536: Social Media Strategy and Foundational Marketing: Connect the PR Dots, Define Your Recurring Themes, and Succeed with Ariel Hyatt

Speaker 1 0:00 Marketer of the Day episode 536, social media strategy and foundational marketing. Connect the PR dots, define your recurring themes and succeed with Arielle Hyatt,

Robert Plank 0:11 Hey, everyone. We're so glad that you tuned into the marketer of the day podcast. We're chatting with Ariel Hyatt. You can find out all about her@cyberpr.com and she's spoken in 12 countries to over 100,000 creative entrepreneurs. She's the author of four best selling books. Her latest book is called crowdstart, The Ultimate Guide to a powerful and profitable crowdfunding campaign. It's been on number one on Amazon. She's here to tell us about social media. So Ariel, glad to be talking to you.

Ariel Hyatt 0:39 I'm so delighted to be talking to you. Well, cool. Well, great.

Robert Plank 0:42 Well, the feeling's mutual. We got the sort of a handshake out of the way. So what's on your mind these days?

Ariel Hyatt 0:50 Facebook, what a crazy time for digital marketing. I think that everything we've seen with the scandal that's going on has really brought a new consciousness to how we are finally understanding the reality of how much of our information is given and shared. And I've been seeing a rash of people deleting their Facebook accounts, and it's been a very interesting time to try to help my clients navigate through this quandary, and it also solidifies some of the philosophies that I've been, you know, skewing for all these years about the importance of having a newsletter, even though you might get a lower open rate, and the the importance of Keeping your tribe in as much of your control as you can, not Facebook's control and not another social platform. Yeah,

Robert Plank 1:47 I agree completely that we should. I mean, we should use Facebook for what it's good for, but we shouldn't necessarily live there, because who knows if years from now, Mark Zuckerberg decides to do something or the government decides to do something else. We never have any sort of control over those other sites, but it seems like we also can't ignore them at the same time, right?

Ariel Hyatt 2:07 Exactly, we cannot. So,

Robert Plank 2:11 alright, so, so you're having sort of this, this sort of craziness happening with Facebook. Could you sort of catch us up on what's been happening on your end and sort of what you're seeing and what your thoughts are about that

Ariel Hyatt 2:22 sure, on my end, I think there's a real fear as someone, my basic role as a marketer, just for those of you who might not be familiar, is we do foundational marketing for mostly small. I wouldn't say small it's entrepreneurial, creatives. And I'm very heavily involved in the music business. So a lot of my clients are musicians, artists, people in bands, music apps. And then I do work with with some female entrepreneurs that are not in the music space. But for the most part, my role is to get them from somewhere between zero and 10 to 50. So I'm dealing with people that are really trying to get their foundations right online, people that might not be so familiar with how digital marketing works. So we do a lot of basic things, like helping people get their dialog straight, helping helping get their themes on social media, get their brand so it looks cohesive. So that's what we spend a lot of our time doing. So a lot of what we do is, of course, teach artists how to use these social channels and teach them the benefits of each ones and the best practices for each one. And I think it's really scary when all of a sudden you realize that something you thought was whatever you thought, you realize it's not that I've been asked many times over the last couple of days, especially, should I delete my Facebook page? And that's a very personal question. I think, you know, that's an individual question. I don't think it's going to kill your marketing strategy. If you do eliminate your page, I think Elon Musk deleting a page that had, what was it, over 5 million followers and likes on it, it's not going to hurt his company, of course, but I think it's a very interesting move that he made to just say, No, this is unacceptable, and he's going to have to find other ways to market as we all are. So it's a personal choice. That's what I've been saying to people. And social media is already very confronting for people to begin with. What do I post? How do I post it? I want to be clever, and I want to do my marketing. But then, of course, it also comes with being personal, which is confronting when you don't understand how to incorporate your personal and your brand. So that's been a big conversation around our offices. And then another thing that we just struggle with every day is helping our. Artists to hone their narratives and making sure they're not all wildly all over the place with their marketing, because it is really hard, especially if you use social media in your social life. Maybe you're posting, you know, pictures of your kids or your life or what you're up to that might not be on brand for what you're doing in your business, or maybe it is. And then how do you incorporate the two? So that's, that's been a lot of what we've been doing and talking about around cyber. PR,

Robert Plank 5:31 okay, great. And it's, it sounds like, as you're explaining that, that if we were to try to figure this out ourselves, there's, there's a million different ways to go wrong, and at the same time, it's, I don't know about you, but it's like, one of those things where it's like, I need to get big on it fast, because if there aren't a lot of followers, I'm spending all this time on this thing that's not really paying off. So it's like, it's like, if we try to figure on ourselves, then it's just a real recipe for disastrous so can you walk us through, maybe an interesting story or something where you had one of these clients who either, like, didn't have a social presence, or they were struggling, and you just jumped in and worked your magic.

Ariel Hyatt 6:07 Yeah, I'd like to talk about someone that had a presence, but because she was very young, she really was struggling. Because when she got on Instagram, she was about 13, and now she's well, maybe she was 14, but now she's in her early 20s. She's a singer songwriter named Lauren Waller, and it was very interesting working with her, because what we had to do was teach a digital native, who'd always use social channels for social things, how to make a brand story out of her life. And she just graduated college, and we stepped in, and we taught her all about how to make a visual narrative so that people will want to come along on her journey. And I'm really proud of a how she took to the coaching, because a lot of times, I think people, you know, they hire us. We're an interesting marketing company. We don't only do it for you, we also love to educate our clients, hence the 12 countries and talking to all those people and about how to be empowered to do this, because it gets expensive when you're hiring marketing teams to do everything for you. So we're big believers in do a lot yourself. And what Lauren did was she took our coaching beautifully. So she's wonderful on Twitter and and very funny, and posts some really great, hilarious things. And then on her Instagram, she has a very distinct look and feel, and if you'd like to check her out, it's L, Waller, l, W, A, L, L, E, R, music. And she has a small following. She has fewer than 1000 followers. But what's amazing is everything she posts has approximately 100 likes, so it's a huge amount of engagement, and she even gets 200 and if you're looking at her page, or if you want to check it out, you'll see she's got a really saturated, stylized way of presenting her life, what she does, her friends, her music, her brand, she lives in LA. It's very clear. And I love just what she's done. And I promise you, when we stepped in her, her Instagram did not look anything like this. It was actually pretty much what you would expect from a 14 year old girl and a college student. So she had to go back and delete a lot of posts, and we worked with her on really honing the brand. And if you scroll all the way down her Instagram, I think it's a real it's a lesson in what does it look like when a marketing company steps in and begins to help you clean up and fix your brand. So she didn't delete every post that she had been posting from when she was younger, that that was there before we came into the picture. But you can definitely see, literally, the week we were hired, it changes. And I'm proud of I'm proud of this account, and proud of this, of what she's done, and she's got new music coming, and we can't wait to kind of bring the new Lauren into the world with this highly stylized brand,

Robert Plank 9:25 super cool. So she posted a lot of the personal stuff, because that's what she grew up with. And then you guys came in and said, Well, you need to kind of be more on brands. And so like, what sort of content is I mean, I don't, I don't have the page pull up right now, but what sort of content is there now? Or what was your thought process as far as what needs to stay, what needs to go?

Ariel Hyatt 9:47 We're really big believers in coming up with themes, so choosing four themes or five themes maximum for your social channels, which will help direct you in not being all over the place. Place. So in Lauren's case, obviously, she's a musician, so music, and her music is one of her themes. It's a very big one, of course. So that theme has a lot of facets, right? You could have yourself on stage singing. You could have a behind the scenes. What does it look like in the studio? Anything that has to do with her music, her album covers, announcements for gigs. So that was one category, a second category that we thought was really strong for her brand, is she really she's a young woman. She's gorgeous. So we thought, You know what? People love, selfies of you and photos that feature you. She's got this great red hair. So that's another theme. Is just her. A third theme for her is friends and family. She's really close to her family, and she loves her friends. So you'll see photos of her like hanging out with her friends and partying with her friends, and she went to the women's march with her friends, and you can see them doing things together, having dinner parties. It's a really nice camaraderie that's coming through. And then the fourth theme is Los Angeles. Living in Los Angeles, so she takes photos of the iconic palm trees and places around LA like photos of her in Hollywood and photos of her at the Getty Museum and around Sunset Boulevard. So, you know, places that are iconic, so that, if you're her at Disneyland, so if you're trying to understand, like, where is this person, it's very clear. So those are the themes that that we worked with with her. And it really works. It really it really works for her. And that might not be what everybody chooses. And what we did was we went back and we had her delete photos of maybe things that were not in those four themes, or things that felt like, you know, she has a newer look as she's gotten older. So maybe the photos that don't reflect that look. We deleted some of those. We deleted some private photos of like her, with her, you know, on family vacations and stuff like that. And she was very open to deleting, to deleting some of it, but some of it she wanted to keep. So I think it's totally up to you when you're deciding to take a new direction, what to leave and what to to move forward with

Robert Plank 12:28 awesome. So it's like this is making a lot of sense. Where you're you're not just taking over her social media. You're sort of working with her and saying, Well, we're educating her and saying, here's what you need to have in there, but then she can also have a little bit of a say to pick and choose. Like, are there some things that are maybe on the borderline edge that that she'll keep on? And so now I'm gonna be, I'm going to be looking at a lot of people's Facebook and Instagram and things like that, with sort of a new perspective, because before I wasn't really sure what I was looking at, but now I'm going to be thinking like, okay, what are their kind of four themes, or four or five themes that they're revisiting again and again? And so something that I'm always curious about with this social media stuff is how much of it is the creative, the fun, the intuitive part, and how much of it is the scientific part. Because I don't know about you, but some, sometimes they get driven sort of crazy when people talk about how much their their social media is automated, or they have to post on certain hours the day, or they've put all this time into like hashtag research or recycling content. So I mean, what are your thoughts on that? Like, how? How much do you depend on the tools and the research versus the sort of just thinking it through and being creative and the human part,

Ariel Hyatt 13:44 you have to understand the science and because you know, if you're going to get in the court, you got to play the game by the rules. So I think it is very important to understand that you can put 30 hashtags on an Instagram post. It's funny. So many of our clients, when they come to us, they have no idea that's even a thing, and it is good to know that if you post at two o'clock, it's better for your audience than at 10 o'clock, so that you can put yourself in what we call harm's way, but meaning so that you can be more effective. So we're not insane about that here, because I think there's another aspect to social media, aside from, you know what's the immediate gratification of how many likes or how many shares, or you know what exactly is happening in the moment, there's also what's the long term story that you're telling, what's the breadcrumb trail that you're leaving behind. If I scroll through 150 or 300 photos, or if I scroll through 150 or 300 tweets, what am I really getting? Because I think we don't just look individually at one thing at a time when we get into someone or something or some brand, we want to see everything that that brand is doing. So I. I think focusing, of course, on the science is very important, but also focusing on what's the larger picture here, what is the story? Because the thing that's cool, unless, of course, all social media changes the rules is, you can go back years and look at tweets that were sent in 2009 you know, so leaving the trail and making a narrative and honing the narrative for whatever happens as you move forward is really as important, we think, as getting the right kind of posts and getting the right time of day and the science. But yes, you need to know at least some of the science, or else you're not doing it right. So we like to balance it and not be super crazy. And because we're dealing with art and music, it's you market art and music differently than you market a lot of other goods or services or products. So I think there has to be an artistic sense to what to what type of content artists are creating.

Robert Plank 16:12 That makes perfect sense. And so what you said right there, at the end of the end there about how like, when you are dealing with like, you know, entertainers and people like that. It seems like social media is a much better fit, because you can get a little like, clip of a song or something and, like, try it out, and then go and buy it or check out the concert stuff. But is there any is there a more difficulty when you move into these other niches where maybe someone is a coach or trying to sell a course or a product or something like that.

Ariel Hyatt 16:44 Um, I think that there's strategies that definitely work in the coaching and in the other spaces that don't necessarily work with the music world. There's a lot of of course, all artists want to build their mailing lists, and it's really hard as a musician, like giving away a free mp three or four or five or 10, in a world where everybody has Spotify, is not a juicy offer, right? So teaching our artists about, you know, what is something that's intriguing. The thing about being a coach is you can give away an e book or a exclusive video or, you know, something that is educational. Musicians and artists aren't really here to educate. They're here to inspire us and have us pay attention to them in other ways. So it's, it's always been a challenge, and always been sort of my life work to figure out, like, how do we take what marketers say and do and change it around and alter it so that it works in a creative domain? So no we really do when we are working with coaches, or, right now, I'm working with a wonderful woman who's a stylist and she helps corporate executives really get their look. And you know Ted talkers, you know women that have maybe turned 40 or 50, and they they're a bit out of step with style. You know, I'm gonna market her very differently than I would market a musician, for example.

Robert Plank 18:19 Okay, great. So that makes a lot of sense. So what I'm hearing from you is that if in these other spaces, it's not necessarily that one has more of an advantage over the other, it's that, depending on the space, there are different tools that apply in others that don't.

Ariel Hyatt 18:35 That's 100% right. Cool.

Robert Plank 18:38 So as we're beginning to wind things down here, something I'm always curious are, is, like, about the super obvious but common mistakes where it's like, oh, I can't believe that I went that long, uh, with making that that, you know, making that mistake over and over again. So like, for example, something that I realized recently that I just can't believe I missed, was not linking to my Twitter account from my website. I think I had traffic coming to it from other places, but, you know, like on, like a in a blog footer, having those little social icons just I hadn't thought to go into that area of my settings and my theme to go and add that. So Does anything come to mind, as far as in this day and age, just any like common but obvious mistakes once we're aware of them that people out there making on social media.

Ariel Hyatt 19:24 That's so funny that you mentioned this. This is exactly why I wrote my most recent ebook, which is called Social Media tune up, because I couldn't believe, I still don't believe, every single time we go to someone's website, when we're doing an audit, we find a mistake exactly like the one that you're mentioning. Like people forgot to put a link to something, or they, they haven't been asking people to sign up to their newsletter on their social media. Or they, you know, they forgot to repurpose some amazing article that they got and post it frequently over the next year. You know, all of these like things so you. I, I don't, is there really one? Yeah, I think, I think the one that I would say would would be one to really think about is when you do get some hard earned publicity or accolades, or an article gets written about you, or you get featured, or your book gets into a top 10 list. Remember, that is great. PR, it's great to show that you got accolades, because people, of course, always believe what other people say more than they believe what you say. So the publicist part in Me can easily tell you, I see it all the time. I will go and Google a client while we're doing a social audit and say, oh my gosh, you were featured in Forbes The Huffington Post, and you tweeted about it once. Well, that tweet lasted for 45 seconds. Let's make sure that you're tweeting it often, so that it gets seen and noticed. Let's make sure it goes on your blog. Let's repurpose it all over your socials. Let's make sure you even include it in your next newsletter. It's amazing how we forget to connect the PR dots, so I'll add that one to the mix. And I think that we forget all kinds of things because there's so many moving parts and so many social channels to pay attention to. But the PR one is a big one. Even if you just get a little mention on someone's blog, you should be visualizing it and posting it.

Robert Plank 21:25 Yeah, and I flipped through your your ebook a little bit this morning, and what I liked about it is what you mentioned is that there's all those little bits and pieces that we forget, and sometimes we need to just go through the from start to finish, just go through the whole ringer and just see if we're missing things like caught something as simple as, like a contact page on our website, just little things like that, or like you mentioned, like, maybe it's useful to do that Google search of ourselves and find all the media appearances, find all the blog posts, and so that way we can get everything connected and just Maybe go through that every now and again, so that that way we know that people can find us and that we're kind of putting our best foot forward, and everything's on display there. So can you let us know people are listening here, and they made me perked up a little bit and gotten excited about the possibilities that they're missing, the things they need to be doing in social media? Can you tell us about some interesting resources, like how to get, maybe that ebook, or how to check out you and your websites, things like that? I'd

Ariel Hyatt 22:28 be delighted. So if you would like to get my ebook, you can visit social media, tune up, dot Arial hyatt.com, and if you want to read some of the 300 plus articles that I've written to help musicians come to cyberpr music.com and if you'd like to read just general articles that are more directed at business people that are not all music focused, Come to cyberpr.com

Robert Plank 22:59 super simple. So social media tuneup.rl, hyatt.com, cyberpr, music.com and cyberpr.com super fantastic. Well, I thank so much for stopping by and telling us about what we need to know about social media, even though sometimes there's disasters, sometimes there's ups and downs, the crazy things happen in the world with social media, but it seems like we can't ignore it. Everyone else is using it. That's how we're gonna reach our fans or customers and whatever niche we're in. So we'd be crazy to be missing out on this, and we'd be doubly crazy to get left behind on all the latest trends. And so everyone needs to check out those three websites, and that way you can be doing what you need to be doing on social media and getting the help you need, and that way, you can stay current and stay ahead of either your competitors or just stay ahead of the obscurity in general. So cyberprmusic.com, cyberpr.com Social Media tuneup.aureohit.com. And we'll see you there. Thanks so much Ariel for stopping by and sharing this great stuff with us today.

Ariel Hyatt 24:01 Thank you so much. That was fun, awesome.

Robert Plank 24:03 Same here. Please take a second to rate and subscribe to marketer of the day in the iTunes Store. It's free marketer of the day.com/itunes. You.