Ep.20 – Product Dev, Welcoming Bad Feedback, and YouTube Marketing with Briona Gallagher

Introduction [00:00:02] Welcome to the All About Digital Marketing podcast. The show all about digital marketing, digital marketing, digital marketing, digital marketing, brought to you by Social INK, the digital marketing agency specialising in social media and content marketing for brave brands and forward-thinking SMEs. I’m your host, Chris Bruno. And as always, we’re here to bring you the most actionable tips, tricks, tools and insights to help you achieve more when it comes to your digital marketing. Subscribe to the show and be sure to share with a friend if you found something useful or interesting. You can find all the show notes and more information on www.AllAboutDigitalMarketing.co.uk

Chris Bruno [00:00:54] Briona, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.

Briona Gallagher [00:00:57] No problem, Chris. Thanks very much for having me on.

Chris Bruno [00:01:01] It’s always our pleasure. Can you tell people a little bit about yourself? And also, I believe you’re the Product Manager of Design Wizard, so maybe start with a little introduction on that as well.

Briona Gallagher [00:01:11] Yeah. Perfect. So, yes, Product Manager of Design Wizard. We are a graphic design software tool. So it’s kind of split between a video editor and an image editor.

Briona Gallagher [00:01:25] And it’s for people who don’t have design experience and don’t have a budget to to be creating and producing videos. So it’s like our target market are other businesses, marketers, entrepreneurs, people who need to be creating high quality content, high quality videos and images. And they need to do it quickly and they need to do it easily. So we offer the solution to that. Where it all started, our sister companies called Wavebreak Media and we started as a stock footage and photography company 13 years ago. So now we’re actually one of the leading stocks, our targets are the big boys, like iStock, Shutterstock, Getty. Very much a B2B business and we just accumulated so many assets, so, so much content that our CEO, Sean Prior, decided to kind of push on making other products. And that’s where Design Wizard came from.

Chris Bruno [00:02:29] That’s awesome. So basically, it was born out of kind of something that was already happening and something completely different. And then kind of you end up with a solution that’s almost ready made for you about built on the ideas of everything else that you’d already done.

Briona Gallagher [00:02:43] That’s it. Yeah, that is. And Wavebreak Media is still thriving. That’s actually where I started. I used to work in art direction over there.

Briona Gallagher [00:02:52] And then when Design Wizard was being developed and about to be launched, you know, I wanted to make the move. I just saw so much potential in Design Wizard. So I moved from Wavebreak over here. And so I’ve been here from the very start on day one. But yeah, that’s it. Exactly. That’s really where it all began.

Chris Bruno [00:03:11] That’s awesome. Okay. So we’ll obviously we all know that content is key or king as they say so often. But the idea of graphics and imagery, it is something that’s a real challenge, especially for small businesses because, yes, you know, not everybody is ‘creative’ in inverted commas. And actually, it’s very challenging for a lot of people to realise that we’re not saying that you have to be able to draw or paint the Mona Lisa. But we’re actually saying you need to create content that’s eye-catching. That’s that’s nice. That looks good. And actually, this is exactly what the tool does really for people, no matter what their skill level is or anything else. They can go in and they can start playing around with things to try and make an image or to make social media posts or whatever it might be and make them actually a little bit more engaging than potentially what somebody might do if they only have basic knowledge of paint, for example.

Briona Gallagher [00:04:00] Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think because we’re fortunate to have so many teams in Wavebreak Media that we share so we have the graphic design team, animation, video department. So we have professionals making content. And then from that content, we create templates. So those templates then can be used by our customers. And then the members, the designers. So it just makes it a lot easier. I think what business, you know, when you talk about creating content, this can be a little bit like, you know, almost panic around. You know, you have to post the social media post. You know, you have to. You have to do this. You have to be talking online in order to say, to get any kind of engagement. Well, we always started it bring to it’s: People just need to communicate what they’re doing, they need to talk to their customers. And if you kind of strip out content to that and what it is, it just makes it easier for our users and our customers to have a good idea of what they want to do. So we offer their inspiration in terms of design templates, in terms of what you can do with colour and composition and layout. And then all they need to bring to the table is what they want to communicate to their customers and to their audience. We’re very much focussed on our customers’ goals and how we can help them achieve their goals. You know.

Chris Bruno [00:05:26] I couldn’t agree with you more. And when you’re saying that it’s something that I hammer into people about so much because people often say, you know what, we’re what we’d have to talk about, you know what? We don’t have any interesting products or services or whatever. And you’re sitting there going, look, if you’ve got one person that’s paying you, then you have a service or a product that’s actually of interest to people.

Briona Gallagher [00:05:47] Absolutely.

Chris Bruno [00:05:48] So so basically taking that back, like you just mentioned and just basically inserting the parts that are about you. Who are you? What are you about? What do you do? Why don’t you do it? What’s happening behind the scenes? And this is something that we end up having many conversations, especially with start-ups, where they go, you know, we’re posting stuff and you go, well, let’s not post for the sake of posting.

Briona Gallagher [00:06:08] Yeah.

Chris Bruno [00:06:09] How do we get your message across and how do we start working towards goals? And I think that’s the next thing I want to ask you about is what do you think is probably the biggest thing for small or medium sized businesses when it comes to actually goal setting with social media? Do you find that too many people are just doing it for the sake of it or because they think they have to? Or do you think people are actually really targeting what they’re trying to do?

Briona Gallagher [00:06:30] I think it’s a mixture of things, really. You know, there is as I say, there is a little bit of kind of panic around social media, you know, and just trying to post for the sake of tit. So I think coming up with your own kind of game plan, I suppose. Not trying to look too much to what everyone else is doing. You know, if you focus on your own message, focus on your own brand and just bring it back to your story. And exactly as you said, you know, why you’re there in the first place. Why your one customer or your five customers, however, many customers you have, are choosing your service and your product. So, yes, I mean, social media is absolutely brutal for that anyway. You know, it makes you compare yourself to other people, whether it’s personal or business. So I think going forward, you know, use it, trying not to compare yourself and just focus on what makes you different, focus on what you can offer. That’s probably where everyone should should begin and should start.

Chris Bruno [00:07:35] Couldn’t agree more. And it’s something actually that we refer to as well. If you are just starting a business, you know that the first person, that the person who’s starting it, you have to kind of become the champion of the business.

Briona Gallagher [00:07:46] Yes.

Chris Bruno [00:07:47] And again, there’s a lot of people there that are like that, “No, no, I keep referring it to as ‘we’ And, you know, it’s the business and it’s the branding of the business.” And we had a question the other day from a startup that WeWorkLabs. We were giving a presentation and somebody actually said, you know, well, how do we create a tone of voice? How do we create brand guidelines? Who are we? And my simple question was, well, how many people are in the company so far? And he said, well, that’s just me. I’ve just started, one thing another. I said, well, there’s your answer. You are the tone of voice. You are the brand guidelines. This is your vision, you know, you need to get out there and start speaking and start talking and start writing and start doing graphics, because if you do it for you, that is going to represent the absolute soul, the heart of the company.

Briona Gallagher [00:08:27] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what? It can be hard to translate your own tone of voice to social media, you know. And I think we’ve we’ve run into issues with that as well, where, you know, you want to say something, you want to be kind of a casual and normal about what you want to say. But when you write it, when you know that it’s going to be published, there can be a kind of a stiffness to the tone of voice. You know, it’s more promotional, perhaps than what you want. And that really makes a difference. So I think, you know, even practicing exercises, you know, like writing, writing things in different ways of just sort of softening the tone and just coming at it from the less kind of promotional way. You know, it takes a little bit of practice to develop that. It’s not just making the decision and doing it. You actually have to write in a tone of voice that you want it to be presenting to the world.

Chris Bruno [00:09:23] I couldn’t agree more. And again, this is something that is this huge because so many people are talking to us or asking us about growth hacks and things like that. Yeah. And literally what you’ve just said that again, fits right into what I believe, which is all of this just takes hard work without wanting to sound rude to anyone. But, you know, we’ve written and created hundreds, maybe even thousands of landing pages over the last eleven years as an agency for various clients. The ones that we thought were gonna do the best didn’t, the ones that we did because we had to have something to test actually ended up proving us completely wrong and ended up surprising us. Sometimes, you know, what we think is really, really good because we’ve written it sort of on all our paradigm or our view of the world in terms of what we think should be right. And again, it’s not necessarily the case. So would you agree that always when you’re trying to write these things and again, like you said, reread and everything else, but we try and tell small businesses, especially put yourself in the shoes of, would you buy this? Would this make you engage with that brand? If you were looking for this service. Is that really how you would look at it? Or are you looking at it from the business owners point of view saying, well, I need to make more sales, therefore a 20% off voucher is how I’m going to make that happen?

Briona Gallagher [00:10:33] Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, people don’t emotionally connect to those things. Yes, of course, they’re connect to discounts. You know. Of course, they do connect to promotions.

Briona Gallagher [00:10:44] But generally speaking, if when you’re trying to build your brands or when you’re trying to develop, you know, a natural and personal tone of voice, it is about the emotional connection. And it’s, that can be hard to do, you know, and we are certainly no experts on it either, you know, we are we’re trying. We’re trying our best and we’re trying to sort of to get there.

Briona Gallagher [00:11:06] But it does take a little bit of time and it takes hard work as you said. Absolutely.

Chris Bruno [00:11:12] Well, I think that’s pretty interesting as well, because obviously you guys haven’t just started. You’ve been around for a while and you’re still saying, you know, you’re still learning, you’re still kind of building this.

Briona Gallagher [00:11:20] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We’re three years in now, you know, and year one, two, we didn’t know how what was going on.

Briona Gallagher [00:11:29] So, you know, it’s only it’s only sort of like kind of as year two developed and now into year three that we’re kind of finding our feet and, you know, getting to know the products as well, like developing the products. So the more you get to know what are you doing. I mean, this is me, I’ve been here since day one. As I’ve said, you know, you’re still kind of developing the product and getting to know what you’re trying to do. So, yeah, it’s a process and it is hard work, takes a little bit of obsession and just sort of, you know, kind of non-stop thinking about it. And so that’s what I found anyway.

Chris Bruno [00:12:01] I like that. Now we’re getting into the hardcore version. You know, you have to think about this all day, every day. Otherwise, it’ll never work.

Briona Gallagher [00:12:07] I mean, there is a bit of us, you know, obviously it depends on, it depends on the product as well.

Briona Gallagher [00:12:12] Designer Wizard is a mammoth product. You know, we also have another another product called Pik Wizard. So that’s a free stock video and image site. And everything that is in Pik Wizard, you can edit in Design Wizard so the two combined create a really, really unique tool.

Chris Bruno [00:12:32] That’s awesome. Especially for businesses that don’t have that kind of ability. I think this is like one of the biggest things. Again, for complete transparency, we’ve never used your product directly. And actually we only met through through the kind of podcast outreach. It’s something that we want to kind of start looking into as well, to be able to offer to small businesses and to be able to showcase to them, because I think this is again, one of those one of those things whereby a lot of people kind of end up going down the route of what I guess stock image. I’ll put that up and I’ll write something on the bottom. And then they kind of sit there and go, why did nobody engage, why did nobody click on it, or why did nobody use the link or whatever else? And actually, again, having this ability to easily edit, easily build things, easily make things from templates that, you know, are going to work. I think that’s a huge stepping stone for so many people.

Briona Gallagher [00:13:18] Yeah no, it is. And we get that feedback from people and you know, we like to look at it as, it’s a highly competitive market as well. But we are trying to be different. You know, we have a different kind of mindset and just product. And that’s where the free stock, that’s where Pik Wizard came from as well, because we just want to offer more. So, you know, not only do you have the content that we supply in Design Wizard, but there’s a whole free stock site that we’re constantly kind of adding to and building as well. But I think when you’re talking about like what you said about the building thousands of landing pages, you know, I mean, they’re 17000 pages on Pik Wizard alone, you know. That is. That’s just huge. It’s just such a huge product. And then and then you throw in Design Wizard. It’s so like, you know, there’s so many aspects to a business and things like tone of voice, your brand image and, you know, like what’s your Facebook post is? What are you saying on Twitter? You know, these things are… These things can often be sort of… Now, I wouldn’t want to say overlooked, but they can add stress where it’s not necessary, you know. That should be the fun part of it. The creative side should be the fun parts of it, which we try and drive message home as well. You know, we take the stress out of the actual design element side of it, you know. You should enjoy building your brand, you should enjoy talking to your customers.

Chris Bruno [00:14:47] I couldn’t agree more. And I think that’s probably a pretty the biggest piece of advice you can give to people, you know, once this becomes a chore and you’re doing it because you think you have to or because somebody told you you have to. And therefore, it’s just on the kind of daily to do list or task list. The creativity part does fall away. And I think as part of that, you end up losing that element of genuine, kind of authentic, wanting to get your message out there, which can become a real problem because people end up, like we said, just sort of churning out content for the sake of putting something out there.

Briona Gallagher [00:15:22] Yeah. And the audience picks up on that, so like, you know, especially if you’re trying to build organically. You know, like no engagement. No likes, no comment. So you’re chatting away to an empty room, you know? And that’s discouraging. And so I think trying to keep the enthusiasm and to follow the passion behind what you’re doing. Otherwise, why are you doing this? Obviously, to make a living. I get that. But, you know, it should be a positive experience. You should try and make it as fun as possible. I believe, anyway.

Chris Bruno [00:15:54] No, I completely agree. And I think that that’s super important. I mean, if you’re just doing it for the paycheque at the end, the chances are it’s probably not going to build as much as when you’re doing something that you’re passionate about. When you’re enjoying what you’re doing, when you really want to talk to people about what you’re doing.

Briona Gallagher [00:16:08] Yeah.

Chris Bruno [00:16:09] And that comes across. People can tell that. People can see that. And again, like you said, there’s nothing more discouraging. And when we meet companies, you know that we will have conversations and a company will say, you know, which we tried videos on social media. Thyt they don’t work. And I say, well, how many videos did you try? And they’ll say, well, we did two and it didn’t work. And you go, OK. Great. Really? So literally two videos and you think it doesn’t work even though everything about it shows that the stats and everything else that it does. So we have these conversations. And like you said, the discouraging nature of social media is, “I posted something I didn’t get a thousand likes” that therefore, I am no good. This is rubbish. No one cares one thing or another. And it’s really not true. Like at the end of the day, we still test, you know, eleven years into being an agency. We don’t get things right first time. There’s nothing wrong with that. And any agency, I think that tells anyone, you know, do it like this. And that’s going to work perfectly first time, is probably lying or bluffing.

Chris Bruno [00:17:05] And I hope it works for them. But it’s not necessarily true. You know, there’s no guarantees that it’s going to resonate every single time.

Briona Gallagher [00:17:11] Definitely not.

Chris Bruno [00:17:11] Yeah, but the more you do it, the more you learn. And therefore, you start realising that actually every time you do the really nice image with that bit of text in that kind of way, people actually respond back a bit more.

Briona Gallagher [00:17:22] Absolutely.

Chris Bruno [00:17:22] Or when you start asking people questions, this is something that I wanted to ask you about. So we talk about this a lot in terms of feedback and also something that recently I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about, which is, you know, putting social back into social media. Nobody wants to be shouted at by a bullhorn. People want to have conversations. And, you know, it’s the same in real life. It’s the same in dating. It’s the same when you go to a store. You know, somebody doesn’t stand there at the store saying, “buy this phone. It’s 20 percent off!” Shouting at you from across the room. But they actually come up to you and they’ll say, you know, how can I help you today?

Chris Bruno [00:17:55] And then suddenly you’re in a conversation and you’re talking about you and you’re talking about the audience. You’re talking about whoever else is involved. So do you guys find that that’s an important part for yourselves on social media as well?

Briona Gallagher [00:18:05] Yeah, definitely. And actually, that’s a similar similar vein to what our customers would say is, you know, putting the social back into social media, you know. And so yeah asking questions, getting to know people. I mean, we definitely try and do demos as often as possible as well. You know, and talk to the customers as much as possible. And then after you translates to social media too. Yeah I agree with that.

Chris Bruno [00:18:34] So this brings me on to a really next lot and really important next point. And again, something I hammer into people, you know, when you’re building a product, when you’re building a service, when you’re building a business or a brand. We have, I think, the biggest opportunity that’s ever existed for a company, which is the fact that social media gives us a feedback loop that’s almost instant, let’s say. So where features or problems or issues or anything can be discussed openly and quickly. And you can start to take that feedback on board. Now as a business for you guys, and I believe you’re the product manager if I’m getting the title right for your position. And that feedback is from, in my opinion, absolutely crucial. No, I’m not saying every single tweet where somebody goes, “this doesn’t work”, that that necessarily means that there’s an issue. But when you start to build a consensus of people’s feedback, whether it’s great, good, bad, whatever it might be. That’s a huge asset for a business in terms of the ongoing product development, things that you could change, things that you can make better. How do you guys feel about that?

Briona Gallagher [00:19:34] Oh, listen, absolutely. Honestly the foundation is based on our customer feedback. These are people – like we’ve got a free plan and then we’ve got paid plans. So it doesn’t matter what price the person is using Design Wzard for. We want and appreciate to welcome their feedback. And so we’ve listening with the foundation on our customer feedback and a roadmap on what our users are they’re telling us that they want. So whether it’s to social media, our NPS survey, you know, and outreach that we do. We do a lot of doing building  as a growth strategy and SEO strategy. And so we’ve been, I think, building and outreach and we get feedback from our customers and people who just jump on to the site and trial it. So, I mean, yeah, I couldn’t underestimate the importance of listening to what people are saying.

Briona Gallagher [00:20:33] As you say, whether it is a tweet or from whatever kind of avenue that they choose to get in contact with us, customer feedback is really everything.

Chris Bruno [00:20:43] I think it’s, well I’m happy to hear you say it because there’s so many people that are scared of getting a “negative”. Let’s put it in inverted commas as well. But a negative tweet or negative comment on social media. And I’m sat there saying, the opposite is true for me. Having somebody say to me, this is rubbish. You didn’t do X quick enough, or this didn’t work in the way it said you said it was going to. That feedback to me means I need to change systems, I need to manage expectations better or I need to explain the process of testing content or whatever it might be. But whatever those things are, we’re constantly learning and we’re constantly evolving our business even after a decade, because that’s what it’s built on. It’s built on our customers. You know, I’d love to pretend like the business is all about me, but it really isn’t. It’s built on customers. And this is something that we often forget or a lot of start-ups especially kind of forget because they’re building the product that they want to build. And I think that’s the really interesting parts of the fact that you’re agreeing on there saying, you know, that feedback, that kind of content coming back from people saying, you know, this or that didn’t work as well as it should or this was a bit more complicated. It allows you to then make changes or developments in the product that in future resolve that problem, not just for that one person, for those 10 people, but for everybody else going forward.

Briona Gallagher [00:21:57] Absolutely. I mean, to be honest, I even think the negative feedback is more important than the positive stuff, you know? I love to convert a detractor or someone that we’ve annoyed in some way, someone that that experience wasn’t perfect in Design Wizard. It’s something that happens in every product and service. So like, just nurturing that person, giving them, giving us a second chance kind of to prove ourselves to show them that actually we can do what we say, you know, we can offer what they want. And so turning someone who has been critical into a promoter or someone that that’s happy to stay with us. You know, that is possibly – that’s just a great feeling and achievement. And it’s something that we strive to do.

Briona Gallagher [00:22:47] And when it’s on social media, it’s the public side of it, isn’t it? It’s you know, it’s someone someone says something negative. It’s the fear that other people will see it. And so I do understand why people have a fear around that. But look, you can’t be building a product, you can’t be promoting a product or service without a bit of thick skin. And you need that in this day and age anyway.

Briona Gallagher [00:23:11] You know, the social media landscape, you need you need to build a thick skin. So I absolutely welcome everything. Obviously, it’s great to get the positive stuff. You know, you want to give them virtual hugs when someone says, “we love you, your product is amazing, you changed this, this is, you know, this conversion rate”, whatever it is, when we help people achieve their goals straight off, you know, that’s completely invaluable. And that means that we’re doing something right. And it’s very encouraging. But there is so much benefit to when people didn’t have the best experience and working on that and learning from that. Test and fail fast. That’s that’s something that we say here, you know, like if you fail fast and learn from it quickly and move on. You mentioned growth hacking as well. That’s something that we did last year and we were going to start it up again. But actually, we got so many growth hack experiments approved that we have to you have to give I.T. a break and a chance to actually implement some of these growth hacks.  But, you know, all those things come back. And, you know, it’s all about testing it’s all about the growth mindset, building and just, you know, trucking on basically, you know. Keep going.

Chris Bruno [00:24:23] And so I think that’s the really important part. Again, you’ve added it in there. You know, it’s constantly experimenting. It’s constantly trying. And so my personal hatred for the term growth hack is because people who don’t understand the element of everything that you’re saying there. You know, there’s 100 ways to growth hack in inverted commas. But what we actually mean is, you know, there’s 100 new experiments that you can try. There’s 100 new techniques, tips, tools, tricks, whatever you want to call them, that you can try for your business. But actually, the way that you’re going to make them, make it work and have that building mindset and that growth mindset is actually from saying, you know, we’ve got all of these things that we want to try. And now we’re going to start testing them and experimenting. But I think where people get stuck, or especially for smaller businesses where they don’t necessarily have as much experience in the marketing side of things. People get stuck because they see somebody offering the latest growth hack special and they think that by doing that one thing that everything is going to change in our business.

Briona Gallagher [00:25:23] Yes. OK, so one size, one size does not fit all.

Chris Bruno [00:25:26] Absolutely. That’s and that’s the key. I keep trying to tell people, you know, if you’re looking for that magic button that you press on Facebook, that takes you to a million pound business. It does not exist. Like it’s just impossible. And anyone who tells you it is, is lying, basically. And so when we end up talking to people, you know, they’ll have told us that they tried to create a funnel, for example. And again, they’ll say it didn’t work. And I’ll say, OK, well, great. How many funnels did you try in total? They’ll say 1. And I’ll say, OK. And did you test anything on those pages? And they’ll be like that, No. And then they’ll say to me, so funnels don’t work for our business and you’ll be sat there going again. No. And it’s not because somebody else sold you on the idea that if you create this one funnel, your business will be revolutionised. It’s actually the opposite. It’s you know, you can try this one funnel and then you could try this other funnel and then you could try a different lead magnet. And then you could try a different series of automated emails and then you could try… And when you start telling people this, they’re like that, wow, I don’t have time to do this. And you say, well, OK, slow down. I’m not saying you have to do everything at the same time, but this is what marketing is. It’s a constant evolution of I’ll try this. I’ll try this. And then actually, this didn’t work. That did work. And then how else could I do this differently, or how could I improve it or how can I change it, how I test other features? And those are the bits that actually help us “hack growth” in inverted commas. Not – there is no, like you said, one size fits all. There is no magic bullet, kind of.

Briona Gallagher [00:26:47] No, no, no, no, no, there isn’t. And I mean, obviously, you know, I read the blogs, I read the articles that are out promising this much. You know, I’ve read them all.

Briona Gallagher [00:26:58] And but really, what works is, is looking at your business and thinking about the customer and just looking at it from every angle, looking at every corner and yeah, testing, measuring, measuring, measuring, measuring.

Chris Bruno [00:27:13] Yeah, I think it was Peter Drucker’s famous quote. But if it can’t be measured, it can’t be improved.

Briona Gallagher [00:27:19] Yes.

Chris Bruno [00:27:20] And I couldn’t agree more with that. And you’ve mentioned the NPS. The Net Promoter Score for those of you who don’t know about that as well. Have a look into that. But you’ve probably answered 100 of these in your past, but it will be. How likely are you to recommend this to a friend and you’ll have a score of one to 10, where nine and ten are the promoters, people that are willing to actually all that would be willing to say that you have a good business, you have a neutral zone, and then the bottom portion is your detractors. So it gives you a score and it’s something that you can actually monitor. So by doing these every six months, for example, you can see if you are improving in terms of people like you more, people are more likely to recommend. And I think that’s a huge tool. Do you guys do this kind of on a regular or would you just kind of cycle it constantly?

Briona Gallagher [00:28:01]  We cycle it constantly.

Chris Bruno [00:28:03] Fantastic. Okay.

Briona Gallagher [00:28:04] So we and we you know, we do data dives into the responses as well, you know. And so it’s it’s fascinating.  love looking at it. I look at it on a daily basis every single morning. I come in and I see what people have scored us the day before. And, you know, look at the promoters, the passives which is seven and eight. I always think that those people are more likely to convert to be promoters. You know, they’re, if they’re like a bit meh, they still haven’t said that they don’t like us. You know, there’s just something. So. So I think they’re easier to you know, they’re easy to talk to. And then, as I said, the detractors, which is which is a big chunk like that’s from 0 to 6 or 6 to 0, whichever way you want to look at it.

Briona Gallagher [00:28:52] And, you know. So it’s it. Then we get on to them, we e-mail. Then we set up calls, we open the conversation. And it’s very much fun from a stand – we’re very much looking at it from their point of view, really, no matter what score they’ve given us. So if they’re promoters, I’m interested in finding out, what is it for them that they like? You know, I can we can we offer more, you know, to make their lives easier. If they’re kind of middle the road, then, you know why are they middle of the road? What else can we offer? And then obviously, if there’s something that hasn’t had good experience, you know, what can we possibly do to sort of change your mind and show you more and improve your experience and to make your life easier? And so it’s really, really about the customer.

Chris Bruno [00:29:40] I think actually I’m gonna drop a note into the show notes with a link, sorry to the NPS score. And for those of you who haven’t really looked at this before, who haven’t ever used this before for your business. This is a great tool. I’m not saying it’s gonna be the be all and end all, but it’s going to start to give you some real data. And yeah, just like Briona was saying you can actually do something with that and that’s what’s important. So I’ll drop a link for that. But we won’t carry on talking about it because I could probably end up having a chat with you for about an hour on the benefits and the value of the NPS score. And but we’ll try and move on from that. So a couple of questions and around the social media side of things. For you as a business, obviously you are I’d say B2B and B2C, really, because whether it’s a solopreneur or a freelancer that wants to create graphics or anything else all the way through to an agency wanting to use a tool where they can quickly churn out content. What the platforms that you find are really working for you as a business.

Briona Gallagher [00:30:38] YouTube gives us a pretty high conversion rate and obviously our focus is on video. It’s what people have and a lot of value, place a lot of value on. And it’s something that they need. So that’s a really really – we started with images. That’s kind of the heart and soul of Design Wizard with Wavebreak Media. But video, you know, people need it. They need professional videos. They need to be able to edit them easily and quickly. So YouTube is actually a really good platform for that. So we have a lot of videos up there and we are ranking for a lot of videos as well. So SEO is a huge, huge part of what we do. We’ve spent a lot of time building out an amazing SEO strategy. We have an SEO expert who built that out. So he really developed a really strong foundation for us.

Briona Gallagher [00:31:37] So let me, yeah let’s say YouTube. There’s a really there’s. We have a high conversion rate from from there. It’s the right audience, the right market. And we deliver the right content to them. I suppose, you know. for Twitter, you know, when we’re promoting our blogs and when we’re like more social, I guess, we find that Twitter has a good conversion rate and good engagement rates as well.

Chris Bruno [00:32:07] Interesting. I think I wanted to pick up on the video stuff. So, first and foremost to any of those clients that I’ve ever spoken to or prospects that I’ve ever spoken to who said video doesn’t work. There you go. You’ve heard it from not my mouth now, but somebody else’s. So I just want to add that in that. But the main concept of your videos, do you guys go for more sort of how to things that people are searching for in terms of, you know, how to create content or how to create videos or how to create images for social media? Or are you doing more sort of educational promotional kind of content? What sort of focus do you guys have?

Briona Gallagher [00:32:42] So it’s very broad. It’s very wide. But what we do is we promote our templates. And we publish our templates. Yes. They don’t even see it as promoting, to be honest. We publish our our video template. So our templates could be things like Halloween, Thanksgiving, you know, seasonal stuff, birthdays, like for the everyday creative. And then there they could also be advertising things like webinars or podcasts and and events. So we have like a really wide range of trending topics and theme that we have created templates and we’ve added text, you know, that obviously can be customized straightaway. And then we put them onto our YouTube channel. We write for those terms. So let’s say, Halloween for example, we’d have like Halloween videos and invitations and just kind of greetings.

Briona Gallagher [00:33:36] Then when someone Googles, Halloween video, you know, we actually that’s probably a bad example because I’m not 100 percent sure if we are ranking on page one for Halloween. New Year’s Eve. We have plenty of time for NYE so I should use that example. So people can click in on that video, they’re straight in to Design Wizard where they can edit that video however they want.

Briona Gallagher [00:34:01] They can also browse the collections to see if there’s any more videos that are more appropriate or catch their fancy. And they can upload their own videos so they can mix our stuff and videos with their own upload that makes it even more natural. And that really kind of elevates the sort of look and feel of their own video as well. And that’s it. Then they can they can promote it, however, whatever way they want.

Chris Bruno [00:34:30] Again from from my side of things. Video is absolutely huge. We try and encourage, especially for small-, mid-sized businesses, to find ways to create videos. And there are platforms out there, including Design Wizard that you can use to do that. But also, we feel that actually using things like Facebook Live, for example, is an incredibly easy way to start showcasing who you really are as a business. And it’s something that, again, not enough people do. I think there’s always that little bit of a fear of, you know, if I put myself forward or if I’m front and centre, what will people say? And I think people get, they let that kind of fear block them from actually showcasing a little bit about themselves, talking naturally about who they are, what they do. Which is all things, you know, that require very little preparation for most of us. You know? Who we are, we know what we do as a business owner, for example. And actually that this ability for me, I think is probably one of the biggest opportunities right now. But, you know, with an iPhone in your pocket, you have 4K, or at least HD, definition broadcasting opportunities that just simply did not exist 10 years ago.

Briona Gallagher [00:35:41] Absolutely, and you’re connected straight into an audience.

Chris Bruno [00:35:45] Yeah, well straight into an audience and then that video is there afterwards. Now, which again is another huge thing. I mean, I can remember – I’m going back a little while now and probably showing my age, but I can remember having to pay, you know, Wistia a good amount of money to be able to actually host all our video content that we were creating. And literally, these things used to rack up in terms of money. Now I look at it and I’m sat there going, okay. Well, back in May as an agency, we did 30 Days of Live as a challenge. And every day somebody on the team went live on one platform or the other. And literally, you know, we must have created, I don’t know, 20, 30 hours worth of content that’s all hosted absolutely free. We haven’t paid a penny to anyone for any hosting or anything else. We didn’t have to bring in any special equipment or anything like that. And we’ve got high definition broadcast quality content that cost us nothing. Basically, other than our time and our effort to go live and click a couple of buttons.

Briona Gallagher [00:36:38] Well, that’s really interesting, like the 30 Day challenge. What kind of return did you get from that? What kind of feedback did you get?

Chris Bruno [00:36:45] We had huge, huge amount of views of all the content across the platforms. I can’t remember the exact figures, but yeah, we’re talking in the tens of thousands of views over all the different platforms put together. But what was really interesting about it was actually the comments. So we were invited to an awards ceremony, which unfortunately that time we didn’t win anything. But when we arrived, most of the guys we hadn’t actually ever met a lot of these people in person. We kind of connected through social or whatever else. And these people sort of would start talking like, oh, my God, you guys are from Social INK, you’re everywhere. And this was something that was really interesting for us because it was the power of how much of this content just kept going round and around and around. And every time we thought it was dead, somebody would click like on Twitter, for example, and that would get shown to their friends and say, well, these guys like this. Have you seen it or anything else? And it kind of just had this trickle on effect. But, you know, we’ve got a couple of live AMAs that have hit sort of a thousand, twelve hundred views of a piece of content. And again, we’re still a small business. You know, we don’t refer to ourselves as being a massive agency or anything else. We don’t have hundreds of thousands of pounds of budget to spend on our own marketing or anything like that. But actually, that content is still performing for us today. You know, people still find it. The views keep trickling up. Our YouTube channel has a copy of everything as well, our Facebook, which is where we put most of the content at the beginning. It’s still driving views organically and people are finding this content through completely no, no kind of express intention after that kind of initial May, June period when we were sharing it. Now we’ve kind of stopped sharing it. But, you know, people are finding our blog. I think we rank number one now for 30 days of live, as a challenge that we’ve done.

Chris Bruno [00:38:25] When all these little things help businesses to actually get out there and for people to really understand who we are and what we’re about. And that’s the most important thing. People feel that they can connect to us better because they understand that actually, you know, if I say something to someone, sometimes they don’t take it as well as they might want to hear, you know, especially when you’re talking or identifying issues with somebody is marketing. People can take it very personally. And actually, when they realize that. No, no, no. We are constantly doing it. We’ll talk about ourselves. We’ll talk about our own failures. We’ll talk about where we’ve gone right or where we’ve gone wrong. We’ll often bring the whole team together and do a AMA with all four of us. For example, talking about the core products and the core systems or the core reasons why we do things. And I think that’s what for me anyway, it’s what it’s all about. It’s continuously giving something to an audience so that they can better understand who you are and what you’re about.

Briona Gallagher [00:39:15] Yeah. That’s very interesting. I love that 30 day challenge because, you know, I imagine that it kind of became a habit, became part of your day then. Then, you know, you’re just building on that momentum, building that energy, you know. So that’s that’s really interesting to me. I must read that blog actually.

Chris Bruno [00:39:30] I’ll ping you the link after this. We then followed that up in June. And then my team hated me because the challenge became 100 blogs in 30 days. And if you’re a small team of four people with, you know, we work with other freelancers and stuff like that. But when you say, you know, 100 blogs spread over four people, it starts to look like a hell of a lot of content.

Briona Gallagher [00:39:53] It is a hell of a lot of content.

Chris Bruno [00:39:55] Yeah, it really was. But again. But that was again, one of those things where, you know, we learned so much from it. We learned so much about processing and systemising what we were doing.

Briona Gallagher [00:40:04] Yeah.

Chris Bruno [00:40:04] How we get that kind of content from idea to written to scheduled or drafted to then published to then shared and all of these things again. You know, we do these challenges to kind of prove a point, which is, you know, if we can do 30 days of live or 100 blogs in 30 days, nobody has any excuse not to get one blog up a week.

Briona Gallagher [00:40:25] Absolutely.

Chris Bruno [00:40:25] Or not to go live once a week or whatever it might be. And I think that’s the important part. Again, it’s trying to encourage people to get away from the norm and actually start focussing on what they could do, which they haven’t done before, and they could try. And that doesn’t have any cost involved, but can start to help them to build.

Briona Gallagher [00:40:45] Absolutely. No, I couldn’t agree more, actually it’s pretty inspiring. What I was just thinking is that it’s come back to your challenges, I’d say it really highlights the gaps in the processes. You know, all things that you could improve things and ways that you can find of, you know, work faster and more efficiently by having, by setting yourself challenges like that. That’s really interesting. I might take that back to the team here, actually.

Chris Bruno [00:41:11] I’m gonna get abusive text messages from your team. Saying, oh, my God, why did you say that? So I might delay the release of this podcast a couple of weeks just to make sure I’m safe. But yeah. But it is like you mentioned, it is a great way. And, you know, trying to do things effectively. This is something that we talk about a lot.

Chris Bruno [00:41:29] And I don’t know about you guys internally, but, you know, we believe in you know, you come up with the idea for a campaign or for what you want to try the experiment, as it were. Then we will batch what we’re trying to do so that the work is done in a solid kind of progression. So that that gives us the two, three weeks worth of that campaign content ready to go. And then that allows us to schedule in advance and it allows us to have headspace, which is something that I think most people don’t get enough of because of the fact they’re working on what needs to go up today. How do you guys work in that sense? Are you, do you guys have sort of things ready in advance and prescheduled?

Briona Gallagher [00:42:07] Yeah, we do. We do like an especially based on our content calendar. So while we’re, we obviously know what we’re going to be blogging about. We got the calendar up until mid-February, pretty much locked down now. So, you know, we can schedule our social media posts. We know who we’re going to tag and connect with. And that’s sort of, that’s the foundation. But everything else, you know, there’s a little bit of spontaneity, I suppose. A little bit of on the spot engagements and then a mixture of actutally planning. What we don’t do actually is live videos we did and we kind of stopped. So it’s something that comes up again, that comes up in the team. And it is a subject that I think we need to go back to because it is such a great way to connect with the audience. And so I feel like that is something that’s missing from what we’re doing on social media.

Chris Bruno [00:43:05] If I see you guys go live, I’m going to comment and say, I’m so happy to see you guys have gone live again.

Briona Gallagher [00:43:10] Okay, thank you. You’ve helped inspire us to do that, I promise. Yeah, I do see the benefits and there’s, I hear the benefits from other people and other businesses, you know. So it’s, I don’t know why we don’t do it. I suppose it is of the you know, it is a bit of that kind of putting yourself out there and just breaking through some barriers.

Chris Bruno [00:43:34] Yeah and again. It doesn’t have to be you know, a lot of people think you have to sort of end up doing a 24 hour marathon kind of stream or something, but you don’t need to.

Briona Gallagher [00:43:42] Yeah.

Chris Bruno [00:43:43] Even if it’s 10 minutes of just sort of showcasing who your business is and who the people are behind it or some of the processes behind it, you know, it doesn’t matter what you do, whether it’s an accountancy firm or you bake cupcakes, it’s doesn’t really matter, but you have something to talk about. And you have a whole system and process in the background and you have people in the background and you have all of these wonderful things that you can share with people.

Briona Gallagher [00:44:06] Yeah story. You’ve got your story.

Chris Bruno [00:44:08] Absolutely. And literally, it’s such an easy way to do it, because the other thing is that people are more accepting of an error or a mistake on a live video. So if you’re talking and you might say the wrong word, you go “oops sorry, no what I meant to say was”, nobody’s going to actually take that offensively or take it badly or kind of give you grief about it. As opposed to, you know, when you make that one slip up and and the bloody subtitle, you missed out that your or you are you all or whatever it was, it becomes a real thing that people kind of go, why’d you do that or you missed that or you wrote the wrong word. And it’s a strange one. But again, it’s just like you mentioned earlier, there’s no one size fits all. But I definitely like to recommend to as many people as possible to try and take advantage of the live capabilities of all the platforms.

Briona Gallagher [00:44:55] Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense.

Chris Bruno [00:44:57] Okay. Right. Well, we’ll wrap up in a second, but what’s your favourite personal for personal use, sorry, social media network.

Briona Gallagher [00:45:05] Instagram.

Chris Bruno [00:45:07] Third in the row since I introduced this question, you are the third guest in a row to say Instagram. So I have to ask you why.

Briona Gallagher [00:45:15] I just find it interesting. You know, I really do. And like my personal Instagram, you know, I follow kind of who I want. I actually ends up following people, a lot of people they don’t know. I think that’s the difference. So on Facebook, maybe when I log onto Facebook and I see, you know, my neighbour has gone on holiday and, you know, my old school friend has just got a new job.

Briona Gallagher [00:45:41] Like, it’s different. It’s nice. To my neighbour and my friend, it’s nice, but there’s a difference feel on Instagram and I suppose it’s just it’s yeah, it’s more of a snapshot into people’s lives. I’m a very visual person. So, you know, just they’re just the way that the platform is made appeals to me. And yeah, I like them. I like the stories. Yes, definitely.

Chris Bruno [00:46:08] Do you look at more content or do you post quite a lot of content?

Briona Gallagher [00:46:13] No, I look at more.

Chris Bruno [00:46:14] Okay.

Briona Gallagher [00:46:15] Voyeur.

Chris Bruno [00:46:17] That’s that’s a really bad way or term to use that as. But yes, I understand what you’re trying to say. I hope.

Briona Gallagher [00:46:27] I mean it in – yeah – just, cut that bit out.

Chris Bruno [00:46:34] That’s great. But I mean to be fair, I am a big fan of Insta as well. Is your Instagram open? Is it public?

Briona Gallagher [00:46:39] It is.

Chris Bruno [00:46:40] Oh, okay. Now you have to tell people then the user name so that they can go follow you.

Briona Gallagher [00:46:44] Sure. I’d love it. It’s @BrionaGallagher

Chris Bruno [00:46:48] Perfect. Okay. We’ll add that to the show notes as well so that people can come stalk you or voyuer you and you can see how it feels. But no, that’s great.

Briona Gallagher [00:47:03] Terribly bad.

Chris Bruno [00:47:04] It was going so well.

Briona Gallagher [00:47:06] It was going to well, it’s all imploded now.

Chris Bruno [00:47:09] Okay. So where can people find yourselves, Design Wizard and yourself personally if they want to connect for any questions or anything they might have about the platform?

Briona Gallagher [00:47:18] Yeah, it’s DesignWizard.com.

Chris Bruno [00:47:22] That’s for the web site and for social or for any of the usernames, are you guys?

Briona Gallagher [00:47:27] It’s all @GetDesignWizard across the board, Get Design Wizard. And then there’s Pik Wizard. So it’s PikWizard.com.

Chris Bruno [00:47:37] Perfect.

Briona Gallagher [00:47:38] That’s the stock, that’s the free stock. Yeah I’m just on social as Briona Gallagher so you can find me there as well.

Chris Bruno [00:47:47] Fantastic. Well, listen, thank you so much for coming on today. It’s been a really interesting conversation.

Briona Gallagher [00:47:52] Thanks so much Chris, yeah. I really enjoyed this.

Chris Bruno [00:47:55] And who knows, hopefully we’ll have you on here again sometime.

Briona Gallagher [00:47:57] Yeah, I’d love it. Yeah. Stay in touch anyway. Thanks so much.

Chris Bruno [00:48:01] Thank you.

Chris Bruno [00:48:04] The All About Digital Marketing podcast is brought to you by Social INK, a distributed digital marketing agency specialised in delivering results through online campaigns, whether it’s content marketing, social media, marketing, online advertising or web design. We’ve got you covered from strategy through to delivery. If you’re struggling with your digital marketing, get in touch today by simply visiting www.SocialINK.co