Amanda Lucidi (00:02)
they would be asking me, okay, what's the strategy? And I would say, I'd love to tell you, but I need to know what you think the goals are. And then that's how I can build a strategy. There's no strategy without a goal. So if you don't know why you're doing something, it's really, really hard.
to build a system around that.
Ben Ard (00:45)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Amanda. Amanda, welcome to the show.
Amanda Lucidi (00:50)
Thanks for having me.
Ben Ard (00:51)
Yeah, Amanda, I am excited. This is going to be fun. This is a subject that I think a lot of people care about. It's something that you've built a business around and I think that your expertise is really going to shine through. So before we dive into that though, let's have you kind of share your background work history. Let us get to know you.
Amanda Lucidi (01:07)
Absolutely. So I started my career as a journalist. I came out of school with a film degree and a journalism degree. And so I found myself working at a lot of publications as their first social media person. And when I was coming out of school, moving into some of these publications, this was really the beginning of when
you would see places start to invest in having a social media person full time. But also, you know, there was this big boom around video. I despite my double comms decision, I was able to really, I think, come in at an opportune time and use expertise that I had already built. that sort of has just led me to
working at a couple of agencies and now my own company, Mandy Media Co., where I do some business consulting, production, a whole slew of the different skill sets that I've collected over the years. But like we're going to discuss today, I think one of my favorites is talking about building sustainable workflows because there's nothing I love more than to see
a team that doesn't seem like they're going to burn out. So yeah, I'm definitely excited to talk about this stuff because I think it doesn't get the airtime it actually probably needs.
Ben Ard (02:32)
yeah, I agree 100 % and I love that you're taking into account the well-being of the people workflows are not there to replace people. It's to let their creativity shine and let them be effective on the things that can be repeatable. So like you said today, we're going to talk about building a content engine that scales the workflows, all that kind of stuff with your experience and you coming into a lot of businesses and helping them out here. What do most businesses miss?
Amanda Lucidi (02:37)
Yeah.
Ben Ard (02:56)
when they're trying to scale their content efforts. What have you seen time and time again?
Amanda Lucidi (03:01)
I think the first thing I tend to notice is there's companies that maybe understand they need to invest in this side of the business, but they're not thinking about the operational side. you know, they're not thinking about the workflows, the approval processes. They might be thinking about, okay, we'd like to see these kinds of
ideas or this kind of content, but they're not thinking about how do you get that first? And what is that kind of lift look like? Is that, know, do you have a team that's making content already and it's about how to optimize using it? Or do you not have that at all yet? And a lot of the conversations I would get into with businesses is they just knew they needed to invest in marketing of some kind. And oftentimes I think there's that anxiety about
we haven't invested in social media and now we have to play catch up. But the reality is if you don't have a strong content production process, you're not gonna have strong content and then the content will not perform. And so it's a little bit of that chicken or the egg game where you're asked.
And I think I think what happens to is sometimes I'll talk to folks and they get kind of anxious about, this is like a bigger lift than I anticipated. But what I say is it's it might it might not be as big of a lift. might just be you have to really understand it before you start it. And I see a lot of places just try to hit the ground running before really taking the adequate time to plan out what that would look like.
And so, yeah, I love to walk through, I love to learn about kind of what the current business operations are, who they think should be involved versus maybe who's actually going to be involved. You know, and I've had conversations where I think they think there's going to be, they're going to need to include every single person in the marketing team in some of these workflows. And that's not always necessarily the case, you know? So,
Yeah, I think without that backbone, it's just going to lead to kind of a failed or launch or just a burnt out team that's going to have some resentment towards the whole process. you don't want your team to lose trust in initiatives that you're starting at the business.
Ben Ard (05:24)
Yeah. And I love that because before you can scale something, you really do need to prove that it works. And I like that you're talking about, Hey, you've got to build like decent enough quality to actually go out there and have an understanding if something is going to be scale worthy, if it's worth the effort, worth the time and energy. How do you know, like you're doing enough that like you're getting the first indicators that like the content is or isn't working. And if you should.
Amanda Lucidi (05:29)
Yes.
Ben Ard (05:52)
Pivot, try different channels, different avenues. Like, how do you know you're, getting enough data to kind of feel like you can make a decision there.
Amanda Lucidi (05:59)
It's such a question. you know, I think it's a hard one to answer depending on the size of the company and how broad of an audience you're dealing with. You know, I worked with a company that dealt with early education all the way up to, you know, like retirees. They had different facets of their business that covered all age groups. So
The question there where do you even start? And so what I said to them is, well, what's the bulk of your business or what is the most established part of your business and what's that age group? And then just reverse engineering from there of, okay, so let's say it's millennials there or, you know, sort of sandwich generation folks that are maybe raising kids, but also taking care of, you're going to start taking care of their parents. I'd say if we're talking social media.
Instagram and Facebook. But then some of the other questions are like, well, what are the goals? Because I can't tell you how many times, you know, I ⁓ had a job where
they would be asking me, okay, what's the strategy? And I would say, I'd love to tell you, but I need to know what you think the goals are. And then that's how I can build a strategy. There's no strategy without a goal. So if you don't know why you're doing something, it's really, really hard.
to build a system around that.
And it's not usually super effective to just try to build something and see what sticks, you know, because then you kind of put yourself in a bit of a box where you've invested in these processes that maybe are not the most effective. So yeah, I really try to get companies to articulate what do you at least think your goals are, you know, ideal world, just give me your wish list. And then from there,
I can radically prioritize, okay, here's the thing that I think would get the most return on your investment in investing in these workflows, the team to support it, just the energy all around that it would cost you guys. And by doing that, you're able to just, I think, focus on one process to build first. And then, you know, if you're lucky, you can maybe even just replicate that depending on what channels we're talking about. But
Like, as I mentioned, you know, I come from social media and in a time when places are, we're starting to invest in it. I saw a lot of places that just thought it would be this catchall. they knew it was big and important, but they didn't really know why or what it did or how it did that. And so just kind of also talking some folks down of like, we got to like walk before we run here for everybody's sake. and.
I think if you can get through to leadership on that concept, that's huge because it sets a standard for how you're gonna build other marketing systems, not just social media, but whatever it may be.
Ben Ard (08:49)
Yeah, I love that. Okay. So now we've got the goal. We know what we're at least trying to accomplish. We're investing a little bit of time and effort into production, making quality content, things like that that fit into that. We're seeing maybe a little bit of success, you know, kind of seeing in cleans that we can hit our goals or maybe we are hitting our goals. How do you start to scale? You talked about like repeating, you know, workflows and processes, hopefully to different areas, but.
Amanda Lucidi (08:52)
Yes.
Right.
Ben Ard (09:15)
for that first one, how do you build that workflow and build that scalability repeatability into scaling what is working?
Amanda Lucidi (09:17)
Yeah.
Yeah, totally. So again, just to use the social media example, I think, you you have to give enough time. You have to let the account kind of operate with enough time that you have a large enough data set to make some kind of analysis. So for example, if you're posting once a week for three months, it's, it's about 12 posts.
So there's some insights you can pull from that, but if you're, you you have a bit more of a robust content schedule, you're gonna be able to pull more insights quicker. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that's what you should do. It really depends on the company. Because again, you don't wanna just all, you know, fire all cylinders and then you can't keep up with it. So you wanna just...
think about what is a small enough kind of data set that I need to produce to be able to garner some kind of insight. It doesn't have to be a full picture, but it could just be as simple as, okay, I know that I get a lot of great engagement from stories and I know that I get a lot of good top of the funnel exposure traffic from reels. And then you dive deeper, you go,
Okay, well, what kind of, is there anything in common with the reels that we've posted? You just, you try to build some kind of Venn diagram and pull out, there something that this has in common with, you know, the other three top ranking posts? And sometimes you get these kind of anomaly things where something will blow up a little bit and it can just be a right place, right time. It can be a success in strategy, that sort of thing.
But you just want enough data that you can make some kind of assessment about it. And then you start to say, okay, what can I do to reinvest in something that maybe doesn't look like this, but operates like this? So whether that means it was like short form, it's trending music, it's like a voiceover from, you know, the head of your company, whatever it is. So from there, you basically just replicate that process.
And I think what happens, and this is kind of the tricky part, is you really need somebody who is either a creative person that is producing this stuff that has some good insights on how to translate the data into something creative or vice versa. You have a strategist who's able to understand the creative process enough to communicate. Because I think a lot of times,
especially at larger places, those two positions become a little bit more siloed. And it can be tough to speak each other's language. I think a lot of people who have dealt with communicating with creative teams have learned that there's like a language. And I'm sure the same for creatives. So it's not that you need necessarily like this unicorn person who can do everything, but you just need at least one or two people who have
the strong comms abilities to kind of bridge that gap because it's a pretty common one. And I think it's something that gets lost in translation often.
Ben Ard (12:36)
I think that's great. love looking for the right personalities and the right people and the process and everything like that. And we're getting close to the end. So I just have one final question. These episodes go so quick and I love the insights here. It's so amazing. A lot of times when people hear the word scalability workflows, things like that, they immediately start hunting for software solutions.
Amanda Lucidi (12:58)
Yes, so true.
Ben Ard (12:59)
Are you building like manual processes and just documenting those so that people follow them time and time again before you invest in software or what is that actually like tangibly look like or is it software acquisition? What does that kind of look like?
Amanda Lucidi (13:11)
Yeah, that's.
No, it's such a good question. I think it depends on the size of the company, but I think you're gonna need both at some point. So for me, I think the insights that you get from something like Sprout, where you're able to just pull a sheet and it's super simple, you're not having to go dig for analytics. I think a lot of social media platforms have been better about their
their platform analytics because they're obviously competing with some of these, some of the software that's out there. But I don't think that, I think often if you can't operate it manually, it's gonna be a lot harder to have as much success as you could have with software. Software to me is something that you invest in
you know that the process works. And so you're able to ramp it up without, you know, crushing everybody under the wheel. And so for me, like, especially when I'm starting from scratch with some folks, some companies that maybe have nothing established, I will do it with them manually first, because I think that also helps them understand what all of the elements in the process are before investing in something that, you know, has it helped
it move a little bit faster.
Ben Ard (14:34)
And I think that's a really healthy way of looking at it. If you can't scale it manually, don't invest in software. Software is not going to make the process all of a sudden better. It just can do it that much more efficient. Yeah. It's not magic. I love that. Amanda, this is amazing. I love the insights about where to start, how to scale, what to keep your eye out for the right people to be involved. I think this is super helpful for anyone listening to this episode that wants to reach out and connect with you online. How and where can they find you?
Amanda Lucidi (14:42)
It's not magic. Yeah, exactly. It's not magic.
Yeah, you can follow me on Instagram at Amanda Lucidi or Mandy Media Co. And then if you want to shoot me an email, it's Amanda at MandyMedia.co. And yeah, I appreciate you having me on. It was a blast to chat and you know, I could just keep yapping about this all day. So it was fun.
Ben Ard (15:15)
Awesome.
And this is
great stuff, I love it. No matter what platform you're listening in on or watching us on, scroll down to the notes and we will link to everything to connect with Amanda so you can click on those links and connect with Amanda there. Amanda, again, thank you for the time and insights today.
Amanda Lucidi (15:37)
Thank you.
