#392 – Social Media Strategies For Amazon & Walmart Sellers

In this episode, Bradley welcomes back Selene Dior, CEO of Vitae Apparel, to talk about some updates on her business and how she’s helping the Project X brand, Manny’s Mysterious Oddities, crush it on Instagram. We also cover the latest trends in social media marketing for E-commerce, Amazon, and Walmart brands. Like, Instagram Collaboration posts, what are the first steps you need to take before working with influencers, utilizing user-generated content in your social media, how giveaways can increase your following, and more! 

Selene also shares her personal experiences of how expanding her swimwear brand to fitness apparel helped the massive growth of her business in 2021 and how she dealt with burnout and lack of motivation by launching a unique card game.

In episode 392 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Selene discuss:

• 02:00 – Spending Time In Costa Rica
• 03:00 – Helping Out With Project X Brand’s Instagram
• 04:20 – Advice For Brands Who Want To Start Working With Influencers
• 07:20 – Breaking Down What Is A Collab Post On Instagram
• 11:00 – Unboxing Footage, User-Generated Content, And Giveaways!
• 16:00 – Using Paid Ads To Promote Your Giveaways
• 17:30 – Selene’s Sales Grew During The Pandemic
• 19:20 – Making $2.6 Million In Gross Revenue In 2021
• 21:00 – From Swimwear And Expanding To Fitness Apparel
• 23:40 – Feeling Burnt Out And Launching A Card Game
• 26:10 – Selene’s Advice For Entrepreneurs Feeling Burnt Out
• 28:30 – More Social Media Strategies From Selene
• 29:00 – What Amazon Products Work Well On TikTok?
• 34:20 – Talking About The BeReal App, Shopify Collabs, Etc.
• 35:00 – Selene’s 30-Second Tip
• 36:00 – How To Get In Touch With Selene

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got one of our popular guests back on the show that I like to call the Queen of Instagram. Selene has built up her apparel company to over seven figures off of Amazon, and also runs an agency that helps e-commerce entrepreneurs crush it in social media, and she’s back with more strategies that sellers of all levels can use. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10, Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook, or you can actually go to h10.me/walmartgroup and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join, you can tag me and carry with questions and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the serious seller’s podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got somebody who’s from a different part of the world and is now actually traveling the world while she works. Selene, how’s it going? Where in the world are you right now?

Selene:

I’m in Costa Rica, going to be working here for the next four weeks. Work travel.

Bradley Sutton:

That is so cool. That’s one of the things that, you know, most people “working for the man”, can’t really do. But when you run your own business or you’re an entrepreneur, you know, it affords you you know, some luxuries and stuff to live in. I’ve been living vicariously through you and your boyfriend’s Instagram with these infinity pools and jungle rain things and all these kinds of all the fancy foods you’re eating know all this cool stuff.

Selene:

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, Costa Rica is beautiful. We were in Monte Verde for five days and if you go to Costa Rica, you have to go there because it’s just different than all your other beach surf towns. It’s in the middle of the jungle, you’re above the clouds, and it’s just peaceful.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Now, guys, we’re not gonna go too much into Selene’s backstory. She’s actually been on the podcast a couple of times before. So if you’re a new listener, maybe she’s new to you go ahead and pause this episode. Go back. She’s been in episode 71, you guys can look up and also 201. 71and 201. So it’s actually been a while since you’ve been on, cuz now we’re like at, I don’t know, 380 something or something like that.

Selene:

Holy. Yeah, it’s been a while.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s been a while. It’s been a while. Now, before we get into like what you’ve been up to and some of your latest tips and strategies cuz the social media world is always staying fresh and changing. I wanna talk about like a little side project that you’ve been helping us out on. And so a lot of people know we have the Project X thing that we did on YouTube where we made coffin shelves and some other spooky products there. And so we’re like, “You know what? We’ve been telling people to have people like Selene?” And we’ll tell people like, “Hey, if you have an Amazon brand, you should, you know, start thinking about utilizing Instagram to grow your so social media presence and get some followers and things. So you’ve actually been advising our team on some of that. And so I actually don’t even have our Instagram handy. It’s like Manny’s Mysterious Oddities. Let me just see what it’s called here. Hold on I think it’s Mysterious Oddities.

Selene:

Mysterious Oddities

Bradley Sutton:

Just Mysterious Oddities. Okay, so it’s @mysterious_oddities. I can actually like share my screen, I think. Here, let me see if I can do that. Yeah, for the people watching this on YouTube. So Selene helped us out on we’ve been working with influencers and we’ve been like throwing up pictures. We’ve been doing memes, it looks like some Drake memes here growing our followers. So we took it pretty much from like zero to like a few hundred followers already 371 followers. And so anyways, let’s talk about–, I actually wasn’t involved much with this project, but do you remember some of the things that you told Shivali and then Lailama originally who was working on this on how they should start this out. And basically what, what you’re gonna say now is all of you other Amazon sellers out there, this, you know, advice would probably apply to you guys too.

Selene:

Yeah, so a few things that are important before starting influencer marketing is to have, I think, an Instagram presence of your own brand. A lot of the time on our agency side, when a new brand comes to us and they wanna work with influencers, some of the more difficult things that we have to work on first is growing their own social media presence. Because the truth is when you’re reaching out to influencers, if your Instagram has very little posting, clearly you’re just starting out and you have no followers. A lot of info influencers don’t really want to work with you or they wanna get paid at least. So for all, all our clients and for my own brand too, and also for Mysterious Oddities, I said, Okay, like, let’s start building your own Instagram page. Maybe Instagram’s not your platform, maybe it’s TikTok, maybe it’s Facebook, maybe it’s YouTube, right?

Selene:

So wherever your customers are, start building your own brand platform there. You can post sporadically maybe like twice a week if you don’t have that much time, but at least keep something going. So the influencers that you’re reaching out to or the people that are looking up your page know that you are active in the social media world and they know that you are like paying attention to it and putting effort into it. So that’s one of the first things that I recommended was to actually post more consistently. And of course, if you have user-generated content, sometimes it is hard to get it from influencers when you’re just starting out, but even if you just have your product at home, which most of the founders do, just ask a friend or, ask your family or friends, and mom, dad, whatever, to take some like organic user-generated content through your iPhone, your camera that you have, which really helps build social media presence.

Selene:

And when a customer or even an influencer goes on your profile, it looks like you’re a real brand, you’re selling products, and you have real customers. So those were like the first two things. And the next thing is going more into influencer marketing. So reaching out to influencers that are similar to your demographic or you think that their followers would be interested in your product. So in this case, I think some of the influencers that you guys reached out to are some of the girls that kind of like probably do like spookier makeups and whatnot. And I also see a collab post here and also a lot of girls or guys into cosplay, dressing up for Halloween. Like there are lots of influencers that are really into that. So in this, you know, case study, like reaching out to influencers like that really helps. Also, Halloween is coming up, and we’re recording mid-October, so lots of like opportunities to even collaborate with influencers that are like moms maybe, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Hold really quick before you finish that, you mentioned something there I wanted to touch on because it’s something I didn’t even know existed a few days ago. But you mentioned a collab post, and then I’m looking here and I see which one you’re talking about, where it’s like, I’m not even sure who this was from, but it’s like the source of this image in our story feed. I’m gonna share this screen again just so people can see what I’m talking about. Does it say Mysterious Oddities and this other person is this what’s called a collab?

Selene:

Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you even do this? I don’t even know how Shivali did this.

Selene:

So it’s actually super easy. When you post or when she posts on her Instagram, you can tag people, right? And there’s another button now that says Invite Collaborator. So if you click Invite Collaborator, let’s say you and I are doing a collab post together, maybe it’s a group photo of you and I basically on Instagram, it shows that you and I posted the photo together. So the author of the post is both of us, and it’ll show the post to your followers and my followers. So there’s a collaboration post and we’ve been doing more of that with influencers because it works really well in terms of reach. So let’s say we are doing a collection drop or a sale or something, and the photo we use is the influencer, we could invite her that way, and her followers also see that, oh, VTA Pro is having a sale.

Selene:

Vice versa, if they are posting and they tag us as a collaborator, it’ll show up on our feed. So if customers are shopping, they’ll be like, “Oh, there are, real people wearing the product.” And the other one is they can also again, just share our page there. And if people are interested in buying our product, they can just click on our profile and it’s way easier to access our Instagram page versus clicking on the tagged person on Instagram. And it just helps with wider reach in general on Instagram. So that post right there did really well. It was a giveaway also.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Okay. Now that collaboration thing is pretty cool. We get a few likes, but for this particular video that’s coming up on our feed, we got like 10x the normal number of likes and engagement on it because it was coming also from the in-influencers page. And also what you said was right. We didn’t wanna do this influencer thing right when we started. We want to have a few hundred followers at first and so that definitely seems like a cool way to go. Another thing that Shivali mentioned here, said as far as our own posts, like a couple of the meme ones actually did kind of like the best from our native posts. Like is that normal? Do you usually see meme posts executed well, like those usually work better than just random ones?

Selene:

I wouldn’t say meme posts in particular. I think it really depends on what your brand is, but for us, it’s relatable humorous content. Especially videos for my brand, it does really well for some clients. Memes do really well for some other clients like educational posts do really well. So it really depends on the product you sell and what your brand message is. The reason why those posts do well is that it’s relatable and it’s shareable content. So people send it to their friends or they comment or they share it on their story and that kind of boosts the engagement on Instagram.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Looking at my notes here to see what else Shivali had said that you guys had worked on here. Let’s see, unboxing footage, she said did well. I’m assuming that she did some with an influencer or something, but if you’re a person who sells physical products and that’s your goal for doing this Instagram, then I guess getting influencers to do unboxing seems to have good engagement.

Selene:

Yeah, so what we usually do with influencers is have a storyline kind of planned out. We reach out to an influencer, and send them the products and whatnot. And what we’re asking for them to post is it needs to be a little bit more organic nowadays. I think the first thing is once you receive the package, ask the influencer. Let’s say I’m an influencer, I receive the package, and the first thing I should be doing is posting kind of like a first impression unboxing story onto my Instagram or TikTok or wherever. That way you’re kind of like doing it in real-time. So I receive this package, “Hey guys, I wanna share it with you.” This is what I receive. Open it first impression, “Oh wow, like this looks really sturdy, this looks really stylish on my shelf and whatnot.” And so kind of talk about first impressions and then leave it at that.

Selene:

The next step that we usually do is to us, sell clothing. So we ask influencers to actually try on the products and do a little TRYON Haul. Like, hey, you know, actually trying on the products today going to wear to the gym later, to test it out, this is how the fabric feels, this is what size I’m wearing, and actually putting it in use to show the customers how it is. So that’s kind of like the second step of the story. And the third step usually we do is an Instagram in feed post. Whether it’s a giveaway or just a feed post usually a picture or Instagram reel of them wearing it. That way when the audience sees the third Instagram post, or Reel, they have already been kind of warmed up to the brand cuz they saw the unboxing story and saw the TRYON Haul. So they’re like, “Oh, it’s this brand.” And nowadays customer needs seven to 13 touchpoints in order to convert and buy something. So I think it’s really important to kind of touch base and warm the audience up until they do wanna purchase. And something else that I mentioned actually is to run giveaways with influencers.

Bradley Sutton:

That was my next question. Yeah, cuz it seems to be working really well. So again, I wasn’t involved in this at also like, as you guys are hearing this, I’m hearing it for the first time here, but Shivali did have her notes that she was doing a giveaway. So like what was your advice to her on how to set this up and how to execute it? And then what are we trying to achieve when we do a giveaway with someone?

Selene:

Yeah, so there are three types of giveaways. One type is the one that we did in the collaboration post. If you are watching on YouTube, you’ll see it basically the influencer posts a giveaway on their page, and in this case, it’s a collaboration post, so it’ll also show up on your own Instagram page. But the rules are to follow both accounts and tag a friend, to win the product. So this way we are gaining new followers from the influencers, followers, and the people that wanna win this product are most likely people that are actually interested in your product. So sometimes what could be interesting is if you have the time, you can kind of check the comments and DM the people that participated in the giveaway, some random gift cards, maybe it’s 10% off, $5 off, or whatever, and this is after you announced the giveaway.

Selene:

Be like, “Hey, sorry you didn’t win, but here’s a five $10 gift card. Thanks for participating.” Who knows? Maybe you would convert a new customer that wouldn’t have bought otherwise. So this is something that we used to do as well. So that’s one type of giveaway, running it with influencers. The second type is running it with another brand. So someone that is not your direct competitor, but a compliment to your product. So for us, for fitness apparel, we could collaborate with shoe companies gym bags like water bottles, whatever, and be creative to think outside of the box a little bit. Snack companies, so collaborating with another brand, you share a similar demographic, but they might not shop at your place yet, and vice versa. And so this usually does really well because it benefits the other brand as well. And the winners get to win different prizes from different companies.

Selene:

So these types of giveaways usually do really well, but it requires reaching out to other brands, you know, doing the logistics, figuring out how the visuals will look. Cause you need to make sure all the prizes is in one photo. There are a few ways to go about it. Sometimes we would ask the brands to ship one product to us, and then we shoot the photo or you can do Photoshop and just kind of put it in a visual. So that’s the second type of giveaway. The third one is doing it on your own page. So this one, if you are starting out and you run a giveaway on your own page and say like, “Hey, follow us and win 10 sunscreens.” And if you only have 10 followers, really only 10 people will be participating in your giveaway. Maybe if those 10 people tag their friends, maybe 20.

Selene:

But what we have seen work really well recently is actually boosting the giveaway post via like a little bit of paid ads is like 5-10 bucks a day for the duration of the giveaway, let’s say five days, it’s just 50 bucks. But the reach that the giveaway post does actually grows the account really well. Recently we did one for one of our clients and it doubled the account in like three days. So that does really well because Facebook doesn’t like you growing your account without really paying for it. So giveaways that are like not really boosted or have outside help, which is another brand or another influencer don’t do as well as it does like five years ago. So putting a few ads spent behind even just five bucks a day does make a huge difference. Yeah, those are kinda like the three types of giveaways that I talked about. And it works really well I think no matter where you are at with social media. So yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Excellent. Excellent. We’ll come back to maybe some social media strategy, but let’s, let’s switch gears and talk about your own other businesses. By the way, guys, she does this for a living, so we’ll make sure to give you her contact info at the end of this episode. So if you guys want help with your Instagram or your e-commerce business and getting it on social media she’ll be able to help you guys out. But, you know, your main, you know, your day job has been your Vitae Apparel. Like I remember the first time you were on the show, I was actually looking at some notes here that my producer recorded for me. But you had said that I think it was like 2019 you were at $400,000 and then you were like, “Man, my goal, for the next couple years time to hit seven figures.”

Bradley Sutton:

And then the next time I had you on the show, you’re like, “we hit 1.5 million in sales.” Now, I don’t remember exactly when we had this episode, the second one, but it was in around, oh no, it was December 2020. So that was kind of like right in the middle of the pandemic. Or 2021. So like, how, how was 2021 almost like an entire year, and 2022, was the pandemic hit for a business like yours? Did things go up? Did things go down? What happened?

Selene:

Yeah, so, well, I think when we filmed that podcast, it was in the middle of the lockdown and like peak Covid. It was 2020. So everything went online during 2020. And it did really well for our business, especially because we have a very engaged community and we know how to captivate our audience in an engaging online platform, and social media and people responded really well. We hosted a lot of IG lives, like online events and whatnot, and to just to keep our customers coming back and engaged. People here in Canada, we had CERB, which the government was basically giving out two k a month to, you know, whoever needs help during Covid. And so people in our age group, which was 18 to 24, just spent it all because they probably haven’t even earned $2,000 a month ever in their life cause they’re in school.

Selene:

Right. But they qualified for it, so they just basically spent it. And I will say that was a huge factor on making us grow so fast in 2020. In 2021, we still grew 50% over 2020. So I think we did like 2.4-2.6 mil in revenue. So 2021 did really well. It was harder. I could feel it. I scaled the team quite a bit in 2021 and I think I scaled it too fast because I was expecting the 2020 e-comm boom to carry over in 2021. But I think people are starting to realize that, well one–

Bradley Sutton:

A lot of people kind of thought that that was the case. You definitely weren’t alone in that.

Selene:

Yeah, so I definitely scaled it very aggressively and I think that a lot of customers are kind of slowing down and spending in 2021. I see it like this, especially in Q4 compared to 2020. It did grow a little bit, but like not as significantly. So yeah, that was an indication for me. And I think a lot of people right now are actually holding back on their spending for the few e-com owners that I talked to at least for the D2C side, I’m not sure how the Amazon side is doing. I think if you’re selling essential products, you’re probably still doing amazing. But I will say this year it is harder and things are moving into retail again because people are craving that in-person connection and they wanna go in a store and they wanna go shopping, whether just staying on their computer and phone and shopping online.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, the very first time you’re on the show, your brand was kind of strictly like swimwear, bikinis, and things like that. And then towards the second time you’re on the show, you were starting doing this shift to the kind of like fitness apparel and things. Refresh my memory, like what prompted that shift and then also like now, end of 2022, what’s the breakdown of like your sales, like what percent is now the newer stuff, like the fitness apparel as opposed to what you originally started out with?

Selene:

Yeah, so we pivoted to fitness apparel because we’re in Vancouver and Vancouver based. So summer is really short. When I launched the brand, we were doing really well in the summer, we were doing okay during the winter months because people were going on vacation. Spring, it’s okay, but then there are months that are super slow and in order to keep up with like sales, we would have to expand into the US and Australia. And at the time, I just like didn’t see that I had the manpower to and that I wanted to, I wanted to focus on the Canadian market. So I asked our customers and our community, “Hey, what else do you wanna see from us?” And they said they want to see Venice apparel, and yoga pants. So a lot of people said that. And I was like, Wait a second. That makes a lot of sense.

Selene:

I used to swim competitively. I trained, you know, running, weightlifting, all that too. So I lived in sports brand and legging, so I was like, Okay, like let’s test it out. The first collection we launched, it sold out immediately, and it was on pre-order for like four weeks. So I knew there was a demand and we started to launch more and more. The thing about fitness apparel is it’s more expensive, so we couldn’t quite have a lot of inventory in stock. So we would sell out. Two months later, restock and it would be this huge thing and we would make like six figures in a day just because of like–

Bradley Sutton:

Easy, like everybody’s hiking when it comes out and it sells out like a dropdown.

Selene:

Yeah, exactly. So that did really well for us, especially during 2020. The supply chain, first of all, was super delayed and everyone was going crazy online shopping. So when we did drop something, it would just do like six figures a day, like no problem, and things would sell out. So we pivoted a little bit to fitness apparel. We launched our first collection in 2019 November, so it was like pre-pandemic and then three-four months later, the pandemic happened, and I’m so lucky that I did start fitness apparel before that because no one was traveling, no one was buying swimwear in 2020 and having fitness apparel being like our main thing really saved us and because of the demand, and we just kind of pushed it more and more. So now we’re basically like 99% fitness apparel, and in the summer we will drop a collection for swimwear, but that’s pretty much the only collection we’ll draw for swimwear.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, Interesting. Now, I also noticed you kind of like launching your own physical product or it was like a card game. So what prompted that? That’s not the typical thing. Okay, swimwear going to fitness apparel, that’s kind of like, you know, like a natural kind of progression there. But to go to like start your own card game. Where was the inspiration for that?

Selene:

Yeah, so for the past, I wanna say five to six months now, I have been feeling the burnout. I grinded really hard. Business has been around for almost six years now, and I didn’t really take a break ever. And I scaled really fast in 2021, so I feel like I scaled it so fast, so much was going on. I was going through all the challenges and learning that you could think of growing the team having more higher expenses and all of that. And it was just a lot. And I felt the burnout, like starting March or April, and I didn’t really have the motivation to do anything anymore. I would wake up and be like, “Oh, I don’t wanna do this.” And so yeah, it was really rough. I feel like I’m getting out of it now, but still not where I was.

Selene:

It was just a mental burnout. So I thought to myself, I was like, “Okay, like why am I feeling this way?” And what I’ve learned is I skilled the team really fast last year, and I learned so much. Wouldn’t take it back for anything, but I do realize that I miss having that smaller team that’s like hardworking, and also everyone is kind of on the same page. Fewer communication issues. And that we were also dropping collections just to earn revenue in 2021 because I wanted to scale to eight figures in three years. And I was like, “Okay, the only way that we’re gonna get there is if we drop more collections like every month.” So we were kind of just pumping out collection drops, like, you know, on repeat, and I kind of miss doing those collections that’s really special to us.

Selene:

The messaging, like the fabric, the color, the cut, the everything. It’s very, very special and dear to our hearts and our customers. So this year I kind of went through a few months of thinking and just, I thought to myself, “Okay, like I miss doing that and I want to make sure the collections that we’re dropping are actually something people want and that we put 110% of our energy in and it’s like a product that people would love, not just because I need to scale the company”. So kind of went through that and it took a lot to realize and also energy. So if anyone’s out there listening, I feel like if you’re going through this, like everyone at any stage in their business, even if you’re starting out, even if you’re like 15 years in, like you’re gonna feel that at some point.

Selene:

And I think it’s just taking a break, taking that time to yourself to reflect on “Why am I doing this? Am I passionate about it? What am I trying to solve here? What am I doing?” And to get me out of that, I went through like a 30-day challenge where every day I did something outta my comfort zone, something that I would do for myself every day. So I would like to wake up, and set the intention of doing something. So maybe today it’s going up for a walk and tomorrow it’s like going ziplining or something. So a lot of the stuff was more adventurous because I’m more of an adrenaline junkie. So I went through a few things. Like I went bungee dumping, I think I flew a plane in 30 days. I did a bunch of stuff. And then–

Bradley Sutton:

You flew a plane?

Selene:

Yeah, I did. I flew a plane.

Bradley Sutton:

Good grief.

Selene:

What is it called? Cessna. And there were like few cockpits so you could co-pilot. And so I flew for like three hours actually. I took off the plane too. He let me take off the plane and I flew around downtown for like two and a half, three hours. And then he landed the plane. So he did that part, but it was really cool.

Bradley Sutton:

So how does this all tie into the game?

Selene:

So, I was like, “How can I inspire people to also do this? If they’re feeling unmotivated, how can they get out of it?” So I also invited some of our customers actually to go jet skiing with us. And to kind of really tie into that messaging of our brand. And by the end of the 30 days, I launched the card game and I had all the footage of all my adventures. And the message was that if you’re feeling burnt out and unmotivated, just step outta your comfort zone and do something for yourself every day. And you could pick a random card and the card will tell you what to do.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I’m like one of those people who probably need to do that a little bit more. Cause I’m a workaholic, I love work so much, but I need to just step away, so I might have to go get that card game. Anyway, let’s go back to talking about social media strategies. Last time you dropped you know, some, some cool knowledge bombs on us. Like you talked about this app called LTK (Like To Know It) and it helped drive $40,000 of sales in like one day or some crazy thing like that. But what has been working for you either Instagram or TikTok or anything lately that’s new that maybe we haven’t talked about on the show before?

Selene:

Yeah, I think TikTok is definitely working really well for a lot of Amazon sellers, especially if you have a lower-valued item, like a lower MSRP item. For us, our leggings are still a little bit on the higher end for TikTok. I think it, it makes people think like twice before they buy, but if you have like a $20, home decor or something on Amazon that you sell and you have that on TikTok and those do really well and, or like cheaper leggings for example, but a lot of brands are using influencer marketing on TikTok, so they’re looking for influencers, whether they are the type of influencers that are like Amazon’s Finds and they, you know, show a bunch of stuff that they found on Amazon. Most of these influencers are actually already Amazon affiliates, so they have their affiliate code, it’s like really easy to set up, pay them a commission, and all that.

Selene:

They know what they’re doing. So those influencers do really well for conversion and just gifting, to be honest on TikTok, there are a lot of people on TikTok that are not yet famous, but they have a very good reach and a very good presence. And like an okay amount of followers is not gonna be like 1 million or 500k, but they have like 10-20k, but they convert really well. And what I’ve seen work the best is, for example, if you’re selling a product, kind of incorporating that into–, I don’t know, let’s say you’re selling protein powder or something, incorporating that into a routine of some sort and post that on TikTok and have it a little bit more organic. And what I find is people in the comments are like, “Oh my God, like, where’s that from?” Obviously, the videos should still be kind of highlighting your product, but in a more organic and storytelling way.

Selene:

So I think that does really well for TikTok. And also there’s this new app called BeReal. We have yet to start it, but I know a lot of people are using it more and more. I see a lot of influencers on there. I am like testing it out. I’m not sure what I could do with the brand on it yet, but I know how it’s different from other platform is that it gives you a notification every day and you have to take a photo of your front camera and your back camera. So it’s like 360. So like when it notifies you, you take a picture right then and there, so it’s real. That’s why it’s called like BeReal. So it’s not like you’re filtered like life highlight on TikTok or Instagram and whatnot, and it’s just Reel. So a lot of people are getting on it more and more.

Selene:

I don’t know what I’ll do if I do it for a brand, but if you like wanna test it out for a personal brand that might be good. Or as an entrepreneur you can you know, post it and be like, today I’m working on whatever sourcing products, and just like the front back photo that app I’m testing out if you are on Shopify, there’s a new app called Shopify Collapse previously called Dovetail. It’s completely free, it helps you find influencers, gives you like some of their analytics and it’s like very streamlined. It’ll make orders for you automatically and it generates the influencer commission code and everything, so it’s just less manual work. And you can also source influencers on there so you don’t have to manually look for them on Instagram, TikTok, and whatnot. It’s just more efficient. And on Instagram, I will say nowadays IG Reel does better. A little while ago Instagram was testing a new layout on their homepage, which kind of looks like TikTok, and a lot of people hated it because they were like, We don’t need that on a TikTok, we want Instagram. Like, we want photos. Yeah. So they’re not launching that from–

Bradley Sutton:

Is that the one where a Kardashian complained about it and then like the next day they took it off or something? Like I read something like that or they were trying, but then yeah, I stopped seeing that, but the thing that I love about I share like sometimes my real, I’ll make a Reel and then I’ll share it to like my story, but now back in the day you had to have like 10,000 followers to be able to put links like in your story.

Selene:

Into the story. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

But now I can like share my Reel and I don’t have 10,000 followers and I can put the link to like the YouTube video or something there. Like has that changed how you guys work with the influencers at all? Cuz now you can go for more micro influencers or that hasn’t affected you guys that much

Selene:

For us, because my brand has quite a bit of social media following, so we don’t have that much trouble looking for influencers that have a higher following that would do it for free and just for commission. I will say influencer marketing is a little bit harder now because there are more and more influencers on Instagram that are trying to make it so they’re trying to chart for every single little post or little thing that they do. So if you’re starting out, I would go on TikTok and find influencers that are not, that have not yet made it, or aren’t even in the interest of being an influencer. They’re just being themselves and genuine. Making content on TikTok, finding those people, and maybe cashing them before they blow up is a really good way. And we, we had a few of those that got picked up by like Netflix shows and whatnot. Like they converted really well because they all of a sudden just kind of like blew up, but then like right before they blew up, they posted about us. So I think finding influences on TikTok for free or very low costs, but with like good reach, and good engagement on TikTok is the way to go.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So like, every time you’re on the show, I always have my TST 30-second tip. So what is your 30-second tip? Some kind of strategy, whether it’s about social media, about Shopify, could be about anything you want it to be. What is something hard-hitting and very actionable that our listeners can do?

Selene:

A 30-second tip is to be organic and be real and show up on your brand’s social media page if you’re running it. I think nowadays people shop because they want to hear a story and they wanna connect with someone and to be in a community and belong to something. So it’s very important for you to build a community for your brand through your customers and also show up whether it’s you showing up or having someone in your team show up or hiring someone to show up. Tying a face to your brand is really important nowadays.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. I like it. I actually had somebody a little bit on the show, Cara from the UK and she was talking about how she’s actually the face of her own brand and she thinks that’s helped her out a lot. So, you know, I was kind of upset at you for not coming to Sell and Scale Summit, Selene. Keeping it real here. I was looking forward to seeing you again for the first time in a couple of years, but yeah, hopefully, we’ll, you know, we’ll link up at one of these, you know, future events or the next Sell and Scale that we do. But enjoy your travels there in Coast Rica and have a safe journey back home. And how can people reach out to you if they want to maybe get help with their social media or check out what you’re doing, what are your socials out there?

Selene:

Yeah, my Instagram is @missss.diorr It’s @missss.diorr, and you can find me on LinkedIn, Selene Dior. And also you can email me at dior@vitaeapparel.com.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Selene, thank you so much and we’ll be seeing you soon.

Selene:

Thank you so much. Bye.

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