Are You Moving Fast Enough Online?

Deborah Shapiro (00:02) people don't understand actually why people love them. And then once you understand that bit and you develop content or you develop marketing or you just, or you develop a loyalty program around that core, Feeling sort of like the bridge between you and the customer. It's like the heartbeat and then it just naturally grows Ben Ard (00:48) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Deborah. Deborah, welcome to the show. Deborah Shapiro (00:53) Nice to be here, thank you. Ben Ard (00:54) Yeah, Deborah, I'm excited. This is a subject that I think our audience is going to love. You know this inside and out, and I think that people really need to pay attention. But before we dive in, let's get to know you. If you don't mind sharing, tell us about your work history, background, and all that kind of fun stuff. Deborah Shapiro (01:11) So I have been in the food marketing business for a little over 20 years, not gonna tell my age too much there, but I'm most recently VP of growth for Black Angus Steakhouse in the restaurant sector, which is a steakhouse chain on the West Coast. But 10 years in grocery with grocery chain at Southeastern Grocers, still actively consult with other large retailers as well through my company, SNS Insights. And I just, love everything about loyalty marketing and specifically in food because it's fun because everybody needs to eat. Ben Ard (01:43) That is true. That is very true. I love that. It is something that unites every single person. I love that. That's a call out. Deborah, you mentioned the loyalty loop and you have, I mean, we were talking beforehand. You have this great graphic and all sorts of stuff. So the subject for today is building the loyalty loop. How core customers drive content and growth. Okay. So where did the loyalty loop Deborah Shapiro (01:53) Mm-hmm. Ben Ard (02:07) come from and why does it work? is it? Maybe let's start off right there at the very get go. Deborah Shapiro (02:12) Well, I am a data freak or a data diva, as I like to say. And so it came from actually looking at what types of marketing was driving sales the fastest. you can, most of us who are in marketing are very much aware of the marketing funnel. And you you start with awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty comes after conversion, right? But if you're able to get someone to advocate, you know, it makes it a faster, you can get closer to, you don't start at awareness when somebody advocates, you start at consideration. So you're one step closer to that conversion. So if you can find a way to get your most loyal customers to talk about you, the loyalty loop is that advocacy breeds awareness, which breeds sales, which breeds more advocacy. So it turns into a loop that can actually spiral up into amazing quick sales. and so really understanding that loyalty loop is trying to figure out what makes your core customer tick and what's going to make them talk about you basically turn into free marketing. Like you, have a much higher ROI and you can scale scale growths 10 times faster. If you use the loyalty loop, then if you just start right out there with an awareness play. Ben Ard (03:29) Okay. I love that. So it all makes perfect sense to me. How did you figure out? And I love this phrase, the get the customer figure out what the customer or how they tick or why they tick. How do you figure that out and turn that into like an advocacy campaign or do something that actually makes a tangible impact and turns people into advocates? Deborah Shapiro (03:48) So you have to identify not just who your customer is, but why they like you. And that's what trips people up. So one of the very first things I do when I start working with a brand is we actually do a brand connection workshop. I called it not a brand workshop. Everybody does a brand workshop, can figure out like their why, et cetera, which is part of it. But a brand connection workshop is to understand also what people are saying about you. So not only are we discovering who we are and what our mission and our core values are, et cetera, because some brands don't have it, if normally in the audience is a customer, the employees, the leadership, any past founders, past employees, friends of family, all the different types, you get them all in the room and you finding out what makes us tick, what do they think about our competition, why do they think we're going to be successful, why do they think we might fail. Hearing all these different things, normally we identify one or two customers that we didn't even know exist. And a lot of times, even finding out like what they think our brand personality is or what they think about us, like people don't understand actually why people love them. And then once you understand that bit and you develop content or you develop marketing or you just, or you develop a loyalty program around that core, Feeling sort of like the bridge between you and the customer. It's like the heartbeat and then it just naturally grows and actually you can have multiple loops at the going on at the same time because You can have completely different customer segments who want you for different reasons, you know, etc I'm I like to like a good brand to think about that is like sketchers like sketchers was Revolutionized when LED lights were put inside sneakers, right? And so all of sudden they have a brand new category that's going off. But right now they're doing step-in sneakers, you know, for people who don't need to bend down, right? So they have two loops going. They have someone going, you know, talking about, what's important to my customer? I don't want to bend down to put on my shoe. What's important to this customer? I can be seen in a rave, you know? So it's like, it's two completely different things. Like what is important about it? And the part is that basically on the bottom line, we're here for you. Like, you know, we're about the life. And so that's what is the most important thing in identifying that bit that connects you to the customer. Ben Ard (06:13) Okay, I love that. That's so cool. I like the interview process, finding who your customers are. I love that you're also discovering new customers in the process. I think that that's a really, really cool thing. So you've worked with so many brands and so many groups. Sometimes it's a learning exercise to figure out what people have done wrong in the past. Are there any common mistakes that you kind of see when you're trying to build out this kind of a program? Deborah Shapiro (06:22) Yes. Yes. There's two common mistakes. The first one is the brand that is certain that they know who their customer is. like, we need to, for a while, you know, right now it's all Gen Z and Gen Alpha, but for a while when millennials were, you know, what everybody was trying to target, they're like, our customer's millennials. We need to target millennials and everything. And I had to explain to my clients, I'd say, okay, let me explain to you. Millennials use more data. than the average person. you might be pulling analytics and see that millennials are there. In the grocery world, everybody puts a banana in their cart, right? So if you were to look at the number one affinity item for chocolate chips, it's bananas. The number one affinity item for bread, it's bananas. it's everything, bananas. Ben Ard (07:24) Is it because bananas are the number one like grocery food ever, right? Deborah Shapiro (07:28) Exactly. And it was the same thing. Now it's with Gen Alpha and it's just they consume more media. Gen Alpha, Gen Z, millennials, they all consume more media than Gen X and boomers did. In a sense, they're the bananas of the internet. They're in everybody's basket. They're not necessarily your target audience. And you will think that they're your target audience and you try to do content for them. And it doesn't resonate because one, that's not your customer. So you're putting it out there to your current customers who are like, who do they think they are? This is the silliest thing I've seen, right? And then you don't even have a chance of getting that new customer. That customer seeing your stuff because they're seeing everything, you know? So you really have to get into the nitty gritty. You almost have to take 20 % of that number out. because 20 % of everybody is Gen Alpha right now. Because they're watching every commercial because of the amount of media that they're consuming. So that's the first mistake. The second mistake is when you jump on any trend thinking that if you do the Grimace drink or if you do this thing, it's going to get you the viral where you're going to be. The trend has to match your brand, right? You can do a trend and it can help you. Like when everyone was doing the mannequin challenge, again, shows my age, you know, like there's lots of more challenges. Sometimes that would work with a brand, especially if you were a clothing brand. It would be amazing to do the mannequin challenge standing next to mannequins, you know, and that kind of stuff. But if you're not, you know, let's say that it's not with your brand, then you look silly. It looks like you are trying for likes. You are trying to get people to follow you. Nobody likes a brand that tries too hard. Like even when you're watching a commercial that looks like it tries too hard, you're just like, oh, you cringe. And you end up losing some lawyers because your loyalists think you're being fake. Post pandemic, all marketing post 2020 has a bit of soul in it because people actually had time to look and to understanding the different companies and what make them tick. and started buying from companies that have the same core values as them. Like it wasn't a big deal. But before then, when people have time to think, they've become picky, right? And then sometimes there's some instances where they're not picky, where you're on Amazon and you're like, I need a book light. And you really don't care about the brand, you know, of your book light. But like, if you're gonna start a subscription program of a skincare, you're probably gonna care a little bit about the back history of that. And so if... you have spent all this time building up your beautiful skincare brand and then you jump on a trend that it goes against your values, you could lose some core customers. And you don't think about that. You think you're fun. You think you're being part of a trend, but like that trend may be a bit, and it's okay to skip one because in two seconds a new one will start or start a new one. like you create something that becomes a trend, which is it's actually, you can actually plan that if you do the right type of. freaky social listening, you can sort of see what's coming and you can possibly jump ahead and be the trend. Ben Ard (10:32) love that. That's so cool. Okay. So one of my questions around all of this is how do you know it's working? How have you done like measurements to kind of understand that the viral loop is going that virtuous cycle is happening? Cause it seems like you're kind of disconnected a few steps from the whole process and marketers are like famous for loving Here are the channels I can directly attribute dollars in the dollars out. So that's where I'm going to spend all my time and effort. How do you look at the analytics or the data or anything at all to kind of prove something is or isn't working so that you can reinvest into it. Deborah Shapiro (10:58) Yes. So I live in the data. So when I identify a customer, I like to figure out where they hang out. If this is an email customer and understanding like how much revenue each email brings in. And if the email is going to our loyal customers or this type of an offer goes better in a push notification or this type of a play needs to be talked about in three different areas. So what we end up is very, very diversified. Marketing we are basically giving different things to different people. It sounds very complicated and ominous, but it's not because in today's digital media you kind of have to ride the wave of The platform for example when Facebook live just launched You need to do a Facebook live because you know Zuckerberg was going to promote you because he wanted to promote the fact that he was doing Facebook live So you should jump on it and do it Uber Eats and DoorDash, the same thing. When Uber Eats launched BOGO, my gosh, you had to do a BOGO because they, their algorithm was putting you up towards the top. So then it's identifying, okay, my customer, they're like, they would be really pissed. We're at Black Angus Steakhouse. We're a steakhouse. If you go, there's a BOGO. Black Angus is doing a steak. And you open up, it'd be like a cheesy bread BOGO. They're like, you are not a piece of place. You are not Little Caesar. don't need cheesy bread twice. You know, it's, I wanted a steak. So you, so making sure we have steak and crispy shrimp. That is our BOGO. It is there. we're writing the platform of Uber Eats because BOGO is doing well, but we are making sure that we are giving Angus steak at a good price. That's what we do. Right? So it's staying true to your brand and writing those plans and then looking at the sales. Like we look at the sales, we look at what we're paying in the promotion. I'm really a cheap person when it comes to spending and marketing. like under a dollar cost per acquisition, not and if it's click, it's got to be like under 20 cents if it's a cost per click, I like to get led down to like five cents or less a click, you know, but at least under a dollar cost per acquisition. And I get crazy targeting into that and making sure that everybody has the right offers that they want to see. But the beauty of doing like a loyalty program in an app is that you actually start to mold that loyal customer into liking what you're offering in that loyalty program. Like they see it as gamification. They start to absolutely love it. Before there were apps, I did gamification at the grocery store with, you know, fuel perks. If you guys are familiar, have you ever done the buy groceries and get dollars off on gas, right? And so I was always bothering me as a loyalty person that the warm and fuzzy was happening at the gas station versus what was happening at the grocery store. And there was two banners at Southeastern Groceries at the time. was actually Bilo Holdings at the time that shows how long it was there. There was the Bilo banner and the Winn-Dixie banner. And Field Perks was great in Winn-Dixie, but Bilo, like we couldn't get people to like enjoy it. So in the times of like the monopolies and the whatever those types of loyalty plays, I created what was called the Dollar Tank Club, which was if you could get enough fuel perks to be able to get like $3.50 off a gallon or you know, whatever it is to get to where you can fill up an entire tank for a dollar or less, then we would give you a dollar towards your next one. And we called it the Dollar Tank Club. ⁓ my gosh. it, Fuel Perks just shot off the gamification. It got excited. We were giving out t-shirts that says this is my tank top, right? And like there was bumper stickers that said I'm a member of the Dollar Tank Club. And basically you can get a whole tank of gas for a dollar if you bought enough of the Fuel Perks items. Well, the sales in general went up and that was like a simple gamification prior to like there being real loyalty apps with points and those types of things, you know, that it's now gotten much more complicated. But people did not wake up this morning and say, you know, it'd be a lot of fun if I could get a tank of gas for a dollar and I'll do all my shopping. No, they conformed to wanting to, because it was a fun game. So today, a lot of the loyalty programs that are out there, the apps, you have to make sure it meshes with what your customer wants to do. But if you can hit it right, like if you have the right type of gamification in your app, then people will become obsessed with it just as much as they will with their next video game. And they will also start sharing it, like advocating and like, you need to get on this. I get 30 points. Like, you know, how many different, you know, those online e-orderings you're like, you have to spin this wheel for me please so that I can get another 10 points so I can buy my next free item. And you get advocates for you everywhere. Ben Ard (15:46) Okay, I love that. And I mean, the wheels are turning. There's so many cool ideas and I love the gamification, understanding your customer, continuing to invest in that. I think that is such a cool lesson. Deborah, I am almost positive there are going to be plenty of people that have a lot of questions after listening to this and have a lots of really cool feedback. How and where can they find you after listening to this and connect with you online? Deborah Shapiro (16:04) Hahaha So I am on LinkedIn, Deborah Shapiro. Like I said, my company's SNS Insights. That's S-A-N-D-S, sansinsights.com. But I also have an online portfolio just at deborahlgshapiro.com. Sometimes that's easier to remember. But LinkedIn, send me a connection. I always reply back to anybody who sends me a message on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect. Ben Ard (16:39) love it for everyone listening. We will link into Deborah's LinkedIn profile in the show notes, scroll down, click on that there and connect with Deborah. Deborah, thank you so much for the time and insights today. This has been amazing. Really do appreciate it. Deborah Shapiro (16:52) That's nice talking with you, Ben. Thanks.