475: TikTok Content Recipe for Founders with Talia Datt

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2:42Hey, Founder fam. Welcome back to another episode of The Founder Podcast. Today, we're sitting down with Talia Dat, the CEO and founder of The Social Click and the content click, two full service agencies that are focused on social media and content creation. So if you want to know how to dominate and monetize social media platforms like TikTok, as well as get a glimpse into a new founder course on content creation and monetization strategies, and if you're looking to level up your social media accounts, which you should be, then this one's for you. Please welcome to the founder podcast, Talia Dat.

3:19first question i ask everyone that comes on is how did you get your job aka how did you find yourself doing the work you're doing today i mean i guess being a founder is a job but i mean i've never actually thought of it like that um ultimately i was at university i spent a semester abroad in sweden and came back and took whatever job i could possibly get my hands on which happened to be in the insurance industry. At that time, I spent maybe four or five weeks in that role before I realized the money's not worth it for me. I couldn't quite enjoy my time there and decided to quit. And the day that I quit was actually the day that Tap to Shop on Instagram came about and it was making headlines everywhere and I sat on the train home in 2018 and literally saw these headlines just coming up about these tap to shop sort of um yeah tap to shop capabilities and I went home enrolled myself in a in a social media marketing course and started to learn about the foundations of social media and how you could make money using this new tap to shop feature after about a month of learning and upskilling I decided to offer some services to local boutiques for free and once I started to make those boutiques money we could see the direct sales coming through was the time that I knew that I could start to charge for my services within four months I had my first employee and we had signed a massive retailer, right?

5:02Art and Craft. At the time, they had 80 stores across Australia. And I mean, they were our first major corporation. And from there, we just scaled the business and consistently upskilled and tried new things in order to lead us to the Social Click Today, which is a full service social media marketing agency. Got you. So this is your first business? This was my first baby, first business. Yep. Will always have my heart. Yep, got you. So when did you leave that insurance company that you were working for? Did you just go cold turkey and then just start working on this social stuff? Or how did you know?

5:44What was the plan? So I was studying marketing at university at the time, as well as a Bachelor of Global Studies. Yeah. So my whole life, everyone told me I was going to be a politician, which is, I know, now thinking of it quite ridiculous, but who knows what's in my future. And so I decided to do this double degree of marketing and communications alongside international relations and politics. So I had essentially delved into both areas before realizing that marketing was the direction I wanted to go. At the time, the universities didn't really teach you about social media marketing. And as someone who had spent the last six months traveling, I'd obviously been logging my entire trip and I'd been posting.

6:36And it was really that time that Instagram was taking off. and so quickly it was about turning my passion into something that could actually make me money. Yeah, yeah, wow, awesome. So talk me through kind of your first major client, Riot. What did you guys do for them? How did you use social? And you talk about like the, what was it called a tap to tap to purchase, was it? Tap to shop. Tap to shop, tap to shop. So that was like when Instagram allowed you to have these shoppable links right on it yeah and so talk me through that and I mean it allowed you to go straight to someone's website from the actual Instagram post which was the first of its kind and it meant that the transaction and the user journey and experience was so much easier than it had ever been and I'd say that's when Instagram ads also really took off because everyone was trying to monetize the community that they had built for the past few years prior yes um with riot i mean it was an incredible story they reached out to me they'd heard via via someone that i was offering these social media services they actually had no social media presence at the time and the best part about it is the artist community is so so vocal and they're so interactive and so we started these channels from scratch and built them to a following of like 12 000 followers within a number of months yes because everyone wanted to engage with our content yes and what we did is we featured local artists and what they were creating with our product in combination with actually doing tutorials posting amazing sort of um yeah tutorials and amazing sorts of flat lays on the different types of materials and the outcome that you can get.

8:36And so before we knew it, we had almost like the recipe of success with content. We weren't running any ads and we were just organically building a massive artist community that wanted to engage with our content. Yes. Got you. Awesome. So you taught for the past four days, an incredible program on the founder platform. What can people expect to learn from this program? Well, ultimately over the last five years, I have established two digital marketing agencies, one social media, one in the user generated content space and invested as well as co-founded a range of e-commerce brands. And ultimately I feel as though I have the perfect recipe in order for you to monetize your organic socials.

9:22Like we did with Riot in 2018, It's a different story now. Obviously, the strategy changes, but we're going to take all those kind of key learnings and pull it together in order to give the founder community the tools to do it themselves. Yeah, I love it. So what does it take? Like, you know, a lot of people that listen to this podcast would be early stages in their journey and they may have just launched their product and they're looking to build a social following. and you talk about monetizing a following, do you need a large following to make a significant amount of, uh, it will sell a certain amount of, like a large amount of products or yeah, talk me through that.

10:05You don't necessarily need a large following, but you need an engaged following, right? So, I mean, in my eyes, it doesn't matter if you have 2000 followers, 500 followers, a million followers. If you're not getting a level of engagement with your content, you're actually not speaking to them like regardless. So in my eyes, as long as you can kind of build that level of engagement with your community, that would be the best way for you to monetize it. Yeah. And how do you start? Like for people that are starting out, how do you start to build an engaged community? What are the key pieces? I guess you got to listen to my course.

10:45I think building a foundational framework ultimately is first and foremost. Like why are you 20 % better or why 20 % better than your competitors? Or why are you trying to build a community? Why are you trying to engage with this community? What's the key messaging, right? And establishing that first and foremost, I think really trickles through to everything else that we do. And then from there, it's about consistency, of course, posting and showing up every single day to make sure that you can build that sort of relationship with your followers in combination with creating amazing content and thinking outside the box, being different.

11:28You can't expect different outcomes by doing the same thing. Keep doing different sort of pieces of content and questioning different types of methods in order for you to build the best community possible and speak to them accordingly. Hey Founder Fam, I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders. We've been recommending OmniSend to founder students for a while now because it just works. Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling the seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results.

12:05Did you know on average, OmniSend customers make$68 for every$1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment. And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50 % off your first three months with the code founder50. Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Yeah, and one thing I find a lot of people struggle with is actually the content creation piece, right? It can be quite intimidating. there's a there's TikTok there's Instagram there's reels there's stories there's you know static images there's all these different content types how do you even know where to start and like even the tools to use and I know you go through all this in the program but like just people listening just even to get started like what can you share just to help people I think use the third party tools around you in order to assist you you know there's so many low barrier tools and capabilities you just need to know what to leverage in order to make sure that you can get the job done yeah I mean if you think about making a TikTok right it might seem super daunting or super overwhelming I mean even for me when TikTok started blowing up and we were busy trying to pivot our entire agency to TikTok because that's where everything was happening.

13:36Creating a piece of content on TikTok felt overwhelming even to experts. But then you've now got these like third party or low barrier tools such as CapCut that basically hand you a template and say, this is how you can make a TikTok. And so utilizing those sort of tools around you, I think is going to assist you to be less overwhelmed and just take that time and invest in actually creating a great piece of content. Yep. So you said you guys are full service, but you specialize really in TikTok now. Is that, yeah? Absolutely. Yeah. We're seeing the results that we can get on TikTok compared to any other platform astronomically high.

14:19like TikTok ultimately is the one-stop shop in order to build a community and monetize that community very quickly. Yeah. So let's talk about that. That's interesting, right? So the thing with TikTok is it's hard to get like that, that CTA, you know, there's not that many links. It's not, it's not like, it's not like Instagram, right? So like how, how can people, the following piece somewhat I can understand, but like the driving sales monetization. Can you talk us through that? Yeah, definitely. So I think the best part about TikTok content is that it's super relatable to the people that it's trying to speak to, right?

15:02It's sharing a message that other people share. And so straight away, I mean, without you even having a call to action specifically, someone sees themselves in that person's shoes automatically, right? And I think that's the monetizing factor that makes the biggest difference is that you're essentially speaking to a group of people that have felt that same sort of problem and you're providing them with a solution. And straight away, what we see is people click through to profile, you see the way in which you can build a following much quicker because they're utilizing this sort of strategy with their content creation.

15:44And then from there, of course, you can have a link in bio or like a link tree sort of concept with multiple links if you need. TikTok at the moment also released a statement recently that they're rolling out the tap to shop and it's starting to kind of come to fruition. So I think that's what we can see next, which I'm sure is going to make also another huge difference to the whole industry. Can you give me some examples? Like, tell me about some of your clients or, you know, business that you've invested in or work with really closely from an e-com side that you've really helped blow up their TikTok.

16:20And yeah, you don't have to talk exact numbers, but yeah, we'd love to hear kind of what, just to give people an example, what's possible. Absolutely. So one of my brands that I actually invested in yes matcha maiden it's a matcha brand um it was previously started by another founder sarah holloway and then we essentially took it over early covet and as we took over matcha maiden um we knew that we wanted to pivot a little bit of our strategy to not be so founder related and in doing so tiktok was a big part of that yeah um essentially within a few months we had built a very very strong following um I think even it was probably like seven or eight thousand at the time within a three three month period but I mean for TikTok in those days that was really huge I mean today in comparisons probably not as much and we saw an uptake in sales by 128 percent in that three month period yeah wow now TikTok didn't have a pixel so we couldn't say this is from like directly from TikTok at the time but the fact that our sales increased by 128 % in that three-month period was huge and I mean it continued to grow even after for example we pulled back some of our TikTok budget because we already had the community and we were already getting the results that we wanted.

17:45Yeah yeah wow interesting so what did you do like talk us through like what you did when you took over that business and how did that come about? You said you invested like with some other partners or how did that work? Definitely. So the other partners had bought the business. They came to me from a marketing perspective and I saw that and I said, I want in. And that's where the conversations basically started on how we could actually work together and build this company together. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a range of other owners, um I think most of them want to be anonymous yeah that's okay um yeah we've we've had a great like it's been a great journey because we've been able to scale what was already a strong brand into multiple skews into um a huge social media presence into consistently driving that community um and I mean it's one of my most proud like I'm the most it's one of my proudest achievements because we were able to scale something so great.

18:51I mean, year one, we increased sales by 70 % overall, which is huge. And we've consistently been increasing that year on year. Yeah, wow. And big driver is TikTok still to this day. Still to this day, TikTok really, really does make a splash. We use a lot of user-generated content. Obviously, I have the user-generated content agency as well. And so I have a network of over 3000 creators worldwide, and we essentially utilize and contract these content creators to create content for us, whether that be recipes or days in a life or whatever that sort of looks like in order for people to resonate more to the brand.

19:33And also it means we don't have one face to the brand. It's super, super diverse. We have a range of different people consistently featured on the page. And so anyone who hits our TikTok page can essentially see themselves in the creator's shoes. Yeah. So talk me through the UGCP. So you started full service social media agency, and then you started effectively an influencer marketing agency, right? What's what you call it? Or you don't like to call it that? I wouldn't call it an influencer marketing agency. Yeah. It's actually interesting. So with Matcha Maiden in particular, we paid this influencer, right?

20:16Something like$10 ,000 or$15 ,000 for a post. And she delivered a range of different flat lays. Now the value in that investment was obviously for her to speak to her community. But the content that she created, I wouldn't say was anything out of the ordinary. So the content itself wasn't something that we could actually utilize or leverage. And so what this led me to think is, what if we had a network of people that really specialized in the content side of things, as opposed to the reach or the community side of things? They're great at creating an amazing piece of content. And then you can essentially post on your own channel and amplify it in that way.

21:02and rather use that 10, 15K to run ads with it, you know? And so that's where the user-generated content agency came about. I thought we've got to create this amazing network. We've got to have a range of different people in all different countries with different ethnicity, looks, feels, whatever it might be, and bring them all as part of one collaborative network in order to create content for the clients that we work with. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I understand, yeah. And look, people don't like to call themselves influencers now. They're now called creators. It's a bit of a dirty word. So that makes sense.

21:44Like I remember my friend Jake, he started a company called Coconut Bowls and he grew that really fast through influencer marketing. And I'll never forget, he was the one that got me into Instagram a long time ago. And he said to me like, you know, when you send out products and you want influencer or creators to post, he said, yeah, it's great if they post, but really where it's at is the content. 100%. And so I totally understand that approach. And then I guess if you just focus on the content, it probably doesn't cost you as much, right, either. Way more cost effective. And you then get to track the amplification efforts.

22:25So if you're running ads with it, you can actually see who you're speaking to, track the views, track the engagement. Whereas an influencer, it stops at a number. Yeah. And look, there's no doubt about it as well, that when you're running ads, you want to have a good mixture of UGC, that kind of native TikTok style stuff that does really, really, really well. So talk me through kind of like anything that people could learn when it comes to working with content creators? What tips could you give people? Absolutely. I think knowing what your brand stands for, first and foremost, is the number one tip because you want to brief them and tell them to actually get the right sort of messaging across.

23:10Often what we find is brands will often copy other brands and what you'll see is that these content creators often end up creating content for the same industry, similar products, but same messaging kind of thing going on. Whereas if you can really establish who you are in order to work with a content creator, I think you'd be in a really good position to brief them accordingly. For us, knowing that this creator actually believes in your product is another a huge thing. We have a network of over 3 ,000, but before we even reach out to any, we put out a call and say, this is the brand who's interested in working with the brand.

23:52And that's number one in shortlisting it. So you really want, you really, really want those brand, that level of brand advocacy or those people that actually, yeah, feel a connection to your brand first and foremost to be representing your brand yep got you so with your i guess network is it like a two-sided marketplace or or it's just like a basically a a curated list of people that you guys are consistently working with that you've vetted and then if somebody wants to work with you guys you guys will help find and basically brief and make sure the content is on point Exactly. So, I mean, we've definitely looked at the marketplace sort of solution, but the missing piece is that our internal team at this point brief the content creators and actually leverage trends on TikTok or what we're seeing to actually, yeah, brief the creators accordingly.

24:53Got you. So a marketplace, often the brands left to actually brief. And that's where we see it doesn't work so well. We have a full-time trend reporter as part of our team. Wow. When I started this agency, if you would have told me that I would be hiring a position called trend reporter, that is essentially her role. She scrolls on TikTok all day and finds what's trending or what she thinks is about a blow up. And that way we can actually make sure that the clients that we work with are leveraging trends well in advance. Yeah, that's crazy. Okay. All right. So you guys are playing a whole different game, right?

25:32So the trends matter when it comes to TikTok. Absolutely. So I feel as though the best strategy when it comes to TikTok is a combination of proactive and reactive content. So proactive content is the content that you can pre-record well in advance. think like testimonials or product explainers or a day in my life, any sort of content that really can universally be posted and it doesn't matter what sort of time you post it at. Whereas reactive content is when you see a trend and you respond directly to that trend. So if you see an audio on your TikTok for you page that comes up more than three times, that is a trend that you want to be on today, right?

26:17And so there's got to be that room and that element to actually identify the trend and then leverage it. Yeah, gotcha. And if you're an e-commerce business, I'm just trying to put myself in the shoes of people listening to this. Oftentimes you don't want to be in front of the camera, right? What would your advice be for people? Is it mainly focused on UGC or is it to do more kind of flat lay stuff with the product and work with spokespeople? Is that the way to go? Or do you think people have to be comfortable being in front of the camera, like flipping out your phone? What's your take there? I feel as though in today's landscape, the founder needs to be in front of the camera.

27:03I think ultimately that's what consumers are interested in they want to know who they're buying for what's happening behind the scenes have that level of interaction in the accounts that we run their tiktok accounts what we're seeing is the content that's product based even a testimonial does not perform as well as when the founder features right whilst even though it does perform pretty pretty well most of the time founder content always supersedes anything else and so in my eyes the founder you've got to get in front of that camera to build a relationship with your community. Yeah, gotcha. So what do you think the biggest mistakes people are making?

27:46You talked about not being in front of the camera, but what are some other things that people are making when it comes to content creation, monetizing an account or social media in general, Instagram, TikTok, whatnot? I think people are implementing strategies that were popular in 2018 and 2019. today which the same equation just does not work um when we look at social so can you use some examples yes yeah yeah so i think if you think about content in 2018 you would think of something being super curated and super perfect like i always use the travel example right you're traveling overseas the piece of content that you would create for traveling overseas in 2018 would be you standing outside the business class lounge wearing your matching tracksuit and having your matching luggage, right?

28:42Think of it very influencer type, right? Super curated and super unobtainable to the majority of people, but that's the type of content that people were posting and that's what was popping off. Whereas today we're trying to be as authentic as possible and as relatable to the masses, right? So a great piece of travel content today would be a person say wearing every item of clothing, walking through security because they don't want to have to pay for luggage, right? And to the majority and to most of us, that's super obtainable, super understanding. Like we've all been there, you know, you've backpacked and you've had to just wear every item to make sure that, yeah, you didn't have to pay the overweight or pay for luggage, whatever it was.

29:29So that sort of content today is what people want to see. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this episode and learning a ton. As you know, in this series, we interview some of the greatest founders of our generation to find out how they did it. However, if you're thinking of starting your own business and you want to hear from some incredible stories from everyday people like you or I who are actually in the trenches, only been building their business for maybe one year or two years, like that are building right now and they're really in the early stages, but they're getting success. You should come and check out our new podcast, From Zero to Founder, hosted by our community manager, Molly Flynn.

30:10These are in the trenches stories from our very own successful students that have gone through some of our programs. People just like you who are deep within the process of building their very own successful business. These are the founders of tomorrow. You can find the From Zero to Founder podcast on all platforms. And remember, it's founder without the E. All right, now let's jump in the show. When it comes to building that relationship, you talked about that relationship with your audience, relationship with your community. I guess the more relatable you can be as a founder or your content appears, then it's easier to connect, right?

30:50Definitely. I think it's easier for someone to understand why the brand was created in the first place. You know, a founder's vision is something so unique and something so, so true to that person's core, like what they believe in. And so that often will come across in the content without even having to try, you know, because it just feels so natural to the founder to come across in that way. So how can brands adapt to this new way of creating content so it's still on brand and it's not too ghetto, right? Like you look at brands like Apple, insanely curated, right? Like, I don't know. Do you think, like, I've never seen this style.

31:37You talk, I've never seen a brand like Apple. I don't know, maybe like a Nike. Like, yeah, talk us through. like it's so interesting you say that because just this week was the first time I saw a piece of apple like a piece of content that apples put out yeah that is super authentic right and native it was an influencer essentially or a creator shopping in one of their stores for their mom and it took this like it took us on a journey the person's shopping journey which yeah for the first time. I mean, I haven't seen it to date. I've seen this content come through and now I'm thinking, okay, well, I feel like all brands almost have to adapt because they're being left behind.

32:22Yeah, I agree. So for someone that is starting their brand and it's just early days, how do you stay on top of like all the different channels, all the different stuff you have to do? what advice would you give to people? Don't do it all. Choose one or two platforms as a starting point, right? Because I think if you have your hands in too many pots, ultimately one of those pots is going to fall. Like it just happens. So rather choose a couple platforms that you feel like really resonate with your audience and then start to develop strategies in order to leverage your community on those platforms.