How Social Marketing Is Like Sharing Ice Cream

Jeffro (00:01.038)
Welcome back to digital dominance. Have you ever felt that social media doesn’t really feel that social anymore? It seems like we all have our feeds and we spend more time consuming content than we do sharing our lives with our friends and family. So as a business owner, it’s natural to wonder how to use social media and all these things online to generate more business. On the one hand, randomly posting without a strategy might not get you very far if you’re just hoping to go viral. On the other hand, maybe we need to get back to the basics and focus on the social in social media.

Now my guest today is Ashley Stanford. She’s a digital marketing consultant and freelancing expert with more than 15 years of experience in the digital marketing space. She’s also the EVP of client strategy at TicketSocket and vice president and co -founder of Ice Cream Social. So Ashley, I’m excited to talk about social media and digital marketing and everything. So welcome to the show.

Ashley Stanford (00:52.277)
Thanks, Jephro. Excited to be here.

Jeffro (00:55.374)
Yeah, and I’m going to say for the people watching on YouTube, Ashley’s not taking a mug shot. There was a situation with her desk. She had to point it at the wall. But you could say the same thing about mine and my boring curtain. So we’re not going to worry about that. But Ashley, you’ve been doing this for a long time. I want to ask your opinion on the current digital marketing landscape and how that’s changed since you started over 15 years ago.

Ashley Stanford (01:05.653)
Yes.

compromise.

Ashley Stanford (01:20.757)
her. So I would say when I first started, one of the first things I got into in digital marketing was search engine optimization. And this was right before social media kind of really became big. And at one time that was, you know, you didn’t need many marketing strategies or tactics in your toolbox. You could change a couple of things on your website and be number one in two weeks on Google. And sadly, that doesn’t work like that anymore.

Jeffro (01:46.574)
Mm -hmm.

Ashley Stanford (01:50.453)
So I’d say one of the biggest changes in digital marketing, social media is there’s not just one channel that’s going to work for you and you don’t want all your eggs in one basket as we found relying on social media platforms. I’ve been in many cases where someone’s you know meta account is hacked or the algorithm changes and you’re just kind of at the mercy of all these tools.

I think one of the most important things really that we have learned over the years is to diversify your marketing channels.

Jeffro (02:28.046)
Right, and that makes sense. I mean, the company could go out of business. We’ve seen social media platforms come and go. There’s no more Vine or a bunch of other ones, too, that people have forgotten about. So what are some of the most effective digital marketing campaigns that you’ve seen during your time?

Ashley Stanford (02:43.477)
Sure, pretty broad question, but one little plan I like to always have in my arsenal, no matter whether I’m marketing an event or a medical device or a fintech company, one of the main things that we like to do, leveraging social media and paid components of that, is have what we call a lead generation strategy.

Jeffro (02:47.821)
It is. So you pick the direction.

Ashley Stanford (03:03.097)
Yeah.

Jeffro (03:12.974)
Mm -hmm.

Ashley Stanford (03:13.077)
And what that means, if you’re not familiar, is you’ve got a form somewhere and you’re collecting people’s name, email, and hopefully phone numbers this day and age. And the whole idea of that is the cost to acquire a lead. If you’re running, let’s say paid social media ads is usually pretty nominal in comparison to the cost to acquire a customer with a Facebook ad, let’s say.

And so if you have a lead in your database, you can market to them much more efficiently and get them to convert. So that could look like emails. They’re put into an email drip sequence, ongoing email marketing communications, SMS marketing. If you’re selling a product online, once they’re in your funnel, you can do things like abandoned cart.

email and SMS. You can also do retargeting ads on social media which convert at a higher rate than cold prospecting traffic. So I’d say a strong lead generation plan as part of your overall marketing strategy will get you the best bang for your buck.

Jeffro (04:29.166)
Yeah. Well, and I like that you highlighted the cost comparison there too, because a lot of people will say, you should have your own email list. It’s like, okay, maybe, but part of the reason why is it’s cheaper to market to those people, right? You don’t have to keep paying over and over to get in front of them once they’re on your email list. You just send another email. So that’s way cheaper. And that’s a good way to think about it too, to help people remember this is worth doing. So what about the actual, what’s on the other side of that form?

to get those leads. Is that some lead magnet, free service? What do you typically recommend there?

Ashley Stanford (05:06.069)
Yeah, it completely depends on your product or service you’re offering. Let’s say when I’m marketing events, which is an area that I play a lot in, what we’ll do oftentimes is before an event even goes on sale, we’re running ads in the market that they’re going to be coming to. And we’re saying, hey, sign up, become a VIP, get on the list so that the second we go on sale,

you are getting the best price, you’re getting special packages, special add -ons, you know, things that won’t be available unless you buy on that opening sales day. So that can be one tactic, just like a FOMO and promo stacking. Another piece, if you’re more service -based, could be a piece of educational content, a download of sorts. If you are a retail product online, it could be

special promotion 20 % off 10 % off type thing

Jeffro (06:08.59)
Gotcha. Yeah. And you can get creative there too. But part of that is assuming you have traffic coming to your website already. And so that’s why you need these other channels like SEO or paid ads or something to get those people on your site in the first place. That lead capture offer is going to help you make the most out of that effort, right? Not let your money be wasted if they just come and then they leave.

Ashley Stanford (06:30.933)
For sure, yeah. Definitely want to capitalize on any traffic coming to your site.

Jeffro (06:36.206)
Yeah, so let’s talk about optimization then for a minute. You know, when someone comes to you and says, my campaign’s not performing as well as I’d like, where do you start with that?

Ashley Stanford (06:45.653)
Sure, so we will look at everything they’re doing in marketing and look for any kind of optimizations. So background, growing up loved playing Super Mario Brothers. It was really the only video game I had. And once you beat the game, you’ve beat the game. So in order to keep it exciting for me over the years,

I would create these kind of different challenges and optimizations along the way and say, okay, this time I’m going to beat the whole game. But while I’m doing that, my main focus is I’m going to collect as many coins as possible. And then you can kind of stack on after you’ve done that. Okay, I’m going to collect as many coins as possible and also go as fast as I can possibly go. And that love for, I guess, optimization of being the best Mario player ever.

kind of drove me to loving that in a marketing campaign. Some people love to build the plan and get it launched. I love to dig in when things aren’t necessarily working. So we’ll take a look at everything and you know, maybe that’s their ads, their email, their SMS, and we’ll find any little area for improvement. Maybe your ads are performing pretty good. Maybe you’re at a 5x return.

Jeffro (07:53.934)
you

Ashley Stanford (08:09.461)
But could we get that to five and a half X or six X if we update the creative or AB test some headlines? Same with email. Are we AB testing subject lines? So kind of looking at every single thing we’re doing and seeing where can we just keep pushing the limits? Where can we keep testing and increasing our results?

Jeffro (08:32.494)
What is your iteration feedback cycle? Like how long of a timeframe are you looking at when you’re making these optimizations before deciding if it worked or not?

Ashley Stanford (08:42.901)
Sure, I mean, again, it depends on the client, what kind of marketing they’re doing, how long their sales cycle, things like events where sales cycles are much shorter. You know, we may be looking at a smaller timeframe. So it could be as little as a week. It could be a month. It could be a quarter. It is like, sorry, just one of those things that depends what kind of product you’re selling and how long have you been doing that strategy and how much time we have.

Jeffro (09:07.502)
Mm -hmm.

Jeffro (09:11.822)
Gotcha. So let’s talk for a second about digital marketing partnerships, because that’s come up as part of something that you like to talk about. But are you talking about partnering with an agency, or are you talking about referral partners who send you business?

Ashley Stanford (09:26.421)
both. So as a freelancer, one of the things I found and I’m getting pretty winded, which you also can’t see on my video is I’m pretty pregnant right now. So thank you. I get pretty winded while I’m talking. So if you hear me take a deep breath, that’s why. So as a freelancer, early on in my career, what I found is I was spending

Jeffro (09:39.15)
Okay, congrats

Ashley Stanford (09:55.445)
80 % of my time doing sales and trying to get new business and keeping that pipeline full and 20 % actually getting to do what I love. So one thing that I learned after getting introduced to an agency is as a freelancer, if you’re a digital marketer, one of the best clients that you can have are agencies. Partner up with agencies because

One, they’re doing all the work to go pitch the clients that have a big budget. So you don’t have to worry about the sales piece of it. Two, they’re always looking for support. They’re needing people who can scale up and scale down with them for different projects, different clients. And three, again, they have the budget so you can charge an hourly rate that you feel comfortable with that allows you to do your best work. And that for more than a decade, 10, 15 years,

has worked out really well for me to just have agency partnerships to help with my freelancing. And then people leave agencies, they refer me other places. So that’s been really great if you’re a freelancer. Now on the, go ahead, sorry. Now I can use a breath.

Jeffro (11:06.254)
So no, no, please continue.

Well, I was going to ask about how do you even approach creating or cultivating those partnerships in the first place? Is it just through networking or just doing some Google searches and say, hey, I’d like to work with these people and reach out. So how do you do that?

Ashley Stanford (11:23.588)
Yeah. So, I mean, for me, it was networking. I did a lot of people -to -people networking early on in my career. It was a different world. Social media wasn’t what it was yet. So I was attending things like Chamber of Commerce mixers, sunset mixers, things they would host in the evening or joining things like BNI where you would meet with other businesses every week and kind of exchange referrals.

And honestly, it just took an introduction to a couple agencies where I, you know, made sure I did my best work, put my best foot forward. And over time that turned into a lot of referrals. Cause like I said, people you’re working with leave, go to other agencies or clients that you worked with left and went other places. So if you do good work, you’ll see that compound effect and

referral business will take off for you. If you haven’t had those kind of introductions or done in -person networking, then yes, I totally suggest seeking out agencies that you wanna work with, put together a really great, almost like resume. In the past, I put together these really fun resumes when I have wanted to approach clients that I wanna work with and I’ll put, you know.

examples of my work. I’ll put case studies, things like that that make it so easy for them to not say no.

Jeffro (12:56.75)
Well, what about, a lot of times it’s easy to see a one way relationship. You’re like, this person works with a lot of my target customers, but you don’t have anybody you could refer back to them. Does the partnership always have to be a two way street for it to be a good arrangement?

Ashley Stanford (13:12.085)
I don’t think so. That definitely hasn’t come up for me in the agency life. They love having freelancers that they can turn to when things get really busy and then also not feel guilty about if things are a little slower. So as long as you’re okay with that and can scale up and down and have other clients, it usually works out pretty well.

Jeffro (13:36.398)
Gotcha. So I did mention in our intro, you know, the social aspect of social media. I feel like we should touch on that a little bit. And you have your company Ice Cream Social, which is all about client referrals, right? Getting people to refer you to someone else. So it’s not necessarily a professional referral partner, but it’s your customers referring you to other people. So can you talk about that and how that works?

Ashley Stanford (13:59.925)
Yeah, so Ice Cream Social was born out of a need of clients that I was working with that said, hey, I really need to sell more tickets to my event, but I am not gonna spend more money on Facebook ads. Like, I’m not gonna increase my budget. What could we possibly do? So after lots of brainstorming, we thought of ways, okay, we’ve already got some customers. How can we get them to bring us?

more customers because they’re the people that would know best. And so, you know, we’ve tried different things like different email campaigns and what we found was kind of again, bringing love for video games into it and gamifying customers and giving them a reward. So an example would be you buy a ticket to let’s say the circus and on your confirmation page, you’ll see an offer that says, Hey,

Jeffro (14:33.774)
Mm -hmm.

Ashley Stanford (14:58.805)
Jeff Rowe, events are more fun when your friends go with you. Share this link and if you get five friends to buy, we’ll give you a full refund. And of course you get a unique URL, you can share however you want, social email, SMS. And what we found is a lot of people will invite their friends if you ask them at the right time and you make it fun and compelling for them. What’s in it for them?

Jeffro (15:26.35)
Right, so you’re just recruiting these instant affiliates who are already buying from you and just kind of getting them to drag their friends along.

Ashley Stanford (15:30.677)
Yeah. Exactly. It’s just taking that word of mouth marketing and kind of putting it to work in the digital world.

Jeffro (15:41.262)
Yeah, well, it’s embracing that social, the psychology, right? Like we like to do things together. We get so used to just being focused on our little world when we’re buying our tickets or doing our thing, scrolling our feeds. But that’s a great reminder to open your eyes up like, yeah, look, who’s next door to you? Who do you work with? And kind of gets you out of that and bring those people into that same funnel. I like it.

Ashley Stanford (15:47.989)
Yeah.

Ashley Stanford (16:05.429)
Exactly. Kind of a big idea behind it is every single person is an influencer, even if they’re not on social media, even if they’re not on Instagram or don’t have any followers. Everyone has friends and family that they talk to in their life and has some sort of influence over something. So this kind of helps facilitate that and reach those people.

Jeffro (16:23.598)
Mm -hmm.

Jeffro (16:30.926)
Do you have any thoughts on how businesses can use that type of social thinking on social media to expand their reach?

Ashley Stanford (16:42.293)
Yeah, I mean, it’s just that philosophy that the people who have already bought from you, who are following you, who are engaging in your content, they’re the best people to tell you who else could be your customer because they are surrounded with like -minded people. So you just got to figure out how to activate that, whether it’s something like ice cream social or, you know, you see a lot of, hey, tag.

two of your friends in the comments, if you know someone that would like this type thing, things like that. You just got to kind of get in the heads of your customer, your following, and figure out what’s going to incentivize them enough to introduce you to people just like them.

Jeffro (17:29.838)
So this sounds like it would work really well with retail or events because it’s kind of a one -time thing or it’s something that everybody can buy. But what about if you’re a service business? Does this approach still work if you’re like, hey, invite three of your neighbors to do their roofs and you’ll get a discount on your roof. Does that still work?

Ashley Stanford (17:35.125)
Yeah.

Ashley Stanford (17:50.869)
Yeah, I mean, maybe not using the ice cream social tool, but it’s that same idea of asking for referrals, which is just timeless business advice of, hey, when you complete a project and you know you did a good job, don’t be ashamed to ask for referrals. Hey, do you know anyone else who would benefit from this just like you?

At the very least, if you are just so uncomfortable with that and can’t figure out the right way to ask somebody for referrals, at the very, very least, one of the best things you can do for your online presence is at least ask them for a review on Google if you help. Which is kind of, yeah, for sure.

Jeffro (18:37.326)
Yeah, that goes a long way.

Because future people browsing the internet or doing a Google search are going to see those reviews. They’re going to read them. And that’s going to help sway them in their decision whether or not to reach out to you. So it’s a great reminder. Are there any common mistakes you see with businesses when it comes to promoting their business, whether it’s on social media or paid ads or anything?

Ashley Stanford (18:49.973)
Absolutely.

Ashley Stanford (19:02.741)
Sure, I would say one thing I see a lot of is a company will have a budget and they might have a plan and test out different marketing channels and say, you know what?

I am only seeing a return on my meta ads. And so I’m going to stop doing every other marketing and I’m going to put all my money into this. Couple things that can fail from that. No matter, it doesn’t have to be meta ads. It could be any marketing channel that you’re going all in on is one, as we mentioned before, you’re at the mercy of that platform. So you never know what could happen, what could change, what could get hat.

So you don’t ever want to put yourself in that vulnerable situation. Number two, with the right marketing strategy, all boats rise with the tide. So email, SMS, Facebook ads, search engine optimization, organic social media, all of those should be working together. And what you’ll find is if they’re all working together properly, the return

on spend will go up on all of those and the cost to acquire a customer will go down. If you pull something from the strategy, what you might see is a cost per acquisition will go way up on meta because you stop doing email and SMS when really those were supporting but you just can’t see it. So part of that is just also a lack in understanding analytics and proper tracking. That’s another mistake that kind of ties into that.

Jeffro (20:42.574)
Well, that sounds… It obviously makes sense and it’s good advice to make sure that you have all these additional touch points. But to your point, it can feel complicated to do it right and make sure that you’re understanding the benefit of all these different channels that you’re reaching out to people with. So how do you make sure that it’s done right?

Ashley Stanford (21:01.877)
Yeah, for sure.

Ashley Stanford (21:06.765)
Well, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you definitely want to hire an expert. But as we all know, even if you hire an expert, you need to have a good enough understanding to ask the right questions. So I would always ask the right questions. I would ask for data points to prove whatever anybody is saying. If they’re presenting a report, get those data points and get those data points from at least two sources.

So let’s say you’re running Facebook ads and your ad person is telling you, hey, we’re getting a 5X return on ad spend. So for every $1 spent, we’re making $5. Great. Also take a look at Google Analytics and show that as well. The numbers aren’t always going to be identical because there’s different attribution, but you should be able to show a consistent pattern.

Jeffro (22:05.134)
Got it. Makes sense? Yeah, and don’t be afraid to ask those questions too. If you’re like, that didn’t really make sense. Could you explain that again? Or can you show me how that looks over on the analytics side? Just ask the questions. Don’t be shy.

Ashley Stanford (22:17.013)
Exactly.

Jeffro (22:18.958)
All right, I forgot to mention or ask earlier, which version of Mario were you beating consistently? Is it Mario 1?

Ashley Stanford (22:26.005)
so yeah, the original Super Mario Bros. for sure. I mean, now that I have kids we love. I don’t love Smash Bros. They do, but I do love a good family night of Mario Party.

Jeffro (22:29.102)
There we go. Okay.

Jeffro (22:42.51)
Sounds good. Yeah, group games are always fun. Well, we’re coming to the end of our time. So I want to say thank you for joining me today, Ashley. You know, social media and digital marketing, it all sounds like it should be easy, but it can feel really tricky in practice and get complicated really fast. So that doesn’t mean you should be scared of it or you shouldn’t do it. Just know what you’re getting into. Have somebody there to help you do it one step at a time and it will be a benefit for your business. So for those of you guys listening,

Ashley Stanford (22:43.445)
Yeah, for sure.

Jeffro (23:11.182)
Check out icecreamsocial .io if you want a widget that can increase your sales through word of mouth at the checkout. And last question for you, Ashley, what’s your number one recommendation for service business owners when it comes to social marketing?

Ashley Stanford (23:24.725)
Hmm, I would really really focus on your email list growing your emails however you can whether it’s running ads to grow an email list Some sort of free content to grow your email list You will always own that email list But you can’t own the algorithms

Jeffro (23:44.85)
True. All right, great advice. Thank you for that reminder. Thanks again for being here, Ashley. Thanks to all you guys for listening. Keep plugging away, and I’ll see you back here for the next episode of Digital Dominance. Take care.