Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast, host Greg Shuey interviews Kevin Indig, a growth advisor with extensive experience in organic marketing for brands like Shopify, Reddit, and Dropbox. The discussion centers around alternative marketing channels beyond Google, such as YouTube, Reddit, forums, and online communities, and how eCommerce brands can leverage these platforms to build real relationships with their audiences. Kevin emphasizes the increasing difficulty of relying solely on Google for growth due to algorithm changes and evolving search experiences. Instead, he advocates for brands to immerse themselves in niche communities, contribute valuable insights, and foster trust before attempting any promotion. They discuss practical strategies for finding the right communities, building credibility, balancing contribution with promotion, and using storytelling to connect emotionally with audiences. Kevin also highlights the importance of patience, as these strategies require a long-term investment, and shares insights on how brands can measure impact through platform-specific KPIs. Looking ahead, he predicts that DTC brands will lean further into community-building and AI-driven marketing to maintain growth in an evolving digital landscape.
Key Takeaways
- Alternative Channels Offer Unique Growth Opportunities – As Google evolves into a more direct answer and shopping engine, brands must explore platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and forums where audiences actively engage in conversations. These spaces provide opportunities to build deeper relationships and trust.
- The Right Approach is Community First, Promotion Later – Success on these platforms requires brands to focus on genuinely contributing value. Instead of direct promotion, brands should become active members of communities, answering questions, sharing insights, and participating in discussions.
- Leverage Audience Insights to Guide Product and Marketing Strategy – Engaging in niche communities allows brands to uncover customer pain points, discover product ideas, and refine messaging based on real conversations. This approach helps create products that resonate and improve brand loyalty.
- Patience is Essential—This is a Long-Term Play – Unlike paid ads, community-driven marketing doesn’t yield instant results. Brands should commit to at least 4-6 months of consistent engagement before expecting meaningful returns, understanding that trust and authority take time to build.
- Use a KPI Ladder to Measure Success – Instead of relying on direct attribution, brands should focus on incremental engagement metrics, such as upvotes, comments, watch time, and brand searches, to evaluate their progress in building an audience and driving conversions over time.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- Where does my audience already spend their time online, and how can I engage with them there?
- Am I providing value in my marketing efforts, or am I just pushing sales?
- How can I measure success beyond direct conversions in community-driven marketing?
- Am I focusing more on building long-term trust or chasing short-term wins?
- How can I use storytelling to connect with my audience on an emotional level?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Kevin Indig LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinindig/
Growth Memo: https://www.growth-memo.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.208)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast. I am Greg Schuey and I am your host. I created this podcast to help D2C business owners and marketers who are stuck and trying to find a way to grow their businesses. Today, my guest is Kevin Indig out of Kalamazoo, Michigan.
I don’t normally announce where my guests are from, but I love to say Kalamazoo, so you got that extra special treatment today, Kevin. Kevin is an advisor to some of the world’s fastest growing startups and has defined organic growth strategies for companies like Ramp, Reddit, Bounce, Dropbox, Hymns, Nextdoor, and Snapchat. You know, some small businesses that you may or may not have heard before.
Kevin Indig (00:32.008)
Thank you.
Greg Shuey (00:53.774)
He’s also led the growth at the world’s leading e-commerce platform at Shopify, which is the number one marketplace for software, G2, and the number one developer company, Atlassian. Once a week, he sends out the growth memo to 17,000 plus subscribers and regularly speaks at conferences around the world. I think it’s pretty clear that this guy knows his stuff.
So Kevin, I’m excited to be with you today. Our topic’s gonna be around alternate channels to Google. So I want you to think about YouTube, Reddit, forums, communities, et cetera, and how to build actual relationships with your ideal customers on that platform, or on those platforms. So over the next 30 to 40 minutes, we’re gonna get super practical in terms of the process.
Kevin Indig (01:27.496)
Same here, Greg. Thanks for having me.
Greg Shuey (01:53.462)
and how to make this kind of approach work for your brand. All right, Kevin, thank you. Before we jump in, would you just take a few minutes to introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today.
Kevin Indig (02:09.328)
Happy to, and I’ll keep this relatively short because I don’t, I always, try to not talk too much about myself, but we’ll get there. long story short, born and raised in Germany, came to the U S when I was in my mid twenties. I’ve been in this kind of SEO slash organic growth slash marketing world for the last 15 years. Started on the agency side, then spent about 10 years in house. And for the last two and half years, I’ve been an advisor.
to some of the companies that you mentioned. And just love working with companies on strategy. I enjoy having a very horizontal views across different verticals, industries, types of companies. from that, I synthesize what’s important right now and which direction companies should be going. And so, yeah, I’m just living the dream.
Greg Shuey (03:01.278)
living the dream. And I love that you’re an SEO guy and we’re not talking about SEO today. So it’s gonna be a fun conversation. Ready to jump in? Awesome, man. So to kind of get this question out of the way before we jump into the meat of the episode.
Kevin Indig (03:13.928)
Let’s do it.
Greg Shuey (03:25.364)
Why should brands be thinking beyond Google and traditional social media for traffic and sales?
Kevin Indig (03:34.483)
This is super intentional. You mentioned that, you know, I’m kind of an SEO guy, doing other stuff as well, but coming out of the SEO world and we’re talking not about SEO and that’s very intentional for a couple of reasons. One of them is because SEO or Google as a channel, I mean, when we talk about SEO, we have to talk about other platforms as well, but just focus on Google has not gotten easier over the last couple of years for, it has not, for varying reasons. Some of them are algorithms.
Greg Shuey (03:40.334)
Sure.
Greg Shuey (03:57.186)
No it has not.
Kevin Indig (04:02.544)
Others are just a changing landscape of Google where Google gives the answer itself. especially in the shopping space, there has been a massive transition from a classic search engine that provides results to a new shopping experience that provides products. Right. If you look at, if you click on the new shopping tab, you’re basically entering a category page. and you can click on products and almost check out on Google instead of going over to website. So that whole ecosystem has changed. However,
To be successful, it’s also not enough to just do the classic SEO things, right? Being a brand, sought after brand, et cetera. Those things are more more important these days. And the third reason is that it’s incredibly effective to build direct relationships with an audience on other channels. And Google is a search, or something like a search engine, maybe an answer engine, but it’s not a relationship channel. And on the other hand, the ones that you mentioned,
YouTube, Reddit, forums, maybe even including social media. Those are ways to build relationships, signal authenticity, and especially trust. And trust is so vital, not just because we’re entering an age of AI, but also because audiences, especially younger audiences, are very tired of the polished, scripted version of a brand, and they want the raw and approachable one.
Greg Shuey (05:25.89)
Yep, I love that. I love that. Google has sure changed a lot over the last year. And I’m really excited about this topic because I have a couple of e-commerce brands that I own. They both sell aftermarket truck parts.
One of them specifically for Toyota Tacoma’s Tundras for runners. And the way that I built my foundational customer base, you my first few hundred thousand dollars in revenue was specifically just getting in the forums and building relationships with people like these folks are a cult and that’s where they hang out.
Kevin Indig (06:03.23)
you
Greg Shuey (06:04.864)
and that’s where they talk and share tips and tricks and ways to fix things. And it was just very natural as a Toyota owner, you know, I have a Toyota truck. It was just very natural for me to get in there and start participating in the community, just helping people, right? And I think we’re going to talk a little bit more about that here in just a minute, but I’m really, really excited to be able to dive into this with you today.
Greg Shuey (07:01.422)
Yeah. So with that, how can brands identify the right alternative channels? So YouTubes, Reddit, forums, et cetera, where their audience is already engaging.
Kevin Indig (10:18.343)
the correct, the fun thing is there are many of these calls out there and the goal is to become part of the cult, not an advertising board to the college. I’m going to come back to that in a moment, but the question was, how do you actually find out which of these platforms you should pursue and, um, and when a good time is. And so here there’s a simple trick they like to use. costs a little bit of money, but it’s essentially to advertise on the platform. So.
Greg Shuey (10:45.623)
Interesting.
Kevin Indig (10:46.351)
If you’re considering YouTube, Reddit, even other forms, doesn’t have to be Reddit. There are many forms out there, as you know, like Toyota, aftermarket parts. Most of them will allow advertising. so to test the waters, you want to run an ad campaign for maybe even just a week or two. would suggest to advertise a bit more aggressively to get higher signal. And then you want to see how many clicks do we get? Do we get any customers?
and use that as a way to make the decision, which of these platforms to prioritize, because you already brought up a really good point, which is that you need to become part of this community. If you’re like, sure, I’m telling you to advertise first, of course, but if you’re becoming an organic member of a community, but you seem like an ad, that’s not going to fly. Right. As you said, these people are passionate, and, and they’re, know, they have.
Greg Shuey (11:20.334)
interest.
Greg Shuey (11:41.708)
They will sniff out a fraud so fast.
Kevin Indig (11:44.507)
Yeah, immediately, immediately. and so the good news is that, you know, all of these, there are many calls out there and the goal for you is to find your cult. And you are also not the only example. have been other companies that have been started on Reddit, or on Instagram, right? Where maybe the conversation was more about feedback for product ideas, but wherever you consider starting, you can get signal through advertising, obviously talking to potential customers, doing some market research and then.
part of the community.
Greg Shuey (12:16.29)
Yeah, one of my favorite things also about becoming part of the community is it can be a launch pad as well to launch new products. Listen to pain points, figure out what your customers need, and then go out and build it and you can grow additional revenue streams that way as well. So I think it just, it packs a huge punch for a brand who actually goes out and does it right.
Kevin Indig (12:40.047)
Man, if you were to ask Seth Godin that question, he’d say, Hey, that’s what I’m trying to tell you all for all these years. So you’re absolutely on the money here. know, this it’s such a powerful way to get new ideas, test ideas, understand what your audience cares about. There are all these examples that you’ll find with like a quick online search of companies who thought they were going to go one direction and then learned that this one aspect was really important. For example, there was a, I think it’s a clothing or furniture brand for kids. forgot the name.
Greg Shuey (12:44.212)
Thank
Kevin Indig (13:09.159)
Long story short, through interacting with their community or with their cult on Instagram, they learned that something that’s really important to their buyers is toxic free material. So they changed their whole supply chain, their whole product design, everything to put that in the foreground. And it was a huge success. You wouldn’t have found this out by, or maybe you would have found it out by launching the product first, but it would have been a very costly mistake.
Greg Shuey (13:32.428)
Yeah, interesting. Okay, so once you identify these platforms and communities which you should be in, what are some of the key strategies that you have seen or that you have personally used to build credibility and trust versus coming off as just being promotional and trying to sell what you offer?
Kevin Indig (13:55.301)
Yeah. the, question you want to ask yourself is what’s the opposite of selling and the opposite of selling is giving or donating. Now donating is maybe a bit far out there, right? Like, but you want to, you want to give your time for nothing in return. and when you give your time, you want to ask yourself what’s actually your value. Interestingly enough, The Verge recently published a survey that, I’ll figure out the name for your show notes, but, they essentially asked 2000 Americans about.
Greg Shuey (14:04.03)
And,
Kevin Indig (14:24.473)
how connected they feel through online communities, what they appreciate about online communities, et cetera. high value content was just one of the things that people want out of a community. What they want most out of it is a sense of belonging. And that can come through many ways and you as a brand or even just as a single person. mean, most of the time you’ve got to be a single person or you’re a marketer, either the founder probably, or the marketer listening to this right now who thinks about how, can it happen to one of these communities? And so you’re.
Greg Shuey (14:39.256)
Hmm.
Kevin Indig (14:53.041)
first and foremost, a person and then a brand. And so the question is like, how can you contribute a sense of belonging? Part of that is sharing your experience. So whether you have a product in a company out there or not, just sharing, you know, like your thought process of maybe designing the product, or maybe you don’t even have to talk about the product at all, just sharing your thoughts about the problem and your observations. That itself can be incredibly valuable.
Now people also like memes, depending on your community and stuff that could be more or less important. But the best connections, and this is true for your partner, husband, wife. This is true for your family. This is true for your coworkers. This is true for you as a parent. A big part of connection comes from sharing. And so the best advice that I can give is share again.
Greg Shuey (15:43.139)
Yeah.
Kevin Indig (15:46.895)
either your insights and perceptions about the problem, maybe about solutions, maybe about how you design your product and what kind of goes into that. But become a part of the cult and contribute.
Greg Shuey (16:01.494)
Yeah, I like that. Okay, so what are some best practices for starting meaningful conversations and building relationships? I know we touched a little bit on that, but I’d like you to maybe go a little bit deeper on if you were to start having a conversation, you started that off versus joining an active conversation, what does that look like and how do you start to get some traction there?
Kevin Indig (16:27.463)
totally. So the companies that I work with on entering a community like Reddit or YouTube, I think Reddit is maybe a good example because it’s very forum heavy. We talked about kind of sharing and contributing, but that can also come in form of questions. And so if you have like no experience with Reddit at all or a comparable forum, first, the most pragmatic thing you can do is look at the most, maybe the 10 or 20 most successful posts on that forum.
Greg Shuey (16:57.581)
Yeah.
Kevin Indig (16:57.593)
see what the topics are and ask a question back. Now that question has to be a little bit thought through. It’s not enough to just regurgitate what’s already out there. Like people will sniff that out, right? But if you see that, you know, like the top 10 posts are all about a specific problem or a specific trend or news that is important for that community. You want to tap into that and maybe ask people, Hey, how have you been solving this lately? Or here’s some that I think would work. Like, does it work for you as well?
Greg Shuey (17:02.84)
Yeah.
Kevin Indig (17:27.003)
What was your experience with X? Very pragmatically, if you’re thinking about starting a new product, you can just ask like, Hey, what’s your experience with the competitor? Right. And not even like in a sense of like, I want to start a product. I want to hear what you have to say about the competitor, but just like, what have you been experiencing? You know, you’re, you’re a Toyota, you know, truck engineer, or mechanic. Cool. What is your experience with, you know, VW, brands or with, you know, something else, or why do you like this so much?
or share your favorite ex, right? These types of things like inviting people to contribute. That’s a really good way to get started and get into conversations. But also as part of a community, if you really engage, meaning if you answer other people’s questions or share from your side, you will naturally identify the most important axioms. And this is a little bit of a, I don’t know if this is a secret, but this is like something that has really worked for me and for my clients is you spend a little bit of time in the community.
And you start to understand what the most firm beliefs of that community are. And once you have identified five to 10, now you go out and create content for that community that is either validating or disproving those beliefs. And you’ll see a lot of engagement. And of course you have to, you you have to be, you have to be subtle with this. cannot come in and be like, you are like, you know, Toyota now here is 10 reasons for why Toyota is absolute trash. Now that’s, know, like that’s going to come off too aggressive, but you know, maybe it’s like.
Greg Shuey (18:52.099)
Sure.
Kevin Indig (18:53.159)
10 reasons for why maybe you should consider a different brand and people will be engaging heavily and you can build on top of that. So all you need to do is just get a footing with sharing, with contributing, with asking, and then out of that come new content ideas. There are some best practices, right? There are the whole kind of AMAs, the behind the scenes, like some reports and some statistics and numbers and all of that is nice. But for the first maybe four to eight, maybe 12 weeks, I would just keep it to sharing.
your perspective and experience, asking really good questions, and then more and more becoming a louder voice in that community.
Greg Shuey (19:28.78)
Yeah, agreed. So my next question, I’m gonna preface it with kind of a story, I guess. So I also am an SEO guy. I’m a big content marketing guy. And I know that, you know, when you’re in these communities that you need to really balance putting out great content versus promoting your content. I lean more towards the putting out great content.
And because I specifically, you know, built my business foundation in forums, the nice thing about forums is that you’ve got a signature. And so I was very rarely promoting anything, but I would put my top 10 guides or my most important resources in that signature. And as that I would go out and answer questions and help people.
people would naturally click on those links and come over to my site, which is top of funnel. And then I would work to bring them into the funnel and work to convert them. So it was kind of different the way that I handled it. But, you know, at some point you’ve got to go and you have to do some promotion. You have to put yourself out there and your business out there. So when you think about how you’ve done this in the past, like how, do you balance that contributing good content versus pushing
products.
Kevin Indig (20:49.703)
I think, you know, maybe we’re talking about a 19 to one kind of ratio, right? Where, I don’t know, like 5 % of the time or something. but I think the signature is a smart move to like really, load that up. And there’s, there’s one instance in which promotion is totally fine. And that’s when you’re being asked to, and so. Ideally you can steer the conversations towards a place where people just ask your free recommendations.
And again, starting from a problem first mindset, eventually people will want to know like, okay, cool. So what do you recommend? You know, this problem really well, like you understand all the ups and pros and cons ups and downs, whatever, what do you recommend? And then the key is to be open and honest, like, Hey, this is my product where I’m thinking about building a product. Here’s why I think it’s great. And here are some alternatives. that is a perfectly fine way to promote your product, but it needs to come from an invitation and the, the
The way to be more intentional about marketing is to maybe drive these conversations more towards a place where people ask you for the recommendation, but not in the kind of sneaky way where you’re like, you you have something really important to say, but you only give away half of it with because you want people to ask you. It’s like, Hey, do know how my day was? It’s like, just tell me how it was. You know what I mean? Like, don’t be that kind of person. if it comes like once you develop the awareness for that, you’ll find a lot of opportunities to actually.
Greg Shuey (22:01.282)
Yeah.
Kevin Indig (22:18.043)
get people to ask you for your accommodation and then you promote it. And if not, then that’s also fine. And people will eventually find you through a signature because you share and contribute so much valuable content to the community.
Greg Shuey (22:29.23)
Yeah, when you don’t have a forums, if you’re not in forums and don’t have a signature, let’s maybe touch on Reddit really quick. I mean, those folks will kick you out so fast. So how do you balance that on a platform that is very protective about promoting? Do you just go 100 % all in on just helping people or what would you do there?
Kevin Indig (22:52.539)
Yeah, I think the same principle applies. think you shouldn’t even like, you shouldn’t try to control how much you promote. You should try to control how often people ask you for recommendations. But it’s the same thing, right? First build up a good amount of karma and you can see how much karma the top contributors have in Reddit community or subreddit and then aim for… They’re very active people.
Greg Shuey (23:00.462)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (23:11.458)
Yeah. And it’s ridiculous. They have so much karma.
Kevin Indig (23:18.675)
Which by the way, I think this can be a full-time job easily. you know, just to be clear for the audience, this is not something you just do for an hour on a Friday afternoon. This is something where…
Greg Shuey (23:26.798)
And it’s not something that an agency is going to do very well for you. That needs to be well kept the house.
Kevin Indig (23:31.109)
Yeah, yeah, I have that same experience. As a matter of fact, look, like I think I don’t want to give like a specific recommendation. think there are some agencies that do this really well. think there are also agencies that offer a scalable way to Reddit. And I think that is a dangerous thing that you should think through really, really hard. You can also burn a brand on Reddit very quickly to your point. has good antibodies and that’s in part for why Google loves it so much.
Greg Shuey (24:00.812)
Yep.
Kevin Indig (24:00.935)
and the community in itself is just very, you know, suspicious, but build up a good karma, amount, which will make your recommendations so much more believable until then maybe hold back as much as you can. But again, see how, how, and when, and where you can get people to ask you for recommendations. think that’s a perfectly fine way, without some, without funny tricks, right? Like make it genuine, but I think it’s totally fine, to be like, Hey,
you’re considering different parts right now. Here’s how you should maybe think about that. And then maybe some user will come back to your post or your comment and say, okay, cool. Do you have any recommendations for who’s really good at this? And then you’re like, okay, yeah, here’s your, brands, your two other brands, you know, check them all out. Here’s why we think we’re the best. think that’s fine to say also, as long as you’re transparent. think
If you give the recommendations and you’re not transparent and it turns out that somebody figures out that you own one of these companies, all of a sudden you’re in the hot seat and it can get very uncomfortable. So transparency wins because it fosters trust. And if you’re open and honest, and even if it’s a bit promotional, then people will allow that or forgive that much more than when you try to be sneaky.
Greg Shuey (25:14.22)
Yeah, all right, cool. Let’s shift gears a little bit and let’s talk about storytelling. I feel like a lot of brands these days, especially newer brands, have kind of pushed storytelling to the side or they don’t know how to do it properly. And they’re more concerned about just getting the next click and the next sell on Meta or through some other ad platform. So in your mind,
How can brands use storytelling to create deeper emotional connections with their audience on these platforms?
Kevin Indig (25:52.551)
I like that question because most of the time when you Google storytelling or how to tell a good story, you’ll find the hero’s journey framework or framework like the hero’s journey, right? It’s like these, you know, seven to 10 steps of this person going out to kind of change the world and then fail. You get the point. You can Google this. And I’ve always found that very difficult to apply to a company or to a brand. However, every story by definition needs to have an arc.
Right. There needs to be some scenario and then something changes or happens. And as a result, something else is kind of the case that it’s, it’s impossible to tell a story without an arc. so here’s how you should think about that as a company, especially in DTC or DTC better said, you typically try to solve the problem. mean, every, every product tries to solve a problem, but in DTC, a lot of brands have some sort of a mission.
Uh, or they have some sort of a larger purpose besides just creating a commodity. Uh, you know, if you’re just creating the, uh, you know, another, uh, cereal and there’s nothing really special about you, think, you know, like your chances are very low, but maybe you don’t love how much sugar there is in cereal. And so your goal is to provide cereal or create a cereal that is just as tasty as what you find in a regular supermarket, but without the sugar. So that’s a mission. Um, and the best way to tell your story.
is to spend 95 % talking about the problem that you’re trying to solve. So talking about the sugar in the cereal, how it’s bad for our kids, how it’s bad for us, what it does to your blood glucose, like all the, all the problem, problem all day, problem all night. and then, you know, when you talk about the solution, again, it doesn’t just have to be your product. It can be maybe the chemical process that you use to avoid the sugar or maybe the sugar replacement. But the best brand stories are mostly.
around the problem. There will be exceptions, right? If you look at like how Apple tells a story, for example, Apple’s story is all about innovation. Apple’s story is all about how to kind of like make your life easier, et cetera, or make a feature more useful. But most companies that are effective at storytelling and who develop followers as a result of their stories, they’re all mostly talking about the problem. And the reason this works is because it’s so relatable, right? The people who care about the product or the story
Greg Shuey (28:07.267)
Yeah.
Kevin Indig (28:15.579)
they will 100 % recognize the problem from their own lives. So might be mothers who are like, yeah, I’m so unhappy with how much sugar my kid is eating. And that’s how they relate. It’s not because of the product or the solution, maybe a little bit. But most of it is because they can see the problem.
Greg Shuey (28:33.709)
it helps tie that back to like emotion, right? They get emotionally tied to you because the problem is relevant to them in their lives right now. And if you can stir up that emotion, chances of getting them to take action is big.
Kevin Indig (28:45.521)
Yes.
Kevin Indig (28:51.119)
Exactly. It’s, know, therapy works in that way as well. Right. A lot of work of therapies to actually free to recognize the problem and what it is, by the way, consulting or advising is also very similar. You know, like it’s, it’s really about helping people to even understand, okay, is this a problem? What exactly is the problem? And then the solutions are not the big trick. So yes, it stirs up an emotion. It’s an emotion often create creates relatability, right? can be. Unfortunately, sometimes anger or sadness.
But it can also be some sort of an excitement, like, OK, we finally understand this better. Now we can move on to the solution.
Greg Shuey (29:27.436)
Yeah, got it, cool. Okay, what are some of the biggest mistakes brands make when they’re trying to engage with communities on these kind of platforms? Now before you jump in, spam, spamming, overly promotional, let’s just get that out of the way, that’s probably the biggest mistake. After that, where else are they making mistakes?
Kevin Indig (29:52.625)
Totally. I’m glad we’re skipping over promotion. We’ve, think we’ve, we’ve brought that point home. The other big mistake. And that’s a really big one that I see over and over because it’s an uncomfortable one is to expect hard returns too quickly. So a lot of the companies that I work with, they have a very performance driven approach to everything in marketing. And that works or has worked in so many channels, right? A lot, especially in advertising, it’s, it’s more data driven than ever.
Greg Shuey (29:55.456)
Yeah.
Kevin Indig (30:21.637)
can target people very specifically, cetera. So you can draw a very linear line between investment and returns. Communities and alternative channels are very different. Both YouTube and Reddit, first of all, and most platforms don’t like to send users out. They want to keep users on the platform. That is the number one goal. Sorry, hurdle. The second hurdle is attribution. What happens a lot of times is that people will watch a bunch of YouTube videos. Some of those are yours.
And then at some point, either they already know that they need something or much, much later, they recognize that they need something. And then they come back to you, but not through YouTube. They’re going to come directly to your website.
Greg Shuey (31:01.376)
or they’re going to go do a brand search in Google. Yep.
Kevin Indig (31:04.131)
Exactly. Brand search on Google and then whoops, all of a sudden it’s direct traffic. And how do know it was YouTube or Reddit? We don’t. Now there are ways we’re to talk about those in a second, but those two problems, attribution and, you know, this, these kinds of walled gardens make it very hard to draw that linear line. On top of that comes a time lag effect. Means it takes a while to build a presence on these communities or in YouTube.
And so all that together makes a lot of leaders very hesitant to invest in these platforms. there are some, again, there’s some remedies to that. You can do post signup surveys, for example, where you ask people, how did you first hear about us? Or why did you sign up for us? And then measure how many select a certain channel. But long story short, it takes a big swing mindset to invest in these channels.
Long story short, leaders need to take a little bit of a risk here. I would argue that for many companies, this is not a big risk. It’s not betting the farm, but it is some sort of a risk. And again, we’ve gotten very uncomfortable with risk because we can predict very well that once we spend, I don’t know, a million into Facebook ads, we’re going to get probably one and a half million back. And so that mindset shift, very hard, very uncomfortable, but absolutely necessary for this to go well because otherwise…
You know, you’re going to get antsy as a leader after four to eight weeks, you’re going to expect results and your team will have not much to show for and the project is dead in the water. Whereas a lot of especially young companies, especially young D2C startups, they have the breadth or they have the founders be so involved in marketing that that problem doesn’t come up. But after a certain size, I see that same symptom over and over.
Greg Shuey (32:47.618)
Yeah, I like to tell people, look, you’re four to six months. We’re out here, we’re doing brand building is what we’re really doing, right? And that’s bare minimum four to six months. And so sometimes it can go a little faster. Other times it can take a lot longer, but it’s a slog and it takes time and you’ve got to be patient for sure.
Kevin Indig (33:09.415)
gotta be patient. It’s like working out, you know, everybody wants to be ripped and then have a say or maybe I should not say everybody, but most people want to be fit, right? And they want to look fit. and, they wish they had started a year ago, which is what it takes. But again, if you start and you expect results after a few weeks, you’re going to probably be in for a rude awakening and more and more of marketing goes towards that world. And it’s, I’m seeing like a little bit of like a 50 50 split where either it’s very measurable.
very controllable, very linear, or it’s the exact opposite. And it might even back the question to a point, Greg, should these be separate teams working on that type of stuff? I actually see more product marketing teams working on Reddit, for example, than performance marketing teams. But I also think that there is bit of like, there are probably some undefined roles in modern marketing teams, or maybe some gaps that companies should really think
Greg Shuey (33:51.181)
Interesting.
Greg Shuey (34:01.344)
Yeah, and I think if you’re just getting started in this as well and you’re a smaller brand, if you’ve got capacity and resources on the customer service side, right? Those people would be good candidates to be able to get in and start having conversations because they know your product, they know your ideal customer. I think that scrappy companies can find resources somewhere to at least start this initiative and start to prove it out.
Kevin Indig (34:25.459)
yeah, hundred percent. You’re probably, there’s a very high chance that somebody in customer support or customer service might actually be very excited about giving this a shot. And I would also push product teams, product developers, product managers to spend a little bit of time on these platforms to just get a feeling for customers. You can make this part of customer research.
Greg Shuey (34:46.136)
Yeah, I love it. All right, so wrapping up, we’re going to talk about attribution. So how should brands measure the impact of their efforts across these platforms? And then what KPIs are you seeing that businesses are monitoring around these efforts?
Kevin Indig (35:05.787)
We’ve already touched on post purchase surveys. So that’s absolutely on the list. And then the second thing you want to do when it comes to KPIs is a bit more of a platform specific approach, but with the same principle. And that principle is a KPI ladder. So what does that mean? Most of the times you have KPIs that build on top of each other. Say on YouTube, you first have a view, then you have subscriptions, then you have maybe retention time or average audience watch time.
and then eventually you might have people coming over to your website. And so, something that I do with my, with all of my clients is we’re building a ladder of KPIs that builds on top of each other. And we’re starting with the first rung. And once we’re getting good at the first rung, we’re focusing on the second rung and then on the third one and the fourth and the fifth and so on. So it could look like in the beginning, let’s just prove that we can drive more views. Let’s just grow views over time as an indicator of product that the content is good.
Then let’s see if we can convert more of these views to subscribers. Then let’s see if we can improve audience retention. So people watching more of the video in itself. And then let’s see if we can get more people to either search for something on our website or go to a specific URL or click a link in the description. And then of course that translates into a business impact more directly. So you want to build your ladder or your house in that way.
And it also applies very similar to platforms and forums like Reddit, example, right? First, get some upvotes, get some karma, and then slowly, slowly see if you can get more responses to your own threads. And maybe at some point start your own subreddit, right? I think that’s also always a big question that companies ask themselves. do I have to start my own subreddit? The answer is usually not, but at some point it will come with a lot of benefits. And so to me, the question is less of what is the one unique KPI?
Greg Shuey (36:51.586)
Yeah.
Kevin Indig (36:59.867)
And more so what’s the right KPI for the right time.
Greg Shuey (37:02.574)
Got it, I like that. Platform specific KPIs. And I have never heard KPI ladder. I like that. That is really, really good. Awesome. Well, do you have any predictions for e-commerce this year? Where do you think D2C is going and marketing D2Cs?
Kevin Indig (37:21.947)
Yeah, I actually think that more D2C companies are going to be involved in that kind of community aspect. Obviously, performance marketing is a big thing for D2C companies and that will not change so fast, right? Like it’s, it’s definitely, it’s a huge chunk of your marketing approach. But I think that as channels like SEO are becoming less stable, this whole AI thing is kind of floating around and there’s a lot of uncertainty.
a macro economic perspective, like there’s a lot of uncertainty just in general and going back to clients or sorry, customers and customer relationships, I think is going to come out as a realization for many DTC companies. So that whole kind of community and we’re standing for something, we have a sense of belonging. I see that already being leveraged and gone in more so in the future. And then I think as another prediction, AI, the question is of course, like, what can we do with AI? how, what should
our AI strategy be. It’s probably a whole other podcast at this point, it’s absolutely changed. I talk to CMOs on regular basis and they all say that they want more of an idea of how AI is going to influence their market and their go-to-market strategy. So I would call it community and AI.
Greg Shuey (38:25.068)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (38:42.99)
Well, we may need to have you back on in a couple of months and we can go deep into AI. Because I know that was another topic that you said you were really passionate about. I think it’s on a lot of marketers’ minds right now. And so if you’re open to it, let’s do it. Let’s get it scheduled. Cool, man.
Kevin Indig (38:46.908)
Yeah.
Kevin Indig (38:56.731)
Let’s do it, Greg. I would love to.
Greg Shuey (38:59.542)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. I’m super grateful that you were willing to take time out of your busy schedule to come and to educate the e-commerce businesses who are listening right now. So to everyone who’s listening, make sure that you tune in next week to our next episode. And Kevin, thank you again and hope that you have an amazing day.
Kevin Indig (39:23.643)
Greg, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me on.
Greg Shuey (39:26.04)
Take care.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
