Welcome to the Virtual Antics Podcast, where we help entrepreneurs streamline their business to six figures and beyond. These short, sweet and info-packed episodes will inspire, educate and leave you feeling motivated to take one more step forward in your business. So put down your never-ending to-do list, because in this podcast, we are interviewing the best of the best in the entrepreneurial world as they spill their secrets to success. This podcast is sponsored by Nadora, the all-in-one software for entrepreneurs to grow their business, with unlimited landing pages, automations, emails and text campaigns, and so much more. I'm your host, natalie Guzman. Now let's get into it.
Speaker 1Hey, welcome back to the Virtual Insights Podcast. I'm your host, natalie Guzman. So excited. We have a really fun and interesting call ready for you guys today. I have Julia Black-Parrison on the call. She is the CEO of Stratus Creative Marketing. She's a marketing strategist who focuses on helping businesses improve their relationship with social media. Oftentimes, business owners are frustrated because social media marketing feels more like throwing darts at a dartboard than actual lead generation right? So by combining social media email strategies, julia and her team have created a lead generation formula that brings in more leads for clients and increases their revenue.
Speaker 2Welcome Julia. How are you doing today? Wonderful Thanks for having me, natalie.
Speaker 1I'm so excited because we're going to talk about one of my favorite subjects. I love marketing. That's why I built a marketing virtual assistant agency. It's definitely so interesting. There's so many different aspects, and I love that you have this strategy that combines social media and email. So how did you get? Started into the marketing world.
Speaker 2Yeah, so I actually like a lot of millennials.
Speaker 2I was working at a job that didn't have a social media marketer, and I was the youngest, and so I got put in charge of the social media because somehow we knew what we were doing, and so that's really how it all started. I came out of the nonprofit world, and in a nonprofit everybody does a little bit of everything, so I was never meant to be a marketer at the time, but I slowly self taught social media, then learn how to build websites, and then, when a job went south, I decided to go off on my own and try to build a business, and so I had three months of savings and I was like all right, that means you have three months to show that you have proof of concept. Like, can you even get one client? And I did still here, and within six months I was hiring my first contractor, and then after a year, she became my first employee, and so I celebrated six years in the biz, and so that has been awesome. Just to see how much my life has changed since then.
Speaker 1So that's awesome and I love that. It's like never the path that we planned. You know we think about like high school and college. They're like what do you want to be when you're older? Well, who says like a marketing strategist? Probably my daughter and I think that's like about it?
Speaker 2No Well, think that's like about it, no well. And that's the thing is. I feel like younger generations are finally like oh, I want to be a social media manager, but like when you and I were going to high school, like social media managers didn't exist, like that wasn't a job. Um, recently I talked to somebody who they said that when they after high school, they wanted to be a YouTube content creator and I was like, oh cool, have you started a YouTube channel? And she's like no. I'm like wow, that is the first. Like people don't go viral just automatically.
Speaker 1I was like I highly recommend starting now yeah, and the longer that you do something, the more likely you're going to be successful. I think about podcasters and they always say you know everyone. My first question from clients when they come to us for podcasting, they're like when do I get sponsors? I'm like the the like most podcasters have to be a podcaster for two years before sponsors will even consider them.
Speaker 2Yeah, and like you have to have the numbers to show it Like, and so I think, and you have to start like numbers to show it like, and so I think and you have to start like even we have that with clients with social media. They're like well, when will I hit 10,000 followers?
Speaker 2I'm like I have no idea like, let's get you started, see, like, how you're attracting followers. And then like, let's keep doing it, and then, once we're in it, I'll have a better idea of how fast this is gonna go, and even then it's very unpredictable.
Speaker 1So yeah, and think about it. You could have 10,000 followers, not have a single relationship or any one of them purchasing something, right? So would you say like building a relationship? Um, on social media is a really important part to your marketing strategies oh for sure.
Speaker 2I have, um, somebody in my network who has 150 followers but got a lead off of it made 10 grand from them. And I have other clients who have 20,000 followers and are not making any money. And so I think there's like a really popular misconception that, like, more followers equals more money, and that's not true. More followers, more followers, equals more money, and that's not true. More followers actually generally equals more problems. Um, because you have more opinions to handle, like you can come under fire for things that you say if they're not your tribe um, or if they're not your um, your group, um, your people, and so I think there's that misconception that, um, oh, I have to get more followers. There's an advantage to having more followers. Like, I won't say that there's not, but I think that, no matter what, whether you have 150 or 10,000, if they're not the right followers, they're not going to do anything for you.
Speaker 1So yeah, 100 and it's so so much harder. I feel like you, you can grow really fast only up to some point, and if you want to take it further, you have to have a relationship with your viewers, and that's what the people I feel like that's gone viral, um, like they show up on their stories, they show up on lives, they're showing up in their daily content and so that all showing up is just the first part of a relationship, right, I think about it like dating, and so you know you can show up to every date, but you're not messaging them in between and, like you know, really learning more about them and asking them questions. You not just talking, you know it's not really going to go anywhere.
Speaker 2For sure I went to oh, I was just going to add on to that I went to a virtual summit that Facebook held last year, um, and in it they talked about um, multipliers, and so multipliers are like okay, if you're doing Instagram feed, instagram stories, instagram reels, it's like the different types facebook themselves, meta said the more multipliers you do, the more our algorithm likes you. So if you, if you are like in a place where you're like, my social media is just proof that my business is alive, by all means do what you gotta do and no more, but like, if you're trying to grow, the more of those multipliers that you can add on meta itself, then it will reward it. So it's just a quick tip from the, from the social gods, social media guys.
Speaker 1I love that. Yeah, and I've noticed that too, like I've been showing up in stories a lot more and I haven't had like on. I haven't really been trying to grow my Instagram.
Speaker 2But since I started doing for stories and Facebook.
Speaker 1Um, I had, like, no new followers unless I was like me, unless it was someone I knew, yeah, um, and now, all of a sudden, I'm showing up. I'm basically not even posting on my feed and I'm getting followers well, and that's the thing is.
Speaker 2I think that stories feel private and like this, I think stories also build better relationships. Um, because it feels private. You're popping into people's dms, they're getting to see, like um, more like raw footage or real footage rather than like something that's curated for the feed, and I think that people appreciate that more so yeah.
Speaker 1I love it and that way people can get to know me too, because it also helps, kind of like with the friends and family stuff, right, because I'm a really busy entrepreneur and so I don't always tell my family what's going on. But they know they can hop on my stories and find out. Totally, totally agree. Yeah, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see um people make on social media?
Speaker 2um, one of them is, um, the lack of consistency. Like I see a lot of posting, ghosting is like a common like thing that you hear in our industry. Um, social media also rewards consistency. Um, the consistency doesn't mean multiple times a day, unless if that's what you need to do, um, but consistency means doing it regularly.
Speaker 2Um, I think the other thing, um, and one of the big mistakes that I see is businesses see, okay, so-and-so is successful. I need to do exactly what they're doing. That's like not correct. You need to figure out, like, what your goals are and then a strategy to get there, because I have a lot of people who are like, hey, all these influencers are doing this, and I'm like you're a mom and pop store on main street, like you are not an influencer, you do not need to be doing what influencers do. And I think that when we compare ourselves and then um borrow from other people's strategies rather than creating our own, um, we end up burning ourselves out too, because then we end up doing way more than what we actually have to do that's a really good point.
Speaker 1I see that in website design all the time.
Speaker 2People are like.
Speaker 1I just had someone recently. They're like I love Tony Robbins website.
Speaker 2I want to do it just like him.
Speaker 1So, tony Robbins, he attracts, you know, entrepreneurs, mainly right or high level executive. This person was her target market was young women that are trying, just trying to get their toes into business, but they're also primarily African-American and I was like, Ooh, those are two different target markets.
Speaker 1I was like his looks really pretty but is it really going to do what you need it to do? And I think that's a really good point. And it kind of goes the same into like the emails, right? I know a lot of people will forward me emails and be like I like how this person did it, I like how this person did it, but you're not. You're using their voice and not yours.
Speaker 1And also, like you said, everything should be based on your goals, and that's actually something I preach on websites is like, whatever your goal is, your website should reflect that. Um, yeah, so that's a really website should reflect that. Yeah, so that's a really, really good point. And then so how do you use social media and email marketing to kind of really help with your marketing efforts?
Speaker 2Yeah, so we. So I, like I said I've been doing like this for six years and started just as like a social media manager and realized that a lot of my clients were not happy with the results. I think one of the biggest, hardest problems with social media is attribution. Like it's really hard. Social media ends up being a lot of brand awareness and in order to have attribution, you need to have things like, like your Google Analytics need to be set up really well, like you need to be having UTM links, all of these things that, like just regular business owners aren't thinking about and they shouldn't have to. And so we started realizing, like our clients weren't very happy, so we brought in ads, not just any kind of ads, we brought in lead gen ads. So, basically, we're trading an asset, usually a PDF, video series, something that's really valuable to the customer, like the end customer, we're setting that up as a download. So for all of us listening, like, if you have ever been on instagram or facebook, and you get an ad that says, hey, I have this free pdf, that's what we're setting up for our clients and we're basically telling meta facebook and instagram um, hey, we only want to pay for emails like that's what we want. We don't want to pay for viewers, we don't want to pay for, like it, going through people's feeds. Give us the emails of these people, um, and so we can use targeting to find those people, um, and so we're trading emails for the pdfs.
Speaker 2Most of our emails, like most of our clients, are getting new leads, those new emails, for all of them are getting it for less than $5. But most of them are getting it for just under $2. So it's kind of like a gumball machine, like you can say Okay, now I got these many emails for this much money, how many emails do you want? And you can start working backwards. And so then we actually send out follow-up email marketing because, just like we were talking about social media creating relationships and stories, I think email also helps create relationships. There's something about the privacy of your email and letting somebody into that, and so that's how we do. It is. We're using social media to do proof of life, showing expertise, attracting people, um, then we're running ads to get new contacts and then we're following up with those contacts via email marketing, and since we've started doing that, our clients have seen better results, which makes them happier, um, but it still, lets us keep doing what we love, which is social media.
Speaker 1so oh, that's awesome, I love that. And under two dollars, uh for roi is amazing.
Speaker 2So roi for those listening, don't know.
Speaker 1Is return on investment? Um, those type of like metrics and things are really really important when it comes to social media. Like julie was saying um, but under two dollars is actually really really good, yeah I will say, oh, go ahead. I was gonna say we've seen it like as high as like 50, sometimes like with, especially, I feel like sometimes the niche, if you especially, yeah, the niche industries, it's definitely like a little bit higher. Um, oh, like I'm talking about like the super, super niche, like yeah, um, well, we have like we do.
Speaker 2I did want to like add a disclaimer. Like I do have one company that it costs $25 to get them a lead, but it's like an energy company in Idaho, so like who wants to really sign up for an energy company?
Speaker 1not very many people like um.
Speaker 2Or we had one client who for a while she, um, she is a floral designer and only wants to target like within 20 miles of her zip code and so that was such a tiny audience. It cost it cost like five dollars a piece, so still like around our average but, um, definitely on a more expensive end. But for people who are running online businesses that you can, that you're coaching or that you're trying to reach every like everybody in the United States, like in Canada, those do really really well because you can. You can have a large enough geographical area that you can get a large enough audience.
Speaker 1Yeah, and you know something that we haven't really talked on the podcast I think would be beneficial, so maybe you could talk on it, but it's sample size. Can you kind of explain what that is and how it's beneficial?
Speaker 2Yeah. So, like, your sample size is going to be really important, because if you have, like a smaller group, um, all of your costs to reach them are gonna go up. Um, if you have a bigger group, all of your costs to reach them is gonna go down because you have that bigger sample size. And so that is really really apparent in um, in ads. And I want to say, like that doesn't mean that you shouldn't niche, like that, you shouldn't like have a smaller sample size audience like that's not, that's irrelevant. Like if that's what you're doing, like keep doing it because somebody needs to serve that niche. But on the same wavelength, like if you have an audience so large, sometimes you can't really speak to the specific needs.
Speaker 2And so I think it's important, like as business owners and marketers, to kind of figure out, okay, who do I want to serve, but also, how much is it going to cost me to reach them? Mainly because we don't want to be surprised, like when people are like oh gosh, like that's $25, a new lead, and I'm like, okay, but let's think about this Like you are in this small geographical area, it's mostly country, um, or countryside. So, like people, your, your sample size, your group is going to be smaller, um, because I think otherwise we're just going to end up being surprised about things that, um, I think otherwise we're just going to end up being surprised about things that we could have expected.
Speaker 1So, yeah, a hundred percent. And I also say you know, never give up on a tactic when you have are only testing a small sample size. So say you even have a very low budget, so you're only trying to do like five. I have a lot of clients come to me and they're like $5 a day and I'm like, okay, don't expect to have results until we have at least like two to three months, because we need a big enough sample size to see what's working, what's not, to see if we have to change a landing page, see if we have to change, you know, the wording of the ad or the look or the feel. So I feel like a lot of people give up and they're like, oh't working, but they only based on they only reached maybe 100 people and I feel like for sure, more people you reach, the better understanding you have of what's
Speaker 2working no, I agree, and I think, like we say similar things to our clients, I think on the flip side, we also have clients who are like here's 10 grand, can you go spend it in two weeks? And I'm like no, that's dumb. Like let's, let's take a couple weeks and like a quarter of that budget to test, and then like let's go spend the rest of it. Because the same way, like, if you're like test, I feel like marketing is half art, half science, like, and so half art, half science and then another half of math, like, and so I think that we have to test things, but you don't want to blow your whole budget on testing. But also, if your budget is tiny, it's just going to take longer. So I think like you have to think about, like the more money I have, the faster I can test, um, but like I've seen a lot of people blow their budgets on something that didn't work because they didn't test, and then afterwards they were like, oh shoot, that didn't work, like so, yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1We just had a scenario. So also trust the people that you hire and like from start to finish. Don't bring them in halfway it's you're going to save so much time money when you bring in like a higher expert, like Julia. So that way it's start to finish. Because we had someone come in and they they kind of had their idea of the landing page and they're like this is how I want to do, it do exactly how I'm saying, and so they didn't get the expert opinion of us. So we did exactly how they did. We ran their ad. They had 257 clicks and only four signups. That tells me the landing page was definitely where it was dropping off Right Because the ad worked. It got our clicks and it was. It was only like um a hundred dollars budget too.
Speaker 2So it wasn't. It was actually clicks and it was. It was only like um $100 budget too.
Speaker 1So it wasn't, it was actually that's amazing. Yeah, so 257 clicks off $100 budget. I was like awesome, that's amazing. And then the but only having four signups. I was like that's a landing page issue. So luckily we went in and we just like completely redid it and now it's the ads are working great but, yeah, and AB testing too. Can you explain what AB testing is?
Speaker 2Yeah, so AB testing, we use it a lot for ads.
Speaker 2That's where we're creating. When we do it for ads, like we're basically putting up, okay, the same image but different captions, or the same caption but different images, like it goes all the way back to like grade school, when we learned, okay, like what's what works better, but like we have to have like a control, um, and so like we have our variables and our controls, um, and so we can see, um, which graphics attract people more, which captions speak to people more. You can do it with email, you can do it with websites, like you can do it with email. You can do it with websites, like you didn't do it with anything really, and you could do it from with websites. You could do like two weeks with one type, two weeks with another type. You could also do ads that go to like either one and see which ones perform better. There's so many different ways to do it and I think that when we don't do it, we're missing out on being able to optimize what's going to work best 100%.
Speaker 1We actually just talked about this in depth in our Nadora Facebook group, which I know a lot of you guys listening are in. So that's awesome. We love you guys. But we went in depth on this because a lot of people were changing multiple things at once and we're like no, how do you know what's working, what's not?
Speaker 1I was like you got it. I love that. You said two weeks this and two weeks that you have to change it. Wait, look at the data and then change something else. It's not a get rich quick thing. It's not like instant result. You are going to continue to be improving.
Speaker 2Totally, and it goes back to the idea even with ads like if you have a budget to do testing, you can test faster. If you don't have the budget to do testing, it's going to take more time, because you could absolutely build two pages, run ads to them and then test it that way and you could figure out your results in a week. But you have to have the budget to do that. And so I think that that's where there's some confusion, where some people can get their testing done quickly because you're right, like you only want to change one thing at a time. But if you can test it for two days with a budget and then change another thing, you could do that whole process faster. But you have to have the eyes to see it, and so that's why I usually do things for at least two weeks If there's not budget behind it.
Speaker 1That's a really really good point. So where can we find more about you and your services? Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2So come and visit us on Instagram. That's where we spend most of our time. It's Stratos Creative. It's S-T-R-A-T-O-S. Our website is stratoscreativemarketingcom. Yeah, that's where we, but really Instagram is like where we hang out the most. Like, you can see all of our staff, we can see our pets. You can see, like like we, a lot of us travel while we work, and so you can see a lot of those adventures. So we'd love to have you over there Awesome.
Speaker 1I'll make sure I put all that in the show notes as well, but thank you so much, Julia, for coming. It has been so much fun and we will talk to you guys next time on the virtual antics podcast.