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Happy Valentine’s Day! You know what that means: We have a brand new season of Love Is Blind to devour. Courtney Revolution (The Circle) joins host Chris Burns to delight in all of the pod romances and love triangles. Plus, Meg joins the podcast to debrief the Madison-Mason-Meg love triangle. Leave us a voice message at www.speakpipe.com/WeHaveTheReceipts Text us at (929) 487-3621 DM Chris @FatCarrieBradshaw on Instagram Follow We Have The Receipts wherever you listen, so you never miss an episode. Listen to more from Netflix Podcasts.…

Custom Apparel Startups

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Great Tips for Starting and Running Your Custom Apparel Business

185 episodios

#Small #Apparel #Tshirt #Embroidery #Screen #Bling #Sales #Marc Vila and Mark Stephenson #Marc Vila #Mark Stephenson #Podcasting Education #Business #Marketing #Print #Directing #Garments

Custom Apparel Startups

20 subscribers

updated hace 3 días

Series en casa•Feed

Great Tips for Starting and Running Your Custom Apparel Business

185 episodios

#Small #Apparel #Tshirt #Embroidery #Screen #Bling #Sales #Marc Vila and Mark Stephenson #Marc Vila #Mark Stephenson #Podcasting Education #Business #Marketing #Print #Directing #Garments

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Episode 189 – The 4 Ps of Marketing This Episode  Marc Vila & Sara Isom  customapparelstartups.com  CAS Podcast  ColDesi You Will Learn How the 4 Ps can help you understand your business goals How using the 4 Ps can help you make better advertising decisions Resources & Links Colman and Company Blog ColDesi Learning Center Leasing Equipment Episode 189 – The 4 Ps of Marketing Many small business owners get into their business with an idea, rather than a full plan. You want to make t-shirts or print signs. You know it’s profitable and you’ve already got some referral business. It’s not that hard to make some money and get overwhelmed with business. What IS hard is growing your business to achieve your dreams and goals. One of the first steps to understanding how to create a great marketing plan (that will lead to success) is understanding the 4 Ps of marketing. In so many words, it’s understanding your businesses goals, so you can make truly educated marketing decisions. So, what are the next steps for your marketing? Should you start a TikTok? Should you do local paid advertising? Would doing Google ads be a good idea? Is renting a booth at a farmers market going to be profitable? Is hiring a marketing firm/person the right move? Anyone who tells you they have the answer to these questions is wrong. None of these can be answered correctly without knowing your 4 Ps. So let’s get to them! All Marketing revolves around the 4 Ps: Product: The number of products categories, product lines and variations your company sells. For example: Product Categories: Workwear, Signage Product Lines: Workwear Men’s Workwear Women’s Workwear Signage Printed Graphic Decorative Indoor Signs Product Variations: Workwear Women’s Short Sleeve t-shirt Women’s Long Sleeve t-shirt Women’s Polo Hats (One) Signage Room Names / Braille Restrooms Directories Maps Instructions (wash hands) How a product is presented or packaged and served How will your customer place their order? ecom, call in, email, in-person. How will your customer get their product? Personal delivery, by mail, customer pick up. Do you install or instruct? Price: What is the fair market rate of each item sold? How do customers pay? Can they pay online? Deposits? Pay in full? Promotion: What channels are you currently utilizing? New business: Nothing because your business hasn’t started. Existing business: Google My Business? Social Media? Word of Mouth? YouTube? Paid Advertising? What channels are you capable of utilizing? Can build a website? Can you hire someone to build one? Can you afford a paid advertising budget? Are there live events you can attend? Do you have a personality for social media/YouTube? Place: Are your products sold online? In store? 3rd party? Do customers need to be local? Are your products only sold with your physical presence? (e.g., signs) Is there anywhere you won’t / can’t sell? BONUS Once you have 4Ps then you need to look at your demographics What is the face of your customer or their profile / avatar? e.g., local small business owners – Dentists, Drs, Pharmacy, Interior Designers, Real Estate, Golf Course Now that you have the 4Ps and your Demographics. You can start answering questions: Should you start a TikTok? Should you do local paid advertising? Would doing Google ads be a good idea? Is renting a booth at a farmers market going to be profitable? Transcript Marc Vila: Hello and welcome to episode 189 of The Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. My name is Marc Vila, and today, we have a fantastic guest with us, Sara Isom. So welcome to the podcast. Sara Isom: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Marc Vila: Thank you. So Sara works on the marketing team over here at ColDesi. She’s a marketing manager over here. And the topic that we’re going to discuss today are the four Ps of marketing, okay? So why don’t you tell us a little bit about why you need to know about the four Ps and then we’ll get into what the Ps are after that. Sara Isom: So the four Ps represent the, I’d say, format of any marketing-based strategy. In order to understand how your marketing structure should be built, you need to answer the questions under each of the Ps. Once we have the answers, we have set our foundation to building out a true marketing strategy. So while tactics and channels can change constantly for marketing, this remains the same. Understanding these Ps will help you gain the knowledge, the information and the foresight to build a strategic strategy for your marketing. Marc Vila: Okay, great, great. So to bring that back, to layman term it, is that somebody is going to ask you, “Should you open up a TikTok account?” or you might ask somebody, “Should I open up a TikTok account? Should I bring my business to TikTok?” And there’s some other things I wrote down here, “Should you do local paid advertising? Should you do Google Ads? Should you rent a booth at a farmers’ market?” So in general, all of these are great marketing ideas for the customization business, just as a general standpoint. So being on social media, yes. Having a website, going to local farmers’ markets, these are all great ideas, but when it comes down to your business, actually figuring out if it’s right for you depends on the answers and the information within your four Ps of marketing. And I love relating things to the real world, right? So I like to barbecue grill. It’s one of the things I like to do. I’ve got a bunch of little hobbies and that’s one of them. And somebody would say, a friend of mine had said, “I was thinking about making a brisket,” right? And I knew about what they had in their yard. And I just said, “You can’t do it with what you have. You don’t want to do it with what you have. Here’s an alternative recipe that’s pretty close with the tools that you have.” So somebody would say, “What’s the best barbecue you could make?” And somebody’s answer might be brisket, right? Well, not for his backyard. You just had a gas grill with nothing else and that’s not really something that’s known to be done. A smoked brisket is not really something you’re going to do in a gas grill. Sara Isom: And maybe one day, but not today. Marc Vila: Yeah, Not today. Yeah, not today, not with the tools that you have. So that’s what this is about, is, should you start a TikTok and start doing things for your business on there? Well, I don’t know what tools you have. I don’t know what is in your business space to really properly answer that. So if anybody comes to you in your business and doesn’t know much about it and tells you, “You should be doing this,” or, “Why aren’t you doing that?” you always have to remember that they may or may not know those four Ps of your business and the advice might not be sound or the suggestion might not be the best one. So you’ve got to do what’s right exactly for your business and it’s going to revolve all around what these four Ps are. So why don’t we dive into those? We’ll describe what these four Ps are, help you to figure out the answers for yourself and it’d be great if you put these into a Word document or an Excel or something like that, so you can start to track this information for yourself. And then at the end of it, with some examples, we can actually answer some of the questions we brought up in the beginning. So why don’t you tell us the first P in the four Ps? Sara Isom: All right, so you will see in the real world the Ps are represented, usually the first P and these aren’t always in the same order, would be product. And it’s the information surrounding the product that you have and that’s product or service. So this would be represented by the overall product, product lines and variations of those products. So really getting to know the product or products that you are selling. That could be what the product is, what does it do, how does it serve the public, but then even breaking it down further into what does your product represent and what represents it. So what is the product? What are the categories? What are the individual lines? I think an example that I usually give is a bakery and representing the different product categories would be something like cookies, cupcakes and donuts and breaking it down by product line. If I was looking at donuts, it might be cream-filled versus a different kind of donut. I don’t even know donuts, donut holes, right? And you can break it further down into the variations of donut holes. So really understanding that knowledge. Also representing within this product element is the packaging, how things are carried out, can a product be delivered. Understanding all of these, and a lot of it seems operational, gives the marketing or the person that’s either on the marketing team, if you have a team, if there’s an individual doing it within your company, it gives us an understanding of where we fit into the mix, what is needed from marketing in order to service these products, the product lines and so forth. Marc Vila: Okay. So in our industry, we’re typically going to be in apparel, promotional goods, customized goods, anything like that, so from science to wall art to T-shirts and everything in between. So if we were to break down your product categories in this example, potentially your business could focus on workwear and signage. Maybe you mainly are working in healthcare and you have a few other areas that you work in. So I made some notes based on the example that you provided or based on your description, I made an example. How about that? Sara Isom: Mm-hmm. Marc Vila: Okay, so for one, we are not getting going to get into a debate of whether a donut hole is a donut, okay? But I’ve imagined that there’s some sort of debate there. So we have product lines or product categories. So if you’re going to define your story, this fictional story, the categories would be workwear and signage, right? That’s the two things they do. They’ve got a UV printer that they print all different types of signage on and then they have mostly workwear that they’re doing. So potentially they’re doing scrubs, they’re doing polo shirts, hats, jackets, things like that. And like I said, mostly medical and potentially in some other areas that have a similar clientele. On the workwear, now you’ve got product lines, right? So you’ve got your workwear. You do men’s and women’s workwear. That’s just simple. You just offer two different categories. You have men/unisex and then you’ve got women’s cuts for the people who like that. And then the second product line you would have would be signage. And in your signage, maybe you do printed graphics that are images of doctors or images of landscapes and then you also do other types of indoor signage as well. Now the next step below that, and if you have your categories or product lines and you have your variations, so in your workwear, we have women’s short sleeve, women’s long sleeve, women’s polos, hats. And then you have all of that broken down. You can imagine all of the different product lines you have under workwear and the same for signage, right? Signage, you may have room names with braille printed on them. You’ve got restroom signs, directories maps, instructional things like in the bathroom, it says, “Wash your hands.” So it’s important for your business to go through that first P, even though it may seem really obvious and simple I would say, but you should break down. What are the categories you have, what product lines are under those categories and what are all the variations? And you may not have to define, and I don’t know, and you can tell me if you do, but should you define every variation? Because I feel like, in apparel and promotions, it can get … How deep do you go? Because you don’t necessarily want to say T-shirts and then have every single color listed down because some T-shirts have 40 variations. So where do you start and stop there? Sara Isom: Well, you get as detailed as you possibly can. And that’s honestly to understand what it is your marketing will be supporting. If you miss one variation, then you might not support that in your marketing efforts. If we’re talking about red, white, blue and green T-shirts and I never mentioned blue anywhere, then I’ve just left that out of all forms of marketing and promotion, which would be terrible to do in the case of anything that you’re trying to sell. So defining things specifically, even mapping them out, you’re going to have to have that somewhere and why not have it out there in the open so that all of your marketing can influence every variation possible because you’re going to need it. Marc Vila: Right. So if you may want to be doing some promotion around like pink ribbons, if you don’t necessarily list or remember or recall or tell somebody you offer lines of pink apparel, they may not consider that in the marketing. Sara Isom: And you’ve just missed out on the entire month of October celebrating Breast Cancer Awareness. Marc Vila: Right, right. And so in this plan where you were breaking down everything, what if you did actually link to products that you sell? So it wasn’t available that not necessarily you physically put in your Excel sheet every color because that does change over time too. They’re going to, apparel manufacturers, add and remove colors all the time. So what if you maybe linked to the shirts that you sell, so it could be dynamic in your Excel spreadsheet or something like that? Sara Isom: Oh, that’s absolutely doable. It’s just more of answering the question for marketing in order to get the understanding of what’s available. When you market it, you market it, but you don’t want to then be blamed for not marketing something that’s on the list. You might not market everything on the list. Marc Vila: Right. Sara Isom: But you don’t want to miss out on marketing, if that makes sense. Marc Vila: Yeah, that makes sense. And in the beginning of your small business, this may all be you, right? Sara Isom: Yes, absolutely. Marc Vila: You may doing it all by yourself. Sara Isom: And it sounds like it’s incredibly tedious, but in the same sense, it is already part of operations. You have the list somewhere. You know what you are selling. So it’s just making sure that you understand that when it comes to all things marketing. Because again if you’re selling online like a lot of businesses do, you want to make sure you have every variation because not everyone wants the same thing. There’s uniqueness out there. And then also understanding that you might have variations that you want to do in the future and it’s great to map those out, because the bigger you get, the more product lines you’ll bring on, the more variations and the more money you can potentially make from bringing on multiple variations or product lines. Marc Vila: So when you’re defining your product then, theoretically could actually map out the core products that you sell now, right? If we look at apparel manufacturers, blank manufacturers, anything like that, even if you’re selling promotional pens, there are just so many variations out there. There’s really too much for you to truly sell to your customer. There’s books alone of just pens, a whole book of pens and to hand that to your customer can be pretty overwhelming. And the same thing with T-shirts and everything like that. So most of the time, small business owners and people starting up and getting successful pick the lines that they carry. This works with the decorating method that I do. This works with technology that I have these. I like the finished product. I know how much I can sell it for. The type of customer that I sell to likes this. So for example, if we’re using the example we just mentioned here and you’re going to offer polo-button-up-style shirts, right? Well, if most of your customers are going to be in medical and then maybe some of them work in outdoors like golf, we say, so you have dentists, doctors, psychologists, maybe some golf courses and trainers. If this is a real estate agent … If this is most of your customer range, you’re going to want to pick apparel that suits that, right? So a polo shirt that is probably resistant to sweat and staining probably is good for all these folks. Because real estate and golf, they’re outside. They bump into things that are dirty. And medical, of course, there’s tons of dirty stuff happening there. So something that’s stain resistance is probably good. You’re probably not going to want something that’s a really thin fabric, that’s cotton, that has no stain resistance, and as soon as the white bumps up to something, you have a stain, all right? So these are the thought processes that you go through and you create your product lines and you get as detailed as reasonably possible. And then maybe the suggestion we said earlier, you can link to these products somewhere, so you can reference them yourselves. And as you grow, it would be great if you brought on an employee to help you market or sell or you decided to do some work with an agency or a freelance marketer that you’ve got something you can hand them right away and you could say, “I put together my four Ps of marketing here a while back and I just updated them for you. Take a look.” And then this gives, whoever’s going to do that sales and marketing, a great opportunity to completely understand what you have to offer. Sara Isom: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Marc Vila: Okay. And then you mentioned about how a package is presented and served to the customer, which is another thing I wrote some notes on here. So this actually is particularly interesting because it’s important to write it down even though it’s so obvious to you, but how is your customer going to place their order? Are you doing an ecommerce store? Are you doing things via email? Are you selling via a forum or Facebook group? Is everything in person because this is going to definitely change the types of marketing you do? And a really good example would be, if almost everything is in person, the service you offer is you go to these offices and you visit them every month or every week and you take orders for new employees, for people who need replacement apparel, you also help them with their signage, so you’re actually doing a little bit of design like, “Hey, that wall’s blank over there. Maybe we should put something there. What do you think about that?” So if that’s the case, then some sort of marketing plan that when you show up there, you’ve got a booklet to share or you’re wearing one of the examples, “Hey, by the way, what I’m wearing here, this is a brand new product line that we have. It comes in all these different colors. Here’s a little booklet of it,” that might be an important piece of marketing or sales for you. Compared to somebody who is selling online, having a sample book, it’s relatively useless to them, right? Sara Isom: Absolutely. And even we can go as far as if people are coming to you, then you need to brand your company externally and internally in the business. So that could be the difference between if you live in the northern states, then you’re going to need to get an outdoor rug when they enter the building, so it represents a comfort level. Your building might need to be cleaned up on the inside. Things might need to be branded. You might need those pens to walk away with. Whereas if everything’s digital, then you need a very nice strategy from an email standpoint to make sure that you’re doing those personal touches in the customer journey. You need to have that built out. I use an example of, again, the bakery and the difference between the dine-in and the carry-out. If somebody dines in, you might want a perfectly branded paper plate for them to use or a napkin that establishes the brand of the bakery. Whereas if they carry out, you might want imprinted boxes with the bakery information and even how to get in contact with the bakery. So it’s different obviously for this world and the products within it, but it’s really the same. It’s like, “How are you going to continue to brand yourself?” Marc Vila: Right, right. That’s great and it’s a great point, because if you’re delivering the product via mail, do you want to have a fancy colored box that it comes in? Do you want to have special packaging? Do you want stickers to come in the box with it? Sara Isom: A handwritten note. Marc Vila: A handwritten note. These are all great things. Where if you’re delivering and setting up and doing everything in person, you may decide that, “Well, what if I got a clothing rack that I can bring and I literally bring it and unpack it outside of the car and then hang stuff on it where people can try on samples?” And then when you deliver the product, maybe you don’t necessarily need a box and paper and stickers and all of these things because you’re going to hand something to the person. Maybe use a baggie or maybe just the shirt by itself is just fine. And then further, talking about signage, if you’re installing the sign yourself, you don’t have to deliver it in any way. As long as it travels safely with you and you’re going to probably bring your own hardware and know where to put it and the finished product is up on the wall versus if you’re mailing it to them or just giving them the sign, do you want to provide hardware or not, instructions on how to hang it up? How is it going to get delivered properly? How is that going to look? Sara Isom: But that delivery and setup, that’s huge because you want to make sure if it’s you or if it’s someone that you work with or that works for you. You need to make sure that they’re branded, that their customer service is on point with your brand, so that again we’re creating that customer journey. So those people that are getting the install are getting the quality that you want your company to represent. Marc Vila: Right. Well, because anybody wearing some sort of a one-piece overalls, you can just go in any building and start installing things and nobody’s pretty much going to stop you, right? If you just have a one-suit thing with a name tag on it. The reason I know this is because I’ve watched a lot of movies. Sara Isom: Well, and I trust men in overalls. Marc Vila: Yeah, see, exactly. So in the movies all the time, if you want to install a secret camera somewhere, you just put on the overall or I don’t know what you call the one-piece mechanic type of uniform. I don’t know the word for that. Somebody does, yelling it out there, but if you have a name tag, you can just walk in anywhere. But the point is because they look like they belong there, they look good. You mentioned customer service being friendly. So these are all things are in part important if you’re hanging up signage and there’s marketing opportunities along that way. When they come, they could deliver a final invoice, but with that could come a postcard or a coupon or a way to get referrals, something like that. So there’s a lot to be said there. Maybe even if you have printed signage with graphics, for example, that you hang up to decorate places, maybe there’s some sort of a marketing program where you say, “Hey, if I could put my logo tiny in the bottom corner, you get 10% off,” right? There’s a million marketing and opportunities, but you’re not going to think about those or be in the right mindset or be able to share that with a marketing agency or a marketing person unless they really understand all of these things down to how it’s delivered, how it’s ordered, what products you’re selling, all of that. Sara Isom: Yeah, absolutely. Marc Vila: Okay, so now that we’ve got product, the next P we have is price. So that sounds pretty simple, right? Sara Isom: Yeah. Again, it sounds simple and it is in a way. So of course, price, it’s the cost of the product. And really what you’re looking at is, what is the fair market value? What are your competitors selling the product or service for? And then what is your target audience like buying this product or service at an average rate? Understanding, “Will you be able to offer any sort of discounts? Will you have payment options? Do people pay upfront? Do they pay in installments?” Understanding the entirety of the pricing of any product or service within your company is really what we’re getting at here. Marc Vila: And I think that there’s something to be said. By the way, I don’t think that’s your email that’s going off. I think that’s on your computer, is it? Sara Isom: No. Marc Vila: No? That’s not where the sound is coming from. Sara Isom: Yeah, I don’t have sound. Marc Vila: Oh, I didn’t think I did either. Well, anyway, maybe it’s another room. If you’re hearing that, maybe actually it is your email out there listening. Maybe it is. I think I’m muted here. Oh, it’s coming through my headphones. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. That sound’s not coming from my headphones though. All right, so price, there’s something to be said about strategy with price too and you could probably write this down that you’re going after a premium market, so you’re going to be selling the premium price. Why? While going back up to the product, I deliver it, install it, help them decide where it’s going to go, make the suggest, “I’m doing design and installation and production. Therefore, my sign costs $200.” They can buy one on the internet maybe for 50, but it doesn’t come with any of those things. So the price, what does it go for is important and then also the strategy behind it, “I sell a premium product.” Also going back up, “Well, the polos that we sell are moisture-wicking, stain-resistant, odor-blocking, all of these things. They’re great for the market that I’m in, compared to, yes, there’s a polo you can buy for five bucks that doesn’t have any of those properties and it’s not really ideal for my customer base.” So that’s an important thing. You want to mark down what you’re selling. Do you have a pricing strategy? And there’s all different types of ways to do pricing. I think we’ll probably have a whole podcast on this. Sara Isom: Oh, absolutely. Marc Vila: But let’s just say you want to sell everything at a certain margin and that’s how you price, so everything needs to be at X percent margin. So you can write that down in your pricing and just talk about that as a strategy. And then within price, it’s also about how the customer interacts with that pricing, so, “How do they pay? Can they pay online? Is there a portal they pay online through or do you just literally give them your Venmo or does it have to be checks? Do they pay a deposit? Do they have to pay in full? Is it all paid for at the end?” These are all part of the strategy, and marketing, as we talk about marketing as an entity, now in your business, marketing just might be you. Sara Isom: Yeah, absolutely. Marc Vila: Or it might just be your wife or your husband or your son. Sara Isom: Which is a lot of small and medium-sized businesses. Believe it or not, 90% of small and medium-sized businesses are marketing internally. Marc Vila: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s expensive to hire somebody. Sara Isom: Absolutely, it is. Marc Vila: And you have to be prepared to take that leap to hire an agency or to hire a freelancer or to hire a full-time employee to do that. And you have to grow yourself to be a part of that. Now, the most likely for you to be successful and get to that point is by doing exercises like this because you’re thinking a growing larger business. You’ve got a plan. And when you are ready to hire somebody or hire somebody to do something for you to take over marketing, whatever your plans are, you’ve got all of this in place. You’ve got the strategy, the pricing, the products and the other Ps to be revealed there. So it’s all part of the strategy. It’s important that you write all the stuff down. And in regards to pricing, how else can it affect marketing? Is there anything else you want to add? Sara Isom: Well, first, I want to say, I can’t stress this enough, understanding what your competitors are doing from a price standpoint is something that you really need to figure out and that’s as simple as doing some secret shopping, calling them up, searching the web, placing some orders just to see how they’re pricing items, asking about their discounts, asking what discounts they have. Do they have age discount? Do they have a veterans discount? Do they offer special certain times of the year? Getting into that really helps you establish some of your goals of what your pricing structure should look like and any opportunities you could take advantage of from a discounting standpoint. But yeah, really it breaks down to just … Again, a lot of it sounds operational, but it’s what marketing will use to promote your products. Marc Vila: Right. Actually, that’s interesting because there’s two ways. There’s your own strategy that has to do with the customers that you have and then what your competition is doing. So in your market, like you mentioned, if they have an advertised pricing, because this is a tricky thing that happens all the time in business, that if they have advertised pricing, they almost never sell at that price. So you think you’re coming into the market equal to their price, finding out that they discount everything 20% or the other way around, they advertise, and this is actually the one that I see a lot, especially in the custom apparel business, is T-shirts from 3.99 and then somebody will post to a forum, “How do I even compete with this company who sells three shirts for three T-shirts for $3.99?” And then that’s not the whole price. Because they’ll have a setup fee and they’ll have a whatever fee and a waste disposal fee. It’s like tires are the same thing, right? Like, “Get tires for $99 a piece,” and then four tires is $700. Sara Isom: Or they’re simply selling that 3.99 shirt, it starts at. They might have a shirt and it might say, “Happy New Year 2001,” and they’re selling it at 3.99 and that makes sense, but then everything else jumps up to $15. Marc Vila: Right. So it very well could be cheapest T-shirt, white only, front print only, single color. They may have very strict guidelines to that. And maybe that’s exactly the opposite of what you sell because you know your product lines. Your product lines, if we’re talking again about *T-shirts, you’re using a higher end shirt, you offer a bunch of different colors, and if you print digitally, then you don’t have any color limits. It doesn’t cost you more money to print more colors because you’re using a digital T-shirt printer or a transfer printer. So in these cases, you’re not necessarily comparing apples to apples per se. So it is important to dive into what your competition sells for and then knowing the products that you want to sell. One of the problems that we run into in small business owners, customization for sure, is they see the product catalog of everything that they can decorate and it’s like phone book thick. In the future, if you’re listening to this and this is 20 years later in the future, there used to be a book that you got that they’ve left on your doorstep with all the numbers of things and then- Sara Isom: It was yellow. Marc Vila: Yeah, it was yellow. And then eventually, nobody used it, but they kept delivering it. So then basically people just left a trash on your doorstep for a handful of years and they’ve stopped it now, so- Sara Isom: I think it became a door stop. Marc Vila: Yeah, it became a door stop. So anyway, we could say that wraps up price there. I’m was diverging too far, okay? We’ve had enough there. So let’s go ahead and go into the next one because we’re making pretty good pace on our episode here. So the next one we have is promotion. Sara Isom: Yeah. So basically how you advertise your product or service. This is where we get into a little bit of the difference between marketing and advertising. So with promotion, you would have to ask yourself, what are you capable of from a marketing standpoint? What are you currently doing? What could you currently be doing? And that’s anywhere from, “Yes, I have a website, but I’m not managing it, somebody else’s and we really don’t make updates,” to, “Yes, I have a Facebook page and I’ve dabbled a little bit in advertising, but I just don’t know if it works for me or not.” Because we get the gist of your capabilities, then we can start building the strategy behind that and we can find out and start understanding what channels might have worked in the past, and looking into the future, what channels might be adequate for your business and your business model. Marc Vila: That’s good. So when it comes to kind of promotion, promoting your business, if you are a brand new business and you’re a startup, because some folks listening right now haven’t even started yet, they’re right at the beginning of the idea and other folks have been doing this for a while and some are very, very established. So you answer promotion differently depending where you are. And if you’re a new business, these are theoretical things. So you mentioned a website. Are you very capable of building a website already? Do you have that skillset? If you are, then probably building a website’s pretty good idea because you can do it on your own. You have that capability. If you have no technical capability of building a website, then you’re going to want to work into your plan, “Do I want to pay somebody to build a website? How much is that going to cost? Does it matter for the products that I want to sell?” Because in the new business, everything here is theoretical. The concept of doing the signs and the apparel for those businesses mentioned, the doctors, dentist, real estate agents, golf, I think is what we said, that’s theoretical right now. So, “Should I have a website for those folks?” would be a question. And I’m thinking just answer it for this one, business-to-business sales professionals, educated folks, nice offices, when you show up and go to sell to them, they may want to look up your website later or share it to the owners or the board or whoever’s in the decision-making process. So having a nice, classy, upscale-looking website that shows how you can represent them is probably a really good idea. Conversely, if you sell T-shirts, local stuff to tourists, they’re probably not going home and then jumping online and ordering something from your website because they forgot to get a shirt like a Finger Lakes T-shirt or something like that, “I forgot to get it. I’m going to order one online now.” No, they’re probably not going to do that. So having the website matters less, but how you can promote what you’re capable of doing and theoretically of what you would do is really important, and then of course, if you’re an existing business, what do you have right now. Sara Isom: Yeah, and the capability, it’s not all on you. An example would be there are certain places within the United States where you might not be able to run a local radio advertisement because the range of the nearest network is not close enough to fall within your demographic. It would be spread among an 80, 90-mile radius, which wouldn’t be adequate for radio local. That being said, not everything is under your control, but establishing elements of control is a good idea. And by capability, it’s not only what are you and your staff, if you have staff, capable of, but also what can you afford? What does your budget look like now? Because what this portion of the P should help represent is what is the best bang for your buck? What is your best return on investment? And the idea is to always start off frugal because you need to put more money into your business in other areas than marketing. But again, marketing represents the lead generation that you need to grow your business. So in order to first stabilize and establish, you really need to set forth a very stringent plan on what can truly be done from a marketing and advertising effort. Marc Vila: Right, okay, and it’s tricky, right? Because promotion, marketing, advertising, all of these words that mean different things, but they’re lumped together, none of it’s ever guaranteed. Sara Isom: Never. Marc Vila: Right? It’s never guaranteed, which is why it’s important to establish a budget. And these are all separate topics for a different podcast, but it’s good to overlay all this information. So it’s good to understand what’s available for you in your area. You mentioned maybe radio is available for some people and they want to do that for certain reason. I can’t think of any of those reasons at this point in time, but somebody … If you’re a car dealer, for some reason, you have to be on the radio screaming, by the way. I don’t know why that’s the case, but you have to scream on the radio. But for a local sign shop or an apparel business or some sort of customization business, the radio may or may not make sense. Are there billboards in your area? Are there print advertising in the area? Sara Isom: Or even trade shows. Marc Vila: Are there trade shows? Yeah. Sara Isom: When you think of the difference between paid advertising and not paid advertising, there’s so many efforts that you can do that don’t cost money. They cost time and energy, but they don’t cost money, but they might not be within your area. We’ve talked about selling to golf apparel. Well, say, that you just had an online store and you were selling golf apparel and you really wanted to get into some of these golf outings and things like that happening, but there were no local golf clubs, then you’d be out of luck. Marc Vila: Right. Sara Isom: If you really wanted to get into farmers’ markets, but there’s no farmers’ markets in your area, you’re out of luck. Not everything is within your capability, but that’s part of understanding your area and what’s going on. Marc Vila: Right. So this is a great both actual and theoretical that you can … And this is part of the promotion thing. You should probably be writing both of these things now, “So what am I doing right now?” And it literally just might be, “Well, nothing,” if you’re brand new, right? But it might just be referrals and that’s it. You’re only working on referrals and you’d like to go your business to the next level. So you need to write down the next piece. What are the ones that are potential piece, potential promotions, right? So that’s where you could put, “Well, I could potentially print. There’s these local print advertisements I could do. I potentially put up a sign at the elementary school.” There’s a million different things you could do and I’m not saying that any of these are good or bad ideas because I don’t know your business, right? I don’t know these four Ps that we’re getting into right now for your business, but you can figure out which one of these are. And then just from a standpoint that you mentioned about starting frugal in the beginning, I do like that. If you’ve got a really deep pocket and you’ve got an investor or you have a ton of money you’ve saved up, then yes, it’s very easy to say, “I’m going to put 2,000 here and 2,000 here and 5,000 here and 8,000 here and I’m going to spend 20,000 something dollars to start marketing my business.” Well great, you’re willing to take all that risk, but a lot of startups and even businesses that are been growing over years, you don’t have $20,000 you’re willing or able to invest in marketing. So you can start with frugal concepts that you can test. So there’s a farmers’ market that goes around your area within 5,000 miles and there’s 40 stops throughout the year, right? So you want to decide, is that a good way to promote your business? Well, can you sign up for one or three maybe? Maybe you don’t give up on one, maybe three. Can you sign up for two or three or four of them? And you try them out, see how they go. And we’ve talked in the past in previous episodes about tracking your marketing and understanding the long-term value of customers and all of these things, but this is something you can look to test and start and you can also do the same with print ads. And you can do the same with all the other marketing channels. You know you sell online, so you could do online type of advertisements, meaning on your website, email marketing, social media. Conversely, you only sell in person, so you can bring flyers, you can bring print materials, you can bring your clothing rack. Sara Isom: And making all printed materials if you do have a website digital with a QR code. Marc Vila: Yeah, combining these things together. If you have a website and you have print that you do in person, so your business card could have a QR code, say, “View the virtual catalog.” That business card with a QR code that says, “View the virtual catalog,” only works if you have all those things, meaning you’re in a position to hand out cards and you have a virtual catalog to do. So that concept in promotion doesn’t exist for some businesses and does … Somebody got scared. I don’t know if anybody can hear that, but that is, if you didn’t hear it, somebody screamed. And what you’re hearing is, in the office next to us, is the accounting office and this wonderful young lady that works in there is so frightened by people walking by. It’s comical and it’s a joke within the building. I’ve gotten coffee or water and I’ve just walked into the kitchen and she’s done that scream and that happened the other day actually. And one another gentleman was coming by and he’s like, “I always ask her if it’s my face that makes her scream.” Sara Isom: I just wonder if hypertension is covered under work [inaudible 00:43:45]. Marc Vila: Yeah, she’s young right now, so she’s okay, but in 20 years, there will be. And yes, high blood pressure medication is covered by her insurance, by the way. Sara Isom: There we go. Marc Vila: So I think we’ve covered up promotion a lot. There’s so many different things we could talk about, social media, YouTube channels, live events, paid advertisement, whether that’s print or digital, billboards to radios. So there’s a ton of different things, but to sum it up, you should write down what you’re doing, what you want to do because maybe you have a gut feeling that it’s a good idea or you desire to do it. For example, not to diverge too much, but you just might want to be a YouTube type of personality, you enjoy it, you like the camera, you like editing and you want to do it. Well, that’s okay to put that in your promotion area if you’re not doing it yet and you desire to do it. Go back up and figure out what product and price you can add or remove or change to make that channel come true. It doesn’t have to be locked in. This is your business. That’s the great thing about why people do all this stuff, is because it’s your business. You could do what you want. So do the things that you are doing. Do the things that you want to do or potentially could do or you think is a good idea. And then I would still write down the things that are potential in your area that you might not think is a good idea or want to do yet, but you should acknowledge that those opportunities exist for promotion. Because you may look at all of this together and say, “I’m not a fan of print ads, but when I’m looking at all this and I’m looking at my customers and what I charge and the service I offer, and as I’m visiting them, I see all of them have this one publication that’s thrown around in their desks. This is the fourth time I’ve seen it, so I know that they’re looking at it. I’m not a fan of print ads, but I actually think this might work for my customers. I’m seeing it right there.” So then you can test it out. So that’s why it’s important to write down just the potential opportunities too. Sara Isom: Absolutely. Marc Vila: Anything else you want to add, then we have the last P? Sara Isom: No, I think we’re ready for place. Marc Vila: Okay. So place, as you mentioned, revealed the final P. So I have some notes, I can read them out here. Are your products sold online, in store? We addressed a little bit of this earlier, but this is very specific. Sara Isom: And they blend. They all should sound like they’re blending together a little bit because they all represent the entirety of the operational aspect of your company. So places where you sell your products and that means distribution channels and how your customers are receiving those. So again, online, if you have an eCommerce store, if you sell in person, if you sell third party where your audience receives this. So if you’re selling through a third party, say that you have something like you have an Amazon store, are they getting most of their stuff from the Amazon? Do you have more clients on the Amazon side of things or your ecomm side of things? Where are the majority of your customers purchasing? That gives you a great understanding of the effort you need to put towards that area. And then the other efforts that you need to open up. Because if you have an eCommerce store and you also sell in person based on the number of customers coming to one area is where you should start putting your marketing dollars or more marketing dollars. If you want to improve an area, you need to adjust those marketing dollars to the next channel, but it gives us an understanding of all of that. Marc Vila: Right, we have a lot of customers that sell eBay, Etsy, Amazon, for example. And if a good portion of your sales are actually coming from eBay traffic because of the product and niche you sell, it happens to live there, then eBay has ways for you to promote your ads. And you may find that you want to try to do paid advertisement there. The place where your customers are is really important to the overall marketing health. If your customers need to be local, meaning that you help design signs, so you’re physically present for all of it, then doing some online ad that’s outside of your area really doesn’t work because you’re not going to travel 150 miles to print and hang up a sign that costs $150, right? You’re not going to do that. So you need to make sure that you’re focusing all of your marketing on what’s going to happen within the area, “Well, I’m willing to work in a 50-mile radius. So now that I understand that,” as the person in charge of your marketing, “I need to understand that all of my marketing needs to be designed that can handle within this 50 mile radius. Anything beyond that is going to be a waste of time, energy, money, absolutely, etcetera. Sara Isom: Absolutely. Marc Vila: So even an example is a YouTube channel might not make sense for that. There’s just things like that. Sara Isom: Absolutely. And honestly, looking at your audience now against the audience you want to have and looking at where they are purchasing from. Your audience now might be the demographic that you have today, but it might not be the demographic that you need to grow your business. So ideally, again, this is a little bit of competitive marketing, but doing your research in what other competitors are bringing in from a demographic standpoint, “What do their customers look like and how are their customers finding them?” is always a great way of building your strategy and future strategy when it comes to your marketing and advertising efforts. Marc Vila: Yeah, no, that’s great and I love that they all do kind of blend together. Sara Isom: All blend. People think that you’re answering the same question over and over again and you are in a way, but it all means something different. It goes in a different pot. Marc Vila: Yeah, no, it’s very true that it’s so related, but when you add all this stuff together, you really get a really good picture of how you can market, what you can market, where you should do things and you actually start answering your own questions where somebody will come to you and say, “Oh, a friend of mine had a little T-shirt company that they ran and they made a bunch of money on YouTube.” And in your head, you could be thinking- Sara Isom: “That’s great, but you don’t have a website.” Marc Vila: “And all of my customers are local because I walk in and sell. I just don’t really have a product that’s a YouTube-selling product because I sell to local doctor, dentist, real estate and the golf community in my area. So it’s just not where ideally I’d be selling. I have a different marketing strategy for that.” And all of that comes into play from place, price, promotion, product, all comes together if you decide how you properly market, who you’re going to market to. But there’s one additional bonus piece that you really need to answer, right? Sara Isom: And you’ve heard this throughout, it’s answering the question about, “Who is your target demographic?” So a lot of times we know that. We know our customer base now, and while that will change over time, depending on if we want to grow the business, we want to maximize efforts, but we know ideally who this custom database looks like. And that helps us fill in the blanks of the questions that will later answer, but it all falls into place with each of these Ps. You’ve heard Marc talk about the dental offices, the real estate building, that face of the people that have built your business, is a great thing to answer. This can be, I should say, looking at not only age, race, gender, looking at income level, occupation, marital status. Marc Vila: Yeah, education. Sara Isom: All gives us an idea of how they get to you or how they should be getting to you from a marketing standpoint. Marc Vila: Right, right, and there’s so much to be said about that. I feel like that’s a podcast in of itself too, right? Sara Isom: It really is. Marc Vila: But you don’t answer the four Ps to get to your demographics. You don’t start with your demographics. The starting point, in my opinion on this one thinking about it, is which one you answer first can be different for everybody. And the reason why, even price could be first. Because if you say, “I want to make this much money and I can work this many hours, and in that many hours, I can make this many things,” then you immediately know how much you have to charge and then you back up … Sara Isom: Absolutely. Marc Vila: … and you could say, “If I need to charge $50 a T-shirt,” right? There are people in this world that buy $50 T-shirts every single day, right? Maybe not the people buying them every day, but every day those transactions happen. So you need to say, “Well, who would I sell $50 to? Okay, well, it has to be a high-quality shirt, it has to be this, it has to be this.” So now you start understanding the product that you’re going to sell, then you can start understanding, “Well, where will I sell it? Where are people that are going to buy $50 T-shirts? How am I going to promote? What’s the promotion that I run to move that?” And maybe in that case you may say, “TikTok and YouTube sound great,” for what you’re saying because you’re trying to sell a super unique high-value T-shirt. You can really start with any one of these or you can start with the demographics. If you know that you’re a member of a local car enthusiast club, then if that’s the case, you know your demographic and you can start backing up to answering your four Ps there. But you’ve got to have all of this together and then you can start answering marketing, advertising type of questions. Sara Isom: Yeah, yeah. Because again, by establishing who your target market is, it helps you define your strategy. That’s not only any promotional or advertisement, but also marketing support. And it helps you build the customer journey that a customer would need to even make a marketing or a selling decision, a buying decision, I should say. Marc Vila: Right. Well, to wrap it up, we can go back to the questions we asked in the beginning, now that we know and just using the one example, but we can add in others if we want, but if we say that your business is selling to these local places that we’ve said numerous times and- Sara Isom: So we said dentist office. Marc Vila: Dentist, doctor, real estate, golf, that’s the area you live in. There’s a lot of customers you have in that and you have different product lines that you sell within there and you’re mainly selling to the business owner. And you sell a nice high-end, good quality product, so they can buy it and they look crisp and clean and professional every single day with your product and the same with the atmosphere that they’re in. So should they start a TikTok? Do you have an answer to that? Sara Isom: Should they start a TikTok? Marc Vila: Yeah, they don’t do TikTok. A business owner now doesn’t do TikTok. Should they have a TikTok channel? Sara Isom: And this is where I would break down it, to me, it doesn’t … Well, first off, looking at those business types, I would say, who is the decisionmaker for actually purchasing your product? If, for instance, the dentist, doctor or real estate agent, if they were the decisionmakers, I would say it’s not necessary if you don’t have a person that has ample time for it. Marc Vila: Right, and that’s what I would say too. Sara Isom: And I wouldn’t say that it would be an advertising effort. It could be a promotional effort in the way of just have it into spread your brand awareness, but not necessarily putting dollars behind it because it doesn’t seem like that’s your demographic. Now, if the decisionmakers within those offices were 20 somethings, then maybe that would be, but you got to look at your demographic. Marc Vila: Yeah, it’s a good point. I think I would just hard no. I think I would just hard no and I would say- Sara Isom: It’s always hard to- Marc Vila: Yeah, I would say if you can spend an hour and a week on TikTok, spend an hour and a week getting in the car, stopping by the local places that you can do that and drop something off, say hello, give them something for free. Sara Isom: Start sponsoring those golf outings. Marc Vila: Yeah, sponsor the golf outing. Show up when they’re having an event and just support them. Even if you’re not selling there, just they’re having some sort of a picnic thing on a Sunday at their golf club or the course, show up. Spend an hour on that rather than an hour on TikTok. But yeah, you make a pretty good point that there are always nuances that maybe if there’s a lot of young decisionmakers, maybe you can show up to the offices and do a TikTok with them and make them feel like they’re- Sara Isom: A little collab. Marc Vila: Yeah, a little collaboration or they feel like they’re part of your little community and it could ingrain them in. So I’m not saying that that couldn’t be very successful. Sara Isom: Yeah, we’ll see where TikTok goes. Marc Vila: Yeah. But otherwise, I would just say it’s just probably not necessary at this point in time, unless- Sara Isom: No dollars behind it. Marc Vila: Yeah. And you could probably demographic that down based in TikTok’s advertising. You could specifically say that you want to advertise to 30 to 50-year-olds and they do have a growing population on TikTok. And you could ask TikTok just to advertise to those people if you wanted to. However, I just think that there’s a lot quicker ways you can get a return on your investment for this particular business. Now, should you do local paid advertising? Sara Isom: Well, if you’ve got the dentist, the doctor, I’m sure there’s more than one of them out there in your local area. That would be a great effort to maximize your return on investment by promoting locally. There’s so many different avenues of that from grassroots up to paid. Paid local. Yeah. Marc Vila: Yeah, so I would say paid local is probably great. If you notice the magazine that they all have, that’s a local magazine, if you notice the- Sara Isom: Sponsorship of- Marc Vila: The sponsorship, yes, of events or something like that. Sara Isom: Little league, farmers’ markets and this, because it sounds like everybody falls under healthcare, maybe not real estate. There’s so many efforts and then referral programs. Right now, small businesses live and die off of their referral programs, and making sure if you don’t have one, you’re establishing one. But keeping a referral program that truly does, you’ve got the numbers, you’ve got the data behind it, that would be where money should be put. Marc Vila: Yeah, that’s great. So you could do … If we’re talking about local paid, you can have some sort of a way to promote financially that referral program. So the next one we had and we could short quick on these, but, “Would doing Google Ads be a good idea?” I’d probably say you can target zip codes and these people might be searching for, “Where do I get uniforms for my doctor’s office?” something to that effect. So I’d put it on a maybe experiment with, but you’d have to make sure whatever you’re advertising, you can definitely pinpoint to the zip codes that you work in, which you can do that stuff on most any platform nowadays. Sara Isom: Yeah, and I would say, before putting money behind ads, first truly establishing your Google My Business page, that’s where your effort should go. Google My Business will outrake most of your websites at this point. COVID put that into effect for us. And establishing a very firm Google My Business plan where you are constantly updating, making sure you’ve got your images in place, making sure that if you have products placed, that they are represented with the correct dollar amounts behind them and that you’re asking for reviews. It should be part of your referral program. It should be part of any customer experience. You should be asking for reviews and getting those. And just maintaining that to its fullest will give you a better return on investment than a lot of the paid efforts that Google will have. Most of the time you’re found through search engine optimization, which is Google My Business rather than paid advertising. Marc Vila: Yeah, that’s a great interjection on a thought there too. So in these questions we’ve asked, these are just random questions, right? But it’s a really good point because when somebody says, “Should you advertise on Google?” Sara Isom: Locally. Marc Vila: “Locally advertise on Google?” the first question probably should be, “Well, have you set up a Google business profile that’s topnotch first?” And if you say no, do that. And then have the conversation about advertising on Google because that’s the free thing they give you at first, which will land you a lot of business. Yes. The next, two more quick questions is, should you do the farmers’ market thing for this business? I definitely think it’s worth a try. You’ll probably run into a lot of these business owners there. Maybe you’re not going to sell signs or uniforms at the market, but you may have a booth where you introduce people, “Ask me about uniforms for your professional business.” Sara Isom: Have some samples sitting out. Marc Vila: Have some samples sitting out. Ask about how to produce sign, “I could produce any sign for any business. Talk to me about it and you can have examples of hand washing signs and directions and directories and braille,” and all these things you can print with your UV printer if you have one of those. Sara Isom: Well, and there’s so many different things that you can do at a farmers’ market. If you don’t have somebody capable of sitting behind a booth or if you can’t afford a booth or if you can’t afford a booth and to brand the booth, which needs to be done, then you might just go to network. It might just be a handshake and a business card. You might be wearing one of your products or carrying a sign, something that can get you in the door. If the farmers’ market allows you to bring things in without necessarily having a booth, you might be handing out items there. Marc Vila: You might be able to even just sponsor with a sign, so you can make a very cool looking sign that they let you put up, that they let you just put up. So maybe your sponsorship is not a booth, but you just have a sign at the entrance that they let you put up a really cool looking design that you UV printed and then it says, “I can make any sign for any business,” and you have something very eye-catching for everybody who walks and sees. Sara Isom: Or for an even more frugal marketing strategy, which is what I like the most is, for the tax write off, you support the farmers’ market by printing signs for them and establish … Marc Vila: Yeah, there you go. Sara Isom: … that tax break. Marc Vila: Yeah. So there’s a lot of great things you could do there by partnering with them potentially … Sara Isom: Absolutely. Marc Vila: … for signs or uniforms or something to that effect. Okay, well, maybe we had some other random questions, but I think we’ve got the point across really well here. And I think the homework or what you would take home from this is if you’re about to start a business or you have an existing one, I would take out a Word document or an Excel sheet or something, write out your piece and your demographics and write them out and see if it makes sense. And if something doesn’t align right, you may have found a solution on why your business is a little stagnant or not growing as fast as you want or you’re not as profitable. We have people consistently talk about their success and how well they’re doing or we can see it in with the amount of supplies or apparel they purchase. And we have consistently also have folks say how they’re struggling, “The ink costs too much for me to be profitable,” or, “The T-shirts cost too much for me to make money,” or, “I can’t sell enough, I can’t compete,” and theoretically, that means that your Ps are not aligned. If you’re saying that it cost too much to print something, well, you have a printer that that’s capable of doing something and you’re trying to sell in a market that doesn’t uphold that price. So you need to probably adjust your demographics or where you’re selling or how you’re selling or something like that, right? Sara Isom: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, furthermore, if you look at your business model after completing the Ps and looking at your demographics, look at the ones around you, look at your competitors and you’re going to start to see holes. Some of the holes you filled, but some are empty. What are your competitors doing that is working? You can see this by filling out the piece. You can see where you’re lacking. And this will hopefully help you move the efforts to fill those holes and grow your business. Marc Vila: If you pay attention to this and actually do the exercise, you’ll absolutely see things. And overall, this one thing that popped in my head was I went to one of the fancy grocery stores and they had this caviar section, right? And it was just like, “I’m not going to buy that.” But they have $150 or $200 jar there. And for some reason, that popped in my head when we were talking about this and I said, “If you were selling that jar at a local farmers’ market where the demographic is not people who would spend $150 on anything that was that little for food, then would you leave the market and just be like, ‘How can I compete? The guy next to me was selling homemade cupcakes for $2 apiece. How do I possibly compete with that?'” And I would say, “Well,” obviously this is an exaggerated example, “but that doesn’t make any sense. Well, why would you try to advertise that at a market where most of the food things that can be bought are like 5 to 10 bucks and you’re trying to sell $150 a jar of caviar? That seems absurd,” and it is. But the problem is that some people when they start a small business, they might not be as exaggerated as that, but that’s the situation they’re putting themselves in, is that they’re trying to sell way out of market, whether it’s too low on price for the technology they’re doing or it’s too high on price or they’re not trying to sell to the right people. They’re trying to advertise $6 T-shirts on Facebook and it’s like, “Well, it’s going to cost you $6 for every sale you make. Do you have an upsell opportunity? Do you have a long-term value proposition that you’re going to be making to make that worth it?” So that’s why it’s really important to line these things up. You’ll what’s missing, you’ll see what doesn’t match and then you can start to adjust and really turn your business into the next biggest P, which would be profitable, right? Sara Isom: Absolutely. Marc Vila: The ultimate goal. So I think we covered a good amount of stuff today. So thanks for listening. And if anybody has any questions about any of this stuff, of course you can go to the customapparelstartups.com. Go to the website and you can contact us through there. And then as always, The Custom Apparel Startups Podcast is sponsored by ColDesi. So you can go to coldesi.com and live chat if you have any questions about equipment we have to offer, or of course, if you want to get in touch with The Custom Apparel Startups crew, you can always just go to coldesi.com and say, “I heard the podcast. I have a question for them,” and they’ll make sure they get you over to us. All right. Well, thanks so much for joining. Sara will be back again, I’m sure, really soon. And in further coming episodes, we’ve got a bunch more guests. And for those who’ve been listening for a while, Mark Stevenson will be back here again. He’s just doing some different things, as you may have heard, if you listened to the episode where he said some changes were happening, but we’ve got a ton more stuff coming up and we have about six or seven episodes lined up, so we can get a little more regularly for those who’ve been missing some of these episodes. So thanks for listening and have a great business. The post Episode 189 – The 4 Ps of Marketing appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups .…

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Episode 188 – Setting up Your Social Media Strategy 1:11:16

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Episode 188 – Setting up Your Social Media Strategy This Episode  Marc Vila & Jes Santiago  customapparelstartups.com  CAS Podcast  ColDesi You Will Learn Why you should have a good social media presence What to consider before planning your strategy How to plan and implement a good strategy for your business Resources & Links Colman and Company Blog ColDesi Learning Center Leasing Equipment Episode 188 – Setting up Your Social Media Strategy What is a social media strategy? A social media strategy is an outline or plan of your social media goals, how you will achieve them, and how you’ll track metrics. Social is talked about all the time in business, but do you need it? If yes, then how will you use it? This episode is all about finding out what is right for your business. Why having a presence on social media is important for small businesses: Maintains and builds relationships with customers you already have Grows brand awareness and familiarity Builds trust with new and current customers Builds engaged communities Turns customers into advocates (gain mentions, comments, likes, tags, etc.) Gives your business a chance to respond to any negative feedback Another channel to promote products or services How to set up a strategy Determine a goal – make sure it’s measurable/realistic for your business (ex: increasing email sign ups, increase web traffic, generate sales/leads, etc). Understanding and researching your competition can help you. Understand your audience – Know the basics about your target audience like age, location, income, interests, etc. Which can all be found using that platform’s analytics tool. This can help you build better strategies and goals based off that data. Also know things like what kind of content do your customers engage with? What accounts do your customers follow? What do they like/share? Get to know your competition – Complete a competitive analysis to help you understand what your competitors are doing, what their strengths/weaknesses are. Or keep an eye on their pages, search relevant keywords and how your competitors rank, etc. Start Implementing Your Strategy Determine which platforms you want to use and are relevant to you (Instagram for reels, TikToks for short videos, Facebook for customer service, etc) Set up your profiles (use consistent branding like logos and brand colors, fill out bio completely, use high-quality images, include keywords people may associate your business with, etc) Create a social media calendar to help organize content ideas, scheduled posts, and maintain consistency Have your first couple of posts planned out and ready to go live Who are you selling to? What is your niche? Should social media be a place for you to sell, or just display your products? What would you be able to show off? What do you WANT to do on social media? Learn about your potential audience / customers Does your audience make purchasing decisions from social media? Can you reasonably work with your customers or influencers to promote your product? Which platforms make sense for your business? Research your competition or other similar businesses What are they doing? Do you want to do what they’re doing or something different? Determine your strategy Do you want to sell online? Do you want to have customers find you on social? Are your pages for building trust ? Are your pages just an online portfolio ? Define your brand What do you want to look like? What is the personality of your brand? Who is your audience? Set up accounts / profiles Images Descriptions Initial Posts Create a social media calendar When will you post? What will you post? Will you go live? Collaborate with others Engage with people in comments Connect with customers on their social accounts Cross-promote when possible Follow and connect with potential influencers Experiment with new ways to engage Contests Ask opinions (This or that? Which is your fav?) Boost posts (pay to get more views) Do you have customers that can promote your pages? e.g. if you work with a school maybe do a # contest for free swag e.g. if you work with another small business, cross-promote each other or share a contest. “Win X from me and Y from them.” Track performance BE PATIENT Look for interesting wins Try to re-create what has worked before Extra Social Media Tips/ Ideas After your social media accounts are created, keep a few things in mind: Experiment with style of content: Post polls, stories, contests, cross collaborations (mention nails), boost posts, customer success stories. Don’t post too much or too little. One can seem annoying and overbearing while the other can seem lazy or like the brand doesn’t care. Get your team on social media, which helps with keeping track of any messages, mentions, or comments. Search popular hashtags/ keywords to use in written and video posts. Using Social Media for business isn’t just as simple as posting cool pictures and getting a million followers. People who have ‘gone viral’ as a rule didnt get there by accident. They spent a ton of time interacting with the platform, creating content, posting like crazy and working hard. Make a smart business decision on how YOUR business will use social media and go for it! Transcript Marc Vila: Welcome to episode 188 of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Marc Vila. And today I’m here with Jes Santiago. Jes Santiago: Hello. Marc Vila: Hi. And Jes is on the ColDesi marketing team with us, and she’s been with the company, with ColDesi over two years now, work in marketing. So tell us, before we get into the podcast too much, just tell us a little bit about what you do, what you’ve done over the years. Jes Santiago: Sure. So I started with ColDesi as a E-commerce marketing assistant, and I just kind of dove right in into E-commerce tasks, which was something I was pretty much completely unfamiliar with. But I did that for about a year. So everything that had to do with Colman and Company.com, our supply site, I was in charge of getting product photos, product descriptions, getting new products launched on the website, things like that. And then I took a different direction, and now I am senior content specialist. So now I kind of am more in charge of creating content, planning our video calendar, any written content that goes up on any of our sites, I try to get behind. And pretty much just helping us get as much content as possible up on our sites is pretty much what I do. Marc Vila: Yeah. And then the final bit of that is really what this podcast is about today. And that’s social media. Jes Santiago: Yes. Marc Vila: So Jes has been a huge part in growing and changing and adapting the ColDesi and our other brands social media accounts. So today’s podcast, episode 188 is called Setting Up Your Social Media Strategy. And this is important, because if you’re starting a new business, right, you think, “I need to be on social media.” Right? Or you’ve heard of people selling a ton of T-shirts or hats through social media, and are you going to do that? And how are you going to do that? And are you going to go viral or go on TikTok live, or are you going to bother with it at all? Right? So I think it’s a pretty confusing landscape, don’t you think? Jes Santiago: Oh, absolutely. And I think that it’s a balance as well of kind of what you plan on doing on social media, and sometimes it’s even as… You kind of get lucky, you know, go viral one time and you may not ever go viral again. So there’s just a couple different things you can do to make sure your business has a presence on social media and it can become really difficult. Marc Vila: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So kind of going into this a little bit, we’re going to talk about how you develop a strategy, how you implement that. And then you’ll also, yeah, I mean, you’re going to deal with a little bit of luck every once in a while, but if you do things correctly with a plan, you’re going increase your chances of lucky things happening to you. Jes Santiago: Exactly. Marc Vila: Right? Jes Santiago: Yeah. Marc Vila: So if you don’t play the lottery, then you can never win it, right? And that’s kind of one extreme of how it goes, but it’s true. If you’re not doing anything on social media, then nobody’s ever going to find you there and become your customer. Jes Santiago: Exactly. Marc Vila: So before we get into that, can you guess when I’m drinking in this cup right here? Jes Santiago: Probably knowing you, a Monster or some type of energy drink. Marc Vila: That’s pretty close. Monster Java. Jes Santiago: Oh, you do like those. I’ve never had one before. Marc Vila: I love it. And I’m also writing with a Waldorf Astoria pen. So there’s some juxtaposition between drinking Java Monster and using a Waldorf pen. But I think that’s the breath of our customers and listeners on Custom Apparel Startups, we have all types of folks. So I got to be relatable. Jes Santiago: Exactly. I’m just being boring and I’m sipping my iced coffee. Marc Vila: From where? Jes Santiago: Foxtail. Marc Vila: Foxtail? Jes Santiago: Yeah. It’s a honey lavender. Marc Vila: Honey. Oh my gosh. So new age. Jes Santiago: It’s really fancy. It really is new age. Marc Vila: All right, well, speaking of new age things, this social media thing, all right. So when we’re talking about strategy on social media, I’ll start with kind of step one. And the first thing you have to really think about, which what you’re going to do is talk about who are you selling to? What’s your niche? And the reason why I’d say this is so important is because if your niche are the type of folks that are going to make decisions on social media, buy things from there, go to social media to make purchasing decisions, then you’re probably going to want to take one strategy. Versus if your customers are likely to not make any decision on social media, then it might not matter necessarily as much for you to get really deep into becoming a mini social media superstar in your business. So and I have a couple in mind, but, Jes, can you think of any examples of maybe a customer who might make a purchasing decision on social media and ones that might not? Jes Santiago: Like the type of person are you saying? Marc Vila: Yeah. Or maybe the type of product you’re selling even or whatever. Do you have any thoughts? Jes Santiago: So immediately when you asked me that, I thought of the type of person. And I know understanding your audience has to do with some purchasing decisions, their age. I think that plays a really huge role in whether or not they’re going to purchase from social media. I think that if you were selling a product or a service and your target audience happens to be maybe an older crowd, I don’t think that they trust that they can purchase from social media. They don’t trust the technology, if that makes sense, versus your younger customers. Or if you’re selling something, a product or a service that’s geared towards a younger audience, I can say for myself, we’re more likely to… I’ll buy something off of Instagram. Marc Vila: Right. Okay. Jes Santiago: I can have that trust through Instagram. The older crowd’s not really going to have that. That’s kind of the first thing I thought about. When thinking about what kind of product, that can go a bunch of different ways. Marc Vila: Okay. Well, I’ve got a thought. Jes Santiago: Okay. Marc Vila: I’ve got a thought. So if your customers are typically going to be folks who are purchasing uniforms for schools, if they’re purchasing all of the T-shirts for the folks that work in a warehouse, if it’s just maybe people who own small businesses that are a little more in the boring business world, if mortgage brokers, and insurance agents, and stuff like that, and maybe even on the contractor world like plumbers, and electricians, and things like that. So if that’s your niche, they’re probably not going to be say, “Oh, I need to order T-shirts for my business. I’m going to go ahead and go to Instagram real quick and try to find somebody and then find their Instagram store and purchase something from there.” Right? They want to do business with somebody who’s going to be professional, helpful, offer good customer service, hopefully deliver it in a quick timeframe. Somebody that they can pick it up directly from and see and talk about the style of shirt that they want to wear. The electrician might say, “I’m up in attics and in crawl spaces, I want something that I’m not going to get all sweaty and moisture wicking shirt.” They’re going to want to have those conversations. On the flip side of things, if you’re selling fashion or maybe you’re selling directly to students at a school, so it’s not necessarily that you’re just going through the person who works in the main office, but you’re dealing with actually having a social presence to sell directly to the students where they can buy hats and other type of school swag you. So those are going to be two different scenarios where how much selling on social media matters or not. Jes Santiago: Right. Marc Vila: So I mean, that’s obviously getting into the weeds, but that’s the concept of understanding who your customers are and what they do. And I think there’s another question too, to be asked once you ask who you’re selling to, what your niche is, what’s your business? But do you want to be on social media, right? Why do you think that’s important? Jes Santiago: I mean, I think there’s a few different reasons why a business would want to be on social media, especially maybe even a smaller business, for example. I mean, that’s where you can maintain and build relationships with customers you may already have. This is a way for you to grow brand awareness and have people become familiar with your brand. You can turn customers… If it starts going well, you can turn customers kind of into advocates where they’ll mention you if they have a good experience, maybe even show off what they bought from you, a product or even a service. They’ll mention you, they’ll tag you, they’ll like your posts, share your posts, kind of builds engaged communities. And then on the flip side, it also just, if a customer has a negative experience and you’re not on social media, you don’t really get to mend that relationship. That’s a missed opportunity in my opinion. So those are just a few ways or reasons why I think someone or a small business would want to join social media to be able to build these communities, be able to respond to any negative feedback that people might have that you’re just missing. Marc Vila: Yeah, that’s actually a really good point that if somebody is upset with something that happened that they potentially are going to go to Facebook or anywhere and post about it or say something and directly potentially message you or tag you and it gives you the opportunity to respond. Maybe you didn’t even know they were upset. So that’s something good. And another about wanting to be on social media, I think is great is having a live public platform that’s a conglomerate of all the work that you do, a portfolio. And then I think the one thing about do you want to be on social media? That’s kind of the business decision. But then there’s a personal decision of if you don’t fee… If you’re not into it to be an online personality, then there’s a degree of authenticity that’s important for social. So if you don’t want do it and you’re trying to force it, everyone’s going to know you’re trying to force it and then nobody’s going to want to watch, or follow, or share, or look. Jes Santiago: Yeah, I think it’s important to make sure that your team wants to be on social media as well. Marc Vila: So anyone else that works with you. And yeah, I mean, it’s all about the plans that you have, right? So if you want to take footage of people running equipment or something like that, or having people talk about the products that you’re selling, whether it’s just you and your husband or wife, or if you have employees, you have to figure out what are the lines you want to draw on that. So I think that kind of… We’ve done part one and part two a little bit here, right? So we talked a bit about, who are you selling to? What’s the niche product? Who’s your audience, right? What kind of products do you sell? How important is social presence for those? So it doesn’t matter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, how important is having that there? And then the potential audience that you have and how they’re going to expect it? So I would say, I think of kind of two extremes on social media. And that’s going to be… And you just have to figure out which one is best for you. On a personal note, what do you want to do? And then on a secondary note of, what does the business, what would benefit the business the most as an entity? So the one extreme would be you just create the two most popular, Facebook and Instagram, and you post pictures, maybe videos of stuff that you make. And that’s it. That’s all it’s designed for, it’s an online portfolio. This way if you meet somebody, you’re at a party and someone says, “What do you do?” “I make T-shirts.” And they say, “Oh, cool. Let me see.” You don’t necessarily have to go to your photo album where you’ve got mixed in pictures of drink that you had at the bar and your dinner somewhere- Jes Santiago: Or reach in your pocket for your business card. Then they’ve got to go to the website on the business card to see your stuff. It’s an easier way to display what you’re doing with your business. Marc Vila: Right. Yeah. “Hey, do you have Instagram? Yeah. Go to it, type in whatever T-shirt shop.” And then they’ll pull it up, and yeah, follow me. And then also they can just see everything that you’ve done. And it looks really cool. It’s a reasonably passive. You could also do the same thing on Facebook. So this does two things. It allows you to share your portfolio in a good way. And it also allows any potential buyers from you that are maybe trying to do a little bit of online research will find your Instagram page, see 100 things that you’ve made, and they say, “Okay, this person knows what they’re doing.” Right? Jes Santiago: Yeah. Marc Vila: So I think those are the extremes. You try to become an online personality and you’re literally wearing and selling hats on TikTok through… Or the Instagram store. And then the other extreme is just like, it’s an online portfolio. And then the third option is having nothing at all, which is I’m going to generally speaking, advocate not for that. Jes Santiago: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that it builds trust with customers and potential customers if you’re not keeping up… I mean, this is how I think at my age, I’m sure there’s other people a little bit even younger than me, like Jailin who’s on our team could agree that if you don’t see that a customer’s keeping up with anything new age, so any newer technologies perhaps, or any of the social media platforms, you kind of start to maybe think a little bit, “Maybe I won’t purchase for them. Maybe I can purchase from someone who’s more on top of things, more willing to show me what they’re doing on a live.” You can even do a live story. Things like that I think are important for a small business or just a business of any size. Marc Vila: So some customers are going to want to see that you’re keeping up to date with things. They’re going to want to see that you’re moving forward because they’re moving forward too. And they would like to work… Listen, if our school or small business, we’re growing small business and if we’re going to need to try to partner up with somebody to do the custom apparel that we’re going to have for not only our customers, but also our employees, we want to make sure that they’re forward moving with us too. And we don’t want to be stuck with somebody who’s going to stay behind while moving forward. Jes Santiago: Oh, yeah. Marc Vila: So I can see that. I mean, there’s definitely a vision going forward of people deciding who they’re going to do business with. Also, they’re going to be curious if you’re real or not. Jes Santiago: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Authenticity for sure. Marc Vila: They also might think you’re a scam. Jes Santiago: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree. Marc Vila: Which is a real thing too. Jes Santiago: Oh, yeah. Marc Vila: Especially nowadays, there’s so many people with credit card fraud and all these scams everywhere from, I mean, starting with Craigslist scam days, all the way now it’s on Facebook Marketplace, it’s everywhere. Everywhere has somebody trying to scam. So having a social presence is another way to just, it adds another layer of trust. If you don’t have one, that doesn’t mean that you are a scam. And if you do have one, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t, right? Jes Santiago: They’re not a scam. Marc Vila: But it adds up over time, all the different things. And if they could see that for two years you’ve been posting pictures on various platforms, and some customers have been in those, and maybe they recognize another small business or something that was mentioned in a post in their community, then they’re going to say, “Oh, okay, I didn’t know that you also made the hats, or the shirts, or the mugs for that other business down the road. Actually, I’ve been there before.” Jes Santiago: Right. Yeah. Marc Vila: “Their stuff looks nice on their employees.” Right? Jes Santiago: That’s a good point. I didn’t really think of that, that layer of trust. But I do really think that that’s a good point. I mean, I know for myself, when I’m shopping, if it’s for a small business at least, I do always look up the business on Instagram, Facebook, wherever I can. I’ll try to read through customer comments if any. I don’t see any, that’s a red flag to me on most of their posts. But yeah, I can agree that that’s something that’s super important if you want to make your business not look like a scam. Marc Vila: Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. That’s a good point. I’ll say I do the same similarly. For example, I’ll be getting married this spring and- Jes Santiago: Congratulations. Marc Vila: Thanks. And we were looking at somebody local to make cakes. We really wanted to have a really local, small business do it in our area. And that was the first thing that I did with all the folks that… First, I went on to Facebook into a group, and I asked, “Does anybody know anybody in this area that does this?” And I had maybe 10 people reply, right? Three or four of them actually shared their Instagram page. So I immediately went right to their portfolio. Jes Santiago: Love that. Marc Vila: So the public was easily able to share their portfolio to me. One of them, I found kind of a website that didn’t have much on it, and I pretty much just bailed on that one immediately. Jes Santiago: It’s a red flag. Marc Vila: Oh, yeah. I was just like, “I don’t know, but I have so many options. I might as well narrow it down to the one that I can already see their work. And there’s a degree of transparency.” So some people immediately got out of the ranking without even me making a phone call. And it’s not like I said, “Oh, they don’t have an Instagram account. I’m not going to do business with them.” That I don’t think that was the thought process at all. The thought process was, “I’ve got so many that were just recommended to me. I’m only interested in calling three to do price comparisons, to have a conversation. I’m just going to pick the ones that are the three obvious ones for me to make a phone call to.” And the one that had barely had a website and no social media presence, I was just like, my attention was already grabbed by the one that had a tagged local cake made just two weeks ago in a park that was two miles from my house. Jes Santiago: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I totally get that. Marc Vila: So now, right, we’re at the point, we’ve gone in some different places right here, but we’re at the point where we figured out who your customer is, what you’re going to sell to, the potential of what type of social presence you want to have, whether it’s a portfolio or you want to try to sell online based on what you’re trying to do. Next, I would say is going to research your competition or just other similar businesses. They might not be as direct competition as you think, but see what they’re doing. So one of the thoughts that I had is you want to actually sell online, right? So you decided that you’re going to make real fashion forward type of T-shirts and hats, or maybe you’re going to do even something completely different. You’re going to do custom canvas prints or drinkware that’s really interesting. And you want to sell it actually on social media. Your goal is to not go to a local business like we’ve been discussing a few times, but your goal is actually to get on social, capture people’s attention, and get people actually on Instagram or through TikTok, click a link to buy it right off there or from your website, or something like that. So saying that, you want to see how other people selling similar products, how are they doing it? And if they look like they’re successful, then I mean, one of the key strategies is to just essentially copycat what they’re doing, right? Jes Santiago: Basically. Yeah. In so many words. I think that keeping up with what their strengths and weaknesses are, maybe it gives you an opportunity to see what different things you can bring to your social media account. So if you are following, or at least just copycatting a business and it seems to be working for them, you can also branch out and look at their website or their page in a different light as well. Okay, so they’re doing X, Y, Z correctly, but what are they not doing that this other business is doing? You can copy that too and bring that into your business and become those two shops all in one essentially. So basically, I would keep an eye on their pages. That’s what I- Marc Vila: Yeah. That’s great. I think the perfect scenario would be if you wanted to sell online, just as going with that example is, I want to sell a drinkware that has this custom art that I do. So I’m going to do this custom art, and I’m going to do tumblers, and mugs, and I’m going to customize each of them. All of them are going to be one of a kind. I’m going to offer some that are personalized with names, or birthdays, or anniversaries. Others are just going to be just the art that I sell, and that’s what I’m going to do. And so just the fictional business, I sell the canvases, the drinkware, and maybe even some apparel too with it. But you’re like, “Well, nobody’s doing this.” Right? That’s the concept. It’s like, “I’m the only person doing this.” Right? So you find people in similar industries or adjacent to it. So if you can find somebody who does hip-hop style, where it’s all has to do with rap lyrics, and dancing, and things like that. Find their page, see what they’re doing, how are they communicating with their audience? How are they talking to them? How are they sharing the product that they sell? How are they taking money accepting money from people? Jes Santiago: Yeah, that’s a good point. Marc Vila: And then it’s not the same as you, but it’s adjacent to you. Jes Santiago: Yes. Marc Vila: They’re just, what they’re selling is just a completely different audience than yours, right? Yours might be people into art, people who would drink tea or coffee with flowers in it, or something like that. Jes Santiago: My lavender coffee. Leave me and my lavender coffee alone. Marc Vila: So your customers might drink… And the other customers are drinking Monster coffee drinks. Jes Santiago: Monster Java, whatever that is. Marc Vila: Right. So saying that, you can just learn some lessons from them. Okay. And then you list what they’re doing. Okay. Well, they’re being live on social media. They’re telling exactly what they’re doing. They’re showing the product being made. They’re inviting customers to join their live with them, and talk about the product, wearing it. And you could say, “I could do that same exact thing.” So you find adjacent customers or adjacent competition that’s not your competition, but very similar. And then you can find direct. And you made a fantastic point where if you find… I would try to find at least three, maybe five or six. Don’t get to 100 or 50, you’ll never be able… Pick a vehicle. And then you Venn diagram it, you draw this is what they do great. This is what they all do great. This is what none of them do great. Here’s this individual idea that I have. And then you pair all that together, and then you build your own little strategy, which is the next thing to talk about, right? Jes Santiago: Yeah. That’s perfect. What a great segue. Marc Vila: So we wrote down, in our notes here, we wrote down some questions about determining a strategy. So why don’t you tell us about what those are? Jes Santiago: So the first question is, do you want to sell online? I think we kind of already went over that. Do you want customers to find you on social media? Are these pages for building trust or are they just an online portfolio? Excuse me. So it’s kind of what we’ve already talked about in the same, I don’t know what- Marc Vila: Yeah. All the questions we were asking earlier are now need to go into writing. Jes Santiago: Yes, exactly. I’m sorry, go ahead. Marc Vila: Oh, no, I was just going to say, you go into Excel or Word or something like that that you have, or on a notepad and you physically start answering these questions and writing out level one of, I think of determining a strategy is just right sentences or words, “I want to sell online. My customers are really active on social media. I believe my customers are on TikTok. I don’t think my customers really use Facebook. I think my customers do use Facebook groups a lot. I’d like to find out about actually selling on Instagram. I just want to build a fantastic portfolio so that I can share with people or my customers can share with people that want referrals.” Jes Santiago: So basically determining your goal. Marc Vila: Yeah, determining the goals, just write them all down. Things you do want, things you don’t want, to keep it simple. And then from there, you can start… I think you’ve got a vision. Jes Santiago: Kind of narrow it down. Yeah. Marc Vila: Yeah, yeah. You’ve got a vision of what you want to do, you know what platforms you want to go on, and how you want to execute. Jes Santiago: Yeah, you know what platforms your customers are going to be on. So that’ll help you choose, okay, I’m going to start on Instagram, or I’m going to start at the basics like Facebook. Maybe you won’t even touch Pinterest, because Pinterest is one that people don’t think about or TikTok just yet. Maybe that can develop over time. But it kind of just helps you determine where you want to put this content and what kind of content you want to put out there, and who’s your audience. So just determining your goal is super important for just starting. Marc Vila: Yeah. No, it’s exactly. It’s just starting. So start somewhere, but have a little bit of a plan of what the start is. Don’t just start making… I read online that if you want to succeed the most, you should have every single social media and post to all of them five times a day. Jes Santiago: At this time. Marc Vila: Yeah. I mean, sure. But if your customers are in procurement for local utility companies they’re not even… They don’t care. Jes Santiago: I don’t think they’re worried about that. Marc Vila: Yeah. It’s just so far removed from them making that decision. And have you seen this thing on TikTok where- Jes Santiago: I’m scared to know what, TikTok has so much. Marc Vila: These people, they have a box of stuff that would be in a junk drawer at your house, and then for 20 bucks, they’ll like scoop a Tupperware full of it and put it in a baggie and mail it to you. Jes Santiago: What? Marc Vila: Yeah. Jes Santiago: Like, what side of TikTok are you on? Marc Vila: It’s like it’s pen caps and little squishy toys, and highlighters, clips. Actually, I just had one somewhere. But the chip bag clips. Jes Santiago: Yeah, the little… Okay. Marc Vila: These little twisty tie things. Jes Santiago: I’ve never seen that before. That’s interesting. Marc Vila: There’s like, oh, here’s a Pokemon toy, and oh, this ones missing an arm. Jes Santiago: Oh my God. Marc Vila: Yeah, it’s just like a junk drawer. Jes Santiago: And they just put it in a bag and sell it to people? Marc Vila: And people buy it. Jes Santiago: That is so interesting. Marc Vila: Right there. Yeah. Jes Santiago: Well, I mean, I guess they are saying what’s going in the bag, but there’s a little bit of an element of surprise. Marc Vila: There is. And there’s some treasures in there too. This one I was watching, the lady had scratch off tickets that would be in there. So there’d be three scratch off tickets too. And sometimes when there would be a scoop, every once in a while they would get a whole little folded up thing of them. So there was maybe 10 scratch off tickets in there. Jes Santiago: OKay. So I can see why people maybe like it. Marc Vila: So every once in a while you get a couple really cool looking pens and a Pokemon toy and 10 scratch-offs, and you’re like, “Dang, I could be a millionaire.” Jes Santiago: Yeah. Or you get a bag that’s like three year old candy or something. Marc Vila: Yeah, just old candy. Jes Santiago: Or old Chick-Fil-A sauce or something. Marc Vila: Just wrappers. I’m pretty sure that might have been in there, ketchup packets and stuff. Jes Santiago: Well, I’m thinking of my junk drawer at home and it’s not pretty. Marc Vila: So anyway, I think the point being on that is you could sell anything online if it makes sense. This one example is entertaining and there’s some luck involved. And then people are just probably enjoy watching it because it’s just this weird awkward person selling stuff out of a drawer. So in the example of the person who does hip-hop rap type of gear, maybe they have people on their freestyle rapping on their live while they’re selling their stuff. So they’re mixing entertainment. So you find that’s again, that’s the one extreme side of things. Because the other is just online portfolio. So now that you’ve, I guess, we can go back on track after that, going down these TikTok rabbit holes. So let’s see, we have here, so oh, the next important thing that you want to do is defining your brand. Jes Santiago: Oh, for sure. Marc Vila: Okay, so you want to talk about that a little bit? Jes Santiago: Yeah. When I think of defining our brand, or just any brand in general, I think about when I’m setting up a page, I want it to be consistent. I want my logos to be in the right places. I want my colors, my business colors to be consistent throughout the page. If I’m going to start a series of how-tos, I want that to look a certain way, be branded a certain way so that when people see that on their, if it’s TikTok, their for you page, or you’re just scrolling through the reels on Instagram, or even on your explore page, if you’ve seen it a few times, if you’ve seen those colors a few times, you know, okay, that’s ColDesi, or okay, that’s Marc’s T-shirt shop, et cetera. So I think having those kind of things, having a personality to your brand, having consistency across the board with logos, colors, I think that’s all important when you’re trying to define your brand, essentially. Marc Vila: Yeah. So you- Jes Santiago: Make a face for it. Marc Vila: Yeah. You start with the simple level of things. Do you have a logo or is it more like a personality? Is it more your face or is it more about the business? Are there certain colors that you use? Are there certain fonts you use? Are there styles of things and the types of content that you want to share? Jes Santiago: Absolutely. Marc Vila: So if you’re doing custom drinkware, just using that as an example, you have the name of your company, you have a logo, maybe it’s not personal, right? Your goal is to not sell them necessarily online, but you want to have an online portfolio and a place for your customers to share, say thanks, give reviews, things like that. So you’re going to want to have the logo of your company as the main image in all these places. If you have any secondary images that can be added to your profile. Maybe it’s a product shop display or something like that, or a picture of your shop, or something like that, or of you working, or something like that. And then the types of posts that you want to have for your branding. So in this example, I just want to have really three types of posts. One is going to be something interactive, maybe to try to get some interaction online. Another one’s just going to be actual pictures of finished products. And then the third type of post is maybe either going to be me making or showing off a finished product. And that’s kind of going to be my social brand, and it’s all going… I’m going to make sure I use the same fonts, the same colors, my logo, take pictures in backgrounds that make sense. Jes Santiago: Right. Yes. Marc Vila: Right? Yeah. So when somebody goes to your page, everything feels like it belongs to you. Jes Santiago: Exactly. Yeah. You want your page to be, I mean, as cohesive, I think, as possible. I mean, you can have fun with it I believe. Even on our pages, one day we’re doing something with sublimation that’s super colorful, and then the next day we’re doing an embroidery design, digital heat effects design. Doesn’t always have to be so structured and so uniform. I don’t want to have people think by saying you want consistency, that has to be a certain uniform kind of way to where it almost becomes boring. Marc Vila: Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be militant either, where it’s like, I cannot break from this. Jes Santiago: Yes. I think it’s important to test, don’t be afraid to test. I think we do that all the time. For a while, we found that just normal social media or Instagram posts, for example, just pictures were working for a while. And then as you scroll up to our most recent, we’ve moved on to reels. So I think that it’s just important to test as long as it makes sense for your business, and as long as you’re still making sure that you have the same kind of face, the same kind of familiarity for customers and potential customers to find you, then you’re on the right track. Marc Vila: Yep. And this is a great place to go and look at other brands, whether it’s competition or just any brand in general, any business as on social media that you think does a good job. When one does a good job, you know it when you see it. And sometimes it’s hard to explain. So when you see one that does a good job, try to write down notes about why. I always find that their brand color is pink, and almost every picture has that shade of pink in it somewhere. Whether it’s literally a scarf on the table next to the product or the product itself. So look for things like that. So let’s see, make sure we have here your brand. Yeah. So your brand is all about, what do you want it to look like? Who is going to look at it? What’s the personality of your brand? And just making sure that your whole business on social media is cohesive and makes sense. Jes Santiago: Yeah. Which I think brings us into setting up your account. It kind of just flows into that, making sure that you have high quality images. You’re not just going to throw up a photo that you took, I don’t know, just randomly, you know. You want to make sure that you have some kind of, I guess, process to it. Make sure you have high quality images. Make sure you’re including keywords in your descriptions, in your bio, I think is important. Any links, if you have a Linktree, that’s also really something that we found pretty cool to use as well. Any initial posts you want to have scheduled at first, kind of have a plan, write out a plan. All right, so I’m going to start with reels. I’m going to do this in day one, or post one, two, three, four, five. I think all of these are important in setting up, kick starting your social media business or portfolio. Marc Vila: And so, no, that’s a great point. And you brought up something about testing too, which we’re going to get into next again as well. But so what you do is you hit the button on Instagram to start a new page, right? And then just start going through the steps. And before you hit publish, make sure you take notes of everything that they want you to fill out. Jes Santiago: Yeah, good point. Marc Vila: Right. So they want you to make a name, they want you to have an image, they want you to have a secondary image, write a description of who you are and make your first post. So write all that down. That’s what I need to start Instagram. And to future-proof this, it might be different in one month. So rather than listing exactly what it is, the best tool you can do is actually to start to pretend to set one up, even if it’s a dummy one that you never publish and just hit delete at the end, or cancel. The same thing on any other account that you’re going to do. Start to go through some of the steps so you can figure out what it is. Or potentially even just research on YouTube, how to set up an Instagram account the best way. And be sure to sort your video by the most recent in case there’s any changes. But you want to make a list of everything that you want to do, look back at your plan, make sure that what you have is going to make sense to it. Look at how you’re going to do your branding. And once you’re all set up and planned, then you can make your page. But before you do it, you should probably work on a bit of a social media calendar. Jes Santiago: Yeah, that’s a good point. I actually have that in my notes. I think without a calendar, I can’t imagine, for example, I can’t imagine working here and not having a social media calendar. And that’s for all three of the platforms that we use, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. It just helps with consistency, making sure that you’re consistently posting, making sure that it’s going out on time. I don’t want to say, “Okay, we’re going to print a design on one of our machines for St. Patrick’s Day.” Oh, well it’s already the 16th. I got to hurry up and get this post up. It’s kind of too late. You want to be ahead of the game. So for example, for that, we started creating content for that this month. And well, just kidding. It’s the 1st of March. So I forgot. In February- Marc Vila: Yeah, we did it last month. Yeah. Jes Santiago: Yeah, we did it last month. And you just kind of start scheduling and getting ahead of the game so that it also just doesn’t… It doesn’t create, you don’t have to just go in all on one day and post, post, post, create all these posts. You have things kind of scheduled out what you’re going to do, you know what you’re going to film. It just makes the process easier. I couldn’t imagine just not having a calendar and working willy-nilly just, oh, I’ll post this. Oh, I’ll post that. Marc Vila: Right. You just want to have a plan. You want to have a daily, weekly, monthly type of a plan. And I would say currently, March 1st, 2023, if you’re listening to this a decade in the future, the AI’s deciding everything. Okay. Jes Santiago: Yeah. Excuse me. Marc Vila: It also decided that you should be listening to this podcast from the distant past. But today, I would say if it’s an online portfolio, have the schedule to post something to social media, bare minimum once a week. Two to three times a week ideally, right? But at least once a week, preferably twice, this way at the end of the year, there’s 100 things up there, right? If you’re doing it about twice a week, at the end of the year, you’ve got 100 pictures on Instagram, which is a pretty nice thing for a year later down the road when a customer says, “Yeah, purchase from so-and-so shop. They did a great job for me.” And they link to your Instagram account and this stranger on social media who you don’t even know, that you don’t even know this is happening, clicks on it, and they see 100 things that you’ve made. And they’re like, “This person’s legit. They’re good.” Jes Santiago: Yeah. Exactly. Going back to the beginning where you were saying you were picking out wedding cakes, you didn’t go for the business that barely had a website built out that barely had a presence on social media. Yeah, you could do the minimum posting, but I mean, I don’t want to look at an Instagram page, a TikTok page that has two, three Instagram… Or two posts, four posts, five posts, even 10. I’m like… Marc Vila: Yeah. Jes Santiago: They seem brand new. I don’t know if I necessarily trust… I want to put my trust into a brand new wedding cake bakery or something. Marc Vila: Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s actually… And that brings up a point, and it’s something, maybe not… I mean, it could be a tangent we could go into, but what you described of having in the beginning when you’re setting it up, having some posts that you’re going to do ahead of time, ready to go. So when you start your page, it’s not blank, but at least when you’re starting it, you’ve got maybe five things ready to go up or 10 things. And then talking about posting on a regular basis. That’s actually one of the biggest challenges I think for all businesses. They say, even us, “What are we going to post this week?” So I would say this, on your busy weeks with business where you’ve got a lot of orders, you should be taking a picture and or video of every order. You don’t have to post all of those that week. Put them in the bank, put them in the folder. And then when you have a moment and you’re going to look at your social media real quick, line them up, say, “Order one, I’m going to do on Tuesday, order two, Thursday order three, next Tuesday, order four, next Thursday.” And now you’ve got six weeks worth of stuff kind of written down. And you know what you’re going to post. And you can schedule posts on a lot of these platforms too. So you can schedule to release it at a later date. And you can also change it. So if you have a really… Oops, I just threw my pen somewhere. If you have a really interesting- Jes Santiago: Got it. Marc Vila: Yeah, I got it. If you have a really interesting customer that comes up, you can alter your schedule a little bit. Hey, you guys are doing a big event this weekend. I’ll advertise it on my Instagram so people can see. And then you just move that post two weeks later, right? So if you have a bunch of stuff in the bank, you’ll always have a bunch of posts to do. So take advantage of things. And it’s okay to share the same thing at a different angle, or from a different light, or from share making it on Tuesday and then the next Tuesday share the finished product as a follow-up post. There’s plenty of content you could do, and especially on the portfolio side. If you’re going to be selling online, you probably want to have a daily plan. Jes Santiago: Yeah, for sure. Marc Vila: What are you going to do every single day? Are you going to be going live every day? Are you going to be posting every day? What are you going to be offering every day? And that’s going to make sure that when your customer is ready to make that decision, you’re there ready to take the order. Jes Santiago: They’re choosing your page, your business. Marc Vila: Okay. So we’ve got a calendar, and then there’s a couple more things to go over. One is going to be kind of what you mentioned earlier. I wrote in the notes here, collaborating with others, but you know, also said community involvement and things like that. Jes Santiago: Yeah. So I know for one, something that we’ve benefited from is our Facebook groups. There’s kind of a community on our Custom Apparel Startups page where we try to be on top of everything, but we’re also busy doing our own tasks. We cannot always reach every comment. There’s a community there that if you’ve built a big enough page built a big enough community, someone else who is familiar, or knows the answer, or can help one of our other customers, they jump on it. I see all the time in our page. And you kind of build cold SE customers who just help each other out when we’re not there for them or we can’t be there necessarily. Marc Vila: Sometimes I’ve seen on customer pages where they’ll say on their social media, it’ll say, “Do y’all make hoodies?” And then another customer will comment and say, “Yes, I actually just got some from them. I love them.” So that’s that community that you’ve created. But what you need to do is you need to help facilitate the creation of that community. And that’s going to be by asking your customers to follow you, asking your customers to maybe leave a review or comment or say, “Hey, I’m going to post the pictures of the hats I made for you on my Instagram.” And just I’d say, just be honest, “I’m trying to grow it. And Instagram kind of gives me Instagram points when people comment and like it, so if you wouldn’t mind when I post it up there, if you wouldn’t mind commenting and liking on it.” Jes Santiago: Yeah, sharing it to your story. Marc Vila: Yeah. Or share it. That’d be a big help to me. And I’d appreciate it. So you could just ask folks that, and then anytime somebody does comment or anything like that on any of your posts, be sure to respond. Respond to all of them if you can. And in the beginning, in the very beginning, you definitely can, because there’s not going to be that many. So respond to that. And then another way to kind of build that online community is by cross-promoting. So if you have a customer who is an electrician, you made hats for them, post their hat, tag them in there, write a note, “Hey, if anybody is in the Harbordale area, you need an electrician. I just did a hat job for Joe over there and he was a super cool guy.” And either drop the name of their business or if they have social media, share their social media. And maybe this electrician, he’s on social media too, kind of sharing his customer’s stories. And potentially ask them, say, “I’m going to share you, will you share me?” And it could be them doing a job wearing the new hats and be like, “Hey, we just fixed the electrical issue at this local school, and by the way, we’re wearing our new hats. And even one of the kids in the school commented how cool it looked.” Whatever. So cross promoting each other like that’s great, especially when you’re dealing with lots of other businesses or if you are doing work with somebody who is really active on social media themselves. Jes Santiago: Yeah, for sure. So I just thought of something on another way to build your, I guess, community or gain followers, but it doesn’t necessarily have to… I’m backtracking a little bit if that’s okay. Marc Vila: All right. Cool. Jes Santiago: Doesn’t necessarily have to do with cross-promoting, but going back to knowing your competitors. I think one of the things that I have found helpful, and I sometimes go through our competitors or someone adjacent to us, their followers. Who are they following? I mean, I’m not going to just follow a random person named Bob who has no post. But if it seems like another shop or something that is relevant to our business, I’ll go ahead and I’ll follow. I’ll pay attention. Marc Vila: So you potentially follow the followers of your competition or adjacent businesses. Jes Santiago: Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? Marc Vila: Yeah, so if you sell apparel and there’s a shop down the road that sells awards and engraving, kind of adjacent, right? Because you figure that a little league is going to use both of those businesses, right? They need awards and they need apparel. And maybe both of you might not do the same thing. So what you do is you can go to this award shop and you can look at their social media. It’s pretty good. They got a good amount of people there. It’s adjacent to my business. Who’s following them? Well there’s three little league teams that are following them. So I’m going to click on their profiles, look at them, and then right from my business profile, I’m going to follow that little league. It’s going to pop up that this custom apparel shop follows them. And that little moment there could be the spark that ignites them to look at you, see how good of a job you do, realize how dissatisfied they are with the apparel that they currently have potentially, didn’t even know you were in business. They found you. And that they start following you back. And next thing you know, the next time that their customer messes up or their vendor messes up and gets the hats wrong again for the third time, they’re going to- Jes Santiago: It’s a light bulb. Marc Vila: Yeah, and they’re going to remember you and they’re going to have seen how good your hats look. And they pick up the phone and they give you a call, or even send you a message on social media and say, “Hey, I’m sick of doing with this business that doesn’t seem to care about me. I’m looking for somebody who does. And looking at your social media, it seems like you care about your customers.” So a little bit of this work that you can do in social can really pay off. Jes Santiago: Oh, for sure. Yeah. Even with influencers, influencers, influencers, tongue-tied. Influencers, you can also follow some influencers that are maybe a little bit popular in the type of industry you’re working in and maybe try to connect with them as well. It’s another way to build brand trust on social media. If this social media influencer is doing this, I should do this. There’s a lot of people that think that way. We’re easily, maybe not easily, but some of us are easily influenced to trust what this influencer, this popular influencer is saying. We see them all the time. We see bigger brands partnering with them. So maybe trying to connect with even some of the smaller ones. Marc Vila: Yeah. I mean, just honestly, and influencers can be on the social media side, meaning they have tons of followers, right? But it also could mean that they’re just an influencer in your community. So the amount of followers they have is maybe very small, maybe 400, but they are the principal of a school, or they are the person who is the head of the homeowner’s association. So the people that are following them are actually a lot of people in your community. And if you’re interacting with them online, they associate you with this person that is of authority, that they trust and it can turn into business for you. So there’s one side of it where it’s like, yes, I’m going to connect with this person who’s in the music industry that has a million followers, that would be great for my business. But that might not really matter too much to you if you’re mainly selling to local stuff. Jes Santiago: Oh, yeah. Marc Vila: Right. What would matter more to you would be principals, politicians, business owners like- Jes Santiago: That big face in the community. Marc Vila: Yeah. Jes Santiago: Yeah. Marc Vila: Yeah, absolutely. The realtor that has their face on every billboard as you’re driving down- Jes Santiago: On the bench. Marc Vila: Yeah, the bench bench man. Jes Santiago: I haven’t seen that in a while actually. Marc Vila: I don’t drive by a lot of benches too much. Jes Santiago: Me either now that I think about it. Otherwise, maybe I just don’t notice. I don’t know. Marc Vila: I just don’t drive in the city as much. Jes Santiago: Yeah, true. I try to avoid. Marc Vila: I live in the suburbs now and I drive on the highway to get through it, so I don’t see the benches. Jes Santiago: Yeah. Marc Vila: Well, all right. There’s two last things to discuss and then we’re about to wrap up. So you had mentioned before just about experimenting with new ways to engage. Jes Santiago: Yeah, absolutely. Marc Vila: So what are some ways you can experiment? And by engage, we mean getting people to follow you, like you, make comments, message you, whatever it is, that means interact with you. Jes Santiago: Yeah. Marc Vila: Do you have any thoughts of ways to experiment things you could try? Jes Santiago: Yeah, I actually did this holiday contest on Instagram and that was kind of a first, I think. Or either maybe a second for us. We did that for the second time, but years apart. So I think contests are a good way to try and get people to engage with you, click on your page, click on your website. You’re going to need some patience though, especially if you’re starting off. You’re a little bit newer on social media. For us, we did it on our Colman and Company Instagram page, which has a little bit less of a following than ColDesi, and Digital Heat Effects. And it took a little bit for the post to pick up. But once I started sharing that contest, once I sent it to people, I even went ahead and sent it to my own friends that I know make their own T-shirts or hats. They shared it to a bunch of different people. And that’s how we got that page or that post to pick up a little bit. Then the comment section was crazy. People were tagging all of their friends trying to win our contest. So I would say maybe try with contests, polls. Marc Vila: Ask people their opinion. Jes Santiago: Yeah. Exactly. Marc Vila: I’m thinking about adding a new… Drinkware example. Before you put art on tumblers and you kind of say, “Which one of these should be the next one I put on my website?” And ask the people that follow you. And the contest one is interesting. You can do something for a free giveaway, or coupon, or something like that. There’s plenty, you can experiment with working with an influencer like the cross posting, see how that works if you cross post with this person and if it makes sense to do it. And by cross posting I mean, you post about them, they post about you. And you probably do that the same day or something like that. Jes Santiago: You could boost a post too. Marc Vila: Yeah, you could do boosting, which is basically paying money to social media to show it to more people. So you can experiment with that and see what it does. If you have a portfolio page that is just a bunch of pictures of stuff you do, I probably wouldn’t spend a ton of money sharing that. Jes Santiago: Yeah, agreed. Marc Vila: Because the goal is not to sell online. Your goal is not necessarily to get customers online, but build trust to potential customers when they look you up or it’s shared. Versus if you’re actually trying to build a following of people where you do something, where you are making your drinkware live and it’s interesting to watch and you have customers on there that are artists that are doing things, and it’s an internet show that you can buy the product, then boosting the post would make sense to get more eyes to that. Jes Santiago: Yeah. And something I noticed that some small businesses are doing on TikTok is they’re going live on TikTok and they’re tagging one of their customers. They’re tagging their handle in their live, and they say something like, “I’m making your custom tumbler today.” And I don’t know, I’ve seen a ton of people just watch the live, just tune in. It’s them just sitting there making that person’s tumbler or mug for example. That’s kind of interactive. It gets people excited, it gets your customers excited. It even gets people who are just random. I’m pretty random. I probably am not going to buy from her, but I watched it. I thought it was cool. Marc Vila: The fact that you watched it also will get other followers, because TikTok maybe will… The algorithm will kind of say, “This was interesting to get 300 people to watch for three minutes. The next time this goes live, we’re going to give it some more juice.” Because the goal of most of these platforms is to keep you on them. So if people watch your stuff for a little bit, then they’ll show it to more people. So, great. So there there’s a handful of ideas and thoughts, and look at what other people do and see if that’s something that you want to try. And then the last thing to do is to track performance. For one, I think the number one rule of this is you have to be super patient in the beginning. Jes Santiago: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Marc Vila: Nobody is going to care. You’re going to have zero likes on something that you thought was the best thing you made. Jes Santiago: I’ve felt that way before. Marc Vila: And yeah, you’re going to ask a question and nobody’s going to answer, “Which one do you like better?” And you have one person that says, “The green one.” And it almost feels like embarrassing for someone else to see that, right? But there are a couple things to remember are, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, their goal is not to make you as famous as possible. Their goal is to make money through ads and please investors, right? And the way that they do that, the best way, the way that ads… What are the most expensive ads on TV? Do you know? Jes Santiago: Oh, I don’t know. Marc Vila: Super Bowl. Jes Santiago: Super Bowl. Marc Vila: Super Bowl. Yes. Jes Santiago: Okay. That’s what I was thinking. Marc Vila: Super Bowl. Why? Because- Jes Santiago: Everyone’s tuned in. Marc Vila: Everyone’s tuned in, right? It’s one of the most watched things ever. So it’s the most expensive ads. So if Facebook wants to make the most money from ads, they want to have the most eyes on phones. Jes Santiago: Yeah, that makes sense. Marc Vila: Which means that ads are worth more money, right? And so that’s their goal, right? So their goal is not to make you famous. Their goal is to make money. So over time, you will start building internet points that add up to say that it’s worth it, right? And if your page never becomes worth it to them for whatever reason, it’s a computer deciding this, then that’s when you make it worth it by you paying for it. By boosting it. Jes Santiago: Boosting. Yeah. Marc Vila: And then that gives you the shot to potentially grow faster. You put 20 bucks into this, it went from two views to 1,000 views. A good amount of people commented, and then that gives you a little more points. So you’re kind of the internet, the AI is going to say, “All right, I mean this people seem to like this. The next time they boost it, we’re going to show it to more people. And the next time they post, more of these people that followed are going to probably be shown it again.” So it’s kind of a thing over time, but don’t be discouraged by it. The fact that it will be particularly slow. And anybody who… Realistically, if somebody tells you that they started up their social page and they got to 10,000 followers their first month, I mean, they lied. Jes Santiago: I’m thinking they bought it, they bought the followers. Marc Vila: Or they just got really lucky. Jes Santiago: Lucky. Yeah. Marc Vila: Right? So being lucky is not the rule. Right? Like the lottery example in the beginning. Yes, people win the lottery every week. The chances of it being you are one in 70 million or whatever the number is, right? Jes Santiago: It’s so sad. Marc Vila: And the same with this getting famous on social media quickly or without purpose is, sure, you may have or heard of somebody who did it. They may be lying. Which I mean, let’s be honest, people lie, that’s not even a secret. People lie. So they may be lying. They may have paid for it, or they may have been lucky. And then chances are, if you look at somebody who has a really successful social media account, the biggest chance is that they put a lot of work into it over time and were very discouraged for a long period of time, and they did the right things. They kept reaching out to people to collaborate. They kept tagging people, commenting, going through their followers followers and following them. Jes Santiago: That person, whoever said that probably didn’t mention all of what Marc is talking about. Marc Vila: Right. Right. They may not have mentioned the fact that, oh, I mean I spent 30 hours a week. I’m trying to remember who, I spoke with somebody who was particularly busy on social media and they were saying that it was like they spent 30 to 40 hours a week doing it. Jes Santiago: Yeah, it takes time. Marc Vila: I think it was a customer or something. But they had… Yeah. And they said, they were like, “Yeah, I mean, every video that you see is two hours worth of work, and I do like 10 a week. So that’s like 20 hours of it. Then I probably spend another 20 hours commenting, sharing.” So point being is that if you’re going to sell online, and that’s going to be the business you’re going to do, it’s a full-time job. You know, it’s a good amount of work and it’s going to take some luck. And if you put 40 hours a week into, it’s going to ramp up faster than if you put 20, or 10, or two. Jes Santiago: Yeah. You’ve got to have that expectation kind set for yourself. Marc Vila: Yeah. Yeah. Have the expectation for yourself that… Because the worst thing that’ll happen is you put a good amount of work into it, even if it’s like an two hours a week, eight, 10 hours a month, and then you give up because you thought it was going to happen super quick. So if you go in and saying, “I’m going to be number one, I’m going to win. I’m going to make money on it, I understand that if I only put in two hours a week, it will be slow. And if I put in 40, it’ll be faster as long as I have a plan and keep going.” Jes Santiago: Exactly. Marc Vila: So set the expectation, have a plan, and then consider everything that we talked about. Who’s your audience? What’s your branding going to look like? How are you going to view the results? And the last bit about tracking performance is just look for wins. Jes Santiago: Yeah, exactly. Look for wins. I mean, you can get pretty specific with tracking. I don’t know if we want to necessarily… Marc Vila: Yeah, I would say, I mean, tracking is actually a good episode in and of itself. Jes Santiago: That is actually. Marc Vila: So we can talk about that. So maybe we’ll stay tuned for that in the future. But I would say generally speaking tracking, look at the stats on the post. They’ll give you stats on the business side of things in any platform. Jes Santiago: Yeah. There’s analytics tools that you can use. Marc Vila: Yeah. Yeah. How many people looked at it? You can just go simple at first. How many views did it get? How many likes did it get? How many comments? How many people shared it? Jes Santiago: How many people saved it? Marc Vila: Yeah. All that stuff. You just look at simple stuff, and look for something interesting. So you posted a picture of a tumbler because you made custom tumblers. And normally you get five likes and this one got 20. So why? Jes Santiago: Yeah, exactly. Ask yourself why. What did you do differently? And then if that worked, try to recreate that. Marc Vila: Yeah. It might not be obvious too, which is the interesting thing too, because for us, we’ve seen that and there’s still some posts I don’t understand why. Jes Santiago: I don’t get why this one did so well. Marc Vila: It could have been anything. Jes Santiago: The audio that you use. Marc Vila: The audio that you used, it could have been just the color was real eye catching. You used a particular color of green that really popped out in the screen, so more people stopped to look at it because it got their attention for a second. It could have just been the time of the year, you know, you posted something really interesting around Christmastime and then that was your best post. So how do you recreate that? Well, you’re going to say, “I’m going to try and do Valentine’s Day too.” Okay, well maybe don’t expect the same results because it’s not as popular of a holiday per se. Right? Jes Santiago: Exactly. Marc Vila: So look for interesting wins, look forward to ways to recreate it, and just have some patience, and keep looking and working on it. So I think that covers about everything. Is there anything else you wanted to add at the end? Jes Santiago: I mean, I don’t think so. I think just piggybacking off of you, be patient, have a plan, just set an expectation for yourself that the amount of time you’re going to put in might be a lot if you want to get bigger, if you want to… Might happen over a year, might happen over two years, or a few months, honestly. Just set realistic expectations, realistic goals, and just do the research and do the work. Marc Vila: Yeah. Yeah. Do the research, and do the work is a great thing to do. And also go all the way back to the plan. Because if the plan is for it to be an online portfolio that having 100 likes is probably never necessarily the goal. Listen, I sell to local businesses, I just want a place to put all my stuff publicly that’s different than my website. And that’s what it’s going to be. So maybe you’re not going to super get into social and it’s literally, you know what? I’m going to spend less than an hour of a week on it. I’m just going to be posting, building that up. On the flip side compared to you’re looking to sell online. So go back to the goal and determine what it is, and then just follow that correctly and you’ll be good. And be patient with it and take time to learn it. Jes Santiago: Don’t be afraid to test. Marc Vila: Yeah, don’t be afraid to test out. Try something new if you’re really curious about doing it, and talk to your customers about it. That’s the best way to do it is people that you meet face to face, you can get them to follow, like, hare, talk about it, participate with you on social, leave me a review on Facebook, stuff like that. Jes Santiago: Exactly. Marc Vila: And then also I say, just if you want to get more reviews on Facebook or more comments or likes, I mean, just literally tell them why. If somebody’s super happy and they’re like, “I love this hat you made, it’s the best. The kids on the team are so happy because their last hats they messed up the numbers for six of the kids and they were so disappointed that the first game they had the wrong number at it, a number, and kids have tape on the back of their hats with Sharpie. I mean… Jes Santiago: You can get so specific, Marc, it cracks me up. Marc Vila: So that’s something that could happen. And now they’re really happy and you can literally just say, “I appreciate it so much. I look forward to doing business again. You know what, one of the things I’m really trying to do is build up the amount of reviews I have on Facebook. So if you’re on there and you want to leave five stars, it would really mean a lot to me too. It’d be a great way to say thanks as well.” Jes Santiago: Just be honest. Marc Vila: Yeah, just be honest. And oftentimes that person who was really satisfied would be like, “Sure. Yeah. I mean, I use Facebook all the time. I’ll do it right now.” And they’ll find you and literally do it right at that moment. And so just ask for it. So all right. Oh, what did I write in the end here just to make sure in my notes here. Jes Santiago: Basically everything we said. Marc Vila: Yeah. Jes Santiago: I think. Marc Vila: Yeah, it sounds good then. I think we nailed everything. So go ahead and you can take a look. Go to ColDesi on social media and on Instagram, or TikTok, or Facebook, you can go to ColDesi, Colman and Company is another. Jes Santiago: Digital Heat Effects. Marc Vila: Digital Heat Effects. Those are the big accounts that we spend time on. You can take a look at some of the stuff we’ve done. Yeah. And I’ll say, I mean, some of our stuff doesn’t have tons of likes or interaction. It’s a little bit portfolio style. Some of the stuff we do have a lot of interaction on and so not every post needs to be a win. And we’re in a niche industry. We’re in the customization business. We’re not selling something that that every single person is buying. So I don’t expect us to have as many likes as something entertainment like someone who’s an amazing dancer or singer. Jes Santiago: Yeah, ASMR. People love that. Marc Vila: That’ll be a whole podcast too, then. Well, great. Thanks for listening and definitely go to ColDesi.com if you’re interested in learning about the different types of customization equipment that we have to offer. And feel free to send a message on any of our accounts on social media. Ask us any questions that you have. And if you really want to directly speak about equipment that we have to sell, then that’s not going to be Jes or I that do that, that’s other folks in the business. So if you go to ColDesi.com, you can live chat with folks if you want to talk about customization equipment. But thanks for listening. My name’s Marc Vila. Jes Santiago: And I’m Jes Santiago. Marc Vila: And we’ll see you in the next episode of Custom Apparel Startups. Jes Santiago: Thank you. The post Episode 188 – Setting up Your Social Media Strategy appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups .…

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