Ep 4: GROW, CONVERT, RETAIN! (PHASE 1 of The S3 System™)

Welcome to Strong Brand Social's Reach Sucks Now What, a private podcast series to help you grow, engage, and thrive in the post-breach metapocalypse. In other words, we make it make sense and we help you hate it less. I'm Mariah Gulsby, my pronouns are she/her, and I'm the Strong Brand Social Social Media Manager. And I'm Katie White, my pronouns are also she/her. I'm the founder and CEO of Strong Brand Social, a global social media marketing education and consulting firm. Let's get into it. This is episode four, the last content strategy you'll ever need, the S3 system. Welcome back. Welcome back. Katie, what are we promising people in this episode? So the real promise of this episode is we're going to help you redefine content pillars. So most people are familiar with the definition of content pillars. If you're not, this is like Google content pillars. You will scroll for pages and pages and pages and you will find only results that show. These are topics or categories for you to organize your content into. Yes, but they don't actually tell you what to organize it around. So we're going to help you redefine content pillars to be something that supports your business goals, literally indirect alignment, right? And we're going to help you think about how to create a sharp message that actually moves the needle for your brand and something that you can be really proud of. Yes. And why do we start there? Why is that the foundation? Because even though you would never know this from what is available to us in terms of like social media marketing consulting and training and all of that stuff is your message is the 20% of the marketing work that will drive 80% of the results. Like if we're talking about the 80/20 rule and we're applying it to marketing or applying it to social media marketing, your message is everything and everybody is glossing over this. No one is teaching this. Because like messaging strategy, customizing this for your brand, this is harder to teach. It's harder to teach than tactics and hopping on a trend and where to hit a button. And so people aren't teaching it, but it's the most important thing. This is a foundation to everything that comes next. You'll start to see what we talk about in this episode and how we organize your content pillars around your business goals. Not only makes it measurable, but makes it really, really clear like how to, when we're aligning a message to an actual goal, it makes it really clear about like how to optimize that and how to improve performance and all of that stuff. So we got to start here. Talking about the tactics and the things that are just like shouted at us when we're scrolling on social media of how to use social media, I feel like so much of that is about creating content just to entertain or amuse people. You hear like be relatable, educate, entertain, yada, yada, yada, but it's like all of that is great. But what is the intended result? So if we don't know, like if we don't start with why to just bring Simon Snack into the conversation, but if we don't start with why, then we have like no idea what we're doing. And so we don't, or why we're doing something so we don't know how to measure success. So yeah. So we want to move from entertain, be relatable, educate to here's how to engineer those things. Like it's okay to educate and entertain, but we want to enter, we want to organize that effort around your business because this is not a hobby. We're talking to brands who are either just starting out maybe you're a solopreneur, but you have big dreams, or we're talking to really well established legacy brands, right? Like we're not here to, this is not a hobby. We need to move the needle with the time and money we're spending and we really, really need every single dollar we're spending to be somehow related to an investment and a return on that investment. Amen. So this is phase one of the S3 system. We are redefining, redefining content pillars. Yes. If I Google content pillars, I will see a bunch of results pages and pages that say content pillars are three to five topics that relate to your area, to your business, your customers will find interesting. Yes. How to entertain them with three topics that you can talk about. We're saying no to that. We're saying no. What are we redefining them as? So we want to redefine content pillars as a scalable storytelling framework that systematically drives increased demand generation, demand conversion and demand retention, aka loyalty or advocacy for your brand. So you'll hear marketers talk about awareness and consideration. We're obsessed with efficiency. So we just kind of collapse that into demand generation. Like we need people who, we don't really just want anyone to know about us. We want people who actually would consider buying from us to know about us. So demand generation is the first goal, converting that demand. So for some of us, that might mean leads. For some of us, it might mean event tickets. For some of us, it's just like trying to revenue sales offline, but converting that demand into the most meaningful, whatever conversion you're after as a business. And then the third is loyalty, demand retention. So this is a little bit different for each brand. Some of us have really high ticket products. There's not a lot of return customers. In that instance, you're trying to figure out how to generate word of mouth, digital word of mouth and advocacy here, and other brands are trying to figure out, yeah, how do I get people coming back to me for repeat purchases? So help me understand, in the picture for me, how are we bridging the gap between those pillars and our business goals? Right. Okay. Cool. So if you think about the way you use social media, everybody here has been online, let's just say you are on Instagram for now. Yeah. Okay. I want you to think about the way when you're scrolling your own behavior. Yes. There is a different type of content that gets your attention. Absolutely. That you're like your friend shares, or it could be on an advertisement that you're trying to ignore, or whatever, it's on your explore page, for you page, and there's this content that gets your attention and gets your thumb to actually click into that content, be like, who published that? Yeah. That is different content than if you've been following an account for a while or a brand for a while, you're like, oh, the sale is going on. Yes. Right? The thing that gets our attention is different than the thing that sends us to the website or gets us to buy something for the first time. Yes. So that content might be different, I would say, than the content that we start sharing. So there is a little bit of a flywheel effect we want to create with our content, right? So the folks who are already in our community, they've already been attracted by pillar one, right? When we publish that pillar three content, we want them sharing it with their friends. So when you think about the way you navigate social media, there's different content that gets your attention. There's different content that gets you to buy, and then there's different content that gets you to share that content with your friends. So what we want to do is look at what are the attributes of those pieces of content and engineer that into your social media calendar, right? So you are generating very intentionally, very systematically that same flywheel effect within your content. Yes. You mentioned pillar one, and I just want to make it super clear for everyone listening. We are talking about three content pillars. There are three content pillars. St pillar one is demand generation, and this is super shareable content, right? So that's the big thing, and it also is going to communicate your point of view and what you stand for as a brand. So for example, a lot of people find us strong-grant social because we publish content that's pretty emotionally charged about how messed up the social media marketing industry is. So whether that's like that platforms are suppressing our reach to 5% and then kind of like lying about it or that we're constantly on this hamster wheel, whatever we, we talk about that. And we talk about it with a really strong point of view that makes when people find it like comments on our ads or our pillar one organic content, people comment like, Oh my God, thank you for saying this. I thought I was the only one. Why does no one say this? Why does no one talk about this? That's like for us, the effect of our pillar one content for different brands, it means different things. But the piece of content when someone's like, Whoa, I hadn't thought about it that way or Whoa, I haven't think about it that way, but I thought I was alone. Yeah. They want to share that. Share. They're sharing that with their friends being like, Oh my God, we were just talking about this the other night. Right? Yes. So that's your pillar one content. And we will give you more very specific examples of different types of business models in just a minute. Great. Pillar two. Pillar two is our money maker. So this is like, if you're an e-com brand or a low ticket product that you're just kind of selling right off of social, it could be that it's like that shop now content. It could be that Lincoln bio content. It's anything that's driving traffic either to your product page or a website or that lead generation page. It's getting people one step closer to that conversion that you want them to take. So, um, so yeah, so normally, and we can talk about how this shows up in different brands, but it's closer. Look at your product. A physical, a physical goods brand is going to want to bring people like as close to the material and the fit and the hand feel and all of this stuff. Like you want to bring people as close to this product as you can possibly get them without actually being in that physical space, you know, and then like a service brand or a consultancy. It's going to be more about those case studies, testimonials, proof points, that kind of thing. What results you're promising. Perfect. And then P three. P three is where we're really generating. I always say like pillar three content should make, it's like, did we just become best friends? It's like as folks have gotten closer to your brand, it's the thing that makes them want to stick around or it makes them want to tell their friends about you. It reinforces that buying from you was the right cause. So I'm thinking about this one client we have and she, you know, found us through a training and then it's like every time we publish something, that's our pillar three content on Instagram. Every single time she's like, Oh my God, I thought I couldn't love you anymore. And she's constantly coming and that's, you know, that looks different for different brands for us. It's really about our values. It's about like redefining not only what social media marketing can look like, but like what a marketing department can look like and what a remote team can look like. Right. And we talk a lot about our values, you know, to the extent that we can hold these conversations about social impact and that kind of thing. So we really signal to our clients like where we, where we are and what we stand for. You know, you think about a brand like Patagonia, they are like pillar three all day. Totally. So we can talk a little bit too in a bit about how much of each pillar, you know, you want to lean into depending on the age of your brand and depending on your goals, but that's kind of the high level. And what we're looking for with pillar three content is just like community engagement. We typically see a lot of comments on pillar three content, but because we're also trying to close that flywheel, you're going to see a lot of shares on your pillar three content as well. And there's, there is a bit of overlap at times again, it kind of depends on the brand, but there's a little bit of overlap between pillar one and pillar three. Definitely. Yeah. So let's, let's get into some examples. Yeah. Let's get into some examples. Let's go from experience that everyone who hears this is like, what about from my business? What about this brand? What about this? Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to give you some examples and then really encourage you to kind of take a step back, go for a walk and think about how these might apply to your brand. One of my favorite brand examples for a sharp content strategy is Reformation. Okay. They haven't been a client of ours. There's, they're the only example I'm going to give that isn't a client of ours, but Reformation, right? They, they have a really like, they are very clear that their unique value proposition is sustainable fashion. And they have this like Instagram bio that's like, what is it? Being naked is the number one most sustainable option were number two. I love that. What is social way to just communicate your point of view, right? And they were, when they first, when they first launched, it was a big deal to have a brand that was like sustainably made and also fashionable. Yes. Right. And so that was that. And if you look at their social media platforms, you will see pillar one content, their pillar one content kind of like takes a lot of different shapes. If you look at their platforms, you'll see their pillar one content is really they're at times a little experimental. I mean, at least at the time of recording this, they can be a little experimental with it. Sometimes it's like memes about how it's, you know, it's Friday, it's payday and like what's going to happen this weekend kind of thing. You know what I mean? Like, it's that like kind of just establishing common ground. That's something we haven't really mentioned is like pillar one is a bridge. It is a bridge. It is common ground. Folks are going to be able to find value out of this content without necessarily buying from you. Yeah. Right. It builds trust. Give such a good example that I love. Can you expand more upon that? Did we just become best friends? Kind of thing. Yeah. It's like how do you make, it's like tape, putting the social back in social. Yes. Right. So that same way that you think about how you use social media, you want to think about like how you make a friend, right? You don't just go somewhere. If you want to meet someone, you know, you're going to be at a party and you know someone's going to be there and you really want to meet them, whether it's like for networking or business or just you just really think they're really cool, right? You're not going to go up to them and interrupt their conversation and tell them all the awesome things about you. Yes. I mean, some people might, they're not very good at making friends. So what you would do is you'd probably research what you have in common. You know what I mean? Like I always give this example that my husband makes so many friends talking about golf. Yes. You know? It could be that you both went to the same college or you looked on LinkedIn and you have a shared connection or you both have kids, whatever it is. Like you're going to start the conversation at that bridge, right? And then you're going to slowly move the conversation, you know, once you show interest in someone and you ask them about themselves, then they're like, Oh, what about you? Yeah. Right. And that conversation starts to kind of like become more equitable in terms of, you know, like what's happening and it kind of follows this journey and then it's like, did we just become best friends? Yeah. When you like pass the phone number, text me. Yeah. So yeah. So back to Reformation. It's like that pillar one content is really, it's kind of takes one of two shapes for them. One of the shapes is like that just kind of like humor around being someone who loves to shop. You know what I mean? And loves clothes and loves style, loves fashion. And then the other is just like looks, outfit of the day. So this is if you're a clothing brand or a retail brand, it's like, how are you styling things? I'm, I'm a follower of yours. I don't need to own the sweater. You're showing me in this photo for me to find inspiration for what I can wear that day. Right. Right. And then so for them that those are kind of their pillar ones, pillar two is just like shop now. It's their new releases. It is, you know, like editorial, like in studio, just like really clear. The product is the focus and they're talking about like, it might be like limited edition. It might be like only a few left or it might, you know, whatever it is, that's their pillar two content. It's featuring the products that are available to buy now. And then their pillar three, their pillar three content is about reminding their customers that they're setting new standard for sustainability in the industry. So it might be an update about, you know, gains they're making on their impact strategy. Or it might be like a behind the scenes on, you know, where they're sourcing these materials from. Right. Right. So I think they do a great job. And he feels like my brother, he owns a kitchen store. He owns a mainstream, a main street brick and mortar kitchen store and he was trying to figure out like the name is kiss the cook, which is just like such a good brand name. He bought this is a 30 year old family owned business, relies on foot traffic. He bought that. And it's like, well, kiss the cook kind of has this potential, right? And he, what's unique about his store is the way he curates the products and what he buys and his wealth of knowledge. And so, you know, in the pandemic when we were trying to figure out, okay, well, like it's time to connect with people online, how are we going to do this? We created a strategy for him where it's like, okay, pillar one is really about thinking about your, your customer and your clients. So he is selling to a lot of families, right? And so pillar one content being like family friendly recipes, right? That feature, what he like certain products that he has in stock because he sells everything from like pots and pans to spices. So pillar one content for him is like blogs and recipes and people love them. Like these get shared like crazy. And it's like, I don't need to own, I didn't need to buy that spice from you to find value in this. So that's the bridge. That's the gap. Yeah. Right. And now people are following you. Right. And now so, and then his pillar two content is when he has sales or, you know, look who's a like new colors for spring or whatever is, you know, his holiday promotions that the sea like June is always knife month. You know what I mean? So like, because they were like, you know, I think May is like barbecue season. And so it's like how he kind of talks about the products that are available to buy now. And then pillar three is all about how he's a family owned business. And there's photos of him baking cookies with his daughter, you know, talking about that kind of stuff. And so any brand can do this. But what happened with him is like his online sales just absolutely sky rocketed from like zero to, you know, six figures in the first year, super easy. And it's because people are like connecting, going crazy for, and it's not his photography is not like, yeah, super high production value that is so important. It's just, this is a family owned brand and we're showing up and we're sharing what we're doing and people are finding recipes and they're sharing it with each other. Right. And then more people are coming into the brand and a lot of people care. I think he's such a great example because it's like you could buy from Amazon. You could buy from William Sonoma. You could buy from, you know what I mean? All of these places and still his business is growing every single year with customers that are like from all over the country because they found him and there are a lot of buyers who when they go to buy something, they're like, who am I sporting right now? You know? And so, so I think he's a really interesting case study, you know, you think about a jewelry brand that pillar one content similar to apparel, like we want to like style it, give people inspiration. Okay. Now what's available? Okay. Now behind the scenes, founder values, that kind of stuff. I feel like we get asked a lot about more like less, less e-commerce, less like brick and mortar, more, um, coaching, consulting real estate agent. Yeah. We get that question a lot. Real estate is super easy. It's like pillar one, it's like that common ground that bridge is like the lifestyle I think about. Right. So a lot of times pillar one is aspirational content. And so with real estate, it's like the, the neighborhood, like how does this neighborhood live? What is the location? Right. All the reasons why someone would want to move somewhere. Pillar two is what is available right now and pillar three is like, what is your process? Why would someone want to work with you besides the listings that you have? Um, courses and creators, I think consultants like service-based businesses that are different than real estate. The biggest challenge they have is being able to develop, first of all, they have the added steps. So I always think about for us at strong grand social, we're selling information. It's a lot easier to send like one email about a physical product that has really clear photos and is just like a tangible object. Yeah. Right. When that works already done for you. That would be a little bit easier to like figure out what your content strategy is because with courses, consultants, um, we need to figure out a way to really concisely talk about like, it's almost like productizing your service. You know what I mean? It's like what, how are we, what are the words, the few words that matter the most to your customer or your client about the results you're promising. Right. And so, and so for, for those types of businesses, I kind of like to look at pillar two first and then ask like, what's getting in the way? What are people missing? Like why aren't, why is this not obvious to them and you're going to start to see the opportunity to craft that pillar one content like that bridge, your strong point of view. Hey, here's the problem. Strong grand social is a great example of that. Right. It's like, we find people were like, this is messed up. Here's what's keeping you stuck. Yes. Pillar two then is here's a better way. Hmm. Pillar three is here's a peep behind the scenes at our team and our values, right. And what our mission is as a company. Yeah. And again, why you would want to work with us? Yeah. And what happens like the, there's two really things that happen in terms of performance when we organize, when we go into our content strategy and producing content through this lens, the first is now everything is measurable. Yes. Right. So like every time I'm talking at a conference, someone raises their hand at this point and says, when we post about our products, no one engages. So we stopped. Yes. And I'm like, Oh my goodness. No, no, no. And it's true. You don't want to like oversell on social. You want social to be social, but this is again a business and we should not be spending time on this stuff. And we're not selling our products. What's the point? We can't do that. Yeah. So, um, you know, and there are more, if you are a like more established legacy business and you're listening to this and you're like, no, no, no, no, the point of social for our business is, is generating more demand and it's all about audience growth and it's all about awareness. Cool. You should have three pillar ones. Yes. Like you should be all pillar one all the time. That's how you grow your audience really fast, right? It's shareable content. You should be optimizing for shares, shares, shares. Um, but for most of us, most companies, we need to be kind of covering all three bases if we're in, if we're investing time and money into this space. So what happens is now everything's measurable. So we don't measure a success of pillar two on likes. Yes. Ever. This was the like emotional game changer for me using the system as a social media marketer, um, feeling like you post something and maybe it doesn't get a bunch of likes. Maybe it doesn't get a bunch of comments, but then there's these, there's shares, there's saves, there's different metrics that you can look at to measure success on an individual level. Yes. Yeah. So it's not just like, well, fuck that post flopped and I suck at my job. No, no, no, it's never. And also, so I think about, so looking at pillar one for us, you know, like hundreds of shares is really exciting. There have been times where we've got thousands of shares on a post. That's amazing. Pillar two, it's always, always, always, always lower quote unquote engagement. But when we use that case study of like a pillar to post drives a hundred clicks to my website, my website converts at 5%. That means that I've got five sales out of that post. If my average order value is 70, what that's now $350, it costs $20 to $30 to create that post because we had a really sharp strategy and a playbomb we were working off of. You know, that's a huge return on my investment. And if we can stack that up over the course of a month, right? And we can also make sure that those sales that are coming in are now being nurtured through email, right? It's not that the return on investment is not just on that first sale. So, so yeah, so I think, and it's like, I would take 20 clicks over 2000 likes every single time. Yes. But I do think that that's the problem with the complete lack of this conversation happening in the industry is everybody's just like, it's like no matter what we feel like shit because you could go viral and then no one buys. Yeah. Cool. So now you feel like a fraud. Everyone's like, well, how'd you go viral? Yep. Either that or you're like, you start perpetuating the like, I grew up, I went viral. Yeah. But you know, a lot of us, the people our people are like, shoot, now I have a bunch of followers that don't even want my products, right? And then on the flip side of that, we don't, we're not being told to actually go look at clicks and go look at our conversion rates and look at these things, you know, so that we can actually feel really great about a post that looks like it didn't have as much engagement, but it actually like drove, we created five new customers out of this silly little meme. Yeah. I mean, you know, like much more. Yeah. So, so yeah, so those are some of the examples. We could talk a little bit. The other thing that happens is we're measuring success properly, right? Which also means now, if we have a post that was intended to be pillar one, and it gets no shares, we're like, huh, okay, that was not it. Yeah. Right. And so that's what we're always analyzing like, yeah, that's how you optimize is actually knowing what the point was in the first place. The other thing that happens is something that I refer to as tactic stacking. Yeah. We can enhance performance when we know what the freaking point was in the beginning. So like, okay, pillar one, the goal is reach. That's how we're measuring success, right? Because reach is the goal we're optimizing for shares. Cool. If we want to optimize for shares or and reach at the same time, like these are kind of, we know that if we create shareable content, that will propel the reach. There's other ways we can stack tactics to increase reach as well. One of them is hashtags. Yes. We're talking about our hashtags on pillar one as more broad. Another is putting $10 behind this post. If we do that, we want to optimize not for conversions on pillar one. We want to optimize for reach, engagement, video views, and we want to target people who look like our customers. Yes. Right. The other thing we can do is location tag. We can make sure that like we are reaching people, we are showing up in a certain location. And then the biggest, biggest game changer is a call to action. So like stack a call to action that actually aligns with the business goals. Share this with a friend, tag someone who needs to see this, that kind of stuff. And then with pillar two, it's all of those same tactics just like adjusted for pillar two. So if we're thinking about hashtags, we're going to make them a little bit more tightly aligned to the product we're selling or our industry or the problem we're solving. We're more specific. Yes. And the call to action is always going to be like a very specific direction about how they can go learn more about this product or service. Yes. Right. So people, especially in like the internet business space, having like a sales page worth of content on their caption, and it's always like so not, it's like so formal. Yeah. And they have like, they go through all three pillars on a caption and then this and then that. And you're just like, oh my God, like, no, just tell me how, what, why I need to know about this thing and where I can learn more. That's what social is for. You know, keep it a little bit. Keep it social. But the goal of a pillar to post is not to keep them on this post as long as possible. It's to get them to the sales page, to get them to the place of conversion. Yes. You know? Yes. So, and then same thing with pillar three, it's like, we can ask for community engagement. You know, we can ask for their input. A lot of times it's like, Hey, we're thinking about this thing. What do you think? Yeah. You know? And so, and you can similarly with hashtags, you can be making it even more niche with pillar three, you know, and around like maybe there's hashtags that have to do with the product. Maybe you have all three sets of hashtags, like super general, more specific product, and then really niche like more around values or the how we're doing this thing. You know? And then similarly with pillar three, it's like if we are, I don't know, if we're adding any dollars behind it, we have this tactic we call like micro engagement campaigns. We've also referred it to new boost in the past. So we will like, if a, if a post is performing really well, put a few dollars behind it, literally a few dollars. Like 10 dollars, you know, um, to make sure it gets in front of the right people. So with pillar three, we want to be getting back in front of our audiences. We're not going to probably target cold audiences with our pillar three content. It's going to be retargeting people who've engaged with us recently and we think need to hear this message. Yeah. You know, so it's just organizing your content pillars around your business goals completely changes the game. It not only makes everything more measurable, it makes it super easy to improve your performance totally. Right? So what comes out of this? I mean, okay. So here are our favorite case studies, cause like every single time, you know, getting your content pillars, right, can sometimes take a little bit of time, right? There is a, there's an element, a lot of people will ask like, you know, because this process of defining your content pillars, we do this with our clients inside of two programs that we have. We have strong grand social club where we work with founders and we work with in house marketers. Like we work with brands. And then we have a certification program where we train marketers how to do this work for brands. This process of redefining content pillars always starts with a target market exercise. Right? We need to think about them. We need to think about where they are if we want to meet them there. So a lot of times clients will say like, especially if they're new, you know, it's a new business. Where do I've come up with this stuff? How do I know? Even if you're established brand with insights, like your content strategy is going to be a mix of based on data and also like assumptions. Yeah. I just want to dispel this myth that brands have it all figured out. Like if you are just starting out, you're going to start with assumptions. This is why at taking action and actually like implementing a new content strategy that's aligned to your business goals and taking action around that is so important because the action is what actually gives us the data. So we need to start with an assumption and then push it to market and observe, right? And so our favorite case studies are when, yes, like it might be that, oh, our first launch was like a huge success or it might be like, holy crap. Looking back, we just literally added seven figures of revenue from our marketing program, from our social media marketing program this year. That's great. My favorite result is when you're pairing that like financial gain with also like a lifestyle game. You get more time back. You are confident. You are calm. You are clear. It's super empowering, right? And so we're looking right now at a testimonial from Michelle, one of our clients. She's a solo per newer mom. What'd she say, Mariah? She said, focusing on the S3 system has made it so much easier for me to figure out what to say to draw in my ideal customer on Instagram and in my paid ads. In just three months, I've tripled my Instagram audience and I'm about to have my biggest sales month on record. This is it though, all while working the same number of hours each week. That hurt. So she's the mom of two young children. She's doing this all alone and she's already like within, I think she's just starting her second year in business. She's a low ticket product e-commerce. Her brand is called the Graceful Goose. You should 100% check her out and she's multiple six figures already, boom, done, right? And we have, I'm thinking about another client of ours, Moon and Stone, who similarly, it's like they are two moms without marketing backgrounds and they're absolutely, they're freaking crushing it, right? Just like on a rocket ship. They're growing so, so fast and it's all built on this foundation. Yes. I'm just like, what are we saying? Why are we saying it? And how do we optimize this for, you know, the, the why behind it? How do we align our content to our business goals? And then I also wanted to read this one from Shelly. She's the client of ours. She found us right in the beginning of 2020. And recently we published a story that was just kind of like bringing back her story. So this was like after a few years and the DM we got from her was love you guys and think about you all the time. So grateful to you all. Someone just reached out to me today, asked me if working with you guys was worth it. Hell yes. So I love that because Shelly, I remember Shelly, she, um, they like raise alpacas and there's an alpaca business, but then they can also do like alpaca yoga and you can take a farm tour and the farm is very sustainable. Good karma ranch. Yeah. Good karma ranch. And she, when she, you know, like she is not trying to be on social media as much as possible. That is not what she's trying to do, right? And when she came in, I remember she was like, I don't know if this is going to work for me. Like I don't know. And it's just like, well, it works for everyone. It works for everyone. And she's absolutely crushing it and her community is super engaged. And you know, if you look at her content again, it's just like, it's super transparent. It's all iPhone content, but it's bringing people in and thinking about like, Oh, she noticed everyone shares her alpaca content. That's how she gave like, wow, what low hanging fruit, right? So and this is, we're going to get more into this in the episodes that are coming about your role and what you should be thinking about, whether you're the founder or you're the social media marketer. But when we think about our role at strong grand social, when we're working with clients and how we think our role is to equip them to lead this work. And I think Shelly is such a great example because it's like, we're not trying to keep clients reliant on us. It's one of the reasons why we want people, we want brands to like learn the S3 system and what this looks like for their brand before they start like hiring agencies and hiring because like, we want to train people how to outgrow us. You can lead your marketing. This is not rocket science. Like the best marketers in the world are just empathetic humans and the marketing industry loves to make people feel like they're super like, like, this is rocket science and you can definitely not do this without our help and like, don't even try. You need to outsource your weaknesses immediately. And that's just not, you know, most marketers are terrible at their job. So like you, no one knows your business and you know, your product and your customer is better than you. And like, so like you can 100% create the strategy for your brand. Yeah. Yeah. Something else I want to touch on that you mentioned was you have to try it and you have to see what works and what doesn't. And I feel like you get that advice a lot in social media of like, just post and yeah, people like out without any strategy behind it. So again, you're like, it's like pin the tail on the donkey. Yes. Like you're, you are blindfolded. Yes. Or like you're just spinning your wheels. Like what am I experimenting towards? Yeah. So that's what we want to do is we really want to get clear on again, like I mentioned, if you're a brand that's like, yes, I have all three of these goals. Okay, great. Demand generation, conversion, retention. Let's go start like looking at these messages in this process. If you're a brand that has different goals, cool, let's look at them and then organize content pillars around them so that when you go publish content, you know what the point was. So, you know, not just how to measure success, but like where were you off? Was it successful? What do you think? It just, it narrows the conversation so much and you're no longer just like flailing around. Yes. Like it might not be a super, it might not be like an exact straight line, but you're moving towards your goal much, much, much more efficiently. Yeah. You mentioned that we would touch on how much of each pillar do I post. Yeah. Great question. So, we always think about it like, so this is a framework. It's meant to be adjusted. It's meant to be customized. The baseline for your pillar percentages would be 50% pillar one, 30% pillar two and 20% pillar three. If you are a seasonal brand, maybe you dial pillar two down and pillar one and three up in your off season, dial pillar two up in your sales season. And then the other time this changes, you know, if you're not a seasonal brands, but you just like, you have maybe a quarterly like launch schedule, you also can do that. So, you can dial up, like think about what you're trying to achieve during a specific business season. Because we are leading up to a launch and really need to generate demand, right? Go hard on pillar one and pillar three for those proof points and then feel free to let pillar two rip during that week that like, you know, the promotion is on. The only other time this is going to change is based on the life stage of your business. So if you are brand new and you are like pre revenue and you're trying to build up a wait list for your launch, you go hard on pillar one, you know, and your pillar two needs to be evident in places like your bio, you could have a pinned post that it's like, it's really clear what's happening, but now we need to bring people back to that. The other time that might change is when you're really well established. So I feel like Ben and Jerry's and Patagonia are just like the best examples of this where I mean, they are already winning the market. So they don't need to really generate demand. Like their customers are super loyal. You know, if they're going to grow in their market, it's going to be incremental because they're already so big. So they invest a lot of time and money in pillar three. And while it's one part because that's their values and that's, you know, they have a triple bottom line approach to business literally. So they're going to do that anyway, but they also know that like, that's the role of their marketing now. The role of their marketing now is just to keep their customers around the way to keep your customers around is make sure that you are helping them know that when they vote with their dollar, you're the right place for them to spend their money. That part. So like, so I think that's one of the ways that it can change once you have kind of, and I think this is a really good example of how like your social media strategy should not be separate from your business strategy, right? A business like Patagonia is like, okay, now the best way for us to get the biggest return on our marketing spend is to spend it in a way that's like conservative and aligned with retaining our customer base, maximizing their value and getting them to buy gifts for their friends or refer us to friends, right? At Christmas, like everyone's like a Patagonia holiday because like it's a brand we can feel good about giving. So like that their business strategy is retention, loyalty, and you see it directly reflected in their social media strategy. So I think that's really, really important and something that the S3 system is trying to help brands navigate is like, these things should not be separate. So as you're figuring out what these pillars look like for you, what's the next step? How do you put it all? What are we doing? Where do we go from like having this conversation to actually deploying it? So one of the things that we advise clients to do is actually get things into a playbook. So once you identify at a high level what your pillar one and pillar two and pillar three are going to be, now you should flesh out really specific examples of what you want that content to look like. This is going to ensure that when you go to do content planning and production, you literally like no longer are you like brainstorming from scratch. You're going to your playbook, look at all of these examples of a plan off those that saves you a ton of time. It also helps you again, establish that baseline of like, what are we testing against? So after 90 days, if I had five pillar one examples in my playbook and only two of them performed well, I'm going to remove the three that didn't. And I mean, they're going to add a few others to experiment with or I'm going to just keep those two that worked really well. So we can talk more about the playbook and when we talk about delegation and stuff, but yeah, the idea of the playbook is just again, having like a crystal clear what we're going to market with and why so that we can do this strategic work in like a sitting and then not have it torment us every day of the week preach. Yeah. And as a social media marketer, we'll come back and we'll talk about this in later episodes, but I just cannot tell you how good the playbook is. I can't wait. I know. I'm like so excited. I feel like we just kind of teased a bunch of the other episodes and we're going to get deeper into all of this because now you and I are getting really excited about it. We are. We are getting excited. Okay. Great. In summary, phase one, the last content strategy you'll ever need the S3 system, redefining content pillars, redefining content pillars to align with business goals, with business goals for sure. And now we're going to move into phase two and phase three. Phase two, we're going to answer how do we get the right message in the right place at the right time in pursuit of our growth goals. And within our budget, phase three, we're going to talk about how to set up a measurement model. And then we're going to get into what your role is, how to think about this, all your next steps. I'm so excited. And don't forget to keep listening because we still are going to, I mean, I feel like we're dropping Easter eggs and gifts all over left and right, but we have like a really good one coming up for you. Okay. Cool. See you there. See you in the next episode. If you want to learn more about receiving our support and implementing the S3 system at your brand or using the system to drive predictable results for your clients, head to the show notes. You can also email us at [email protected] and follow us on Instagram at strongbrandsocial.