Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Robert
[00:00:04]
Hey eCommerce marketing podcast list. I wanted to let you know that we have created 16 eCommerce marketing videos for you. You can download these free videos by visiting eCommerce marketing podcast.com/videos. Or by texting the word videos to plus 1 4 8 0 4 1 8 1 4 1 11. These step by step video marketing tutorials will teach you how to drive more traffic to your eCommerce website. How to get more back links to your eCommerce website and how to optimize your website to get more paid customers. Get the videos right now by visiting eCommerce marketing podcast.com/videos or by texting videos to plus 1 4 8 0 4 1 8 1 4 1 1. On today’s episode, we will be talking to Laura Roeder from Edgar. This is the eCommerce marketing podcast episode 16. Welcome to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Today’s guest is Laura rodder. She is the founder of Edgar and it’s a new social media automation tool. It’s designed to prevent updates from going to waste since 2009. Laura has been teaching entrepreneurs how to harness the power of social media, social media marketing, and create their own fame at L KR social media. Welcome to the podcast, Laura, how you doing?

Laura
[00:01:32]
Thank you, Robert. I am happy to be here.

Robert
[00:01:34]
Okay. And for those people who don’t know about you, can you just give a brief background and introduction about how you got into social media, what you do and yeah, just a brief introduction.

Laura
[00:01:51]
Yeah. So I’m the founder of Edgar. We are a social media marketing and automation tool, and I’ve been in the social media space for as long as it’s been around. I’ve explored lots of different business models, but always stayed within social media marketing. So I started working for myself as a freelance web and print designer, and I was making websites for my clients. And around 2007, 2008, they started asking me about social media. You know, they had heard about Facebook and Twitter and that you could use it for a business and to drive traffic to your website. So I was kind of giving them advice on that. And then people kept telling me, you know, you could get paid just to give people advice about social media. And I thought that sounded a lot easier than building a website for them. So I thought, okay, cool.

Laura
[00:02:39]
I’ll, I’ll go with that. That sounds like a great career. So in 2008, I switched over to doing social media consulting and that quickly turned into social media training, putting together online courses, teaching small business about how to leverage social media marketing. And then in 2014, we took the ideas that we were teaching and built a tool to do them automatically, which is Edgar ideas like repeating the same content so that it can get seen by more people getting a good mix of links back to your site and promotions and other people’s content. So Edgar does all that automatically. So I’ve been in the, the social media software business for about a year and a half now.

Robert
[00:03:21]
Okay. And since you’ve been in, you’ve been in social media for, I guess, about seven years professionally, what type of successes have you seen with, or do you have any case studies that can just show why automating or working with social media can actually help a business increase their revenue?

Laura
[00:03:43]
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, you know, when people ask me about how does social media really help a business, I love to point to shark tank. So do you, do you watch shark tank Robert or are

Robert
[00:03:55]
You a shark? I’m yeah, I’m a big fan of shark tank. I always watch it every Saturday. Yeah. And yeah, I, I definitely enjoy shark tank and yeah, it’s a really, really great show. I show that all entrepre should definitely be watching.

Laura
[00:04:10]
Yeah. So I, I love it too. And you know, one of the cool things about shark tank is every so often a business comes on and you know, the sharks are like, I remember one was baby moccasins and the sharks are like, all right, you make baby moccasins, you know, have you actually sold any, and then people will come on and they’ll be like, oh yeah, we sold, you know, $5 million where the baby moccasins last year. And it’s like, oh my God, how could you possibly do that? You know, you don’t have funding, you started out of your garage. And every time the answer is we did it through social media. You know, we started posting on Instagram, we’d set up Pinterest boards. We started this Facebook account and people found us and people started buying from us. I mean, social media is how you get exposure as a small business, a business without a big budget to use for advertising.

Laura
[00:04:59]
So I always think those stories are, are so cool. And one of our customers [email protected]. They actually make an app for sharing your experience with the wine you’re drinking and, and keeping track of what you’re drinking and, and what you like. And they signed up for Edgar back in February. And they went from basically no Twitter followers to 20,000 Twitter followers in six months. Wow. Yeah. Huge, huge, huge for them. They’re a small company and these are all targeted real followers, by the way, you know, anyone can go buy a bunch of fake Twitter followers for 50 bucks or whatever that that’s not what they did. These are, these are real leads for their business, you know, drives tremendous traffic to their business. And the big change that they did was they started using Edgar to repeat content. So before they were using Edgar, they didn’t have much time to come up with social media content because of course, it’s, it’s a big job to come up with content to post five or six times a day.

Laura
[00:06:07]
So when they got on Edgar, they used Edgar to start repeating the same things they had already posted. So he gave us one quote that he has social media posts that are getting retweeted 30 times, even though they got retweeted 30 times, just four days ago. So you can repeat a lot more than you think, because most of your audiences not seeing your posts. And we see the same thing here at Edgar will post the exact same update on social media. You know, we try to space it out a little more than four days. We’re posting the exact same thing maybe a month or two later, and it’ll get the exact almost sometimes it’s funny because sometimes it’ll be like the exact same amount of retweets or shares. And of course that means it’s being exposed to a whole new audience. And if it’s a link back to our site, driving a lot of traffic back to our site and, and he really built his following so huge by having great content that’s being shared day in or day out. So having things like interesting facts about wine, inspirational quotes, cool images of wine, he basically saw it as, okay, I’m gonna build really valuable content. I’m gonna spend my time building less pieces of valuable content, and then using that content more in order to get those shares that really build out an audience.

Robert
[00:07:22]
Okay. So at this, I mean, at this point today, all businesses know it’s very important to have a social media present, but before they can get to that point as WinCo, that’s the name? Correct? WinCo

Laura
[00:07:39]
Wine tracker.com.

Robert
[00:07:39]
Okay. Before they can get to that point, like wine tracker.com, what are the steps they need to take as far as they already have the Twitter accounts created, they have the Facebook pages, but what are the next steps they need to take to just to get started with their social, you know, their social media, marketing and automation.

Laura
[00:08:03]
So social media is all about content and you can’t just write, visit my website and that be your update. You know, you want to share content that other people are going to want to share because that’s how these numbers start to add up. Right? People sometimes just sort of find your accounts or maybe they’ve clicked on your accounts from your website, but how you really start to get new leads from social media is people that are already following you, retweeting and sharing and going out to their audience, right? That’s where things really start to become a huge multiplier because you might have someone retweet you that has 10,000, or maybe you get really lucky and has 500,000 people that are following them. And they’ve just shown your brand and your content to, to a whole new audience. So that’s why social media marketing and content marketing really go hand in hand for an eCommerce business.

Laura
[00:08:56]
I think social media can actually be a really easy tool for an eCommerce business because you already have all these products that people are interested in buying, right? So you can use social media to talk about those products and depending on your business, often just photos of products can do really well. If you sell jewelry, for example, posting beautiful photos of your jewelry, those can often get shared just, just on their own, especially in these more image focused tools like Instagram or Pinterest. Maybe you’re not in such a sexy eCommerce industry like jewelry. And maybe you’re telling stories about your products. You’re sharing interesting content on your blog related to your industry. That’s the type of stuff you want to share on social media that that gets shared by others. So the first place you start is, is creating that base of interesting content.

Robert
[00:09:53]
Okay? Okay. So once you’ve already created your content and you want to do some social media automation, you probably want to look at a tool like Edgar, but even before jumping into the tool, are there some best practices you have to keep in mind when you’re dealing with the different social platforms?

Laura
[01:10:15]
Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s a big, big question, right? Because there’s lots of different platforms. They, they operate in different ways. So obviously there’s just some sort of logistical differences, you know, on Twitter, you have the 140 character limit on Facebook. You can do much more long form content across all platforms. What we’re seeing work really well right now is images and videos. The, the data shows that your, your tweets and Facebook updates in particular definitely get more clicks and more shares. If they have an image attached, just helps them stand out a lot more on the platform. So that’s one best practice I would, I would look at actually across platforms is how can you make your content more interesting with images and videos?

Robert
[01:11:00]
Okay. And what about mistakes to avoid?

Laura
[01:11:07]
So some of the common mistakes to avoid one, you know, we’re talking about automation because automation is a really valuable part of your, your toolkit for social media, but you can’t expect to just automate and never go in and engage because engagement is really important as well. And engagement means interacting live. So I haven’t really seen any businesses that just use an automation tool, load up a bunch of content, send it out, and then just, you know, see all this traffic pour in, [email protected], they use the, they used Edgar to make sure they have great content going out every day, but then they can use their lifetime finding people to follow talking to people, engaging in conversations, you know, sharing other people’s content. All of those social interactions on social media are really important. So don’t think you can ignore the live interaction. You just wanna use a tool. So that social media becomes a lot less time consuming because the live interaction is actually really quick. You know, you can do that on your phone when you’re waiting in line or whatever, spend five minutes kind of talking to people on social. Let that be how you’re spending your time on social media. It’s, it’s pointless to spend your time doing things like manually scheduling or trying to come up with new content five times a day, live every single day.

Robert
[01:12:22]
Okay. And that does bring up a good point. I’ve seen, I’ve read different articles online where some people argue against using tools like Edgar or B, just because they claimed that, you know, without using the tools and just doing life postings, they, they had a better reach. But I read that article a few months ago. I don’t know if that has changed as far as the argument or the different case studies. But what you’re saying is when you use Edgar, even though you, you are, you’re automating and you’re scheduling the post to go out, you still want to encourage live engagement to have, just to have better reach and better engagement.

Laura
[01:13:10]
Exactly. And it, it’s all about finding that mix for what’s realistic as well. Some people anecdotally say that they get a better response. For example, posting, you know, live through Facebook instead of using a tool, although all the studies, no, one’s actually been able to show that in numbers, across accounts, but Facebook is also very secretive about their algorithm and how they rank things. So, so we don’t really know, but even if that were true, that you always saw a higher rate of reach or engagement with live posts. That’s great. If you have a social media team, you know, that has time to be on Facebook all day, creating content, posting it live small businesses, you know, are often doing the social media themselves, right? The business owner is the one creating all the content, doing all the engagement of social media. If that’s the case for you, you don’t have time sign on to Facebook all day, right. It’s just not going to work for your business. You have to be smart about automating it so that it just is, is getting done every day.

Robert
[01:14:12]
Okay. And so what makes, what makes Edgar unique compared to the other tools out there? Why should users choose Edgar over their competition?

Laura
[01:14:25]
So what’s really unique about Edgar is that we store your content in a library and then automatically cycle through it over and over again. So other other tools don’t do that. So the problem with other tools is that you can create a queue for example, but then it always runs out. You know, maybe you add, you spend time on social media, you come up with 50 posts and you add them to your queue, but then the tool is gonna run through that queue. And then you have to start all over again. And they also don’t save your updates in a library, which is one of the main reasons I created Edgar, that seemed so odd to me that I was creating all these social updates and the tool doesn’t save them. It just sends them out. And then they’re gone. And I knew looking at the stats that you reach, maybe like five to 10% of your audience actually sees any given post that you send.

Laura
[01:15:16]
That’s just the nature of social, right? You sign on to Twitter, you see what in your home fade in the five minutes that you’re there and you don’t see anything else. And, and then you log off. So it’s really a waste of time as a small business owner. If you’re spending time creating all this content, why would you just send it out once for 5% of your audience to see, you know, you made the time to write the update, put together the image, write the blog post, you know, record the podcast. You’re spending a lot of time creating this content. Why would you waste it by just sending it out once, which is kind of what other tools encourage you to do. And it’s the only thing they allow you to do. So with Edgar, you say, okay, here are all my podcasts. I’m gonna put them all in a library. And then Edgar just cycles through them over and over again, de depending on the schedule that you determine. So you know that your social accounts are just filled up with great content day in and day out.

Robert
[01:16:05]
So yeah, that’s a really, really great idea how you came up with that. Maybe we’ll see you in an episode of shark tank selling the company

Laura
[01:16:15]
May, maybe. So

Robert
[01:16:17]
If you decide to go there route with social automation, what are the key numbers that businesses need to be, to be looking at, to see whether their campaigns are a success?

Laura
[01:16:28]
So the biggest number to look at is your traffic and how that traffic is converting. So something to understand about social media marketing is the sales are not happening on social media. And I think this is something that a lot of people don’t understand about social media marketing. You know, you’re not going to sell, we talked about a jewelry company earlier, right? You’re not going to sell your necklaces directly from Twitter. The way that it works is Twitter helps to drive traffic to your website. You know, either straight to the product page or more often to like a blog or some sort of content you’ve created, then maybe you get them on your email list. You know, you’re sending updates, basically social media is a way to, to drive traffic, but then you still need to create your marketing funnel from there, right? You can’t expect just to post a link to something on social media.

Laura
[01:17:17]
Someone just clicks it and buys anyone. Who’s, you know, who’s run a business for a while, knows that it’s not really that simple. So you want to look at how much traffic you’re driving from social media, and then look at how it’s converting compared to other mediums. And both these, both of these things are really easy to do with Google analytics. You know, you don’t need any kind of fancy, fancy tool. Analytics actually has really advanced social breakdowns that show you exactly how the different social media channels are performing. And then if you set up goals within analytics, you can see exactly how those social channels are converting compared to other sources of traffic. So that’s what you wanna keep your eye on. And, and the easiest way to increase your traffic from social media is just to post more. I mean, it, it’s kind of obvious, but it’s funny because so many of our, our Edgar customers tell us I started using Edgar and then just like instantly my traffic from social doubled overnight. And it’s not because we have some sort of secret sauce it’s because Edgar makes sure that you’re sending out those links every single day without you having to lift a finger. So of of course, if you start sending, you know, double the links back to your website, you’re gonna see it double a traffic to your site. So luckily that’s really simple. That’s really easy to do the most important way to drive up your traffic is just to make sure that you have links to your site going out on social media every single day.

Robert
[01:18:39]
Yeah. It, it is very unique how, how, how you came up with AGA and it is helping a lot of businesses. I mean, it does seem obvious right now that just having reputation would increase traffic, but a lot of these platforms and other tools out there weren’t built with that in mind.

Laura
[01:18:59]
Exactly. It’s just really hard to do. You know, so before we had Edgar, what we were doing at my company is we had this giant spreadsheet, cuz we’re like, okay, we don’t wanna waste these old blog posts. We wanna keep sending traffic back to those blog posts. And, and that’s exactly what we see at Edgar. We get, when we look at our, our traffic patterns on our blog, we get these regular spikes of traffic because every time you send out a post on social, people are gonna share it. People are gonna click on it. So I felt really frustrated, you know, why can’t I just send the tool? All of, all of my stuff and the tool just keeps sending it out. So, so that’s exactly what Edgar does.

Robert
[01:19:34]
Is it too late to get a patent on the reputation?

Laura
[01:19:39]
Well, we haven’t, we haven’t really, we haven’t really explored the patent route.

Robert
[01:19:43]
Yeah. Because I, I can just see the other tools, your competition, just adding that feature, you know, in a few months

Laura
[01:19:51]
It’s, it’s definitely, always possible. Yeah. I mean, anytime you build software, someone else can, can just build the same thing.

Robert
[01:19:56]
Yeah. So other than Edgar, which we’ve already established is a great tool for social media automation and just getting traffic for website. What other tools would you recommend for businesses to use with Edgar or just for social media?

Laura
[02:20:13]
It, you know, it really depends on your needs and, and how you’re using social. Like the, the case study that I mentioned, wine tracker, they’ve had great success using a tool called Tweety that’s T w E E P I to track potential leads on Twitter, potential Twitter accounts that might be interested in wine so that they can follow those people and engage with those people. So I know they’re a big fan of that one Co-Schedule is another tool that I like that integrates with your WordPress site to automatically send out your, your blog posts on a certain schedule. We also have RSS integration within Twitter. TWI is a tool that helps you find the best time of day to post on, on Twitter. So you can go to TWI find your best times and then use that to craft your, your schedule on Edgar. So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of cool tools out there.

Robert
[02:21:07]
Okay. And if, if there’s just one thing, maybe, maybe a listener, just probably with how our attention spans work. If there’s just one thing that you, you would give any listener right now that they can actually use to, to help the business, whether it’s on social media or just something else, you you’re a business owner yourself. So if there’s just one thing, one action that can actually take right now to, to move the needle in their business, what, what would you tell them?

Laura
[02:21:41]
So I think the most important thing is to get started on, on your idea. So most business owners, the problem is not a lack of ideas, right. You know, if I ask a business owner, okay, how could you drive more traffic? Or how could you sell more? Can, can you think of five things? Most people can think of five things that they could try. They’re just overwhelmed, overwhelmed by everything they have to do. You know, which, which is one of the reasons I wanted to build a tool where it’s like, okay, Edgar can just handle your social media for you. It’s just one less thing you have to do. So I think the most important thing is just to get started in a small way and not be afraid to do things badly and then improve. So if you are struggling with social media, you know, if you use Edgar or another tool and just start linking to your blog once a day, every day, most people actually aren’t even doing that consistently.

Laura
[02:22:34]
You know, making sure that every day on social media, there, there’s just one post that goes out linking back to their blog. That would be a great step. And then, and then you can build on it from there, right? If you’re using a tool like Edgar that saves the library, you can go into your Edgar library and then add an image and that’ll get you even, even better engagement on that post. Or maybe you’ve been wanting to do better email marketing. And you’re like, okay, I know that if I added an opt-in box on my homepage, I should do that. But I don’t know what it should say. Like, even if you just add a box that says, sign up for our email list, that’s all it says, a few people are gonna sign up and then you can improve the headline and then you can test it, you know? So whatever it is for your business, just take that imperfect baby step. And then, then you’ll start seeing real action that you can build on.

Robert
[02:23:21]
Okay. And if people wanted to reach you and find you and sign up for Edgar, where should I go?

Laura
[02:23:30]
Yeah. So go to meet edgar.com. You can also find us on Twitter, meet Edgar, Facebook, meet Edgar. And my personal Twitter is L KR.

Robert
[02:23:39]
Okay. Any final thoughts, Laura,

Laura
[02:23:43]
That social media is, is such a powerful tool for a small business. You know, people get intimidated by the time that it can take, but it really doesn’t have to take that that much time. So again, I would just really encourage you, give it a shot, you know, start small, try out Edgar to automate this and, and save yourself a lot of time on social media.

Robert
[02:24:04]
Okay, Laura, thanks for being on the podcast.

Laura
[02:24:06]
Thank you.

Robert
[02:24:07]
Thank you for listening to the eCommerce marketing podcast. If you have a question for us, email [email protected]. Subscribe to us on iTune by searching for eCommerce marketing podcast, and please leave us a five star rating and a brief review visit eCommerce marketing podcast, where you can also find a full transcript and show notes of each episode. Thank you for listening. See you next time.