Episode 65 – Marketing Q&A with The Sasha Group: Paid media, organic content, and TikTok

Katie Hankinson (00:00):

Welcome to building while flying a Sasha group podcast, where we interview business leaders about how they tackle challenges, stay resilient and navigate ever-changing skies.

Joe Quattrone (00:11):

Welcome back to another episode of building while flying Q and a edition I’m Joe Quattrone, your host let’s dig into the questions. So the first question that we have today comes from Alicia Willis Tunby who asks, I love the super bowl commercial for Mr. Peanut. How do you best prepare for these amazing events and what steps do you take to get those creative content ideas flowing? Well, I didn’t work on that campaign specifically, but I have worked on eight or nine different super bowl, uh, campaigns throughout the course of my career, mostly from a social media and a digital perspective across brands like Audi of America, Jaguar, Budweiser, uh, bud lake, to name a few. Um, so what I can say that is a common denominator against all of them is you really have to, as a brand plan out what you are hoping to get out of the event, just like you do in, in the rest of marketing, right?

Joe Quattrone (01:01):

What is your ROI of this specific campaign activation? It’s not always what you might think, right? It’s not necessarily going into it, planning to come out of it with a certain bump in revenue or sales or something like that. This is also the largest advertising event in the world on an annual basis. So it is really a, a competition of creativity of sorts, how, who can tell the biggest and the best story. That’s why a lot of brands specifically in the consumer package, goods, territory, you know, think chips, beer, soda, that type of thing. Um, they tend to, to play around in the, uh, the awareness memorability relevance space, right? How do I win the ad meter per se? Like how do I rank highly based on super bowl Watchers, um, you know, point of view. So that’s when you get into these big grandiose stories, right?

Joe Quattrone (01:52):

And that’s also the other interesting thing about it is the super bowl. Unlike other moments in TV, throughout the course of the year, it’s actually something that consumers do watch and they pay a lot of attention to, and they talk about it online. So it is one point during the year where you can take TV as a format and you can tell these big 32nd, 62nd, 92nd stories. We can’t really hold people’s attention that long in that format, outside of that event. Right? So the other thing I would keep in mind and, and what brands spend a lot of time on is if you think about your full investment there, you’re spending millions of dollars on a TV spot, right? 5 million for 30 seconds, $10 million for 60 seconds kind of thing. So you wanna make sure that you have proper support around it. You wanna make sure you’re fully buttoned up when it comes to, you know, search social media, uh, all of the things that could kind of, uh, surround that event and give it more bang for its buck.

Joe Quattrone (02:43):

So putting the proper components, people strategies in place to surround that type of event, I’d say you probably need about a three to six month timeline in, in advance of the super bowl to really kick it off in earnest, come up with ideas, bring them to life in enough time, uh, to kind of ramp up to the super bowl and have some bang coming out of it. Um, and the super bowl is not what it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. It’s no longer an event that happens in isolation now with so much money on the line, advertisers are starting to get their spots out well in advance two to three weeks ahead of time getting some buzz going for their, their TV spot. Um, and really starting to craft what the public narrative is around their creative, uh, well in advance, some brands are even taking it to the extent where they’re tacking on contests, sweepstakes, other types of alternative data capture mechanisms on the back end, so that they are walking away with not only a lot of brand awareness and relevance, but they’re able to capture data, uh, as a result of this massive media spend as well.

Joe Quattrone (03:46):

Um, so keep that in mind, what is your data, data analysis and your first party data play as it pertains to the super bowl? The next one comes from Jake up and he is asking, uh, if we have any book recommendations, well, there is a book called 12 and a half that I can think about. You’ve probably checked that one out. Anything, Gary, I will not steer you away from that. Uh, as a person that’s worked within Gary’s hallways for eight years, uh, I too am a consumer of his products. Uh, and, uh, I love some of the life lessons in leadership. He, he, uh, puts out there in that book, uh, outside of that though, I’m a non-traditional reader. Um, I, I don’t necessarily read a ton of, of business marketing books. Um, I tend to spend more of my time reading about topics that I’m interested in, uh, things like geopolitical theory, some George Fri Friedman fans out there the next 100 years, uh, obviously with all that’s going on with the Warren, Ukraine and Russia, it’s always nice to dust off a decade old book like that and see how much this particular theorist’s predictions came true.

Joe Quattrone (04:48):

Um, but really any anything’ll energize and, uh, and kind of, um, make you think bigger and deeper, um, things that give you a different perspective on the world than what you have. Um, I don’t necessarily like to just reinforce my own stereotypes. I like to, to read stuff that forces me to think in a different way, so I can be more open-minded and diverse and apply that thinking to my brands and to my, my teammates. Hope that was a good one for you, Jake up. Uh, the next one comes from Skmurtaza Uddin what is the process for making sure the content is relevant? What kind of organic strategy allows you to reach new audiences for a B2B shipping business, wanting to build brand to attract talent and POS and position itself in the industry? Um, so the best way to be relevant is to be as authentic as you can be.

Joe Quattrone (05:36):

Right? And so from a B2B, uh, perspective, the one thing that kind of automatically jumps out to me is being people driven, right? You probably have a sales pipeline that you have to tend to, you’re probably hand to hand combat you’re maybe a little bit of a higher price point than obviously like CPG products and stuff like that. Um, so being, being critical, uh, and relevant on certain platforms like LinkedIn are gonna be more important to you than probably a B2C type company. Um, so make sure that you’re, you’re in those platforms in which you actually can sell to people. Uh, but that you’re also, uh, not being robotic, right? Don’t get up in front of people and try to force the issue. One of the great things about LinkedIn is that if you’re not a good writer, uh, but you’re a better speaker in video form, they’re gonna notice that and the algorithm’s gonna slightly favor, uh, your skills, uh, wherever those skills might lie.

Joe Quattrone (06:32):

Um, in terms of other platforms outside of just a LinkedIn from a B to B2B space, TikTok is absolutely exploding with how to content. And I think, um, you know, just like Gary typically gives advice. You’ve gotta be giving an extraordinary amount of value to people before you actually ask for anything in return. Uh, I think a lot of B2B marketers fall victim to this cuz they are expecting every single thing that they do to result in, uh, dollars earned. So you, if you put a dollar of energy in, you expect to get $2 out, it’s not the way it works on social media. You gotta put in hours and hours and hours, if not hundreds of hours, thousands of hours of value before you expect a single dollar in return. Um, so just understand that there are monetization opportunities, but they come much, much later, right?

Joe Quattrone (07:20):

Go out and build brand in social media by giving the most possible value before you expect anything in return. The next question comes to us from I am Jeremy Tran. At what point do you consider using paid media? I’ve been dabbling a little bit, but it’s been straight organic. Uh, that is a very loaded question. <laugh> and the answer to it is not very specific. The answer is you could, you could consider paid at any stage, right? Depending on what your access to resources are. Obviously if money is no option and you’ve got, uh, a wealthy benefactor who really believes in your product or brand, uh, if you can bring in some paid earlier, I would say that that’s a strategic advantage. You have, um, definitely start to work with people that can teach you or people that can do it for you, uh, and make sure you’re understanding audiences that you can tap into with your product, uh, and that you’re building economies of scale at an early stage, right?

Joe Quattrone (08:18):

That’s I’m never going to say don’t do paid if you have the means <laugh>. Um, but what, what, what I will say is if you, if you do have limitations on the money and it’s more, you have to go out and build brand first in social media, don’t think about that as a negative detractors. There’s still a lot of things you can do in social media before you start to utilize paid. Um, and you know, I think a lot of people, when they go out and they start getting in the world of paid advertising to drive sales, they fall victim to this trap of, you know, going out and, and seeking the arbitrage opportunities only going out and paying for the growth that exists within the channels. But then the channels change, right? Like Facebook or apple, if they change their terms of services, if they come up with new privacy updates and then it tanks your, your row as you start to blame those products and services and channels versus blaming yourself for not understanding how to build brand outside of them.

Joe Quattrone (09:16):

So at the end of the day, it’s both, you need to be good at both things organic and paid media, and they’re wildly different in terms of their approach. Um, I would probably say that for me as a business owner, I would want to go out and, and prove viability and organic social media first while I’m kind of getting my act together on the product development side and go to market side. But once I’m ready to start scaling, or once my actions need to start paying dividends, like if I have investors and stuff like that, I’m gonna start to need to start factoring in, um, how to level in different levels of paid media, to be able to scale my product to the masses and be able to tell my investors when they’re gonna be expecting, you know, profitability. Um, so it really just depends.

Joe Quattrone (10:04):

Are you going out and raising more money? Are you, are you gonna come into some money somehow? Uh, has your revenue increased as a result of your organic, um, don’t necessarily do it just to do it right? If you haven’t seen your efforts paid dividends from a sales perspective, yet nothing is gonna magically change when you turn on paid media. But, um, if you’re already doing a good job, you’ve got a good product, good market fit, people are buying your product, um, and you wanna take it to the next level. I think that’s a good spot to come in and say, all right, I need to figure out a way to take what I’m doing now, but then augment it with a little bit of an extra turbo boost, which could be your paid media strategy. The next one comes to us from DAS paints, who are the best companies to be following on TikTok.

Joe Quattrone (10:48):

And where can I find video and audio content that’s trending, but is usable for business accounts? Well, okay. The first one’s a little bit more challenging because there’s a lot of good companies on TikTok and they’re good for a lot of different reasons. I wouldn’t necessarily say the bigger, the better on TikTok. I would say the best within your niche is probably what you wanna be looking at. So if you’re in the paint vertical, um, going out and following bare paints is probably not gonna give you any insight as to like what good TikTok content looks like, right? But there’s a lot of good interior designers that are doing amazing things on TikTok, uh, when it comes to usage of transition, hopping on trends, uh, that are slightly less known from a brand awareness standpoint in the masses, but have like 2 million followers on TikTok.

Joe Quattrone (11:33):

Right. Um, none of them come off the top of my head, but we can link you up to some, uh, interesting TikTok accounts in the, in the comment section, um, in terms of your last question, um, where do I find, uh, video and audio content that’s trending, but usable for business accounts, I would say don’t act bigger than you are, right? So if you are at a level of scale in which you don’t have a massive audience, um, that is not instantly monetizable, I would stay as a personal account until you get bigger until it becomes an issue, right? There’s, there’s not gonna be any issue if you remaining as a personal account and tapping into the much more vast library of, of songs and trends. Um, but there will be a negative, uh, detraction if you go to becoming a business account too soon, right?

Joe Quattrone (12:24):

So other than getting a check mark and being able to get some incremental benefit, when you leave comments on other accounts, there really is no strategic advantage to having that blue check mark other than a signal of credibility or, or confidence in, in the user’s end. Um, but the benefit to being a personal account and being able to use trending sounds far outweighs having the blue check mark. So for now, until you’ve built a massive following, I wouldn’t say massive, but until you’re in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, um, I would stick where you are as a personal account and just keep using those sounds. Uh, are there places to find sounds that are, you know, cleared for business use? Yes, but the library and the catalog is much, uh, much more scaled down than what you’re probably looking to use as you’re growing and building that audience.

Joe Quattrone (13:11):

If you don’t have the access to those, uh, sounds and trends, it’s gonna be a lot harder for you to grow organically over the next couple years. So I would stick around on the personal side of fence, keep growing until you’ve reached critical mass, then flip over into a business account, get the blue check and all that kind of jazz. And then lastly, Mx Moritz, how do I get others in a company to create video content? So I don’t have any contacts here, MX, but I’m gonna assume that you work for a type of company that, um, is maybe a little more B2B in nature. And, uh, it’s, you know, it actually could help you with, uh, you know, a multiplying factor or becoming a multiplying force within your organization. If you’ve got all of your sales people and all of your executives really singing off the same song sheet in social media and really amplifying the voice of your brand, uh, in that space.

Joe Quattrone (14:05):

And the answer is there’s really no way to like, force the issue and say, Hey, go out and create social media content. Uh, cuz it’ll make us a better company, right? People don’t typically tend to think about the company’s value when it comes to them putting themselves out on social media. Right. Uh, of course the answer is yes, the company will benefit more if it has employees that know how to position the brand and talk about the brand on social media, but what is in what is in it for them. Right. I think the way you have to justify it to them is by leading by example. Right? So my company, you know, we’ve got one of the foremost thinkers in the world of mass communications and Gary Vanerchuk and he’s been putting his personal brand out there for as long as I can remember.

Joe Quattrone (14:54):

He really started amping things up, uh, probably about five or six years ago when he started, uh, doing the ask Gary V show and the daily V with DRock. Um, but you know, we all just kind of sat on the sidelines, witnessed him doing his thing, saw him build, seeing him build fame and then being able to, to leverage that fame into being able to build more businesses on the back end of it. That’s why the Sasha group exists for instance. Um, but if, if you don’t have a main person like a CEO or a director or somebody that’s like the head of strategy, somebody that really means something to the core essence of what the business is. If there’s not somebody like that, really leading by example, it’s gonna be really hard for people to follow. Right. Um, so I think the first thing I would do is figure out who that central figure is.

Joe Quattrone (15:42):

That’s gonna build out a powerhouse brand, focus on them for a little while and then maybe start building out concentric concentric circles from there. Um, obviously the what’s in it for them, aspect of things are if you have a personal brand, it is your reputation online, you having a personal brand and us encouraging you from a business perspective to focus on it. We’re gonna give you time while you’re on the job to point a camera at you and actually be taking video footage. And, uh, we’re gonna allow you time to sit in your own thoughts and write blog posts and whatever it is, whatever, whatever it may be that, uh, is really relevant to your business, that is a core perk, right? Like we are giving you time on our watch on our money, on our dime to make yourself more marketable, hopefully for us and for our future roles at our company.

Joe Quattrone (16:28):

But we believe that your marketability and your, uh, smarts and your, your intellect when it comes to this space are gonna be good for you, but it’s gonna be good for us as well. So I think having that mentality of making sure you’re growing amazing human beings in these roles, no matter the cost of your company is of the utmost importance. And they have to really feel that. I think they have to feel that you want them to succeed in or out of your company and you have to be committed to it. And, and by sharing your resources and allowing them to grow themselves professionally and personally, I think that is a commitment to them as people. Well, that’s all I’ve got for you today. I hope you enjoyed this special episode of building while flying Q and a edition. I’m your host, Joe Quattrone. And we’ll see you around next time.

Katie Hankinson (17:16):

Thanks for joining us for building while flying today. I hope you learned as much as we did. We’ll meet you right back here next time for another flight.

Mickey Cloud (17:28):

If you’d like to hear more about how business owners and brands are navigating these times, tune in to the next episode. And if you’re so kind, please rate and review us, plus we’d love feedback. So let us know what you think, what you’d like us to dig into next on building while flying across brands, businesses, marketing, and more

Katie Hankinson (17:43):

Original music by Fulton street music group.