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December 8, 2023
Join us to learn about how Spencer grew Eat Well Nashville from 0 to 7-figures in revenue with influencer marketing.
Will Schreiber: Hey, I'm Will Schreiber, co-founder of Bottle, and welcome to our very first coffee chat. The goal of this is to buy you coffee to say thank you for all of the work you do to feed your community and make the world a better place. If you missed this December coffee, we're going to do these every month. So go to bottle.com/coffee. It doesn't matter if you're using Bottle software or not. If you're in the meal delivery world, we want to celebrate you.
Go to bottle.com/coffee and we'll send you a free gift card for free coffee in January. And we hope you will join us for our next expert conversation. Today in this coffee chat, we are hosting Spencer Donaldson, and Spencer founded and grew Eat Well Nashville, which was a meal prep business in Nashville, Tennessee, that he grew to seven figures and ended up selling.
We've gotten to know Spencer over the years and watched him grow, build, and sell that business. We've always been super impressed with how he operated it and, more importantly, how he marketed it and grew it. After he left Eat Well, he started a marketing agency to help people in the meal delivery world specifically grow their business through SEO, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and a bunch of other tools.
Today we're talking about influencer marketing. It doesn't matter if you use Bottle software or not. We keep the conversation extremely straightforward so that anybody, regardless of what tools or software you're using, can take advantage of what he has to say and teach you.
About 10 minutes are spent going through Spencer's background and how he started Eat Well. And then the back half of the conversation, we really get into some of his tools, tips, tricks, and strategies when it comes to influencer marketing at Eat Well. Hope you enjoy the talk. Cheers to you. Hope you have a great cup of coffee in hand and I'll see you in January.
Will Schreiber: Hey, Spencer. All right. We're back. We're back. We'll give it another minute before we really get started to let a few other people join. But we were just on and you don't even have coffee. You've got Celsius.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, it counts though. It's caffeine. It's caffeine. We're good.
Will Schreiber: So this is actually my first Zoom webinar, and we have a Q&A feature. So the basic format of today is Spencer and I'm going to ask Spencer some questions, and then we're going to open up Q&A. I have the Q&A questions pulled up. But let's get into it, Spencer. So quick introduction and how I got to know Spencer a few years ago. He was running at the time a meal prep business in Nashville called Eat Well Nashville. And we were always really impressed with how he operated that business and grew it. We've stayed in touch over the years and now Spencer runs a marketing agency after selling Eat Well. So just for everyone to have context, let's start at the Eat Well stuff. How'd you get into meal prep? And give a quick backstory of that business.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, my business partner, Rob Bellenpont, and I started Eat Well Nashville in 2016. And it was just built out of essentially a need for healthy meals in the Nashville, Tennessee area. We just found that there weren't a lot of great options for healthy, convenient meals. So we really just set out to build a business that would provide what we needed desperately as founders and business owners. At that time, I was in real estate hopping from meeting to meeting and really just needed healthy options. So that's where we decided to kick things off and launch the business that would just basically fulfill our need and offer us healthy options.
Will Schreiber: And just I want to spend most of the talk on what you learned from a marketing perspective and what you do now. But what were some of the core challenges you faced running Eat Well, or just some high level things you learned or that were surprising about running that business?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, there are so many challenges. I'd started a lot of different businesses ahead of Eat Well Nashville. The ability to scale is really difficult when you're scaling into delivering thousands of meals and really just figuring out all of the nuance around hiring and who to hire and who to bring in and how you keep your quality where it should be. I think that's the biggest thing. Quality assurance in the product was very important for us. Figuring out how we could generate a high quality product at scale as we grew. When we started, it was really small. Our first month, I think we generated 50 to 100 customers, which was a lot for us. We were working out of a shared kitchen, about 1,000 square feet before we had an opportunity to move into the custom kitchen that we had built out.
Starting out, your quality is amazing, and then figuring out how to scale from 100 customers to 1,000 customers to thousands of customers is really a difficult challenge. So figuring that out was the biggest thing. How do you scale this thing effectively and keep your quality where it needs to be to make sure your customers are happy and that you retain them?
Will Schreiber: Yeah, that is a huge challenge. What was one of the more rewarding things of running Eat Well?
Spencer Donaldson: I think the biggest thing for me was just the connection with the community. Everybody eats, right? So everyone in the community you can work with. We had a lot of opportunities to support a bunch of different charities and offer support during the tornado when that hit a few years ago in Nashville, which was really rewarding. We were out serving a lot of folks who were affected by the tornado, also helping out during the pandemic when schools were shut down. We worked with a lot of different country music artists and different folks to help support the community and deliver meals to those folks. I think that was probably the most rewarding part. Just being able to support and drive awareness that there is a healthy meal business out there that provides meals in the community. For us, that was probably the biggest thing—just being a community-based business and growing within the community and everyone feeling like we were their next-door neighbor.
Will Schreiber: That's very cool. And a question here from Hannah. Because you brought up the quality and scaling production, she's wondering at what point did you determine it was time to move past a shared kitchen if you were ever in one and into your own, or how did you scale the operations in the end?
Spencer Donaldson: I think we knew immediately early on. The fact that we had such a good reception right away from the jump, we knew it was going to be a great opportunity. We reviewed other meal prep businesses in the area. Our intention was to grow into our own kitchen anyway. We already had the build out plans ready going into the business because we said if we're going to do this, we're going to do this right. So I think we were in the shared kitchen for just a couple of months before we ended up in our custom built kitchen.
Will Schreiber: Very cool. All right, I just want to give a quick welcome again to Spencer, who had built and sold Eat Well Nashville and now runs a marketing agency. We're going to get to that in a second on tools and ideas to market your business. But one other kind of happy coffee day question for you—do you have a favorite coffee shop in Nashville?
Spencer Donaldson: Ooh, I really like Elegy in East Nashville. It's like a small coffee shop, so it's not one of the better-known ones, but that's by far probably my best, my favorite option for both food and coffee for breakfast.
Will Schreiber: Are you from Nashville originally? Did you grow up there?
Spencer Donaldson: No, I grew up just outside of Detroit and I've been here for about 12 years now.
Will Schreiber: What brought you to Nashville? I also lived in Nashville for six or seven years. Awesome city. Curious what brought you there?
Spencer Donaldson: I chased my now wife down here. So I chased the girl.
Will Schreiber: That's a good reason. Always. Yeah.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, we're married and have a one-year-old daughter. So we're doing well.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, cool. All right, these are awesome questions rolling in. We will circle back to them as it relates to Spencer's time running Eat Well, but let's get into the promised meat of this conversation. Spencer now runs a marketing agency based out of Nashville. If you're curious, I'm happy to put you in touch with Spencer if you just reach out to me after this call. But we're talking about influencer marketing. Spencer had put together these five points of what it takes to do influencer marketing. So Spencer, how did you all think about influencer marketing at Eat Well? Let's start there. There's a lot to dig into.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah. So honestly, for us, working with influencers was not just a factor of marketing. It was also a way to get rid of our excess food. Every week we would generate a little bit of extra food, just by way of how the business works. You're always adding a few extra meals to what you're delivering, and if anything comes up, you can dip into those excess meals that you have in your inventory. So we were taking a lot of that excess and instead of donating it at a lower cost, what we would do is invite influencers to come and share in those meals and try those meals out. So basically it's just a way for us to grow the business, get the word out. And we would just say, hey, come check out our fridge and sign an agreement—a quick agreement that you're going to post several times on one of your social channels, and they would get the word out about the meals that we were producing.
Will Schreiber: And how would you find influencers?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, so there's a lot of different ways. Over the years that's changed. Still one of the best ways is just to do hashtag searches on Instagram. If you're looking at Instagram, you can also TikTok now. You can easily search. So if you're finding keywords based on Nashville, for instance, or whatever city you're located in, you want to look for influencers in those areas. And then once you find someone, if you look through their follower list, you'll usually find other influencers that you can work with. So really, that's the best way to do it—is to find people that you enjoy their content.
But there's also a bunch of other tools that you can use like HypeAuditor, Collabster, Influence City, and then TikTok Creator Marketplace. So those are some of the areas that you can utilize. You want to be very careful to look at any influencer and qualify them appropriately to make sure that they're in your city or whatever geographic region you're in so you get the most out of those influencers.
Will Schreiber: And then how would you qualify influencers? So I imagine you use one of those tools, you're searching hashtags, you build a list. How did you deem that someone was worth reaching out to?
Spencer Donaldson: Number one, you want to check with a tool called InBeat, which will allow you to check to see if someone has a fake audience or fake engagement. You want to be careful. That's the first thing you want to make sure of—a lot of people are buying followers, a lot of people are buying comments and likes and things like that. So the first thing to do is to check to make sure that the audience is real.
Will Schreiber: And then what's the name of that tool? We'll also send out in the email kind of links to these tools that Spencer mentions. But what was the name of that?
Spencer Donaldson: That one's called InBeat. It's inbeat.co. So that'll tell you whether or not the audience is real or fake. And so that's the most important thing because there's a lot of people buying those. Then you can work depending on what city you're in. You can work with influencers of all sizes between micro-influencers and macro-influencers. So we would always say 10,000 plus followers and then 3% plus engagement. So the bigger the influencer though, the lower that engagement rate may be. So it might be 2%, but they've got a million followers. Well, that's still maybe a person that's good to work with just depending on how big their audience is. So you want to take their audience size into account. But yeah, in general, if you have—
But also when you work with these influencers, you want to ask to see their audience metrics. So you know that most of their audience is in your geographic area where you're serving, because if you don't, then what's the point? It's wasted audience. So it's not a great opportunity if they're not there.
Will Schreiber: And so okay. So you've identified influencers. You've checked it. It's not full of spam and purchased audience. How did you then craft or do a reach out in terms of the pitch of being an influencer for Eat Well?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, I think the pitch is the most important part, right? Like influencers and content creators need content ideas at all times. So most people are just reaching out and saying, hey, we'd love for you to promote my product. Well, that's not good enough. So what you want to do is really look into the influencers, figure out what they care about. And a big thing you can do is just align with the charity—even if it's a charity that you like or a charity that the influencer likes. And say, hey, we were looking to see if you might be interested in collaborating to help support a local charity. That's a different pitch. That influencer wants to be seen in that light as someone who is promoting charitable work and it's something different. So you're giving them an opportunity to support the community versus saying, hey, just promote my product. You're giving them a whole different way of doing business with you. Plus you're giving them the content ideas. You're crafting the content ideas for them, which that's what they want. You want to let them have their own freedom when they create content. Coming up with good ideas for them—they're always going to look at you in a good light if you do that. So you really want to figure out how you can go about creating something.
And sometimes it's, if someone has a million followers and they love dogs, maybe align with a charity that helps support foster dogs or something like that and ask if they'd be willing to help you promote that. And once you get them in, you have a conversation about what you can do later on to support the business. Usually they're happy to do that, but you're just coming in with a different pitch. What causes do they have? What food do they like? And what's on your menu that might align with that. If they like avocado toast and maybe you have avocado toast on your menu, then you bring that up in the conversation.
But a lot of times this is just coming straight from DM. And also you can find a lot of influencers' emails out there.
Will Schreiber: You threw out a specific example that I thought was cool. There was bad tornadoes in Nashville one year. Can you explain just so that there's a specific example what you did with that effort?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah. I mean, so basically the tornado came through and we just reached out to a bunch of influencers and said, hey, we're going to be out serving food to anyone who's affected by the tornado—whether or not it's someone who was affected or any of the first responders or anyone helping clean up. We're going to be out serving food at this location. And we set up a buffet in a parking lot. And we just said, hey, would you all mind just sharing this with your community so everybody knows that we're here to support and they can come get food from us. And that opened up that conversation with a lot of those influencers to really have a greater talk about how we can collaborate together overall.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, definitely. It seems like coming in and building some sort of conversation that isn't directly "hey, promote my stuff" is the most effective way to come at it.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, they're getting pitched on that all the time. They're getting so many pitches. That's not even going to work. They'll find you if they like your product and work with you. But the best way is to find a different angle to get in there.
Will Schreiber: Yeah. And when we were talking, you mentioned like one of the keys to success with influencer marketing is building that long-term relationship. And obviously, this idea of a mutually beneficial relationship where you're both supporting the community or you're giving them a content idea or giving them something to post is a way to do that. But you also brought up a really cool idea that you call it, I believe, a creator board where you had an ongoing relationship with these influencers. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah. I mean, what you want to do in general—this is something that we work with a lot of clients on now—is just helping them create a feedback loop with the influencers that they work with so they're more tied into the brand. So a good way to do that is to create what we would just call an advisory board or a creator board where you've got a bunch of influencers on that board who have an impact on your business. Basically it's, hey, what do you guys think on the new meal that we just released? Do you have any ideas for meals that you would like? And then also you're connecting the creators that you work with so that they can collaborate too. So it's just creating an environment where it's a community of those influencers and creators that you're working with.
And we've seen that work really well. It's like, what else are you going to do to build community within your business with those creators? And that just ties them much more into what you're doing than just getting them meals and then letting them go home and having a transactional relationship where you're saying, hey, you've got to post this many times. Here's the exact amount of sales I need to have.
Because let's face it, influencer marketing is the top of funnel marketing strategy. Without a lot of frequency, you're not going to convert people into customers for you. So you need to figure out good ways to collaborate with the influencers. Another thing that you want to do is work with influencers' friends. So like usually these influencers will have a group of friends that they collaborate with, and you'll see that in their posts. You want to work with all of their friends because they're going to have the same audience. And you need that frequency. So the greater the cluster of influencers or creators that you're working with that cross promote, the better off you are in generating business. So that's another thing to think about. And just getting all those people on that board and tying them into the business will definitely give you a leg up in generating. And you're coming up with content ideas too, like while you're doing that. So it's like, how can we support them versus them just support us. And by doing that, you're getting much better deals. And you're also figuring out ways to work with them over a three to six month period versus just, oh, we're going to do a one post this week and see how it works. You want to definitely do longer-term deals.
Will Schreiber: Let's I could keep asking you questions about this for a while, but there's a lot of good ones here in the Q&A, yeah, I would love to get to. So let's start with the influencer-specific one. Hannah's asked what's some of the best messaging or catchy phrases that you would advise or give ideas for the influencers to post.
Spencer Donaldson: So for them to post about your business?
Will Schreiber: Yeah, I think if you were helping craft content ideas for the influencers, what are some of those ideas or like things that work in terms of like actually driving traffic to your site on behalf?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, I mean, I think number one, you want to let the influencer drive the car. They have to come up with the specifics around how to message their audience. They built that audience. They're the ones that are going to do a great job with the audience. You can give them ideas, but when it comes down to the specifics, you really want them to do that. But I think in general, it's staying away from just promoting the product. It's like, how else can you collaborate? Like we talked about with the charities, what else is going on in the community? Did they have a new product launch that you can promote? Like, how else can you get involved with them that's not just transactional? So you gotta be careful about what you're pitching. It's like, hey, we want to build a relationship with you.
And I would stay away from giving them specifics around the language. I would let them craft that so that it's more successful because every audience is a little bit different.
Will Schreiber: And then what did you set as your success metric for an influencer post? Was it new customers? Did you attach some sort of lifetime value to that—that these people actually drove what ended up becoming recurring customers? How did you think about the efficacy of those posts?
Spencer Donaldson: See, for us, you want to be careful about those metrics. There's things you can do. You can use something like Viral Sweeps, a sweepstakes platform that allows you to weight entries. So like if someone signs up via email, it might be worth 15 entries. If they just follow you, it's worth five entries. So there's technology like that that will allow you to collect different pieces of information along with purchases. If someone purchases, you can give them more entries into the sweepstakes. So you can do something like that.
But a lot of times, in your checkout flow, you want to ask people where they come from, and you'll get a lot of influencers discount codes and things like that. But when it comes down to it, a lot of people just don't use the discount codes. So if you say, how did you hear about us? You may get an answer if you make it required versus just having a discount code that is specific to the influencer. You can also track visits to the website from their link too. So you'll see success there.
But again, with influencers, it's the top of funnel strategy. So your goal with influencers should be to drive your email list signups, your social following. And over time that will convert, but those are the things that you want to focus on, which is why you want to keep this really low cost and kind of focus on providing them with free product versus paying them. That's why you've got to appeal to their senses outside of just this is a monetary transactional relationship so that they're more willing to give you a better deal and work just for product.
Will Schreiber: So that leads perfectly into another question we got: can you share more on converting influencer content into sales? And if I'm translating a little bit your strategy, it seemed like was take influencer traffic and those posts and drive them to a first touch point with your brand and get them on an email list. Get them somehow in your funnel, maybe even just to hit your website, pixel to retarget them with ads. Can you talk a bit more about how you think about influencers as top of funnel and then eventually converting them into customers?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, I think influencers are really just a way to get people in the funnel interested in your product. You will get purchases. It's really hard to track which is one of the challenging things. So that's why you want to do this as low cost as possible if you can. But yeah, you just want to look at your email signups and make sure you have a solid email cadence along with that. And the other thing too, when you work with the influencers, you want to ask them for ownership over the content. So you're going to have them send you the raw video files, the raw photos that they've taken, and use that in your marketing communication as well. So if you're doing an email flow and they've done a post, take some of those photos or those videos and put it in the post so it's more likely to resonate with the folks to drive that sale once they're in your email list. So that's how we think about it. It's more about email signup and social following and that kind of thing versus bottom line where it's going to convert.
Will Schreiber: And is that typically in the agreement? Anything you post we can use as well. Shared IP?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah. Yeah. We own the content. We request that you send us the raw video files and photos.
Will Schreiber: Got it. Another question here. Back to that influencer board concept. What environment or tool did you use to manage that or to manage your list of influencers? Something like a Facebook group chat or something else?
Spencer Donaldson: So for us, what we've done, especially recently, is just set up Zoom calls where we have Zoom calls with everyone. But you can definitely use a Facebook group or something like that, even having a group text. You can do that as well. And so that's an option for you to build it. But really anything where there's community that they're likely to sign in. But for us, it's more or less just setting up a monthly call with those influencers. And if they can make it great, if they can't, no problem. But a lot of them do show up. So I think a monthly cadence is important just to keep them tied into the brand.
Will Schreiber: Some sort of update every month. Yeah. Yeah. Another just tactical question here. Okay, you've got influencers, you agree to create content. How do you have them share that content with you? Email it, Google Drive? Did you have any sort of tool or tech to help manage that?
Spencer Donaldson: What we typically do is just Google Drive. But honestly, it just depends on how many you're managing. Like, for some clients in our marketing agency where we're managing like 300 influencers, it has to be a lot more organized. But if you're managing, say 20 or 30 good relationships, you can manage it however you want. That's easiest for you—either email, Google Drive, or just have them text you. The easier it is for the influencer, the more likely it is that you're going to get that content and have an easier time working with them. So you just want to be conscious of that. If you can do it via text, that's even better.
Will Schreiber: And then another idea or just brainstorming. I think the question here from somebody—the charity idea is great. Would you ever just do something as simple as trade meals for posts? Or do people usually ask to be paid in cash?
Spencer Donaldson: I mean, we were only—with something like food, everybody needs to eat. And so if you're offering free meals, most people would trade for posts. So we would just ask for a certain type of post. So depending on how you want to set up the deal, you can ask for story posts. So if you're going to get story posts that only last for 24 hours, you ask for more of those. So you might say, give me four story posts for however many meals you want to offer them. Or you could do one feed post instead. So it's just figuring out the value of each post to your business and how you want to go about asking them to do that. But it was all trade. Really the charity conversations are just a way to get in the door and have those conversations, and then you start that partnership where you start trading meals on a weekly or bi-weekly basis and get posts for those.
Will Schreiber: More generally, beyond the influencer stuff, have you ever done giveaways on social media? And is that successful?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, I mean, giveaways will work, but they—people are skeptical of them. Like the longer giveaways have been around, the more skeptical people are because a lot of people will run giveaways and not actually give the prize away. So if you're going to do one, it's gotta be a valuable prize. You don't want it to be like, oh, this is a $50 giveaway. Most people aren't going to take the time, and if they do, it's very little engagement. So it's gotta be a good amount. So if you're going to give away $500 or $1,000 with the meals, that's much more appealing. And then when you actually do the giveaway, actually market the fact that you gave away those meals and who you gave them away to. So that way people know you're serious about it. That way the next time you do it, people are like, okay, they actually fulfill on their promise.
Will Schreiber: Right. Yeah, that is funny. I'm like, man, that you could totally just not give it away. But that's a good point. If you go and make a big noise and even maybe feature the person who won, that'd be cool.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, a hundred percent. You should definitely do that for sure.
Will Schreiber: Another question. Somebody trying to structure time periods of working with influencers and saying that you had mentioned the three to six month window. Any more thoughts on that? Maybe like, what's a good timeline in terms of working with different influencers?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, I think you should see results within three months. So minimum, I would say three months. By saying three months, you're saying to the influencer, like, I want to work with you and I'm willing to take a chance with you. So as long as you've done everything else and you verified the audience and everything like that, I think three months is a good starting point. Then if it's not working out, then you can just cancel the agreement after that point and work with someone else. A lot of times too, you want to rotate the audience. So one influencer might have one audience—say if you're doing healthy meal prep, one influencer's got a fitness audience. Well, you want to target that audience, but you might also want to target stay-at-home moms. So you want to make sure the audiences that you're targeting are diverse. So you are rotating through the influencers every three to six months if you can, but if it's a great relationship and they're providing value, you can continue to offer them a product in exchange for posts.
Will Schreiber: Yeah. And as it relates to, we have a question about running Google ads, which is quite different from social media marketing. So I'm curious from just like a high level, where did influencer marketing rank in your mind in terms of a driver of revenue from the marketing pie? And how did that stack against something like AdWords in your experience?
Spencer Donaldson: I mean, so long term, influencer marketing is a big part of any business. If you do it right now, if you do it wrong, it's going to fail miserably for you. Whereas—it's a top of funnel strategy again, though. So you're looking at generating emails, opting people into an email service, and then making sure that you're keeping them informed. So there's added costs on top of what you're doing with the influencers in order to convert. With something like Google AdWords, you can see right away whether or not it's converting. So in my opinion, SEO and AdWords are the greatest marketing channels for almost any business. So for me, from a conversion standpoint, those are channels that you can easily look at metrics and make sure that you're converting. So I would focus heavily on those when it comes to your marketing budget. Now, if you've got excess meals and you think, hey, I've got excess meals. I either have to throw them away, give them away, or I can give them to influencers and then it's a marketing expense. If you look at it that way, then it costs you almost nothing. And it's a great model to work with influencers. So doing that is important, but Google Ads far and away, SEO far and away are the best drivers for performance.
Will Schreiber: So one plug for Spencer here—his current marketing agency does great work with SEO and AdWords. And again, if you're interested in connecting with Spencer let me know. We'll put you in touch. We will, though, have a dedicated coffee chat and then hopefully much more content after that coming out about this question about AdWords and some of these other strategies. So it's a great question, and Spencer is totally right that the difference—as we all know, social media and Google ads—one has intent. Someone's searching for meals over on Google, and the other is top of funnel, which correct me if I'm wrong, Spencer, but that's really why the goal of the influencer marketing is getting you in the funnel. Because the intent isn't necessarily there to buy, but they're interested in your business. They're interested in your brand. So using the influencer marketing to get your customer on a list, get them into your funnel so that when they are ready to buy and do have intent, your brand comes to mind and they're ready to do it.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, you're exactly right.
Will Schreiber: All right. Some more kind of social media questions. Do you see that hashtag still generate leads? And any ideas on how to grow followers or engagement beyond just posting?
Spencer Donaldson: You got to think about it this way. And I talked to a lot of clients about this: the social media platforms are not incentivized to promote your organic posts. So you gotta be creative with this. Like they, Meta and Facebook want you to advertise. They don't want you to have an organic following to be able to sell off of organic posts. So the hashtag model doesn't work great anymore. Now, the influencer model, though, does help you build a following. So working with influencers, that's—you'll grow a following just working with influencers. So that's an easy metric to look at when you're working with influencers. You can also have the influencers promote, hey, go follow Eat Well Nashville or whatever your business is. And they'll go drive an audience for you, but when it comes to organic social, there's just so many people competing for attention.
And I think Meta is really good at figuring out like, hey, we can't promote this business or they're not going to pay for ads. So we don't see organic as a great model right now. TikTok, you can grow a better organic following. YouTube's better too, because it's a search model. Same with TikTok—both of them have search ads, which we recommend. So now TikTok is running almost like an AdWords model when folks search, because it is more of a search engine. Same with YouTube. Those videos last—it's not disposable content.
Will Schreiber: So that confuses me though. I've heard this from so many people that I feel young. I guess every year I get less young feeling more and more disconnected from Gen Z every day. And my friends who are in their mid to low twenties talk about searching TikTok and it blows my mind. It's like, what are you searching for? And what's the result? Like, what's the consumer behavior there? Like, if I were searching for meals, why am I searching TikTok? And like, what would I be searching? Do you know?
Spencer Donaldson: Well, I mean, for me, it's like I search TikTok now. I mean, I just want quick information in video format. Like almost a step-by-step tutorial. It's easy to consume. It's 15 to 30 seconds. So like, anything like that would be helpful. I mean, I've done it for lawn care advice, things like that, because I don't have time to watch a full YouTube video. I just want something that's a bullet point, quick thing. So I think there's a lot of things about meal recipes. I search new restaurants in cities. If I go travel to a city, I'll search for what restaurants are in those cities and you'll pull up a ton of content on TikTok.
Will Schreiber: Yeah. Yeah. And this is a quick aside, but I feel like YouTube shot itself in the foot here with—they used to only monetize videos that are at least 10 minutes. And so they forced their creators to stretch the video out. And what you just said is interesting. I don't have time to go watch a 10-minute video. It's an interesting kind of like incentive design flaw that they ended up with.
Spencer Donaldson: I think yeah, people just don't want to read as much. Like, the—and even with websites that we build for SEO purposes, we tell everyone a lot of that content is just built for the search engine, not really the end user. So people just have less time. They're less engaged. They have more ads coming at them. I think I read a study that said people see between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements a day, which is crazy to think about. So yeah, you just got to think about people's time. It's so distracted.
Will Schreiber: All right. Where does social media ads fall on the scheme of SEO, AdWords, and influencer marketing? Like, would you recommend doing them? And what budget split would you recommend?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, I mean, I would say budget. You want to push a majority of your budget towards Google. Anyone who has that intent, if they're searching like "Austin meal deliveries" or "meal delivery companies," that they're buying. So that's going to be best again. Social ads, you're generating interest. So it's not as far down the funnel, but I think if you have good UGC ads and content, then you're going to drive business doing it. So I think Google AdWords, SEO first, a solid web presence, that kind of thing. And then after that, you want to do Facebook and Instagram ads. You just got to make sure that the content—you don't want Canva-style content. You want video, UGC video. Everyone's talking about that user-generated content. So whether or not—and that's one of the great things about doing influencer marketing. You're asking them for ownership over that content. So you can run ads utilizing those videos. And so that's what we recommend.
Will Schreiber: Just to get specific, what kind of content—you don't want to post a list of your menu in text. Like instead post someone on camera style, hey, here's our food this week. We're talking to the camera. That performs way better. Yeah.
Spencer Donaldson: I'm talking static posts where it's just text over a stock image or something. You see a lot of companies do that. That doesn't work and it's a waste of money.
Will Schreiber: Is Canva the best platform you think for creating that kind of content and editing videos or is there another tool you recommend?
Spencer Donaldson: No. If you're going to do video, like CapCut is great. That's integrated with TikTok for editing. Canva is good for like email and stuff like that—creating those types of graphics. But there's a lot of better editing softwares you can use for UGC. But again, if you work with influencers, a lot of times they're going to edit that content for you. So you can go directly into your ads. Yeah.
Will Schreiber: Do you ever boost those posts on Instagram and find that it's worth it?
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah. If you have good UGC, for sure. Yeah, it's along the same lines. Yep.
Will Schreiber: And then what kind of high-level, like revenue percentage of revenue do you think about allotting to an annual marketing budget?
Spencer Donaldson: I mean, this is all over the map, right? And it depends on what you're considering. I mean, between at least 5%—that's what we would look at—2% to 5%, somewhere in that range. You can get resourceful with it and you can do things yourself and hire someone in house, or you can go to an agency where it's going to be more expensive because they have to cover their costs. It just depends on how you want to do it. But yeah, I mean, most companies need to spend around 5% in marketing.
Will Schreiber: And then back to that kind of gauging success question. As you said, codes often don't get used—hard to measure ROI and sales. How would you gauge an independent, individual influencer as they were successful or not? You mentioned like you can start to see results after three months for someone that's working. What results are you referring to? What do you look at and say, yeah, that they're working. They're a good brand promoter, it's whatever metric you're trying to drive.
Spencer Donaldson: So if it's email signups, then it's email signups. If it's followers, and you'll notice a bump in—like if you see a bunch of followers after someone posts, that it's probably from those posts. So that's a good indicator. So you're going to consider all factors. You're going to see if you have a lift on your website, if you've got a lift on your website, you've got new followers, you've got email signups, then you're great. You do want to see web traffic, and that's why there's—you could have the website, you could have an exit intent pop up. And if someone comes to the website and fills that out, that exit intent form, for instance, if it says before you leave, get 15% off, and someone fills that out, if you had a lift in traffic and a lift in your email list based on that exit intent pop up, it worked. So you just have to decide on what metric you're going to measure the influencer on upfront based on the posts. And you can tell them like, here's what we want to promote. We want to promote building our email list. We want to promote adding followers, whatever it is.
Will Schreiber: Yeah. And that's why the ROI to sales, as you mentioned, is so hard. It's really like you have to believe that the lift in followers, lift in email, lift in website visitors is contributing to a lift in traffic or a lift in sales, but it's really hard to tie it back. There's just like an issue.
Spencer Donaldson: Well, that's why you got to look at it different. So if you look at it—so for instance, for us, how we looked at it, we're getting rid of waste meals that would be gone anyways, right? We're also getting UGC content. So the video ownership, we have ownership over those videos. We can use it in email and ads. So when you think of the value of those meals and what you're giving away versus what you're getting, it's actually negligible. If you do it right. If you're getting ownership over that content, because you can run that in ads that would cost you more than what the meals cost just to get that video. So that's how you have to look at it. And then how those metrics are driven. You just pay attention to what's happening after those promotions happen and you should be good.
Will Schreiber: Yeah. My main takeaway so far, I think, are first, you got to build long-term relationships and like be friendly with an influencer instead of just direct transactional. And building those, you need to drive funnel versus drive direct sales. So because it's not intent-based marketing, the goal from an influencer post is to get you on an email list, to get you to the site, to get you in a pixel tag, to get you as a follower. That's the real direct outcome of influencer marketing. And then third, user-generated content performs so much better than anything static. That asset alone, and then using that in the email list that people sign up for and in your story for the account that people have now followed, is the real juice. And then converting that lead to a customer over time. Do you feel like those are the main takeaways? That's at least been my three main takeaways so far.
Spencer Donaldson: No, that's a hundred percent accurate. And that's why we're just getting creative and how we can work with these influencers in a low-cost way, which is why appealing with the charity aspect or coming up with content ideas for them is so important because you're going to be able to get a better deal with them than if you're just asking them to promote a product.
Will Schreiber: Yeah. Lots of awesome questions here. So if you could stick around for about 10 more minutes, there's a few more.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, I can take, yeah, I can take 10 more. Yeah.
Will Schreiber: All right. For the small business, how do you suggest handling an influencer program? Does the business owner handle it? Do you recommend an agency? Is it worth hiring someone part time?
Spencer Donaldson: For us, we always, like now as an agency, we do this for a lot of different clients. But as a business owner, a great way to do it is just to have someone at the entry-level position in marketing help you out with that. So someone who's maybe just out of college who can have that communication, who understands social media—it's really going to be easy for them to do it. Now, as the business owner, you want to be engaged with them too. So if you're doing a creator board, be on those calls, because they want to know who the owner is. They want to feel like they have an interaction with the owner. But the initial setup can happen from someone outside of the ownership role.
Will Schreiber: And question here that—influencer marketing seems to have lost efficacy in the last six to 12 months compared to what I think were definite boom times for meal delivery of '21, '22. When everyone ordered online, like these e-commerce graphs are insane. We've all snapped back to the trend. And so going into next year, how do you see influencer marketing changing, evolving in 2024?
Spencer Donaldson: Well, I mean, I think when you say it's losing efficacy, I think there's a lot of noise in the market. So it's a competitive market. You need to make sure you're on top of all channels. So more of the good creators are on TikTok, so that's something to keep in mind. So making sure that you're switching channels. Also, it's a lot easier for people to fake their following. And so keeping that in mind, there's just a lot of folks. When we had the boom with influencers, that went out and bought engagement, they went out and bought followers. So finding the right ones takes a little bit more effort. And I think that's important. But I think creator marketing overall, if you're looking at all channels, we're seeing that do really well overall. So just keep that in mind. You're not just staying on Instagram. You're not just doing Instagram story posts anymore. You're getting creative in how you do this. So if you do that, you're going to see a significant boost in your business.
Will Schreiber: Is that, does that mean when you say that, does that mean you're also going over to TikTok now? Or does it mean you can't just post to the grid? Like it really, like you should be experimenting with reels. You should be cross posting. I know it's a new feature what strategies come to mind?
Spencer Donaldson: If you're on Instagram, you should really only be doing reels. Because Instagram no—like Instagram knows they're competing with TikTok. So you just have to think in their terms of how they're doing things. They're going to promote reels because they want to compete with TikTok. And so they're going to push reels more than they're going to push anything else. So it's just not as easy. But yeah, reels are important. TikTok, YouTube Shorts is another decent platform to utilize. So just getting creative and trying different channels and working, finding some TikTokers and just testing. So think of this as a testing process. And if you do that, you're going to do well overall.
Will Schreiber: In general, some things aren't going to work. Not everything works. So it's important to remember that. How do you feel about Yelp ads?
Spencer Donaldson: Yelp ads, honestly, that's something we never really engaged with. Mainly, and I don't know if you've had this happen, but as a small business owner, like the sales reps at Yelp are just ridiculous. They'll call you up constantly. So it was a big turn off. They're like hard-selling salespeople for these local listing ads. So it was a huge turn off. So we never went forward with it. So I don't have a ton of information.
Will Schreiber: I have a few friends who have worked on that sales floor. That's the whole company. It's intense. They just cold call people all day. And I love the meme about Yelp. That it's like the mafia. Like they're going to win that SEO box and then call you and say wouldn't it be a shame if we stop linking to you unless you start paying us money. It doesn't feel good.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, not at all. Yelp is the worst. Don't do it. Yeah.
Will Schreiber: Thoughts on utilizing Pinterest for meal delivery?
Spencer Donaldson: I honestly we never saw success with it. For something like meal delivery, I don't—you could probably get creative, but most people who are on Pinterest are looking for recipes. So I don't see that being a good channel just from my perspective. If anyone knows different, they'll let me know because I'm curious to know if anyone is utilizing that successfully.
Will Schreiber: I'll have to let you know if we see anyone. Okay, here's a more general question. Yeah, customer here works out of a cloud kitchen and it's online only. No, I presume no physical locations. How can they or how would you recommend them get or work on getting a diversity of local customers without having a storefront?
Spencer Donaldson: I mean, a great way that we did it is we did—when we kick things off, we did a lot of lunch and learns at businesses. Now things have changed. Like, so I don't know. Not as many people are in the office. But I think a lot of companies are going back to the office. So if you can figure out how to get in front of a group of people and do a lunch and learn, and even if you did it buffet style—if you're a meal prep company and you did a buffet buffet-style luncheon and you talk about what you do, you'll generate a lot of customers from that. That's a good way just to get face to face with the community. But it's figuring out how to get in front of those groups. It could be a church lunch and learn, or it could be a real estate agent lunch and learn. There's a lot of ways.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, sure. Here to give you a shout out—just, I don't know if everyone could see the Q&A questions. Just a local chamber, gym presentation that sparks me. We see a lot of businesses really utilize gyms very successfully. So I don't know if it pertains to your business specifically based on your target customer, the kinds of meals you're making. But if you're targeting a specific kind of diet or if you're targeting a specific health goal, aligning with the people who are helping similar clients achieve those goals is a really good idea. So we see people partner with personal trainers and have that be really successful. We see people partner with nutritionists and that'd be really successful. People who are also helping their customers eat better and live a better life—and finding those people in your community we see is really effective.
Will Schreiber: Last question here from the Q&A. Oh, another—we do over 1,000 meals to hospitals each week. That's really cool.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah, that's great.
Will Schreiber: So last question here. Did you ever promote on LinkedIn? Would love to contact us. Would love to offer box breakfast and lunch options to businesses.
Spencer Donaldson: No, but we are seeing a lot more traction with our clients on LinkedIn in general. So I do think it is a good model and it's not the posts that are working. Are always almost like a slide post. So it'll be a bunch of different images essentially of the product and then you could do—you could talk about what's in your meals and how that affects people's health and how it relates to their work. I think if you did something like that, it would work. And I think that's a great idea because no one's really using LinkedIn to market meals. So I would definitely know that route. I think that's a cool idea.
Will Schreiber: Yeah. Well, Spencer, thank you so much for joining us. This was our first ever coffee chat this December. You're a very qualified, helpful first person to learn from. To everyone listening in, thank you so much. We love you guys, love what you're doing, love supporting your local community. So we just really hope that you take the coffee, enjoy it, and you do not need to be a customer of ours to use the gift card or to sign up every month. We'll be doing another one next month and another one the month after that. Feel free to keep signing up. You do not have to be a customer to do that.
And to our customers, if you'd like to chat more about this, just email me, text me. We'd love to hop on a call. We can do a debrief, chat more about what was discussed today. And if anyone wants Spencer's information, as mentioned, just let me know and I will put you in touch. Hope everybody has an awesome December, a great holiday season, and good morning, having to have an awesome day.
Spencer Donaldson: Thanks guys. A great talking with you all. And we'll talk soon.
Will Schreiber: Sounds good. Thanks again, Spencer.
Spencer Donaldson: Yeah. Take care. We'll see you.