EP 236: The Importance of Collaboration with Thibaud Clement | Loomly

Stacy Jones (00:01):
Welcome to Marketing Mistakes (& How To Avoid Them). I’m Stacy Jones, the founder of influencer marketing and branded content agency, Hollywood Branded. This podcast provides brand marketers a learning platform for topics, first to share their insights and knowledge on topics which make a direct impact on your business today. While it is impossible to be well-versed on every topic and strategy that can improve bottom line results, my goal is to help you avoid making costly mistakes of time, energy, or money, whether you are doing a DIY approach or hiring an expert to help. Let’s begin today’s discussion.

Announcer (00:31):
Welcome to Marketing Mistakes (& How To Avoid Them). Here’s your host, Stacy Jones.

Stacy Jones (00:36):
Welcome to Marketing Mistakes (& How To Avoid Them). I’m Stacy Jones, and I’m so happy to be here with you all today, and want to give a very warm welcome to Thibaud Clément. Thibaud is the CEO and co-founder of Loomly, which he launched with his wife and business partner Noemie, along with three other successful businesses over the years.
As a self-taught programmer, Thibaud began building software to make their jobs easier managing a marketing agency and developing an in-house solution to streamline the process of creating and sharing editorial calendars with their clients, namely for social media, and Loomly was launched. Today we’re going to talk about issues marketers face on a daily basis, the C-word, collaboration, with your teams and with your clients, and how to better collaborate as a marketer, and what you need to know about today social media. We’ll learn what works from Thibaud’s perspective, what should be avoided and how some businesses just miss the mark. Thibaud, welcome. So happy to have you here today.

Thibaud Clément (01:31):
Thank you very much for having me, Stacy. It’s a pleasure,

Stacy Jones (01:34):
Of course. So I would love for us to start off and just share a little bit more about who you are and what got you to developing software, which is fantastic, because you created a tool in-house to solve problems you were having, and then you decided to share this tool and gift with the world, because any marketing agency, anyone who’s doing social media marketing is having the same problems you are encountering.

Thibaud Clément (01:57):
Yeah, well actually you nailed it during your introduction so I don’t want to be redundant, but yeah, like you mentioned, I’ve been working with my spouse Noemie for over nine years now, close to a decade. Time is flying. And so prior to launching Loomly, we actually had an advertising agency, actually two. One in France where our largest client was L’Oreal, and we were managing five brands for them in the luxury product division. So very serious stuff. And here in the US where we were working with fast growing startups, so younger company looking for more innovative ways to grow in scale.
And so there was one process that was common to all of those clients, which was that we were preparing for them what we call editorial calendars. Now, I’m sure you know what it is. And marking the days, and actually even still to this day, one of the most popular ways to handle editorial calendars was to use spreadsheets. And spreadsheets are great for numbers, you’re doing a P&L you’re doing a forecast. Terrific. Now, if you’re trying to do some marketing and collaborate, you want to include some text and some images, and then get a back and forth with other people, not so much.
So we try to look for other products and ways to streamline the process. And all we could find was one of two things, either we could find generic project management software, which was great for collaboration, but was not addressing the publishing part of our marketing workflow. Or the other option that we could find was social media schedulers, which were great to actually publish content to different platforms, but were not actually helping with what is happening upfront, which is how do we create the content? How do we get it approved as a team by the client?
So that was back in 2015. And so, because we couldn’t find anything that’s was suiting our needs we decided to build it. I’m not an engineer. I just learned everything on my own. And then by the end of the year, we had something up and running, a cool prototype and we started using it with our clients. We did not tell them it was our product, because we wanted some honest feedback, and they actually liked it. So a couple of months later, in 2016, we just opened it up in public beta to see if other people would be interested in using it. And from here it seems to have got out of hand, but in the right sense. So today things are going pretty fast and it’s pretty exciting.

Stacy Jones (04:33):
That’s awesome. So had you ever developed software before?

Thibaud Clément (04:37):
You know, I’ve been playing around with the web for a long time, but it was not my main job. I went to business schools, I also got an MBA so that was what I graduated about, and just I learned everything on my own. I learned Ruby on Rails and JavaScript and all these things on my spare time.

Stacy Jones (04:59):
At what platform did you start off working for Loomly? How did you say, “This is the platform we’re going to start making it and building it from”?

Thibaud Clément (05:05):
Ruby on Rails. So it’s what I had the most experience with because I find that Ruby is a very elegant language, and I also find that Rails, which is framework for Ruby, is actually a very, very powerful system that helps you build applications very fast. And so this is where I started and it’s actually still what we use today.

Stacy Jones (05:32):
That’s awesome. Now, as an agency owner and I think all other agency owners, or those who are running agencies, they have the same thing. We all are, we’re like, “I just wish I could develop something and create something and craft something to solve my problems.” And then you have to figure out whether you’re going to do it yourself, which none of us have time to do, or a lot of times the smarts to do, or if you’re going to outsource it and then teach someone how to do it, but that’s incredible that you were able to approach it and do that. So congratulations.

Thibaud Clément (06:03):
Thanks. Well, the funny thing is I actually built it, when I say for us, it was for us as an agency, but on a daily basis, it was actually Noemie who was doing the job. So what was interesting is I was building it, she was the first user. So we had a very short feedback loop. And I was adding features, she would test it, or test them and then tell me, “Oh, we could do this this way or that way.” And it was great.
And what’s interesting is that nowadays it’s not only Noemie. We are actually serving over 7,000 marketing teams across the world. And we are very proud to still be having this very short feedback loop where we speak with over 200 of our users every single day, and they tell us, they say, “Hey, I would like to have this feature. I would like to improve the UID this way,” or, “I found a bug.” And so that’s still what is fueling the roadmap and how we are still building the product. So it’s very interesting to see that we are still following the same process.

Stacy Jones (07:04):
Yeah. That’s awesome. And then with everything that you’re doing, your software, you touched on this earlier and we were talking before the podcast a bit, you’re competing, if you’re looking at your competitors, but you’re [inaudible 00:07:17] but what our audience might be familiar with, if they have to frame what Loomly does. So you’re competing against a Hootsuite, a HubSpot scheduler, a Later, anything that is a scheduler of your social media, that’s the bare base of it. But then you have bells and whistles that actually allow better collaboration.

Thibaud Clément (07:38):
Yeah. So the funny story is, the very first version of Loomly that we had built actually didn’t have any scheduling or publishing features. It was the bare bones, whereas you could come to the platform, you could upload an image, upload a copy, and it would generate a mock up of the posts for you and your team, and you could share it. It was a simple link and it was a notification to someone, and they would be able to preview what the post would look like, and then they would be able to approve it, or leave a comment and say, “Hey, can you change that?” Or even maybe change it themselves. And this is, to this day, it’s still the core value proposition of what we do.
What we do is we help marketing teams collaborate, and also we cover the entire content publishing workflow from asset management to ID generation to, of course, content creation. We also have a studio where, you mentioned Canva, we have something similar. It’s called Loomly Studio, and you’re able to crop your images to the popular social media ratio, then you add text and filter and all this crazy and cool stuff. And then once you have your content, it generates a preview for you and your team. And then once it’s approved, you can publish and respond to comments and get analytics.
So we cannot do the full spectrum, but we still see that to this day, why marketing teams come to our platform is because they are able to work together. They’re able to preview the assets and the posts, and also the ads, because we also support Facebook and Instagram ads, and they can collaborate. They can say, “I love this post. No, please change the copy on that post, because it’s not compliant with the brand,” or, “Maybe let’s use another asset,” or this kind of things. And so what’s great about Loomly is that it’s not really about saving time, like publishing to multiple channels. You can do it, of course, but the true value is making sure that anything that you actually publish to social media is actually on brand. There is no typo, there is nothing that is not compliant with whichever regulation that you operate in, and this kind of thing. So that’s where we are really different.

Stacy Jones (09:53):
That’s awesome. And you’re working across all platforms.

Thibaud Clément (09:56):
Yes.

Stacy Jones (09:57):
There’s some updates that I had seen for Instagram, because Instagram has some nice gate features that make it very difficult sometimes I think to integrate with it. But you work across pretty much all social platforms.

Thibaud Clément (10:11):
Yes. At the moment we’re integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, but also Google My Business and YouTube. And we also have some light integrations with TikTok and Snapchat. Again, with this focus on collaboration and creating the content, previewing it and approving it before it’s released to your social channel.

Stacy Jones (10:35):
Okay. In your history, you’ve owned ad agencies, marketing agencies, you’ve done all sorts of things that you came up with solutions for. What are some of the common issues that you see where collaboration just goes awry? Like whether or not it’s with Loomly, but just in general. What happens?

Thibaud Clément (10:58):
The most common thing that we see… Or if I start with actually what works best and then we can maybe work backwards from there. What we see today is that successful social media marketing and collaboration is all about having a team working together on these projects, and ideally a cross-functional team, meaning you not only involve just a marketing guy or a marketing person, you also invite sales people and product people and HR people and legal people, and even financial people, because they all have something different to bring to the table and they will make your content richer and more in line with the brand. And they will just make it better.
So that’s usually the top thing that we see, is marketing teams where you involve people from different parts of a company or a business. So that’s the top. Working backward, it’s true that sometimes it may be overwhelming if you have just one person who is handling it, because every month you have to start from a blank slate and come up with 10, 20 or 50 posts for the upcoming months. And that’s where it’s challenging. And so doing it on your own may not be the easiest thing to do. And the other thing is also if you are only just the marketing department, maybe at some point, you’re going to miss some insights from the users or the customers or the prospects. And so that’s why we believe that what we see today from the most successful brands, it’s people who work as a team and as a cross-functional team.

Stacy Jones (12:49):
Okay. And you know, you and I were talking a little bit earlier also, a lot of the communications that we’ve all done is through Excel spreadsheets. That’s, here to 30 days out. This is it.

Thibaud Clément (12:49):
Exactly.

Stacy Jones (13:02):
30 days. Here’s a tiny little image. Our agency, we handle social media accounts, clients and [inaudible 00:13:11] client, which is very, very focused on their imagery because it’s so, so important to them.

Thibaud Clément (13:15):
Exactly.

Stacy Jones (13:15):
So we build in Canva the images, then we import them into another slide in Canva for a week. And then we have the text underneath it, and then it goes to the client and then the client says, “Let’s get on a call.” And then we go back and forth and she changes things. And then it comes back and the photos are updated. I mean, it’s a process, to get all of this done.

Thibaud Clément (13:36):
Yes, it is. It is. And actually, that’s the other thing where we see successful teams actually doing it very well, is actually understanding that it’s a process. And they have a workflow where they usually work in batch. So like you said, here is your upcoming months of content. That’s one best practice. Rather than, saying, “Oh, it’s 9:00 AM. I need to post by 10:00 AM. What am I going to say?”
This is usually something that you want to avoid (because when you work in batch and you look at couple of days, weeks, or even months down the line, what you’re able to do is you’re able to develop a brand story. You’re able to see how things are going to unfold over time and how we are going to tell a consistent story that is going to make sense to people who follow you, where you will have maybe some repetition of some messages and maybe some nuances in some messages. And so at the end of the day this is how you will be building your brand, because you’re going to be telling a consistent brand story).
Part of the process is working in batch and ahead of time, and as a part of the process, which is very important, it’s making sure that you involve the right people so that you are able to get some feedback and some approval and that you communicate with them the deadlines for when you expect to have an approval and some feedback, and what kind of approval and feedback you are expecting from them. And then that you have specific roles assigned for who is creating the content, who is approving, who is publishing, who is answering to comments and mentions and messages, and who is doing the reporting at the end of the month? And usually having this team workflow in place where who is doing what and when, is usually a very, very solid basis for success.

Stacy Jones (15:28):
Yeah. And then it goes wrong where the wheels fall off the bus when someone actually doesn’t fill their checkbox of what they’re supposed to be doing throughout the processes.

Thibaud Clément (15:42):
Yeah, exactly. So you have the workflow and then you can have the tools to implement the workflow. Some of the things that you have at Loomly is that you have assignments so that when someone is supposed to review a piece of content and they are going to receive a notification, they won’t miss it because you can send it over even email, or push notification, or even Slack and Microsoft Teams, so they can’t say they didn’t get it. And so you have those reminders, and then if the post has not been approved one hour before it’s time to publish it, then you will get another notification, this kind of thing. So it actually takes you, it’s like an autopilot, almost like an additional member in your team that tells you, “Hey, remember to do that.” So that’s how you can also take it to the next level in terms of productivity priority.

Stacy Jones (16:33):
And with social media, I mean, you all are so involved with social media. What are some of the best practices now? I know your software allows your incorporation of your RSS feed, so you could share your blogs. What type of content is actually getting noticed now that people really should be focused on this year?

Thibaud Clément (16:57):
Okay. So if you don’t mind, I can break down my answer and maybe it’s three parts.

Stacy Jones (17:02):
Of course.

Thibaud Clément (17:03):
So number one, for sure, and this has been true probably for the last 10 years, and I anticipate is going to keep being true in the next few years as well, is that consistency beats creativity every time. So it’s not about trying to go viral, and maybe you post a video or a photo and then for a few hours, you’re trending, but then what’s going to happen in 24 or 48 hours, well, nothing because that was just, you went viral and then you get forgotten. So this is why we say consistency beats creativity every time, or luck, because when you are consistent and you have this work flow we were talking about, and you put out your 10, 20, 50 posts per month, maybe you’re not going to go from zero to a million subscribers in a month, but over time you are getting to build your audience. You’re going to engage with them and they are going to trust your brand. And that’s how you build your business and your brand over time.
So that’s number one, for sure this is one of the best practices is being consistent. Number two, if we look at the type of content that we are seeing more and more, which is very obvious, it’s videos. Text, of course it works. Images like you mentioned, imagery is very, very important. It’s the bread and butter of social media. But these days we see that algorithms, they favor videos, users, they enjoy videos because they get even more information in a smaller amount of time. And we see more and more social media actually focusing on video.
So video marketing, it’s actually one of the trends that we have identified for 2021 as the marketing trends and the things that we anticipate to see more and more. Especially as, I know 5G and all of that, it’s controversial, but from a pure technical point of view, it’s actually going to make it even easier to consume videos. There are more and more smartphones equipped with tremendous cameras that allow you to make exceptional videos at no cost. And like I said, we have video-focused social networks rising. So we do believe that video is one of the big trends and it’s one of the types of content format we’re going to see more and more of, so that would be the second part of my answer.
And the third part of my answer is where to go next? What are the best social networks to be on? And so, there are usually three that we are the most impressed with these days. Number one, of course, I don’t even know if I need to say it, but of course TikTok, how can you miss it? And it’s tying into what I was saying. TikTok is fast-growing. It’s impressive. It went from this musical niche to something that is more mainstream, and there are so many people who are passionate about it. And it’s really fascinating to see the growth that this platform has been experiencing. So of course TikTok, if you’re in the consumer business, it’s a great place to be.
Second which we believe is highly underrated, maybe it’s a bit scary because of the type of social network that it is, but it’s YouTube. We feel like YouTube has a huge potential. And we see that people who put out videos after videos, it takes time to grow, but then once you reach a certain scale then it goes really really fast. We’ve seen many examples of YouTubers who had just a couple hundred views in the early days, but then they kept pushing. It may have taken them three years to go from zero to 1 million subscribers, but then going from one to three took just less than 12 months. So there is a huge potential with YouTube, because it’s more than a social network where you just follow people and you see the videos, it’s also a search engine where actually people look for tutorials and information and things like that. So really, really powerful platform.
And the last one, which we also think is a bit underrated, is LinkedIn. There is a lot happening on LinkedIn. They are putting out a lot of new format, like Stories. You can publish long form posts on LinkedIn. You can publish as a company, as a profile. And also it’s a bit more B2B. There are many, many companies can take advantage of it, for instance even if you’re a B2C company, you can still build your employer brand with them, and there are many, many things that you can do with LinkedIn, which we find fascinating. So those would be our three favorites. So wrapping up, I would say best practices are having a solid workflow, two, maybe trying to invest in video producing and three, looking into TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn. Sorry. That was a long answer, but-

Stacy Jones (22:25):
No, it’s a great answer. No, it’s fantastic. So with any of these platforms, whether it’s Instagram, which we didn’t talk about, but is the go-to for every marketer under the sun right now, everyone’s like, “I have to have an Instagram account.”

Thibaud Clément (22:37):
Of course, of course, of course.

Stacy Jones (22:38):
And now they’re like, “What’s Instagram reels?” But how many posts should people be doing? Depending upon the platform, what is best practices there? Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube? Where should people be concentrating their time and efforts?

Thibaud Clément (22:57):
Okay. I don’t think there is a one size fits all solution. If we talk about Instagram, the most popular, I would say, accounts that I see, and it can be brands, but it can be celebrities, and I know this is something that you know very well, usually anywhere between, I would say, two and four posts per week is usually what we see works best. Because under that amount people may forget about you because there are other accounts that are more active. Over that amount you may start to overwhelm people and, depending on how frequently they check into Instagram, maybe if they feel like they are missing out on five or 10 posts because you’ve published that much in a couple of days, then they may be frustrated. So that’s what we tend to say.
And then this is a good rule of thumb for, I would say generally social networks. Of course, on Twitter, you can be a bit more prolific. No problem. On YouTube anywhere between one video per week, it works, it’s already very solid. And then the best and the most prolific YouTubers, they tend to post maybe two or three per week, but that’s when this is becoming your full-time job. There are even some who actually publish one video per day. I’m not sure how they do it. It’s very, very impressive, but you don’t need to go that far on the platform. And then LinkedIn, I would say maybe twice a week, something like that, that’s usually what you see.

Stacy Jones (24:37):
Yeah. I know LinkedIn actually will penalize you if you’re over-posting and they’ll [crosstalk 00:24:41]

Thibaud Clément (24:42):
Yes, exactly. So you want to be careful with that.

Stacy Jones (24:45):
And if someone’s starting out, or maybe they have a platform that just hasn’t been really their focus in a while, how fast should they expect growth? Whether they’re like, “It’s my first Instagram account, I’m putting it up there.” Or it’s, “I’ve been in business for 10 years, but we haven’t focused on this.” How fast should they expect actual growth to happen?

Thibaud Clément (25:08):
So again, I know there’s probably not a one-size-fit-all answer to that, but the thing is, if you’re just getting started here is what’s most likely going to happen. You’re going to create an account and then publish a couple of posts. And then you are going to have a lot of traction, a lot of reach because it’s the early days. And then you’re going to go through a dip, because it’s how it works, right? Social networks, they try to incentivize you to start a new account. So your first few posts, you may have a lot of reach and interactions and likes, and then you may go through a dip.
And so that’s when you want to keep posting, like I was saying, the consistency. Because many social networks, for instance, even on YouTube, they actually reportedly look into how perseverance you are. And because there are so many channels that are created every year, just last year I think it was something like seven million channels created, and that’s not accounts of people who want to watch content, it’s people who want to create content. 7 million channels. So they cannot just over-promote everyone who is just getting started. So they give you a cake at the beginning, and then they will make sure that you keep posting, even if it’s becoming a bit more challenging, and then you will have another spike.
I would say depending on what you are trying to accomplish, depending on whether you to be an influencer, or you want to build your brand, or it really depends on what you’re trying to do, but I would say for sure you have to at least give it three months before you just see some first results. And then at the end of your first year, you will have an idea. If you’ve been consistent and you’ve been continuously improving your content by looking at what made people react, and what they don’t like, and what drives conversions if you have an e-commerce business, then at the end of the first year, you will have a sense of whether you’re going into the right direction or not. But I would give it time for sure.

Stacy Jones (27:28):
And with all of these accounts there’s different tactics to use, but maybe TikTok’s a little different than this, but with everything else I think it’s tried and true, at least with Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. One of the parts that I think a lot of people forget about social media accounts and platforms is that word social. That you’re actually supposed to be going on and interacting with other people, and it’s not just about what you are vomiting out to the world about yourself.

Thibaud Clément (28:03):
Exactly.

Stacy Jones (28:03):
It’s actually communicating and sharing and supporting. And that’s a big miss for a lot of people, right?

Thibaud Clément (28:10):
I agree 100%. And so the first step is of course to publish great content. And when we say great content, it means that it’s not only saying, “Hey, look at me, look at my brand, look at my product. This is the best,” and so on and so forth because at some point, people, there is only so much they can care about. So the first thing is trying to build great content and tell a solid brand story that is compelling. And then if you do that, you are going to get some reactions. You are going to get some people who will say, “Hey, love what you’re doing.” Or maybe they will be asking questions. Maybe you will have some trolls as well. That’s fine. That’s the cost of doing business.
Then you will start receiving direct messages and you’ll have people mentioning you or recommending whatever you are doing, giving you shout-outs and things like that. What you want to do once you get in that phase, which is the grail, you want to interact with those people. You want to stay with them. You don’t want to ignore them. You want to reply to their comments or their questions or their messages, because this is how you are going to go from just this one-way account that like you say, pushes out content, to this two-way community where of course you put out content, but then you have some questions and you interact with them and people feel like it’s not one way, but that they can actually ask you things and interact with you.
So I would say this is definitely the, I don’t want to say the second step in terms of importance, I just think that in sequence it usually happens only if you put out great content, but definitely it’s how you build a great brand.

Stacy Jones (30:04):
How can more people find out about Loomly? Where should they go? What should they be doing? Obviously they can go to loomly.com I’m assuming, but how is a good way to learn about you?

Thibaud Clément (30:16):
They can at listen and watch your show. I think that’s a great place because we’ve talked about it a lot. But yeah, everything is on loomly.com. You can follow us, of course, on LinkedIn and on Twitter and on Instagram. But you know, most of what we explain is on our website. And if you want to learn about how to build a great brand online, you can also go to the Loomly blog, which is blog.loomly.com. And we actually publish a long form article every week on a specific topic. So for instance, this week it’s not even about social media, it’s about email marketing. And we have this definitive guide on how you can go from zero to actually launching your first campaign and building your list of subscribers. And so we try to cover all the different angles of what it takes to build a successful brand online, even when it’s not related directly to what Loomly does.

Stacy Jones (31:10):
But so much is because everything’s digital now. And even before, we were talking about how you are going to promote this podcast through your own platforms, and you all have built together quite a newsletter that you have a very large reach on those who are reading your blogs and who are reading your newsletters right now. And that’s also partly driven by social media, too.

Thibaud Clément (31:34):
Yes, it is. Social media, there is some content that you produce natively for social media and specifically for social media. So your Instagram post and in your tweets. But there are also some piece of content that are made for elsewhere. So for instance, for a blog. And that you are actually distributing through social media. And so that’s where social media is a very interesting phenomenon because you can publish content. You can also share content from elsewhere. You can interact with people, you can run ads. There are so many different things that you can do to actually build your brand. And what matters at the end of the day is that you find the right mix for your brand and your audience, and how to best reach them, and make sure that they like what you’re putting out there and not that they feel overwhelmed, or this is too much from you. So it’s finding the right mix in where you put the cursor. Yeah, social media is a big part of this mix.

Stacy Jones (32:38):
Are there any last thoughts that you’d like to share with our listeners today?

Thibaud Clément (32:43):
No. Well, thanks for watching your show. I think it’s great. And thank you for having me.

Stacy Jones (32:50):
Of course.

Thibaud Clément (32:50):
But I would say, to the risk of repeating myself, I would say give it time. If you’re trying to build a brand, give it time. It’s probably not going to happen overnight. And remember that consistency beats creativity every time. That’s what I would say.

Stacy Jones (33:06):
Fantastic. And then to give you a last plug with Loomly, I know that if you do go to your website and you sign up, you get 15 days free so that you can actually test that form and play around with it a bit. I know this because I was doing this last night.

Thibaud Clément (33:18):
I see. And it’s a true 15 day free trial. We don’t ask you for your credit card. You have access to all the features and you can speak to our support team anytime in the chat, if you have any questions. So we try to be nice with you, if you are kind enough to visit our website.

Stacy Jones (33:40):
Awesome. Well, Thibaud, thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed our chat and conversation. You all obviously know a lot about social media and digital marketing.

Thibaud Clément (33:47):
Thank you so much for having me, Stacy. It was a pleasure.

Stacy Jones (33:49):
Of course. And to all of our listeners. Thank you so much today for tuning in to Marketing Mistakes (& How To Avoid Them). I look forward to chatting with you this next week. Have a great day.