Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Your go-to guide to organic marketing

Transcript

Your go-to guide to organic marketing · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:09
  Hello everyone, it's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's solo episode. Today I'm going to be chatting about something that's been top of mind recently, and that's the workshop Lisa Guerrera from Experiment Beauty hosted through Hype Club a few weeks ago.
• 0:30
  It was just so good and she shared so many pointers. So because I can't stop thinking about it, I wanted to share all the best bits with you guys. And you might notice that my voice is a little bit scratchy today. I came down with a nasty stomach virus that wiped me out for the whole of last week and
• 0:52
  And I'm still not 100%. And my voice is letting me down. I feel like this happened to me around the same time last year and it took forever to recover. So please bear with me. Okay. So for a little bit of context, every Wednesday, we host a virtual coffee chat through Hype Club. So all the founders can catch up in a chill environment to talk about what's going well, what's going not so well, and just life in general.
• 1:22
  And for a little bit more context, Hype Club is our private virtual network.
• 1:28
  We like to refer to it as the all-in-one resource for female founders who are building really cool e-commerce businesses. It's super valuable and I mean, I guess I'm biased, but I'm really proud of it. We've got such an awesome group of like-minded D2C founders in there right now. And it is such a dream to see the sisterhood of support for one another.
• 1:54
  Okay, anyway, I'm digressing. Let me get back to this workshop. Roughly once a month, we bring in an expert or a founder from the show in the DTC space to teach us about their area of expertise or give us some tactical lessons or provide strategies to level up in business. After Lisa was a guest on the show last month, I just knew she'd have so much to offer our Hype Girls. Okay.
• 2:22
  There's been a lot of chat about how to move forward with TikTok and organic marketing, and who better to learn from than the queen of Gen Z marketing herself. And oh my goodness, she went above and beyond for us. I'm so excited to share this with you. She covered virtual friends, creative collabs, fearless fundraising, and TikTok tactics. This is one for the savvy founders who are at any stage of their journey.
• 2:52
  The first thing I took away from the workshop is how common and even important it's become to make friends on the web. And the way to set yourself up for that is to dive into the content creation side of things. Being a content creator on your brand account and being front and center to the business sets the tone to catch all the eyeballs. Yeah.
• 3:14
  Hard facts here, hard truths. If you're not prepared to make content and dive into social media, it's going to be really hard for you to grow organically.
• 3:25
  The ideal situation here would be to start building your online presence well before it's time to launch, like as soon as you can. It's great to have platforms and audiences that you've already built that are totally relevant to the industry you're going into. And obviously it costs nothing. It's an investment in time, not in dollars. In today's world, this sets the stage to building those relationships.
• 3:53
  Lisa became friends with a lot of TikTokers and content creators through her now 50,000 strong TikTok account and with consistent interaction. At the end of the day, it really helps to come at people as a creator, overcoming at them as a brand. Building these relationships really helped when it came time to launch and she could call in some favors.
• 4:19
  Which brings me to a couple of nifty little tips Lisa shared for when that time comes to approach your online community. And this is the time when you should get a pen and paper to take some notes. Firstly, it's key not to ask too much right off the bat. Ask enough to get on their radar. Propose something that's easy to help with, something that will lay the foundation of that connection moving forwards.
• 4:45
  Secondly, it helps a lot to target someone influential in your niche, but to also ensure that that person is reachable and attainable. Your chance at a response will be higher and they'll be much more willing to help. And lastly, one for when you've built up a little bit of community is to hunt for those connections in your own follower list.
• 5:08
  Look through your Instagram stories and see who has a blue tick or check out anyone who has over a thousand followers and just reach out. They're already familiar with you. They already know what you're up to and they might just be interested in a connection or even working together in the future.
• 5:26
  It's these three simple steps that secured seven big influences to chat about experiments, hero product at the time of launch. So creating those relationships is the number one most important thing that you should be focusing on. And it's also relevant to every aspect of business.
• 5:46
  Okay, so I know what you're thinking. Content creation is all good and all well, but how on earth do we get started? Where do we get started? Especially when it comes to TikTok. It can be hard to know how to kick things off. And that's one of the main reasons I so, so wanted Lisa to come in and chat with our hype girls. What Lisa said it comes down to is actually a lot to do with what works for you.
• 6:14
  There is no right or wrong way to curate your content as long as it fits your brand essence and just fits you. And this reminds me of a chat I had with Youth4Ears' Fiona Chan, who was adamant that you should always create content in a way that makes life easier for yourself. Choose something that's easy for you to talk about and easy for you to fit into your day.
• 6:39
  And above all, keep in mind that you don't need to be a subject matter expert to do well on TikTok. You can show the behind the scenes, show random things happening to you throughout your day and give people access to a world they don't know about. On days you're feeling inspired, focus on high value content. On a low day, there's absolutely nothing wrong with churning out a quick meme or a quick trend related video. Mix it up and put yourself out there.
• 7:09
  There are just two hard rules you need to follow. The first one is being consistent. Consistency is absolutely key. Even if you're not posting every single day, although you probably should be, consistency is the secret sauce.
• 7:27
  And the second, number two, is don't burn yourself out. It's really, really easy to do that on TikTok and no one wins. And I have definitely been there and I can tell you it really sucks. It's hard to get back into it. Next, I want to talk about Lisa's final and burning hot tip on the organic marketing front and one that definitely got my interest when she mentioned it on the show, and that's collaborations. Collaborations.
• 7:55
  You can achieve an impressive amount by yourself, but holy moly, together we can do so much more. For experiment, this was tried and tested and proven to be the best way to grow their audience. So we've got TikTok down, Pat. How do we curate cool collaborations? You partner up with a brand that has customers that look and act like the customers that you're targeting. It's as simple as that.
• 8:24
  The goal is to approach a brand that's a little further on in the journey than you are. The result will obviously be more social clout, more credibility, and also more engagement. And there's a lot of opportunity here. In approaching your dream collab brand, the key is to focus on all the unique aspects that you bring to the table.
• 8:46
  If you're early on in the journey, don't feel intimidated because it doesn't always have to be more followers, more money or ad spend that gets you looking interesting. You can also focus on the theoretical and the philosophical and the look and feel.
• 9:03
  Experiment Beauty has an undeniable Gen Z cool factor, and that's exactly how they secured their collab with Topicals. So when you're thinking about collabs and who you should partner with, ask yourself what sets you apart, note it down, and lean into that.
• 9:21
  Lastly, in the workshop, we chatted a bunch about fundraising, and this was particularly interesting because Lisa was not originally such an advocate for it for herself. She much preferred the idea of bootstrapping over taking any external capital.
• 9:37
  But as you probably know, especially if you work in the D2C or CPG space, beauty is notoriously expensive. You need a lot of working capital. So that just wasn't going to work at any significant scale for Lisa. Okay.
• 9:54
  On top of that, her first attempt at fundraising was pretty traumatizing. But luckily, she learned a thing or two and ended up raising about a million dollars since then. And she was willing to dish out all the tips. During our workshop, she shared the two big things she took away from the experience.
• 10:14
  The number one thing was how to pitch. It is so important to craft your message in a way that it translates your story in the way you intend. And it takes practice. You need to do the pitch in front of as many people as possible, iterate, do it again.
• 10:32
  And secondly, and dare I say more importantly, she networked her butt off. The 50 to 75 investors she spoke to the first time around might not have put in any capital, but they liked her. And we should never underestimate how powerful that is. In combination, Lisa broadened her fellow founder network and she was hanging out at co-working spots and hitting up fellow founders in the space for other connections.
• 11:02
  So with this behind you, putting yourself in the right room and talking to the right people, you've got yourself a pretty sweet recipe for success and a whole new world of opportunities that might just open up. Okay, this brings me to the end of something I truly believe to be the smartest thing you can do for yourself and your business today.
• 11:25
  Whether it's through your social media presence, collabs or fundraising, relationship building is now more than ever the most important thing to do. Relationship building is not algorithmic. An iOS update cannot take that away from you and it will open up a whole new world of possibilities. So get out there and start networking, start meeting people and start building those relationships.
• 11:53
  Okay, that's all for today. Thank you for bearing with me and my croaky voice. Thank you so much for listening. And I hope you got as much out of Lisa's workshop as I and our hype girls did. If you are gutted that you missed this one, you are still in luck because all of our workshops are recorded and stored in our resource bank, accessible to all members of hype club forever. You can find the link to the club in the show notes or check out our website for all the details.
• 12:23
  And as always, if you're on your phone listening to this episode, take a quick screenshot of the podcast and share it to your Instagram stories or leave us a review in your podcast app to help others find us. And of course, you are always welcome to slide into my DMs or my inbox to chat. I absolutely love meeting you guys and learning about what you're up to.
• 12:45
  You can reach me at dunrosheen on Instagram, which is D-O-O-N-E-R-O-I-S-I-N. See you next week. Bye.
• 13:12
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 13:37
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 13:59
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