SPECIAL SERIES: Marketing Moments: What's Actually Breaking Through Right Now with Samantha Yehle, Brand and Social Media Consultant

0:00A quick one before we dive in. If you're running a social team, you need to look at Slate. Video and image editing, long to short form clipping, team approvals, and all of your brand guidelines baked in one place to create content. No chaos. It was built by the guy who ran social for the NFL, so he actually knows what your team is dealing with. Go to slateteams.com to learn more.

0:30Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marking Millennials. I have Sam on the podcast. Sam has been running social for some cool companies for a long time, which is pretty cool. Her most recent was Frida, where she crushed it. And we'll talk a little bit about that too. And I know you also were at Nara Organics recently. and now you are doing your own thing, which is fun.

1:27So excited to chat. I want to go into how did you get into marketing? How did you get into social? Yeah, thanks. Thank you for having me. Really excited to chat today. So I am a marketer through and through. So I spent the first 12 years of my career at Saucony, which is a global running and lifestyle brand based up in Boston, which is home for me. And that's really where I sort of like dipped my toe into every part of marketing except for digital and social. So it was everything from field marketing, retail, brand marketing. And I kind of learned that one of the things that's most important to me as a marketer is to have a product that I really believe in.

2:10And I was obsessed with the shoes and apparel, the gear that we made there. And from that experience, I realized like it's really hard for me to get excited about a brand and about storytelling if there isn't a product at the at the core of everything that I really believe and love. And so I spent a good chunk of my career there. And then I moved over to parenting brand Frida. And that sort of coincided with me becoming a mom. So really spoke to who I was at the time. And in the same sense, an incredible product company that, you know, built an incredible brand and really meaningful platform for parents.

2:47And that is sort of where I went from being a marketing generalist to really being a social specialist in particular and a content creator. And then from there, hopped over to Nara, so kind of stayed in the parenting space for my next move. And then a couple months ago, I decided to, you know, do my own thing. And so now I'm consulting with brands and also sort of carving my own little corner of the internet where on my Instagram and TikTok accounts, I sort of dig into all the best and smartest brand and marketing campaigns, stunts, social plays. And that's been really fun because I think I have this running theory now that marketing is a spectator sport and social media has made it that way.

3:28People love to, you know, pick apart and dig into the things that they see brands doing online. And so it's just really fun to be a voice in that conversation and sort of create space for people to talk about and analyze those things. I love the marketing as a spectator sport. I feel that so much creating marketing content, because I always think one of the spectators is going to see if I put out this PSO content, if I launch this campaign or if I do something. So I always think about that. I'm like, I know I'm going to get a bunch of people flooding in. If I do something wrong or do something right, or don't do something, or it's a, it's, it's, that's a great way to put it.

4:08I want to also go, what is like a marketing moment from like the last 60 days that actually made you stop scrolling and you were like to yourself, okay, this brand has actually figured something out. There are so much. And I think part of it has to do with the fact that we are, well, today, the World Cup literally kicks off today. And so the last, you know, 30 days really has been just one beat after another from some of the biggest brands in the world showing us what they have to say. And so it's been really neat. I've been paying super close attention to Adidas and Nike in particular. I think both of them, you know, at the surface level, did something similar.

4:53Like they both had these really incredible five minute videos or films, which, you know, Adidas sort of took more of a cinematic approach. Nike, I feel like showed up with like a Marvel Universe type of situation with just an incredibly broad mix of athletes, celebrities. And so they both had these singular touch points that were really incredible and very fun to sort of look at and compare. But I think the thing that's most interesting to me right now is Nike's tactical approach because it actually isn't about that hero film. It's about all of the content extensions that they've built around it.

5:30And last week, we really started to see what that looks like and sort of see these sort of like secondary beats to the story on each of their athlete and celebrities accounts. So they're really sort of building this incredibly smart, interconnected web of content that leverages not just their brand platforms, but all of their athletes and celebrities. So I just think that's really interesting. And that's something that when I think of marketing, it is so hard to have a singular beat because the social cycle moves so quickly, the news cycle moves so quickly. But I'm really curious to see if they're able to sustain the pace and the level of interest that they've had over the past couple of weeks throughout the games.

6:15And if they can, I just think that will be an incredible case study for a lot of brands going forward. Yeah. When you're talking to brands or when you've like launched a campaign, how do you think about creating beats for the brand? Because I think a lot of people, a lot of brands I see focus on like that one, like, let me try to get a firework show. I don't, I'm not going to do any beats leading up to this. I'm just going to try for the firework show. And if it doesn't succeed, it's all or nothing. So if you were like running a, like doing someone, telling someone to do a social strategy, like what should people think about when they're creating those beats?

6:53I think the smartest place to start is with social listening. And I think, again, touching back to what's so neat with Nike's campaign here is that a lot of the storylines that they've built aren't, they didn't come up with them in a vacuum. They stem from interesting cultural moments or sports moments related to these athletes. And so they're using things that they know already struck, you know, strike a chord with people emotionally. They're touching back to it. So it sort of has that, you know, It's like a, you know, a wink to the consumer, like, hey, we're fans as much as you are in this. We know all of these moments.

7:33And they're using that as the fuel for a really creative, fun, high energy moment in our current world. The Internet, there's a track record for you to work off of. And if something struck a chord or went viral once before, it will go viral or strike a chord again. And I think like that's sort of a principle that I've had as a content creator is, you know, you don't just go viral and move on to the next thing. You figure out how can I remix or, you know, recycle this into a new idea or a new concept. So I think that's sort of the space. I really love looking at, you know, if we had a celebrity or an athlete, I would go back into the archives and figure out what are all the interesting things that happened.

8:15And is there anything that feels relevant or that we can connect here again? So you're not starting from scratch and it sort of, you know, it has that that element of like a wink, you know, to the audience. Like, hey, we we know we know this backstory. We know the lore and we're sort of continuing it or building on it as opposed to just throwing something new at you. I don't get why so many people don't repeat their winners. It's just blows my mind. like until that idea dies, you should just keep beating that idea until it stops. And then the other thing I wanted to say is like, when you're social listening for a brand, are you like, how wide are you going?

8:57Because obviously there's like culture, culture moments and the best ideas come from all over. They don't just come from, so how wide are you going? Because some people just like listen to their narrow space at the end, but you could take something from an industry that is so, has nothing to do with your aspect, take the idea, remix it for your industry. And it's a whole new idea that will probably have some sort of steam behind it because you knew it went viral for that other brand. So how, why does that go? The social listening? I think it depends. And I think one of the benefits, you know, of being on a team or a part of a team is that everybody has sort of their own algorithm and their own cultural connections and things that they find interesting.

9:50So I do think the smartest thing you can do is surround yourself with people who aren't in your exact algorithm and have different interests, because I think that's, you know, a smart place for a brand. And one of my favorite phrases is like, bad artist copy, good artist steal. So it's like looking outside of your direct industry and outside of your competitors, like forget your competitors, look at just brands that you admire or you're interested in and see what they're doing. And is there a way you can sort of adapt, you know, maybe something they did tactically with a celebrity or somebody you're partnering with who has this interesting backstory.

10:27So I think it's like, you know, this is where I just always find the the Gen Z intern or like the social media intern steering the ship. It's like they're an important part of things, but so are people who have had experience and exposure over 10 or 15 years. And sort of the magic, I think, happens when you have people who are tapped in from different ends of the spectrum age wise, culture wise. So I think that's that's probably one of the most important things. And then the other piece, just your question of like, how broad do you go? I think one of the most interesting uses of AI right now for marketers is in AI social listening and the ability to not have to be fully dialed into all of these, you know, disparate topics or different areas of the Internet and really using that as a cheat code to figure out, you know, what is interesting or not even just to figure out, but also to validate a hunch you might have.

11:22And that's something that before would be a lot harder to do. And it would be way more of a manual process. And you'd probably, you know, go blind scrolling, trying to validate the things that you might think, you know, are effective or think could be interesting for a campaign. And so I just think with social listening in particular, AI, like I'm not going to use AI to make my content, but for research purposes, absolutely. I think that's like a place that will only get smarter and better. I want to also go into some things you did at Frida. I think I want you to walk me through the moment where you decided, hey, we need to go this unconventional route in the space that nobody's doing.

12:03and it could have been a risk, but it turned out it panned off. Walk me through how that decision was made and how you had conversations internally saying, okay, I think this will work. I think we should start doing different content for the brand. Yeah. So we, when this was about like two and a half years ago, and I'd been at the brand for about eight months or so. And our president was like, hey, you know, we really need to figure out TikTok and short form video. At the time, the only videos we were posting were UGC. It was just UGC either found or things that we had briefed creators, but it was just a very, you know, traditional way that we were operating.

12:45And so we really wanted to crack that code. So we actually brought on a consultant, Ashwin Krishnaswamy, who is still a close friend and mentor, but we brought him on board. And it really took sort of a sort of task force team to decide if we want to do something that's going to actually break through. We're going to need to break some of the brand guidelines and some of the things that we have sort of held really dear and close to our our marketing approach. And so right from the start, we kind of decided, you know, we have these products that are incredibly well-loved, but also really easy to demonstrate and show on camera.

13:29And so we decided, you know, we were going to try and see how product demo-based content would function and how it would do. and because some of these products are so unexpected, the Nose Frida, the snot sucker is one of them, but it's literally a tube you put up to your baby's nostril and there's a straw attached and the parent sucks to get the snot out of their baby's nose. There are these products that they're so weird and like almost so unbelievable that they have that stopping power and they serve as their own visual hook, which is so powerful and important for social content. So we knew we had those.

14:04And then I think the real breakthrough for me came, you know, after the first, I think the first video we posted did go viral. Immediately it became a process of using data to validate the swings we were taking. And so we, we said, we had like two or three different formats. We tried right out of the gate. We almost immediately saw that product demos were working really well. So we're like, we're going to go all in on those. And we're really going to, you know, we're going to test and try and see which products are just as viral as the nose Frida and kind of go from there. And so that was really interesting to me as a marketer, because up to that point, a lot of the work I had done was more on, you know, the brand marketing side or product marketing.

14:45I wasn't close to data in that way. And I wasn't able to see the immediate results of my efforts and be like, okay, the numbers are here. That validates this, you know, shot that we took. So we're going to go again and again and again. So I think that was just a very pivotal moment for me as, you know, a content creator and as a marketer, as I was able to say, I know how to talk about these products. I know how to position them. I know what pain points they solve for parents. And then I'm going to take the data of what's working and use that to sort of snowball. And it very much did. So I'd say that that was one piece of it.

15:24And then I think the other was, you know, the thing that makes Frida so distinct in the parenting category is that it's a brand that has never been afraid to have, you know, the honest conversation and sort of go where other brands don't. And, you know, 10 years ago or so, actually even more, I think like 11 or 12, when Chelsea Hirshhorn founded the brand, it was like, you know, sort of like peak millennial Instagram where everything you were seeing online as a parent was sort of like, it was Instagram perfect. And it was like this very idealized image of parenting, very sterilized and sweet and not, didn't really speak to the realities of parenting when you're up with a baby at 2 a.m.

16:08and they're screaming and crying and they can't breathe because their nose is stuffed. So because of the the, you know, sort of ethos that Frida had to be a brand that not only solved those problems, but helped parents really feel seen through those experiences. I think that gave us the sort of the the permission to be more distinct on social compared to a lot of other parenting brands. And so I think that was just it was sort of a perfect storm of, you know, So the brand positioning and the products and sort of, yeah, it all created just a perfect storm for us to really fly. And I will say the snot sucker works really well.

16:49Yes. I also want to go into what you're seeing specifically. What is working on short-form video platforms right now? Could you describe like what the difference between what's working on TikTok versus what's working on IG, what's working on YouTube Shorts and how brands should think about each platform as a different entity? Yeah, I think that the things that work, they vary. And the sort of like biggest challenge or misconception, I think, is that what works for one brand and what works for one creator will work for everybody. And there really is no, there is no like universal advice you can give that anything will work.

17:36And that's like my big pet peeve. Whenever you see sort of these like, you know, social media growth hackers and stuff, we're like three tips to grow your brand online. And it's like, you really don't know what will work until you sort of assess what the goals are for social, for the brand, which platforms make sense based on the consumers you're trying to reach. But I will say, I think the biggest opportunity right now is brands are able to diversify their accounts and sort of create specific goal-oriented accounts based on what they need to market or how they need to reach people and the stories they need to tell.

18:17And I think the biggest missed opportunity is like everybody is always very focused on being entertaining, being funny, being unhinged, creating content that's going to make it to the group chat and into the DMs. But the thing that I hear people talk far less about, which was actually one of the biggest growth hacks for us at Frida, was understanding that social media and Instagram and TikTok in particular are search engines. and so many brands that have products that have high search value, especially products that solve problems, there is an entire world of content you could be making that is very specifically engineered to surface when somebody is looking for a solution.

18:59And so, you know, at Frito, what that looked like was creating content that literally was built off of the things I knew parents were searching for. So it was like how to clear my baby stuffy nose, how to sleep train my baby. Actually, one of the best anecdotes I have for this or the best proof points is I think like five or six months in to us creating content, daylight saving time was coming up. And I knew as a parent, one of the biggest things that you would see like the week or two before daylight saving time is all the sleep training accounts would start posting tips for how to help your kid adjust to the new time change.

19:38And so I was like, all right, I know that that's coming. So then same way that you can do like, you know, predictive SEO and sort of like seed content on your website or wherever. I was like, I'm actually going to see if I can create content that will surface when somebody searches for video tips about this. And so I did, I created a video and it was literally, I think the hook was parents, if you value your sleep, this is about to be the hardest week for you, but here's what you can do instead. And I posted it the Monday before the time change. The time change was a Sunday. So I posted it on Monday and it didn't do anything crazy.

20:11It kind of, I think had like 40 or 50 ,000 views or so. But once we got into that Wednesday, Thursday time period, there was a little spike in the views and engagement. People started sharing and saving the video. But the coolest proof point was that then NBC or GMA, I forget exactly who it was. Good Morning America, I think, was doing a story on Daylight Saving Time. And they reached out. They'd seen the video and they reached out and were like, hey, can we use this on the show? And they ended up using my hook as the hook for their segment. So it was like understanding that, A, not just people, but reporters, editors, producers, they're looking for content.

20:50Consumers are looking for content. there are so many interesting cultural moments or cultural moments, sporting moments, all sorts of things that are happening in the calendar that you can sort of reverse engineer your content plans to address so that when people come searching, your brand is there. And, you know, that was sort of like a fun example, but there are so many others. And so I just think one of the things, say for example if you were like mac apple you could have a dedicated account and i don't know maybe they do have this but you could have a dedicated account that is just iphone hacks and it's just a consistent feed of like every different hack you can think of for your phone how to use your phone how to take better pictures and we all know that algorithms favor consistency and audiences favor consistency in the kind of content so instead of trying to like maybe throw a hack or a tip into the general Apple account once every two weeks.

21:45You have one place for that, one dedicated account. So I think that's sort of the new world of social is deciding, you know, what sort of areas could you go deep into and maybe deciding is that its own account as opposed to it living and fighting for air on your brand account, which is maybe where you want to be more editorial and sort of share more of like your brand storytelling perspective. So I think that's just like an interesting opportunity. Yeah. I think the search engine one is super interesting and I think super valuable because like you said, there's like those moments that happen in your brain, those 10 pole moments, but there's also like, like evergreen moments that like, for example, parents, like they're probably searching my child got sick for the first time or milestones that there or all parents are searching like weeks four through eight or my child's gonna hit what happens with my child's not sleeping into any of you capitalize on that and the search work because even me when i'm looking for a restaurant i'll go to tiktok or ig and say like what are the best restaurants in that area before i go to the area and i get videos of people who have what like 500 like 500 likes and they're not like viral videos but they're very valuable to me because I'm going to that area I'm looking.

23:06So even though that video didn't go viral, it's, it's a valuable resource. And now I might go follow that creator or that brand who gave me those tips because I found them valuable or I went to the restaurant and it was good. Or I will share it to my friends in a group chat because I were going on vacation there. So I think that's super good way to think about that. Sometimes it's not the goal. Isn't like that engagement, Even your goal could be that you're trying to get searched and you're trying to pop up when at a moment your audience needs something and you are fulfilling that need. Because they're not going to need everything at every moment.

23:45And you want to be there when you fulfill that need of those people. Because I'm guaranteed the views are people in market for that content at that time. And then there's like those people who aren't in market at that time, but they could be in market in two months and you are in that search engine when you pop up. So I think that's super interesting take that I don't hear many people say with social.

24:13We're brought to you by Slate today. And honestly, if you run social for a brand, listen in for like 20 seconds. How many tools are you using just to make content? Because most teams are at five or six apps. And you're still chasing logos in some Google Drive folder nobody's organized since 2022. Slate is one content creation workspace. The NFL, Amazon, New York Times are on it. The Pistons Lily dish cap cut for Slate. Video and image editing, AI clipping, approvals, brand assets, all of it. SlateTeams.com, links in the show notes. Back to the episode. i also want to go into like we talked about social listening a little bit but i wanted to know about how do you like spot as a brand how are you supposed to spot a trend and know in your head or in this this trend or this moment or this is something we should be a part of or we should just sit this one out because you've seen they play the game and it goes badly or they play of the game and it goes, very good.

25:23So how do you know, like, as a brand, I need to hop on this moment in time? The best way that I've seen a brand sort of operationalize their approach to trend-based content, it's sort of like culturally relevant content, is I actually saw IKEA, one of their heads of marketing recently posted that they've built structure and guidelines that help them decide when and how they're going to insert themselves into moments like this. So I think that's like, the most important thing is understanding that it shouldn't just be like a, let's do it. I think everybody should pause and sort of try to, you know, put down on paper, here's when and why we will insert ourselves.

26:07And here are also some parameters. If we can't think of a great idea in the first 15 minutes, 20 minutes of brainstorming, maybe it's not worth our time. because I do think, you know, if you're not a brand who lives and breathes internet culture, and you don't speak that language, and it's not easy for you, like say it's a trending meme, if it's not easy for you to like dig right in and riff and produce something quickly, it's probably gonna be more of a distraction than it is a benefit. And I think that going back to the thing we were talking about not long ago about remixing your content, the biggest pitfall with reliance on trends is that trends are not evergreen.

26:49You cannot say you go viral with that, you know, I can't even think of a recent recent trend that happened or a meme that went viral recently. But, you know, say say you you generate half a million views on a Taylor Swift moment. That moment is gone the next week. You can't remix that. You can't go back to that. So you're sort of looking for, OK, if I'm going to get those numbers again, I need another trend and another trend. And it's like you're investing and sort of dependent and reliant on these moments coming to you as opposed to you as a brand figuring out what is your distinct sort of POV and sense of humor or perspective, whatever it is, like what's the thing that you can sort of create and put into the world that gets people psyched to see like, oh my God, this brand again, they're so funny, they get it.

27:40I think when you rely on moments to come to you, you're just, you're not able to control and, you know, own your destiny. You're reliant on external inputs, which again, maybe if you're the kind of brand that needs to be incredibly culturally relevant and tapped in, if you're like a meme based account, that might make sense. But I think for a lot of brands, the bigger value is sort of building a world that doesn't, it's your world. It's not like, you know, you're not waiting for anybody else to sort of tell you like, hey, go do this. So I think that's one of the most important things. And yeah.

28:17Like I'm thinking about the trend of like the, that just happened, not like probably a month ago, like millennial PR team versus like Gen Z, like some brands hopped on it. Some brands didn't hop on it. If you probably didn't have a millennial audience or Gen Z audience, or if you might, didn't want to turn off millennials too much by saying the wrong thing, or if you're not funny enough to hop on that trend, you probably shouldn't have hopped on that trend, but you saw tons of brands from every walk of consumer hop on that trend. Like my feed for a day was that trend. I actually think so. One of the interesting things that, you know, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and I read all of the hot takes from all of the marketing pundits who are on there.