We sit down with Ice Cream Social co-founder, Ashley Cline, to talk about digital marketing strategy vs. tactics, the old school power of word of mouth, influencers, event marketing, and Idiocracy.   SHOWPAGE:  www.ninjacat.io/blog/amplify-engage-unleashing-the-digital-marketing-mix    © 2023, NinjaCat

If you have your Facebook ads, your SMS, your email strategy, all those different marketing channels in place, when you plug in word of mouth marketing online, What you're going to find is not only, yes, that'll be the lowest cost for acquisition, but it's going to bring down the cost of all your other marketing channels.

Welcome to What Gets Measured, a NinjaCat podcast about marketing performance management, metrics, and effectiveness.

Ashley Klein is vice president and co-founder of Ice Cream Social, as well as VP of client strategy at TicketSocket.

Across her tenure in the field, Ashley has held nearly every role in the digital marketing space, giving her unmatched expertise in customer acquisition and email search and content marketing.

And she's here today to talk about digital marketing strategy.

wanted to call you Ninja Cat, but I didn't know if that was appropriate yet, so I went with Jacob.

You know, even as we're recording new platforms are coming out.

What do you think the biggest mistakes you see?

Yes, I would say There's 2 really big mistakes that I encounter on a daily basis when talking with clients.

They think the strategy is build it and they will come or I'm just going to run a Facebook ad.

Shooting from the hip, making decisions that you're not prepared to make because 1 thing's not working, can put you in a tight spot.

So I think you need to have a well-rounded digital marketing strategy, really know where you're going.

You gotta have a plan to navigate somewhere.

It's okay to pivot along the way, but you have to have an idea.

No, I'm just like, mm-hmm, preach, keep preaching.

Alternately to that, I will work with a client who hasn't had a strategy.

And they've just been killing it with Facebook ads, or whatever else, insert any other marketing channel, but for the most part, it's usually Facebook ads.

And what I'll find is all their eggs are in that 1 basket and something will happen, which has been happening.

I don't know if there's anyone else out there that's been running Facebook ads lately, but the past month, all kinds of issues happening with different Facebook ad accounts where they're just getting shut down or weird, strange billing problems that are almost impossible to resolve, some major hacks going on.

And that makes you so vulnerable when your entire marketing plan is all in 1 basket.

I mean, and so it's, do you see people struggling with the difference in between tactics and strategy?

Do you do you help them kind of parse those things?

Or I mean, it seems like you just kind of explain that like the tactic is Facebook ads.

I was very fortunate very early on in my career.

I knew all these different tactics, But I was really forced by the people I was working with to understand strategy and build out strategies and having no idea what I was doing.

So early on in my career, I had to learn the difference.

Because immediately your brain wants to go, well, how do I do that?

If that's our goal and that's our overall plan, how do you do that?

So yeah, you do have to understand a little bit of the difference between strategy and tactics, but let's say you don't and you just understand tactics.

I want you to have a basket of like 5 or 6 different tactics you got going at 1 time.

And that will help you from being in such a vulnerable place.

And well, it's interesting if you have enough tactics, would that make a strategy?

I feel, I feel dumb asking that, but I know somebody out there is like, well, I have like a, you know, a giant grab bag full of tactics.

You just want to tie in some overarching goals in there and have something tangible that you're working with, but, and understand your target market.

So if you got solid goals in place, you know, your target market and you got 5 or 6 tactics, I wouldn't stress about strategy.

Well, I'm pretty sure somebody's just kind of wiping the sweat off their brow.

So if you, in our interfacing and booking this, there was something on your press kit saying word of mouth marketing is, is important now more than ever, but it kind of seems a little bit at odds.

But is that where the talking's happening?

Like what, just kind of riff on word of mouth marketing and why it's important?

So, you know, traditionally we know word of mouth mark, word of mouth marketing as, you know, people talking and interfacing with each other.

It's actually where we got the business name, Ice Cream Social, because back in the day, I don't know when, maybe the fifties, we'll go with that.

People would interact and kind of swap what they're loving and liking these days at their local neighborhood parties, Tupperware parties, their ice cream socials.

And so that's really where we can go back and see where word of mouth marketing was really starting out.

And we have to evolve over time, of course.

So here we are online and we're still networking.

And what we found at Ice cream social, which is just a widget you attach onto your website that allows you to do essentially word of mouth marketing online.

But what happens is when you have an online word of mouth marketing strategy, You know, a lot of times that can happen through a lot of influencer marketing really, or peer to peer marketing, or really taking all of your customers and turning them into brand advocates.

So those are kind of the 3 main ways word of mouth marketing would happen online for you, for your business.

And when you have a robust plan and you're really working that, which is a great way if you're just doing Facebook ads to focus on this because what we found is word of mouth marketing usually against other marketing channels.

1 is the cheapest cost per acquisition for a customer or an order, whatever it is.

It's going to be cheaper than acquiring customer via Facebook ad or SMS or whatever the case may be.

Whatever the marketing channel is, it's going to be cheaper.

Second of all, when you, I'm not saying you need to get

rid of your other marketing channels and double down on word of mouth marketing because that's not gonna, that's only gonna get you so far.

But if you have your Facebook ads, your SMS, your email strategy, all those different marketing channels in place, when you plug in word of mouth marketing online, what you're going to find is not only, yes, that'll be the lowest cost per acquisition, but it's gonna bring down the cost of all your other marketing channels.

Because at the end of the day, it's just bringing more traffic to your website, whether those people all convert or not, at least you're able to pixel them, you're able to get them to join your list, whatever the case may be.

At the end of the day, bringing that in is just going to bring down your overall marketing costs altogether.

So that will really allow you to do more with your marketing budget without having to spend more money.

And some, some that I've been thinking about recently with word of mouth is you have to fill their mouth with the right words.

And I think some people just saying they're just going to love my product and they're just gonna talk about it.

Do you help your clients kind of establish how they can get the right language coming out of those influencers or like you said, advocates or is there some kind of, do you have a script that you give them or do you just let them say whatever they're going to say?

So in my career With Ice Cream Social, we focus on that peer-to-peer marketing, turning your customers into brand advocates.

But before Ice Cream Social, I did a lot of influencer marketing, both working on the agency side for a brand looking to partner with influencers and also on the influencer side helping them negotiate deals with brands.

So I've worked on all the sides of when it comes to that word-of-mouth marketing, influencer marketing online, everything from paying a 15 year old girl $100, 000 for 1 YouTube video to just asking people to share for free.

So never, ever let people share without giving them something to work with.

When it comes to influencers, if you want to go out there and start working with influencers, 1, you need to give them very strict brand guidelines.

You need to give them a lot of verbiage to work with.

You want them to put it in their own voice, but you also don't want them to go rogue and say things that are not true because then you won't be able to legally use that content.

Like you really want to set them up to win so you get exactly what you're looking for.

And the influencer appreciates it, because then they don't have to start from scratch.

And then on the peer-to-peer side, with our Ice Cream social widget, what we do is we auto populate the share copy.

So they're going to share it and SMS, Facebook, email.

We already pre-populate the share copy for them and an asset.

If they want to customize it or add more to it, great, but we're giving them something to work with and we're gamifying it.

If you get 5 friends to buy, we'll give you a refund, whatever the case may be, whatever the reward is, we gamify it And that encourages them to invite even more people back to your website.

So you always want to make sure you give people the messaging.

Otherwise they won't share because they don't want to think of something or they'll go rogue and say something that really has nothing to do with your product or false claims, whatever the case

Well, and something that you said that was really interesting is that the beauty of having a strategy that straddles many tactics is that it makes the individual tactics better if you have an overarching kind of goal for that.

And it's nice to see with word of mouth is that Your ads could be influencing the words that they're choosing.

And if they get emails, then they're starting to put all these pieces together.

It isn't this attribution from this single source.

Do you sort of see a digital marketing strategy embracing this idea that these leads and conversions can come from many different places?

And that's the reason why strategy is so important.

I mean, I don't even need to really say more than that.

It's just the idea that all boats rise with the tides.

And you know, you might think 1 channel and this isn't doing that much for me, but it is, you just don't realize it because the attributions wonky in the way that you know, analytics track things.

And so it really is a bunch of things working together.

So, and then it's getting me thinking organic social, what's your thought?

Useless, useful, do post every day, post every hour, post once a week.

The typical marketing answer is it depends.

But what's your thoughts on organic social, especially as things are evolving?

If people go to your profile and you're not posting, they're just not as interested.

Whatever reason, that's what we use to validate whether a company's real, sustainable, whatever the case may be.

And as far as posting, where I say it depends, it's not going to hurt you to post every day, multiple times a day, but it's a resources thing.

If you don't, at least post a couple times a week.

I mean, and people are wondering what's the ROI for organic like it's nothing and you're, you just made a really good point.

Is sort of, sort of the organic social equivalent, right?

You're, it's the attribution isn't going to tell you organics bringing in all your sales, but it's what people, it's your legitimacy factor.

I will say in the world of GPT, organic social is a lot easier these days.

Well, and then there's just another thing to run through your strategy is making sure you're using strategic insights.

If you are choosing to use an AI augmentation for organic posting, make sure it's saying something that's in line with how you would say it.

Make sure it has your taglines or, you know, cute, clever ways that you do that.

So once again, it's a resources thing, But I would say it's easier, but you also have to double check the work.

Well, so that's a great pivot into my next question, which is what do you think the future of digital marketing is?

From your vantage point, what are you seeing in the future, things that maybe we should be keeping on our radar?

You know, I'm not gonna say I'm good at predicting things.

But really, whenever I'm asked this question, I always think of the movie Idiocracy.

Oh, so everybody's going to be feeding their plants, Brando or, or it's got what plants

No, but I mean, if you really had to just maybe, maybe don't make a prediction, but maybe think of a, you know, not science fiction.

But I really got into this idea about a year and a half ago.

It's not catching on as quickly as I would have liked, but maybe 5 years from now, the whole metaverse idea and marketing in the metaverse, I just think that's so fun.

I mean, talk about a need for a strategy at that point, too.

I mean, my kids, they will have days where we play Roblox and you have to build a burrito at Chipotle and then you get free burritos.

I just think that's the most genius marketing ever.

Well, it wasn't too long ago that Pokemon Go was going to take over the world.

Like I was working at a law firm at the time and I was like, should we do like a station where they can catch some mutants as they walk by the law firm?

Yeah, so like I said, I like the idea of the metaverse.

It's not catching on quite yet, but 1 day maybe.

So Here's a quick time for you to give us some stories.

Do you have any like Cinderella stories about clients you've worked with that got their digital marketing strategy locked down and saw success?

And conversely, do you have any horror stories?

And you don't have to name names, Ashley, you can just say we had a client.

I could tell like my most embarrassing horror story marketing mistake I made.

As far as Cinderella stories, I mean, so I primarily right now focus a lot on event marketing.

So it's a very little bit different of a game when it comes to marketing because you have a very distinct sales cycle.

And a lot of clients that come to me wanting support wanting to work with me for event marketing.

That marketing, what I see is they announce they're on sale.

And then they start running Facebook ads.

Maybe they've got a list if they're a previous event that they're emailing.

And what I found is that is very stressful to go on sale and start marketing at the same time.

And, and it's stressful in the fact that you're almost going the entire sales cycle, not sure if you're going to be able to pull off this event or not, not sure if you're going to have enough funds, not sure if enough people are going to show up, and everyone panically banks on that last 2 weeks before the event, where typically there is a large spike in sales because people are ready to commit in those last 2 weeks.

Sometimes it works out great and you can breathe afterwards but sometimes and a lot of times these days, it does not.

In a post COVID world, no longer does that work anymore for event marketing.

And speaking really, I was just wondering, like ghosting, people are ghosting left and right.

Like, is that, are you seeing that in the event marketing space?

Yeah, we see a lot of more so than ever more people adding to cart and this might be an event thing and I won't name big name ticketing companies but you know you don't know what the fees are going to be and how much your tickets going to cost.

If you live in the US because we like to wait to show our ticketing fees till checkout.

A lot of people will add to cart just to see.

It's just so competitive to compete for people's time.

So you're not even competing with other events and other events that do similar things as you anymore.

You're literally just competing with a birthday party, a bachelorette, like anything, Netflix, yeah, anything, Game of Thrones, I don't care.

You're competing for people's time, which is difficult.

And so what I found with these event companies that come to me, what we do now is before we ever go on sale, we start marketing about 90 days beforehand.

For a lot of marketers, marketers out there, this isn't going to sound like anything.

But in events, it was just not something a lot of people are doing.

And so 90 days before an event will go on.

We will do a lead gen strategy of all things.

And we will let people know We are coming to their town.

Sometimes we'll have billboards, but primarily it's focused in on Facebook ads, driving people to a landing page where we get their name, phone number, email.

For sure, phone number, If you're not doing SMS marketing yet, you better hurry because I don't know what else is coming up soon, but you're already behind if you're not

We get those 3 things and we create a whole sequence of emails and text messages and retargeting ads that they then see after they fill out the form, reminding them, don't forget, we go on sale this day at this time, and we just hit them across the head with it every couple of days.

Like do not forget because when we go on sale, if you don't get this VIP offer, you're out of luck.

You might not get a ticket, you might not get the best price, whatever kind of FOMO we can work in there, we do it.

And We do come up with a great legitimate deal for opening night.

What happens is on opening night, We get a very large, I wouldn't say majority, but a really large amount of orders, usually within the first hour.

So within that first hour of going on sale, and unless you're like Taylor Swift or a big name artist, you don't really need this, But if you're just a standard event, a fun run or some sort of festival, Renaissance festival, whatever, circus, whatever you may be, you need this.

That opening night, what happens is we get a lot of sales.

Everyone can breathe because we'll generate enough income typically on opening night to pay for a lot of the hard cost overheads like your venue fees, your down payments, like artist talent, whatever, and you can just relax.

It doesn't mean you can't sit back and not do marketing during that on sales period, but at least, you know, you can kind of go maintenance mode for quite a while until again, those last 2, 3 weeks before the actual event happens.

When we know a large amount of tickets will sell.

And that that's 1 of my questions is, is that so with a proper runway, you're going to see a large spike opening night when you release the tickets for this event.

But do you typically see that, not the majority, but a large portion of the attendance are actually coming in that 2 weeks before the event?

And if you've done it correctly, let's say you didn't do the lead gen, you just go straight on sale, no excitement, you're not gonna get that big, big spike in those last 2 weeks because you didn't make a big enough deal out of it.

You don't have enough people out there talking about your event.

So yeah, you'll get a big spike, but not nearly what you would have got if you still did it the right way with the proper opening.

So, so we've talked a lot about, word of mouth event, event marketing, you know, how you, your strategy can help you launch those things and keep them afloat, reduce customer acquisition costs.

But if you had to take all of this and cook it down into a couple sentences, what's your 1 piece of advice for the audience about digital marketing strategy?

Well, I would say my piece of advice, which may not be what you're thinking.

I've been doing digital marketing for 17, 18 years.

And for a long time early on in my career, all I did was consume every podcast, book, conference.

What I learned when I really hit like a plateau, and I was just like, I can't, I don't got anything new left in me, like Same bag of tricks.

I found inspiration in the strangest places and I had to learn to let myself play.

I had to give myself space to read a book for fun.

If it wasn't educational, I wasn't going to watch it.

And this whole idea of this thing I just explained to you that we do for event marketing now.

See all NinjaCat transcripts on Youtube

Amplify & Engage: Unleashing The Digital Marketing Mix