Ep. 45: How to Use Social Media to Reach Your Audience

00:00:01

Andrea Marquez: Social media, it can be a powerful tool for your business if you use it correctly. It can help you get more customers, highlight new products and grow your brand. If you're starting a business, you're probably already trying to figure out how to make social media work for you. How do you keep up with all these trends? Should you even try? What content should you be posting and how often?  

To answer these questions, I've enlisted the help of Kat Norton, the founder of the incredibly successful Miss Excel, a company that teaches Microsoft Excel to individuals, businesses, and educational institutions. Kat knows her way around a spreadsheet, and she absolutely rocks the social media landscape. We're going to find out how she does it.

00:00:45

Kat Norton: When it comes to taking these different social media concepts and really boiling them down into those different niche audiences, it really comes down to authenticity. So for me, my three favorite things were Excel, dancing and helping people. So melding those together is what really helped our content take off.

00:01:03

Andrea Marquez: Kat manages to make using Excel fun. Those are two words I never thought I'd say in the same sentence. Miss Excel now has over 2 million followers across all her social media platforms. She'll be sharing the secrets to her growth throughout the episode.  

Hi, I'm Andrea Marquez, and This is Small Business, a podcast brought to you by Amazon. Welcome to season four. With more than 60 episodes under my belt, I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, and something that keeps coming up is social media. It's such a powerful tool and can reach so many people if you do it right. So today we'll be talking about social media and how to reach your audience.  

00:01:50

Kat Norton: It really happens through infusing our social media content with the element of fun. So whether it's dancing, which is really how our content got started, I was dancing to the different Excel functions on TikTok or now we integrate fun talking videos and we're always just experimenting with what is trending.

00:02:09

Andrea Marquez: Before all of the success, Kat was working a corporate job and then the pandemic hit.

00:02:14

Kat Norton: I had found myself with the start of the pandemic back in my childhood bedroom of my parents' house. I was buried in student debt, really trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and I started digging into mindset work. I was like, “Why am I playing it small? What can I do?” So I was really going through and unwiring a bunch of limiting beliefs I had that were keeping me at my corporate job, playing it safe when I knew there was something much bigger I wanted to do.

00:02:42

Andrea Marquez: Kat was already teaching Excel on the side, and she loved doing it. So she gets on a call with a friend to figure out a side hustle she could do with her skills.

00:02:51

Kat Norton: And I'll never forget, she goes, “What if you put the Excel tips on TikTok?” And I was like, “TikTok? I have a corporate job. I can't just post myself on TikTok.” And I had so much resistance, but intuitively I knew. I got this lightning bolt hit where I saw it, and I could not shake this thought.

00:03:09

Andrea Marquez: A few days go by and Kat just can't stop thinking about it.

00:03:13

Kat Norton: And I'm in tears so conflicted about making this TikTok account. So I'm like, “You know what? It's going to be a secret.” So I created this secret TikTok account Miss Excel, and the only people who knew I was doing it was my mother and my boyfriend, and I started silently just posting one video a day of these fun Excel tip videos.

00:03:35

Andrea Marquez: And then the views start rolling in.

00:03:37

Kat Norton: By the fourth video, it reaches a hundred thousand views and gets pushed to all these people I know. And then by the sixth video, the CEO of an IT company reaches out and it's like, “Hey, I love your teaching style. I'm looking to create G Suite training videos,” so the Google version of everything I was doing for students, parents and teachers because this is when the schools were going digital, and clearly I'm a Microsoft gal, but I was like, “Okay, I can learn these different products. I'll just take this side hustle.”

00:04:08

Andrea Marquez: After a couple of weeks of posting daily, her first video goes viral.

00:04:13

Kat Norton: And next thing you know I've had a video hit 3. 7 million views, and I had a hundred thousand TikTok followers. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, what do I do with this?”

00:04:22

Andrea Marquez: Kat creates an Instagram account that keeps going viral. In a few months, she gets a few thousand followers across both platforms.

00:04:30

Kat Norton: I had a business coach reach out just being like, “Knock, knock, what you doing over there? It seems like you have a pretty big following and you don't even have a link in your bio.” And I was like, “Whoa, touche.” So I took two weeks off from my day job, and I built the most fun, cool creative Excel course I possibly could think of because at this point if you've seen my content, your girl cannot have a boring course.

00:04:53

Andrea Marquez: She then designs a video Excel training course, and within a few weeks of releasing it, she's already making more money from the course than she does at her job, so she quits.

00:05:04

Kat Norton: And at that point it was still just me in the business, and I cranked out nine more courses across the entire Microsoft Office suite, started bundling them together, selling on webinars, and that's how I scaled it into a multi seven figure business. I have the most incredible team now who really helps us continue to scale this and grow this because I know we're just at the tip of the iceberg given the majority of companies use Excel.

00:05:28

Andrea Marquez: I love that optimism. But Kat started her business off the back of her social media success. She made content she loves, then developed a product to go with it. I think most small business owners do the opposite, start the business first, then work to make a social media strategy that works for them. Our next guest is one of those people.

00:05:47

Sarah Nguyen: I'm a first generation Vietnamese- American born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Both of my parents are refugees from the Vietnam War. So that context, that historical context for my family is really important because it's a huge foundation for who I am as a person, my connection to culture and my current business, Nguyen Coffee Supply.

00:06:06

Andrea Marquez: That's the founder and CEO Sarah Nguyen. She buys coffee beans from a farmer in Vietnam and then roasts them in Brooklyn, New York.

00:06:14

Sarah Nguyen: And the reason why I started my company was because prior to this I actually couldn't find a fresh- roasted single- origin, Vietnamese coffee bean, let alone a robust bean anywhere in the U. S market.

00:06:25

Andrea Marquez: After doing some research, Sarah also found out that Vietnam is the second- largest producer of coffee in the world.

00:06:31

Sarah Nguyen: Most people don't know this. And for me, that was an issue around lack of transparency, visibility and representation.

00:06:38

Andrea Marquez: And the way Sarah represents Nguyen Coffee Supply on social media reflects that. She makes sure to keep inclusivity in mind when creating content around her brand.

00:06:48

Sarah Nguyen: Because that's what we need as a coffee community to expand and for the change that we want to create on an institutional and systemic level. This change being how do we be more inclusive of coffee origins that have been historically underrepresented? So in order for us to create this systemic institutional shift, we know that we need to create a narrative shift, and that's why storytelling the video is so powerful for us.

00:07:09

Andrea Marquez: Sarah's background is in documentary filmmaking. She's produced documentaries for PBS, NBC and Vice. So video was the way to go. Sarah's primary social media platform is Instagram, then TikTok, YouTube coming in third. She's done a lot of work around telling the company's origin story, but in general, she likes to focus her content around education and storytelling.

00:07:31

Sarah Nguyen: On our YouTube, we have a whole Vietnamese coffee guide. It's a series where you can learn everything about Vietnamese coffee. We also have a general brew guide on Instagram and TikTok as a combination of the coffee education along with the founder's storytelling and also the cultural community storytelling.

00:07:48

Andrea Marquez: I love that Sarah centers her own story in her business social media. Scrolling through Nguyen Coffee Supply's social media pages made me feel like I was part of the brand. Sarah wasn't just selling coffee, she was building a community. But according to Miss Excel, also known as Kat Norton, using a storytelling approach in your social media might not work for everyone.

00:08:09

Kat Norton: Personally, my brand is a different audience than the Excel brand. The Excel brand is definitely more technical, and they want those tangible tips. So I do think it does depend on the brand, but I always encourage you to test it. Another aspect of that though is people buy from people. So you want to come through and make sure that even if they don't know the story of how I started Miss Excel or they don't care about that, they just want their tips, I make sure my personality is coming through in those videos so that we are connecting, and I'm sitting down, and I'm helping you, and I'm coming through the screen versus just a cold screen with no person behind it.

00:08:42

Andrea Marquez: And even though there's a ton of pros that come with being a founder led brand, Sarah noticed a few cons.

00:08:49

Sarah Nguyen: The challenges are the expectation for someone in my position to constantly play that role of creating content telling stories when I'm also a full- time operator. I'm a solo founder. I'm the CEO, and I'm deeply operating. And so it's all about sustainability for me as a human and for the company.

00:09:07

Andrea Marquez: How do you learn to adapt your social media strategy based on what your audience wants? Sarah uses data.

00:09:13

Sarah Nguyen: Each platform is very unique, and what works on one platform, may or may not work on the other platform. I think there are instances where we can use a piece of content as the root and then iterate, cut it up and repurpose for different platforms. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it won't, and sometimes you'll just need a complete different content strategy altogether.  

We spent a lot of time just comparing content strategy and performance and data on both Instagram and TikTok. And what we often found was a piece of content that did well on TikTok would not do well on Instagram and vice versa. And then we would dissect the reasons why. Really short form six seconds do really well on TikTok, but that may not be as engaging on Instagram because Instagram, I think, there's a little bit more space and bandwidth for maybe 15 seconds. I know it sounds wild, but 15 seconds, it makes a big difference, 15 to 30 seconds up to 60 seconds for that more extended education of storytelling.

00:10:04

Andrea Marquez: And if you try to post anything longer than that-

00:10:08

Sarah Nguyen: It'll just flop because people don't stare at their phones for three minutes.

00:10:11

Andrea Marquez: Kat has a slightly different approach. She would use the same video but would change up the audio depending on what's trending on each platform.

00:10:19

Kat Norton: So what we do is we film and edit everything off of the app so we don't have to deal with watermarks or anything like that. If we did make a specific piece of content for a certain platform, maybe there is a certain song trending on TikTok that's not available on Instagram, in that case, we would make something more TikTok specific. But overall, it really comes down to creating that content once and then getting it into the right format and underlaying the right music.

00:10:47

Andrea Marquez: We'll dig deeper into trends in a minute, but before that, I wanted to quickly go over how Sarah uses TikTok and Instagram. She says that TikTok is treated like a discovery platform where they test and try new things, but she's not as experimental with her Instagram account.

00:11:02

Sarah Nguyen: Let's say there was someone new who was discovering us for the first time when they go visit our Instagram page, can they understand our brand immediately in the first nine blocks? Whereas TikTok, it's like random content all day, and you can go to a TikTok page and you don't even know anything about it. So then that was a silly funny video.

00:11:18

Andrea Marquez: And according to Kat, the most important thing is trying new things because you never know what'll strike big.

00:11:24

Kat Norton: I feel like that experimenter's mindset is something that really helped me go viral 10- 20 plus times at this point because I'm not really going into it trying to force something and coming from that lack space energetically like, “Oh, I need this to happen. I need this to go viral or my business won't do well.” I go into it as like, “Let's try this. Let's see how it works.” And then it's a matter of, “Okay, now we've just up leveled. We have hundreds of thousands of followers or millions of followers,” which for me, that was a big part of my story. In three days, I went from a thousand followers to over a hundred thousand and I was like, “Oh, what do I do?” And that's really where layering in the business acumen comes into play and structuring something around that that will serve that audience.

00:12:08

Andrea Marquez: Even if the viral video doesn't really align with your brand, you can still make the most of it.

00:12:13

Kat Norton: I hear this all the time where people go viral with the most random video, and they're like, “What the heck? My account is about this, but I went viral on a knitting video,” or something so random that's not core to the brand. And I look at it, I'm like, “It is still a business opportunity.” For example, I had hundreds of thousands of followers, no mailing list, no product, and a business coach just happened to reach out to me being like, “Hey, I noticed you have a lot of followers there and zero product.” And I was like, “Oh, light bulb moment. Maybe I should get that course out there.”

The right steps will find you, so I wouldn't worry as much about that. In due time, it all does work out. But if you do have the extra time to start researching how to grow an online or digital business, if that's the space you're in or whatever space you're in, I do recommend doing that. But don't let it hold you back because a lot of the times you can't even predict what's going to happen. And that has been my entire trajectory of my business is just learning how to pivot and being really adaptable and just being ready when the opportunities come my way to be able to be like, “All right, let's do it and not get overwhelmed.”

00:13:19

Andrea Marquez: And, of course, we can't talk about social media without mentioning trends. I feel like it must be so stressful to stay up to date with all the new trends and figure out which ones to follow. Sarah spent a whole year experimenting with trends on TikTok.

00:13:31

Sarah Nguyen: I think from a team bandwidth perspective, it felt like we were constantly chasing something. At times, it could be decentering in our brand identity, brand voice, brand mission. Now we're at a place in our marketing strategy and juncture where we're not focused on trends. If something comes up and we feel really inspired and we feel like it's aligned with another pillar, we can engage, but we're no longer actively following, actively tracking and quickly creating content to hop onto that trend.

00:13:59

Andrea Marquez: So when Sarah experimented with trends, she realized that it doesn't really work for her brand. She only hops onto a trend if she feels inspired and it aligns, but every business is different. So if you do want to actively follow trends, here's Kat breaking down the process.

00:14:15

Kat Norton: When you see a trend that you like, I always mark it down, and typically when we create content, we batch it. So I'll every week or so go through and look at those different video ideas that I saved down, those different trending songs and music and then go after them in those times.

00:14:31

Andrea Marquez: Okay, so step one is research. Find the trends you want to follow and write them down.

00:14:36

Kat Norton: And depending on the size of your team, you may have certain things in place where the whole team has to go in and approve the content or the script. And I would really recommend in cases like that, taking a step back and looking at where you can optimize that process.

00:14:50

Andrea Marquez: And step two, set guidelines for which trends you want to follow. Maybe you want to avoid songs with curse words or prefer a specific genre of music that aligns with your brand. Having the specifics on hand can speed up the approval process if you or your team wants to get something out quickly.

00:15:06

Kat Norton: If you have an awesome content creator on your team and they see a trend and they know they have that freedom to be able to go and pick up their phone and knock that out and get it in right when the trend is taking off, that's something that I would really want to enable them to do by simply adding in those guidelines of the different pieces and elements that they would need to follow in order to get that content approved.

00:15:27

Andrea Marquez: And if you plan on following trends-  

00:15:29

Kat Norton: Do something that does feel authentic and light you up. So there's a big trend around realness on social media and authenticity and honesty and just coming through like we are friends versus coming through as like, “I am reading off my teleprompter.” People can tell, one, that lacks authenticity if someone's just reading off the teleprompter looking really stiff. If you look uncomfortable, they feel uncomfortable.

00:15:52

Andrea Marquez: So be authentic to you and your brand.

00:15:59

Kat Norton: There are constantly tons of trends going on at all times. So for me, if I hear a song or if it sparks a certain idea, if you're going through and making those connections, then I think it's a great piece of content to run with. However, if you are struggling to force something that's a circle into a square hole or whatever that saying is, that is really where I'd be like,  “Okay, this doesn't feel as aligned.” Because a big part of content is it is an energy transmission. So when you are going through and creating that content, the user could tell if it's authentic or not. They could tell if you're forcing it or not. So I like to just go after the things that excite me. If the trend feels really good, if it matches with my content style, then I'm like, “Okay, this is something I want to create.”

00:16:41

Andrea Marquez: Even if you know exactly what your content will look like and where you want to put it, you still have to make it. Kat figured out how to create content as efficiently as possible.

00:16:52

Kat Norton: I usually make content maybe two days per month. I'll go through and batch content every couple of weeks. I have a really awesome team now, but before all of that, I was a one woman show from designing the courses, editing the courses, creating the content, customer service. We're now 17,000 students. I was doing it all, and now we have a team of 12. So that definitely helps a lot from the perspective of they can take old dance videos that I have and pair them with different Excel tricks and still be pumping out content every day on the platforms.

00:17:25

Andrea Marquez: That's one way to free up the founder from constantly making content. But if you don't have a team of 12, there are still ways to make the process manageable. Here's how Kat suggests to break it down.  

00:17:34

Kat Norton: I'm doing all different activities that are tapping into that right side of the brain. So I'll be going through and taking a walk in nature, meditating and staying out of my more analytical mind. That's where you got your giant to- do list, your iced coffee, you're knocking things out, and I stay more in that flowy seat, and then I find that the ideas more easily just flow right through. I mark them down.

00:17:57

Andrea Marquez: Then there's the performance day.

00:17:59

Kat Norton: You don't have to get all dressed up every day. If you're filming every day, you can just really go through and take that one day, make your setup.

00:18:06

Andrea Marquez: And finally editing days.

00:18:08

Kat Norton: That's when you're in the zone. I always say it's like my messy bun and I'm sitting there just grinding it out and making those videos. So really separating it out by the different energy types helps you capitalize in each of those areas to be at max capacity versus being 50% all flowy and then trying to get on the camera. And then it really helps to separate it out that way for myself.

00:18:29

Andrea Marquez: It sounds so easy when it's broken down like that. So I was wondering what does the next phase of social media look like?

00:18:38

Kat Norton: It can be hard to tell. I've been to lots of conferences and things where they're like, “Long forms coming back.” A lot of people do really want to see that, but I personally still see from an attention span perspective and people and culture, we just want things fast. We want things packaged fast, we want things done right, and I feel like a big part of that still is in that micro learning space and just having those elements there. But I do really see too a big call for authenticity and content, continuing to plow through and just having that content that stands out. So whenever you see different things happening, different things trending, experimenting, trying things, and pivoting because no matter where it goes, if you're adaptable, you will make that work. So it's hard to sit here and prepare this may happen. It's like, “Okay, if long form's trending, let's go.”  And really having the team ready, having yourself ready, just getting that content and not being too rigid.

00:19:33

Andrea Marquez: I feel like when you're an entrepreneur, you could get stuck in the analysis paralysis phase, so just get started. Sarah didn't even have a social media strategy when she was first starting Nguyen Coffee Supply.

00:19:44

Sarah Nguyen: There was really no thought behind it. There was no constant calendar, there were no pillars. It was literally what do I feel like posting? I think the only thread if you were to really dissect it was this feeling of building in public. That's something that I felt like could be dissected as a common theme in our early social media is all the BTS of me building the brand. Every stage in building a company, getting our first shipment of greens, learning how to roast, meet at the roastery, us packing coffee, going to USPS, building in public was probably the only theme. And because that was their approach, we were just really organic about it.

00:20:20

Andrea Marquez: So if there's one thing you take away from this episode, it's start and don't force it.

00:20:25

Kat Norton: Not everything has to be perfect, and that takes a lot of inner work, especially on the content creator going inward and being like, “Okay, we're releasing the perfectionism, the people pleasing,” all that kind of stuff because it's really important to take a look at ourselves and figure out what is actually standing in our way when it comes to scaling our business. Is it do we need a bigger team? Is it a time thing? Is it a money thing, an energy thing? Unblocking within yourself, whatever that is. And that's what opens it up. And that paired with taking that messy action and not getting all in our heads, waiting for the perfect day to film. Oh, but I need this camera, but I need that. I started all my things on an iPhone. I had no exterior microphone, I didn't have any crazy quality things. I just put myself out there and did the thing. And a lot of times it's that messy action that you take that will lead you to that next step to help you really scale and grow.

00:21:19

Andrea Marquez: I feel like I just got a crash course on everything social media. I love that we got two different perspectives on what kind and how to make content, but a common thread throughout all the advice was make sure to stay authentic and aligned with your brand's values and, of course, be adaptable. We covered a lot in this episode. If you missed anything, don't worry. We've taken notes for you. You can find them at smallbusiness. amazon/ podcasts. Let me know what you think of this episode by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. It's easier if you do it through your phone. If you liked what you heard, I hope you'll share us with anyone else who needs to hear this.  

If you're an aspiring entrepreneur or maybe you already have your small business up and running and you're ready for the next step, a super valuable resource that can help you is the Amazon Small Business Academy. Take the free self- assessment on the Amazon Small Business Academy site at www. smallbusiness. amazon. That's it for today's episode of This Is Small Business, brought to you by Amazon. I'm your host, Andrea Marquez. Hasta luego, and thanks for listening. This is Small Businesses brought to you by Amazon with technical and story production by JAR Audio.