planning, that’s one way that you can start to document that in a more agile way than the typical Word document manual.
Catherine Langman:
Oh yeah, I’m not a fan of that.
Kate vanderVoort:
No, me neither.
Catherine Langman:
No.
Kate vanderVoort:
But the other thing around that too, as I mentioned we do a 90-minute content sprint, so I suggest in 90 minutes a month you can map out your strategy for the month ahead, and we tend to do that in week two, or three of the month before.
And then I suggest that people spend one hour a week creating one to two weeks worth of content, that you always want to be two weeks in advance, so that you’re never working on what’s happening this week, you’re working two weeks in advance.
And if you always keep ahead, then you can get on top of that in an hour a week and then you want to spend 15 minutes a week where you’re scheduling and you don’t want to schedule too far in advance because you don’t want to be sharing… If you’ve got something scheduled and then all of a sudden something happens today that you go, “Oh, I’m going to share that now,” and it clashes with what’s scheduled.
And even, things can break in the news that mean you’ve got to bump content, that’s happened a lot with clients, where there’s scheduled content and then something happens, it’s like, oh that was really inappropriate content that was scheduled and no one thought to pull it.
So you can come up with that system or that cycle on your business and then it literally comes down to just sticking to that but no one can make you do that at the end of the day.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, well true. We do have to push ourselves along a little bit, don’t we, with this stuff?
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, and I suggest putting it in the diary as a non-negotiable because if you understand the value of what the content delivers then it has to be a priority in the business. And what I find for most businesses is that it drops to the bottom of the priority list and then they wonder why social media is not working for them.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, well there’s probably two reasons I think that people reach that opinion, number one, is exactly what you’ve just said and then next to that would also be, I think people who think that thinking posting some posts on social media is going suddenly drive a ton of traffic and sales to their website. Which in my opinion is not really what social media is for.
Kate vanderVoort:
No, I mean it plays a role in that journey but you’re absolutely right, most businesses go, I want to go from step A to sale, instead of step A to B to C to D to E to F, maybe to Z before we talk about a sale.
And I often look at is as, it’s a bit of an emotional bank account, you have to earn the right to make any kind of ask, because people are there to be social, they’re there to connect with people, they’re not there to be sold to.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, exactly.
Kate vanderVoort:
So yeah, it’s having a longer term view about the micro steps that people will take on that journey, and the different touchpoints that you can use social media.
And I think it’s one of the most underutilized strategies I guess, in social media is that if you map out your whole customer journey from beginning to end, every single little step along the way, and then look at where does social media fit in there and how can I use social media to strengthen that relationship each step along the way, rather than being the instigator of the step, if that makes sense?
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, it does. Yeah, I like that way of looking at it. I think that if everyone could think about it in that way, it’s exactly how you started out. You were talking about building relationships with our audience and if we think of it in those terms then it’s that, that’s going to then support the effectiveness of the advertising or the email marketing or the website to convert and all of that other stuff that needs to happen if we’re going to make money in our business.
Kate vanderVoort:
Absolutely.
Catherine Langman:
Some absolute gems that you’re dropping with us today which is sensational, I know that our listeners are going to be absolutely loving it. I want to ask you a different question now, and that is are all followers the same and what’s more important, quantity or quality when it comes to followers?
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, so not all followers are the same. You’ll have your lurkers, you’ll have your competitors, you’ll have your detractors, all sorts of people who might be watching what you’re doing for whatever reasons they are but equally… And this happens a lot with particularly product brands or brands that have got some kind of customer lifecycle that ends.
Like if you think of a lot of the pregnancy brands, once you’re not pregnant anymore, those products are not as relevant. So you might have a lot of followers who are still there just because they followed you at a particular time but they’ve moved on in their own journey and so you’re not relevant to them anymore.
And we probably all know by now, but in case we don’t, all of the algorithms on these platforms are based on engagement and if someone hasn’t engaged with your brand online for months on end, they’re not seeing your content anyway.
So you’ll have a lot of, I won’t say dead followers, you’ll have a lot of followers who will never see your-
Catherine Langman:
Dead wood, you mean.
Kate vanderVoort:
… because they definitely wouldn’t turn into customers. But you have a lot of followers who are not engaged and they’re not seeing your content.
So I always say that you are far better off having a small engaged, dedicated community of raving fans around your business, and we always talk about the facts that if you’re looking at what works organically, it’s that if you have your best customers, if you have your ideal avatar as part of your community, they are connected to other people like them. And so then it becomes a part of, how do we really nurture those people and really create content that speaks to them, that they want to engage with and share because they lead you to your next best customer.
Catherine Langman:
Yes, yeah.
Kate vanderVoort:
I see this more than ever with mom brands.
Catherine Langman:
That’s so true.
Kate vanderVoort:
I know that all of my purchases apart from the impulse ones when I was pregnant, all the things I had to have for the first one-
Catherine Langman:
Totally, because your mates told you to get it, didn’t they?
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, and when you think about those pregnancy groups and how often women might ask a question, and complete strangers are giving them their opinion but they absolutely influence the buying decision.
Catherine Langman:
Definitely.
Kate vanderVoort:
And so, we do a lot of work with our clients around how do you create digital champions or micro influencers.
And so not your typical glossy, on there doing my makeup influencer, but they are people who are really active on social media and we know that what other people say about you is far more important than what you say about yourself.
And that’s that activating part when we talk about growing and activating a customer community. You’re rewarding them with some kind of recognition for that but really getting your raving fans talking about you and making that super easy for them, is really key.
But you’re much better off having a small engaged, dedicated, loyal group of followers than you are having hundreds and thousands of people that are not engaged because it actually affects whether anyone sees your content.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, well I’m sure that many listeners will be happy to hear that and hopefully it takes the pressure off people feeling the need to spend lots of time and money building up an enormous following on the platform.
Kate vanderVoort:
Well, I think the platforms themselves have realized that too and are reducing all those vanity metrics so that it’s not so much about… Facebook is getting rid of likes and turning them into followers, and Instagram removed view counts and that’s happening more and more across the platform that the vanities are less important which is great for smaller brands.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, yeah that’s so good. So I guess, now that you’ve mentioned that, how do we tell whether the content that we’re creating is actually hitting the mark? Is it because we’ve got lots of comments and that sort of thing? What should people be looking for?
Kate vanderVoort:
It was always engagement was sort of the metric and it’s gone beyond that now. The platforms themselves, and I think we intuitively know as well that it’s the conversations and the sharing that actually makes a difference.
So it’s all good and well for people just to like a piece of content but what does that actually achieve? It might give a quarter of a second boost of serotonin, [inaudible 00:33:54] our brains work, but if we can actually get them engaging in conversation.
Now what that requires is for the brand or the business to volley back the conversation, and so many people miss this I still see big brands, and you would see it all the time with Facebook, brands that-
Catherine Langman:
Not replying?
Kate vanderVoort:
… don’t reply to anything that’s on there. And it’s like you’re paying for that real estate and you’re still not replying. So it’s really being present.
And I think the other thing that people miss in that is that we often want to move people offline really quickly. If they make a comment or a question and we say, “Sure, send me a DM.”
Catherine Langman:
I hate that. It’s a missed opportunity.
Kate vanderVoort:
[crosstalk 00:34:49]. And there’s a few reasons for that, one is it signals to the algorithm that there’s interest. If someone comments, and you comment back, and they comment back and you comment back, that’s saying to the algorithm, there’s actually something of interest here, it’s not just a one-way conversation.
Secondly, you miss the opportunity to influence other people who would see that conversation. If you’ve got a question about the beach towels that I sell, chances are somebody else does. So really taking the time to do that online and do that in the place where you’re asked the question holds a lot of value.
And we’re becoming more and more lazy as consumers, if I ask a question on Facebook, I don’t want to talk to you on the phone. If I want to talk to you on the phone, I’ll pick up the phone. If I asked a question on Facebook, I want you to answer my question on Facebook.
Catherine Langman:
That’s right.
Kate vanderVoort:
When buyers are in buying mode, if you take too long to respond, chances are they’re asking other businesses the same question.
I was doing some work with some photographers recent and there was one who goes, “No, I’m going online once a week to answer inquiries,” I’m like, “That is fine, but if I’m out there looking for a family-portrait photographer and you come back to me four days later, I’ve already booked somebody else.”
Catherine Langman:
That’s right.
Kate vanderVoort:
So when people are in buying mode, you want to be really present for them but use that opportunity to educate others, rather than moving the conversation offline too quickly.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, and I think a lot of people, they’ll move it offline because they’re embarrassed because there’s been a problem or a criticism or something like that. And I definitely am an advocate for answering those difficult questions publicly because chances are, as you were just saying, somebody else will be thinking the same thing and haven’t asked, so you’ve just been able to help somebody else as well.
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah absolutely, and I’ve been asked that question quite a bit lately where people say, “Well if someone asks me whether my product’s Australian-made, I don’t want to answer that publicly because it’s not, it’s made in China.” And it’s like, well the reality is, it’s made in China, so own that and find a way to describe that in a way that explains why you do that. And it won’t be for everybody, there are some people who will not like your answer whatever you say, they’re not your customer.
We can often get quite deceptive about how we respond on social media, I think the same story as women, if you’ve got a baby on the hip and a glass of wine in the other hand and you’re trying to respond, terrible example but we’re so busy and we’ve got so much going on and often we just want to flick off a quick response when it comes to social media, but really think about an answer that’s going to connect with your ideal audience because you won’t please everybody on social media, ever.
Catherine Langman:
No, yes we have to lose that expectation, I think, in life as well. I have a couple more questions for you and I think the first one, is what would be one suggestion that you would like just to emphasize that product brands could be doing right now to improve their social media game, especially engagement?
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, look I think really that the key to all of that is understanding what your audience wants and so sometimes it’s just slightly changing what it is we’re sharing but the best way to find out what it is that your audience wants, is to ask them.
So I gave you a whole of strategies, if you don’t want to ask your customers, you can use those strategies but for something businesses it’s literally about, who are your repeat customers and have a quick conversation with them, “What’s one thing I could be sharing with you on social media that would actually make a difference to your day?” Because if you can understand that.
I think the other thing, particularly for smaller brands or those… I know you asked me for one thing, I’m going to give you two… Particularly for smaller brands or those that have been doing social media but not getting any results and not getting that engagement, the reality is there are times where you have to manufacture some of that. So if you’ve got five friends or five loyal customers that you can have in a chat and go, “Hey, I’ve just done this post, can you just give me a quick comment,” sometimes that can just kickstart.
And I’m not saying manipulate or be inauthentic about that, I’m talking about asking people who would be more than happy to support your content but yeah, just not saying it or are busy themselves.
I literally had a phone call last Sunday morning from… Hopefully she won’t listen to this podcast, from a friend of mine, “I have to read you this post,” I’m like, “Okay, what is it?” And she goes, “It’s a post I just wrote on LinkedIn,” I’m like, “It’s Sunday morning,” she goes, “Yeah, it’s a post I just wrote on LinkedIn, it’s hilarious.” And I’m like, “Okay,” so she read it to me, and I’m a very visual person so listening to something I might have missed the joke anyway, I’m like, “Fine, okay,” and she goes, “Anyway, can you just get on and like it for me, and maybe leave a comment? You’re the first of 10 calls I’m making,” and I thought, wow, that’s dedicated.
Catherine Langman:
On a Sunday morning, that is dedication. Good on her.
Kate vanderVoort:
I’m not suggesting you do that necessarily.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kate vanderVoort:
And it’s the same if someone writes you and email and gushes about how fabulous your business is, it’s fine to write back and say, “Hey, I’d love you to leave that as a recommendation on Facebook, would you be willing to do that?” So sometimes there is just that little bit of engineering that’s required to get people engaged.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, well that makes sense, why not? We email people and ask them to leave a review on our website, and all that sort of stuff, so why not? I think as long as we’re not trying to push the wrong sorts of people who aren’t our ideal customers to do those things, then that’s not going to help us at all.
Kate vanderVoort:
Let’s face it, your mum is always your ideal customer.
Catherine Langman:
My mum wouldn’t even know what Facebook is. And I’m pretty sure my dad thinks it’s a conspiracy.
Kate vanderVoort:
My grandmother once said to all of her friends at the nursing home, one of the staff members told me she said, “I am so proud of my granddaughter, she is amazing at what she does. I have no idea what it is but it’s really amazing.”
Catherine Langman:
Ah, what a gem.
Kate vanderVoort:
The staff member says to me, “What do you do?”
Catherine Langman:
Oh, that’s fantastic. All right, so I have one more question for you, and that is probably a fairly quick one, but when do you think that a brand should look at either outsourcing their social media management or handing it off either to hiring or outsourcing?
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, I think this is something that should happen in stages, and never be an all-or-nothing approach. I would always argue that you should retain the core strategy within the organization. It’s absolutely fine to get help and get support to do that, but that dump and run that we spoke about earlier definitely does not work and can actually be disastrous for a brand particularly one that grows really quickly.
And often if a brand grows really quickly, then they go, “Ah, we’ve got to get someone else to do our social media,” a lot of pain points can come from that. I’ve seen some shocking disasters with that strategy.
Catherine Langman:
I bet.
Kate vanderVoort:
So I’d break down all of the different parts that are required within a social media strategy. So you’ve got your graphics, you’ve got your copywriting, you’ve got your video, you’ve got your monitoring and your response strategy, you’ve got your social listening, you’ve got your research though not necessarily in that order but there’s all these skillsets that are required in social media. Sometimes one person can do them all but if you’re a smaller business it might just be a virtual assistant who helps you to do what you do.
But if you’re really looking at outsourcing it, I’d be just deciding on which of those are most crucial to your business. So if it’s brand that gets a lot of negative feedback online, social listening and response strategy should be the number one priority and so maybe that’s one area you can get help in.
Whereas if it’s content creation that’s a constant pain point in the company or the business, then getting support on the graphics and the video might be something that you do.
So I would suggest breaking it down and looking at what the priority is, but realistically it’s whenever you’re stretched beyond the ability to keep doing it within your business, you then need to start looking at what it is that you can handle.
But I would definitely suggest that strategy of whichever platforms you’re using, that having a really agile operations manual so that anything that you are training someone else to do, create a video of it so that you’ve got that. They don’t have to come to you for questions all the time, they can just go back and look at the videos again.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, so good. And I think really your point there about really breaking down all of the different components and different types of tasks that are involved and then I guess, figuring out where your own skillset and interest lies and trying to delegate the rest, is probably the best way to approach it.
Kate vanderVoort:
And obviously ads, so I forgot to put that in the mix there but ads are critically important and sometimes that’s the most obvious thing to outsource first because you can actually see a fairly defined return on investment on ads. And it’s probably somewhat difficult for average business person to get their head around how ads work, compared to the natural storytelling and organic content within an organization or a business.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, probably. Certainly a pretty technical platform to get your head around these days with media buying, that’s for sure.
Kate vanderVoort:
That’s the first thing I always suggest that people outsource because it’s the one that can have the biggest impact if it’s done right, so you want it done right and you need an expert to do that.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, very, very true. So I guess to round us out today, a lot of what you’ve said, you’ve been bringing it back to really researching who the audience is and what they want to hear from you about and to learn about the kinds of content that you should be creating. And when we were having a bit of a chat before hitting the record button today, you were describing this amazing tool that you have, would you like to share a little bit about that?
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, we’re very excited to be launching a new avatar tool. It’ll take about 15 minutes and you can go through and I literally step you through step by step, what are all the different things that you need to consider when crafting your avatar and then at the end we email you a beautiful little poster that can go up on your wall, so that when you’re creating content you’re speaking directly to your customer.
And it completely changes the language that you use, it shifts us out of marketing and into conversations because we can actually visualize the human being at the other end who’s ingesting our content.
And so I’m very happy to make that available to your listeners, and then we also have Facebook group where you can post your avatar and get feedback. So we suggest that you put out who your avatar is and then ask the question, “Do you fit any part of my avatar and if you do, where do you hang out on social media?”
So that if I’m your ideal customer, Catherine, I don’t know you from a bar of soap, or what you do, but here’s my [crosstalk 00:47:32], and I go, “Yeah, these are the Facebook groups that I spend most of my time in and you know what? I love doing TikTok dance videos.” Not really.
Catherine Langman:
You’re not talking about me, that’s for sure.
Kate vanderVoort:
I can tell you as someone who fits some of the demographics and interests of your ideal avatar, I can tell you where I hang out.
And just to finish with a quick story. We’ve just finished doing some work with a transport infrastructure company-
Catherine Langman:
Oh wow, scintillating.
Kate vanderVoort:
[crosstalk 00:48:00] and they want, “No, Kate this stuff just does not work with us,” and it was really interesting, like long story, story but really interesting that what they found was the decision makers in government and corporate that they work with, who are their ideal avatar, were largely men 40 to 50 age range and they were mostly passionate about mountain bike riding. It literally turned out 95% of the people they spoke to, mountain bike riding was one of their hobbies.
And so now what they do, is they use mountain bike riding analogies when they’re talking about strategy and infrastructure. I know nothing about mountain bike riding but, “It’s like going down this kind of bend, and doing this,” so they’ve actually taken those analogies and put them in their content and you can imagine reading that, you’re like, “Ah, these people know about mountain bike riding,” so it just speaks to your customer in a different way.
Catherine Langman:
I love that.
Kate vanderVoort:
So it can [inaudible 00:49:04] to do that.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, oh that’s so cool.
Kate vanderVoort:
[inaudible 00:49:07] a new avatar tool.
Catherine Langman:
So obviously we’re going to share that link in the podcast show notes, so definitely head on over to Episode 67, so it’ll be CatherineLangman.com/episode-67 and you can grab the link and it’s a free tool, I think. Isn’t that right, Kate?
Kate vanderVoort:
It certainly is.
Catherine Langman:
So definitely go and jump on that, and I absolutely love the Facebook group idea, obviously that really adds some extra value there for any punters who are looking for help to really up their social media game.
Kate vanderVoort:
Yeah, that’s great.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, so thank you so much for joining us on the show today, you’ve really shared some amazing gems and strategies and ideas and I just know that our listeners are going to have lots of value from listening.
So thank you so much for joining us today.
Kate vanderVoort:
Thanks so much for having me, Catherine.