In episode 8 of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast, hosts Greg Shuey and Laurel Teuscher dive deep into the nuances of e-commerce marketing, emphasizing the critical importance of customer research, engagement, and tailored marketing strategies for scaling brands cost-effectively. The episode serves as a follow-up to previous discussions, particularly focusing on the metaphor of “fishing in ponds” to describe the process of meeting potential customers in online spaces where they are most active.
Video Replay
Key Takeaways
The Importance of Customer Research and Engagement: The conversation highlights the critical role of understanding your ideal customer’s needs, pain points, and buying journey. Engaging with customers where they spend time online, such as forums or social media platforms, is crucial for identifying opportunities to address their needs and preferences effectively.
Utilizing Tools for Audience Research: The use of specific tools like post-purchase surveys, Google Analytics, and SparkToro is emphasized for uncovering where your audience spends time online. These tools help in identifying “ponds” or communities where potential customers are active, enabling targeted marketing efforts.
Content Creation Based on Audience Insights: Producing content that answers frequently asked questions and solves common problems is recommended. This approach involves engaging with the audience on various platforms without directly promoting products, instead focusing on adding value and building relationships.
Iterative and Platform-Specific Ad Strategies: The discussion underscores the need for custom ad strategies that cater to the unique characteristics of each platform. It involves an iterative process of testing and refining ad concepts based on platform-specific audience behavior and preferences.
Engagement and Relationship Building: A significant portion of the conversation is dedicated to the importance of genuinely engaging with online communities and building relationships. This includes participating in discussions, providing insightful comments, and creating content that addresses the interests and needs of potential customers without appearing promotional or salesy.
Hey everyone, welcome to episode 8 of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast. I’m super stoked to be with you today. Laurel is back with us. I know she is stoked as well. Actually, I can never really tell when she’s stoked. She’s got a super good poker face, hey, she’s actually got a smile on, so that’s fantastic. So if you need a reminder or if you missed our last episode when Laurel was on, she is our awesome VP of services here at Stride. So basically, she’s an e-commerce wizard or she’s a woman, so she’d be a witch, but an e-commerce witch how about that? That’s really aggressive. So we’re going to be sticking with wizard. She’s an e-commerce wizard. She loves it. She loves it so much.
So Laurel joins us once a month to talk about things that are working and that are not working for our clients here at Stride, and she has so much experience and so many insights to share, which is why I have her on so often. So if you listen to episode 3, we specifically talked about customer research and we talked about data mining and why it’s absolutely critical for an e-commerce brand Intimately knowing your ideal customer what their problems are, what their pain points are and what their unique buying journey looks like is really, in our opinion, the only way to scale your brand cost effectively, because you can keep dumping cash into Meta, into Google, and you can get some pretty good returns there. But if you’re not going out and actively trying to figure out where your ideal customer is the ones that have higher average order value, the ones that have greater customer lifetime value it gets really difficult to scale your brand and to stay profitable. So today’s discussion is going to be a follow-up to that. We are going to be talking about phishing in ponds and meeting your potential customers where they spend time online, meeting them where they are. So you might be confused by that statement and I can’t remember where I heard it originally, but for some reason it’s really stuck with me and what it means is like the pond is the place or the community where your people hang out. So if you think about a pond, it’s usually stocked with fish, especially early in the season, and the fish are your ideal customers.
So if you’re familiar with fishing, there’s rainbow trout. We have a lot of rainbow trout here in Utah. If you’re going to go fishing for rainbow trout, you are not going to catch them out in the middle of the ocean or even in specific reservoirs or specific lakes. You are going to catch them exactly in the rivers and the lakes that they hang out in. So that’s the very same concept with marketing you can go out and you can spend a lot of money on Meta. Chances are your customers are on Meta, but are those ones that are going to have the high average order value, high customer lifetime value? Are those the ones that are on Meta? Maybe, but there could be other ponds and places out there online where those high value customers hang out online, and so that’s what we’re really going to talk about today. So, laurel, I’ve prepped a couple of questions to guide our conversation today. Are you ready to jump in?
Laurel Teuscher
Yeah, let’s go.
Greg Shuey
Awesome. So the first question that I have are what kind of tools can you use to research and uncover where your audience is at?
Laurel Teuscher
Yeah, last week or the last episode, I guess that we were on it was the last week we talked about focus groups being a really great spot to, or surveys in order to interview your customers.
So, like I just want to reiterate and hit on that again that that’s a really that’s a good place to start to find out where your customers are. But if you’re like me, I’m a total introvert. I really struggle to talk to people and like engage with them, so I prefer to play like a detective and just start looking at some data to try and lead me to those places. So a couple of tools that I like to use the first is no commerce or like any post purchase survey that you can have and you can determine where a customer like they’ll share with you where they remember you from. So maybe they came directly from an email source, but they first saw your business or they remember it from a meta add on Instagram. Now their memory may not be super reliable, but it’s just a really good starting point is hearing what customers think is their, their place, that’s where they first saw you and that’s a place for you to fish.
Greg Shuey
So I talk about no commerce a lot. I mean, we probably talked about them on half of our podcast episodes. I talk about them all the time on LinkedIn. I live in no commerce. It’s one of my tabs that’s up. I find it to be like the most fascinating data and one of my favorite things to look at inside of no commerce are all of the responses that come under the other option. So that first question on that post purchase survey that we typically ask is where did you first hear about us? And the responses that people put in are awesome.
So one of our clients who sells baseball equipment we, we did a pretty extensive research study for them and we use no commerce to supplement a lot of that data. And we learned that there were several influencers, several vloggers. Do we still call them vloggers like video bloggers? I don’t even know, I’m old, that’s what we used to call them, who knows? And then there were several forums where people were discussing their brand and discussing their product.
When we brought this to their attention, they literally had no idea that these people were talking about them. It wasn’t like they seeded these influencers or these video bloggers with product to talk about them. It was just happening organically and we didn’t know that either, right, but it opened up some opportunities to go and to have some discussions about Sponsoring them, seeding them with additional product to review and so forth, and it it can be a very powerful tool to kind of unlock those, those pools, those places where your, your ideal customer spends time on yeah, see, I love that that it wasn’t just this tool that you went and looked at and that we kind of just sat on that information Saying, okay, that’s great it was.
Laurel Teuscher
Then. Okay, let’s go out and have discussions with these influencers and talk to them about when or what we could do to get more product into their hands so that we can get more people Aware of our clients products and their store and get them to make that first purchase magic is in the follow-up.
Yeah for sure. So the second tool that I love to use is actually just Google Analytics referral traffic sources. I like to find the blog posts that are driving traffic to the website, or consistently. A lot of times there’s like blog posts that was published years ago or like a year ago and it just continues to drive traffic a little bit of traffic or a lot of traffic, depending on if it gets promoted on the front page or whatever and A lot of times it can be like a roundup blog post, where and a roundup blog post is when they list out like a bunch of different products.
You’ll see it around Mother’s Day, like best gifts to give to a mom for Mother’s Day or something like that and you’ll see them on places like you know. I mean Buzzfeed will do it, publications, but Oprah’s list will do it, cnn real simple, like these publications love to do these roundups and link to Specific products. So if you can find those traffic sources, you can say okay, a lot of our readers and traffic that’s coming is From real simple. So what do we have to do to find those people? Find out where they’re also living, so we’re talking about our products, so that we can engage with them?
Greg Shuey
And a lot of times they don’t tell you but they just write it up and they post and so if you’re not in that section of your Google Analytics looking at that on a monthly basis, you could miss some of these opportunities.
Laurel Teuscher
Yeah, spark Toro is another really really cool tool that’s been around for a while.
Greg Shuey
That if you want to do some audience research, that’s a really great place to start so most people I’m gonna chime in here again Most people that I talked to have never heard of spark Toro. Really, it’s kind of this really cool tool that’s flying under the radar. If you’ve ever heard of Rand Fishkin, if you’re an SEO person like me, he started the, the business Moz, and they have a really awesome suite of SEO tools. When he left, he took some time off and then he started working on spark Toro and it’s a really awesome audience research tool. So you know, the first thing that you do you can sign up for a free account. It doesn’t give you all of the data, as a paid account would, but it still kind of gives you a really good starting point.
What you do is you start by entering a keyword or a topic that your audience Uses, whether that’s for a Google search or whatever. So I went just ran an example last night as we were prepping for this For this episode, and I use the word journals. So in their database it shows that there are almost 1,000 people who talk about journals online. So from there you can drill down further and you’ll be able to see which social media accounts they follow most. You’ll also be able to see which websites they visit most often. You’ll see what podcast they listen to. You can also see what press accounts they read, like New York Times and, and that will really give you a handle on where you need to be spending time and where you need to be trying to add to the conversation.
Maybe you can sponsor one of those podcasts, maybe you can run some native outbrain or tabula, native ads on the New York Times. Maybe you need to figure out if you can write a guest blog post and get it published on one of those blogs, and there’s just so many ways that you can leverage this, this kind of data, and there’s just all of these niche tools out there that that that can help you do that research. And this kind of ties back into my next question for you, laurel, is Once you know all of these places, once you found all of these pools where your ideal customer hangs out, how do you organically jump into the discussion and initiate Conversations? Because you can look really spammy and really Sellsy really fast. So how do you go about that and do it in a way that doesn’t feel like dirty, doesn’t feel slimy?
Laurel Teuscher
That’s really hard to do when, when you’ve got like a focus on yourself and your products and that you’re wanting to sell. But I have to start out and say that hardly any brands that we talked to actually do this, and and here’s a few reasons why. One, it takes a lot of time. Two, it takes a lot of effort and they’re just really busy trying to scale their business. But by doing this, like jumping into discussions, initiating conversations, you can create so many opportunities that you really can’t ignore. That can lead to social content, blog content. I mean so many things that will support all of your marketing efforts. So let’s talk about engaging first. Engaging is really just taking those opportunities to jump into the conversation, not to sell, but to just engage in ad value. So let’s say that you find out that there’s a forum message board, maybe even Reddit, that you have a lot of customers on that are talking about not necessarily your brand or your product, but are talking about something that your product can help with or support, and so you just might spend time answering questions, not promoting your business, but providing some insights to the conversation, what might be helpful. You may even start asking questions to see what kind of response you get from the people that are there For a blog. You could write an engaging comment on a blog post that you read from somebody, not again as a way to drop a link, but just to give a comment and engage with that blogger. You could go to a social media account and you can start commenting on their posts. I’ve actually noticed this. A ton on TikTok that I’ve been on there is brands will start commenting as the brand on other people’s posts and not in a come, look at me or trying to be snarky. They’re honestly trying to just engage. You can also reshare posts. You can tag them and then you can just add your own context or commentary on it.
There’s podcasts. So you listed Spark toro. We’ll tell you podcasts to go to. You can reach out and build a relationship with a podcast or not in a hey, I want ads or I want to be a guest. Don’t come at them straight just being like can I be a guest? But you can ask them questions, learn about their audiences and, yeah, maybe ask if you could sponsor them. I bet a podcaster would love to be a sponsor. So again, it’s engaging, not to get what you want, but seeing how you can help that person and then, once you’re building that relationship with a podcaster, typically they’ll naturally want to invite you to be a guest, because they are sometimes desperate to find qualified guests, and so your outreach, that relationship, is a natural way to start talking about that opportunity. But you don’t go insane. I need this opportunity. Give it to me. You’re looking to help them.
So, as you do these things, those individuals that are behind these threads, the sites, the podcast episodes, the social account, they’ll start to engage with you. They’ll see you because they’re seeing everybody Like, just like your business sees who’s commenting on your stuff. They’ll see it and they might start sharing your stuff. They might start responding to your comments. It just starts this organic snowball effect and it just takes off.
So let’s talk about the next step, which is actually creating content that speaks to them. I talked about commenting. That’s really like micro content or that’s just like commenting, answering questions, but then there’s this micro content that really helps people. So this is where you have to take time to pay attention to the questions that people ask over and over again, because they do. They’re asking it in different ways, but really they’re asking the same question, and then what you do is you go back and you produce content that answers those questions and solves the problems. This content you can make it as a blog post, you can do a podcast, you can do a video on YouTube, like whatever the medium is that you feel is strongest for your brand, is the channel that’s like most important for you, but then take that and use it to answer people’s questions and then link out to a really good resource. You’re not trying to sell them on your product, you’re just helping and you’re adding value within that space.
Greg Shuey
Yeah, I like that and you already know this about me. But I do a lot of this for my aftermarket truck part company. That’s actually how I started the company. I sell aftermarket parts for Tacomas and Tundras and I just started in the Toyota Tacoma forums Before I even had a product. I just got on there and I started just watching and listening to people and seeing what they were complaining about and seeing what problems they had, and then I started joining the conversation. I started answering questions and then that eventually led me to start to build content that answers those questions.
And so if you visit my website, you’ll be able to see just these really long form blog posts that I wrote that answers these very specific questions that keep coming up over and over and over again in the forums. And I’ve gotten to the point that I’ve built so much cloud in that forum that it’s no big deal for me to hop in and say, hey, I actually wrote a blog post. So it’s a little bit more self promotion, but I’m not trying to sell. It’s like I actually wrote a blog post that solves this problem. You should check it out and drop a link in there.
Over time that’s evolved to me taking all of that blog content and building out video assets that I then put on YouTube and I can reference those, I’ll drop links to those as well which helps fuel the YouTube algorithm as we get more views and more likes and more shares and comments, and it all just again, like you said, just kind of snowballs, just organically snowballs over time. But you have to put in the work and you have to have someone internally. It’s really difficult to hire an agency Like we don’t we don’t do this very often for our clients. It’s very difficult for an agency to be able to do that and have that deep subject matter expertise. You have to have someone internally who has that knowledge and doesn’t sound just like a sneaky marketing person or a sneaky sales person. They have to know what they’re talking about and they have to be able to add value. And again, that’s really where the magic like really happens.
Laurel Teuscher
Can I like jump in because I have to say right now there’s a big thing in the SEO community because Reddit’s taking over search engine results pages, like for a lot of different e-commerce queries, and so a lot of businesses are like, okay, well, we’ll just jump into Reddit, Like we’ll hijack those, those posts that are ranking, and let’s just get links back to our products and they’re missing the whole point of why I think the algorithm is favoring. Well, there’s two parts to it. Number one the algorithm’s going to change. Reddit may not be ranking forever.
Greg Shuey
We’ll see, that’s what we hope, but that’s why I just read yesterday that Google and Reddit now have a strategic partnership in place. Yeah For AI they’re never going to remove them, it’s not good. Okay, I’m sorry, back to you.
Laurel Teuscher
No, no, but it’s okay. But like that’s totally the opposite of what we’re talking about is like not just going in for your own like to get products, like place to get the links back to build it, because people will see through it and they will rip you apart, like on Reddit. They’ll rip you apart on Twitter. They’ll rip you apart, like everybody will, they can smell.
Greg Shuey
A rat, they can smell you, yeah, yeah.
Laurel Teuscher
So, like, take these Reddit forums that are posts that are ranking and see what people are asking about and then create that content and then go back in and see, because when I did look at this, like those Reddit posts, a lot of them are from like two, three, four, five years ago and you can’t add a new entry into that.
Greg Shuey
Comments are closed.
Laurel Teuscher
Yeah, yeah, comments are closed. The threads are archived. So it’s like that, doesn’t you know? Good, like that plan, you’re now okay. So now I just need to go into this forum so really like take the time to engage and like I love what you said about making sure that it’s an expert an expert in not just the product itself, like a product manager, but like somebody who cares about whatever it is that these people are talking about.
Greg Shuey
Yeah, absolutely Okay. So that also kind of ties back into my next question, because we’re going to talk a little bit about Reddit. I’m going to talk a little bit about Reddit specifically. But how do you then, once you have these pools, how do you build a custom ad strategy for each platform? Because what works on Google may not work as well on Meta, may not work at all on Quora, may not work at all on a forum or whatnot. So how do you build that custom strategy?
Laurel Teuscher
So this is how like spending that time in the platform, in the forum where you want to launch ads, is really important because it comes back to talking about the problems that your customers have, that are talking, that they’re talking about on a regular basis. So spending time there gives you the messaging angles to try. So when you create ad campaigns for each site or platform, you build the creative and copy that then addresses the pain points or problems and just really showcases that way to alleviate the pain or solve the problem for them. So when we run ads on Google and meta, you’re just, we should just all accept this, this truth. Okay, this is a truth.
Greg Shuey
This is a truth bomb.
Laurel Teuscher
You’re probably not going to hit a home run with the very first ad you create and publish.
Greg Shuey
Maybe, maybe you might, but that’s very rare.
Laurel Teuscher
Maybe it’s rare. You’re gonna have to like, just iterate, and you’re gonna have to try different things in order to find the one that hits.
Greg Shuey
So, again, a good example of this is with Reddit. I’m gonna hop back in. I know that this isn’t e-commerce, so I’m sorry about that, but I recently ran some Reddit ads for Stride and the concept here applies to any kind of business, whether you’re a service business, lead gen business, whatever. Right, as we talked about, reddit’s a fickle little community, right? They can sniff out a rat. They can sniff out a business promoter like no one I’ve ever seen. They’re crazy over there. So because of this, I actually very rarely hop into discussions and a lot of like Laurel said, a lot of those threads are locked. They’re old, maybe not necessarily archived, but you can’t contribute to those conversations. So the only way that you can really insert yourself into those conversations and people reading those threads is to run ads, and ads are so cheap on Reddit. If you haven’t played with it, I totally recommend it.
But before I started running ads on Reddit for Stride, I spent hours and hours and hours just reading through threads and comments of what people were discussing to start by coming up with just a handful of ideas. So I took those ideas. I ran them through chat, gpt and I got about 10 ad concepts. So I took those I ran them. Only one worked okay. It wasn’t great, wasn’t mind blowing, so I took that one and then I had chat GPT come up with another 30 concepts and I had four really high performing ads. Then I did it again. I had another two winners from there. So I had six really high performing ads over three different tests that I ran on platforms, specifically to drive more newsletter signups for Stride.
So it’s all about regardless of platform, regardless of pool, it’s all about iterating and really being hyper specific to the platform, Because the ads you run on, like I said, the ads you run on Meta, may not work on TikTok, right, it’s a diff, maybe a different audience, but they’re there for different reasons, and maybe they are on Meta and they’re on Google for different reasons than they are on the Meta. And so it’s all about being hyper specific to the platform, hyper specific to the audience. And as I was doing this, right, my prompts to chat GPT weren’t just like. I just need some ads, right.
I made sure to be very, very specific to include. These ads are gonna be on Reddit. The people on this platform hate companies who promote and are overly salesy, and I need them to be very natural. I need them to be able to fit into this type of conversation so that it feels native and so that it feels non-threatening, and so you know it. Just, it takes some massaging, it takes some iterations and if you do it and you’re patient, you’re going to get clear winners that come out of that that you can double down on and really start accelerating your growth.
Laurel Teuscher
Exactly, I think a lot of marketers and e-commerce businesses are, one, not very patient and two, they’re scared to test. They want to hit that home run with their first ad, like period, like they wanna. Just they feel like they know their audience and therefore, you know, I know the ad. But I feel like in the last year there’s been this shift and a lot of e-commerce businesses or at least the ones that I think are gonna survive they’re learning that there’s just no way to predict what will work and so, like, taking that step back and looking at what’s performing definitely helps.
Yesterday I was in this meeting with a client and we were talking about some meta ads that were running for them, and once a month during our meetings, we like to look at the ads that we currently have running and just see how to iterate to make the next ad set better, like okay, what are we learning from these ads? Like which ones perform the best. And it’s really interesting because the way I lined it up to show them, I had these three ads side by side, they’re from the same campaign and I pulled the metrics in. The metric that they are most passionate about is ROAS, so I had an ad that had a ROAS of 39, 16 and a ROAS of eight. But I don’t like to stop with just ROAS, so I added what they add spend for that specific ad was what the revenue, how many purchases there were, so that we’re not just relying on one metric but we’re taking this bigger picture of performance. So they were looking at ROAS and they probably were like, okay, the ad with the ROAS of 39, that’s gonna be our winner.
Greg Shuey
Let’s go, let’s go hard.
Laurel Teuscher
Let’s go, yeah, but I’m like, okay, well, let’s look at it and that 39 ROAS had spent $10 and gotten one purchase. Okay, like I mean that’s great. But like when we looked at this other ad with a ROAS of eight, which is still really good, a ROAS of eight, metta was spending a lot more money on that ad and the total number of, or the amount of revenue coming in from that was so good and so, and that one, like it didn’t have a call to action on it, it did some of different things. So if you’re only looking at like one metric, you’re gonna miss the bigger picture. And that like to look at all of that really helped us.
And we started talking about, okay, like what’s the next iteration of this? What should we try to do? Because of what we’re seeing here and I think that’s where that magic happens of any custom ad strategy for any platform is, you know, maybe you could test the ads that are performing really well on Metta, on Google or TikTok, and then just see what it is and then say, okay, what did we learn from that, from all of the data? And let’s like try something new and try something different again. It’s really working and optimizing and iterating, and optimizing and iterating or something that marketers like to talk about, but I don’t know that clients love or businesses love to think about. But it’s my favorite part because that’s really where the ads perform well. You can have your ideas, but, like engaging with your audience, talking to them, being where they are and finding out what their issues are, is going to help you find more opportunities. And just like build that messaging to test that’s going to make your ads find success.
Greg Shuey
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Lots of good ideas in there, cool. So I mean, that’s pretty much a wrap for this week. It was a really great discussion. I think that, as we talked about at the beginning, like, these are things that most brands don’t either think about it all, or they think about it and they just can’t do it. They don’t have the time, they don’t have the resources to be able to knock it out. So I think it’s important to always talk about these things and show the value that they can bring to any kind of organization. So thank you, laurel, so much for being with us today and sharing those things with us.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
