Today in Digital Marketing - Black Friday Special: Social Commerce from the Trenches

Episode Date: November 26, 2021

A special episode today — I'm speaking with Lauren Petrullo, owner of the Mongoose Media agency. We're diving deep into the growing trends of social commerce and livestreaming.• Get a Free 14-Day Trial of the Premium Newsletter (with exclusive content, videos, links, and more) — https://b.link/pod-newsletter Showcase your marketing tool for free! Apply at https://todayindigital.com/showcase ADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads ABOUT THIS PODCAST: Produced by engageQ digital — https://engageq.com JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia(TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and more) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, well, it's Black Friday, the unofficial kickoff of the holiday buying season, or as you and I know it, the holiday selling season.

And if you've been following this podcast for a little while, you'll know that one of the most common themes emerging this year has been the concept of social commerce, that middle ground between social media engagement and selling product. Many of us try, a great number fail, sometimes spectacularly. Thank you. in addition to owning a busy e-commerce store of her own. Prior to that, Lauren was an innovation producer at the Walt Disney Company and has worked with some of the most well-known Fortune 500 brands. Lauren, welcome. And first, I have to ask, what is an innovation producer? It's a fancy word for someone who supports big innovation projects using design thinking. So I would do the production side, whether that's bringing materials, note-taking, facilitating conversations

of getting the bigger picture, yes anding a lot. We'd have a larger facilitator leading the whole sessions. And then I would come in as the support team. Gotcha. Okay. It sounds very Disney, innovation producer. It sounds like something. What do they call? I follow some Disney accounts on TikTok, and I think they call their engineers Imagineers, which is sort of brilliant as well.

Correct. Yes. Imagineers. Well, I will say one thing on that. Todd, I actually have my doctorate from Disney University. No, it's not actually called that. Yeah. No, 100%. I have a certificate in everything. That's awesome. Well, I want to get your take on where you think that we digital marketers need to be next year to kind of take advantage of social commerce. But can we first talk about definitions? Like what does social commerce mean to you? Social commerce to me is the intersection of e-commerce sales and community. So similar to what you were introducing earlier, but it's a chance of leveraging social media platforms to be an experiential sales tool for your company brand or Shopify store. So let's talk specifics. You run an agency, you've got clients. How has social

commerce been helping some of your clients? Social commerce, like too long, don't read would be free exposure and free purchases. And when I say free, I mean that they're not paying any traffic to it. They're not spending time producing organic content for that store. It's at the basics level. It's setting up a social commerce store on Pinterest or on Facebook or even Instagram shop, which people are most familiar with. And they've set up those, but they neglect the other platforms so that those that are on those active platforms can do one click and buy. So similar to the Amazon experiencing. You mentioned social storefront or social shop.

Are we talking about something different than just Shopify? Oh yeah, yeah. So you can have your Shopify feed connected into the social media platform so that you can buy from the platforms, pulling your Shopify inventory. Okay, so you're talking about catalogs inside like Instagram shop, Facebook shop. Is that what you mean by social commerce? Yes, but also part of social commerce is doing live selling. So you can bring in the community for social media selling like from Facebook lives, from Instagram lives. It's doing so much more than just putting in the catalog, but at the bare minimum, most individuals neglect using the catalog and creating collections that make sense for the user. Um, and then having like four hours of input for your social store, your Facebook shop, your Pinterest stop can yield Matt. I'm like about 20,000 hits a month is what we've done for one of our clients from four hours of effort.

You know, whenever anyone asks me where I think that sort of the big things in the next six months are going to be, it's always for me, augmented reality in the e-commerce space and live stream commerce, like live shopping. I think those are going to be the two things that are, you know, I think you're going to surprise a lot of us. So, all right, let's talk sort of specific. So, let's imagine that someone who's listening to this has a small business, has a small store or something like that and decides to socialize it, I suppose, you know, decides to use these catalog tools inside all of these platforms and they're all getting it, TikTok, Pinterest, they're all sort

of bolting this stuff on. What kind of numbers can someone expect when they set that up on something like a Facebook or like a Pinterest? Sure. I will say the sooner they do it, the larger the numbers, for sure. We set up a shop last week and they did $150 in sales within three days of that shop going live. Other shops that we've had, now granted, that's a company that's four years old so they do have about 13,000 followers on their Instagram account so it's not small but it's definitely not massive another store that we set up we set up their shop about a month ago and they're getting 450 500 visits a day I like the numbers but how did you do that oh okay how did we do it so uh we set up through the Shopify store you have to have the application. So starting first is you add Facebook.

You can no longer do the Pinterest one, I think. They like switch it out or it's like changing on some of the accounts. And you connect your feeds directly to your Pinterest profile to your Facebook shop so that you can enable it. And then you have the ad account you're connected to and the catalog, and then you can go to business.facebook.com slash uh events manager

and then the commerce account i can pull up in the exact url uh because it's i guess what i mean is like like i think most people know sort of how to connect their catalogs who listen to this most people we just did a listener survey most people are fairly advanced i guess what i'm asking is you you had these big numbers you said you know one of our clients got this big number, one of our clients got this big number. And surely that wasn't just because they connected to the API. Correct. Once we connected to the API, then we went in and customized the collections. Every collection needs to have a minimum of two products in it. So we take the mega menus and the collections that we've created on the back end and recreate them inside the commerce account. So it doesn't automatically carry all of the organization of your Shopify store into the different social platforms for your catalog. It imports all the products, but if you don't

organize it in a way for someone to quickly find what they're looking for, you're just going here, everything. I didn't realize that. I assumed we don't do that at our agencies, I just assumed that if you've got a taxonomy set up on the source e-commerce platform, whatever it is that you're using, that that would carry through. Is that just, people aren't programming that ability in, or does that ability could exist at the APIs at the dev level. We do it at the manual side because we create additional collections that we'll test on Facebook side. So we'll do a lot more like gifts for him under $25. Or we'll do gifts for December birthdays, things that make more sense in the social realm, and are too crowded in the mega menus in our Shopify stores. So you have a lot more ability to customize and you can add pictures and make it more search friendly as social shops continue to become more SEO forward.

And have you found that there's different types of those collection groupings work better on different platforms? Like you mentioned kind of, you know, the cheap gifts for men on Facebook, but is there something that like really kills it on Instagram or on Pinterest or TikTok that wouldn't necessarily work on Facebook, but is there something that like really kills it on Instagram or on Pinterest or TikTok that wouldn't necessarily work on, on Facebook as a collection? This is such a really

good question. Cause it's weird. Um, we've made color-based collections. So some of our, some of our clients have SKUs in the thousands. And so we started grouping products that are pink and we started making like purple collections and just allowing people to have products that are pink and we started making like purple collections and just allowing people to have products that like literally align with whatever their birthstone color is it's it's weird but we do those and i don't think those would ever work on facebook we tried it once and it got zero traction isn't that interesting i wonder i guess pinterest like where did it work pinterest and instagram it worked yeah it worked on Pinterest. We didn't do that on Instagram. We do most of the Facebook shop customization is at the, or sorry, most of the social commerce impact is

not on Instagram shop. It's on Facebook or Pinterest. I, yeah, I never would have thought of those Instagram, the Instagram shop isn't as sophisticated yet. Um, it's just saying those, but what Facebook can do, especially when you can pull into what if you're doing Facebook live and selling on live, it's way more impactful with Instagram, because it's still such a mobile forward app. There's a bit more restrictions where Facebook is this like massive monster. All right, let's talk about the live shopping then. Because I think that's I think a lot of people kind of want to get to there as well. So let's start with it with the technical part of it. How does someone take, let's assume that they already have whatever, WooCommerce, BigCommerce,

Shopify, who cares, whatever the commerce platform is. They've got that already and they want to start doing a live. How do they briefly, technically put that together? And then we'll talk about sort of optimizing it for better sales. Sure. So for technically putting it together, you just have to connect whatever your camera and microphone is. And that's the easiest way to go live. However, I strongly recommend integrating with a software tool. But if you're starting from zero and going to one,

you can just use your native computer microphone and use your cell phone if necessary as your camera. But there's other programs like BeLive and other feed programs that allow you to pull in comments, that allow you to have multiple camera angles. So if you're doing live shopping, say I want to, just grabbing a highlighter, say I wanna highlight this, I can have one camera showing the different sides and then my other camera showing my face side of it.

But step one, you just go into your Facebook Live account, you schedule an event, and then you connect natively, like you're setting up with Zoom, your camera and your microphone. All right. And I have to say, BeLive and similar type programs are relatively inexpensive, and they do offer a fairly solid. And in fact, they're sometimes on like AppSumo occasionally, which is like that lifetime deal site. Occasionally, they'll have, I think they've even had BeLive once or twice, but they certainly have got similar ones that are there. All right, so you set that up, you put the things there. One of the other types of live streaming categories that exist as software,

as a service, are these sort of restream services, where you're broadcasting to a middleware server that is sending you out to YouTube Live, to Facebook Live, to Instagram Live, to whatever else supports those APIs. Is that good or bad to do? It's great. Instagram Live doesn't have that API connection yet. So BeLive will let you do YouTube and Facebook. Facebook and Instagram, they're already talking about having a more native platform because there's like two ways to do Instagram live and Facebook at the same time. You can't simulcast.

You can do the way where you have like your phone and a camera and so you like keep looking between the two cameras, which is the easiest way and just hit push live and push live. Or which I think is a better recommendation, which we've seen because the audiences on Instagram aren't always behaving the same way they are on Facebook, you create two separate strategies. Rachel Miller is probably the best one that has all the free content related to going live on Facebook versus going live on Instagram. And she always preaches like having separate strategies because those audiences are different. But if you're like, again, going from zero to one, you know, use like one of those gooseneenecks put your phone right next to your other camera and then try to talk in the middle it can get hard if

you're doing it solo and you're like looking at the comments and responding like oh okay Instagram said here and Facebook says there but if you're using a tool like be live which is that middle component it allows you to see all those comments in one feed. And if you have like a virtual assistant or a larger crowd on your live shopping, it's much easier to manage. But yeah, BeLive is super comfortable

and does allow you to, oh my gosh, what's the code? There's a term where you project onto all those- Like multi-stream or- Multi, simulcast, sorry. Simulcast, there you go, yeah, yeah, yeah. When you simulcast onto those platforms. Yeah, but Instagram isn't yet, but Facebook is working on making that native.

So you can just push live, like the way you publish just stories on both Facebook and Instagram, they're working on that, go live on both platforms. Yeah, I'm actually surprised they don't have that yet. I would have thought they'd have accelerated that by now. Maybe they're too busy with the name change, I don't know. I want to take a quick break, but when we come back more with Lauren Petrulo, we'll talk product categories, which are best suited for live stream commerce, and whether you need a professional host or an influencer, or if authenticity is so valued that anyone from the brand can be the face of the stream.

That's in a minute when this Black Friday special on Today in Digital Marketing continues. Thank you. If I'm interviewing a guest a thousand miles away with the shakiest of internet connections, it still sounds like we're sitting in the same room. It's as easy to use as Zoom, but gives much higher quality audio and video recordings. Other features include options to record from your iPhone, a magic editor to easily edit with a series of simple clicks, and automatic transcriptions. So if you're looking for a hero platform for all your recording needs, from podcasts to webinars to other video content, you should be using Riverside.fm. Sign up today so you can focus on your content and leave the quality to Riverside.fm. Back with Lauren Petrulo here on this Black Friday edition of Today in Digital Marketing.

Lauren, are there types of products that just do better on live stream versus inside your product catalogs or inside your e-commerce store? I would say no, because we have done live streams with products as high as $5,000 as physical products as well as digital commerce products at $5,000. The only thing is right now and Facebook has been working on bringing digital commerce products, or sorry, digital products to commerce, because right now it's all physical, you can still do on live, not as sophisticated or easy as a process. But using tools like BeLive, you can drop the links below and then people can leave platform and purchase elsewhere. But we've had success selling physical and digital products in the $5,000 plus range on live.

And then what we've seen work really, really well for those like quick grab instant gratification products that are under $50 usually is doing grouping discounts. So that's something that's been really popular in China. And social commerce is like we're behind. We're dinosaurs when you compare to what's going on in East Asia. So doing group incentive and community products and codes for those like quick grabs under $50, we've seen massively do well. An example would be if you're saying, hey, okay, if you have a group of five of you and you come together and you all agree that you want to buy this mouse, I'll give all of you a 20% discount as an incentive for coming together. And it has a surprise delight and live genuine interaction that only works on the live.

And you don't get on the recorded version of that e-commerce, social commerce experience. So basically people who are watching all put up their hand or indicate in some way that they're willing to go in on it. Isn't that interesting? And where is that functionality? Is that like a plug-in on the e-commerce side? Is it part of the live stream? Does it exist at all anywhere for us here in sort of, you know, non-East Asian countries? There could be a plugin that can make this easier. So Pinduoduo, P-I-N-D-U-O-D-U-O is the fastest leading social commerce platform in China, if anyone wants to like go deeper and read into it.

But what we do is we get five people that come together and they send a group message to the page. And they say, we're all five. And then we create a special discount code on Shopify and send them, hey, here's your five. And how do they find each other? They'll talk to each other on the live or they'll go and recruit their friends

and bring them into the live, which pushes the organic reach even larger isn't that interesting so and you're encouraging that i suppose in the course of the live broadcast right so so it's find five other people here in there and and yeah and i it's kind of it's kind of crafty in a way because the nature the very mechanism of them trying to find each other increases chat in the comment section, which increases your organic reach. Oh, yeah. Oh, isn't that clever? All right.

And bringing people. We've had it where we worked with a lip balm and they went to other lip balm groups and like, guys, they're selling the strawberry kiwi one. Like they're doing it 25% off. I just need four other people who wants in come join this and like start the conversation. And then when they've got the five, they send in the DM. I mean, it's, you could buy it full price, but if you recruit your friends, similar to like living social style, where it's like buy three and that fourth one is free.

You get three other friends, do it with you. It's that principle. It almost reminds me of the old days of Groupon, because I think the original point of Groupon was to have a group of people that came together. And then and the early days, in fact, that was the only way you could buy. You couldn't even really buy it as a single individual person. And then I don't know what the hell happened to Groupon, but suddenly they went all spa all the time. And the only thing you can buy there now is like are like 99 massage packages it's it's kind of weird um are there are there any brands that you think that stand out with social commerce that we should be following to what's a nice way of putting this uh get inspiration

instead of steal ideas from uh sephora is definitely the best one um during mark zuckerberg's first like audio um call on, they brought in Sephora's commerce team because they've been accessed to a bunch of betas that still other brands don't have. So Sephora and just beauty products and skincare in general, because people are starting to become more savvy about what ingredients are being used and applied on their face, has been good because it's a way to describe the product in features forward language that we know converts really well for consumers, but can bring in the benefits and can talk about, I'm sorry, benefit forward. And then they can talk about the features that are specific, like talking about

ingredients and what the impact is of that ingredient. Sephora has done that really, really well. And they've been able to sell higher end products. And they've also done live videos where they're showing this versus that and the better, good, better, best scenario. So you can choose based on your price point and based off of the features, which benefits you want when you make the purchase. Do you have to have like a professional host or a professional influencer? I mean, I know you don't have to, but do you get better results if you get someone who's not just, you know, the director of marketing trying their best to do a live? Is there a lot of value in that? When you have a full production, there's expectations that there's going to be a

bigger, like your expectations are set out the gate, like, okay, you're gonna have different angles. And if something goes down with your feed, the audience is going to be less forgiving. But when it is the individual small business owner especially during coven and the last six months or so we've seen the like using your phone and being that non-influencer celebrity style has been more successful because people can relate to you stronger and then all these small businesses are coming together and uniting to support other small businesses and And I think like the best example of that is the forgiveness of when tech breaks, because they're like, oh, I've totally been in that. I'm totally okay. They're sending support messages and then watching that brand grow and

showing up more and more frequently has been helpful for our more mature clients. Is there an art to the pacing of one of these live stream shows, you know, like a little bit of sell and then back off and tell the story of the brand and the social impact for two minutes and then go back in for one minute to sell? Like, I mean, we've talked a lot about the science of it, but what is the art of using that medium to kind of move people through that sales process that might be different than say, you know, a catalog based click? I think if at the core, if you can replicate what you would do, if you had a brick and mortar store, and what that conversation would look like in person, and take that online is where you're going to win always, I don't believe in selling, if you have a tool like be live, and you can have the information at the bottom. So there's always a

call to action and the info available. When you're providing value, you're just getting someone super excited. And if you can have someone support you, like a team member or even a VA, responding to comments, continuing the conversation, or providing the information of how to get the coupons, or if you're doing like the Groupon style of how to coordinate, like, okay,

all five of you come together, start a group chat with us. We'll be able to send you that coupon code. When you can facilitate that, that's when it's best, but it takes more than one person. But if you are just one person and you're sharing it, what that formula would look like is I would, like we call them like heartbeats and designing always for second zero for the beginning.

So in the beginning, you want to come out the gate and tell them what value you're getting and why you want to stay tuned. And then we always recommend every eight minutes reintroducing it because people are going to come off and drop off. And then if you can do a script, you can do a different feature every eight minutes,

assuming you're doing at least 12 because 12 minutes is what Facebook has always said is better for long-form videos. If you're doing less than 12, it's fine. But they say when you can go over 12, it's going to increase your reach significantly. You run an agency. You have your own e-commerce store. You have clients.

I want to pick your brains briefly before we go on third-party cookies. I assume the looming loss of third-party cookies is impacting you folks as well. It's been fun. Facebook did just talk about how they're opening aggregated event managers for view-through conversion information. We were used to seeing double-digit ROAS on our Facebook ad accounts. I mean, especially with Warren. We sometimes would have 27 and like 30 row as numbers like these numbers were awesome and would carry over all the cold testing We had to change our benchmarks Significantly, we had to invest in third-party reporting tools. So using

Companies like wicked reports or high roast to give us further inside of data that Facebook wasn't providing for us But yeah, no, I mean, this has been like graduating from college and then realizing you have a culinary degree and you're starting a job as a rocket scientist. Yes, very much so. I think the sales of gin for media buyers has gone up dramatically, personally. It's fair. So someone is just starting out people are listening

to this they've got an e-commerce store they're this has intrigued them they're keen to get started maybe they haven't done any sort of catalog you know moving their catalog over to to the other platforms they haven't done any live streaming which of those should they do first and what are the first steps in getting started uh the first step, assuming they have a shop, we work with only Shopify stores, so that's where I'm like forward that. But you can now with Shop Pay and other collections, you can actually import if you're an Amazon only store, you can create your shop inside a Facebook page, which is huge for brands that are on Amazon and couldn't do that kind of selling before because you needed to have some sort of WooCommerce or bigger website, but Facebook is providing that intermediary

resource so if you're not creating a Shopify store, you can use them. First thing I would do is for sure connect your catalog, add the app, and I'm sure it's the same with WordPress, WooCommerce plugin, or if you're using Magento, add the Facebook app, connect all the appropriate things. If you are working with an agency, you want to connect your accounts because it's your Shopify store or your e-commerce store. So you want to connect, be the end all, be all of that connection. Do not give it to your agency because if you change agencies, you have to start over. So add that app, make all the connections. I think it takes at most 15 minutes because you need to connect the Instagram account,

the business manager. Sometimes you need to go to business.facebook.com slash overview and create a Facebook business manager. But all in all, add that app, connect those pieces, and then it takes up to 72 hours for your feed to go through. Then you want to go to business.facebook.com slash commerce, where you'll be able to dive deeper into and create those collections. But step one, if you do nothing else but connect the catalog, start there for Facebook. And then two, if you don't have a business Pinterest profile, you need to make your Pinterest profile a business one and then you connect your catalog that way so that all of your products can essentially become pins and you'll start getting visibility on those products

on platforms where people are searching for them. And doing that first and foremost will take you no more than four hours to do. And I'm giving you four hours if you are not technically savvy to go through whatever documentation they have of like, okay, add this button. Okay. Hit enter. Now choose drop down all of those pieces. But by setting those up pinterest is known as the

search engine social media platform so we've gotten massive visibility on some of our clients products because people are searching and out what those product titles are verbatim and most other stores aren't present on pinterest that's where like the exposure and visibility is in the tens of thousands. One of our stores, they are like 10th in their space, but they're the only Pinterest store in their area that has all their product lines. So they're getting millions of hits a month, even though their competitors are massive brands that they're just not optimizing. They didn't connect their connect their catalog too. So I'd start there.

Connect the catalog. Yeah. I may want to bring you back just for Pinterest SEO, I think. And so we're clear. We're not talking about, if I understand Facebook shop, which is the, the, the plat, the payment platform that Facebook has, right? Everything we've talked about so far, Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest, when people click on a product,

where do they go? Do they go back to your commerce site or are we talking about them paying right on the platform? You stay on platform because you get benefits. You have to, oh, sorry. There is one thing on the setup you, and I always recommend you agree to give Facebook, I think it's like as high as 5% or like two and a half to 5% it's a higher percentage than Shopify Facebook is going to keep their percentage by keeping them on platform do it it's worth it because you're adding less friction to taking someone off Facebook to go to your store before you could say like yeah I know go to my store go to Shopify purchase there if you don't opt in to accepting Facebook payments and they have a button now with ShopPay.

So it's really seamless for the user. So when you were talking about earlier, like why didn't they prioritize it? I think they were prioritizing the ShopPay integration so people can do one click and buy if they've purchased on other Shopify stores using ShopPay as a payment gateway for an easier transaction.

Because I know last year when we were talking with our agency teams, they were really going to go deep into digital products in the Facebook shops, but they pivoted with COVID and all this e-commerce stuff and making it easier for brick and mortars to translate into social commerce stores. And for the brick and mortars that don't know how to create a Shopify store or a WordPress store with the WooCommerce plugin, creating a store on Facebook was easier for them. All right. So we are talking then about, about Facebook actually taking the money. Like that's, it's their payment processor. Facebook will take a percentage of the sale. Yeah. And then does Pinterest have a similar thing or does Pinterest bounce you back to the commerce store? Pinterest will bounce you back. All right. Um, so it's 5% for Facebook.

It can go up to 5%. I like, don't quote me on that number, but it's definitely higher than any Shopify percentage. I could have sworn I heard that they had been waiving that. I don't know whether they're still doing that or whether it's just on a- They're not still doing that. All right. They did. They are not still doing that. They're not doing it anymore. All right. And then are we also paying Shopify's fee on top of that? If you're doing fulfillment, it's not the same amount of Shopify.

You're going to do the transaction fee. You're not going to do the payment fee. So you are paying, but instead of like, so based off of, if you have like an advanced plan, a basic plan or a plus plan, you have that percentage that gets Facebook takes that percentage. So like in Amazon,

Amazon keeps 15%. I think like Walmart keeps 10%. And then Facebook is five. I'm pretty sure it's five. But again, don't quote me on that number. Because there's always a bunch of numbers that are going through my head all day long. So it's fine. So it's Facebook, I just I want to see if we can get all of the all of the fees tallied up so that there's no surprise review so so going this way facebook is five percent then shopify will have some we don't know what the exact number is some transaction not transaction but but fulfillment based fee because they're doing the fulfillment part and is there like an additional like is there a fee that is facebook's payment processor? Like at the end of the day, does all this go to Stripe and then Stripe has its own bullshit fee too? Or is that wrapped up in the Facebook?

You'll have your credit card fee and then you'll have the Facebook fee. Well, I mean, depending on like what if you're using like Amex. Yeah. Because Amex has a different system. I can pull open and I can send it to you. Like what, like, let me just pull up in a different Shopify store. I am curious to know, like, like, because it's very, you know, we, I think we get enticed by this. It's super easy to do. And then we realize it's kind of like, well, they've got a fee and they've got a fee and they've got a fee. And,

you know, if you tweet about it, Twitter will have a Twitter promotion fee, I'm sure. But, you know, like it, It just becomes almost comical. And in the space of where we are right now, as we're talking, it's Q4. That's the kind of stuff that just eats up the profit margin. And so you end up with maybe being profitable, maybe not. I would say that it does come into effect. But if you use Amazon as the baseline where they are 15 everything under is like way under i don't think you're going to be paying more than 10 max across all fees if you're leveraging

both systems we haven't seen it come up in conversations with our clients where they're like whoa whoa whoa our profit margin has changed and said it's like whoa we weren't selling organically and people are now just purchasing it or they're buying it for gifts. Like, for example, on Facebook, their product showed up for one of their customers' friends as something to buy for their birthday. So they just said done. I'm speaking with Lauren Petrulo, owner of the Mongoose Media Digital Agency. Still ahead on this Black Friday special edition, what are the biggest mistakes that merchants make when they try to outsource the

operation of their e-commerce store to an agency? That's in a minute when Today in Digital Marketing continues. So part of your job is to manage your brand's social media accounts. That can get busy, especially if you're running a paid campaign. You've got comments to moderate, reviews to reply to, issues to escalate to management, and that engagement comes in around the clock. That's why you might need a social media engagement firm, a partner who's handling all that for you, either just evenings and weekends or offloading it entirely. And that is where my agency, EngageQ, can come in.

We've handled the social engagement for dozens of brands. We start with a brand briefing to collect the info we need, answers to the most common questions, and an escalation path. Then leave it to us. Our team can answer product questions, encourage purchases, thank your customers, hide or delete the bad stuff, reply to reviews, and more. And best of all, your customers won't know it's not you. We don't outsource this. Every single person is an in-house employee here in North America. If you're interested, check us out at engageq.com. That's engageq.com. Look for the link in this episode's notes in the

About This Podcast section. You run an agency. It's called the Mongoose Media Agency. Tell me about what a brand or a small business, if they decide that they want to outsource this to an agency, what should they be asking on that first review call with an agency to determine whether or not that agency actually knows what they're talking about or whether they've just bolted on e-commerce as like one of 7 000 services they think they can do um okay so just in general high level e-commerce stuff or specifically in social commerce assistance in the latter if they have listened to this if, if someone owns a brand and they've listened to this and they thought, okay, fine, fuck it, I'm going to do it. I'm going to hire an agency who's going to help me get there.

They get on the phone with the account rep who is super keen. What specific questions should that person who's listening right now ask of the agency to know whether or not they would be a good agency and would actually deliver good results. I would say the easiest question is to ask them about how do they mitigate commerce issues because there's a lot of policy violations that happen with products. So if someone's not familiar with commerce policies within Facebook's ecosystem, I think there are like nine or 14 of them. Like you can't sell humans, you can't sell animal byproducts, you can't sell drugs,

you can't sell things that have weight loss or health or sexual health promotion, things of that nature. If you ask the question of like, how do you mitigate those commerce policies? Or like, what are examples of products that you've experienced that have been flagged and rejected from Facebook in the commerce side of things, if they don't even know about those commerce policies and they have zero experience and it can be painful because we've had stores get shut down because they have products or ingredients that violate terms of services and they have to so in Shopify side you uncheck and say that product cannot be fed into the Facebook ecosystem for their organic side of things.

But we have seen accounts that we've taken over because their Facebook shop got shut down there. And when their Facebook shop got shut down, their Instagram shop got shut down. And then they couldn't bring their Instagram shop into their ecosystem. So if you violate those terms in this commerce space, you can really mess up all the other things that Facebook touches. And they created a second Instagram page, lost thousands of followers and restarted because of an issue that a previous agency had for them. Tell me about your agency, Mongoose Media Agency. What type of client is your ideal client? An e-commerce store on Shopify using Klaviyo as their email service provider in the baby beauty and food space. Because those are the three verticals we have extensive experience in. And if someone's listening and they're in that space and they use

Klaviyo, how do they reach you? You can message me. My personal email is lauren at mongoosmedia.us or you can go to mongoosmedia.us, fill out a contact form, and then our team can reach out, provide you with an audit, do an easy discovery call to see what your current overview looks like. Most often, the clients that come to us are ones that have disconnected ecosystems. So they have one person doing social, one person doing Facebook, one person doing Google, and none of them are talking to each other. And so they're not cohesive in their Black Friday plans or they're not leveraging the marketing budget consistently together so that the money in and money out makes sense for the owner. Right. And you have kindly offered 50 percent off consulting and audits when people mention this podcast, which is super helpful. Lauren, thank you so much for this.

Yeah, no problem. Thank you. Lauren Petrillo, she owns the Mongoose Media Agency. That is it for this special Black Friday episode. There is a weekend edition coming your way tomorrow. I'll be chatting with Darian Kovacs from the Jelly Marketing Agency about their digital marketing certification program. It's a really interesting model that they've built. It includes certifications from all the major platforms.

And you do the work alongside experienced practitioners from Darien's agency. That's tomorrow on the Weekend Edition. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Scripting and promotional support by Steph Gunn, podcast music licensing by Source Audio, and our theme composer Mark Blevis is that moment when you finally realize Twitter has a latest tweets algorithm. I'm Todd Maffin. Stay dry and safe, fellow British Columbians.

I'll talk to you tomorrow for the weekend edition and then on Monday.