Ensuring Brand Consistency in the Digital Space

Introduction and Guest Introduction
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[00:00:00] Jim Banks: So I'm joined today by Grace Clemens. Is it Clemens or Clemons? I'm never sure like, like, Clemens. Yeah, I, I've got a habit of butchering people's names. I apologize. I, I was kind of like, maybe I should check. But anyway, that's, that's by the by. So Grace Clemens, who, uh, just, just talking the green room I've established is in Barcelona in, I guess, sunny Spain.

It's got to be sunnier than the UK for sure.

[00:00:18] Grace Clemens: Yep. It's sunny today.

[00:00:19] Jim Banks: And, 

Grace's Background and Business Overview
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[00:00:19] Jim Banks: and Grace, you, your company is styled by Grace. Is that right?

[00:00:23] Grace Clemens: So my freelance is styled by Grace Clemens. Uh, Grace Clemens, gracieclemens.com is my website, but my marketing agency is SGC marketing. We don't have a website yet. Um, but that's another story for another time, but that's a work in progress, but that stands for strategy growth and communication. So what I do is I do digital marketing audits for e-commerce brands or nonprofits and B2B companies as well.

And if you, Choose to implement the findings in that audit in house. You can choose to do so, or you can choose to implement with SGC marketing where I have a team of handpicked freelancers, custom team made to your audit and what you need for your strategy.

Choosing E-commerce and Audit Focus
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[00:01:00] Jim Banks: what was it that made you kind of choose e-commerce as kind of like an audit specifically as your sort of method of attack for kind of the digital marketing ecosystem? you

[00:01:09] Grace Clemens: a great question. So I would have to credit the e-commerce path that I chose to go down to a manager of mine, Ben Cheston back in one of my first full time gigs. In the early, early social media days, I was working for a B2B company and my manager there, Ben Cheston, just said to me, he said, You need to be in e-commerce.

That's that's where you belong. And that really stuck with me. And I moved forward and ended up working in B2C for, you know, five years with a company in London. So I think that was just a small sort of piece of advice that always stuck with me that I always realized I really enjoy e-commerce. That's where I have the most fun.

So that's where when I chose to niche down, I chose to niche towards e-commerce. But that's not to say that I don't, you know, I'm working with People outside of that realm and those businesses outside of that realm. Now for audits, the reason that I chose audits is because, you know, after over a decade and working in marketing, that's just something that I've noticed that over my entire career, whether I'm coming on board as a contractor or a full time.

employee. An audit is where I start. An audit is the best place to start for a marketer because that's a great onboarding process. They're getting to know the ins and outs of the company, um, and your content and how you speak and how you exist online. But also It's how you find the low hanging fruit and the longterm, um, strategy really.

So that's just where I always start. And so I felt that's just the best place to start because that's where you want to start with, um, finding out where the company is now and where they want to go in the future.

[00:02:44] Jim Banks: So one of the things I've always kind of found is that, uh, again, I've worked with a lot of e-commerce businesses, um, Generally speaking, I mean, you know, I don't I don't necessarily say I go in and do an audit, but I mean, I guess in a sort of in a roundabout way, I kind of am. But you know, one of the things I always kind of look at is where are they leaving money on the table, right?

And I think for me, it's amazing. So you see some hugely successful businesses that are doing, you know, like seven, eight figures. Still leaving a ton of money on the table, right? You know, so even though they're they're deemed to be successful to the outside world, there are still some glaring errors that they're making when it comes to their implementation of their sort of strategy and execution.

So what? What? 

Common Audit Findings and Recommendations
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[00:03:19] Jim Banks: What are the sort of typical things that you find when you're you're kind of going into get invited to kind of do an audit with somebody? What's typically the things that you look for? One of the things that you find more frequently than not. Okay.

Importance of Consistency and Automation
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[00:03:40] Grace Clemens: your branding aligned from email to website to every single platform? And I'm talking about your bio, you know, making sure that that bio Reads the same it can be a little bit different But overall when you pull up if you were to sit at your computer screen and pull up every single platform That your company exists on and look at it across the screen Are you seeing consistency?

That's the number one thing that I, that I see companies, which is so simple and it, and it, and it needs to be checked on. I think it's easy when you have a couple hands in the pot as well. If you're a larger business, sometimes it's easy to overlook that one profile might have an old branding look on it than another might.

And especially the bios, you know, bios are going to vary from platform to platform because of how each platform and the CTAs work. But overall the messaging is going to be the same. So that's the number one thing that I see companies kind of making the mistake of. Number two is obviously just making sure your content has purpose.

So when people land on there, it's clear who you are, what you do and why they should follow you, what they're going to gain by following you on that channel. From an email standpoint, I would say automations and flows is the first place that I look at, just to make sure again, like those low hanging fruit.

Do you have welcome funnels on welcome funnels are an easy win for e-commerce brands. Sometimes people don't have these, these ones on your abandoned basket carts. You are missing. You haven't seen you in six months. You haven't shopped as well as back in stock is a massive winner. That's something that I founded at a fashion company a while back.

And that was just. Every single time it was a winner. So automations and flows is a number one place that I also check when I'm doing an audit, just to make sure that you have. All of those low, low hanging fruits, set it, forget it. Come back in the quarter and check it. 

[00:05:31] Jim Banks: And you tend to find I mean again, 

Challenges and Strategies in Digital Marketing
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[00:05:31] Jim Banks: one of the things I've always found, even though I kind of primarily run paid advertising for clients. Um, you know, we look at the whole business in terms of. terms of all the infrastructure, because it's all kind of dependent upon each other, right? So, you know, yes, we, we do paid ads, but we care about SEO, right?

So we need to make sure that the pages load quickly, that they're, you know, the images are kind of optimized for, you know, speed. Um, you know, as you say, email, make sure that they've got all of those sorts of things that they're kind of the simple things, you know, like, um, again, if you're selling a subscription, right, one of the main reasons people stop it is because They forget that they've got it.

Right. So, you know, if you're selling, um, you know, supplements that sit in a drawer and you are on a 30 day auto ship, if they don't remember that they've got them, then they're going to go, hang on a minute. I've got, I've still got a box of these that you sent me before. I don't need them now. So I'm going to cancel it.

Right. So, you know, it's that bonding sequence of saying, you know, Hey, how are you getting on with this? This is what we found people kind of once they get to this stage, this is where they have, you know, so again, we tend to kind of, and again, make sure that we align the messaging in the paid ads with the messaging in the the email sequences that go out with people.

So I think again, I think we tend to kind of like Act more like a conductor of an orchestra. Because what tends to happen? The reason some of these businesses fail is they have everything working in a silo, right? So the email team work just on email and the paid search work just on paid search and the organic social just organic social.

They don't all talk to each other and they don't really kind of join the dots between them, right? And that's always for me, one of the easiest kind of quick wins that you can kind of put in place to say, look, You to each other, right? And we can help facilitate that. So we would kind of say we'll kind of do the call.

We'll invite you all to it. That way we can kind of all agree what the strategy for execution is going to be right in terms of deliverables when it's going to be done by again, things like PPC, we always say you've got to have dedicated landing pages, right? There are no index, no follow and you strip away all the stuff that is kind of noise, right?

Because ultimately you just want them to do one thing, right? If it's buy a product by product, if it's sign up for a, you know, ebook, sign up the book. Everything else can be sort of introduced down the line, right? So yes, we want to kind of build a relationship with them socially, but not immediately. I'd rather get them to do what I want them to do first and then introduce the fact that we have social media, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it might be.

You can do that after the event. If they don't like you to begin with, then sort of saying, Hey, sign up for my, my YouTube. Pointless because if they don't like the experience I had on your website, they're not going to come back to you regardless of which social channels they look at. Right. It's just not going to, going to vibe with them.

Working with Different Company Sizes
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[00:07:53] Jim Banks: So do you have a sort of sweet spot in terms of the size of companies that you like to work with in terms of, you know, like, again, I work with businesses typically typically do between one and 5 million. Do you have a kind of sweet spot in terms of size of company? Um,

[00:07:58] Grace Clemens: I would say it really varies. What changes is where I start with the approach. Of course, I'm always going to start with an audit, but that audit is going to be a little bit different for a company that.

Is well into, say, 10 years into their social strategy or their multi channel strategy. That audit is going to look completely different because the benchmarks are already set. The goals are already set. There's a lot of larger data pools to work with to move forward with confidence. Whereas a startup, I'm going to be setting benchmarks a lot more and maybe there's been a gap in data and I'll have to look back at old data.

But you see, that's that you're starting to. from a little bit of a scratch where you're actually filling up the data pool, right? So that's where it changes. It's not, can I work with you? It's how I'm going to work with you, I guess, right? Where, where we're going to start in the approach. Um, that's something also I see common, you know, I will do, I offer free 15 minutes, social media audits for businesses.

That's something that I commonly see. I can give a lot more surface level feedback to smaller companies, whereas higher level companies, again, that are five to 10 years into their strategy. I'm going to have to see in the back end to be able to give, you know, some really juicy feedback.

[00:09:14] Jim Banks: Are you doing that 15 minute thing? Is it, is it kind of like a, it's a mutual kind of like I'm checking them out and they can check me out because I think, you know, I think a lot of people kind of blindly go into pitches that maybe they will not to go into. And if you have. the opportunity to kind of have a 15 minute conversation with somebody to begin with, right?

You can kind of get a feel for whether it's actually worth pursuing it kind of for a longer, bigger commitment, right? Because again, I've talked to people before where I've done a sort of 15 minute, you know, let's just kind of have a discussion and see how things work and you can pick up a vibe from the person that you're talking to that they probably wouldn't be a good company to work with, right?

So it's easy for you to at that point in time to just kind of You know, offer them some, Hey, you know, I don't think this is going to work for us. And at that point in time, you can kind of duck out, right? Rather than having to kind of go down the full blown, you produce everything. And, you know, a lot of people just want to pick your brains or, you know, kick the tires or whatever, and never really have any kind of intention to engage you.

They just want to kind of, like I said, get inside your head and get some free, free information that you might ordinarily be charging consulting for. 

[00:10:11] Grace Clemens: Yeah, absolutely. And in most cases, I have found that people really enjoy the audit. And it's more so to find, to give them an opportunity as well to kind of see what it is that they're going to get out of an audit. Because it might not really be clear like why it's worth spending money on an audit. It also might not be clear.

Why should I hire somebody outside of my internal team? You know, most marketing teams do monthly audits and quarterly audits as they should. Um, but actually it's always good to get a little fresh perspective, especially if you've been honing in on a strategy for, you know, over two years, getting that, that outsider perspective really can give you a fresh.

A fresh take on things and maybe spot some things that your internal team might not, might not be able to because they've been in it for so long.

[00:10:58] Jim Banks: I always find. Sometimes the mistakes are so glaringly obvious to an outsider with expertise looking in than it is for the people internally. They just don't see the challenges that are so readily available.  And obvious to people that are not working day to day in the business, right? So again, that sort of new pair of eyes looking at it can give you a completely different perspective, right?

And again, I'm always amazed how many people invite you in. They want your help. When you start sort of giving giving them critique, if you like, right, they start getting defensive, right? And it's like, Oh, hang on. I'm not attacking you here, right? I'm not sort of, you know, this, this, I'm kind of here to help.

I'm not here to hurt, right? So, you know, you've got to take this feedback in the spirit in which is given. I'm trying to help your business. Right. And these are things that we need to fix, you know, if we fix this first, this will have a an impact pretty, pretty quickly. And these are the things we need to work on sort of over the next 3, 6, 12 months.

Right. And, um, you know, and again, I think, I think a lot of people, um, that you work with, if, if you're, you know, honest with them, they'll, they'll be, they'll value it kind of more than, you know, you just blowing smoke up their ass and, and that's not really what they want. Right. They need help. Right. And, and sometimes that, that candid opinion from a, right.

neutral third party can be really valuable. 

[00:12:00] Grace Clemens: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I found in general, you know, CEOs will never argue with data in the most in most cases. So I'm maybe I'm lucky I've I've never had somebody take offense to any of the feedback that I've given. But that's the beauty of data. Data driven feedback is it's not personal. It's the data.

[00:12:18] Jim Banks: Yeah, you must be better at giving feedback than I am. I've, I've had

[00:12:24] Grace Clemens: Yeah, maybe it's just, uh,

[00:12:25] Jim Banks: I've always kind of like sometimes I kind of go in and I've got like a, a chain mail fist with a silk glove on. Right. So it's you take it off and whack them in the face and and they go, wow, that really hurt. But you know, again, I think I think I'm doing it with the best intentions. I want to make sure that their business succeeds.

And, you know, sometimes it is a case of they're doing stuff internally. So there's things that they can fix themselves. Some of it will be, you know, what their competitors are doing. And, you know, Again, I've always kind of said sometimes that I used to work with startups, right? And then I really got to the point where I hated working with them, right?

I know you said you kind of like you'll sometimes work with startups. One of the reasons I didn't like working with startups was Quite often, right, they had come from, say, bigger companies. They'd worked as, you know, execs in a sort of big company, got laid off and they kind of set up their own thing, right?

They still have the mentality, the brain, the brain set of, you know, they're an executive working for a big company, right? But the reality of it is they're a startup, right? And they need to act like a startup, right? They need to be scrappy and punchy. And you know, all the things that that, you know, big businesses tend not to do because they have, you know, that that sort of architecture that really prevents them being able to be that nimble sort of startup environment.

Right. And for me, it's always one of those things like, Again, what you tend to find is that they feel entitled, right? And I'm just kind of like, I don't want to get into those kind of conversations. So generally speaking, if somebody approaches me, one of the reasons I say is I've set the floor at one million, right?

Is usually if somebody is doing a million dollars of business, they're not a startup. They're not kind of brand new. It's not a brand new business. Right. And, um, you know, they want to go in and they want to be, you know, like they want to be the biggest company in the sector. Right. But they've got the tiniest budget.

So they have to kind of, you know, set their stall out according to their, their sort of environment at that particular point in time. Great and have the ambition, but you need to kind of be a bit more realistic about it. 

[00:14:08] Grace Clemens: Yeah. Yeah. 

Customer Feedback and Campaign Success
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[00:14:08] Grace Clemens: And what's coming to mind as well in terms of like feedback in general is actually leaning on the customer feedback is if you're not happy with the feedback, the customers are the people who literally will not hold back and we see it on social media and actually that's another part of the audit that feeds into your overarching strategy.

So an example is coming up with the campaign and it became Yeah. a general campaign for an e-commerce brand was breastfeeding dresses. So, um, for Silk Fred, which is the, a UK based agents, uh, a UK based fashion marketplace. So we were, we classify everything based on party dresses, what's new, um, where you can wear things.

But during an audit, we noticed a lot of customers. talking about breastfeeding. So we tested that we put out some breastfeeding content. Well, lo and behold, our customer feedback. That was a number one hit for us. It sold a ton. It sold thousands. I think about 15, 000 in an email. So that was one example of how we use customer feedback to then feed into the e-commerce strategy.

So I think looking at audits as not only your data dashboards feedback because that's going to have a ton of data that's not actually numbers, but some of the best data I found for silk thread was in the customer feedback. 

[00:15:31] Jim Banks: Um, so

Tools and Techniques for Data Analysis
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[00:15:33] Jim Banks: as, as you say, like analyzing that data is important, um, do you have any sort of particular tools or techniques that you kind of use to, to kind of, to, to gather that information and analyze it? I mean, or is it sort of you just export it in and view it in a spreadsheet? 

[00:15:46] Grace Clemens: Well, that's circumstantial to what the company's budget really is and what the company's objective is. So for a B2B company, I might. have a lower end third party social media tool that collects and gives me overall engagement rate for a company and B2C that social drives ROI a little bit higher. I might be investing more in something like sprout or later that gives me much higher level dashboards.

So I'm looking directly in each social media platform because sometimes you can find a couple, you know, surprise pieces of data. But overall, I'm looking at the overall data as well. In the third party dashboard, I'm looking in your website data. So most likely GA4 or if you have any other, you know, HubSpot CRM tools that you're using.

And I'm also looking in your email marketing. So probably Klaviyo, maybe MailChimp, depending on what you use. Um, and then any other back end. So like if you have a place where you are collecting customer testimonials, I might. You know, look through those if you have a place that you centralize any really winning comments that you've gone on, gone on social media, anything like that.

Um, and obviously I'm going to look at all of your paid wherever you have paid ads going on.

[00:17:08] Jim Banks: The general is not so much cast in stone, but I usually will go into a kind of company and I normally recommend that they should be spending 5 to 10 percent of their annual budget that they spend on advertising on technology to support the advertising, right? Whether that's, you know, like again, whether it's a kind of like a, um, a tool to enable you to kind of handle your.

Facebook comments. I mean, again, I've always been stunned at how many brands allow people to post, you know, like competitor, uh, comments on their Facebook ads, right? I'm like, why are you guys allowing that to happen? It's because nobody's actually sitting there and monitoring it and jumping on it and making sure it, Right.

So this is where some of the tools can really help to add value because they're able to kind of go in there. You can actually sort of, again, I know you can kind of set it up organically. You can say, you know, these, these are words. If somebody types this in a comment, don't allow the comment to go through.

I mean, usually people would use it for, you know, uh,  profanity, right. But you can equally just as well use it for competitors, right? So somebody mentions a competitor in a comment won't get posted. Right. So, um, you know, but I think generally speaking. You know, again, we tend to kind of invest money in in tools like Lucky Orange, right?

Which again gives us the ability to understand the troubles that people are having by interacting with the website, right? We can see it in real time. We can kind of look at play, do playbacks of, you know, and go through it with the client and explain to them this is where they had a problem in navigating your website.

Right? Because people always go, Oh, they spent five minutes on the site must be a really sticky site might be. No, they had a real problem getting to where they ultimately needed to get to. That's why they spent five minutes on the checkout. Not because, right, they were looking at more products and evaluating and everything else.

Right? I mean, we've all kind of done it where, you know, you get a phone call, you go on the phone for 20 minutes, and then you go back to the page you're on and go, Wow, the page must be really sticky. They spent 20 minutes on it's like, well, No, they probably had a phone call, needed to go to the toilet, can't make a cup of tea.

There's so many things that could happen as a result of that. And if you analyze and look at it, because I've always kind of maintained that not all page views are equal value, right? Because, you know, we've always kind of said that if you have a long Let's say you've got a very, very long, um, you know, product description page, right?

And you've got images and descriptions and videos and all that sort of stuff, right? You need to understand and see how people are navigating that information. And again, if you have a scroll, a scroll event that happens in Google Analytics or Facebook, right? And you're with your Facebook pixel. You can say they got to 25 percent of the page, 50 percent of the page, 75 percent of the page.

There's a video on there. You want to see. How much time of the video? So let's say it's a 30 second video. You somebody that watches it for three seconds and people always go, Oh, it's this three second hook is really important. I get it right. But you know, the reality of it is, is that, you know, if the most important messages at 10 seconds, right?

I'm much more concerned about how many people saw that than saw the first three seconds because the three seconds might be yet gets them to hooks them in, right? But if they don't see the 10 second point, so if you have a 50 percent 75% You know, event that happens to say they watched 50 percent of that video.

You can create an audience of people that saw that. And then from there, you can inform what the next step in the process needs to be in terms of right now that they've seen that video, they should see this one next. If they still haven't bought, they should see this video next. That moves them along the kind of production line.

Towards the checkout, right? So, um, as a general rule, 5 to 10 percent of the money on external tools, whether it's analytics, whether it's, you know, um, data capture, sentiment analysis, all that sort of stuff. Really important, I think, for, um, for people that, um, you know, are trying to understand, right? You know, because otherwise they'll just spend that 10%.

They might spend on tools, on more ads, and they just won't really know what's going on.

[00:20:49] Grace Clemens: Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head with the listening tools because that falls right into community management and it's funny because I've had the discussion with so many. Uh, business owners of whether or not they should invest that money in listening tools. And the answer is always yes.

Just because that's where you find the opportunities that are the big wins, right? This is what you're strategizing for. You are strategizing so you create time for yourself. To catch the big wins. And I'm going to use an example. There was a recent Tik TOK trend. It was like, uh, hear your voice. It was, um, like a prayer with Madonna and you, you swipe and it's like a Muppet on fire and it's a storytelling and this was going viral, viral, viral.

And there was one story in particular, it's disgusting, it's about a girl who like sat in poop on the NYC subway. But it went incredibly viral and she had rented a specific pair of jeans. Well this story went so, so, so viral that the company whose jeans that she had rented when she had sat in this Disgusting.

This they were able to get in touch. They posted another story explaining how they reached out. They refunded her, you know, 5 10 years later. And that was An example of how listening and they went super viral, like this company that I've never heard of. Many people hadn't heard of, and they're on, you know, Lululemon's kind of, um, average price point checkout.

Um, and that's, you know, that's a great example of that's why you strategize. So you have time to listen and catch those moments. To act in real time.

[00:22:34] Jim Banks: I mean, actually every guest. I've had on the podcast since the very beginning. 

The Role of AI in Marketing
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[00:22:41] Jim Banks: At some point in time, we've ended up talking about AI, right? And again, I don't know what your thoughts are on AI. I found AI is phenomenal for kind of, again, doing some of the kind of the heavy lifting on things that maybe you used to have to do manually, right?

You can just kind of throw a bunch of data at it and say, this is all the data that I have, these are all the comments I've got, right? Analyze them and kind of break them down in terms of sentiment analysis. And you know, what are the common things that people kind of come up with word clouds, all that sort of stuff, right?

Because again, you know, if, if the, uh, the average people, again, if they look at it and go, wow, this is, this is really good content because we've had 500 comments. If 480 of the comments are negative, that's not a good kind of look, right? Because You know, people are going to read the comments and go, Wow, this must be a horrible company, right?

I'm not gonna buy from them because nobody likes the product at all, right? They're all kind of don't ever buy. This is horrible. Don't do it. Right. And, um, you know, and I think I think a lot of the success will come from how do you how do you handle that? Right? How do you kind of handle those sorts of situations?

So do you give your clients advice as part of the audit process in terms of how they should be handling those negative sentiment comments? Thanks.

[00:23:55] Grace Clemens: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. You should have a crisis team on hand who's trained to handle that and you should be training your customer service team or whoever is doing the community management on how to handle those types of situations. Uh, for me, it's all about reflection. Uh, I deleted a TikTok comment that was negative a few weeks ago, and I really actually regretted it because I felt upon reflection that it was a great time for me to come back with a response, but.

For businesses, you have to set the bar for one, you have to protect your teams. 

Handling Negative Comments with Care
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[00:24:31] Grace Clemens: So, you know, make sure that there is a guideline set of what is not tolerable. You know, like if that is slander and actually affecting your team. Then they should have permission to report, block, do what they need to, um, versus if it is a customer who is rightfully upset and, and, and has a right to be voicing that, well, then you just want to make sure that you have systems in place that you are hearing the people that need to be heard.

Um, because negative comments are there for a reason, and it's an opportunity to improve as a business. So, I would encourage people to not automatically, like, don't make your reflex to delete. Uh, stop and reflect on it. Think about how you want to respond. Um, and obviously consider your, your team's mental health and safety, obviously, of course, comes first.

Community Support and Brand Advocacy
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[00:25:28] Jim Banks: And as you say, I think some of the brands that are maybe community led, community driven, right? Quite often the community will rally to the defense of the brand, right? Somebody attacks them. They're the ones that kind of go in there and they go, that's. That's not that's not experience. I've had and and really kind of like, you know, if you like, they'll put out the fire on your behalf, right?

You didn't have to necessarily do it. You just have to always say it's a little bit like big brother. You throw a bit few bottles of booze into a house and put in cameras and record it and just sit back and watch what happens, right? So I think sometimes that that can happen. In the same way with communities like you, you know, you don't need to be the person that's driving the conversation within the community, right?

You will have people that will be again. Some some people will be they'll just align with your brand, right? And feel kind of connected to it. And they'll take part. They'll comment on every Facebook Post you put up there and they'll share it and you know, they'll, they'll, they'll do things. 

Recognizing and Rewarding Loyal Customers
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[00:26:24] Jim Banks: And again, I'm, I'm always amazed at how few brands recognize those people and kind of.

If you like, lift them up and say, Hey, look, you know, you're one of our most popular commenters. We'd love to kind of give you something a special discount just for you or something like that, right? Because those are the advocates again. If you said, Hey, could you leave me a review on Yelp or something like that?

Absolutely going to do it because they love your brand, right? And I'm I'm always amazed at how many people they're trying to get get sort of feedback from them. And reviews from people that may have made. You don't know if they've had a good experience, right? Whereas if somebody's bought from you 10 times in the past and they always spend 50, 100 bucks a time, right?

Then that person is not going to go, I don't like this company, but I buy the product anyway, right? They're going to go, they love it. Service is great. And so on and so on. Right. And those are the people that you, you would say, you can't ask for a five star review, but you almost by proxy, you can say, I'm going to get a five star review.

Okay. That's it. Nice to meet

[00:27:23] Grace Clemens: Yeah, absolutely. And you know what? That is literally

[00:27:26] Jim Banks: there's a, uh, there's

[00:27:27] Grace Clemens: the beauty of having a business with purpose. Like that is the beauty of if you do your marketing with pure intent. And you just do it because that's what you feel like your your company and your mission, that's your values and you feel passionate about it, that is going to translate into an audience who supports you and has your back.

That's why trust is so, so, so important. And, you know, I've seen influencers. People have made videos about them saying, you know, this person, blah, blah, blah. And I've seen the comments, all of their audience came to their rescue, you know, just like you were saying and saying, no, that's not the case. I've followed her for five years and you know, she, we trust her.

And so I think that's. That's just evidence. And that's, that's what I feel passionate about. What, when I do marketing is like, is the brands that have great products and have a reason, a real reason, genuine reason to exist and are, and are bringing something exciting and valuable to the world, you know, something that makes us.

feel something. Um, and then I would also just add, uh, absolutely to, to making sure that you listen and highlight your V. I. P. S. That was something that, uh, during my time at silk, Fred, all of us were really good at is picking out our V. I. P. S. and rewarding them. So we often brought customers into the office for shoot days, uh, workshops.

We even brought one of our VIP customers in for a date night in London with her husband and treated them to a nice hotel and a nice dinner and brought her in and gifted her some clothes. And, you know, that is one of the things I will say Silkthread is a great example of is they really listen to their customers and they see the VIPs and they say, thank you.

And they reward them. And I think that's something that. You should really keep in mind when you're looking at your collaboration strategy. Are you collaborating with influencers? Brilliant, but are you collaborating with your customers? 'cause you should be if you're not 

[00:29:33] Jim Banks: Yeah, because I've always kind of said, like, you know 

The Role of AI in User-Generated Content
---

[00:29:33] Jim Banks: I know there's a lot of people that are using AI to generate, you know, user generated content. And I'm thinking to me, that's, that's kind of, you know, that's, that's wrong. I mean, you know, again, the best users are your actual users. I'm looking for.

unprofessional videos with bad audio, right? I'm not looking for that whole polished, you know, TikTok influencer that, you know, you could give them any product. Oh, this is the most amazing thing. And, and, you know, that's used to bother me immensely when you'd see 22 year old women rubbing cream, aging cream into their face.

Look how soft it makes my skin look. It's like 22 years old for God's sake. Right. I just couldn't understand. Right. Why anyone would buy it. But I think it's probably because, you know, the audience, the target audience, they look at that and they aspire to be that. Right. That's probably why it succeeds.

Right. I always remember somebody was telling me that, um, You, me, you mentioned like Lululemon, right? And typically what tends to happen is that the, the people that can afford to buy Lululemon are typically, you know, say men above 45 or 40 or whatever, right? But the people that they, they use in their ads are all men in their twenties because the men are over 40, aspire to be the men in their twenties, right?

So they put on this skin tight shirt and it looks. Hideous on them, but it looks great on the model, right? And that's why they kind of, they could afford the product, right? Whereas the 22 year old probably can't afford it unless they're an influencer or, you know, something like that. So, um, for me, it's, again, it's quite interesting why, you know, people use certain methods in their advertising.

You go, well, that doesn't make sense. But, but for me that the whole thing with UGC. Again, I'm very anti it unless it's genuine user user generated content. What are your thoughts 

[00:31:12] Grace Clemens: I agree with you 

[00:31:14] Jim Banks: on that? Silence.

[00:31:17] Grace Clemens: know how to feed it versus asking for it. So if you ask ChatGPT to give you a YouTube content idea, a script, it will, but one, it won't be from your heart.

It won't be what you know in here, so it will come out differently. It will come out less authentic. Um, versus if you feed ChatGPT like, here's my idea, here's what I want to say, lay it out into a nice script so I can organize it. That's where you're going to get a much higher quality Um, thing. AI is not, I don't think AI should be involved with creating UGC, unless it is cleaning up something you already have, organizing something you have, like, hey, I have these 10 testimonials that I want to push out and I want to Um, you know, can you organize it of a calendar for me and dates?

So I look at a I more for doing the work faster for me that I already, you know, I would be doing, but I'm not asking it to start from scratch. That's different. It's just you're not going to have quality. You're not going to have authentic. It's not going to engage people the way that You know, real humans do. 

[00:32:47] Jim Banks: Yeah, I think I think, um, so that there's a guy who I know he's just set up a new it's like a new project. I really knew him through. He was very kind of a big in kind of audio, right? So, um, you know, Like I think he came from a sort of broadcasting background in radio. So, you know, he would talk about, you know, all the various tools that you can use, Adobe Audition and Premiere Pro and stuff like that.

But he's got into AI now and I was watching one of his videos. Um, the other day, and he was talking about NotionAI, right? And I mean, I've been using Notion for forever, right? But, um, I thought it'd be interesting to kind of give NotionAI kind of a bit of a try, and he had a video on it. I think it's called Creator Magic.

It's kind of what this board is, all about AI. Um, and some of the use cases that you have in there is just amazing. I mean, so what he does is every YouTube video that he's created, he gets the The transcript downloaded and uploaded into Google Drive. He then can analyze the transcript and he'll, he'll be able to kind of say, you know, show me all the videos where I talked about X or Y or whatever it might be, right?

And it'll spit out all the videos, give the context. He's got a YouTube style guide, right? So it's basically. He'll, he'll say, yes, write me a script, but he'll say, this is the style in which I want you to do it. So the hook and, you know, the intro and the outro and call to action, all that sort of stuff, it's all sort of laid out.

But it's, it's all in the style of his voice. So the script will be more relevant to the way in which he would do it. Right. Rather than it being a, just a cheesy, you know, one that Mr. Beast might use. It's like, you know, Mr. Beast works because it's Mr. Beast, right? Lots of people have tried to replicate it, but.

failed miserably in the process, right? Whereas if you have the style guide for yourself, right? In the same way that, you know, I think a lot of people will lean into using like things like HeyGen and, and, you know, you can create your own sort of custom avatar. So eventually you'll get to the point where your customer service could be conducted by somebody who is, you know, that maybe looks like you, sounds like you.

Talks like you because you've trained it to kind of like talk that way, but is answering the questions that again, every business usually has a list of probably the 10 questions that virtually every single person will ask before they make a commitment, right? And rather than it being a here's we can go and read the FAQ.

They might be able to kind of go. Hey, can you tell me how to do this? And then the AI chat bot right can actually respond to them, but it doesn't look so kind of like stale and sterile. It's kind of, it's more of an interactive process. But, but equally, I'm not saying you just sort of sit back and leave that to get on with it.

You would still need to monitor it, supervise it, make sure it's actually doing what you expect it to do. But some of them are like really, really kind of getting on and are very, very close to being where they need to be, right. But, um, you know, I think a lot of it is, you know, if you can train your Um, agents with your book of business, your playbook, your, you know, like how you handle things again, I think so many businesses will be able to take some of the, I call it grunt work, but some of the work that you know, doesn't necessarily need to be done by your highly expensive marketing team, right?

It can be done by kind of a lesser, a lesser entity, you know, to allow that marketing person to then focus on other aspects within the business. 

[00:35:50] Grace Clemens: Yeah. I think there's definitely some interest in these AR, you know, training. I played around with one the other day where I wanted to see what it would be like if I created a VR, you know, uh, an AR, like augmented myself and see how it would be. I think there might be some opportunities for brands there.

Yeah. If you have say, I know a lot of e-commerce brands have like, A face of the brand that records a lot of the content. So people aren't used to seeing that person on Tik TOK. So that might be a useful thing, but where the, and it's a thin line, but there's that small piece of human connection that if you miss it, if you miss the mark on that, and it's a very thin line, the minute the audience picks up on that, you've lost them.

So. I think that's what, you know, as a society, we're going to have to, to just learn that, that, what that small line is. Right. And again, I think this is where it falls into the marketer's hands is that's just part of part of the skill is knowing if that human authenticity part is still in there, even if it's been created by AI, because there are,

[00:37:10] Jim Banks: I can, I can use like AI to write ads for clients, right, but I tend not to. Right. Even though I could, I tend not to because I feel I, I have a better understanding of what the client's objectives are, because, you know, in a lot of cases, I've been working with them a long time. Right. And I also know where the boundaries are in terms of what Google or Facebook or Microsoft might accept when it comes to ad copy.

Right. And where the red flags would start to kick in, you start getting ad disapproved. And sometimes that can jeopardize the whole ad account, right. Or the business manager even. Right. I mean, um, you know, I was working with a client where, Okay. They were outsourcing. So we were we were running their paid social.

I suggested we got some kind of you. if you like UGC kind of videos created. So they hired a social agency to do that. They came in, they started kind of creating and some of some of the ads, I looked at them, I thought they're really good, right? But then I thought, well, but they don't necessarily align with the ideal client persona that we know exists.

It's not, it's not really kind of like aligned with that. But you know, we kind of, we kept going with it anyway. Then we had a sort of situation where because their business manager had been associated with all these other stuff. They had a problem that their business manager got sort of blocked, right?

So basically their ads were being disabled in our ad account, right? Until we disconnected them from the business manager, right? Which, you know, and, and fortunately we were sort of the existing agency and they were just a sort of secondary agency. We, so we were able to unplug them. How did we been the only agency that has all been done through us?

We don't lost that account, right? And, you know, and I think sometimes that's where, you know, there is this, you need to understand where the limit is and kind of walk it back a couple of steps from that, right? Because if you go too close to it, you'll end up getting burnt. 
 

[00:38:57] Grace Clemens: absolutely. Absolutely. 

The Future of Social Media Marketing
---

[00:38:59] Jim Banks: So, so Grace, what, what do you, what do you see the kind of the next, because obviously been doing this for 13 years or so, something like that. Uh, where do you see the future of the industry? Because again, I've always maintained, I still think we're in the infancy. Where do you think we're going? Where do you think we're heading? 

[00:39:11] Grace Clemens: that's a hard question right now, obviously, with the TikTok ban, um, going on blooming. I don't think the TikTok ban is going to happen, but right now I'm pretty concerned about the state of the algorithms. Like I'm, I'm noticing a shift in the quality of my news feeds on both X and Facebook, Instagram. 

Um, so I think as a user and as a marketer, I'm definitely concerned. Uh, but I, I think it will be an interesting six months. I don't think I have an answer on what's going to happen, but I do think that as marketers just, it's important for us to. Stay true to our values in the coming, you know, times, just because things are changing on the algorithms and we don't have control over that.

So ensuring that you're doing what you can to, you know, keep your clients expectations. Standing and in the loop as to what's going on with meta and with X, because these things are changing day to day right now. Um, 

Maintaining a Multi-Channel Strategy
---

[00:40:20] Grace Clemens: I think the most important thing for the next six months to 12 months for social media and for marketers in general for e-commerce businesses is to make sure you keep a multi channel strategy.

I've always said that before, and I've always said that because we've seen We've seen outages on WhatsApp meta. It happens. It does. And whether or not it's hacking, it is, that is just, it's like the electricity. Sometimes the electricity goes out. We're 2025, but it still happens. Sometimes Fi goes. 

[00:40:54] Jim Banks: When, when, uh, when, uh, Facebook kind of went down, everyone was going to X to complain about Facebook. It's like, come on.

[00:41:02] Grace Clemens: Exactly. So, but that is why it's so important. You have a multi channel strategy. So your customers can go find you somewhere else if there is an outage or if there is some sort of reason that your business does not want to be on that platform anymore. We saw Lush bow out. They're a great company to look at.

They took a stand on social media. They still exist on social media. You can find them. They just don't exist on Facebook anymore. So you can exist on social without being on social. If your business feels like that is something that you feel you need to stand against, stand strong for your values. Um, you know, I've considered leaving X myself, but you know, we'll, we'll see how things go.

[00:41:50] Jim Banks: And it was making me laugh, and, um, When people do that, I've started to use threads a lot more, right? Because again, I find it's sort of like, it's almost like, uh, the early days of Twitter, right? When things were nice and people were friendly and helpful and, you know, encouraging, giving positive feedback rather than just, you know, ripping into people.

Um, but what's really interesting, I've seen so many people come over to, to, You know, threads, they post exactly the same stuff that they were posting on X, clearly not getting the engagement that they felt they were getting, or they, they, they felt they deserved. Right. And then announcing to everyone, well, I've tried this for a week and it's not really worked out and I'm going to leave and I'm going to be on Bluesky and here's how you can get hold of me.

Right. And I'm like, it's, I kind of likened it to, you know, going to a party and people announcing that they're leaving the party. It's like. Just leave. Just if you want to go, just go right. I actually like it when people say I'm leaving threads. I'm gonna go to Bluesky because I can unfollow them on threads.

I'm like, I don't need to follow them anymore, right? So they're not gonna post anything. Why follow them? I'm not gonna be there. He's not adding any value to mine. My feed at all, right? They're not posting anything, right? So, um, you know, but I completely agree with you that, you know, people kind of, in a lot of cases, they'll just go, we just do Google ads, or we just do Facebook ads, or we just do email, or we just do organic search.

It's like, you know, I think you need to have as many kind of toes in as many kind of camps as you can, right? For that very reason, you could have situations where, like I said, stuff goes down, you said stuff goes down, right? TikTok. Yeah, I don't think TikTok necessarily going to go anywhere, right?

But it certainly put the sort of frighteners on people. I think a lot of people like I don't I know it went down for 12 hours or something. I think a lot of people never even thought it's going to get to that. Right. But, um, you know, I think I think, uh, ByteDance were like, Okay, we'll call our bluff, right?

If you think we're going to, you know, comply with selling the company, not going to happen. Right? So shut us down. And they did. Right. And, um, And then obviously kind of his comeback, but it's only come back with a sort of minus day of execution that it could it could look completely different as a result of that.

Right? Elon might go to dot from Donald Trump might go. You know, Elon, you should, you should kind of buy. And I think, honestly, I think if, if, uh, you know, if Elon Musk ends up owning, you know, uh,  TikTok, I would say, right, that's it. I'm uninstalling. I'm done. I don't want that. I mean, you know, as you say, like, I think Twitter used to be great.

I think ever since X has been sort of owned by Elon, it's just not been the same platform at all. Although I know a lot of people that still get some decent success with it. I'm still on it. I still use it from time to time, um, but you know, but just generally speaking, you know, it's not, it's nowhere near what it used to be before.

Silence.

[00:44:34] Grace Clemens: That's a great book for anybody who's in the industry. Um, filter bubble. I think there's something to be said about popping your full filter bubble and seeing things outside of your your idealisms.

Um, But there's also something to be said that there's a reason why we have a filter bubble and I love what's in my bubble and it makes me sad that that bubble might pop and it might change for the longer term. But we'll see how it goes. I think as humans and as marketers stay true to ourselves, stay, you know, stay true to our values and keep a multi channel strategy, you know, like don't put pressure on yourself to create content for every single channel every single day.

Not every company is able to do that. Only the big players are unfortunately, but keep your profiles warm. You know, like if you, if TikTok is your number one channel, fine, but make sure to keep your, your funnel and that you aren't getting people from TikTok to go into email or to go into Instagram or you have them somewhere for.

That multi channel strategy, it's only going to become more and more important. I do wonder if maybe in 30 years time, you know, we're only seeing more and more social media apps come on board. We've got red note now. I just downloaded that last week. Um, so it's going to be interesting to see how. You know, the world splits our attention span up and where we decide to spend our time.

So I think values are going to come into play now, especially

[00:46:03] Jim Banks: I think it's I think it's marketers is not for us to tell people where they should I've always maintained like if somebody decides that they're going to run, you know, they're going to play Candy Crush on the subway, right? And I can put an ad right through a programmatic exchange into Candy Crush while they're watching that on the subway.

Then I'm going to do that, right? It's not for me to go, well, Candy Crush is not a good placement because they're the ones that have chosen to use Candy Crush. I'm not the one that's forced them to use it, right? They've chosen to use it and I've still got an in with them because I can use remarketing and I can actually say, well, if they've been to my Facebook page, right, I want to remarket to them on, you know, through Programatic and actually Run ads that, you know, if you like, continue the conversation that we've started somewhere else, right?

I want to make sure that there's that continuity right the way through. 
 

[00:46:49] Grace Clemens: Absolutely.

Final Thoughts and Contact Information
---

[00:46:50] Jim Banks: So, so Grace, when, when, when I, um, ask my podcast, podcast guests to come on, right? I give them the kind of like the, uh, the guest intake form. You are so comprehensive with all of the, you know, again, I think you've kind of like completely ticked the box in terms of your every omnipresent everywhere. Um, so if people wanted to kind of get in touch with you to take up on your audit or something like that.

Where would you recommend that they do? Cause all your, all your details have been the show notes. Where would you recommend people kind of get in touch with you? 

[00:47:14] Grace Clemens: Uh, gracieclemens.Com. That's G. R. A. C. I. E. C. L. E. M. E. N. S. Dot com. Or you can head to linkedin/graceclemens. I'm on there as well. And you can email me styled by Gracie Clemens at gmail. com. You can really find me on any, any social channel or shoot me an email. I always check in. I am a multi channel marketer, so

it's 

[00:47:25] Jim Banks: made it very hard for people not to find you. Right. So,

[00:47:28] Grace Clemens: exactly. 

[00:47:30] Jim Banks: uh,

so, so Grace, thank you so much for being a fantastic guest today. I've loved, I've loved the conversation. It's been terrific. Um, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day in Barcelona and, um, yeah, hopefully we'll have you back on, on, uh, in the future and we see where you've got to and, um, and pick up the conversation at that point.

[00:47:45] Grace Clemens: awesome. Thank you so much for having me and I'm wishing you a great 2025.

[00:47:49] Jim Banks: Yeah, you too. Thanks a lot.