Oct. 29, 2024
059: Tactic Tuesdays: Leveraging Community to Grow Your Brand
Ever wondered how to turn a small community into a powerhouse for your brand? Discover the surprising journey behind Gio, a unique non-alcoholic beverage brand, and learn how building an engaged audience before launch can create excitement and momentum. Inspired by Ryan Daniel Moran's innovative approach, we share how sharing weekly updates—even about minor details like flavor tweaks—has fostered a growing community eager to be part of our story. We also discuss the power of social media platforms, particularly TikTok, and how they can transform marketing efforts for brands, even those that may seem less glamorous.
Join us as we explore the art of fostering community engagement and loyalty, diving into strategies for interactive product packaging and maintaining active communication via automated email campaigns. Discover how involving your audience in decision-making, from flavor naming to product development, can cultivate a sense of ownership and drive brand growth. We highlight the importance of aligning with existing communities and leveraging their influence to elevate your brand's visibility and engagement, as well as the balance between providing excellent customer service and maintaining authenticity in marketing efforts.
In our conversation we discuss marketing expert Janelle Page and uncover the secrets to building genuine connections with influencers and creating captivating stories for even the most mundane products. Learn how creative marketing campaigns, like the viral "Will it Blend?" series, can inspire innovative approaches to engage audiences and ensure ongoing brand success. By focusing on building loyalty within your existing audience and exploring potential partnerships, you'll learn how to unlock new avenues for revenue and growth.
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Chapters
00:00 - Leveraging Community to Power Your Brand
06:49 - Fostering Community Engagement for Brand Growth
13:43 - Building Loyalty in Existing Audiences
23:13 - Finding Success Through Engaged Audiences
27:23 - Creative Marketing Strategies for Brand Growth
35:16 - Monetizing Audience Engagement for Brand Growth
Transcript
WEBVTT
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Welcome to another Brand Fortress HQ podcast Tactics Tuesday.
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Today we're going to be talking about how to leverage a community to power your brand, and I'm really excited to have this conversation because I think we have a couple of different angles on how you can do this with your brand.
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So the first one I want to start out with is you know, I actually handed over to you, Matt, because I know you're doing some really exciting things with Gio, the brand that you're building out in the open.
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Things with Gio, the brand that you're building out in the open, and how you guys are building and looking at leveraging community as a part of your launch for this, you know, very new brand.
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Yes, I still don't.
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Oh, there we go.
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I was looking for the go live button on LinkedIn.
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That it's taken a little bit longer than it usually does, but I just hit it.
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Give me one second so I can focus on your question.
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All right, got it.
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So yeah, with GEO.
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So one of the things that we decided from the very beginning, the goal that we set and I think it initially started out to be a stretch goal, but I think we're going to blow past it we wanted to have 500 people on a pre-launch list.
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There's a book that I read not too long ago from Ryan Daniel Moran that kind of laid out what his building a brand kind of process looks like.
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And that's really one of the first things that he does is and he calls it a tiny little audience of about a hundred people and the power that something like that has and his mechanism for getting those a hundred people on a list or just building the brand out in the open from the very beginning.
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And that's what we did.
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So kind of what that looked like for us is, first of all, we have a really unique product did so kind of.
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What that looked like for us is, first of all, we have a really unique product.
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It's a non-alcoholic I don't I hesitate to call it a seltzer, because I think that word's overused but it's essentially a kind of like a seltzer I don't think of like a white claw or a truly but non-alcoholic and with some functional ingredients.
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So you know, I think that they're both of those like the non-alcoholic it's.
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I think it's more of a trend.
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It's not a trend anymore.
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I think it's more of a movement that is kind of spanning the globe as a matter of fact, but then also that functional piece.
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So there's a couple of interesting things about our product.
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We're, I don't want to say a brand new category, because those two categories exist, but we're really the first that's combining those two things.
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So there's a lot of cool things to talk about.
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There's a lot of things that people are already talking about Sober, curious and functional ingredients and supplements and things like that.
00:02:09.581 --> 00:02:16.389
So, building it out in the open, I think this brand lends itself really well to that, because there's, like I said, there's a lot of cool things to talk about.
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But really I just go live once a week and I just talk about you know what happened, and even if it's just kind of hey, we just got new samples from our, from our manufacturer.
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We didn't love them.
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Here's, you know, we made a whole bunch of changes to flavors and potentially the bitterness of a particular ingredient.
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So really just building it out in the open and having a discussion around some things.
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But we've used that kind of our socials to ask them about flavor names and you know if they thought that we should go with dual fruit flavors as opposed to kind of mocktail names and like we've actually used the little bit of an audience that we have.
00:02:50.701 --> 00:02:55.362
I mean, we probably have a couple hundred followers across all of our socials that are organic.
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Yes, we do have some friends and family, but we do have some people that just came from just organic posting.
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We're posting pretty regularly and we actually we hired a social media agency to handle a lot of that for us, as opposed to us having to post ourselves and come up with that content.
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So really for us it's building it out in the open, kind of getting people excited about the brand, but also getting them on a pre-launch list is kind of how we're approaching this brand.
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I mean, we're still a month and a half away from, hopefully, when we launch and we already have a couple of hundred people on that pre-launch list, which is going to be like fuel to the fire once we get ready to launch.
00:03:29.860 --> 00:03:32.268
So, matt, if you could share a little bit, what did that buildup look like?
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I mean, because obviously when you start a new brand you start from zero.
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So, social media wise, how long did it take kind of posting and putting some content out there and doing those lives before you started to see more than a handful of followers?
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So initially it started like I feel like Instagram and Facebook are slow in that you know there's not from an organic standpoint, you don't really get a lot of exposure in the beginning.
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Tiktok, on the other hand, if you're posting regular content now, we haven't really got to the place where we're posting really engaging content yet, because we really need the cans in order to actually create content, the kind of content that we want.
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Really.
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Our brand is built around.
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What we know about people that are going to consume our products is that they do consume alcohol.
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They're not people that don't, but they're also people that enjoy social activities.
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They like going to baseball games and festivals and concerts, but they don't want to drink alcohol on a Tuesday night.
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So, like those types of people, I think it's hard to build up just from an organic standpoint.
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On Facebook and Instagram, we haven't really spent anything on advertising because we don't have a product to sell yet.
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So I would say where a lot of our organic followers have come from are just regular posting.
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On TikTok Now, again, it's not great content yet because we don't have actual cans.
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It's just kind of informational and educational about some of the ingredients that we're using, but I would say, the vast majority of the organic followers that aren't friends and family or people that know other brands that we work with, all came from TikTok, for the most part.
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We have a couple videos that have gotten over a thousand views.
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I mean nothing viral yet and I don't expect that to happen anytime soon but it has created, it has amounted to followers on all three of those main platforms Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
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All right and I think that's a really good example of if you're launching a new brand or a new product, of maybe what that looks like.
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As far as social media, I think what I want to do now is Mike is pivot to you because you have an email list and a brand within the pool tools category that maybe isn't, as you know, social media, sexy as something you know and kind of in the zeitgeist, like what Matt's working on.
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So talk to me about you know how you've built that audience and how you're building kind of that community and then leveraging that community in order to move the brand forward.
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I mean, we've talked about this a number of times because obviously we were very focused on kind of the post-purchase process, especially for Amazon sellers, and what that means in terms of the ability to build a brand, and what does that actually look like?
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How do you define building a brand right?
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And I would say that from our perspective, amazon is great.
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You can make a lot of sales there, there's a lot of volume, but if you're not building that list, of course you're in jeopardy always because Amazon could always shut you down.
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We've talked about that a lot, but in our case it was the warranty that we utilized in order to build that list.
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It was a fairly simple means.
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To an end, we have a really, really high-powered warranty, and so it just makes it that much more likely that someone will register after the fact.
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We do a number of things in our product packaging to encourage that even further.
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One of those is making sure that you know we either use a hang tag or we use something similar that it requires the user to interact with that insert in some way before they can actually use the product, rather than just tossing it out with the box or whatever.
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You don't have to remove it.
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I can't just ignore it.
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That has improved our registrations, making sure that there are additional reasons for them to register.
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There's a contest that they're entering and that sort of thing.
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So we get pretty good registration rates.
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But the biggest thing is is that once you have them on the list, you have to do something with it.
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A cold list is not of that much value.
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So if you add a bunch of customers to a list but you never send them any emails, then you haven't really accomplished anything and you certainly aren't building a brand.
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So the biggest thing is is that we do have an automated process that sends out I don't know about 30 emails, something like that, maybe a little less, that are automated on a weekly basis, so that you know for essentially, you know, six months.
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You know they're receiving regular mailings from us that are basically telling them how to maintain their pool, how to use our tools better.
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You know other product recommendations of different brands, things that we think they might want to pay attention to, stuff like that.
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But then also the way that we end up using that in a community sense is that we also build our we'll say not the brand out in the open necessarily so much.
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But each individual product launch becomes public in the sense that we're launching it in front of our community, which is our email list.
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So from start to finish, that process involves them.
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So at the first steps, it's what would be the new products that you would want to see.
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Then we take that and we narrow that down to the ones that we think we have the best shot at being the best of category that fit our warranty structure effectively, that we think there's improvements that we can make that are significant within the industry.
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Then we go back to the list and we say, ok, these are the three that we think are the best options for ProTuff.
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Which one would you want?
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And they vote again.
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And so, ok, whichever one is voted, then we go forward with that.
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Or maybe we go forward with all three, if they're all great.
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But then as we walk through that, as we're, you know, designing the product, as we're adding features what features do you want to see?
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What are the features that you hate about other products?
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What color would you want it to be?
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You know.
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And then, once we get the product developed, then the prototypes you know who wants to be a beta tester, things like that.
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So it's all very organic and, again, if you've been listening to the podcast for long enough, you probably already heard that messaging.
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But I think it's important to recognize that as you do that it does build that very community nature where they feel like they're a part of the brand.
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They feel like they're a part of something bigger.
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And when you launch those products, anybody on your list that has any amount of use, let's say, for that product that you're about to launch is going to buy.
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They are absolutely going to buy it, and you don't have to give a 50% off discount.
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10% or 15% or 20% is oftentimes enough to stimulate a pretty significant purchase rate out of that community, to stimulate a pretty significant purchase rate out of that community.
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And so the ease with which you can launch products that way and the profitability of those launches is miles ahead of anything that you can do if you don't have that community built.
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And it doesn't matter where that community is.
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I would say that email is good because it's your community.
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If you build it on social, it's not technically yours.
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You can be shut down at any time, just the same way that Amazon could shut you down on their platform.
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So in that sense, I would suggest that building a community via social is a means to an end, and I think the end should still be an email list at the end of the day.
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But social is a very useful, you know, avenue for doing that, especially on the front end.
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If you don't have a brand, you don't have a product where you've got inserts in the back end that you're, you know, funneling into a list.
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If you don't have any of that yet, then social is a tremendous avenue and mostly socials that have that kind of organic component where you don't have to pay for traffic on the front end.
00:11:01.546 --> 00:11:13.345
So TikTok, youtube Live or YouTube Shorts, that sort of thing I think are tremendous and I would also say for anybody who has a very unsexy product like pool cleaning tools.
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We have been actually amazed at the fact that our TikTok content, even though none of it is particularly viral in nature, it's not all that terribly interesting.
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You know some of it is UGC, you know reviews and things like that, but a lot of it isn't.
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I have been amazed to find that our average view count per video is about 500 views, which you know if you're posting regularly.
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500 views on every single video that you put out.
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That's a lot of eyeballs on your brand and every once in a while especially if you're getting in that 500, every once in a while you're going to kick off one that gets a few thousand or 10,000.
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So if your product is not a sexy product, I would say do not discount the usefulness of social platforms like TikTok.
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I did for quite a long time I ignored TikTok, assuming that we really just weren't a good fit.
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Turns out I think we are actually a decent fit and we actually have some ideas about how to be much more interesting on that platform and possibly gain some virality for some of our videos.
00:12:19.125 --> 00:12:21.068
So we could talk about that some more.
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Yeah, I think that's such an important point is that you know, depending on where you're at with your brand and in that kind of process, like you know, you might have a brand and products that are in the zeitgeist that already have, naturally you know, kind of audiences that are very engaged, built into them, and sometimes you don't.
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And if you don't, you know what I like about that.
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Mike is thinking about hey, how can I take an angle in order to make this, you know, unsexy product brand category, whatever it happens to be, how can I make it interesting?
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So I think you know that's a really good point.
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Before we dive into that, though, I'm just really curious, based on what you said for your email list, because I think this is so important, I just want to double click on it is that you know, yes, having an after purchase you know system is really important in order to collect those email addresses because you can take those with you anywhere.
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But having that interaction and building up that community, like just collecting that email address is not enough, like you do actually have to send out email messages.
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I'm curious on those kind of 30 messages um, how long did it take you in order to build that and how you know what is.
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Is that something that you look at like once a quarter or how do you?
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What does maintenance on that look like?
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Sure, If I'm being completely honest, maintenance on that has been zero for quite a long time.
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You know we have added some additional.
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You know, when an article came up that we thought was useful, maybe we've added that as an email, but as a rule maintenance on it has been nil.
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I wouldn't recommend that.
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I don't think that's the best approach.
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Fortunately, most of the content that's in there is very evergreen content within the pool space.
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So you know it's not that big of a deal that we haven't really done that.
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But we also haven't taken the time to to split test any of them.
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You know, check different subject headings, you know things like that.
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Like, we is more brand loyalty than it is anything that that customers really have come to that place where they just really love our brand because of who we are and what we do for them.
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And so when we send an email, a lot of times I think our open rates have a lot less to do with how interesting the email is and more to do with the fact of who sent it.
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And so they just open it, right, like maybe there's a little tidbit in here that might be useful to me, you know, even if the subject heading isn't particularly interesting, right?
00:15:01.640 --> 00:15:05.652
So we get now and we've talked about this before so we have to be careful with.
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You know citing numbers without qualifying it, but we get about a 50% open rate for every email that we send out.
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Obviously, that's not accurate.
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Apple users you know that that credits it as opened, you know, even if it's not technically open.
00:15:18.745 --> 00:15:25.148
So I'm sure that our open rates are not actually 50%, but everybody has to track it the same way.
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You don't have a way to track it any other way.
00:15:27.211 --> 00:15:37.001
So if you're comparing against most other email lists out there, we have a much higher open rate than most other email lists and I think most of that comes down to they're very brand loyal.
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It doesn't have so much to do with how interesting the emails are, it's that they really love our brand.
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So, on that front, if you want people to open your emails, do good things for them, treat them well, have a really amazing product with a terrific warranty and wonderful customer service and all of those things right, because if you're doing those things right, even if you are incredibly boring, they will still pay attention to you just because they like you.
00:16:02.720 --> 00:16:08.241
Yeah, I think that's the key point is, again, you know the authenticity piece of it and taking care of people.
00:16:08.241 --> 00:16:12.101
Like I know, as you know, someone who spends a lot of time marketing.
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We get I get caught in this trap of like, oh, what is the perfect, you know wording for that subject line and the best copy and that type of stuff and yeah, those things can help but, at the end of the day, like, people want to connect with other people and so if you're authentic but you know outside of that email, then you're going to see your open rates be a lot higher and your marketing overall be a lot more effective, because people really are interested in what you're doing as a brand and who you are as a person, in addition to having a really good product a real, a really big part, not just emails but also, like you, mike mentioned TikTok.
00:16:51.017 --> 00:17:00.527
I think I really do think that their algorithm is significantly based on consistency and how often you're posting.
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I think that is, in a lot of cases, as important as the quality of the post, especially in the beginning when TikTok doesn't really know who you are who to show your videos to.
00:17:09.800 --> 00:17:12.230
So I think consistency is a big part of that.
00:17:12.230 --> 00:17:37.472
But one of the things I wanted to say about an audience and for me, when I started thinking about starting an Amazon brand, my experience was with a healthy meal prep business that we launched about 10 years previous and the audience that we attached ourselves to wasn't one that I created personally, but it was one that already existed, that my product or my service was complimentary to.
00:17:37.472 --> 00:17:41.871
So the CrossFit community ate paleo food.
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That was kind of where they went hand in hand.
00:17:44.420 --> 00:17:54.982
So my meal service was a paleo meal service that we went and marketed to CrossFit gyms, meal service that we went and marketed to CrossFit gym.
00:17:54.982 --> 00:18:03.710
So because I created a win-win scenario for the CrossFit gym owner, it was a value add for his gym, but also we gave him an affiliate commission for any meals that he sold delivered to his gym.
00:18:03.710 --> 00:18:05.602
So he was incentivized to tell people.
00:18:05.602 --> 00:18:06.806
But they wanted it anyway.
00:18:06.886 --> 00:18:18.012
So, like I didn't have to do, michael went the long route on building his list and because of that they're very super engaged, they trust him, they know him, they like him, they know the brand.
00:18:18.012 --> 00:18:22.961
Like he said, for me it was an audience that had already existed, so I didn't.
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It wasn't I don't want to say the easy way, because there was still a lot of work involved in creating those relationships and that kind of stuff.
00:18:28.645 --> 00:18:35.648
But you don't have to create a list or an audience from scratch, like there are other existing groups out there.
00:18:35.648 --> 00:18:43.769
The other thing that we were able to kind of piggyback along with were Facebook groups, not only in the CrossFit space but also for our Amazon brands.
00:18:43.769 --> 00:18:55.488
You know, like our, my first brand was a barbecue accessories brand and we partnered with a Facebook group that had about 40,000 members in it that were all super passionate about barbecuing and smoking meat and things like that.
00:18:55.568 --> 00:19:03.323
So again, it wasn't an audience that I created, but it was one that we attached to the brand and a lot of things become a lot easier.
00:19:03.323 --> 00:19:20.684
So for me, I think that one of the things that I want to make sure that people understand while we're talking about this is that building an audience is a specialized skill I think that not a lot of people have not everybody has, certainly and there's a lot of people out there that have that skill but don't know how to monetize the audience that they've created.
00:19:20.684 --> 00:19:27.244
So, matching your brand with an existing audience, it makes sense and it's not big and scary.
00:19:27.244 --> 00:19:33.954
It's just reaching out to Facebook group owners and saying, hey, you know, I have this brand idea, you have an audience for it.
00:19:33.954 --> 00:19:35.878
How can we, how can we come together?
00:19:35.878 --> 00:19:41.361
So I think that's also a really good way to leverage an audience with one that you didn't have to build yourself.
00:19:41.741 --> 00:20:00.671
I think people would be really shocked actually to to learn just how many individuals there are out there that have managed to build a community, and and I would I would say that many of them have built the community by accident, like it was not ever intended to be what it's become.
00:20:00.671 --> 00:20:11.625
Right, they were just very genuine individuals that were very passionate about some particular topic or some sport or whatever it was, and this community just became.
00:20:11.625 --> 00:20:20.255
And so now those people are in the position of they recognize that there's value in that community.
00:20:20.255 --> 00:20:27.181
They recognize that other people are monetizing their communities, so there's really no reason they shouldn't also be able to do so.
00:20:27.181 --> 00:20:28.903
But they don't know how.
00:20:28.903 --> 00:20:34.230
Most of them don't have any business experience, they don't have any marketing experience, they don't really know any of that.
00:20:34.230 --> 00:20:38.284
And so you know there is a goldmine out there.
00:20:39.007 --> 00:20:47.529
If you would just simply take the time to look for communities that already exist, where the people that you want to sell to are already in that community.
00:20:47.529 --> 00:21:02.125
If you reach out to 20 communities, even if you don't do anything else other than determine that they're in the right target market, right Like they have the right people, you don't even have to research anything else, just reach out to them and make the offer, like, hey, I see that you've got a list.
00:21:02.125 --> 00:21:03.648
You know you've got this community.
00:21:03.648 --> 00:21:06.923
It looks like you know everybody really loves you and what you're doing.
00:21:06.923 --> 00:21:11.551
You know we have this product that we think would be or the service that we think would be really amazing for them.
00:21:11.912 --> 00:21:13.734
You know, could we partner up in some way?
00:21:13.734 --> 00:21:25.673
You would be surprised I would be amazed if at least two or three of those you know community leaders didn't reach back out to you and say, oh, I'm so glad you contacted me.
00:21:25.673 --> 00:21:27.462
I have no idea how to monetize this list.
00:21:27.462 --> 00:21:29.647
I would love to do that Right now.
00:21:29.647 --> 00:21:35.901
You might get 17 people who don't respond or who respond back and they're like, nah, I know what I'm doing, I don't need your help, whatever.
00:21:35.901 --> 00:21:41.682
But if you get two or three responses back to say, oh yeah, we'd love to do that, what could you do with that?
00:21:41.682 --> 00:21:43.710
I think you know there's, there's gold there.
00:21:45.220 --> 00:22:05.309
Well, and just to piggyback off of that, you know, one thing that comes to my mind, that's been in the news a little bit recently, is, if you think about who the you know, the ultimate YouTube creator is at least right now, it's Mr Beast, who has dipped his toes into a number of different types of products and actually run into some pretty significant problems.
00:22:05.871 --> 00:22:23.778
And so I bring that up because, you know, most of the listeners of this podcast and the people in our community really know how to develop a product, how to get it manufactured and how to make a really good product that people are really going to want to buy, and that is a whole other different skill set.
00:22:23.778 --> 00:22:29.885
So I think that's really important to keep in mind is that, matt, like you said, these are very different skill sets.
00:22:29.885 --> 00:22:46.329
I mean, obviously Mr Beast is amazing at building an audience and making really engaging YouTube videos, but doesn't have, you know, the expertise at that same level, for you know, launching a brand and products and need somebody with that experience.
00:22:46.329 --> 00:23:07.455
And so you know, maybe it's not to the Mr Beast level, but there's a lot of other creators out there that have built communities that you know don't have a tenth of the experience of you, know the people that are listening to this podcast do and what it takes in order to develop a product, get it manufactured and get it delivered to customers.
00:23:08.457 --> 00:23:13.482
For sure, deliver to customers For sure.
00:23:13.482 --> 00:23:20.205
I don't know what her name is, and by the time this episode goes live, I want to be able to give her credit, because I heard her speak on stage and I think, michael, you probably did too at one of the BDSS events.
00:23:20.205 --> 00:23:29.009
I don't remember her name, but this is what she does she pairs influencers or celebrities with physical product brands.
00:23:29.009 --> 00:23:33.655
Janelle, janelle or yeah, janelle or Janelle.
00:23:33.980 --> 00:23:39.589
Yeah, we need to give her some sort of credit in the show notes or something like that, but I mean that's what she does.
00:23:40.579 --> 00:23:49.019
This is exactly what she does, I think, now because she's perfected the finding someone that has the eyeballs and connecting them with a physical product brand.
00:23:49.019 --> 00:23:53.066
I think she's actually creating the brand from scratch for a lot of these influencers.
00:23:53.066 --> 00:23:55.922
Now Janelle Page, I think, is that her last name?
00:23:56.483 --> 00:23:57.567
I believe that's correct.
00:23:57.606 --> 00:24:02.980
I'm trying to find her right now actually, but yeah, this is what she does and it's essentially what I did with the Facebook group.
00:24:02.980 --> 00:24:22.086
Now, obviously he wasn't an influencer, but I would argue that there's 100,000 members in his group now are probably more engaged than if I were to have gone and found just like a the rock influencer or something along those lines Like I have a hundred thousand people that these are the guys that are out checking their brisket at two o'clock in the morning.
00:24:22.086 --> 00:24:28.826
They aren't someone that just signed up for something free on an email list or saw someone in a movie and decided to hit follow on their social profile.
00:24:28.826 --> 00:24:31.592
Like these are people that are very interested in what we sell.
00:24:31.592 --> 00:24:40.829
So I would say that that audience is probably more engaged than me going out and finding someone that has a million followers of just kind of random people.
00:24:40.829 --> 00:24:52.554
So, yes, I mean she does that and she's made a lot of very successful brands just by pointing eyeballs that already existed in one place and pointed them to products that they were already buying anyways.
00:24:53.580 --> 00:24:59.172
It is Janelle Page that is P-A-G-E and she's terrific and, man, she got a lot of energy.
00:24:59.172 --> 00:25:00.673
I'll tell you what, that's for sure.
00:25:01.759 --> 00:25:20.381
Well, Matt, you bring up a really good point, because I think it circles back to you know, something you mentioned earlier, which is, you know some people might get caught up in hey, I only have a thousand people on my email list, or only a hundred people following my brand, or, you know, this influencer or community only has 1000 members.
00:25:20.381 --> 00:25:22.606
At the end of the day, it really matters.
00:25:22.606 --> 00:25:28.595
You know how passionate those people are Because, I mean, it's not hard to build an email list with 10,000 emails.
00:25:28.595 --> 00:25:43.627
You know it's pretty easy to do that, but are they going to be people that are, you know, true fans of your brand are going to be engaged and are going to be into the solution that you're providing through your brand and through your products.
00:25:43.627 --> 00:25:55.709
I would much rather take a thousand of those that are really truly engaged, as opposed to an email list of 100,000 people that could care less about the brand or the product that I'm working with.
00:25:56.490 --> 00:25:57.813
Yeah, I agree.
00:25:57.813 --> 00:26:04.029
Yeah, one of the things before we wrap up today that I think is useful to think through.
00:26:04.029 --> 00:26:21.843
I kind of mentioned it earlier, but we talked about this whole social piece and that you can be a boring product and a boring brand and you can still actually have a following there, and especially if you're connecting with the right audience that has a passion for what you do or you know, whatever.
00:26:21.843 --> 00:26:41.538
But there's also an aspect of that where you know and this is the reason why I thought our brand was a bad fit for social, you know is that there's this aspect of how excited do people get or how much are they going to share things, or how viral could you make a video about such and such a brand or topic?
00:26:41.538 --> 00:26:49.180
And you might think well, you know, cleaning pools is not something that you can make viral, and to some degree that's accurate.
00:26:49.180 --> 00:27:01.749
But you know, we actually have come up with a few ideas that I will say we have not yet implemented, but I am entirely convinced that at least one of them, if not more of them, could end up producing some results for us.
00:27:01.749 --> 00:27:18.209
One of them is because we offer an unlimited and unconditional lifetime warranty on our products, what that allows us to do is we're super liberal with the warranty, we'll cover basically anything loss, theft, you know it doesn't matter, right?
00:27:18.209 --> 00:27:23.321
So I don't know how many people in the audience remember this, but there was.
00:27:23.824 --> 00:27:32.212
So Blendtec is like a rival to Vitamix blenders and they had a series that they did that, a bunch of viral videos that they ran.
00:27:32.212 --> 00:27:40.924
It was a series of videos and it was called Will it Blend and the idea was to prove, obviously, how tough a Blendtec blender is and that it can blend up pretty much anything.
00:27:40.924 --> 00:27:46.786
But by extension of that, they were blending up just about anything you can think of.
00:27:46.786 --> 00:27:56.905
So they were throwing iPhones in there and they were throwing in, you know, action figures and broomsticks and you know, I mean whatever you could think of that you might be able to shove in there to try and break a blender.
00:27:56.905 --> 00:28:02.843
That's what they were doing, and every time, of course, it blended it all up and it never broke, you know, and that sort of thing.
00:28:02.843 --> 00:28:06.192
So it became this you know, wow, blendtex are indestructible.
00:28:06.192 --> 00:28:09.901
But it was just fun to watch the videos and see what the next thing was that they were going to blend up.
00:28:11.083 --> 00:28:24.085
So this idea came to me a few weeks ago, which is because of our warranty and because we cover anything doing a series that's and I don't know that this is the right name.
00:28:24.085 --> 00:28:25.570
I'd really love to come up with a better name for it, but is it covered?
00:28:25.570 --> 00:28:27.859
And it would basically just be these stupid antics.
00:28:27.859 --> 00:28:39.769
We need either one or multiple influencers or whatever, who would potentially dress up as either people cleaning their pool or pool pros, whatever it, as either people you know cleaning their pool or pool pros, whatever it is.
00:28:39.769 --> 00:28:48.320
We're thinking we may focus on pool pros, but the idea of all of the ridiculous things that could potentially happen to your pool tools that we would still cover.
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