How your company can use social media to drive lower-funnel actions and conversions like website traffic, leads, and more from social expert, Hannah Acosta. Going beyond social engagements of likes, comments and clicks.
THIS EPISODE AT-A-GLANCE
- Tips to generate results using social media
- Does organic outreach create success?
- Brand example: utilizing social to generate results
- Hannah's interest in Twitter for brands
- Ask yourself this question before posting
Links mentioned in episode
- Social Media Mastery Facebook Group
- Follow Ugly Mug Marketing on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & YouTube
- Connect with Hannah on LinkedIn
Full Podcast Transcription
Hannah Acosta:
The fact that some people think about their goals and their business, their revenue goals, or the amount of leads that they wanna generate. People want that they want added to their email list. They think of those as separate from their social platforms. And the reality is those two things need to be in alignment. You can't go on social media and put into place a strategy without knowing what the goal is or what is the purpose of that content or the purpose of those posts.
Sarah Panus:
Hi, my name is Sarah Panus. I have spent the last two decades driving digital content for billion dollar brands. Now I help content marketers build winning brand storytelling strategies and reduce feelings of overwhelm and confusion. Join me as we discuss strategy, creativity, confidence, and building a better connection with your audience. Think of this as a creative content marketing jam session mixed with chicken soup for the soul. This is the Marketing With Empathy podcast.
Sarah Panus:
Hey, Hey, Kindred Speakers. Social media is the topic of the day. Social is a facet of everyone's business in varying forms. So today we're gonna talk more about it and talk about social media marketing that delivers more than likes comments and shares. Joining me, is my guest Hannah Acosta. Hannah is the passionate and purposeful leader of the social media department at Ugly Mug Marketing. What a great name for a business by the way. Ugly Mug Marketing, love that.
Sarah Panus:
Over the past four years, Hannah has grown her department by over 340% and has worked alongside hundreds of small business owners and entrepreneurs as they navigate the ever changing digital marketing landscape. After launching more than 4,000 social media campaigns, Hannah has had a front row seat to the challenges and rewards faced by marketers today from private clients to social media master classes, Hannah brings her expertise and energy. As she teaches clients how to use social media to scale their business, generate leads and achieve results. We all know social is important. We're gonna dig a lot more into it with Hannah and we'll get into that after a word from our sponsors. All right. Welcome to the show, Hannah.
Hannah Acosta:
Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Sarah Panus:
Yeah, me too. Thank you so much for coming on. I used to spend a lot of time on social when I worked on the corporate side, running a social team. And so social is definitely here to stay and it's only evolving and growing on a daily basis for all of us. And so really wanted to have you on, because I liked your point of view around thinking about social, you know, beyond just one way. And so I think that's what we have to do as brand marketers, as, as business owners, we have to be always evolving to make sure it's doing the most for our business and that we're adding the best value to our audience, to the people who are actually consuming that content. So social engagements, you know, are a huge part of tracking social media's success, but we're gonna talk about how to create content that delivers more than like shares and comments. So Hannah let's start there because so beyond like those traditional engagement metrics, how else do you recommend using social to generate results for a company?
Tips to generate results using social media
Hannah Acosta:
Yeah. I love that question so much because it's true. Those engagement metrics, those likes comments, shares, reach impressions. Those are measurements that I like to call vanity metrics. Those are things that may be important if we're in the initial stages of working with someone or an entrepreneur or a company of small, medium, large size, they might just be getting started and they might need that brand awareness help. And so we can definitely dive in and help them there. But the metrics that really matter the most to me, the things that help your business actually grow are things like leads. Number of phone calls, completed visits to the website, conversions, cart purchases completed. Those are the metrics that people seem to really stray away from. They're the ones that are a little bit more challenging to set up. If you aren't familiar with running ads or campaigns or looking into the true data of your social media platforms, whether you're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn there's so many, right?
Hannah Acosta:
There's new ones coming every day. Yes. Like a couple years ago, if someone explained TikTok to me, I probably, would've never under like understood it. But now here we are in a world where it's like, now we have TikTok and we have reels and who knows what the next thing is gonna be. Right. But anyway, you know, those true metrics of leads, phone calls, you know, getting people to your website, getting conversions. Those are the things that really matter, right? Because ultimately what companies are trying to do is build a relationship with their customers, further the relationship with their customers and bring in new customers, attract new people, invite them to sit around the table, invite them to follow them and to like, and to engage with their content. But ultimately they're trying to make money, right? Companies are trying to make money.
Hannah Acosta:
They're trying to find more customers. They're trying to find more evangelists. They're trying to find more people who are going to rant and rave about their company and tell their friends and tag them in their giveaways or tag them when a, a new release of a new color of their product comes out or a new service gets expanded. Those are what we're trying to measure. Those, those really meaningful engagements that ultimately take someone from a stranger to a friend to ultimately a customer. And that's where we're trying to take people when we're interacting with them on, on social media.
Sarah Panus:
Yeah. And it can be hard to do from a metrics perspective. Some that, I think that's what I've always found is like the hurdle that prevents a lot of companies. I think there's twofold. There's one, there's the mindset and the strategic planning process where they're not thinking about connecting those dots, but then two can also be tying it and actually figuring out, well, how do we track these things? So let's unpack that a little bit. Like what tips do you have to improve in those areas to drive more of those, you know, leads, phone calls, web conversions, all the things that you just said.
Hannah Acosta:
Yeah, that's a great. I love that too. So I think one thing that I wanna touch on real quick too, is the fact that some people think about their goals and their business, their revenue goals, or the amount of leads that they wanna generate. People want, that they want added to their email list. They think of those as separate from their social platforms. And the reality is those two things need to be in alignment. You can't go on social media and put into place a strategy without knowing what the goal is, or what is the purpose of that content or the purpose of those posts. If you're going out there and, you know, for lack of a better term, throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, you're never actually going to be able to measure those results or measure those phone calls or those leads or those add to carts or those true conversions of customers coming to your website.
Hannah Acosta:
For us, we've really learned that this is unique to every different type of business. So for example, one of my clients is a heating and pooling company. They are a, you know, I would say medium to large size business. They own over 60 different HVAC companies over the, over the Gulf coast. So from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, even into Arkansas, into Oklahoma, they have a multitude of different HVAC locations that they're over. Each of them has their own unique brand. Some of them are different branches of the same brand, but what we've found is, okay, we need to focus on what is y'all's revenue goal for each location? How many leads are typically generated for these locations before you started implementing social media marketing or implementing lead generation, and what is the measuring stick that we're going to use to kind of guide our decisions or measure success with, if we don't have a starting point, we'll never know if what we're doing is working or not.
Hannah Acosta:
So we need to have a common goal that we can all come to. So we've got this, this percentage of increase in revenue goal for each one of these locations. And what we do is run specific offers tailored to each location and the region that they serve. So for example, a $69 HVAC tuneup might be something that's really appealing to the greater new Orleans Metro area, but maybe something that isn't appealing to someone who lives in rural Hazelhurst, Mississippi, which is of better language, or which offers perform better in with, in whichever region, but then taking those leads that come through Facebook, lead generation campaigns. And we're actually measuring that directly in their CRM and on our own tracking spreadsheet separately, where we've got all the leads and information going into a spreadsheet via Zapier, which is a tool that I absolutely love for automation.
Hannah Acosta:
If you are a business owner, entrepreneur, any scale, shape, size, anything, Zapier, you need to look into it for any type of automation in your business. But anyways as the leads come in from Facebook, then the zap happens, the automation happens and they get added to the spreadsheet and we're tracking, okay, this lead came in. Here's when they came in, here's the lead form that they completed. Here's what they were interested in, but then, okay, what happened with this lead? How quickly did the customer service representative follow up with this person? Did this person schedule an appointment with us? If so, when does that appointment scheduled for? And when the appointment happened, did we track that? Did we measure that revenue? Okay, now that person is in your CRM and we're able to track what is the, how many more times did this person come back for our product or service, you know, did they schedule another $69 HVAC tune up in the fall, as opposed to the spring, or did their system completely go out and now they need a new system.
Hannah Acosta:
And they decided to call us over, you know, Joe Schmo, HVAC company down the street, you know, we're tactfully measuring all of those things. And we're able to do that partially because of Zapier, but also because of a lot of really fun formulas that we've got in our Excel document. But in addition to that Excel document, we've got it tied directly to their CRM. And so these leads are actively getting tagged as someone who came from Facebook. And so we can see the value over time of that person coming back again and again, and they're coming back because they're having a really good experience too. Right? And that's so important when we're, as companies are interacting and generating these leads, getting people to their website, we need to be thinking about the customer's experience and what their journey is along the way are they being followed up with promptly?
Hannah Acosta:
Is the technician showing up on time? Did the technician communicate with them all of the details of, you know, their $69 tuneup and everything that he did, and here's what my recommendations are. And here's when we can schedule another appointment again in the fall, you know, all of that is marketing too. And we forget that a lot. You know, it might start on social media, but it's also being carried out in the entire experience of that person from the time that they see the ad and they fill out the lead generation form on Facebook all the way to when the technician leaves their home. We have to be thinking about every, every single little piece in that entire journey, your journey.
Sarah Panus:
That's great. I think that's it's a great example that you shared of how you do that with your client. And it's also really interesting, I, what you said around the, like the customer service and the handhold and all of like the sales process at the end like that that's marketing too, because we you know, I come from a background of very large corporate, huge teams and, you know, you marketing does it, it gets handed off and then the sales team, you know, does their thing, but it is important cuz it's all about the customer experience as a whole. And all of that can be shared externally, which then becomes a marketing issue doesn't it cause almost that happy then it's like, Hey marketing, help us, you know, respond to this. So we have to remember that as part of that whole funnel. So everything you're talking about then just so I'm on the same page as you too. I agree with what you've said, everything you talk about then from a tracking perspective will be done and executed through paid ads. Correct? None of this is organic.
Hannah Acosta:
Yes. Correct. Yeah. And in that example in particular.
Sarah Panus:
Definitely, is there anything and I that's been my world too. My experiences that, you know, you, when you pay, obviously you get all the analysis and the metrics and the backend and it helps you reach a lot more people cuz the channels have keep, you know, changing and you kind of have to pay to get the eyeballs in front of them on, on a lot of the channels now. Is there any, any world or any experience that you've had that you see organic outreach efforts playing a role here or have you seen it all come back to paid? I'm just always curious if anyone's getting any success with organic outreach on any of the channels.
Does ORganic outreach create success?
Hannah Acosta:
Yeah. We tend to really focus on the paid aspect of things. We don't completely ignore the organic side because ultimately that's how all of these platforms started right there. Wasn't always paid Facebook ads or, or maybe it wasn't such a large component of people's marketing strategies in the way that it is now. So we don't dismiss the organic content. I think, especially when you look at companies that are doing a lot of Instagram reels and engaging with their perspective customers and current customers in that way, they're reaching a ton of people and they're having great success. So I don't think that organic content is dead by any means or that you have to pay to play in every scenario. I think you can have really great success, but the biggest and most important thing is consistency. You're not going to have great success with organic content and getting sales and helping you reach your goal if you're not consistent.
Hannah Acosta:
I think that having the paid side in conjunction with organic helps you get on a little bit of a fast track if you will, of getting to those results because Hey, I'm showing up for my people three times a week organically. But in addition to that, I've got three or four ads that are also running for the duration of the entire month. So I'm still showing up, I'm still relevant. They're still seeing my name. They're still seeing my face. They're still seeing my product, my story come across their screens, whether they're scrolling on Instagram reels or they're just scrolling mindlessly on Facebook or they're on or LinkedIn, we're still showing up is a little bit of a right. You have to really have your content out in such a way that, you know, you're showing this day, this day and this day and knowing that you paid, when you do paid, you can, I don't wanna say you can coast a little bit, but there is a little bit of relaxation.
Hannah Acosta:
I feel like that can happen. Of course you're still monitoring and looking at the data and the metrics and trying to tweak as needed. But organic, I just feel like is a, is a little bit more work and depending on the company's size and or an entrepreneur where they're at in their journey and time that can determine whether, okay, I need to go to the paid route or Hey, I think I can, I can kind of grind it out and have a lot of success with organic. The key to organic is yes, consistently showing up, but it is also interacting with your people on the platform. I read this really great book called, Know What You're For by Jeff Henderson and in the book, he talks about how important it is for brands of all shapes and sizes to go and interact with their customers on their platforms rather than just waiting for the customer to come to them.
Hannah Acosta:
Right. That seems to be the mentality, Hey, I'm gonna post something. And then I want my customers to come and interact here and then buy my stuff and that's gonna be that right. That's not really how it works. Right? We have to go and interact with them too. And his example that he uses is actually the company Chubby, which I'm a huge fan of. I love their fun swim trunks. My husband wears them. They have matching swimsuits for women. It's just a really fun and youthful brand. And one thing that Chubby does really well is they use their customers, photos on their Instagram pages. They share their customers, photos in their Instagram stories. They build their content to really be around their customer. And I think that's what allows them to have such great organic success. If you were to go and look at what's on Chubby's Instagram feed versus maybe what they're running on ads.
Hannah Acosta:
If you go into Facebook ads, library and search Chubby and look at their ads, I bet you, you know, they're, they're probably running some ads, right? Every, every larger scale business is running ads to some degree, whether it's, you know, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever it's. But I feel, it's an as I'm making a large assumption here, but I feel like the majority of their sales come off of that organic content that shows real people who are their customers that are wearing the swim trunks or wearing the matching swimsuits or have the, the mom and daughter or the dad and son matching swim trunks on. I would be willing to bet that the majority of their sales come from that content. And it's because they're using the right type of content they're showing up consistently. And they're creating content that really relates to their target audience. Because people go to their page and they say, Hey, that person looks like me. I also wanna buy from them. So all of that to say, answering your, your overarching question of, you know, can organic content really work? I do believe organic content can still really work and help companies make money. And I think Chubby as an example of a company that's doing creating really, really phenomenal organic content and having great success at generating revenue because of it.
Sarah Panus:
Awesome. I've never heard of Chubby, so now I'm not gonna check them out for matching gear for my family. That sounds exciting. Yeah. The name threw me for a second. I was like, is this dog food? Is this what it is?
Hannah Acosta:
Right.
Sarah Panus:
Yeah. Well that, that's a good example. And you mentioned you know, the heating and cooling company, your, one of your clients are, are there any other brand examples that you see or can share with us of doing this well in terms of how they think about social full funnel, you know, bringing it all the way down to like the conversion metric and how they track that?
Brand example: utilizing social to generate results
Hannah Acosta:
Yeah. Another company that we work with and have been working with for probably five or six years now is a coffee shop in Louisiana called little cakes with like attitude. They are a cupcake and coffee shop and they started their business 10 years ago and they are in a really big season of growth and really have been showing year over year, crazy, crazy growth since we've been working with them and even before then, but one thing that I think they've done really well is they've gone to Facebook and built a huge following. And that's what I see a lot of like companies of all sizes doing they're going on these platforms and they've got thousands and thousands of true followers of real people. I'm not talking about people who go on these platforms and buy, you know, and try and get all these fake likes.
Hannah Acosta:
I'm talking about people who get real potential customers and current customers to like them on social media and follow them. What little cakes has done is they said, Hey, okay, we've got like 13,000 people who like our page. That's crazy. Like, you know, we're, we're a decent size business, but we right now, we only have one location, but we have 13,000 people who like our page. We feel like we really need to capitalize on that. What they were missing was other channels and ways to reach their customers. When we started working with them, they had 13,000 people who liked their page and an email list of only 200. Hello. If your Facebook page gets deleted tomorrow, how are you gonna talk to those 13,000 people that are your fans? Yeah. Or that are your customers, man, what a missed opportunity there is for companies of all shapes and sizes.
Hannah Acosta:
If your Facebook, Instagram, TikTok following is greater than your email list, we have a problem. And we, there's an easy solution to that. We can use Facebook lead generation campaigns. It sounds like that's my only thing that I do, but it's really the most rewarding. And the way that I've found that I can really measure success for clients of all sizes is okay, let's run an ad just to those people who like your page. We know that that's the low hanging fruit. They're already committed to you. They already like your content. They interact with you in some way, shape or form. They've liked your page. You know, maybe they've come through the drive through, they've ordered a cake from you. You know, whatever the experience, they, they already have some level of buy in. So getting them to join the email list is not really that hard of an ask.
Hannah Acosta:
If I was blasting this out to a bunch of strangers, people who aren't familiar with little cakes, with big attitude, they might be like, wait, I don't know you, why would I wanna join your email list? People are constantly thinking what's in it for me. There's nothing in it for those people. But for someone who already likes your page, who follows you interacts with you, you might be able to hook them in with some sort of incentive, like a free cupcake on their birthday or 15% off on their next visit. Or you're gonna get an inside scoop or sneak peek at a behind the scenes on new recipes or things that are in the works or happening behind the scenes at little cakes with big gratitude. And we've found that those are the things that people who already have some level of buy-in are interested in.
Hannah Acosta:
And those people that have a level of buy in are those who already follow little cakes on Instagram and on Facebook. So what we did was created that late generation campaign and targeted only those people. And what we were able to do was generate hundreds. I think the last time I looked, we've been running this campaign for them on and off for the last three years when we ran it ju just this past January, we were generating 150 leads at about 54 cents a lead, I think, which is insane. And we're slowly working up to getting those 13,000 people who currently like them on Facebook onto that email list. Because now it's a one, two punch I'm showing up organically, or I'm showing up with an ad on Facebook while they're scrolling, but I'm also showing up in their email inbox and that's really valuable, right?
Hannah Acosta:
We wanna have multiple touch points with the customer. I think there's some statistic out there and there's probably contradicting ones, but there's a statistic that says people need to see something up to seven times before they make a decision. That's a lot of impressions we need to have on a singular person before they ever come through the drive through or order a cupcake from us, or place a custom order or dine in with us in the, in the bakery. So being able to touch have those touchpoints on Facebook, on Instagram, and then also then again, be able to communicate with them via our MailChimp email list. That's super important. And it's so valuable because now if my Facebook gets deleted or disappears tomorrow, or Facebook is nonexistent in two years, at least I still have all that contact information. I at least I can still communicate with them via email, or we're also collecting their phone number and we're collecting their birthday so that we can send them an email with a special treat on their birthday and make them feel really special.
Hannah Acosta:
And then we're also providing extra value with them as we're sending monthly newsletters telling them, you know, what the cupcake of the month is and what special treats are happening, or, you know, Hey, we have cupcake decorating gift boxes that are available for sale. And then we can go in and further track those measurements of all right, how many people opened this email, how many people clicked and purchased one of our cupcake decorating boxes or purchased an online gift card as a result of this email campaign. And so that is another way that we're utilizing paid and honestly, organic campaigns to prove those results to our clients, but get them away from putting all of their eggs in the social media basket. Right. We need to make sure that we're diversifying our reach and, and kind of where we're investing our marketing dollars.
Sarah Panus:
Definitely. And it is such a good tip to that. You said to not put all of your, not assume that your followers and likes are gonna be around forever on those channels. I always think about we're renting space from Zuckerberg, you know, you know, we're renting that space on those social platforms and you're right. Sometimes things happen where you see a company and all of a sudden glitch, you lost all your followers. It's terrifying. Like I see that happen to people. And I just, just last, the end of last year, there was like five different entrepreneurs. I know that that happened to on Instagram. And I was like, oh, and so it's very smart to think about how do you get those followers that are engaged with you socially to how do you get them into your own channels through, through your email marketing is great.
Sarah Panus:
And then you really have to nurture them with like a great, you know, email content, which you mentioned from like a newsletter perspective so that they're seeing value there. But super smart. I think, especially with everyone listening right now, I know you guys work for brands of varying sizes. And especially I think with the ones it's for everybody. But I also think about my early days at sleep number when we were starting social back when social was really just starting with brands and we were like social fad. And like, literally that was a question, Hannah, that was so funny, but to think about now, but I would say brands back then, like that ha now have millions and millions of followers. Like there's this huge opportunity cuz that's, you know, followers was like that vanity metric, everyone was trying to grow their channels, you know, to be big in the beginning, you have all these people in your community. How do you get them back into your own channel so that you can communicate to them whenever you want, which will help with all of this lower conversion stuff that Hannah is talking about too. So super smart. Okay. Hannah, lots of goodness from you so far. So is there anything on social right now or that's coming up that you're especially excited about right now for brands?
Hannah's Interest in twitter for brands
Hannah Acosta:
Yeah. One thing that I'm very interested to see how it plays out is Twitter has now been purchased by Elon Musk. So that's been the buzz in the digital marketing world and yes, really just across the news in general. And there are a variety of different feelings and thoughts around it. But for me, strictly looking at this new leadership and new owner of Twitter, one thing that is particularly interesting to me is the, that really wants source more for people who use the platform. Now don't know what that will mean and what tri Twitter is going to look like down the road. Heck I don't know what it's gonna look like a month from now or a year from now but what I am curious to see is how that affects other platforms like Instagram, like Facebook, like LinkedIn, how are they going to change and adapt?
Hannah Acosta:
Are they going to change and adapt at all? Are they going to be forced to have some sort of open source source algorithm as well and be even more transparent? Facebook has had a rough go in the last five years. I think everyone is fully aware of that, but I do think there has been progress in transparency. However, the idea of, again, this open source algorithm that we choose what shows up and when it shows up and how it shows up and when we see it, you know, gosh, I feel like that could be really interesting to see how, how that all plays out for Twitter in particular, and again, how it's going to affect other social media platforms and their strategy for keeping people on their platform and allowing people to see the things that they really want to see. I think, I think it's going to be really interesting as it plays out.
Sarah Panus:
I do too. I'm fascinated to watch it as is, as all of us are just to see how this changes, but I, my personal take on it is I think it's gonna be a good thing. I think it's gonna be a good thing for Twitter and I'm super curious to see what happens.
Hannah Acosta:
Okay. Other things that are coming to, you know, maybe Facebook and Instagram, I love seeing their emails that come across because there's always some beta version of something that they're testing or something. Some new feature that's rolling out. One thing in particular that I'm curious about is this was a couple months ago, they had shared in an email to their advertisers, that they were going to be moving from people, having personal Facebook page admin access to essentially like a company portal that you could log into to get access to the page. And so I think that would really solve. A lot of issues that people have with page ownership and who has access to my page and removing employees from there once they've left your company because especially larger scale companies, a lot of people have access to your Facebook page and they're publishing content and interacting with users.
Hannah Acosta:
And so I think having a really nice centralized location to be able to give people access easily so that it's not associated with their personal Facebook page. I think a lot of people are looking forward to that. I have a lot of clients who don't want to be on Facebook, but they know it's important, you know, personally, but they know it's important for their business to be on Facebook. So this would be a way for that to be able to happen. And so I'm, I'm excited for, for that to come around sooner rather than later.
Sarah Panus:
Awesome. Okay. So we're getting towards the end, but I have a couple more questions for you. So the first one is, before we wrap up is like, after listening to this episode, what would you say is like one piece of advice that you want my listeners to do to improve their social media marketing plans after listening to our conversation?
Ask yourself this question before posting
Hannah Acosta:
Yeah, that's a great question. I want people to ask themselves before they post a real or just a regular old post or video create an ad for their platform or for their, for their brand on their platform. I want them to ask themselves, will this post or ad or content contribute to me achieving blank, whatever your company's goal is for this month for this quarter, for this year, for the next five years, is that ad post content, is it going to actually help you in achieving that goal? If the answer is no, you gotta ditch it. You gotta find something better. There's gotta be a better solution, a better way to help you reach that goal. And that doesn't mean that all of your content has to be by my stuff, by my stuff, by my stuff, because I will tell you that that does not work right.
Hannah Acosta:
We need to have that engaging content. We have to be relating to our consumers, but you have to be able to justify and tell yourself I'm going add this piece of content across all of my platforms or on this singular platform. And it is going to help me achieve this goal by, you know, helping me relate to my audience or help me develop more social proof or brand awareness, you know, whatever it may be. But make sure that it's helping you reach and achieve that essential goal. Now, I also know that keeping up with all of these changes coming to Facebook and Instagram and all of the social media platforms, gosh, it's a lot to be in the note on, okay. Like I said, I get these emails from Facebook. I feel like twice a week, you know, it's impossible to keep up with all of the updates.
Hannah Acosta:
And so really as an added bonus, for those of you who are listening today, I wanna invite you to our Ugly Mug Marketing Social Media Mastery group. This is a private Facebook group for business owners, CEOs, marketing inside marketing people at companies for y'all to be able to come in, engage with one another, ask questions and also get those high level updates. Like the, what you really need to know about changes that are coming to Facebook or what you really need to know about these changes coming to Instagram, because there's a lot going on out there. And some of it impacts you and some of it might not. And so I think we do a really good job of kind of breaking down. Here's what you need to know. Here's why it's important. And also here's some tips on how you can adjust your strategy based on those changes.
Hannah Acosta:
And I think an example really quick of a change that recently rolled out was Facebook removed some specific interests on within targeting in, on the ad side of things. So you can't target people who are like interested in American cancer society or breast cancer awareness or things like that. And that really impacted one of our clients because their whole nonprofit is based around people getting free mammograms and cancer screenings. And so we had to rework our strategy a little bit and I was like, man, the way that we reworked their strategy, it worked and we're still producing great results. But man, I would love to be able to share this with people who are, who have been impacted by, you know, that specific ad target audience, you know, being removed. And so this is a place for all of those questions to be answered and for you to get the latest updates on also from media.
Sarah Panus:
Oh, love that. Great. Thank you. I'll make sure I'll get that link from you too for the Facebook group. We'll put that in the show notes, everyone. So if you're out and about just click on the show notes to access that Facebook group, I think that's a great value add, especially with how fast everything keeps moving. You just wanna make sure you're not missing something. So it's nice that you guys have created that for, for people. That's really smart. Okay. So then next question is how can people connect with you online both personally as well as Ugly Mug Marketing?
Hannah Acosta:
Yes. So you can join our Facebook group if you're interested or you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Ugly Mug Marketing. You can also find us on LinkedIn and give us a follow there and on YouTube at Ugly Mug Marketing and to connect with me personally, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can find me at Hannah Costa. I would love to connect with you there, grab a virtual cup of coffee and help you as you're navigating the crazy digital marketing world as it is today. And kind of brainstorm together.
Sarah Panus:
Love that. Okay, great. I'll put all those in the show notes too. Thank you so much for coming on today. I do have like one burning last PS kind of question for you, which is why Ugly Mug Marketing? Like where did that name come from? Is there like a short answer to that? Or do you even know the answer to that? It's such an interesting company name.
Hannah Acosta:
Yeah. So I do know the answer. It's a pretty short story. So our founder, our owner and founder Wayne Mullins, he is like the marketing guru behind Ugly Mug Marketing. But anyways, he founded this company 13 years ago and ugly came from David Ogilvie. Who's like a famous marketer. Yeah. So David Olivie once said, he'd rather have an ad that is ugly and produce results than an ad that is pretty and does nothing. Mm. In so many words, he said that and so that's why our name is ugly. And the mug is I, you know, maybe I need to ask Wayne about the mug, but everyone in our office just chugs coffee or tea and that's actually a question that we ask people when we, when they apply is do you prefer coffee or tea? Oh. And so that's where the mug part comes in, but really we're, we're all about results. You know, one of our taglines is results. Not reasons, you know, I wanna, I wanna produce results for somebody. And it might be means of an ad that you think is ugly, but if it's gonna help you get more money in your business, then that's the thing that we're gonna roll with.
Sarah Panus:
And does your agency exclusively do social? So is that what the types of clients that you like to work with? Tell us a little bit more about that.
Hannah Acosta:
Yeah, so we do social media marketing, digital marketing. We also build custom websites from scratch as well. And we also provide traditional marketing services as well. And clients that typically fit into that side of things are businesses that don't have a marketing department and we just become their handy Dany marketing department. And we handle social email billboards, television radio. We can do all the things. So it's kind of a trifold. So social media and digital specific websites, and then traditional marketing as well.
Sarah Panus:
Okay, well big thanks again to Hannah Acosta, the fabulous Hannah Acosta from Ugly Mug Marketing. Make sure you check out all the show notes for all the links that we mentioned throughout the show today. Until next time, Kindred Speakers.
Closing Remarks
Sarah Panus:
Hi fives for finishing another episode. When faced with an obstacle, you’re the type of person who gets better instead of bitter. I hope you feel creatively inspired and invite you to check back often for more goodness from me and my guest. If you want more actionable advice and inspiration head over to kindredspeak.com for show notes, all discount codes from today's episode, and to sign up for my newsletter. Subscribe now to the Marketing With Empathy podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify and wherever else you get your podcast. And if you'd be so kind, will you please leave me a review. This helps my podcast get noticed by others. Keep smiling.
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ABOUT SARAH PANUS
Sarah Panus is a brand storytelling marketing strategist, Minnesota mom, and owner of Kindred Speak, LLC, a remote consultancy that helps corporations attract upper-funnel leads that drive bottom-funnel results through storytelling. Her mission is to add value to the world by humanizing brand+consumer connections. Her online courses teach content professionals inside corporations think like Editorial Directors for their brand to drive stronger results while enjoying their jobs more. She’s spent the last 20 years helping brands including Sleep Number, Starbucks, Nestle Waters, Christos Bridal, Game Crazy, Cone Inc, and others, speak a kindred language with their audiences, driving brand advocacy and millions in revenue and brand engagements. Learn more at www.kindredspeak.com. Follow Sarah on Instagram and LinkedIn.
