So you’ve got everything in place for your business. Product? Check. Pricing? Check. But when it comes to content marketing…you’re stranded. With the strategies outlined in this episode, creating content doesn’t have to be hard. On this 126th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff shares the must-have strategies for all graphic designerless businesses.
When it comes down to it, it's often not your resources that count, but your ability to be resourceful. From cultivating a sense of exclusivity to strategic memes, Andrew shows us how to do just that. Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.
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No Graphic Designer? No Problem! Here Are the Content Strategies You Need…
Andrew Maff
CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com | Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff
00:02
And because of that, it's really causing marketing specialists to become less and less necessary I'm your host, Andrew Maffetone. Today I'm going to talk to you about content ideas for social media when you don't have a graphic designer available to you, for those of you who are watching, you'll see I have my laptop with me this time, because I finally wrote down, I had a bigger list this time. So I want to make sure I don't forget it. So not having graphic designer available. So I always, always, always suggest investing in a good graphic designer, this is your brand, it's how it looks. If you're half assing, your graphic designers because you wanted to save a couple bucks, you're probably going to lose more than you actually saved almost every time. So let's say they're out sick, because you did get one or you found even a great Freelancer that you love that has the availability. And by the way, if you do that you get a freelancer, first job you should have them do is make a brand guideline because if all of a sudden you don't like the Freelancer anymore, or they leave or they become, you know, less responsive or something like that, you always want to make sure you have a brand guidelines. So when you hire the next one, it's like a templated process super easy. However, here's a list. So content ideas, if you don't have a graphic designers available, the biggest one, the top one which talked about on the podcast for is UGC. So if you can get some user generated content, it's great. You can simply just share stuff that people have shared before they're already posting about your product. If you have influencers or sharing stuff, or even just regular customers, that stuff is great. So any kind of UGC that you can get. Typically, I would even suggest even if you had a graphic designer use that stuff and don't touch it. Because UGC is a raw like your product in the wild kind of picture. And even cleaning it up or adding kind of like your logo to or anything like that can immediately make it not look that real. You want it to be like an organic true picture. Take it leave it as is. Another one is gifts. I love gifts. If you say gifs stop listening to my podcast, but yeah, so gifts for me they work really well in emails that work fantastic. We use them all the time for certain brands where you know, like goofy kind of gift can work well, Twitter, it works really well, then suddenly, you can add them onto stories and things like that for Instagram, I wouldn't suggest doing on Facebook, they don't look that good. They don't really look that great. If you do them as like an Instagram video, either you kind of have to, it still has to be an mp4. It's a whole different issue. But gifts in certain channels works really well. sharing videos. So companies like a sprout BuzzFeed doesn't a lot. But we do this specifically on Facebook, where you know, because Facebook, I still like to get as much engagement as we can on company pages on Facebook, just because obviously you can reengage and there's other, there's really great ways that you can leverage that kind of stuff. It's difficult to get traffic or to get engagement on Facebook, if you're just posting a picture unless you're boosting it. On Facebook, what works really well is we'll actually find videos that other channels have shared, that are great videos that are really relevant to our audience. And we'll just share them to our page will will keep the other pages name there, we're not stealing it, we're just sharing it, they still get all the credit and all that stuff. But we get all the engagement, we get all the traffic, they get the video views. It works really, really well it works fantastically on YouTube, or I'm sorry, on Facebook, stuff like that retweeting and things like that on Twitter can work well too. But if you're if you can reshare videos on Facebook that are already getting like millions of views that works out great. Sharing influencer posts works really well, even if they haven't mentioned your company. So sometimes what we'll do is if we're thinking about working with an influencer, we'll actually share a post that's kind of relevant to the product line we're working with, on that product lines, social media to kind of see how people respond. And if some of our audience says oh my god, I love so and so I'm glad you guys shared this or something like that. We know that they liked that influencer and we'd be more than happy to do some kind of campaign with them. So it's kind of like testing the influencer a little bit. And of course, we'll give them credit you always want to share, you always want to tag them in that kind of fun stuff, especially if you do it on Instagram quotes, you know, inspirational quotes and that kind of crap. I'm not a fan of them. But depending on your product line, it could do really well. I know some people who do like sports, apparel and stuff like that they do quotes from coaches, that kind of thing works pretty well. I don't like the motivational stuff just because it drives me insane. But it can work, it can definitely work well. Any kind of cool like that can work pretty well, jokes, especially if you have in fact, we've worked with like a novelty gift company for a long time. And we started doing quotes for them with just jokes that we were able to find. So we would do different jokes and throw them up on different channels and stuff like that worked really well because they're kind of racy jokes, and in the back of idea. So this is if you have a graphic designer that you can leverage and you can actually get them to set you up on Canva. Have them create templates in Canva. And then have them even just put an SEO SOP together, the really, really easy ways to adjust the template. So if you're putting in words, you're putting in quotes, anything like that, that's the simplest way to leverage stuff that you may have already had a designer do. Or even if you have like slight design abilities, do Canva take some of their templates for a while and just tweak them yourself for a bit until you can get an actual designer to come in and kind of make new stuff with Canvas got some great templates that you can leverage if you're if you're kind of looking to just like a starter kit, kind of today's episode is brought to you by finale inventory meet finale inventory, the ultimate solution for accurate and efficient inventory management. Trusted by 1000s of brands finale inventory offers seamless integrations with over 80 sales channels and platforms. With customizable workflows and reporting features. Finale empowers you to streamline operations and scale your business with ease, preventing overselling and maximizing profitability. Whether you're juggling multiple platforms, expanding your product range, or just looking for a way to reduce operational chaos finale has the tools you need to succeed step into the future of E commerce with finale inventory. So what I'm talking about here specifically, is kind of making your customer or your audience in any way feel like they are a part of an exclusive group that got this deal. So I'm talking about let's say if you go to a concert, someone spends a little bit extra money to get a VIP ticket, even though they spent the extra money, they actually in the end feel like they actually got more out of it and will brag to other people that they got a lot out of it. I'm not necessarily talking about asking people to pay more to get more, because that's really just an upsell. But I'm actually talking a little bit about just trying to find a way to make them feel like they're a VIP. So there's a few different ways you can do this. So it kind of depends on things that you may have had set up already. So one of the first things would be like exclusive groups, right. So if you have a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group, or something along those lines that you've created, maybe a Slack community channel or something like that, which would be a little bit more b2b. But still, it let's say you created something along those lines, right? If you offer that specific group, their own discount that's a little bit higher than whatever you're publicizing, they're going to feel like they got a better deal for being a part of that exclusive group. The biggest benefit of that as well as obviously minus the fact that you might have a higher engagement rate just because that audience is already much more of an advocate than anyone elses. But they're going to be so excited that they got that little extra deal that others were unable to get that word of mouth about that group will grow, in which case more people will join that group. And hopefully you can repeat this same kind of thing next year later on for a different campaign. Now, not everyone has a Facebook group or LinkedIn group or something like that already up and running. If you don't, I suggest doing that too. There's another podcast about that, go listen to that one. The other thing you can do, so another one was newsletters. So there's two ways to do this one. So you can offer people who are on your email list a certain discount. So I've done this before, where essentially, the website banner has a 10% off, then maybe I publicize on social media that we're doing 10% off or something like that big 10% off deal. And then I send out a newsletter that says something along the lines of we have an offer only for our newsletter subscribers or something like that. And now you're offering them 20% off. So they're going to not only be more inclined to open that email because you're offering them more than what everyone else is getting. They're also going to be inclined to not unsubscribe from that email because of this different thing that you do every now and then. So by offering your newsletter subscribers and basically segmenting your audience into different ways, specifically one for newsletter subscribers, you can now offer them something completely different. There's an even deeper way you can get into that. We used to do something like this at The company I worked for years ago, and worked pretty well, it was, it wasn't the most ethical thing in the world. But it worked. It was technically I guess, in theory, you could say it was false advertising. I wasn't a huge advocate of it, but it worked. So I guess who cares? A lot of E commerce sellers, you offer a warranty. Technically, there are some legalities to what you have to do with a warranty and how you can offer it and how someone can obtain one. But what we used to do is just say, enter your order number, and then enter your email address. And we will put a warranty on every product that you purchased with that order. But what would happen is, the only way they would have gotten that information would be something that we put in the box that we sent out for the product, in which case, they would go to this special exclusive group warranty slash landing page thing, sign in, we would really just put their news their email in to a regular list and then just kind of ignore their order, because we basically just gave a warranty to everyone. And now we had a very special list of people who we knew purchase with us before, we could in theory, go and look and see what it is that they had purchased with us prior. But it's also someone who took the time to actually open up the box, find this pamphlet in there want to warranty their products, so they cared enough about the product line. So that was a bit more like our exclusive group. And what we used to do is to tell people that if you know if you get your product warranty, you're also signing up with his group where you're going to get special discounts and things like that. So that's basically a separate segmented audience in your newsletter that you could offer a different discount, you could offer your ad, you can segment your audience in your newsletter habit, fuck you, I really don't care, you could give girls versus boys a completely different discount, you could do north or south, you can do it any different way you want. I really don't care. But it's an interesting way to do it. And I've seen it work very well. Another one, another one's interesting, I've seen this work really well. I don't like doing it. But it's kind of like a kind of like a purchase order kind of like a backorder kind of thing, where you do you apply to purchase. So this will be very dependent on your product line. And it's only going to really work for slightly more expensive products, I would say in the 100 to 200 plus range, where you can actually say, we only have, you know, 1000 of these. So you're doing the standard exclusivity kind of thing where you only have so much, but then say we're not giving it to the first 1000 We're giving it to the first 1000 that qualify. And then you're saying we only want to give it to 1000 people that are a certain way or a certain something, or who can really convince us that they needed this holiday or something like that. So now you're asking people to apply to purchase for your product line makes it extremely exclusive, it makes them extremely excited to spend the money in itself just because they're like, oh, great, I got accepted because my story was awesome or whatever. And but that can work, I've seen it work really well. It's very specific product lines that that type of thing works for but it can work. And then last on my list was early access to products for market research. So this one is basically we're going to allow X amount of people to purchase this product under the pretense that they fill out a survey and you're doing it for market research. And then you just say that it's highly discounted. So you sell a product normally, for $40. Instead of doing a 30% off discount, you just discount it discount the top price by 30%. Sell it to them for that price. And then say all we ask since this is a new product line is for you to fill out the survey. So it's interesting that they can kind of start to feel like it's an exclusive group that's being allowed to purchase this product early at a at a very inexpensive rate. But you're also getting free market research out of it. So that one's interesting and great for new product lines. I don't know if I would suggest that one for Black Friday, Cyber Monday because I usually don't suggest at this time because it's already a little late into the season to announce a new product. But if you are I hope you're doing a big ass campaign behind it. But it is something interesting to think about going forward that you can do for any campaign I'm going to talk to you about something that blew my mind. Yes, I said it. I can't believe this is the thing. I love the I love hate relationship with the Internet. I love it because it's where I make a living. And I hate it because of the Society of just people who make up dumb shit on the internet blows my mind. But I'm going to talk to you today about me marketing which is totally thing, not only is it a thing, there are companies who hire people whose sole job it is to do this. It's obscene. It's ridiculously, just stupid, but it works. So I get it. I'm not a fan of like the internet lingo and like, oh, you know, when people hop on, like really dumb trends, like, it just drives me fucking crazy. But this works. And it's and memes have been around for the decade or so now. So it is what it is. So I'm talking about about me marketing, the first thing I'm gonna mention. So it's it's image flip.com. And it's IMG flip.com. So this is a website you can use to create memes, there's 500 Other out there, I think there's like meme generator.com Go to Google and search meme generator, you'll be fine. So what I'm talking about, though, is leveraging these memes to basically connect with your audience. Now, there's companies out there and it's I thought, dammit, I didn't. So me managers are totally a thing. And I thought I wrote down a list of companies, I saw that were hiring for this role. But if you go to if you go to LinkedIn, and you search as a job mean manager, it's totally fine. I think it's great. So the job of this person is to not only create memes that are relevant to the product line, but also make sure that they're on top of trends. So they're basically spending their entire day reading and creating memes and figuring out how to leverage them to basically hand off to the social media team or in maybe used in blogs or newsletters or something like that, to actually drive more engagement and more traffic. So why does this work. So this works, mainly because the easiest way to connect with someone is through humor. So you can connect by, you know, really big, life changing experiences, you can connect by, you know, really sad things that both happened to you and find that kind of commonality between the two of you. But there's one thing that you don't really have to find a commonality between you two, except for the fact that you both laughed. So for you both smiled, is essentially the thing I'm looking at. So you can basically say if you went to a concert, and you met someone, and you knew nothing about them, but you both were losing your minds during this contrary rewatching, you both realize that you have a commonality, you're having fun, it's easier to bond with that person. Same thing goes with humor. So for memes, the whole point is being that you can actually drive more traffic, you can actually engage more people. And you can actually develop an even bigger conversation by creating memes because some of these memes are, I guess, more opinionated others are really just for laughs. The other thing that's nice about these two is think about what's an example? Okay, so I hope everyone in their lives has to work in hospitality. But I served for a while bartending. And one of the things I noticed was that our favorite thing to do to kind of relax from a busy shift or from just a rough day, was to basically talk shop with the other servers and other bartenders, while still joking around, right. So we would make fun of other people or we would make fun of customers we had or something like that just to kind of laugh about it together and ease up the day. And so memes are relatively similar. So if you can actually create your own memes that are targeted to your own audience, and you start to post those things, it would blow your mind how quickly they start to blow up just because people are starting to realize, oh, there's a way I can connect to this, I relate to this. So it works really friggin well. You can create them around your product line, it kind of depends on your product line. If you try too hard, I find that it doesn't work very well. And by doing that, I kind of mean like, you know, if you got a picture of someone smiling, and your copy in the meme just said, oh, when you purchase, you know, blank new product, it's kind of like shut up. Like that's you're trying way too hard. You have to find a way to connect with them and not necessarily make it a sales pitch. So it's perfect for social media, hence why you typically see these things on social media. And then you obviously need to make sure you're creating memes for your audience. So yes, you can make memes about things that are funny, in general, but it's not specific to your audience, and they followed you for a reason. And that reason was because they had an interest in what it is you sell in that specific community. So let's say cheese. Let's say you sell desks, I'm looking at my desk so I'm Kizer saying this bitch. So let's say you sell desks and you primarily focus on people who work from home right big A huge audience right now, you're not going to really crack jokes about, you know, political stuff, you're not going to crack jokes about football, you're not going to do things that in theory could be related. Where Yes, football has a big market. So maybe there's a lot of people who buy desks that also watch football. That's true, but they started following you because you had an interest. They had an interest in working from home and that lifestyle. So you want to make sure your memes are based around that. So honestly, I mean, creation, super easy and super difficult. At the same time, it's the perfect like social media thing we're posting on social media is very easy, but being great at social media is very hard. So it's two different things you kind of have to look into what memes are out there that are trending because old memes start to fall off. Like that little kid who's got like his fist up, he's actually eating sand. By the way, if you look and you there's an article on it, you can read was eating sand, but I'm moving on. But no one really uses that one anymore. The new ones now Leonardo DiCaprio is everywhere for some reason. So are those little troll looking things from whatever game it is people are playing right now. But you need to look at making sure that you're creating them for your audience so that your audience can relate to it. And then obviously, if you're trying to make sales, if you can incorporate your product, great, but don't force it. But I would definitely suggest trying it, give it a shot, create a handful of memes, schedule them out, typically on social media and see what the responses then you can start to leverage them in different ways. I've seen people do great stuff on blogs, where they'll do a section that's got a little bit of a character kind of like comical character to it. So they'll add in a meme just to kind of break up the monotony of all the copy. It's a great way to do it. Great way to try I would not suggest hiring the mean manager just yet. But if you actually start this and it works really well, you may want to have one or somebody who's creating this stuff full time.
21:55
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