MARCH 9, 2022

What does the Primco team know about leveraging brand identity on social media? They know enough to ask an expert for assistance. Cam Overacker and Tyler Yelland chat with Tara Osipoff, executive vice president of Avana, about creating stronger emotional connections via social media and converting followers into real-life customers.

What ROI is to the bottom line ROE is to social media engagement. Creating content with an eye towards return-on-emotion produces posts that resonate with audiences, says Tara. “Right now, people are looking for raw; they’re looking for real.”

If the very idea of social media sounds intimidating, Tara reminds folks that posting consistent quality content doesn’t require a PR team or an entire marketing department. Instead, she urges flooring distributors and retailers to think internally. Engage staffers from different departments for channel take-overs or “staffer of the week” posts for example. Get the team involved. Followers are more likely to become customers if they can connect with a company’s culture rather than an endless scroll of products.

Of course, it helps to find out who your followers are first. “Before you can even take a stab at a social platform. I highly recommend looking at where your audience lives.” Tara repeatedly returns to this point with good reason: audience intel is a key to a successful social strategy.

Why shout into the void of Twitter, which tends to skew “hot take” or political, when you’re better served showing off products with personality over on Instagram, Pinterest, or TikTok? That’s not to say that a multi-channel presence isn’t advantageous. There are limits, however, to its effectiveness and someone’s ability to maintain content consistency. Tara reminds folks to “test and see which ones your business performs best on and focus attention there.”

Demographic data can help folks understand where their audience likes to scroll. Psychographic data pinpoints why they’re scrolling by delivering info on what motivates them, their priorities, their beliefs. Since significant emotional considerations within the home and family often dictate flooring purchases, psychographic data can improve the tone of social media messaging, thus making an emotional connection and influencing a future sale.

“Emotions create memories,” agrees Cam, adding that there’s always room for adjustment in the fast-changing landscape of social media. “Like anything you do in life, the more research and the more focused you can do on getting to the right place and make an emotional connection along the way, that’s the key for businesses.”

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Croft Electric
Saskatchewan Professional Marketing Association
Why They Buy

QUOTES

Tara Osipoff
“I really think you need to pay attention to who your market is, where they spend their time, what type of content they like before investing a whole bunch of time and spreading yourself thin.”

“I think taking anything––it can be a flooring product, it can be electrical––whatever it may be, and adding a human element to it is so important because the whole point of marketing is to try to get people to see themselves with the product.”

“If you can get your staff to talk about the company positively on their social accounts, they’re reaching an audience that you may not be reaching.”

“Talking about yourself is boring, so if you can get more people to talk about your company unsolicited, the better.”

“Marketing is essentially storytelling; the better story you have, the better content you’ve got. The best stories win.”

Cam Overacker
“When you say ROI, that’s, you know, as a business owner, that’s what it’s all about: it’s about return on investment. It’s not just about doing, most of the time; it’s not just about doing things just for the sake of doing them because you’re looking for something to do, right? It’s what kind of return do I get on it and then be able to measure it.”
“I can look at it and see, you know, for our own benefit, trying to tap into that emotional side of we’ve been around for 75 years. Let’s tap into the emotion of what that means ‘cause there’s a ton of history.”
“The biggest thing that I’m pulling from this whole episode is just the power of emotions, and, you know, emotions create memories.”

Tyler Yelland
“As much as you want to sell yourself, there’s, you know, there’s a fine line between being authentic to people and also selling to people.”

“You don’t need to be a big business with 15 marketing people. You just need to use the people and the talent you have internally and provide that content. And, it’s again, humanizing the content, I mean, the floodgates will open up.”
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Know Where You Stand is produced and edited by The Creative Impostor Studios.

To learn more about topics we discuss, visit https://primco.ca/ or contact your local sales rep.

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