The reason facebook ads don't work or any ads mind everyone's is always because of the content. The content is the variable of success. This portion is like with me, so i think this is when you need to get selfish like you need to ask your question: hiring is guessing firing is knowing like you got to go fast. That's how you get done, that's how you figure stuff out this is the television and the television is the radio 40s cool naomi.

Why don't you get us started yeah? Certainly so my name is naomi. I'm the marketing manager for the very salon group and the invaders to winnipeg. I take care of our top line marketing strategy, all of our paid advertising, um social strategy, all of that good stuff um. So i also manage a small team of two people uh in our marketing department, and we pretty much take care of every digital aspect of the business and fun.

Fact that i learned today and naomi is actually at the company because of uh some advice that you gave to roberto back in 2019. I'm sure we have that as a talking point in a little bit but colleen. Why don't you get into your background? A little bit and what you do for the company yeah, so i'm colleen, i'm the director of education and business development for the verde salon group. I've also educated at the aveda institute before i've educated for other hair product lines as well, and i helped rob kind of right from the beginning.

He doesn't know how to do hair and he went to hair school for a few minutes, but um. So i've been there to help him out with all the things that he needs and uh yeah we've been a team throughout this, so it's awesome and roberta. Why don't you go ahead and uh? Take it away? Yeah! It's gary thanks! So much for your time today. I know you're launching series two, i'm a huge fan.

I've got uh, i got four v friends one and i'm waiting for the drop that stupid game you just put out has just got me locked in right. Now, i'm not paying attention to jeff too much but uh, but it's a lot of fun thanks for taking this time today, so i opened up the uh, the business back in 2017 um, with some help from nick and a government grant that we got. I was able to attend um four d's in 2019, um hired naomi right after that event, and it changed a lot for me really put a lot of things in a different perspective for me, opened my eyes new opportunity. A couple um couple tips that you gave me uh before i left.

We implemented it and it's just it's done a lot for our business um and i just wanted to have this opportunity right now to have naomi and colleen experience that as well. We're gon na be coming down to new york in june um, and just that whole experience too was was really good for me, so i'm really looking forward to them experiencing it as well. Um we're at a place now where we um have like expanded. So we opened our second salon.

This is something that we talked about. When i was at 40s, we opened our second salon. We also acquired a hair school and the two work really close together, so the hair school feeds, the hair salons, gives us the opportunity to scale our businesses and whatnot and we're kind of at a place. Now, where you know, when i came back to 4ds back in 2019, we're on the verge or just on that doorstep of taking our next step to expand our business and we feel like we're back there again now.

Um and you know, there's this marketing piece is going to be huge for us um joe and the team, and ourselves here talked about some of the things that we're thinking of implementing we're going to want to run some of those by you and uh and just Get your take on it. I totally understand i'm so happy to be here with you three thank you appreciate it yeah. So one of the things that uh got me fired up was not only that um. You know he's a second time guest of ours but um.

The team uh is interested in building out a podcast and uh. We got to talking a little bit about how we use podcast strategically or episodic content strategically throughout the vayner x organization, whether it's marketing for the now or your podcast experience, or what we're doing with building while flying where we really go out. And we find the guests that we want to become our customers or our next employees or something like that um, so rob. Why don't you go ahead and launch in a little bit to kind of what you were thinking about in terms of a podcast? And maybe we can jam a little bit on seeing if we can uh enhance it, make it better help you roll it out yeah.

I was being very top-line that naomi could speak further to it um. But the idea is, you know, there's i think, there's two people that we're marketing to marketing to our guests that come into the salon to get their hair done and buy our product, but then there's also other salons and our brand of veda that we're a part Of that we want to market you to position ourselves as leaders within the industry. That will do very well for us with the veda down the road. As eventually, i want to get to the point where we're going to be distributing a beta for canada and further to that being able to position ourselves as professionals or leaders in industry for to salons, so that we can attract some of their senior talents as well.

To come, work with us, something that really is going to help the the wheel continue to move um, and i think you know the idea of being able to interview people and really highlight who they are and then as well sure. Our expertise would work really well. But i'll let naomi maybe get a little bit further into that yeah. Absolutely one thing: that's really interesting about the beauty industry is that uh there's a lot of kind of like old school thought like there's a lot of salon owners who are just getting to the point where they realize that they have to post on instagram consistently um.

So a lot of the marketing in the beauty industry is very old school because a lot of salon owners are hair stylists. They don't necessarily have a business background or a marketing background. So i think that establishing our brand and really establishing ourselves within the broader salon network will do us a lot of good as rob just mentioned, and i think that diving a little bit deeper more so into like the business side of beauty. As far as operations goes as far as marketing goes, as far as you know, the takeaways and learning we've done through scaling our business opening a second location.

I think we have a lot of knowledge and a lot of expertise that we can potentially share with others. In the industry - and i think that that would be probably my main focus in putting together a podcast and all for people to do what so the idea would be is really sharing our expertise on the business side. To then gain. We want to be the forerunners within our industry to be able to speak to all these all the business side domains so that it puts us in a position to attract more talent and also in a position with aveda to show that we're the forerunners within our Own country to have them build a trust with them.

Then further do business with them down the road. The when you say the betas. Sorry aveda aveda is the brand, the hair brand, the hair company brand, so they're owned by estee, lauder, um they're out of minneapolis um, and at one time there was a distribution in canada which they bought back. It's proving that it doesn't work very well for them to run it out of the us in canada, and we want to be able to position ourselves down the road to be the forerunners to say these guys know what they're talking about.

We should go a little bit further with them and start talking distribution. That's the kpi of the business leadership understood. I would run linkedin ads of clips from the podcast against the employees that work at the highest levels of avida. So when it comes to creating the content on the podcast, what's the best, what's the best form to do, that is interviewing the best way to do that or interviewing you making pretend that you're, the b2b magazine of the industry, like one of the reasons i do Well is when i make content, i make content, there's never a moment in the last 15 years, including wine library, tv, where i would review wines that we had a lot of, and i would pan them, which was insane my dad literally lost his mind.

First, the first year my dad literally, was like look. You are a wild dude and everything you do is right, but this one can't be right. I'm like it's right he's like no, no you're wrong. Here it is.

We were selling 30 cases a week of this wine. You put it on the show. You said that it sucks, and now we sell four bottles a week. You were wrong.

I'm like look at our overall business they're not going to buy that because it does suck. Look what they're buying! So what what you do is you interview people, but every time you interview people, every selfish, want and need that you want from aveda executives, kids to go to the school employees from your competitors to join you every one of those things that are running through your Mind you never act on them. You act as if you left this business and are now hosting a b2b show for the industry and you're trying to get the best ratings on serious radio. You do that and your subconscious will still make you go a little bit to the business side.

Naomi will find those moments we clip them. We link to the full podcast and you run ads against people in your industry and very very quickly. Six months to a year, it matters makes sense. Yep.

Is there a lot of that going on garrett with uh? I know marketing from the now's a different beast, but there's so many people across the understand yeah. You know it's 100, not even 99. yeah. That was an eye opener rancho mentioned that yeah yeah i mean i.

I definitely did not want to do that today for 30 minutes. Some to you know i, this launch is pissing me off and i got a lot going on, but you know we're doing that because a we don't do business with the everlane cmo. You know and that's an opportunity but b one moment. One second is the right clip on linkedin.

We run a thousand dollars worth of ads against cmos and two people decide to reach out to vayner x and want to do business. That's cool! So there's two other kind of themes, gary that i think. That being said, the reason i said six months to a year is that's 15 years of me, putting out content at scale and being historically correct. That gives us that level of conversion it's going to take now.

What's nice, though, is your industry is so niche and no one's doing like it that it'll take six months to a year? But you know this: you don't need a lot to happen for it to be a real good use of your time and money and there's going to be there's going to be 14 things that happen. They have no idea. Nor do i a local newscaster thinks that's interesting uh. The paper has a slow week and they just want to do a profile and a business person uh an executive.

You never thought you could afford to get is burnt out at you know, procter and gamble, and his and his husband and wife is moving to your part of the woods and like it. This is creative and interesting. I don't care that i have to make. You know more than half my salary, i'm moving towards the tail end of my career.

I'm moving this middle of nowhere place compared to being in you know, unilever, in new york city, i'm i'm going to reach out to these people and this guy and see if he wants to do like it leads to so much yeah. I agree with you. Some of those um, some of those things that we implemented after we came back from 4ds, wasn't the actual result from what we implemented. It was all the things all the synergies that happened afterwards from it, so that was cool cool joe we're going to jump into this on the b to c side.

Where are you with tick? Tock uh? I asked a question um, so i definitely know we need to be utilizing it more. We post about once a day which i know is not the best way to use like utilize. It um by the way one day still has me like, literally with the way you reacted. I'm like literally, i thought the word week was going to come out.

Instead of day, one a day is already a huge accomplishment just to give the three of you context, yeah, absolutely and that's content that we take, and we put it anywhere that vertical video makes sense um. So we're really maximizing what we're putting out across platforms um and we just haven't even seen. Are you making tick tocks or not? Really, i would say we're making tick tocks uh. I definitely.

I definitely have found that you know more polished content does better on other platforms, whereas tick tock, you know, even if you're running an ad, if you're doing organic, it's got to be a tick tock. So that's definitely something i've learned um over the last like year or so of making content on that platform um. So that's something that's really critical and then you sense that there's an opportunity there, oh yeah, absolutely - and i even just got some very good information from the conversation we just had with jeff as well, so they did just launch uh or during the pandemic they launched That dtc product error that could fit into their strategy for for social media. It's uh kind of in various different conversations.

We've had from a research perspective. You typically go in on, like you got ta white label, something so that you can kind of maximize your margins and have a product that consumers can latch on and really start to own the game. So um rob! Why don't you talk a little bit about the at-home product? You guys created and maybe that's a something we can sink our teeth into in terms of talking to consumers, yeah for sure, just based on the tick tock um conversation for a second, they laughed at me. Gary i was talking to talk when you were talking about it they're laughing at me, but it's done very well for us and um we've seen actually through the school side of the majority of our leads are coming through tick tock.

So i guess one of the questions too, that we can throw in is: how do we double down? Create the content, we're a team of three between three businesses? How do we double down, create the content so that we've got enough for tick-tock, but then again enough? For everything else make less profit say it again, make less profit alluding to hire another person yeah. That was the advice you gave me the first time i didn't. I love that i'm still consistent consistent three years later, um yeah, but the good news is it's a dream job for you know, without knowing laws of like like for a 16 to 22 year old, that's interested in this subject matter. It's a dream job to make two tick.

Tocks a day got it. You could also hire someone to just search locally or not locally for influencers and try to get good deals on people. It's a lot of hand-to-hand combat dm-ing them this that the other thing. But it's a great arbitrage.

I have a quick question to you gary. What's the best way to find the people you want to hire as content creators to just know, like oh they're, they're, amazing, at what they do search hashtags on tick tock in your subject matter find people that you subjectively, the three of you like who don't have A lot of followers and dm them and say: do you want a job, so you find someone that you three you're like wow, that was a good hair, video or whatever am i right? It doesn't even have to be a hair. You could literally be like wow, that was a good eggs video and she has great hair, like you could play this a couple of different ways and, and then you're like. Oh, she only has 700 followers yeah.

I think that's a good idea and this could be done remote. You know right yeah, i mean think about her. People in college right now are having tick. Tocks go viral like to gary's point: it's a dream job.

If you're in college, you can make side money, making tick tocks forget about it. That's awesome that didn't exist when i was in college and and even better the year before college or the year after, even more interesting, like different option. Psychology that i like a lot for sure, are you talking verde at home, yeah, sorry, uh, varidate homes are um our direct consumer, so this is something that we developed. I apologize because i want to get this down in my head.

Verde is a brand that's owned by them right. No, so verde is our brand aveda is the brand right. I'm sorry, i'm sorry right so dyslexic enough that i got confused got it so we sell it. It's our school is an aveda school.

So we we have like it's not a franchise, but if we're allowed to be innovative school contractually and our brand is verde, which is the salon and we salivate it in the salon and use their hair color so over the pandas exclusively and is that kind of The punch line to be a school yeah and that's because they're feeding their brand is strong enough and they're helping feed or the brand is helping clothes and that's why you make that deal no different than frank. I understand big big point of difference for us and, as of june, we'll be the only available institute in canada, so we'll be able to market ourselves as invaders we're emerging, hairstylists or even current ones. If that brand carries that level of weight, it does yeah. That's what it does and now there it is your product, your private label product, that's right and is that a veda inside or something else uh? Well, we carry aveda products inside so we sell exclusively our products inside the verdict: juice, the formula, the dtc products.

Yes, it's available yep right, so any people ever done a good job enough with building a private label in their ecosystem that they got upset about it, um. No, no, as a matter of fact, they asked us about it. Um they were interested in you know we had one of their national international educators come to the salon to do a class. They heard about our the product that we put out verdi at home and they were actually asking us to help them um.

You know because of that the at-home part right, that's right different than just sitting on the shelf. That's where you're going to be understand. That's right! So that's the does that come with like! Is that just a pure dtc or is there a level of, like you guys, hand, holding and helping people because you have school dna? I don't understand the question, i'm sure. So one thing i've always been fascinated with ddc products is the level of scaling virtual um, handholding and experience not just getting the product? Yes, so there was an aspect of them that we thought was one of our points of difference, which is you can buy the product.

We can ship it to you, but before that even happens, you can have a virtual consultation with the natural hair stylist and without guessing, and right was that did that work? Is that good, like people like that during that pandemic it worked, but then, once we opened again and then brick and mortar became the thing again, it completely died out. So i think it's a good right, so we think it's a good product, there's, definitely a market in it, because it's a billion dollar industry, um home color. You know buying home color big difference in price point. It obviously exploded because of covid, so it still might be a nice base and to your point, if you run ads against different income levels or figure out how to target the right people, there's still a big industry there there there should be - and this is the Part we haven't been able to crack because post covid, we were marketing to our we're marketing to our guests, who were buying it throughout the pandemic.

The problem is those guests already have the context of people wanting to be that are willing to pay the extra to be a guest. You need a whole review, so that's the direction we went in afterwards, but we couldn't crack it. Yeah. Have you been running facebook ads facebook, instagram yeah, what about tick tock, not on tick tock and is facebook challenging because you can't really market in the ios 15 and all that cookie and stuff yeah and because creative is the variables? So let me tell you what you should do: you should make tick tocks that are about the with the product make at least two more of them.

So i need you to make four tick tocks a day, so you're gon na have to figure this out roberto like let's play it out, though two of those, i think are from verde all organic different value. Props, right, like like you, got to be very creative, like naomi, the video's got to have like four tim hortons coffees there like the expensive ones and say you can afford these now, because you're using very at home and not going to like you got to like Really be clever around the value proposition like you know, like you almost have to go outside. You know how on tick, tock, there's that guy that comes up to people with expensive cars. You almost have to like do.

Videos where, like these are people people drive this when they go to the salon and obviously have to be careful because you have a salon business, so you have to be thoughtful, but bottom line is: do tick-tock ads to build the brand when it goes viral. You turn it into a performance dtc ad, so you take the essence of the ad and you tweak the wording. You add the call to action. You run that as a tick tock ad and as a linkedin as a instagram and facebook ad, because it's been proven that humans are interested in the content.

The reason facebook ads don't work or any ads mind everyone's is always because of the content. The content is the variable of success right. It's the substance, like you know the reason people don't marry each other after a date is that they didn't go well, but you got to the date right same with advertising right like your facebook and instagram is right. It's just the content, wasn't right.

For that instance, tick tock is so built on people's interest that you know there's people that are interested. Then you just scale it by running ads on all three platforms. Use your knowledge. How platforms are slightly different? You might use different words.

You might play right. The slang is different for tick-tock, where it's young versus facebook, where it's older, but you still get the essence of the content. This is why making four tick tocks a day is everything because you're getting the consumer insights yeah, absolutely that makes total sense um. The other thing i had a question about in regards to that is the level of customizability, because we thought that that was a major point of difference, obviously with the consultation and all of those additional pieces um.

But what we found was that when you know a lot of people expressed interest clicked through got to the landing page, but then didn't take the step of booking a consultation. People seemed to just want to purchase the item and then have it be done when it was working or now um. Both, i would say yeah i mean i think, you've got to run creative ads that play up the consultation. What was happening before was, i mean right, like hey like i was on a girls marketing zoom, with like all the cmo mafia, ladies, that i'm friends with in their 50s and 60s, and we were doing wine one night in covid four months in and the first 45 minutes was hair coloring.

They were just making fun of me every five minutes like are you bored yet gary, i'm like no i'm kind of i'm greying. I might have to do that too. Like you know, we were having some fun. It was just the culture right that culture is over to your point.

Um, so you're gon na have to find the people that are actually interested in it by running ads that feature that value problem yeah absolutely you're, just gon na need more at-bats on tick-tock. That is going to be the punchline of this conversation. That is the big breakthrough right now and there's a 99 chance that after they've done coloring their hair with your product they're going to post it to tic, toc or instagram anyway. So maybe there's a way you can incentivize them somehow give me your tick tock address just so i can see you posting the product or something like that.

Just figure out a way to get their social data, so you can kind of plug in with them a little bit comment on their stuff. You know just engage with them. Absolutely the posting more content on tick tock is going to give us the insight he dennis. What's going to work and what's not going to work, you.