Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Ashley Cline, Digital Marketing Consultant Vice President & Co-Founder of Ice Cream Social

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Ashley Cline is a Digital Marketing Consultant and Freelancing Expert. With more than 15 years of experience in the digital marketing space, she specializes in building strategic marketing plans, mapping strategy execution, and collaborating to optimize tactics that drive increased performance for clients, primarily in the Events & Entertainment space but has extensive experience working with Medical Device/Healthcare and Finance Technology sectors as well.She is also the EVP of Client Strategy at TicketSocket and Vice President and Co-Founder of Ice Cream Social.Learn more: https://icecreamsocial.io/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-ashley-cline-digital-marketing-consultant-vice-president-co-founder-of-ice-cream-social

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Ashley Klein, who's a digital marketing consultant and vice president, co-founder of ice cream social. Ashley, welcome to the program. Hi there. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you because I love the sound of ice cream social at our church. We have those from time to time. And I love interacting and eating ice cream. So I'm excited to hear what you do and how you do it. But get us started with your story. What's your background?

Sure. So as you said, I've been doing digital marketing for the past 17 years now. And currently, I'm really focused in on the event marketing industry. industry at ice cream social. We are a social referral widget that can turn all your customers into influencers. We're backed by Comcast NBC Universal Sports Tech, which invested in our company in 2022. And really, if I get back to the back, back story of when I was young, I'd have to say what really sprawled my career was a love for video games. And as I kind of went into adults, I found that digital marketing is a lot like playing video games. And I love that idea of always finding tweaks and optimizations that can be done to help you continue to grow your sales and business time over time.

I love that. And it's like I can envision a book that you need to write. Everything I learned about marketing came from my obsession with video games. Yeah, came from Mario and Luigi. Well, I mean, maybe a little side note there. Maybe that's a little project you need to work on. But anyway, talk a little bit about that. What is it about video games that ties into marketing?

And then how can entrepreneurs take some of a low-hanging fruit lessons that you've learned and improve their business? Sure. So I'd have to say where I've kind of gathered that comparison to video games is growing up, my brother and I, we had one. one video game. So once you beat it, you beat it. And we had only that one game for many years. And in order to keep it fun and interesting, I had to create new challenges for myself. So I would say, okay, this time I'm going to see, you know, how quickly I can beat the game or this time I'm going to see how many coins can I collect throughout this whole game. And, you know, keep creating little optimizations and tweets to just keep beating the game.

and better every time. And when I first started my career, I started out in searching an optimization. And that became really fun to me to continuously make little tweaks and changes on websites and watch it, you know, rise to the top of Google. And as I expanded my digital marketing career to include other activities, such as, you know, Facebook ads, email, SMS, I still look at it with that same filter every day. I'll look at a campaign and say, okay, what can we do this week to increase our return on ad spend? Or what can we do to get higher open rates on our emails or click through rates on our text messages? So having that kind of filter and keeping it fun like a game is really what drives my passion to keep doing marketing. You know, I'm sure we could probably talk

about an hour and a half on that one topic alone, but it makes me think about the concept of gamification. And because we are wired to win or motivate ourselves, I think gamification really is a neat way that entrepreneurs can think about, you know, hey, if I'm doing a certain task and I know I need to do it to achieve this outcome, what's going to motivate me to do it? Well, I'm going to check how many times I, whatever the case is. Or when I hit this metric, I'm going to buy myself a cup of coffee or walk around the block or whatever. So does gamification play into kind of how you are advising your clients on digital marketing? Okay.

I just have to say for anyone listening, we did not plan this. The whole gamification thing is actually, I was going to bring that up later. That's where ice cream social is born is not where it thrives. is that gamification. It's, you know, traditional social referral tools will say, hey, send your friend $10 and you'll get $10 back to keep shopping. And so what we've done with ice cream social is bring more of that game component to it where they have a goal to reach and the reward is much higher.

Maybe it's a refund on your full order or, you know, a large gift card. And so what we'll do is say, hey, send this promo code to your friends. and if you get five friends to buy, you'll get your reward. And by doing that, not only does it make it a little more fun and interesting for the influencer sharing, but if we ask them to get five friends to buy, they're typically going to ask, you know, eight to 12 people to come check out your site. And so that in itself just kind of creates a little game out of it. Yeah, and also we could probably quickly dial in.

a psychologist and get them on the interview right now and go true or false. Does achieving things, right? Does it release dopamine? Does it help us with our endorphins when we achieve and we have these. And I know the answer would be yes. And I feel also that an aspect of why we all post what we do on social media is to get responses. Like, oh, check out my thing.

And then you go back 19 times throughout the day to go, what did people, oh, look, it was shared. It was liked. It was commented on. And I think that that becomes, if we can have a gamification for a business outcome and then metrics all along the way, it's like, hey, good job. You just hit this many. Hey, great job. You're almost to your goal of.

Well, if in the process of doing that, because that's human nature, my business benefits because my people, my tribe, my clients and customers are becoming many influencers for me. well, that just throws fuel on the fire. Oh, absolutely. And we found that, you know, by turning all of your customers into influencers for you and creating that fun game, it actually helps all your other marketing channels that you have running. It's that whole idea of, you know, all boats rise with the tide just by getting the word out there organically through word of mouth and bringing people back to your website. Then you can pixel them. Then maybe they'll opt into your email newsletter. And that just supports all the different marketing channels.

And overall can help bring down your cost to acquire a customer or an order. Yeah, that's a really big, big piece. And let's talk about now how, because you mentioned pixel. And now people's eyes are glazing over going, oh, I've heard about that. I don't know how to do it. So how easy is it to use ice cream social? Oh, it's very easy. we integrate with all checkouts, even if you have a custom website checkout.

It's just plug and play. We help build the campaigns for you, get you up and running. And the nice thing about ice cream social compared to other marketing channels is it's a little more of a set it and forget it and let it run its, you know, let it do its thing. Let your customers do the marketing for you. It's not something that you necessarily have to be optimizing. day to day, but it's fun to watch. And it is fun to come up with new tweaks, but it's not quite as intensive as email marketing or Facebook ads. Yep. So I feel like in the old, old days of learning, you know, I love reading old books, you know, like think and grow rich and all the different

ones from the 50s and 60s. And I feel like in the old days of marketing and sales, it was really like, hey, let's read a book from an insurance salesperson who used to work for whatever, A.L. Williams, and they will tell you that word of mouth marketing is huge. Word of mouth, WOM. Well, today, digital word of mouth is massive. Well, digital word of mouth is, you know, like social proof. It's reviews. It's posting on your social media to go, hey, if you guys ever need, boom, you need to try that. So isn't this a form of digital word of mouth that helps goose that along without having to do the work of it? For sure.

I mean, that's where the name ice cream social came from. Like you mentioned, your church has ice cream socials and everyone's there in person, talking to each other, you know, talking about where they got, you know,

their favorite new dress or what books are reading. And, you know, back in the day that, you know, the same way people would exchange that kind of word of mouth marketing is, you know, at the Mary Kay parties, at the Tupperware party,

at your neighborhood block parties, ice cream socials. And you know what else? And kind of going deeper on, I always love to go, hey, what's beneath the surface? There used to be a commercial, I want to say it was AMCO that did this. And it was the, I've got a guy. I've got a guy.

If you need this, oh, I've got a guy. Because we all want to have that guy or a person, right? And we all want to go, oh, you have this problem. I know who to call. We all want to be that one that goes, oh, my word. I can't believe you found that funny video, that solution to my problem. So isn't ice cream social a way to incentivize and gamify, you know, social networking? But also it plays into that thing of when you tell your network about my thing you just bought,

it kind of plays into that. You want to be the thought leader that has that cool thing. and if you did it, I want to do it too. Absolutely. That's so true. I mean, who doesn't want to be the helpful friend? Yeah. So I think that that's a really cool idea.

So what other kind of marketing hacks do you find in your digital marketing agency that you're working with your clients with? Yeah. So another thing that I really like to leverage outside of, you know, that referral, digital word of mouth marketing is mastering the game. of lead generation. So I guess I'll share what I mean by that, by just kind of giving a real-life example that I do every day.

So as I mentioned before, I focus a lot in the event marketing industry, but you could really take this tactic and apply it to any industry, any product, any service. But what we do is before an event goes on sale, is we'll spend about three or four weeks running Facebook ads saying, hey, we're coming to your city, get excited. This is the day we go on sale at this time. Do not forget to click through, sign up, and we will send you an email, we'll send you a text message, making sure you do not miss the second we go on sale. And by doing that, we're creating this real fear of missing out. And what, um, Once they sign up through that lead gen form, we're sending them, you know, a series of automated emails.

Again, getting them excited about this opening day and time and what they can look forward to and what's in it for them if they purchase during this time period. They also get text messages and then they get retargeting ads saying, hey, you're on the list. Don't forget. Make sure you've added this to your calendar. So we do that for about three or four weeks. And then the second we go on sale, we make sure there's, you know, emails, text messages, on sale ads, everything that goes out. In that first hour, we just have explosive sales. And that really helps us ease off a little bit during the rest of the sales cycle because anyone who's on sale day, they can get stagnant.

Yes, you prime the pump. And there's a lot of benefits to that because, Anyone who, you know, didn't buy an opening night, we can continue to market to them. So we've got a list to carry us through the sales cycle. But also, if anyone has run Facebook ads lately, it can take a while to get out of what they call learning mode, where you have to have enough conversions for Facebook to truly optimize your ads to have the best performance. And by having explosive sales in the first hour, that helps you get out of that learning mode very quickly and make sure that your, ads are optimized and ready to go for the rest of your sale cycle.

And while events are very timely, you can still create an event online out of anything or any kind of sale or promotion, really. Yeah, like being of that digital hype man, you know, like save the date, here it's coming. And you do find yourself, you know, I'll get emails like that. And I'm like, okay, I know who. Now see, here's the deal. That campaign that you just described will work, but it works way better when your audience fully has the no like and trust relationship with you already.

So that means before you launch this, you better be giving great value to your prospects and your network and teaching and educating and not just blitzing them with other salesy kind of a thing. So this works best when you're doing what you should be doing anyway, just teaching. Absolutely. And you also,

you want to make sure that whatever you're offering, it is actually a big deal. You know, even if it's for only one hour of, a very great promotion, promo code, offer, whatever it is, it does really need to be good. And it should be, you know, the best thing that you offer throughout your entire sales cycle. So you don't want to make false claims or, you know, get them all excited for nothing. So once you deliver, it'll definitely work well. Neat. Well, from a digital hype campaign to the digital word

a mouth campaign and an ice cream social, all these are wonderful ways to expand your social proof and footprint. So Ashley, it's been a great pleasure having you on. What's the best way people can learn more and then also reach out and connect with you. Yeah, sure. You can find me at ice cream social. com or Ashley Klein.com. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Likewise. Thank you so much. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.com.