Episode 284 / Liz Nash / Loop Earplugs / Manager, Global Social Media Strategy
How to Find Surprising Vehicles for Brand Storytelling
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Marketing needs to surprise people - but that’s the worst brief. So how can brands be surprising, stop people from scrolling past their content, and build an identity? It’s what Loop Earplugs’ Liz Nash shares on the latest episode of the podcast.
To create new content and get inspiration, Liz relies on curiosity. “I think one of the best things you can invest in as a marketer is your own broad curiosity,” she explains. This means going further than simply your industry or “looking for answers in obvious places,” which tends to just repeat other people’s creative and make you lose interest.
Social media marketers can find themselves “sucked into the algorithm.” It’s easier to know when you’re not in it and stay away, of course, but the key is to look beyond only your industry or your typical platforms in order to find inspiration. Liz’ advice is to also keep “interrogating the problem” that your audience has, in order to find new ways of tackling it and communicating about it.
Liz’ shiny new object is building the Loop brand, as there is a mindset shift in the organisation from performance only, to storytelling. Find out how she’s doing that on the podcast.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Liz Nash 0:00
I think there's a difference between how you maybe get people across the line in paid advertising. On organic social I think it is someone who can tell a more surprising story that makes you stop scrolling.
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Tom Ollerton 0:51
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform, and this is a podcast about the future of data driven marketing. Every week or so I have the absolute pleasure and privilege of interviewing one of our industry's leaders about the future of data driven marketing. I'm here in Amsterdam at Loop earplugs' office, and I'm here with Liz Nash, who is manager global social media strategy here at Loop earplugs. So Liz, thanks for having me. For anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, can you give us a bit of background?
Liz Nash 1:28
Sure thing, thanks so much for having me, and thanks for coming into our office. So I am, as you mentioned, the manager of our global social media strategy here at Loop earplugs. My path to this role, I guess, started at a boutique PR agency in Sydney. I was there for a few years. We focused mainly on booze, food, wine, restaurants, and I kind of evolved from a typical PR role there to more social influencer community management role, funny to think about it now, but those industries were evolving 10 years ago in Sydney anyway. So that was kind of where I got my start in social. I then was very sick of the sunny weather in Sydney, so I relocated to Amsterdam, where I've been now for seven years. I got a job as a strategist at an in house agency for Unilever, completely different environment to the one I'd been in previously, completely different challenges, but definitely helped evolve my longer term planning skills, strategy skills, data analyst skills, was a lot less immediate. Sometimes felt a bit hypothetical and a bit like university assignments, but really helped, I guess, round out my experience from my previous role. Had a very quick stint at media monks here in Amsterdam as well as a strategist, before landing in my current role at loop, where I've been for just over two years.
Tom Ollerton 3:02
And so what does the job here entail? For high level?
Liz Nash 3:07
Great question, that the company's evolved a lot while I've been here. When I joined, there were about 50 people. There's now over 250 people globally. There was maybe five of us in Amsterdam, there's now, I have no idea how many people in Amsterdam. We definitely didn't have an office when I joined, and you're here today on our eighth birthday. So you know, things have really evolved in the two years I've been here, but definitely over the course of those eight years. When I joined, my role in social encompassed more than it does today in terms of like disciplines, I managed the organic social strategy and team, plus influence and marketing plus community management, with the growth of the company, obviously, more people being hired, more goals being set for those teams, those teams being split, and now are each managed by kind of a different person. With me focusing on organic social, we have a great team split between Antwerp and New York City, and the focus has really shifted over the years from, I guess, helping get an audience, get people interested, show the problem and solution of wearing earplugs, and now we're getting into kind of a different push towards bigger brand awareness. And so, yeah, it's an exciting time.
Tom Ollerton 4:38
So in your career so far, what has been the best investment of your own time, energy or money in your career?
Liz Nash 4:49
I think one of the best things you can invest in if you're a marketer, but also I think a good thing for anyone to invest in is your own broad curiosity. I don't think it's a particularly groundbreaking idea that having interests and hobbies and exploring ideas outside of your actual profession is a good thing to do, but I do think and I have to actively do this, it is so easy, especially as a social media marketer, to get sucked in to the algorithm, spend so much time on social media and come out of it not really feeling any particular inspiration or motivation. I also don't like the idea of looking for answers in obvious places. I don't only want to find inspiration for a social strategy by looking at other ear plug brand or other D to C brands. So I think taking the space and time to properly immerse yourself in other things is a really good way to get inspired. You know, think more critically, get excited about things that aren't necessarily just like your job, and then things that are very related to your job. I think two kind of examples I have more recently is a great podcast called the cutting room floor. It is not about marketing. It's not about social media, I guess, specifically, it's about fashion, but more broadly speaking, it is about building a successful business. It's about how you can mentor people. It's about, I guess, how to not be an asshole to people you work with. It's really focused on how to nurture creativity, and I think I found a lot of inspiration and motivation through that podcast. I mean, it's one example, but, you know, looking at how businesses like complex or Harper's Bazaar or kid super have launched, and how they've been successful and how they've evolved over time. Maybe there's not an immediate way to apply that to marketing and earplug, but you can get great lessons there, and I think it's important to chew on things that aren't necessarily directly related to your industry.
Tom Ollerton 7:18
An interesting word that I picked up there was excitement. And also the point about like, you can just be scrolling and not feeling anything, I think that two quite obviously ends of the spectrum. So how do you know when you're in that kind of like dead eyed Doom scroll, Death March, and need to get into the exciting bit. Like, do you have a way of just... get out when you're in it?
Liz Nash 7:49
Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know if I have. I think it's harder to know when you're in it, versus knowing when you're not in it. I think it's really easy, especially when things are stressful at work, or now that, like the sun's going down at 4pm that you finish work and you close your laptop and you open your phone, and it's quite easy to fall into this trap. And I know it might sound ridiculous, coming from someone who works in social media to highlight I don't know how it can affect your motivation or affect your level of inspiration, but I think when you're just ingesting stuff online without much critical thought or without much active thinking, that's when I think you get in this trap. And I think taking moments to digest things outside of social media can only help me and my job doing that. You know, storytelling, connecting with people, thinking critically, being surprised. It can happen if you are on Instagram and Tiktok, don't get me wrong, but I think it has a greater chance of happening there if you're also experiencing it in other places. I saw a really great but crazy movie last night called the substance. There is no way that you can connect the substance to my job as a social media marketer for an earplug company, but I've been thinking about it since I watched it last night. There were great lessons in there about, you know, telling really hyperbolic stories. The movie itself was fucking loud, and that made me think, you know, there were really intense like chewing moments and bone breaking moments. And it was, it really made me think about noise sensitivity. So, I mean, there's quite an obvious link, but it also touched on, like, different pressures people feel. And. I think the idea of telling a story to like the the nth degree, like, how can you keep going and keep going and keep going, but keep people engaged is an interesting thing again, to chew on that's not, you know, just social media.
Tom Ollerton 10:14
So what advice would you give to someone who's a data driven marketer? I love this idea of exposing yourself to different conversations, different media, stepping away from social media to become inspired and excited. But when it comes to the you know, the gritty reality of delivering data driven marketing, what advice do you have?
Liz Nash 10:34
Of course, I think the most obvious piece of advice, but it's like very worth repeating, is to be discerning, like ask why and how multiple times, get the context. You need to know really what you're looking at. I think avoiding jumping too quickly from a piece of data or an insight to a conclusion is really, really important. And I mean, one of my biggest fears sounds a bit over the top, but something I think about a lot is, How do we avoid marketing to ourselves? You know, like we all obviously have our own lives, perspectives, point of views, however you want to frame it. But I think when you have something, a piece of data or an insight or even an assumption about your audience or what you're trying to do, ask, interrogate, it a little bit more. I think that's a good piece of advice. I think another very good piece of advice beyond just interrogating the piece of data is interrogate the problem or challenge that you're facing, I think. To make that more concrete, a problem or a challenge, I should say that we were having here at loop is, or we have, you know, a goal as a business, As I guess most do, to drive results efficiently, and to really think about what efficiency means. It means different things for different people and in different departments, but for me, it really meant, how are we driving results efficiently through content? And you can look at efficiency or results. I mean in terms of like, what types of content is performing well, carousels, static posts, video. But that seemed a bit surface level, I guess, and it wasn't really going to get us down to that efficiency point. So we did that piece of work, but then we also interrogated it a little bit more. We looked at, okay, if it's types of content, also, what are the messages or topics that are performing really well? We looked at the level of effort or time it takes to make these certain pieces of content. How many rounds of feedback are the content pieces going through? And it ended up by going through all of this understanding, like the hours that go into it, the feedback grounds, we ended up at a place where we had answered kind of both questions, the efficiency piece and the results piece. And we could make changes to the way we were working, whether that was doing more and it was doing more of what was working, making sure the messages that were important to people were the ones that we were touching on more often. On top of that, you know, up skilling the team in how to brief more clearly, so the feedback grounds became less of an issue. How to align people, putting an effort up front to align people before they got into the work, reduce feedback grounds and really get people on the same page. So I think interrogating the problem that we had more deeply so that we opened all the correct doors when it came to data. Maybe we didn't nail it. Maybe there were other doors to open, but we ended up somewhere really good. The collaboration improved, the results improved, and it also did give the opportunity for, I guess, greater learning, for people that were in those teams to upskill as well.
Tom Ollerton 14:20
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I'm going to come on to your shiny new object now. Which is building the Loop brand, which seems like a kind of odd shiny new object for me, because clearly, you have a brand. What's going on? What do you mean? Why is that your shiny new object?
Liz Nash 15:08
I know it does. Feels kind of weird, because, yeah, like I said, you're here on our eighth birthday. The brand definitely exists, but I guess it is a mindset shift for us to set the scene a little we've been focused on performance for as long as I've been with the business and longer actions that we took, all marketing actions we took, were basically taken on. You know, how much revenue can we get from this? What is the direct revenue? Obviously, from an organic social perspective, that's a little bit more difficult, but we were measuring revenue from social, and we were measuring how many people were landing on our website from social it was all really conversion based. And for some parts of the business, that obviously makes sense. When I was still managing the influencer marketing team, that is a very performance driven part of the business. The Influencer Marketing Team Drives around 10% of our total revenue. The ROAs from those campaigns are really high. And I guess because we had that mindset as a business, I was also managing the influencer marketing team. We had revenue goals as an organic social team, which is crazy to think now, but I do think at the time for for the last period that we were in, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, and it also had come from from data in a way we knew From attribution surveys, we knew from other studies we'd done that people were looking at social as their like vibe check before they went to the website to to purchase. We knew that. I mean, last year, the Taylor Swift Eras tour was a huge moment for us. Our sales kind of like followed her around the world, and a lot of people were a lot of Swifties were recommending the product on Tik Tok, these videos will go viral, and we could see sales jumps from these different platforms on days where particular videos had gone viral, and putting all of this kind of these pieces together, plus what was performing well on our channels, then we were very problem and solution orientated in our content. We tried to tell that story in a really engaging way, but it was really the story we were trying to tell, content that was product focused performed really well because we had a really engaged community of people that loved our products. For some people, the product was life changing, and so we were like a product first brand. Now we're in a different phase. We really need to grow our upper funnel awareness, our upper funnel excitement, get people more engaged with loop earplugs instead of the specific products. And so there's quite a job to be done now of building the loop brand.
Tom Ollerton 18:43
How are you going to do it?
Liz Nash 18:47
Well, I can talk about how we're going to do it from an organic, social perspective. Obviously, different parts of the brand and marketing team are focusing on different things, or the same things in different ways, but a few things I'm focused on and I'm excited about, is testing and learning with incremental audiences. The Taylor Swift thing is obviously her power, her influence is ginormous. But that was kind of an interesting one. You know, when it comes to our experience product, this is for music. It's for live music, it's for festivals, there is like a chasm between someone who goes to a Taylor Swift concert and someone who goes to Tomorrowland, for example. So figuring out how we can get closer to those audiences, those passion areas, and show up as a brand that shares those passion areas, I think is important. I think it the same for a. Yeah, we just launched loop dream. It's a sleep product. Everyone sleeps. So big news, everyone sleeps. What are the incremental audiences that you can get to in a really interesting way beyond, does your partner snore? Do you live on a loud street? So really, I think there's quite a job that we're doing at the moment of, I guess, testing some assumptions people have, trying to find more surprising areas that we can create content over, around, trying to, I guess, make things interesting and surprising. I think when you look at performance marketing, problem, solution, Awareness continues to be something that works for us on organic social I think we need to push for more surprising stories. And so that's what we're doing at the moment, kind of looking at what potential audience passion areas can be, have a having a perspective as a brand on how we show up in these areas, and trying to create content that is is social, first exciting, and At the risk of sounding like it's five years ago. Thumb stopping. You know, people are, people are endlessly scrolling, and it's, you know, so easy. This is not new stuff, but it is easy, easy, easy to get lost in it. You're following your friends, your family influences. They have such a good perspective on who they're trying to talk to. I think brands have less of that perspective, especially when they're trying to talk to a lot of people, which we are and so that is really where I see a big effort for us in the coming year.
Tom Ollerton 21:58
How do you do surprising?
Liz Nash 22:00
Yeah, yeah.
Tom Ollerton 22:00
I really, I really like that as a word, because I always have this theory that they're called brand managers, not brand risk takers. And marketing needs to surprise. It needs to make us notice it. Otherwise it does. Can't do its job. But yet, surprising is isn't a word you hear used very often, when actually really it should always be the goal. So I like the ambition of surprising, but that's the worst brief ever.
Liz Nash 22:30
Yeah, it is.
I saw this great Phoebe Waller bridge clip once, and she spoke about writing the script for fleabag. I'm not sure if you're a fleabag fan, yes, nodding, but she said, you know, they went through this exercise of just writing down ideas and then pairing things together, and the most absurd pairings became episodes. So I'm not entirely sure that's precisely how I would take the briefing process to my team, but I do think the idea of like, what story are you trying to tell to an audience, and then who is a surprising vehicle? What is a surprising way to tell that story is a way in, I think, also from, you know, if I look at loop as a brand, the the topics that we talk about our products, whatever partnerships we have, we have Tomorrowland. We've partnered with them for the last three years. We have loop experience that's obvious to me. We now have a sleep product. You could easily tell a sleep story at a festival. You could tell a like sleep recovery story with a Tomorrowland performer who you know is playing weekend after weekend after weekend over summer and needs their eight hours like you make these more surprising pairs. And I do believe it's it's more enticing for people to watch. I think there's a difference between how you maybe get people across the line in paid advertising. Maybe there it's, you know, a sleep expert, or someone who can talk to the wellness aspects of, you know, a full eight hours on organic social. I think it is someone who can tell a more surprising story that makes you stop scrolling, and that maybe you can relate to on a more of a personal level, or more of an excitement level.
Tom Ollerton 24:53
Liz, I'm really annoyed that we have to finish it here. I've got a feeling you've got, like, a small notebook worth of stuff. Have to share. So we think about how we could do that in a different way. But I need to stop the podcast now, because we're at time. If someone wants to talk to you about this stuff, where can they do that? And if they write to you, what makes you write back?
Liz Nash 25:15
Great question. I guess LinkedIn is the best place to reach out. I think, I mean, I'm happy to hear from anyone, really, but I yeah, I'm happy to hear from you. I think the thing that would make it memorable is if you have, or make me reply is if you have something that's very relevant to what we're trying to do. I think, like most people, a lot of people reach out. So Relevancy is quite key.
Tom Ollerton 25:47
Brilliant. Thank you so much.
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