Are you tired of hitting a wall every time you try to get leadership to buy in for your social media initiatives? If you’re managing social media for a retail brand, you’ve probably experienced that frustrating moment when you’re passionately explaining the potential impact of a new campaign, only to be met with doubting looks and questions about social ROI.
What if you could transform those skeptical executives into your biggest social media champions?
In this recap of an Social Pulse: Retail Edition episode, guest Adam Buchanan talks about with host Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton. Adam has mastered the art of building internal support for social media initiatives, starting with organic content and community management, and now focusing on paid, owned, and earned media at Camofire and Black Ovis.
[Listen to the full episode below, or get the highlights of the Social Pulse: Retail Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]
Walk us through a specific moment where you faced skepticism from leadership regarding social media
Adam Buchanan: Yeah, there’s so many. I think one that stands out was there was this idea at Cabela’s. I was there running consumer-facing social media, and we were there, and everything was top level, best agencies, high-quality content. I just remember thinking, “Man, it takes so long to produce a simple photo, a simple video, right?” And so.
One thing I started dabbling with is I would say, “Hey, we’re sitting on a pile of user-generated content. We could reuse some of that. Our own team, we’re passionate about hunting. We’re out, we like to experience that as well. We could take photos and do things on our iPhone.”
I remember just the pushback was like, “Well, who’s going to review it, and how many levels?” And I mean, there was more red tape than I expected. And I just remember [being] like: “Just give me the keys to the car. Let me test a few things.”
Two that stick out are just mind-blowing:
- When you think of Cabela’s, you think of pretty in-depth hunting, and guys like doing kind of intense things, holding weapons, holding dead animals, things like that. And this photo we got tacked in was this little boy with spiky blonde hair, and he was on a boat, and he had put his arms stretched out, and he’s in this big red Cabela’s life vest, he’s on a fishing boat, and he is just like living his best life, like head back, just loving it. And I re-shared it. And I was just like, “Best ride ever!” or something like the caption was so—I had to make it up because it was before AI, and uh, sorry, little jab at AI there—and dude, the engagement was absurd. Like, 4X what we’ve normally seen. And the older audience could see that and be, “I can relate with that. I was that kid one time.” And so that was kind of a cool one.
- And then another one was, this was back in 2013, 2014. We used to be open on Thanksgiving. We had concluded we were going to stay closed on Thanksgiving. I love this because it’s just my favorite thing. We printed off this notice on all 70 doors of retail stores. It was an 8×10. And it says, “We are closed on Thanksgiving, so our employees can be with their families on Thanksgiving Day.” And it was this big thing. I emailed one of the store managers and I said, “Can you just run out there with your iPhone and just snap a photo of it? I just think that’d be kind of cool for Facebook and Instagram.” And so he did. He sent it back to me, and the engagement was over 200,000 likes in like a few days. And then I got my paid media person. I said, “Hey, let’s put money behind that. Like, this is going very, very well.” The thing I love is the Q1 of the next year, someone contacted me and said, “Hey, we just wanted to let you know, that Cabela’s had more social engagement than iTunes, Target, and Neiman Marcus.” I looked at the report, and that one post sent us over the moon—and I was just like, “Take him with an iPhone, eight by 10 sheet laminated on the front door of our retail store.”
Those are just some fun stories that I like to share.
Learn more retail psychology insights, strategies, and wisdom from our experts in every episode of Social Pulse: Retail Edition.
What pushback have you gotten from leadership when you’ve said, “Hey, we should do this, that, or the next thing?”
Adam Buchanan: I think the biggest disconnect is leadership looks at things very comparatively.
And so they’ll look at somebody else, and they’ll say two things: “Well, why can’t we do that?” or “We can never do that.”
Everything is so comparison-focused. And so when I hear that in conversations, generally, depending on if they’ve had their coffee that day—or if we’re in a good place and they’re not going to kill me—I’ll say you know, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
Mike Allton: You got to judge the room before you say that.
Adam Buchanan: Read the room, guys, you know? Generally, if we’re in a good place, we’re like, “Yeah, yeah, we get it, you know?”
And so what I’ll say is: “Why don’t we strengthen our strengths versus strengthening our weaknesses? Like, let’s find out what’s going well for us. Like, how did we get here? What brought us to this point?”
[In] the company I’m at now (BlackOvis/Camofire), one of the things that got us where we were was just trust, like building trust with people. So, when they call the 800 number, a person picks up and could speak to the product versus, “Oh, I don’t know, what does it say on the website?” We’re very helpful that way.
And then the other one was our founder, Kendall Card. He got involved in YouTube and would show the product and dive deep into it. People still contact us about those great videos for so long. And so we can look at TikTok. “Oh, let’s go do something funny.” And it’s like, “Well, did humor get us here? And is humor going to get us to the next step?” Humor is an easy one to land on. Truthfully, people do it all the time, it’s like, “Oh, we got to make something funny and that’ll win it.” That kind of @squattypotty approach type thing.
I come from a world where hunting outdoors, there are times for that. We’ve done April Fool’s things and certain things, but I think just at a base level with leadership, try to get them off the comparative train. And then that can build a basis. So then they say, “Okay, yeah, we’re not @liquiddeath.” No, we’re not Liquid Death. They’re selling water in a can. We’re selling outdoor gear.
Tell me a little bit about BlackOvis and Camofire, the business you’re at now
Adam Buchanan: I’ve been here at Camofire for two years—and I say Camofire because that’s truly is the company name. It started first in 2008. If you remember, the housing market crashed, and everyone freaked out. However, Camofire was built in this idea of daily hunting deals: 40 to 70% off retail.
Now if you’re a hunter, you talk to any hunter, talk to the hunter’s wife, and you’ll get a pretty good pulse on how she feels about him spending money on hunting gear ’cause it’s very, very expensive. And so Camofire came out. The housing market crashed, and my boss Kendall Card and his co-founder were like, “Yep, we’re moving forward, we’re doing this.”
I’ve asked him about this multiple times. I’m like, “That must have been really difficult.” Like, people are losing their homes and you’re starting a business. Wasn’t that scary? And he’s like, “People don’t stop hunting regardless of what happens to the economy.” But having those deals, so it took off.
It was very successful. Every word of mouth went unbelievable. It was just the first of its kind. And so then many years later, BlackOvis came out, and it’s more of a traditional retailer, like a Cabela’s or a Dick’s Sporting Goods but all online. We have a little retail store out by the airport in Salt Lake. And then BlackOvis gear came out where it’s branded gear. We’ve got it on our hats, the merino tops, waterproof rain jackets, things like that. So we have this whole other line now, and it’s taken off and been successful.
So, we are a specialized retailer for hunting. We try to be very curated of what goes on our website.
We’re not like, “Hey, whatever Walmart’s got, we’re going to put that on our website.” There are people who shop for hunting gear at Walmart, and we have nothing against that. We just carry very select hand-curated products that we carry.
We work with great brands like Sitka, Mystery Ranch, Crispi Boots, and things like that. So, that’s just a little about us and how we use social media really is through video. It’s displaying the product. It’s diving into the details. Hunters are very specific about what they buy. So they need to see this zipper. Compared to an REI commercial where a cute girl is walking down the trail, head to toe in Patagonia, it’s like, “Cool, I want to be that girl. That looks fun.”
I want to do that versus hunting. You might see some of that aspirational, but it’s really like, well, how much does that jacket weigh? And that pack, is it going to handle 110 pounds of alchemy? So a little different.
What role does data play in that?
Adam Buchanan: For us in retail, what I wrap my arms around, regardless of talking paid earned, and owned, I break it down with three main metrics and it’s traffic, conversion rate, and AOV. When you speak in those three terms, everything can be anchored in those three terms. So, if you’re talking about an SMS campaign, paid ads, or email, it doesn’t matter. It’s just that we’re anchoring in those three main terms.
What I found is when you talk to investors, they can wrap their heads around those three metrics very, very fast. And then you just talking points for each three. So traffic, conversion rate, AOV. So you say, “Okay, traffic, where does traffic come from?” Word of mouth, a great ad, an optimized automated email campaign, that type of thing. If we work with a really good ambassador and they’re helping drive traffic, great.
What people don’t realize, too, is you times each of those three things together actually outputs your revenue. So, it’s a really nice formula … Here’s the thing with digital marketers. We get caught off guard earlier in our career because we just can’t speak to things very well. So this is just like super simple and people remember things in threes. And so when you teach people in threes, they’ll remember it that way. And then two weeks later you have a follow-up and it’s like, “Remember the conversion rate AOV and traffic?” And they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that’s right.”
You calculate all those together, you get your revenue. Conversion rate is what the site experiences. Are people feeling trusted? Are we being trusted with the credit card with the disposable income? Is that product going to hit the mark for them? And then AOV is how much are they going to put in their bag? You know how comfortable they are. I’ve run that for probably four or five years now and honestly, I have gotten quicker responses, quicker feedback, and more buy-in. You got to understand with TikTok, and it’s like, dude, break it down to those three things. And if TikTok’s driving traffic has a good conversion rate and a high AOV, great, let’s do it. If it’s not, what else is doing it?
I map out my paid, earned, and owned by what are those all driving? And then we say, well, shoot, we have a really high conversion rate with paid and a high ROAS we’re not spending enough, we need more money. Oh yeah. Well, duh. ‘Cause they just get it, and they’ll sign those checks. But if they don’t understand it and they don’t understand the return on investment, it’s just confusing. So if you just simplify it like that, it goes a long way.
How do you connect the dots with some of the other social media metrics?
Adam Buchanan: I don’t report on them. It’s nice when we have leadership that doesn’t care about them. And I feel like the shift happened probably six to eight years ago.
I haven’t been asked about followers and close to a decade. And the reason why I think of that is because it’s so muddy and befuddled, and it’s so paid-driven now that it’s like, “Oh, our follower growth, like we need 50,000 followers this year.” Okay, cool. We’ll just go buy them.
Truthfully, you just have to run campaigns now of paid. And then it’s like, great, we got 50,000 followers. What did that do? Getting down to followers and engagement, it’s muddy. And so for being an e-comm retailer, it’s like traffic, conversion rate, AOV. And then we tie it back to organic, and then we go back up that funnel and say, “Okay, well, how many followers are you talking to engagement?”
We can go down that route, but I can tell you in my experience, the conversion rate is always the lowest. It’s a touch point. It’s not like an endpoint. So what I’ve wrapped my arms around is email growth and how many emails are we tying to, and how much is an email worth to us? So I think right now an email is worth to us about 12. And so I’m like, “Great. We’ve got 10,000 new followers from that last giveaway, here’s what that means, and let’s get them in the cycle, and that kind of juicy stuff is way more important.”
Social media, I think, is just like a touch point. We’ll have people say like, “Oh, man, I saw you guys launch that new headlamp, that flashlight. Oh, that’s so sick. I watched that video. That was really cool.” Yeah, but I can tell you, I bet the email converted you. I bet the SMS converted you. As you become familiar with Google Analytics and make that work for you, I think that’s what’s super key with data, truthfully.
Mike Allton: So it sounds like then for most social campaigns, you’re probably trying to drive them into a simple email signup rather than converting into a sale.
Adam Buchanan: For sure. A hundred percent. Like, the conversion rate of email and SMS is way higher than organic. We’ve tried upping the cadence of how many images and how much content we’re pushing out there and especially when you’re in a small team—like we’re in a small team right now, we’re actually trying to hire a content specialist right now and a videographer. We don’t have all the cadence that we’d want. I’d post twice a day if I could, honestly. We just don’t have the bandwidth.
But what do I do have the bandwidth for is email. It’s like higher converging there. So, I would tell people if you’re really in social media, make sure, ’cause technically you’re in an earned channel, right? Or a little bit of owned, I believe, is emails and website traffic and SMS.
I just advise people [to] learn paid as fast as you can learn owned as fast as you can. ‘Cause, truly, let’s be honest. It’s more in the earned bucket. When I spread out and learned all three, that’s when my career took off, and my opportunities took off.
Are there tools in your stack?
Adam Buchanan: We’ll go direct to the platform. So we do look at the direct platform and see what a Meta paid campaign is doing or a Google paid campaign.
Then we look at site traffic. We’ll look at data aggregators. It used to be called Uncover, but now it’s called Glue, and it ties into our Magento platform in the backend.
One quick story I was going to share is you’re talking about cross-channel communication because some people, may not be able to learn those things quite yet. Or there’s a team that does that.
I just have a quick story, and it’s so important and it just illustrates how cross-communication can just blow up:
- I got tagged. When you’re on Facebook, and your mother-in-law tagged you in something, and you just feel like someone’s banging on your office door, you’re like, “Ah! I’m working.”
- My sweet mother-in-law tags me in this photo, and she says, “Hey, you might want to check this out!” And this was back in the day—where was it? When we’d shoot vertically, you weren’t supposed to shoot horizontally. Do you remember all that? And it’s this crappy, taken with a Nokia, piece of junk cell phone, and it’s 33 seconds long. And I’m like, “Oh, what is this? It’s so blurry.” It’s terrible.
- And this lady is filming her husband using a device. It’s called a fish skinner. (So, when you catch a fish, you can peel the skin off with this electric fish skinner. It’s a $150 device. Cabela’s just happened to sell them.)
- I didn’t know that. I just discovered that when I watched this video, and this lady’s like, “Jimmy just got his fish skinner and we’re trying it out and he’s doing it,” and it just really shows the product incredible.
- And I’m sitting here looking at this. I’m like, “I’m going to reshare this on our Facebook and see what happens.”
- So it goes out to 3.4 million people, right? She had already generated 12 million views. This is back in like 2013. 12 million views was Taylor Swift style back then if you’re going to ratio it out. So we add on probably five or 10 million views over a few weeks’ period.
- I flipped my chair around and I looked at the paid team and I said, “Hey, something just happened, and I think you guys need to know about it.” And I told them the product, we carried it, and everything, and they said, “Oh my gosh!”
- They shifted their paid budgets for that particular item for that category of word terms. We generated like 50 grand in 48 hours. Because organic, like that thing was taking off.
- She didn’t even post where the item was from. She tagged us in it, but didn’t say, “Go buy it here.” We added the link, but then our search volume took off.
- Organic activities do play into going into a Google search. People need to understand that, and that’s what happened.
How do you balance the needs for long-term brand building with some of those immediate needs for conversions when you’re communicating with leadership?
Adam Buchanan: I think that’s where LTV comes into play. And so we do track LTV. Some leaders want it on a weekly basis, but truthfully, it doesn’t go up very much week over week. If you understand LTV, it can take a year to just move a few bucks in some cases. So, I think that helps a bigger picture of like, “Hey, here’s what we’re trying to do on a longer term, how it ties back to brand versus getting the conversion today.”
I tie that back to also automated email campaigns, like how we’re talking to people, three or four times after they enter our ecosystem. So, it’s really helpful to understand the email side of that journey.
We just did a trade show last week here in Salt Lake. It was called Hunt Expo. We had three booths. 20 feet by 60 feet each. So a huge footprint, they’re all next to each other. And we had a sales goal. We were selling products there at the show. And then if we didn’t have the product, we would do an online order for somebody. So consumers were very happy. They’re enjoying the experience.
Well, the sales were a little bit lighter than we were hoping for. And some people are kind of like, “Oh, well, we didn’t hit our goal.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but think of all the people we talked to. Think of the people who got to experience us. And so that’s helping build our brand. Now we may not cash in on that for a while, but we collected a lot of emails.”
We also collect emails when something is out of stock. Imagine this for a second. When something’s out of stock, have you ever filled in that little box that says, “Notify me when back in stock?”
For me, it depends on what I’m buying. If it’s out of stock, and it’s like a spatula, and it’s got the shape of like, I don’t know, Mike Tyson’s face or something. I want a Mike Tyson, and I don’t have it. I’m probably going to try to find it. I just want my spatula. I’m not that into it. Now hunting gear, it’s very expensive. It’s very specific. It’s very particular sometimes by a matter of ounces. Those hiking poles are four ounces less than the other one, but they’re out of stock, but that’s the one I want.
And it’s not a color thing. It’s very a utility thing. So, it was really cool. I’d flip my iPhone around and be like, “Hey, I found that product. Unfortunately, we don’t have your size, but if you punch your email in right here. You’ll get an email the minute it comes back in stock, and you can purchase it.”
People are like, “Sweet. Heck yeah!” They’re not like, “Oh, I can’t get it today.” It’s like, “No, man, that’s the boot I want when I go to Alaska to hunt sheep. I’ll wait two months. I don’t care.” And they’re not bugs.
The other thing is they’re not bugging us a lot for “Hey, when’s it in stock?” or that type of thing.
I just think brand-building in that way is really cool. Then also just a takeaway versus here’s 10 percent off, go buy something. We didn’t have that in stock? Punch your email in. That is one of our highest-converting email campaigns is a back-in-stock campaign.
People need to look at that. If you’re in e-commerce and retail, that is the most religious report we look at.
What other advice would you give to social media managers?
Adam Buchanan: The best advice I ever got and the thing I implemented was having open office hours.
It depends on where you’re at and your structure and the team, but I literally did this at Cabela’s. I would just go book a room and have this standing appointment, inviting like 58 people to it, and I said, “This is a social media open office hours. You can come in, you can come talk to us.” I was in the Denver office back then, and so Cabela’s corporate was in Nebraska. We’d go once a month or so. I’d always make sure it was up in Nebraska ’cause that’s where a lot of the people were all the way up to the CEO. Anyone was welcome.
It was fascinating because I never had an agenda or a PowerPoint, and I would tell them that I would say, “No PowerPoints. This is live only. Come and ask me anything.” We can flash something up on a screen and we’re always ready. Like, we could pull reports and look at things live, but it was never sit and watch and drone through a PowerPoint. Which saved me a lot of time because I didn’t have to make a lot of PowerPoints. We’d say things like, “I saw this thing and what are your thoughts on that? You know, could we ever do something like that?”
Sometimes, people come up with really good ideas. I think sometimes you have to be open as well and not be so like, “Well, I’m the digital marketer and I know everything. And I’m just doing this to check a box to make you feel warm and fuzzy about yourself so you buy-in to me later.”
It’s like, no, truly be open. And when we’ve done that, we have developed campaigns or social posts around something. If it goes well, it’s great. If it doesn’t go well, it’s cool. We learned to move on, fail fast, and move forward. But when people feel like they’re part of the journey, that is huge. That is so huge. That is more successful than, “Oh, did we hit our numbers this week?” No, but long-term, as you get a lot more buy-in, you will hit those numbers.
I think it’ll go a whole lot better. So, that open office hours, I’d tell people out the gate.
Are there any thought leaders or resources that you would suggest other people turn to for ideas, social media trends, that sort of thing?
Adam Buchanan: Yeah, I think so.
I was a consultant for a very long time and did a lot of public speaking and things. So, I’d work with brands like HydroFlask, the water bottles, and was able to come in. (There’s always this weird conflicting experience with consultants because I think some people look at them like, “Oh, you’re going to come in and you’re going to take my job or you’re auditing what I’m doing.” And I would do audits all the time. And I just always try to make myself very clear of, “I’m not coming in to take your job. I like my job. I like what I do. I’m just coming in to help and just give you another dimension of what we’re looking at.”)
I’ve heard a lot of times people saying that the smartest thing you can do is just bring in smarter people. And so just a shout-out to the consultants out there. Those are good people to lean on because for a nominal price—you’re not paying their full-time salary for a year. You pay a retainer or an audit or whatever it might be. You’re getting into decades of data, information, and insight. So there are a lot of good. The things out there, I would say, really, if you want to double down, like get an audit, get somebody, you know, and so I did, consulting in the consumer space, outdoor and hunting and things like that.
So, it was a nice marriage. Beause people would be like, “Oh, sweet. Could you come to help train my people and have really open conversations?” That just opened up so many things. As I was doing that, and then as we’ve done that in the past, my favorite story is when I was at Columbia Sportswear, we hired Jay Baer’s team Convince and Convert, who I’ve worked for, and I love Jay Baer.
Jay’s fabulous. He is the best in the business. They came in, did an audit, and broke it all down of what Columbia Sportswear should be doing, and just phenomenal. And it was just like great. And it wasn’t like, “Oh, shoot, Adam, why didn’t you come up with that? Why didn’t you come up with that?” No, you need someone not drinking the Kool-Aid every day to come and give you that fresh insight.
We actually brought Jay’s team back to Cabela’s. Did the same thing. Then I think it was a couple of years later, he actually called me and invited me to be on the Convince and Convert team. It was just the best experience ever. So I just love Jay, love that whole team, but that just was a very powerful process.
I think we need to do that more to be very prescriptive. I worry that sometimes people are getting too much vague information where it’s like, “Go be on TikTok. Look at what this fashion influencer brand did.”
Dude, I need something for my space. So, get into something that’s vertical, informed for what you’re doing.
Thanks for reading the highlights from this episode with Adam Buchanan. 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.
