Elevating Your eCommerce Ads: Advanced Video Hooks and Strategies | Nikki Lindgren

Matt Edmundson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the eCommerce Podcast. With me, your host, Matt Edmundson. Now this is a show all about helping you deliver eCommerce wow. Yes it is. And to help us do just that, today I'm chatting with Nikki Lindgreen from Pen, Pennock, I almost said Pencock. I don't know why, but it's Pennock. About, we're going to be talking about video.

We're going to be talking about hooks. We're going to be talking about how to do all of that in eCommerce. And we're going to have some fun doing it as well. Now, before I get too carried away, let me just welcome you. If this is your first time to the eCommerce Podcast, a very warm welcome to you, wherever you are in the world.

It's always great when new people join us. I'm Matt Edmundson. on this fabulous journey of eCommerce. So it's great to have you here. Hope you enjoy it. Make sure you like and subscribe and do all of that good stuff. And of course you can head over to the website, eCommercePodcast. net and sign up to the newsletter.

And all that happens is. We just send you the notes, the links, the transcriptions, [00:01:00] all that sort of stuff. No, actually not the transcriptions, the notes, the show notes and the links. They come to you automatically straight to your inbox by email. So then you never miss anything from the show, which is a beautiful thing, right?

So make sure you do that. Check it out. ecommercepodcast. net. Now let's talk about Nikki, the savvy marketer turned agency founder. Who's all about turning challenges into triumphs. After experiencing the hurdles of an in house marketing team first hand, she created Pennock, the dream agency she wished for back in the day.

Love that. Now she's the go to guru for seven figure beauty and lifestyle brands, driving their growth with her killer media buying and advertising. And SEO Wizardry. Nikki, welcome to the show, you've got a lot to live up to.

Nikki Lindgreen: Impressive lead in there. Thank you, Matt.

Matt Edmundson: It's great to have you, I'm really curious what SEO Wizardry is, so I [00:02:00] think we'll get into that.

Nikki Lindgreen: Absolutely.

Matt Edmundson: Now, before we hit the record button Nikki, you were telling me how you're based in the San Francisco Bay area. You're as far away from England as you can get before I start hitting, like Japan and places like that really. But yeah, it's great to have you. Great that you're with us all the way from San Francisco.

It's definitely looking a lot brighter and sunnier where you are based on the video.

Nikki Lindgreen: Yes it's shaven up to be a good morning. So I appreciate you having me on today.

Matt Edmundson: No problem. It's great to have you here. So tell me about the agency tell me about what you guys do. Do what makes you different? Really curious. 'cause San Francisco in my head, is a wash with agency. So how do you do it different?

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah, so we started in 2020 to be a boutique, female led and female employed agency. We did not intend to be fully decentralized, [00:03:00] but things in the macro environment allowed us to really find talent throughout the United States. And so while we're a really agile and small team, the employees just work from their home offices, which is where I am today.

So that's Ben RMO. And then in terms of the types of brands we're helping, as you alluded to, it's earlier stage businesses in beauty and lifestyle. So we're talking about a handful of skincare brands, fragrance brands fashion, and a few home decor. So really anything that's needing some love and attention to grow their eCommerce business.

I think all of our brands are on Shopify. And so that's really what we're doing first and foremost in the paid lane where we are pretty channel agnostic. We'll help brands with any and every paid product. Program they need to run including Spotify ads and out of home things of that sort in addition to just the basic digital.

And then we do SEO, we do our wizardry which I think is all changing with [00:04:00] generative optimization. So we'll see how that all plays in. But we found some formulas that really helped. Our brands that said, like our brands haven't done SEO before. So the first quarter is always like fantastic because they've never touched

So we do a lot of on page optimizations and schema markup optimizations and things about their evergreen content. We're not really building out new blog posts and content to serve the purpose of their lane. We're trying to get their long term content to rank better. These are usually category landing pages and they're hero SKUs that they don't intend to ever go out of stock in.

Things like that are where my team and I would focus our efforts in SEO.

Matt Edmundson: Wow. There's a lot there already. I'm curious about this. Evergreen content, you don't focus on blog posts, which I find fascinating. You focus on category pages. Now for, this is really interesting, Nikki, if you don't mind, I'm going to ask you a few questions about this. Dig into this straight.

Let's just get straight into it. Why not? I'm curious [00:05:00] simply because 99 times out of 100, when I go to an eCommerce website, their category page is literally just like a default amalgamation of various products. It's like it's an automation type thing. I'm assuming then, you take that sort of standard category page And execute your wizardry upon that.

I'm curious what sort of things you would do.

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah, so for, we'll use a jewelry brand as an example. And so they'll have a category page for either a collection, so maybe it's like the design is a coil jewelry. So we would go in and we would look at that collection landing page and figure out do people even know what coil jewelry is? Should we look at the other variations of coil that might be more commonly used?

And we'll add that into the meta fields that still matter. So mainly the page title. And to some extent, the meta description, and then we'll go in and look at like the alt tags for video images [00:06:00] and stuff like that. So we're doing those pieces of on page for them. Similarly, if we're talking about their jewelry collection, and they have a landing page for rings, we'll do the same thing with rings.

Do people care about that they're 18 karat gold? Do they care about size? Something else, just gold. So we'll figure out which makes the most sense for them in terms of the primary keyword and go in and attack those components. Because again, these brands usually haven't done SEO for at least a year.

If ever we can get moving in the rankings quite quickly. But as soon as the com competition kind of catches on that we're. More people are in the space trying to compete than that never ending cycle. So what we end up doing is roughly every quarter to six months, we're going to go back and dust off old pages that have maybe peaked and now they're starting to climb down the mountain because competition has come back in.

So that's usually our system. We will divert some on page optimizations for backlinks, generative Engine Optimization is supposed to really change the landscape and importance of [00:07:00] backlinks. So TBD on how long they become or they stay relevant for SEO. So we've got to keep our finger on the pulse related to that too.

But I was going Fractional kind of CMO a couple of years back for our wearable pregnancy device that helped people know when women know when they were about to go into labor. And what we found back then is working with a bunch of content creators to produce articles versus working with nurses and practitioners in the industry, night and day different in terms of like how those stacked up for content for many obvious reasons.

And so that's when we made an intentional pivot to say we can't be an outside agency that just doesn't exist. Makes blog posts for you. It's not a good sure we can lean on AI at this point, but it's not a good use for us, the outsiders, to pretend we're subject matter experts in what our clients do.

Matt Edmundson: right. So the Category pages, I just want to draw out some of the terminology you use phrases like meta tags that [00:08:00] matter which I find quite fascinating. For those that are listening to the show, maybe new to eCommerce, have no idea what you're talking about. Meta tags that matter. Is that something to do with Facebook?

You, could you just explain what they are for the three people listening that might not know?

Nikki Lindgreen: Yes, absolutely. On any webpage, you have some tags of your page. You have your page title, which is a, I think they're technically called meta tags, right? Am I just making that up? Is it too

Matt Edmundson: No, that's exactly what they're called.

Nikki Lindgreen: Okay, I'm good. I'm like, wait, did I just lose, did I just lose any credibility here? So yeah, the on page or the page title is what really shows up like if you're in a web experience and you have multiple tabs open, when you hover over each tab, whatever text appears is your page title.

So that's the, still the most important for SEO for on page. So we want to make sure that looks really good and is filled with as many keywords as possible. Make sense to the human reader, not the bot. So that would be the first one. There's another tag in there called Meta Description Tag, which is important to look at because it's [00:09:00] like the click babiness, in a good sense, of your results on Google.

So while it's not going to, if you fill keywords, it's not going to improve your ranking, it's at least going to be like, what, Hook someone like an email subject line to actually click through. And then anything else, like meta keywords. I think I had a client come to me recently and ask like, why we weren't putting in meta keywords.

I'm like, oh sweetie, that's 15 years ago. Like we just don't. We don't do that anymore.

Matt Edmundson: yeah. That's so 2010, isn't it, really? Keywords.

Nikki Lindgreen: So if anyone's filling in your meta keywords field, it's a total waste of time to spend any money to have them populate that field.

Matt Edmundson: yeah, I remember those days when we would do that. And I'm actually quite glad they've gone because it took a long time and I don't know if it yielded any fruit even back then, Nikki, I'm not going to lie. But so the category page you're setting the meta information and you're optimizing on page content for both keyword and how the customer is going to interact with that, [00:10:00] right?

How the viewer is going to interact with that. So you use coil jewelry. I have no idea what that is. So that would def I would definitely need some explanation on that. If I go to Shopify and I just leave it to the default category, what they're going to do is they're going to show products from that category, aren't they, or they're going to show maybe some subcategories but you used another phrase in there about a landing page which leads me to think that you're probably making the category pages more than just meta title, meta description, a headline as in Coil Jewelry and then just showing a whole bunch of coil jewelry.

It sounds like you're adding content to that page as well. Am I understanding that right?

Nikki Lindgreen: Possibly, we're really like, when we come in, our brands are so brand centric that like, it's their baby. If we're going to say you need content blocks left and right, they're going to be like, let's break up immediately because that's not what our brand looks like. So we have to figure out how to play into the aesthetic of this beautiful site they've developed and their comfort zone.

So when we find ourselves in situations with a coiled jewelry example where [00:11:00] no one and their mother know what that even means. Let alone, we're gonna go search for it. We would then maybe look, that would be an instance where we would say if we have a flexible block that we can like expose on certain pages, this would be a page to do it.

We've tried Coil Jewelry, you got 20 visitors to your website. So we need to explain more, because unless you're fine with 20 SEO visitors to this page we're leaving a lot on the table. And so we'll come to that with data and not just say now we're going to update your template and every single category or collection link landing page will need copy and my team is going to put together some copy in two days and cross our fingers that you, it resonates with you, right?

Matt Edmundson: that's very good. I like that. Slight deviation that we talked about SEO, but one of the things that you mentioned there, which is a beautiful segue to perhaps what we should get into talking about, Nikki is when you talked about the meta description. In effect the sort of your meta titling, Google pulled down.

So when you go to Google, you search something, you see the titling, you see the description and the [00:12:00] description now we're told is to be written in such a way that it makes sense to the viewer or the person doing the searching in relation to that keyword. And it's going to entice them to click through to your website, right?

The phrase we're now using a lot. It seems to be is hook. So let's talk about hooks a little bit. Cause I know we wanted to get into this on video as well. What is a good hook? What do you mean by hook? Because I've heard lots of different definitions of this and I've heard lots of different examples.

So let's just clarify terms before we crack on. Yeah.

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah, that's fair. Cause I think we've even moved around in terms of what we're calling them internally. To me what I'm talking about when I say a hook is like the content theme of the video. So in the land of where I am in heavily in beauty and skin care, we usually have 15 different hooks or themes of video content that are like, [00:13:00] we know it's likely going to at leats hit our current Roas or CAC, and we'll pull from those, especially if a client's been light in those areas, but across the industry and even those super creative paid media people, there's probably hundreds of different pillars, hooks to pull from, but it's saying we have to code everything in our system so that we can easily dissect what hook is working or what pillar is working, so it's just our way of really keeping things together.

Organized and narrow so that as we're doing these analysis to see what's moving the needle client by client, we can really quickly summarize what it is. So I can give you like a more of an example. So in beauty, there's a lot of outcome hooks. They are known as before and after, but Matt hates terminology like before and after and if your ad is named before and after, there's a higher likelihood it will get flagged just because you used [00:14:00] so we work with some wrinkle reduction, acne reducing type brands, and for them, the outcome, like the before and truly the after of using a product works really well.

And so that would be an outcome hook is like, how did this product or service work for them? move you forward in your path and journey towards X goal?

Matt Edmundson: It's interesting, you talk about how Meta a fan of before and after. Why is that before we carry on, but I'm curious. Why would they not like before and after.

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah, I think there's a little bit of it that overlaps with a medical leaning. So if you think about like a weight loss, something or other, like seeing an overweight person and a thin person might've just, legally, I think there's some things that are a little questionable about whether or not they should be able to advertise on their platform.

So that's probably one thing. One example and same with seeing a face covered in acne and then a clear face. They just, they don't like that for those reasons. And so what we found over the [00:15:00] years is even working with our meta reps, just rename it and it will probably not be live for a long time because they will eventually catch on.

But, something that would be rejected before it ever went live can now be live for a couple of days. The other ways in which people can, Before and after on meta can go forward is if you do a compilation whether either a carousel or a video bury the before and after in the middle of the video So it's harder for them to spot quickly But if the first asset is super heavy acne second is super clear skin It's like too obvious for their algorithm to look at and pull down.

Yeah,

Matt Edmundson: it is, this is interesting, isn't it? Because my initial reaction to this is I get the marketing power, I suppose of a before and after you see them all the time, in men's magazines. So I've got a beer belly over here, and now over here I've got a six pack and it took me four and a half minutes using your system to get from A to B, right?

That kind of thing. It's never worked for me, Nikki, I'm not going to lie. But it's intriguing [00:16:00] how obviously Facebook and, or Meta is it now, is and other ad platforms are not very pro these kinds of ads. Yet here we are still trying to use them. Like we're trying to gamify the system a little bit.

And are we still using the before and after stuff because it is such a powerful thing, especially in the beauty industry and skincare industry?

Nikki Lindgreen: 100%. And I think the power really lies into how heavily Facebook doesn't want you to use it, right? If you're a teenage boy and you're suffering with severe acne, the only thing on your mind when you look in the mirror is how do I get rid of this acne? So it resonates really well. It is our top performing product because people who experience it want get to go away tomorrow.

And I think same with probably the weight loss stuff, right? If there's a way I can look better soon if, I'm gonna put everything into it. But I think we're all aging humans, like we know wrinkles probably are gonna be hard to remove. So I think like for wrinkle creams and like anything [00:17:00] that's anti aging, It's more acceptable because it's meh, like no one really knows if any of this stuff is going to work, but if something's going to clear acne, it's something you strike on a little bit more quickly as a consumer.

Matt Edmundson: yeah. Yeah, I get that. And I suppose there's the real powerful psychological drivers here, isn't there, in the before and after. It's like you're very much in the before identifying with somebody, resonating, aren't you, with where they're at. And in the after you're showing them where they can be using your product.

And it's interesting how Facebook are clamping down on this, probably because marketers have over exaggerated claims as one would have thought over the years. So how critical is it in the before and after to, what was it Zig Ziglar said tell the truth attractively I think is such a great phrase, sales is all about telling the truth attractively yeah I'm curious what your experience with the before and afters are, do you get many complaints I'm curious.

Nikki Lindgreen: So I think the way the industry's kind of evolved has found solutions to the issue. The [00:18:00] attractive way right now and the passable way, even in the algorithm side to do it, is using a lot of creator generated content. So like, when this particular client, we kept telling them like, Hey, we're talking to our reps, we're doing everything we've done, we've modeled.

Rearrange the ad so that it is like the most favorable and it's still live for three days and then it's getting rejected. So then the next step is who are the creators you're working with right now? Can we put this in a creator landscape and show one person's journey rather than us the brand speaking to why we're so awesome?

So I think that is a lot more passable, right? So most of our assets, when they are in the creator generated lane, do work out well, but I think, UGC is totally overdone right now, like I think people are starting to tire of it. It's still effective, but like that, we're at the bottom of that bell curve now, so we don't know for how much longer.

The new way people are thinking through user generated anything is [00:19:00] education. And so this is where we could, in this continuing the Acne brand example, go after creators who have acne, who can speak. In an educational lens or like more intelligently about maybe the ingredients and why some brands worked for them.

So I think that's going to be the evolution for brands like this to get through the outcome hook is really push it in the lane of a creator and hopefully an educational focused creator, whether that's like an expert in the industry or a consumer who can speak intelligently.

Matt Edmundson: That's really interesting. It's an interesting evolution, isn't it? Because I smiled when you said, we're all getting a bit tired of UGC. It's again, marketers know how to screw things up, don't they? They get anybody, maybe they don't even use their products. This is, we've sent you some free stuff.

Can you just tell us how cool it is? Sure. You've sent it to me free. No problem. And then we'll use that as an ad. I find quite a fascinating concept. And so I can see why we're getting tired [00:20:00] of it. So now what you're saying is actually for UGC, the next evolution, if we're an eCommerce brand, if you're listening to the show, guys, listen up, if you're using UGC, To actually take that stage furthering and the people you get to create the UGC should do it from a more educational viewpoint.

They should talk like they actually know what the product is all about etc. How do you do that? Yeah,

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah, so for some of these brands, I think having like B2B partners, so an acne brand might work with estheticians or dermatologists and so trying to find a couple in their corner who would be willing to speak them. Hard to do in that particular industry, but that would be a really great example of having someone with authority who is not the brand speak about the efficacy of the product.

And then I think the other is if they are sort of influential individuals who have been on the acne to clear skin journey, and ideally with this said product, that could be another good way to [00:21:00] do it. And so this individual may not be super, educated on the on the topic But if or whatever, but if the team can prep them on how to speak to the, why their special sauce works at really clearing acne, I think would be the win for a brand like that.

Yeah

Matt Edmundson: I'm seeing more and more starting to see more and more, Nikki. It's probably the right phrase, what I call the Zac Efron effect, right? So this is where Zac Efron goes to some village in the remotest part of the world, figures out what they eat and learn something from it, and his Netflix documentaries and which my wife has thoroughly enjoyed and I've enjoyed watching as well.

And so what I'm seeing now start to spring up are content creators who maybe suffer from acne, and they are in effect creating their own mini documentary, aren't they? They're like, I am going on a journey to figure something out. I'm going to work this out. And then the brand, With the cream comes in almost like Obi-Wan [00:22:00] Kenobi to use the story brand analogy.

And it's let me show you and there's conversations between science people or whatever going on. And then there's a sort of the revelation that hits and that sort of educational storytelling, that journey of discovery, if you like, seems to be working quite well and is becoming more and more, it's starting to become more and more common, I think.

Nikki Lindgreen: I would agree with that. I would say there's always ways to game the system. Just like you said, marketers screwed up UGC by over utilizing it. I think similarly in the TikTok affiliate programs right now. That could be a good place for the little video you just mentioned, but TikTok affiliates may or may not be coming very crowded with the people who just got free product and are excited to say anything about it to make a 10 to 15 percent commission.

So I think as much as we in, we as marketers wanted UGC to help build our brand through third parties that were more credible, the end is, [00:23:00] it may be hitting our credibility by these people, maybe just not. Looking our brand, speaking the brand. So it's a little bit all over the place and I think brands like really should work closely with whomever is running influencers, just to make sure the whole, the whole space of it feels good from a branding perspective and doesn't feel off brand.

I'll give you another example. We were working with a brand and they had they had just gone out to a bunch of people for UGC because they knew they were light on it. Really great content from one woman and then she started talking about how she used it through a religious practice and it's okay the brand didn't have any religious standings it's okay they could use they could ask her to clip and use some of the video but they're like oh it was almost a slam dunk but we missed that she was very leaning in this direction and it's not appropriate for the brand.

Matt Edmundson: Right there. Good stuff. So that's the outcome hook. What's next on the list?

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah, so another one that I think [00:24:00] is working really good overall, through the last six to nine months is Frequently Asked Questions. If you think about having your CX team go through whatever the issues are and complaints of, being a customer or questions they're having before becoming a customer and answering those in video format, like probably someone at the company, maybe someone in in the making of the product can walk through and explain.

The answers to those frequently asked questions. That's worked really well. Another one that's not video, but it's hitting right now is Faking a Google image search result of your product being like the best Incense on the market. And then you have faked the Google search results with like kind of the curved edges, just like Google looks and you show all of your product.

So that's been hitting, like we just tested it over the weekend and it had a 12 X row as versus everything else we did had

Matt Edmundson: Oh, wow.[00:25:00]

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah,

Matt Edmundson: So this is this then is it if I'm understanding this correctly, Nikki. I sell beauty products and I'm in effect creating a video of somebody almost typing what's the best skincare product in the Google. I'm zoomed in, on the screen. The results come up with our products and it's click here for more info.

Is that what you're talking about?

Nikki Lindgreen: Exactly. Exactly. And we're running that on Meta and we're running that on TikTok. And so clearly the people there have experienced Google, so they know what they're looking at. But they're not having an allergic reaction to what is a Google search doing as an ad on Meta. They're like, Intrigued

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, because I imagine it's quite a quick video. It seems like a few seconds long, so you're going to, I assume you're going to maintain their interest long enough to get it listed, right?

Nikki Lindgreen: Exactly. Yeah. And then we can talk about more hooks, but I think a way in which marketing is evolving with all of the third party tracking going to the wayside is bring the funnel journey to the social platform so that you are potentially, and [00:26:00] hopefully most marketers are doing this already, but like the remarketing is built on.

Earlier assets they were exposed to engagement. There's a lot. We've done first versus third party tests in terms of remarketing pools on Meta and TikTok, and it is proving that their own first party, the social first party, does perform better than website remarketing, which is insane. Who would have thought we would find ourselves here?

But yeah. It's the way we're going.

Matt Edmundson: So what does that mean then for the skincare brand? How does that work in reality?

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah, so what we will be doing let's just talk about a meta ads funnel. So what we'll be doing on meta ads is really finding our most enjoyable content that people are consuming as video for the very top of the funnel, the cold audiences. Once they watch a percentage of the video, it doesn't matter if they clicked, it doesn't matter, anything else doesn't matter.

But once they got to the top, a percentage of the video or a couple seconds, and then we'll start remarketing [00:27:00] to them with what we believe is the next kind of like educational journey to make them like us even more. And so we'll show them those sets of videos, ideally at that point with an objective to convert, but if for some reason that isn't working, we'll continue to hook them and pull them down to the lowest level, which would be like really the testimonials, third party credibility from like press quotes, things of that sort is what we would do at the bottom.

But like the whole the whole funneling system and like the ecosystem of ads and where people are going to find you and it's choose your own adventure. So I think it's really hard to work with old school marketers who are like how are we going to hook them the first time?

How are we going to move them down the funnel? Because it's just, it really is choose your own adventure these days. Yeah,

Matt Edmundson: idea, isn't it? And we've had people on the show talk about this before, where the funnel actually is on social media. I'm going to take you from here to here, and then possibly your two, three steps in before I even think about trying to convert you, into getting our products on the site.

How do you see that [00:28:00] type of funnel working, say, in conjunction with, say, TikTok Shop, where they're not even actually ever coming to your website, you're creating this funnel, they're buying it in that ecosystem, I don't know if you've tried that.

Nikki Lindgreen: we do run ads for TikTok Shop and Metashops and I think how does it work? It works a heck of a lot better. You will get better results when you point people to those shops as opposed to your eCommerce store. So I think if the jury's still out and management is still concerned, like we're seeing on average a 27 percent lift in ROAS.

So I there's a lot of different ways that you can do that in pointing to the store on the social platform. So the efficiencies are there. How it works, I think from a consumer perspective, it's just that much simpler and fewer touch points. I was talking to a couple prospects last week and they were higher consideration and like longer lead time.

Those would be places or more mature audiences. Those would be times where like shop probably isn't going to outperform because they really want to be immersed in the content of your [00:29:00] website before they consider, so there are going to be outliers, but I would say if you normally have a purchase journey that's under 15 days in your AOVs, under a couple hundred dollars, you should be fine to be testing out TikTok shops and Metashops and probably see some success.

Matt Edmundson: yeah, which makes an awful lot of sense, really. Yeah, no very good. Okay, so the, we've had the FAQ hook. We've had the little sidestep here into the fake Google search video. What else is on your little list? So the, but in fact now let me, if I can, let me just rewind.

Let's go back to the FAQ questions. So your research in the questions, which. Get asked by customers either through your customer service team or through Google and doing searching the questions. Those videos you're creating are they like talking headshots? That is me with camera going, Oh, this is my beauty product.

This is what it does. This is going to be great. This is how you use it. Or is there a bit more thinking? Behind it.[00:30:00]

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah, I think it's interesting because like it is a little bit of the Wild West, right? Like we will say this is what we want you to do, but it's up to the brand to say okay I'm gonna hire a creator to do that. I believe do it. So like the ways in which it can be executed, I think is like really whatever feels natural for your brand.

So we try not to be like, as we get working with brands, we can be much more formulate because we understand their vibe and like what they're going for. But to say on this conversation here, like this is prescriptive, like exactly how to do it. It's a maybe like land really flat. So I think it's hearing that frequently asked questions.

Okay, they want to know if the gold is 14 or 18 karat cool. My designer can hop on and talk about that, why we think 18 karat is so important, blah, blah, blah. I think it's let's direct them towards what matters and then have a conversation with them around. What different angles we think we could actually execute against it.

And ideally you land on a couple and it can actually be done so that we do have [00:31:00] these various A B tests, because if it's just the product designer and it doesn't land, we could scrap it completely. But have missed that it was just the designer falling like a little flat on camera or whatever.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. No. Great. Great. And where are you putting those videos? Are you excuse me. Are they going on an FAQ page? Are they going on product pages? You've got some great assets or are you just using them on social media?

Nikki Lindgreen: We're using them as ads so hopefully we can find a way for them to want to distribute them a lot of places but like we'll ask them unless they hate the assets like we'll ask them to share them organically so we can boost or spark them through the ads platform of Google or TikTok or Meta or TikTok.

We'll actually also ask them to put them on YouTube Shorts unless they have an allergic reaction to being on YouTube. And then we can pick it up in Demand Gen or Performance Max or something too. So we're really trying to think through, ways in which we can exploit content for the sake of it bettering the whole company, not just like an ad [00:32:00] placement.

Matt Edmundson: Do you have many people with allergic reactions to YouTube?

Nikki Lindgreen: And no a lot of people are like, let me share it, but privately, because we don't want people to see our ads everything on YouTube has to feel very much like it was created for YouTube, so there's some of that.

Matt Edmundson: yeah. Interesting. It made me smile. So the ads then, you're using all this video content for ads. Am I still thinking about timeframes here or actually, are we going back to the as long as it's interesting analogy.

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah from a length of video, I would say 7 to 12 seconds work really well. We work with a couple celebrity kind of lead brands, and people want to see one person, and therefore, longer videos of, in that scenario could work better, but I think like short and to the point, like no one has the attention span for more than that.

And then I just want to evolve on to like how these hooks and pillars, if you will, do evolve with time. Like we've known since the beginning of digital marketing that talking about your [00:33:00] press hits. In third party credibility, whether it's like your best star rating and what they said about your product, like works really right now.

Like this moment in time, a split screen where on the vertical screen, the top is like someone doing something with the product, and the bottom is like a scroll reel of your, like testimonials is a type. third party cred and testimonial type hook that's working. I would have never even thought of that three months ago because that just wasn't in the marketplace but now we're starting to see it trend and we're starting to test it and like I don't know if it'll be live in six months from now but we're going to ride that wave now so I think it's good to have these like areas in which you're going to latch on to in terms of like thematic plays and then you have all the time to like fulfill.

how you can do it. But if someone tells you that a hook or a pillar is UGC, like major eye roll because that's a way in which you can execute any of the hooks, but it's not a hook in itself.

Matt Edmundson: yeah. That's I'm intrigued. I've not actually seen that where you have on [00:34:00] vertical video, someone at the top doing something and then reviews on the bottom. I'm curious to see what that actually looks like. Mainly because I think, I just wonder if it would split my attention somehow and I'm, maybe it does,

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah.

Matt Edmundson: don't, I'm watching this video for seven seconds.

My attention split in 45, 000 directions anyway, right at this point. I'm flicking through videos faster than I know what to do with. So the videos that you've created for ads, we've got our different, however, any other hooks, by the way, that are really just, they're doing well at the moment.

Oh,

Nikki Lindgreen: out that does work well, but some brands also dislike is Us Vs. Them. And so I think if you can do them by name or them by the category overall really resonates. So I think if you're like a protein powder and your powder is like cleaner or whatever, I don't even know.

I'm not in that lane at all. But like those are ones that seem to work really well is like how much healthier your mix is versus. Just the average or a competitor by name.

Matt Edmundson: that's a really interesting, but we're just, [00:35:00] we're as I say, we're talking about creating some ads for one of the brands that we're involved with. Right now doing exactly that talking Omega-3 that we have like ours is better than theirs because dot. It's very much the I call it the Apple ad because that's what Apple did, isn't it?

Years ago they basically had a guy saying I'm Apple and then the guy saying I'm a PC and it was just like, I'm cool, I wear Vans and a t shirt, you're in a suit and a jacket. All those kind of things I thought were quite clever. I don't know, a question if I can, Nikki, we've talked about a lot of creative ideas and some of which I'm definitely going to try.

I'm really curious to see what's going to happen here. How, if at all, are you guys using AI to help with this creation process?

Nikki Lindgreen: yeah. So we are really small, but I think one of the things we are trying to put some of our time into is like what, what will move us forward. So we probably tested seven different [00:36:00] creative AI solutions just to see. What one's like legit, what one can actually help us move the need forward. And I think we've identified one that could be a value add in terms of, cause we do creative briefing for our clients and creative strategy.

So it'll simplify that and also do some actual lifting of assets for us, video or. Check out our podcast live every Wednesday and Saturday Starting today at 10pm ET. What we're finding is they're not that much of a time saver right now on the ads management side, and the recommendations are like pretty much the Google Ads recommendations verbatim, or like just that level where you're like, yeah, I see how this could be said, but like a person would come up with it.

So we're not super sold on that yet, and we do work with early stage brands, so often times we'll pitch them, and they're like, [00:37:00] oh, we went with Otis, or one of the AI plays, and then three months later, they're like, actually,

Matt Edmundson: Can you please help? Yeah.

Nikki Lindgreen: rap.

Matt Edmundson: That's what I said. I'm not entirely sure that, AI is saving all the time that people think it is actually saving, by the time you've figured out how to use it and all the prompts and stuff. What sort of AI tools are you playing with at the moment that you're finding interesting, if I can ask?

Nikki Lindgreen: Yeah, so I think on the creative side, the, our favorite for ad creative is called Best Ever and they are very new. We were fortunate enough to meet the founder since they're another Bay Area company, and so she's been able to walk us through the journey with her. And so it's been a good experience to just understand agency needs.

So I think she's going to be a good agency solution. So that's best ever. On the management AI side, I am the most impressed with Captivate. And that's CAC tivate? I don't know. There's like [00:38:00] Captivate as an agency. There's just so many overlaps and like names. But I think Captivate is still just maybe six months from now we'll take it a little bit more seriously, but we did the free trial, we talked to their CEO quite extensively, and I think it's just not there.

Not quite there yet.

Matt Edmundson: that's interesting. That's interesting. Be interesting to see where it goes, Nikki,

because I'm with you. If you'd have asked me three months ago, I'd have said, oh, I'm playing with this AI tool, but now I've forgotten about that AI tool, this one instead. And I don't know if you're doing the same thing.

I'm, I feel like I just jumped from one thing to the next. I've not settled in on anything yet. And I will definitely check out Best Ever though. I will check out the recommendation because I think that's that's going to be great. Nikki, listen, we've got to this part of the show, right?

I should have warned you about this before we hit the record, but I'm really sorry. So I didn't do that. It's a new feature we are putting in the eCommerce podcast, which is why I didn't remind you because I'd completely forgotten. All it is for our own social media, we are doing videos whereby I answer guest questions.

So I need a question from you that I can then go [00:39:00] and answer on the eCommerce Podcast social media channels. I'm curious to know what that question would be.

Nikki Lindgreen: Okay question for you. I think I would like Your point of view on what oh my gosh. I mean I have two different questions so

Matt Edmundson: can ask too. That's fine. We're still new into it. It's totally fine.

Nikki Lindgreen: I think the first thing that's percolating in my mind is how To position the work of the paid team. We do creative and we do landing page recommendations. We're not devs.

But because the eCommerce industry feels paid media disposable and you can switch teams, and the result sustain.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah.

Nikki Lindgreen: How are they really feeling about needing to use paid media to grow their business and like what do you slash clients believe is going to happen in the next couple of years?

Matt Edmundson: Oh, okay. What's going to happen? Love that. That's a [00:40:00] great

Nikki Lindgreen: paid with create paid creative, paid management and then landing pages. I would say like

Matt Edmundson: Okay.

Nikki Lindgreen: My second question if I can ask you too, would be around the role of the CMO, because there seems to be some news articles about that. I forget if it was Starbucks or another major, but they moved their CMO into the CEO role.

And I don't know if they believe that like marketing is yeah, I'd just like to know like where CMOs are going, if the role is evolving, if they're being sunset, like really what's happening with CMOs.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. That's a great question. Especially I think in the light of AI as well which we were previously talking about. I am going to, I am going to ruminate on those questions and I'm going to post the answer on social media. If you want to know how I'm going to answer Nikki's question, make sure you subscribe to us on Instagram because this brand new channel, we're like five, Nikki, I'm ashamed to say it, we've been podcasting for five years.

We get thousands of people downloading every month. We have just [00:41:00] literally launched our eCommerce Podcast Instagram channel, and I'm involved in the digital space. Forgive me, dear listener, but go check it out. It'd be great to see you in there. Nikki, listen, I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

Huge thanks to you today coming on the show. How do people reach you? How do they connect with you? If they want to do that, if they want to find out more about working with you guys, what's the scoop? What's the MO? What's your process? Noodling.

Nikki Lindgreen: Yes. Yeah. So I just love to connect. Part of the reason I started an agency is like I wanted to help multiple brands, not just be in the house with one. So if you have any burning questions or just need a third party point of view on something like reach out, I am Nikki at Pennock. co.

That's P E N N O C K. C O. That's our domain too, so feel free to go ahead and check us out, but we'd love to hear from anyone and just spend some time noodling in what's going on with their business.

Matt Edmundson: Noodling is such a good word. I like that. We will, of course, link to Nikki in the show notes as well, but [00:42:00] Nikki, appreciate you coming on. Anything else in closing before before I close out the show here, anything else top of mind for you?

Nikki Lindgreen: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Matt Edmundson: Oh, okay. Explain what you mean by that.

Nikki Lindgreen: I think like sometimes people are afraid to test or they test and they miss the point of the test and they just, be very clear on what you're doing, what the objective is and don't mix up your KPI. So that.

Matt Edmundson: Very good. Very good. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Brilliant. Nikki, thank you for coming on. Really appreciate it. It's been fantastic. Really enjoyed the conversation. Got lots of good ideas.

Nikki Lindgreen: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me, Matt.

Matt Edmundson: There you have it. Another fantastic conversation. Huge thanks again to Nikki for joining me today. Also, be sure to follow the eCommerce Podcast wherever you get your podcast from because we've got yet more great conversations lined up and I don't want you to miss any of them. Any of them. And in case no one has told you yet today, let me start that again.

And in case no one has told you yet today, let me be the first. [00:43:00] You are awesome. Yes, you are. Create it awesome. It's just a burden you've got to bear. Nikki's got to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well. Now the eCommerce Podcast is produced by PodJunction. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app.

The team that makes this show possible is the beautiful, the talented, the just sheer amazing Sadaf Beynon and Tanya Hutsuliak. Our theme music was written by the super talented Josh Edmundson. And as I mentioned, if you would like to read the transcript or show notes, head over to the website, ecommercepodcast. net, where, coincidentally, you can sign up to the newsletter if you haven't done so already it'd be great to see you in there. So that's it from me. That's it from Nikki. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic week, wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time. Bye for [00:44:00] now.