EP389: Leveraging Social Tools For Effective Event Marketing With Ashley

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Stacy Jones: Welcome to marketing mistakes and how to avoid here’s your host, Stacey Jones. Welcome to marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. I’m Stacey Jones and I’m so happy to be here with you all today. I want to give a very warm welcome to Ashley Klein. Ashley is the co founder and vice president of Ice Cream Social, an innovative social invite tool designed to multiply a business’s customer base by encouraging existing clients to bring in their acquaintances using state of the art social invite features. For the last 18 years, Ashley has been a digital marketing strategist, where she’s been instrumental in devising strategies that allow businesses to effectively harness social media channels from influencer marketing to content development and event marketing.2
Stacy Jones: She also holds the role of executive vice president of client strategy at Ticketsocket, the parent company of Ice Cream Social, a leading white label ticketing and registration platform behind several renowned events like Spartan Race, USA, Triathlon, Meow Wolf and the Color run. Today, Ashley are going to be diving deep into the intricacies of digital marketing. We’re going to learn what works from Ashley’s perspective, what should be avoided, and how some businesses just miss the mark. Ashley, welcome. So happy to have you here today.3
Ashley Cline: Thank you so much for having me. Stacey. I have to say, you have a radio voice of angel.4
Stacy Jones: Well, thank never. Thank you. I do appreciate that.5
Ashley Cline: Very amazing.6
Stacy Jones: Well, what I would love to start us off with is how did you get here today? You have been doing digital marketing and social media marketing for quite some time. And I know event marketing is your go to right now, but what made you decide this was the world you wanted to live and play in?7
Ashley Cline: Sure. Two things. One, the only class I got a good grade in high school was marketing.

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Stacy Jones: At least your high school had a marketing class. I mean, how cool is that? That is cool. When I went to high school, there was no marketing classes. There was european history.

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Ashley Cline: Yeah, I grew up in a very small town, so it’s also very surprising that we had a marketing class. But we did, and it was the only class I did pretty well in. And two, I learned right out of high school as I started getting into marketing, that marketing is a lot like a video game. And I loved playing video games growing up. And my brother and I really only had one or two video games. Mario Brothers fan over here. And once you beat the game, you have to learn how to keep it interesting because you’re playing it over and over again. So we would optimize things, know, say, okay, let’s see how many coins we can get this round or how quickly can we beat the game? And I have found that to me, that’s a lot like marketing.

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Ashley Cline: Once you get a campaign up and going now, how can you tinker with it to continue to create that success over and over?

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Stacy Jones: That’s smart because a lot of people approach it of, okay, I got it out the door. It’s there, it’s live onto the next, and they never go back and really dial in on all the good things and the bad things and tinker, as you just said.

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Ashley Cline: For sure, it’s a lot of work to get a campaign up and running. And so unfortunately, that’s not where the work ends.

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Stacy Jones: I think a lot of times, though, people are so onto the next where there’s just so much on their plate and it’s coming at you and it’s hard to actually dive in and measure and do that play and kind of figure it out because you’re racing out of the gate to get the next thing just checked off and done.

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Ashley Cline: Yes, exactly. I forever hear in the back of my mind the motto of what gets measured matters. And you really got to take that approach in marketing and very closely measure and watch the analytics and see how you can fix things and improve and not give up so easily and move on to the next shiny object.

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Stacy Jones: And this may sound, I don’t know, simplistic because people listening may be like, oh, sure, after a campaign, you just go in, you look at it, you measure it. There’s a lot to measuring on that. So what’s your approach when you actually are trying to figure out how a campaign works?

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Ashley Cline: Sure. Well, initially, of course, before you really launch any kind of digital marketing campaign strategy, tactical plan, you do really want to take the time to set some goals, not something we always think about, especially if you’re a small business or an entrepreneur and a smaller team running your marketing, you do want to think about what does a successful outcome look like so that you know, what kind of benchmarks to have in place and what does success look like for you. And in doing that, from that point, knowing what success looks like for me personally, I have a list of things that I go through for each marketing channel. So are we looking at email? What are all the things that we can a B test?

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Ashley Cline: Can we a B test subject lines, certain segments of an email list, preview, copy, call to actions, for click throughs. There’s so much that you can essentially test in every marketing platform, not just email. You can do the same thing in SMS and then Facebook ads, copy ads, audience calls, to action, different buttons, different landing pages. So there is a lot that you can certainly tinker with, which I realize, as I say, that sounds extremely overwhelming, too. So if you take that approach of oh, this is a fun video game, it can kind of help you get over that overwhelm.

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Stacy Jones: And so besides the tinkering and the measuring, how else do you step forward to make sure your campaigns are successful when you’re launching them? Like when you’re starting to work with a client? What’s the first step to figuring it all out?

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Ashley Cline: Sure. I would say the first step, whether it’s digital marketing, any marketing, you do need to know who your audience is. I know, sounds so obvious and basic, but a lot of people don’t really know. They have an idea and it’s a vague idea, but you want to get so specific, as specific as possible to know who that audience is. And then the second most important piece that is very helpful, especially if you’re outsourcing your marketing and hiring someone to do it for you. But there’s a lot of companies I work with that haven’t really thought through what their product is or what they’re selling. Like they know what it is, but they don’t know what’s the value of it. What is the benefit for the end user?

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Ashley Cline: And sure, you might know that in your head, but thinking through how that translates to copy and what is your messaging as a company, that is important to know when getting started. Honestly, those two things are pretty crucial for any marketer to just be able to pick up and do anything, put together successful email campaigns, Facebook ads, whatever the case may be.

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Stacy Jones: And so when you’re working right now with ice cream social, and obviously you’re not as an agency, you have your own business. It’s the own ticketing. How are you guys really figuring out who the customer base is for all the very events that are out there and how to best target for that.

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Ashley Cline: Sure. So when I’m working with different events, one, we will take a look at who have all their previous customers been? What kind of first party data were they able to collect via checkout or anything? What information do we have to build profiles on who these people are coming to events? And I’ve worked on everything from your fun runs to lantern festivals to circuses to music festivals. And so each of those all have very different audiences, obviously. And so starting with who your current customer base is, maybe even sending an email or social media post to just learn more information about them and solicit feedback is very helpful if you’re just honestly not sure the second piece is.

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Ashley Cline: I also work with a lot of first time events who don’t know exactly who their customer is, but they think they do or they have a similar event style that maybe we can start with. So there is just some research involved. And sometimes when you’re first starting it out, it can be a matter of throwing spaghetti against the wall. But that is where the great thing about social media ads is. You can get pretty detailed in who your audience is and test it for a very small amount of money before spending all your budget one audience set.

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Stacy Jones: And so besides hitting the wrong audience, where do other people also go wrong with their digital marketing? If you’re not aligned to your correct target, how else can you kind of mess it up?

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Ashley Cline: Sure, I’m going to throw out some pretty obvious ones, but they are mistakes that I’ve made over my almost 20 year period. Mistakes that have made my stomach hurt and just want to pass it on.

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Stacy Jones: Sometimes it’s like the smallest little things that get overlooked or done that you’re just like, what the hell? How could I have missed that? And then you want to shout from the roof to everyone else and say, don’t do this. So that’s great. Yes.

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Ashley Cline: And especially as you’re building these campaigns, you put so much love and labor into them and you launch. Some of these things can get overlooked pretty easily. So I would say, number one, triple check your budgets that you set on any kind of advertising platform. So let’s say meta. You can set your budgets at a campaign level or an ad set level. You want to triple check that because one, sometimes, as we know, these ads managers can be a little buggy. Secondly, sometimes you can accidentally add an extra zero at the end of those numbers, or sometimes you can get your end date wrong. So in my experience, I accidentally set an end date wrong and I spent all of my budget in three days instead of 30 days.

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Ashley Cline: So that was a pretty big mistake that I felt pretty hard and it was just perfect storm, which takes you to the next mistake. If you are running social ads, these are things that you need to keep a pulse on and check in at least daily, even if it’s for two minutes, because I said it took a long weekend vacation, came back on Monday and things were not good. So that was a hard lesson to learn, but one I will never forget.

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Stacy Jones: And you won’t do it again.

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Ashley Cline: Never. No, set it and forget.

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Stacy Jones: It is not in line with pretty much anything you can do in marketing.

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Ashley Cline: Yes. And for anyone, if you are a large enough business. Or I would just say this. I’ve always worked with agencies or have some sort of metrics in place. Granted, this mistake was not as huge where I needed this, but something like errors and emissions insurance in case you were to ever do this. If you are a marketer and you do this with a client and you accidentally spend $100,000 instead of $10,000, something like an insurance that might help you out in those cases for mistakes. Those could be pretty helpful if you want to look into that. I would say the other really big mistake that I’ve made before is spelling grammar errors in an ad copy that appears on an ad for a large company.

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Stacy Jones: I feel like a total idiot when that happens, and it happens to everyone.

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Ashley Cline: It’s such an easy mistake to make, especially when you have looked at these ads over and over again through a review process and eventually you just glaze over because you’ve seen it so many times that you miss the absolute most obvious. So now, at the very least, I always use Grammarly. So I suggest investing in the Grammarly. If you don’t, or depending on the client, how much we’re spending, how large they are, I will for sure hire a professional proofreader to proofread everything before it’s published, even after it’s gone through many reviews with the client and internal reviews at the end of that, at final approval, I’ll still send it to approve grader.

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Stacy Jones: There is a company, and I only remember it because they did email. Not email, sorry, they do hard mail, or they used to do hard mail marketing campaigns and their name and I will give them a shout out. It’s bulletproof and their website is bulletproof online and it’s a proofreading service. And the reason I love them and my team just thought I was probably insane all these years, where they send out just a flat cardboard something that is like a third of a letter size and one side is bright red and it has a phrase that’s kind of funny on it and you look at it and then you see all the things that are wrong with it, but you don’t see it at first. And it shows you how easy it is to overlook this stuff.

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Stacy Jones: At our agency, we mandate, especially for social copy or anything that’s going out, that’s going to be published, that we have to have someone else’s eyes on something too. And that there’s an accountability system in process because I do it. I’m a good writer and I’m on top of my stuff, usually, and it’s easy to mess up.

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Ashley Cline: It is so easy. Also, we live in this world of, like, an autocorrect, where sometimes it does not autocorrect properly in the right way. Yeah.

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Stacy Jones: I agree. But, yeah, the proofreading is just. Yeah, it helps.

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Ashley Cline: Absolutely.

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Stacy Jones: And there’s big companies that do this wrong, and then they get a lot of press about it, and that’s not good.

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Ashley Cline: Know, I know. I feel for those people that published it. I know there’s always those jokes on Twitter of, like, it’s the intern’s first day type thing when those mistakes happen. And I really feel for them when it happens. Exactly.

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Stacy Jones: So how else do people screw up their marketing?

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Ashley Cline: Those are pretty basic, I would say. One thing that I’m currently struggling with, and we’ll just put it out there, and something that I’m viewing as a mistake to kind of get a new filter on how to approach things is duplicating what worked over and over again. Now, yes, there’s always a strategy. There is a base foundation that will be successful, but at the end of the day, that can be like your little recipe for success. But you need to continue to dig in year after year, month after month, however long you’ve been doing, this particular strategy that’s working really well for you, because eventually your results will become stagnant or you’ll see a slow, could be very slow, but a slow decline month after month, year over year.

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Ashley Cline: And it can be really hard to get out of that mindset of like, this has always worked, and sometimes it’s not enough to change up your creative or your copy, as easy as that sounds. And sometimes you do need to give yourself space to brainstorm and say, how can I take this foundation but build upon it in a little bit newer way to continue to improve over time rather than just getting complacent, essentially.

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Stacy Jones: And it’s easy. Again, going back to what we talked about earlier, you’re like eyes on the goal and just go. And you don’t think that you’re being complacent. It’s just if you’re not always going back and revisiting and rejiggering it just a little bit, it’s easy for things to go a little bit off the rails and just mess up.

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Ashley Cline: At one point even just thinking, okay, three years ago, a five x return on our ad spend was really nice. But if we’re still getting a five x return today, what can we do to get better? Because things are more expensive, there’s more behind the scenes expenses coming through now than maybe before. And so you just want to keep trying to improve.

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Stacy Jones: And so any other mistakes that you would like people to avoid along the way, you’ve shared some good ones.

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Ashley Cline: Okay, I have got one more, I think, just thinking back in my career. So I’ve worked a lot with influencers and everything from giving someone free product in exchange for a free post or celebrity endorsements or paying teenagers $100,000 for one piece of content all the way down to where ice cream social is really created from of that peer to peer referral marketing. So I’ve kind of worked the gamut across all influencer marketing. And so I would say if you’re doing any kind of influencer marketing, and honestly, this could ring true if you’re using any kind of photography from the Internet, even if you’ve downloaded it from a special site where you can source free photos, free music, anything like that, you do really need to understand usage rights. And are you using that content the way it is meant to be used?

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Ashley Cline: And if you’re downloading photos and free imagery and music, you stock videos. You do need to read that fine print because you could have content out there that’s very successful for you and get the rug pulled out from underneath of you out of nowhere. And then if you’re working with influencers, this is something you need to think about before a contract is ever signed, because you want this clearly stated within any kind of contract you put together. How long can you use that content that an influencer creates for you? Can you use it? We’ve had instances where we can use it for one week, three months, one year or indefinitely. You do want to make sure that’s clearly defined and that you don’t overstep any boundaries there.

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Stacy Jones: And it’s not just even how you use it, not just the, when you can use it’s also how you can use it. Are you allowed to use it and run it as a digital ad? Because the answer is you’ve taken it off of the social platform that it was originally on, and that’s a no go if it’s not in the contract, or are you allowed to even keep it on the social platform and repost it on your own and put money behind it? And if you boost it and you don’t have rights to boost it, then you’re in a heap of trouble. And then the other is if you haven’t negotiated to whitelist it, which would be to keep the content on the social platform and secretly behind the scenes, boost it on the influencer’s own platform. You haven’t negotiated that.

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Stacy Jones: That too is going to cause you a hurdle and a problem.

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Ashley Cline: Yes, absolutely. I always preach if an influencer won’t allow you whitelisting access, it’s almost not worth it for you to even sign that contract. If you’re paying them, if it’s free content, okay, sure. But if you’re paying them, if they don’t give you whitelisting access, I don’t know if it’s worth it.

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Stacy Jones: And a lot of the things that I’ve seen we do influencer marketing, where influencers will push back is they think that because the brand is putting dollars behind it that they should be getting more dollars. And so that comes up a lot of times of is the influencer being compensated fairly if the brand is running out and using this now as a major ad campaign and you have to look at and understand how many dollars really are going into there, were they compensated fairly? So it’s a bigger conversation to be had. But you are right, actually, we’ll encounter someone who’s like, you can’t whitelist or you can’t boost or there’s so many influencers out there. It’s not like when you’re working with a celebrity and you only want one celebrity.

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Stacy Jones: There are so many influencers to work with unless they’re of that celebrity level that you can easily find someone else to work with you who will be excited, too.

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Ashley Cline: Absolutely. And in my mind, if this is an ongoing relationship with the influencer or you do not get that whitelisting access, having them post once and it be a blip on the map for you for like one day or 1 hour spike in traffic or sales, a lot of times it is hard to calculate that would be profitable for you.

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Stacy Jones: And so how can our listeners find out more about ice cream social, especially if they have an upcoming event that they want to be able to figure out how to get people to?

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Ashley Cline: Yes, you can learn more about ice cream social at Ice creamsocial IO.

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Stacy Jones: Perfect. And then I bet you’re on LinkedIn as well if there’s any questions they have for you.

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Ashley Cline: Yes, find me on LinkedIn. Ashley Stamford, happy to chat.

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Stacy Jones: And so, Ashley, any last? No, so more so when you’re working with someone who wants to do an event and they come to you and they think that it should just be advertised in one way, are there multiple ways that really they could be leveraging to get more people to that event?

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Ashley Cline: Oh, absolutely. Depending where the event is makes a big difference because every city sells pretty differently and you have to kind of understand that market. Is it a first time event? Do people know your name? There’s a lot that you can do. What’s your budget? There’s a lot of things that we can do from a grassroots perspective in terms of getting the word out there on the ground and that sort of thing. That can help all kinds of things. So it depends on the event, where it’s happening, how much time we got, and from there we kind of work to put together a solid strategy for them.

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Stacy Jones: Well, Ashley, thank you so much for joining today and sharing all of your mistakes and successes along the way.

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Ashley Cline: Yes, I appreciate you having me, Stacey. Of course.

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Stacy Jones: And to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning in to another episode of marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. It was great to have you here today and I look forward to chatting with you next week. And until then, if you have any questions about content partnerships with movies or tv shows, with product placement or celebrity endorsements or influencer marketing, reach out to me and I’ll connect you or jump on a call. Hollywood branded is the agency and I look forward to chatting with you soon. Take care.