Part 1 of our 2 episode deep-dive on using data! WE LIVE FOR THIS STUFF.

We talk about:

• (1:00) Sephora vs Ulta: loyalty program comparions and what you should link to during the sale
• (8:00) Q&A: how to use trending products in a way that will convert your audience
• (15:00) How to figure out what content is and is not working for you

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Episode-5-final-mixdown-2

[00:00:10] Monica: that might not

[00:00:20] Monica: Hello and welcome back to inside the click where Monica and Michelle.

[00:00:40] Michelle: Long weekend was great. Um, well, actually it's not going to be a long weekend.

[00:00:52] Michelle: makeup shopping. Okay. That's like pretty much what I spend my money on. Ulta

[00:01:02] Michelle: we had a little post about that. Yep.

[00:01:27] Michelle: And they can be a little more premium than Ulta, though Ulta's like very

[00:01:35] Michelle: Oh, yeah, literally, I got to diamond and I was like, Oh, and then in my first few days, they're like, you get a free diamond gift. And I'm like, Oh, thank you. The

[00:01:53] Monica: And unfortunately, that's where all my points are because my mom and I share an account. Which is a great way [00:02:00] to rack up points, but not when their program is now trash. That's

[00:02:12] Monica: Yeah, it's great. I think this is an interesting thing when it comes to deciding if you're going to link to Ulta though, or link to Sephora.

[00:02:39] Monica: Specifically calling out the loyalty program because everyone's going to say they shot

[00:02:57] Michelle: Nope. And I'm probably not [00:03:00] gonna hit it come this year. Like, I, I can't imagine spending, I think I still need like 400 more dollars at Sephora or something. I'm just like. two things, but. I also think if you pull your audience, like people might say Sephora, even if they're really old talk. Isn't

[00:03:25] Michelle: That's wild. Do you, would you do that? That's what I do. I don't think it's that much extra effort. You can open up Ultra, open up Sephora, make this two links, one for each. And then if you're posting an Instagram stories, for example, just post like one is Ulta. And then you can even say Sephora on the next page.

[00:04:10] Monica: Yeah, that's a good point. But anyway, I'm excited for today's episode because we're talking about data, which I think we work in anyway, but how to understand. Your analytics and what to even do with them. And we know that getting into the weeds of this is a lot. So we're going to break it out where we're not just going to like go through tables and like talk about numbers.

[00:04:51] Monica: it. We have to do the Q and a we're not going to forget it. So the question is how can you [00:05:00] leverage trend reports and customize them, so to speak for your audience?

[00:05:24] Michelle: Yeah, it varies based on what you have shown works for you. So if you have never posted that brand or if you have never posted a sneaker Then it could be I mean anything's always worth trying But I don't know if you could for sure say this is a slam dunk because it's trending Yeah, i've even seen some influencers that will post that and be like This item is trending, and I'm

[00:05:55] Monica: Yeah, so maybe it's like, let's say it's the Adidas Samba sneaker [00:06:00] again. A scenario could be, well, if this is trending, maybe people are thinking about sneakers just in general, and my audience might not like those either, so I'll share with them the sneakers that I actually do wear. Would that work or is that starting to take a trending product and trying to force it to work?

[00:06:19] Michelle: think that you might have to apply one more layer where it's like, okay, if it's the Adidas Samba sneaker Then understanding what the sneaker looks like, what its uses and seeing then how that could translate for a product that is at a brand or a retailer that you know, your audience likes, that could be how you translate it.

[00:07:03] Monica: That's true. One example I'm thinking about is with this Adidas Samba sneaker.

[00:07:34] Monica: And like, I have this Adidas white sweatshirt that I'm obsessed with. I have two of them in the same color. And I'm like, okay, maybe you just play with the actual retailer rather than the item itself. Yep, I like that

[00:07:54] Monica: item.

[00:08:13] Monica: They want to know something else that goes along those lines.

[00:08:32] Michelle: And then you can just indicate there are some trending shoes in here. If you buy them, you might be on the trend, but then you can say, this is what I really like. And Hey, all of these things match and go together. You can also look at your own data. And once you get enough data to have like year over year trends, then you can see what happened, what happened in September of last year and look at some [00:09:00] of those trends and even compare to August, like, Hey, this is what worked last month, last year, then this is what transitioned and worked well for me in September of last year.

[00:09:24] Monica: Yeah. So my massive experiment that I did was create a brand new account from scratch. Because one thing I did know about my Instagram account is that when I took a break from all this blogging stuff and didn't post or.

[00:10:02] Monica: So my reach has always been super, super low. even on stories. So I thought, okay, what if I create a brand new account, start from scratch and compare the data. So I did like a real deep dive for about two, three months, I believe comparing the two side by side. And essentially the conversion I was getting an engagement on the new one was equal to what I was getting on the old account that had like 7, 000 more followers.

[00:10:57] Monica: So then I was like, I'll just try to get the new account [00:11:00] to equal. Old account and call it a day then and switch over as exhausting because I still have to manage the other account. So at the end of the day, I chose the vanity metric over the conversion. And I think that you could argue both ways. I don't think there's a right or wrong.

[00:11:34] Michelle: Actually, question though, if you were to put out some paid content, And basically like through Essentially paying for eyeballs, but then it would kind of right set you.

[00:11:49] Monica: Yeah, I would boost a lot of posts. Sometimes I would do ads And I also bought the blue check mark for two months and it didn't help I mean it [00:12:00] not really not to the percentage that it should the percentage is there enough that I Do get to work with brands. It's not good enough that I want to pitch myself to brands.

[00:12:31] Monica: And it doesn't even matter how, what my conversion is, because you're just going to love working with me so

[00:12:52] Michelle: I'm not an influencer. I just study influencers basically, but. I'm sure that one of [00:13:00] my friends would be like, Oh yeah, like I saw that you use Stanley water bottle. So, I saw that they were on sale when I was at Target and I got one. There's impact like that, that happens all the time. that you're not privy to, that you don't see, you could also be influencing things in that way.

[00:13:47] Monica: The my favorite example of that for my own account is my favorite nighttime snack is a bowl of popcorn But then I throw other things in it like goldfish hot cheetos Reese's and it's like [00:14:00] my little Someone called it a something salad like a monica salad or something like that.

[00:14:27] Monica: And then over in Mexico, the Flaming Hot Cheetos came up in a conversation. Someone brought up the extra hot ones, and I was like, I've never had the extra hot ones. And someone else interpreted that as I'd never had them. And one of the girls was like, yes you have, you make them in your, your bowl every night.

[00:14:52] Michelle: Yes. And that's why it's also important that all of the content that you post is not just like link, link, sale, [00:15:00] link. Even in zooming a step out. If you look at your performance for something, don't forget looking a few days before or even like a few weeks before what types of content did you post that's leading to higher engagement.

[00:15:45] Michelle: If you relax your eyes, you should be able to kind of just tell what's happening. So if you put all of your like high performing posts over on one side, like the images of them, like drag them over in your, I don't know, like Apple [00:16:00] notes and then put all of your low performing images by each other or posts even, right.

[00:16:30] Monica: people's

[00:16:31] Michelle: Yeah. But let's just say that in this instance that they, that the selfie was not good. So. Yeah. Then you're like, okay, like I shouldn't really post selfies. I mean, I still see some creators posting text posts on Facebook and it drives me nuts. Awful. No one's gonna click on that. No. No one's gonna even see it probably.

[00:17:21] Michelle: Here's what doesn't work.

[00:17:41] Monica: I am not doing the same stuff. What worked when I had a successful Instagram account was I wasn't on stories all the time, chatting with my audience about random things that happening in my day to day. Like there was one instance where I, so I love Hallmark [00:18:00] Christmas movies and Hallmark had released an app so that you could start checking off.

[00:18:30] Monica: So I got on Instagram stories and I was like, y'all, you need to help me like a mass delete all this for my Google calendars, like telling this whole situation. I was having like followers as boyfriends, like trying to like help tech solve this, like this whole thing. And there was always something like once a week, ridiculous like that, that I would do where like, I would go.

[00:19:20] Monica: I would say almost like do kind of that exercise that we just did here, too. It was just thinking like, when I enjoyed being a content creator, like, let's say your burnout, think back to when you enjoyed being a content creator. What were you doing? Because there's probably something that happened between then and now that made you start to alter something.

[00:19:50] Michelle: Yeah, it's weird too when it becomes more of like a job. That's what's always really tricky is that sometimes [00:20:00] And I know that there's people that like make it out there as like musicians and like models and whatnot.

[00:20:34] Michelle: Like, that's like fun. And you're not like, okay, I need to do this and that. And then I need to make sure that this post makes me 5, 000. And it removes a lot of the creativity. So people that are trying to take that next step. I think that that is why looking at data is very important so you can figure out here's the money makers.