377: Social Media Strategy For New Ecommerce Store Owners With Alex Rossman

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. And today I have Alex Rossman on the show and Alex is the founder of Rossman Media, which is a social media agency that helps e-commerce brands kill it with social media. And in this episode, Alex teaches us how to formulate a social media strategy for a brand new e-commerce store in today’s landscape. But before I begin, I want to thank Clavio for sponsoring this episode.

00:27
Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they have their email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy.

00:53
Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they purchased, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every single email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing.

01:23
SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source for my ecommerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce stores, and ecommerce is their only focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too, and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers.

01:50
So head on over to postscope.io slash Steve and try for free. That’s P O S T S T R I P T dot I O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention a new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app.

02:20
Now on to the show.

02:28
Welcome to the My Wife, Put a Job podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have Alex Rossman on the show. Now, Alex is actually someone who I met on a panel that we were both on for Small Biz Trends, where we discussed how to establish a brand off of Amazon. Now, Alex is the founder of Rossman Media, which is a social media agency that helps improve the sales and the site traffic for e-commerce businesses with, you guessed it, social media. Now, his agency was actually awarded the best social media agency in 2020 by Business Insider.

02:57
And he’s helped some of the world’s largest brands like Bose and Orange Theory manage multi-million dollar social campaigns. Now in this episode, Alex is going to teach us how to formulate a social media strategy for an e-commerce business. And with that, welcome to the show, Alex, how are you doing today? Thanks, Steve, appreciate it, man. I’m good. Thanks for having me. So for those people listening who don’t know who you are, can you just give us a quick background story and tell us how you got started with social media and why’d you start an agency?

03:26
Absolutely. So I own Rossman Media, hence the last name correlation there. So started the company about five years ago. It started really as a full service digital agency. And then we really over the last couple of years honed our skills in the social media world. And that’s really where things began to take off. We had the opportunity to work with some very large brands, as you mentioned, Bose, Orange Theory, Airbnb being some of them. And

03:55
That’s really been our focus for the past few years and it’s grown to a fairly large business, all in-house staff based in Portland and LA currently. And that’s really where we’re at. think starting the digital marketing adventure is what I always like to call it because it’s truly an adventure. There’s lots of…

04:18
Learning experiences because this industry, as you know, is always changing. So being ahead of trends and understanding where things are going to be five, 10 years from now is really my day-to-day job. So I got into it because really I like it. I love marketing. I love how brands can really connect with consumers through really

04:42
you know, intentional marketing. I started as actually a musician. was a singer songwriter right out of college, went on a college tour, started touring with some big acts and that’s good. lot of my own promotion and learn social media, learn PR, learn really ways to get my personal brand out there. And so I kind of took that knowledge and brought it over to, you know, a professional career. your agency what I call like a full stack agency? You do the creatives, you do.

05:11
like email, SMS and all that stuff in addition to social media? We do. We prefer it. You know, we really like to have, you know, I don’t want to say complete control, but we do like to have, you know, the foundation all built. So we know that, Hey, this is going to be successful campaign because we really built it out from scratch. We also find that it’s a great way to collaborate with our clients really from, you know, ideation to activation. Okay.

05:39
So what I was hoping to do today, Alex, and you heard during the intro, was to go in depth on the best way to kind of implement and formulate a social media strategy for a smaller e-commerce business. I know you guys have worked with lot of larger players, but I want to talk about the little guy today. So where would you start? So let’s talk about your choices first, right? There’s Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat. Can you just kind of give your assessment on the different platforms to start with? Yeah, do we have three hours?

06:09
No, I’m just joking, Steve. I think social media right now is in a very unique place because for the first time in a long time, there is a social media platform, a new one that is aggressively competing with the big boys, as I call them, the Facebooks, the YouTubes, Googles, Instagrams, and that’s TikTok, right? And it’s been around for a little while. you know, I’m sure people may have heard, you know,

06:37
the grapevine of this platform since probably 2016. But with that said, it’s really starting to gain momentum, particularly during the pandemic when everybody was really hunkered down, attached to their cell phones. And it became really what started as a very Gen Z platform to now very expansive. have a very wide demographic of people that are on that channel from

07:05
the Gen Z to the middle-aged woman who’s just looking to be entertained throughout the day. What that leads to is a new business owner or e-commerce store owner that can really take advantage of a platform that I would consider to be really the Wild West. There’s a lot of new opportunity there. The organic reach is very significant in comparison to other channels.

07:32
Instagram even came out, as I’m sure you saw recently, to say, we’re going to try to almost mimic what TikTok is doing and try to get back to that organic potential that we used to have when the platform initially launched. So if I was a new e-commerce store owner, I would really put all my eggs into the TikTok basket right now. And the reason I say that is because what we’ve noticed is it’s really a volume play.

08:00
TikTok’s algorithm is, know, typically one in 10 posts have some sort of viral component to it. So, you know, the, reach there, I think is incredible. The advertising platform, we actually became a TikTok agency partner recently. So we’ve had the incredible opportunity to test and beta really TikTok’s technology on the backend. So they are moving towards a direction where

08:27
it’s really going to be social media commerce where you can now, instead of just, you know, going and clicking on a product and then taking you to a landing page and then a checkout page, you are going to be able to purchase directly from the platform. And this is going to absolutely change the game. Instagram is been trying to do it and they’re actually working towards it. It’s probably going to be implemented around the same time, time TikTok is. So as an e-commerce store owner,

08:57
you are about to be opened up to an incredible new world of social commerce. So I think it’s a great, great time. It almost takes us back to really kind of where e-commerce kicked off and had major success, you know, 10 or so years ago when it was kind of just like, you know, everyone was creating e-commerce stores and seeing great success. think we’re going to start to revert back to that because of this. I’ve actually been on TikTok for two months and in just those short two months I’ve masked about

09:25
45,000 subscribers and you’re right. one out of every 10 goes viral. I even had one that went over a million views, which is pretty incredible. Right on, man. Good for you. And you can check off the middle-aged Asian dude is on the platform checkbox. I love it. All right. So let’s talk about TikTok then. Okay. let’s say, let’s, let’s say I’m an apparel brand, right? How do you get started on TikTok? What types of videos should you post and what’s working well?

09:55
That’s a great question. So TikTok is all about trends, as I’m sure you know. algorithm is built around hashtags and those hashtags hold a lot of weight. So if you’re posting content, my advice is to always be ahead of the trends. Okay. So of course you want to create your own content and create your own trend, but to get started to really start seeing that momentum build.

10:22
you’re going to have to kind of piggyback off of what is already trending on the platform. And that’s really the foundation of why TikTok is so successful is because it is a collaborative platform. The intent behind TikTok is to collaborate. It’s to do the duets, right? So if you see another influencer or content creator that’s posting content that you feel resonates with your product or your brand, do a duet.

10:50
create a video that’s in collaboration with them. So my biggest recommendation is that, is really just look up those trends post frequently. I’m all about collaboration, as I mentioned. So if you can identify other creators, because I think there’s going to be a lot of people, Steve, are listening to this. And they’re saying, you know what, as a business owner, I’m not going to get behind the camera all day, every day. I don’t have the time. I want to build the…

11:17
business and not have to worry about creating content every day. And that’s fine. I actually, you know, we have several clients that are really just getting started on that platform and we let the creators do the work. We reach out to content creators that we feel resonate with our brand’s audience. And we send them product and they create content, they cross promote on their page. They send us, you know, the raw content so we can repost.

11:44
So I think that’s a great alternative as well. If you’re not wanting to get in front of the camera is to leverage people that know the platform well. Okay. I lots of questions for you. So you said frequently define frequently of posting. Well, you know, yeah. And I think that’s very subjective, but what I will tell you is that some of the biggest TikTok stars right now, whether you’re a influencer or even a brand,

12:10
They’re posting once or twice a day. Typically some that really have built a massive following had posted up to like five times a day. Wow. So, I mean, that’s a lot of content. You’ve got to have a lot of time on your hands. But what I will tell you is that if you like, for example, one of my fiance’s, you know, really good friends, she just wanted to start, she had this product in mind. She built it, build a prototype and

12:36
She’s like, you I don’t have any money to really market this thing. Like what is the most inexpensive way to get this product out there? And so she’s like, you know what, I’m going to try TikTok. And she did exactly that. She posted like three to five times a day for the first, you know, several weeks. And all of a sudden, you know, she had three or four videos that hit that, you know, million, 2 million. And then I think even now 3 million. Wow. You Mark.

13:02
And she sold out her product. mean, she didn’t, she couldn’t even keep up with the man within the first month. So I think again, there’s, know, as this platform continues to grow, that’s probably going to be less likely to happen. I mean, I think TikTok is always going to try to make it, you know, a very viral platform. However, this is the time to really execute on that. So with that friend, can you kind of describe the videos that went viral and what the layout? Yeah.

13:31
what the video was about? Yeah, great question. you know, hers, which is so funny because we were laughing about this with her on the phone just a few weeks ago. She’s like the videos that got the most traction were like videos I didn’t even like. They were just like almost stupid. said they were short form, you know, five, 10 second pieces. And in her case, believe it not, it was showcasing how the product worked. It was actually more educational than anything.

14:01
So I think if you have a product that kind of has a unique value proposition, really explicitly showing that I think is going to be advantageous for you. Like for her, it was as simple as she created this. It’s basically for makeup. So you’re, let’s say you’re traveling on, you know, plane, you’re going everywhere. It’s like this makeup bag or box or whatever that basically you can throw your stuff in and it,

14:29
kind of clamps together and it has this like snapping sound. So she basically took advantage of that snapping sound and just kind of like, it’s this almost like appealing sound that you know, like, okay, it’s going to hold all of my stuff in there, right? And it’s so simple, but that was really what took off. And what was so interesting, Steve, is that the audience that she initially thought it would go for, which was, you know, the beauty geeks, people that were all about, you know, new makeup and that kind of thing.

14:59
it was actually gamers. people that wanted to have all of their gaming equipment in this little thing and travel with it or something. So it took off on this other channel and she’s like, I would have never guessed in a million years that the demand was in the gaming community. Isn’t that crazy? it’s again, it just kind of shows you that in the beginning, sometimes the audience, the right audience will come to you. And I think it’s just really a matter of creating, you know, content frequently.

15:28
So did she mention her URL or anything in those videos that went viral?

15:34
So I’ll tell you guys, I’ll give her a little plug here, but it’s called a splay tray. Okay. And so you can look her up on TikTok. You can look her up on her website, but she had some branding in there, but not really. Like it really wasn’t super brand forward. wasn’t like click the link here, you know, which is very, you know, kind of Instagram-esque, you know, swipe up or anything like that. wasn’t.

16:02
It really wasn’t a strong call to action. was really a matter of saying, Hey, this is, this is what I’ve created and here’s how it can be utilized. And she basically got very creative with all the different ways that you could use it. And so she just, you know, kept creating content. Um, but yeah, to your point, mean, again, it’s just, it’s a matter of, you know, creating content, you know, you don’t have to be super salesy with it again, you know,

16:30
The TikTok user is pretty intelligent. They know that if they like something, there’s still a link in the bio that they can click and go check it out. But pretty soon it’s going to be as simple as clicking the product in the video and being able to check out, which is going to, for someone like her, going to be a game changer. Here’s kind of what I’ve noticed with, with TikTok and just social in general. Like when you try to steer people towards a website, it never reaches as many people.

16:59
And I think my philosophy now is if someone wants your product, they’ll just Google it or they’ll find you somehow. And that kind of leads to the next point is that kind of omni-channel approach. you are, let’s say, as you mentioned, which I think you’re exactly right, if somebody sees your product on TikTok, the first thing they’re going to do, even if they don’t, click the link in the bio on TikTok,

17:23
going go to Amazon, they’re going to go to Google, they’re going to find a place where they can buy your product. So I think again, it all comes down to having a jumping off point and then also having the omnichannel approach to back it up. So your friend, is she still posting like two or three times a day or is she tapered off a little

17:45
She’s tapered off a little bit and it actually has worked for her. So I think, you know, after communicating just with her, you know, really from a small business standpoint, she’s, you know, trying to keep up with demand and now has to allocate time towards, you know, operations and really, you know, working outside of the business and ways to grow it. So what she’s realized though, she was concerned as, Hey, am I going to be able to sustain this type of virality? And, and

18:14
what she realizes she doesn’t need to post that much anymore because with TikTok’s algorithm, once you have that following, know, your posting is going to still reach, you know, a larger audience than if you were just to get started. What is different though, and, you know, I must say is following doesn’t always account for engagement, which is something that again, you always have to be kind of reinventing the wheel and creating new content, but in her case, she doesn’t have to do it as frequently. Right.

18:45
You actually earlier you mentioned another model where you actually pay influencers on TikTok to promote or talk about your products. Yeah, I’m just kind of curious what the going rate on that is. Is it cheaper than the others? know, that’s a great question. So we have access to TikTok’s content creator network. And that was really something I was interested, you know, particularly early on was, know, what are the rates going to be in comparison to Instagram or YouTube, which are typically the two most popular influencer platforms. And

19:14
What I can tell you is, it’s very expansive, right? I feel like YouTube, the bloggers have a pretty set, you know, if you have this many followers, here’s the rate. If you have this engagement, here’s the rate. TikTok is very much different in the sense where you can work with an influencer that randomly went viral and, you know, they don’t really know what to charge. You know, they’re just out there, you know, putting their own personal brand, you know, out into the world.

19:44
And so you can really honestly as low as $100 per post all the way up to 20, 30, 40 grand per post. really just depends on the influencer. My strategy, especially since we’re on the topic of small businesses really breaking out and building a following, my goal is go micro influencer, go the nano influencer route. Just if you can afford to send out product

20:14
to influencers, you can sometimes work out a product trait. If you find the right influencer that’s saying, hey, you know what, I see value in that product. And you also have to keep in mind that creators are looking for ways to create new content. So it’s advantageous for them to work with brands as well, especially micro influencers who are trying to build their kind of catalog.

20:40
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now, what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

21:08
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

21:38
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. It’s almost like Instagram was five years ago, right? 100%. So it is the wild, wild west. What is your definition of nano in this case? So that can range anywhere from, cause you know, what I look at, is different than

22:04
you know, Instagram and YouTube, you look to, you know, subscriber and engagement ratio. TikTok is more heavily weighted towards engagement ratio. So I’m looking at, you know, how many viral videos has this influencer had, not necessarily how many followers they have. Obviously that’s, that’s important. Don’t get me wrong, but I’m really looking at, you know, every time they post, what does that engagement look like? So we kind of have a system in place that looks at, you know, that engagement rate.

22:34
you know, how frequently they’re posting and so forth. But, you know, typically a nano or micro influencer on TikTok, anywhere from 10,000 followers upwards of 200, 300,000. Okay. Is still in that kind of nano micro influencer or anything above that. You start getting into a higher tier level typically. Okay. And in terms of ads, have you played around with the ad platform at all?

23:02
We have quite a bit. Yeah, we’re doing some pretty big activations right now. One with a food tech brand, which I can’t name, but they’ve got a significant budget. They’ve actually, since the whole iOS update with Facebook, I think they’ve just about taken all of their budget over to TikTok. On the TikTok have the same problems with iOS 14 as Facebook though? Not necessarily. No. So there’s actually some, quite a bit of workarounds with TikTok.

23:31
more on kind of the interest side that is different than Facebook actually. You know, it’s interesting because when I first got into the TikTok ad platform, it almost like creepily like looked exactly like the back end of Facebook ads manager. And I was like, oh boy, is this going to be like the same? Is this going to be like a…

23:55
you know, a duplicate of what we’ve already experienced with Facebook. And then I think TikTok has caught on to it. We worked with TikTok out of Austin, Texas, their corporate office down there. And, you know, that was the first thing I brought up. was like, are you guys going to be kind of shifting gears with the ads manager platform? And they have, so they’ve created basically a self-serve option and then a managed services option. So the managed services is really focused on

24:20
either TikTok managing that campaign or an agency like third party managing it. Self-Serve is more for, you know, a small business owner that wants to kind of get their feet wet with trying it out. Now the managed services side is where you can actually have more flexibility in terms of the targeting, which we’ve found bypasses some of the iOS, I guess, you know, restrictions. Is it because TikTok isn’t really

24:48
gathering that much purchase data and all that stuff just yet? I would think so. I honestly would think so. Okay. Yeah, I would. And you’re the self serve has less features than the managed. It does. So for example, you know, you look at and this is what actually really excites me about TikTok is you look at platforms. And again, this is not to discredit Facebook and Instagram. I do a ton of advertising with them and

25:16
still a very viable platform. However, the placements are relatively limited, right? I think the two most common typically are newsfeed or kind of in-story. And those in terms of conversions. Now with TikTok, they’re opening you up to branded hashtags, right? Challenges. You can do branded filters. You can do things that are a bit more…

25:44
I would say diverse in terms of the placement. know, one of the biggest kind of ones that we’re working on now is a hashtag challenge and a branded filter, right? To you describe what those are. Yeah. So for example, if you go onto the discovery page of Tik TOK, as you would with Instagram, you’ll see that there’s trending hashtag challenges, right? And those are typically, if you start scrolling through those very similar content, one right after the other, basically people piggybacking off of a, of a trend. Okay. So.

26:14
what TikTok is allowing brands to do. And again, this is where you start getting into bigger budgets because these are a bit more exclusive placements. However, they can be very effective and frankly more effective than just the typical newsfeed ads. So you can create a branded hashtag challenge where TikTok will put you in that top three row with your own hashtag challenge, and then they will launch it off with their own influencer network. So for example, let’s say

26:44
Let’s say, know, my wife quit, we can use your brand kind of as an example here, right? So let’s say that you wanted to do a hashtag challenge and you came up with this great concept that incentivizes creators to basically, you know, do some sort of funny, you know, video, right? You could actually pay TikTok to get you in that one, two or three spot for a period of time. And with that comes a ton of content.

27:14
Right. So once you get on that placement, basically it’s, it’s a domino effect. You have people that are creating content left and right every second all around the world. So it’s a great strategy from a brand awareness standpoint, but also a conversion standpoint. So, you know, with that, you can, you know, typically a part of the hashtag challenge, you have to include the brand name, you know, whether it’s the username or, you know, specific branded hashtag.

27:42
So there’s some kind of workarounds with it, but that’s kind of how that works. And so far we’ve found that to be very effective. The branded filter is another one that as I’m sure, you know, any TikTok user has seen, you can go onto the platform and, know, use these funny filters. Like there’s one where you can, your face like looks fat and keeps blowing up and blowing up and blowing up. So there’s like a lot of these funny ones, but you can create branded filters. You’ve probably seen, you know,

28:11
Coca-Cola did one recently. And these appear in kind of the top three to five areas of where you can actually choose the filter to use. I think again, that’s a great option to just get brand awareness out there. So again, it’s things like this that are, mean, you can’t do that on Instagram, you can’t do that on YouTube. These are pretty much brand new placement channels that are available to brands.

28:40
Obviously at a cost. But so for the little guy though, does it look like Facebook where you can target based on interests? Do they have like lookalikes and all that stuff? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What we found to be the most effective is, you know, uploading a custom audience. So if you have a even a small custom list. So I think with Facebook, it’s like a thousand or so to create a lookalike with TikTok. It’s actually less. I think it’s I think it’s five hundred. Don’t quote me on it, but

29:09
You can get away with if you have a customer list or a potential customer list, you can upload it in there and it’ll actually create a lookalike. So a lot of the same targeting, the interest-based targeting I would say is probably not as advanced yet as Facebook, but that also doesn’t mean it’s bad, right? Because sometimes the less choices still opens you up to a pretty large audience.

29:36
Can we talk about like the CPM costs versus like Facebook? Yep. So what we found, it started out, I would say CPM costs were not much higher, but definitely higher than Facebook and Instagram. We’ve started to see that change over the last few months. CPM costs are definitely lower now than Facebook and Instagram from what we’ve seen. And I think that’s predominantly because of the usage now with TikTok and really

30:06
how many people are on it. So I think we’re starting to see a little bit of a change there. But yeah, I would definitely say it’s improved on the CPM side for sure. So with more people advertising though, wouldn’t it go up in price? So there’s definitely more people advertising on it. However, the, we haven’t, and I don’t, again, I can’t speak to as to why it is, but I can tell you that the CPM’s

30:36
definitely have dropped. Like for example, you one of the clients we had started TikTok ads probably six months ago. As that data has built, we started to see those CPMs drop probably, I think around 30, 40 % since start. So, you know, pretty significant. So in terms of effectiveness and costs, especially with this iOS 14, which is kind of something I wanted to touch on just a little bit. Are you finding like TikTok ads are

31:05
More cost effective?

31:08
There’s a longer ramp up period. mean, you know, I look at it in two ways. If the goal is to get conversions right out of the gate and you just need sales, I would not go the TikTok route. I just wouldn’t. On the ad side, let me practice. I would use that for organic first and then, you know, add on that, you know, once you start seeing some sales that way. I do think, however, and we’ve seen this just with some of our clients that

31:37
Once you’ve ramped up, I do believe that it is very competitive when looking at Facebook ads, for example, I think is a good kind of side-by-side comparison. So somebody getting started, would really, if you’re going to use ads, I would really try to make sure that you built a foundation with your channel first. One thing that we do that I think is a best practice, Steve, is we take UGC content that has performed well organically.

32:07
and we use that as the creative with a paid ad. And so I think it’s good to test the ad or test the content that you already know is going to perform well. We found that there’s a pretty direct correlation with if it performs more organically, usually it’s going to perform well with an ad. So perfect example, you know, when we first started running ads for this one client, the creative was incredibly overproduced, right? It was like,

32:36
something you’d see probably on Facebook or Instagram, which is super polished. And we realized like, whoa, this audience does not like that. They are not about it. So you want to create ads that mimic the widgets, the experience, the whole TikTok vibe, right? Because if you go into an ad, the first thing, if you know it’s an ad, it’s over. So you want it to look like it’s truly a piece of organic content.

33:06
And that’s really how you can win with that. So that’s just something I’ll kind of add to the table here. buddy of mine told me that all he does is he, he takes his organic hits and then he runs ads on them. Yep. That’s essentially that’s very smart. So let’s switch gears a little bit. So as a brand new owner, it sounds like you’d start out with organic Tik TOK and build it up. And then once you have some winners, maybe experiment with ads, but you said yourself that you’re probably still.

33:35
look to run Facebook and Instagram ads. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about iOS 14. I just came back from Geek Out, which is essentially a media, a conference for media buyers. And everyone has been like going nuts over the iOS 14 updates saying like the reporting is horrible. It’s like plus or minus 30%, either way. What has your experience been? So I’ve seen that brands that, you know, it’s so

34:04
segmented. I wish I had like the best golden answer for you, but it’s so weird because we manage several Facebook accounts on the ad side and some of them are affected, some of them are not. We find that e-commerce over lead gen is typically more affected. So if you’re an e-commerce, you know, all based on conversions, you’re probably seeing some weird things happening with tracking.

34:34
In terms of performance, think the brands that have been on the platform longer are seeing less effect. there’s just a lot of data already pre-existing that you can piggyback off of. If you’re a new brand and you are trying to get started with Facebook right now, especially if you’re e-commerce, man, it’s tough. It’s very tough. And I think you’ve got to be willing

35:03
to invest more right out of the gate than you would have even a year ago. So that’s at least one of the biggest things that I’ve noticed right out of the gate. And so one of the themes of the event also is people were starting to gravitate towards Google because Google isn’t really effective because it’s in the browser and not a specific app. Are you guys doing that also? Yep.

35:27
I definitely have seen that. think on the Google side, really have not seen, actually, if anything, we’ve seen improvement on our Google ads. And I think that could be the reason is, you know, we’re just, you know, there’s still more availability in terms of data to pull from versus, you know, Facebook. So yeah, I’ve absolutely seen Google really not been affected at all. Can we just comment on

35:55
Instagram and Facebook organic like you you recommended starting on tik-tok organic. What about Instagram and Facebook? It’s tough. Yeah, and that’s that’s another conversation I have very frequently with you know brands is they’re just like Why are we not seeing you know, the organic reach and that we were you know several years ago and and the reality is

36:20
It’s just not as organic platform as it used to be. I would just say that, you know, that the most organic friendly platforms right now are TikTok and LinkedIn, predominantly. YouTube, I’d say probably is in that realm as well. But Facebook and Instagram are having a tough time. And I think that’s what prompted the recent kind of call out on Instagram’s side was that, you know, you have

36:49
big time creators that are saying, I’m moving to TikTok, see you later. you see these creators that are basically cross promoting their TikTok videos on Instagram reels and Instagram’s like, no, this is not what we want. And so they actually are frowning upon anybody that posts anything with the branded TikTok watermark in your reel. So my whole thing is that if you’re gonna go the organic route with

37:18
Instagram and Facebook, really the way that we’ve seen that be successful is leveraging influencers. still think it’s a viable platform for that to really move the needle. I also still strongly believe that social media is a two-way street. So if you’re thinking that just posting is going to do the magic trick and wave the magic wand, that’s not the case. I believe in kind of that 180 strategy, really going in and

37:47
being intentional with your comments and direct messages and really treating the platform as a social collaborative platform versus just posting and hoping you’re gonna get likes and follows and eventually conversions. You mean like talking to people and stuff Alex? Like actually talking, isn’t that a weird concept? You know, it’s funny. Like I make a lot of sales just from the DMs actually, not from the posts themselves.

38:17
So what you’re saying basically is organic, especially if you’re brand new is going to be challenging. If you’re trying to build your audience organically, it sounds like TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn, I guess, if it’s appropriate. Yeah. If you’re a B2B brand, I still think that there’s some opportunity there to really make an impact, especially, you know, if you’re being a part of the conversations. Again, it’s I’m all about reciprocity with social media. think there’s, as I keep mentioning and I

38:47
always hit it home when people ask is that, I thought all I needed to do was post. And if I have an engaging caption, I’m going to get follows and likes. it’s, for any social channel, is really not the case. You really have to dedicate time. And I think that’s a big reason why brands hire agencies like ours or hire a full staff to really manage social media, because it is a full-time job, as you know.

39:15
So one thing that I’ve noticed is that my Instagram reels have like 20X more reach than my regular posts. I am actually just taking my TikToks and putting them without the watermark, obviously on Instagram. And it seems to be working well. I think the only caveat is Instagram only allows 30 seconds, whereas TikTok allows up to a minute. So if you’re going Instagram heavy, would you recommend like just going all in on reels then? I would.

39:43
Yeah. And it seems like you know your stuff. Obviously you do. yeah, I mean, you’re exactly right. think Reels right now, I Instagram even came out and said, I believe that, you know, they’re basically the algorithm is treating Reels, you know, with a heavier weight than a standard newsfeed post. So I certainly would. think, you know, Reels, just like with TikTok is a great way to personalize the brand. So, you know, just with any platform.

40:14
try to use every single one of their components, right? Whether it’s Reels, Stories, Posts, like really try to have a strategy for each of those because I have noticed and I’m sure you have too Steve that if you really leverage all of them, the social platform will reward you. So again, just kind of having visibility across the entire platform I do think is important, but Reels right now absolutely are getting more engagement.

40:43
Do you know much about YouTube Shorts, which is again, the same competitor to TikTok? Yeah, I know it’s really, I’m seeing that it’s certainly going to trend upwards and absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I know about it enough to be dangerous, but I know that it’s still a growing platform. I haven’t had much luck with them compared to like Instagram Reels. I was just kind of curious what your take was on it. Yeah. So we were to prioritize

41:13
all of the, let’s say we’re like a small business center without a budget, right? If we’re to prioritize organic reach, it sounds like TikTok is number one. How would you rank the other platforms? So yeah, you’re exactly right. TikTok number one, Instagram number two, particularly I would say if you can leverage Instagram reels like we talked about, think, you know, that’s probably where I’d, you know, spend a good chunk of my time. Facebook, I still think for, again, if

41:43
know, if you are going to run ads, I still believe that if you’re driving traffic to your website organically, it’s never a bad idea to have some money just for retargeting. know, so if you’re, let’s say, TikTok, you’re crushing it, you’re posting daily, Instagram reels, you’ve got moving, that is naturally going to start driving some site traffic. And I think that’s, you know, if you are going to, you know, start launching ads, even on a shoestring budget,

42:12
I think having, you know, even as little as 10 bucks a day just in retargeting, um, is, not a bad idea with Facebook ads. So I would kind of put that as maybe number three or maybe even tied with two. I do think if you can leverage YouTube and you really have the time and energy to put into that channel and grow it, I think there’s that would probably be the latter on my list. Um, but at the same token is still a very viable channel.

42:41
if you are willing to collaborate with other YouTubers and really, you know, put the time and energy that’s needed. As I’m sure you know, Steve, it takes a while to really, really grow a YouTube channel successfully, but that would probably be my order for somebody who’s really just getting started. My order is a little different. I think I would put TikTok and YouTube up front and you can just, you know, argue with me if you want YouTube. Like if you get some traction and some traffic,

43:10
It’s almost like, it’s very steady. Like it doesn’t go away after like three days, like Instagram. I almost feel like with Instagram and Facebook, you have to constantly be posting. Whereas if you hit something big on YouTube, you can reap the rewards for a very long time. And similar with TikTok, I feel like I have some of these hits that last for like a month or more. I would actually not argue with you. I would definitely agree with you. I think that it also depends on, as I’m sure you know,

43:39
With YouTube, think the quickest way to success is if your video content answers a commonly asked question or is really at the forefront. Like I look at YouTube as an SEO play more than anything. Right. And I think as you mentioned, you know, it lives there forever. Right. And if you start like, for example, some of our YouTube strategy, as I’m sure with you is to like look up trends, like use BuzzSumo and these other platforms to see like what’s what’s going on in my industry.

44:08
And how can I create content around that that I know is naturally going to drive traffic? And so I would absolutely agree with you a hundred percent. Okay. All right. So Alex, let’s, let’s sum this up. Okay. So we, so we talked about Tik TOK. Uh, where does Snapchat and Twitter kind of fall into this? Do are those platforms just not really good for e-commerce brands? I don’t think so. Okay.

44:34
I think there might be an argument to be made for Snapchat still, but with Twitter for an e-commerce brand, have not, let’s just put it this way, we have not seen much success with it. Okay. Yeah. And if people need help along these lines, can you just talk briefly about what services you offer and where people can find you online? Absolutely. So, uh, you can go to RossmanMedia.com.

45:00
And, you know, as I mentioned kind of early on, we truly are a social media agency. This is what we live and breathe. We really make an effort to stay ahead of the trends and see what’s going on and ways that we can really, you know, impact businesses. If you are, you know, an e-commerce brand, direct consumer, consumer product goods, you know, something of that sort, I think we could probably help you and find a solution that could really, you know, help either whether you’re

45:30
just on the ground level or look into scale, we could find an option for you. You know, we specialize in everything from social media management to paid social influencer marketing and really building out creative in a way that is really social kind of bite size content that we know would resonate. So that’s where you can check me out. But, okay. Can you comment on like the size of businesses you work with? Just curious. Yeah. So we.

45:57
We’re selective with the startups we work with. We really have to believe in the brands that we invest in. So I will say that if you are a small startup business, we look at it as really a truly invested partner to help get you to that next level because it does take a lot of time. If you are kind of mid to large size, obviously again, we’re selective, but if the budget’s there, we can certainly find a way typically to help scale.

46:26
The majority of our clients kind of fall within the mid to large size. Right. However, just as of late, we’ve really made an effort to work with startups who are really driven and have the budget to take it to the next level. Cool. Well, Alex, really appreciate your time. I’m so glad I met you on that random small business trend panel that we’re both on. I know it’s so funny how that works and, you know, keep doing what you’re doing. I love, you know, following your content and I

46:56
totally echo that and I’m so glad we got introduced and it’s been a pleasure. Cool, well take care Alex. All right man, thank you. Hope you enjoyed that episode. E-commerce changes so fast and so does social media. You kind of have to ride the wave while it lasts and take action immediately. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecluderjob.com slash episode 377. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce.

47:24
With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscoop.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

47:52
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.