Are you worried that if you don’t innovate, you’ll eventually become invisible to your audience? But you also struggle with a fear of change. How do you break free from this cycle and push your market to new heights without risking everything you’ve built?
This Social Pulse: Retail Edition episode’s guest Nathaniel Jones, director of Marketing at Farm and Home Supply, shares insights and advice about those questions with host Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton.
[Listen to the full episode below, or get the highlights of the Social Pulse: Retail Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]
What sparked your realization that “playing it safe” wasn’t going to cut it anymore in retail marketing?
Nathaniel Jones: It was about 10 years ago. I think I was seeing stagnant growth on social and no real energy behind it. Gary Vaynerchuk started popping up in my feed, and I started really listening. And then it was like an “Ah-ha!” moment that I had.
He pointed out, “Why would someone pay attention to your content if you yourself don’t wanna make it?”
And so that clicked with me:“Hey, I probably need to start making content that I would be interested in.” ‘Cause social media is obviously supposed to be social and supposed to be personally relatable. I think a lot of times, as marketers, we always get to business initiatives of pushing out what we feel the business would want to, without any regard for how it’s being consumed.
“Why would someone pay attention to your content if you yourself don’t wanna make it?”
And so Gary V helped me realize that first, we need to make sure that we’re being relatable as a business because we have to get attention that way. And that’s what social media is built for. So we need to be our own media company, produce our own content, and be our own influencers for that content.
Walk us through a specific campaign where you felt like taking a creative risk paid off
Nathaniel Jones: Sometimes, it’s creative itself, and other times I think it’s the budget that we put behind it.
I’ll start with creative first. Traditional retail marketing thinking is that TikTok is only for kids and college kids. But what about 65-year-old gardeners? It’s unique.
We did a test with how-to videos with our resident plant expert, and it’s driven insane growth on TikTok. And we went from basically having zero followers to having thousands across the country pay attention to this series that we did with our plant expert.
So it’s reverse thinking of “We always have to keep up with the trends and the whippersnappers that are on TikTok,” but actually the fastest growing demographic on TikTok is 50+ because the younger kids are already there.
The incremental growth is gonna happen as it ages. So, budget movements are probably more risky like where you move your money in order to get that attention. But last year, in quarter four and Black Friday, we decided to move money away from traditional marketing being broadcast TV and radio towards social, specifically towards YouTube, and we saw a record Black Friday in order to make that happen. But that can be risky, too, not only making the decision to do something different from a content standpoint but also from a money-spending content.
Could you elaborate on what you did on YouTube?
Nathaniel Jones: YouTube’s unique because, as far as I know, it’s the only video platform that you can measure in-store traffic. With the majority of our business still in brick and mortar, it’s tough to evaluate that, and I know we’ll get to that here in a second: How do you evaluate the performance of social media?
But with YouTube, which I would consider a social media, you can see based on the Google My Business locations, the amount of in-store traffic you’re driving with the videos. And so with that analytics, that helps prove, hey, we moved this money, spent more money on YouTube, drove in-store visits, and then surely your sales will follow if you can see more people coming into your stores.
So folks are watching the videos then clicking through to the location to go to purchase that product.
Nathaniel Jones: Correct. And I think if you are a little bit wise as a marketer, you’re gonna know [how] to advertise to people, especially those who are around in your store area, so be smart about your targeting. Not only are you gonna do niche targeting, if I make a video about shoes, go after people shopping for shoes, but number two, make sure people can buy your shoes in a brick-and-mortar area. If you’re not just e-commerce, pay attention to geography, too.
How do you balance this need to innovate with what works?
Nathaniel Jones: So I’ll frame this in two ways ’cause there’s no one size fits all, and it’s all up to your own personal preference.
But if you feel stuck and lost, it’s probably gonna be, I’m more willing to innovate than not. And now if you’re successful, I like the 80/20 rule, 80% of your time and money spent on what works, 20% on innovating, because the next evolution of what works is what doesn’t work, and you don’t want that to happen.
You always have to innovate in my perspective. But it’s just maybe not a lot of your time if you’re already finding success in 80% of what you do, keep on doing that.
Again, if you’re stuck and you don’t have the energy to keep moving, like we talked about when we opened the conversation of nothing’s working , you’re gonna have to try something different rather than keep doing the same old things.
What’s your process then for identifying opportunities to innovate?
Nathaniel Jones: I’m never satisfied. I’m super-competitive. Even against myself. So it’s always can we beat that? That is always the question. It’s the elephant in the room of, yeah, we did this yesterday, but what do we do tomorrow that makes a difference?
In retail, you can’t just sit back and do nothing and push that, it’s trying to find ways. How can we top last year’s success? Last week’s success, yesterday’s success, and maybe looking for somebody who’s doing it better and then trying to tweak that idea for our own brand. How do you make that unique for what your audience would want to see or that your company would wanna promote? So it’s never being satisfied.
How do you get buy-in from those kinds of stakeholders when you want to take these kinds of risks?
Nathaniel Jones: I think it’s communication. It’s always about communication. Whether that’s with communicating to the higher-ups or your own team members or your audience. It’s always the number-one step in getting feedback. So if it’s toeing the line on being controversial, then I’ll bring it up to my owners: Is this a good fit for us? Is this what we want to do?
If not, we move on from what we might have planned. It’s imperative, I think, that marketers always be adaptable. So to evolve if something gets shut down, go to something else. If something isn’t working, go into something else. So that’s at least in my opinion, the most important part of being a marketer is being willing to change.
Mike Allton: On a previous episode, I was talking to the guest and they were suggesting that one of the challenges and the traps that folks fall into, particularly if they want to innovate and improve, is comparing themselves to others and he was framing it as that was a negative thing.
Do you compare your brand to others?
Nathaniel Jones: Always. Yeah. Especially if you find their stuff interesting. So like when we opened up to make content that you yourself would wanna watch, there’s a million different niches that you can serve.
Our company itself sells everything from pet food to shoes, to mowers, to fishing equipment, to snacks. It’s a wide array of things. So we have a million different niches. Any company’s audience is gonna be the same thing in different niches.
So if you can find somebody else who is serving the niche better than you, well obviously that’s a good thing to compare yourself to, and then again, tweak the ideas. Don’t steal directly, but you can tweak it to what your brand might want to do.
Are there specific strategies to help you and your team continuously come up with new ideas?
Nathaniel Jones: It comes easier to some people than others. I think if you can naturally watch something or consume something and say, how can I do that? It makes it easier. But I think from a team standpoint is always asking, what would you want to see?
We talked about those niches earlier, and there’s everybody from a 5-year-old to a 105-year-old that might be watching your content. So you always have to be thoughtful of that. And I think sometimes marketers can get confined in a box of this is what’s possible, this is what the brand would fit. And I would encourage them to break out of that box. So if you see something on TikTok if you see something on SNL, or if you see something on a movie that you watched, that kind of sparks the idea.
I think the more content you consume and the more things you see that are inspiring, informative or engaging, then that can help lift your overall creativity.
So don’t be handcuffed to what you did last year. Make a new path every single day, every quarter, every year. Sometimes we as marketers get locked into a marketing calendar of doing the same things each year or repurposing things that might’ve worked in the past, but we almost start fresh every single day, can we come up with something that we didn’t do last year. Again, that challenging thing.
How do you identify that someone is not an ideal person?
Nathaniel Jones: Yeah. Some of it can be taught, I think especially being young in marketing, going out for the first time, you don’t have the experience to go off of what works or what’s possible. But again, consuming the content, you’ll learn, Hey, that’s interesting. Could we try that? Bring ideas. There are not a lot of things that I don’t, I think that we say no to, and I think that’s important let’s just try it.
Why be so constrained? To what you think might work. Try it and see if it will work. Chat GPT is another tool that I find great to bounce ideas off of and I encourage others to use, too.
If you feel in a writer’s block of coming up with creativity or innovation, start a conversation. It’s almost like a partner that you can have a sparring partner on brainstorming that you can have of, Hey, gimme 10 ideas for a short video concept about real estate.
You will be amazed by the stuff that thing it can spit out.
How are you measuring impact?
Nathaniel Jones: Sometimes, it’s hard to put the exact finger on it, especially for brick and mortar. Like we said, there are not too many tools out there that can measure the direct correlation between somebody seeing your ad and then going to your store.
Number one in my opinion, what social media is built for is to be engaging and to build your brand, so I think instead of being so transactional based, which I know a lot of times proof is in the pudding to executives, but try to preach patience as much as possible, that it’s all about uplifting the number of people who see your brand or draw your brand through awareness and getting that attention.
That’s the number-one step before you can sell anything. So as long as you’re building your audience, you’re building the engagement, social media and the content you produce is doing its job. Sales will come eventually as long as you have that awareness. But the hardest step is breaking through the noise and getting attention and awareness first.
In my opinion, you need to do that first, and sales will come after that, and then you can try to test in a vacuum if you are looking for a transaction.
So, run a piece of content, create a video campaign against one category, one event, or maybe one item, and then measure the lift of those sales. Don’t advertise it anywhere else except on social media.
Even if you want to test different social media channels, advertise this only on TikTok, advertise that only on Meta, and see the results with the sales difference inside the store. But again, you gotta be willing to test it in a vacuum and nowhere else. So you gotta hedge your bet. Pick your gamble on which products and categories that you wanna test that with.
Mike Allton: Fantastic advice. Our previous guest had a very different take, but the clarification was he worked for Black Ovis. I’m talking about Adam Buchanan, who is working for a primarily e-commerce brand. They can drive a significant amount of direct traffic from social media and track its performance. In a B2C model, however, operating a brick-and-mortar store is entirely a different ball game. I feel and to your point then the role of social media becomes almost exclusively, your brand awareness and engagement and top of mind and maybe some product awareness, too, for sure. But yeah, getting them to actually walk in. It’s great when it happens, but it’s hard to know for sure.
Nathaniel Jones: Man, Mike, I’m glad you brought up the e-comm standpoint too, because for people who drive e-commerce business, a lot of it is transactional, but there’s a really thin line between getting clicks and driving transactions and it is a hundred percent sell, sell, sell, too.
It’s tough to build a social audience when you’re strictly just e-commerce ’cause you’re so much leaned into, I gotta make this work for me on a money basis. And so a hundred percent of the content’s going to be that right hook of, I’m selling people, I’m selling people, I’m selling people.
And then your audience starts to get less engaged. So, again, if it’s working. But if you start to see that kind of dip down of I’m losing fans, I’m losing followers, there’s no engagement there, then you’re probably over the top on being that sales pitch rather than a social pitch.
What specific tools or platforms have been helpful in innovative marketing efforts?
Nathaniel Jones: Capcut. We discovered that probably a year and a half ago, the same Bytedance, owns it, the same company that owns TikTok, but the video editing in that far surpasses anything else that we’ve tried. I’ve been in video editing for a long time, starting with the news industry and TV news, but that’s what you’re able to do using AI, and the text, templates, transitions, frames, and filters just blow my mind how intuitive that platform is and what you can do with just a very short learning curve.
It takes the fear sometimes I think marketers have of doing it themselves away, and I would encourage even directors of marketing and you don’t have a video background if you can see what that platform can do it, it would save hours, days, and months of time in order to put out more content. Gary V and I are aligned as you put enough good stuff out. Do you allow cussing on your show? Yeah, okay. Put the good sh*t out, and good sh*t will come. We put as much stuff as possible out there. As long as it’s good stuff. You can spam your audience, but I’m of the belief that there’s a void that can never be filled with social media ’cause so much time is spent there currently by all ages. So you need to fill that with as much stuff from your company or your personal brand as you can in order to get visible and cut through that noise. Capcut definitely helps with that, producing more content in a great polished way that I like.
Then we talked about ChatGPT using that for thought concepts and even looking at competitors’ websites or social media and trying to brainstorm ideas off of that. We found that pretty be beneficial recently. And then have you ever messed around with TikTok Trends, especially within transitions?
Yeah, so those transitions into TikTok, If you can see, clothing and jewelry are some of the ones that are pretty high up. Sports are starting to use a lot more from what I’ve seen. So if you see some of those transitions inside of TikTok that are on the up and up, that can give you a leg up on competition potentially that maybe aren’t experimenting with some of those editing capabilities.
I think a lot of people use social media as the new broadcast, especially TV. It’s gotta look a certain way.
And the more we experiment with content, the more we realize that, especially on social media, people are looking for stuff that looks friendly. Sometimes it isn’t polished. So I think sometimes marketers get into this belief that it has to look good to work. It doesn’t ’cause sometimes the things that might appear a little bit off or askew or potentially grainy sometimes as long as what you’re saying is important or informative or funny, then that’s okay. That’s all that matters. It’s the how does it get awareness, right? The attention. That’s the first task. So marketers tend to overthink. I think creatives tend to overthink sometimes. There’s this perfectionist thing that lives deep inside of us, of the thing that I have to put out.
The thing that I’m creating has to be perfect in the way that I want it to be, but sometimes it’s quantity more than quality. It’s great if you can have both. Quality, I think overtakes quantity sometimes.
What happens when the campaign does not perform as expected?
Nathaniel Jones: You’re gonna lose. I hate losing, absolutely despise it, but failures are gonna happen and it’s inevitable in life, especially if you’re trying a lot of sh*t it’s gonna happen to where it’s just not gonna hit. So either you can try it again if you feel like it was the right move or maybe bad timing or try something else.
There are only two options that you have, so it’s whether or not you feel strongly enough about that campaign, that creative, maybe it’s just bad timing.
The example I have is the Super Bowl. It’s hard to push through what the Super Bowl is. It’s a behemoth in the media realm. Even [on] social media, your whole newsfeed is gonna be taken over by the Super Bowl. Sometimes what you’re pushing during that timeframe isn’t gonna work just because so much attention is on that. Can you tie into the Super Bowl? Sure. If there’s anything else, it might get pushed to the side.
Be cognizant of from a timing standpoint, from an awareness standpoint, some things may not work and you could either try it again with the tweak or move on to something else.
Analyzing stuff in a vacuum is tough. You always have to be cognizant of the other factors that went into it.
Are there any other thought leaders or resources that you turn to to help you stay inspired?
Nathaniel Jones: I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. Some of ’em I call out is the Hustle and then Stacked Marketer. They’re pretty ahead of the curve and seeing what’s coming down the pipeline. Stack Market has a lot of AI tools that I like, too. Then I think it’s watching the trends on your own feed and asking your team to do the same.
We talk about the different niches that we serve. Somebody could be heavy into wha-tnot. Somebody could be heavy into BeReal. Some could be heavy into YouTube Shorts, other ones into Reels, other ones into TikTok, and all the different facets of content creation that were within them.
It’s always being open to trying something. Staying ahead of the trends is tough. I use the phrase of riding the wave. So, you try to ride it when the wave is high. It’s nice to get it at the peak, but sometimes it might be coming down, but it starts, it’s tough to start a trend on your own. So I don’t know if it’s necessarily possible to get ahead of a trend, but it’s to ride that wave as much as possible and always try to think of, again, challenge yourself. We did this on Tuesday, but it may not work on Thursday, and that’s fine.
You just have to try and try.
Thanks for reading the highlights from this episode with Nathaniel Jones. Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: Retail Edition on Apple or Spotify, where we’re digging into the challenges, successes, and stories of social media and community professionals in the industry, just like you. And don’t miss other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Hospitality Edition, Agency Edition, and B2B Edition.
