In today’s episode, we are thrilled to share with you an interview with Lindsay Heighes, a renowned social media expert who has been revolutionizing the digital landscape with her innovative strategies and tactics. With an enviable track record of driving massive growth and engagement for small business clients across various industries, Lindsay is here to share her secrets for navigating the ever-evolving world of social media. So, buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready for a deep dive into the powerful tactics that have transformed businesses, as we explore the world of social media mastery with Lindsay Heighes!
Links Mentioned In This Episode
Links & information for show notes:
Purchase A Social Media Audit For Your Business with Lindsay
Lindsay’s Social Media Links –
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ttsmarketingagency
IG: https://www.instagram.com/ttsmarketingagency/
FB: facebook.com/TTSMarketingAgency
TTSMA Repurposing Content Flow (1).pdf
Podcast episodes, articles, and books mentioned in this episode
Episode 14 – Email vs. Social Media Marketing
Episode 37- Strong Brand Identity Part 1: The Customer
Episode 38- Strong Brand Identity Part 2: How To Talk To Your Customers For Better Engagement
Episode 39 – Strong Brand Identity Part 3: Branding Visual Identity
Episode 101 – TikTok Vs YouTube Shorts – Where To Post Short Videos
What we discussed:
- Breaking down gatekeeping in the industry
- Value-based content
- Post Where Your Audience Is
- Marketing Mix – Using different marketing tools
Interview with Lindsay Heighes – Post Where Your Audience Is Transcript
Hi everyone. It’s Inkyma’s Marketing Strategies and this episode, if you are listening, definitely go check us out on YouTube because when we have guests, we are on YouTube.
And today I have, I’m really excited about this one. All right. So I know I’m always excited about all of my guests, but today’s guest is Lindsay Heighes. And Lindsay is also a marketing professional. She and I refer back and forth to each other and she really specializes in social media. As you’re gonna find out over the next half hour how she thinks about social media, what she does with her clients is very different than what you probably get when you talk to other social media professionals.
Lindsay, I’m so excited. I’m glad to have you here, and I’m really excited to let people just in on our little, conversation that you and I just always have about marketing and social media. Yes. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here and. yes. We see things so the same, even though we work in different areas of marketing, it’s funny how aligned we are in the strategic portion of social media of marketing, excuse me.
And I think that’s where it matters, right? Is that we fundamentally know how marketing works, right? Where you get some people that say, oh, I designed websites and oh, I do social media, but they don’t understand how marketing is really supposed to work for small businesses. And that’s why I actually… you’re like the very first industry insider, like inside of marketing that I’ve ever had on the podcast in these last two years. Because most of the time when I talk to folks I’m like no, no…, you really don’t get this. I’m so honored. So yeah, listeners know. I don’t usually have other people in my field on here unless, but see, this is where you’re different.
So let’s kinda just, let’s just have a chat. So let’s start out with social media and your thoughts around what social media is and how it should be used for small busienss.
Yeah. Social media for small businesses can be such an amazing tool because it’s free to show up on the platforms, right?
The effort you put in to show up on those platforms are not necessarily free, but the platforms themselves are free to advertise on and to expose people to your business. One of the things that I see a lot when people come to me is they ask me what platform their business should be on. And the reality of the situation is I can’t answer that question for them until we’ve had an in-depth conversation about who their ideal client is.
You could be posting all day on Instagram, but if your ideal client actually hangs out on LinkedIn, then you’re missing the mark with where you’re putting out your content. So one of the biggest pieces that I see people not bring to the table with social media is that target audience persona piece, and understanding their ideal client in such an intimate way that they understand their pain points and understand how their products and services transform those pain points and help them live a better life, save money, whatever it is that the, that their ultimate goal is, your products and services should solve those problems for them.
So business owners should be taking a look at where their ideal client actually spends time and show up on those platforms first. Because like I said, just because you like to post on Instagram doesn’t mean that’s where your ideal client is spending their time. So you should be really looking at your ideal client, making sure that you’re catering not only what platform you’re on, but the content to them as well.
Again, solving their pain points, giving them value, gone are the days of gatekeeping and promoting all day. It’s now a lot more about awareness and giving away value to your ideal client in whatever form that looks like for your business. So really those two things are just so important and they’re one of the first things that we really look at as a company because, you know this, Audrey, we’ve talked about this.
If you don’t understand your ideal client, you don’t understand how to market to them. And that’s just fundamentals for sure.
Right. And that’s, we’ve had that discussion too. It’s just because you post on social media doesn’t mean, and people are gonna buy your stuff. You still have to go back to the fundamentals of marketing, which is know your target audience and let them know that you can solve their problem.
You can’t just post weird random things. I’ve talked to people in the past, they’re like I was posting every day and they were posting like stuff that had nothing to do with their business or they were doing the dreaded, let me just keep asking for business, but not give any value back. It’s like, no wonder you’re not getting anybody, because all you’re doing is you’re just saying, buy my stuff, buy my stuff.
And you’re not giving them the reason why or that you understand who they are. And that’s what I like, because I’ve talked to a lot of other social media professionals and they’re like, oh no, we’re gonna make you an influencer. We’re gonna do this. I’m like, okay, hold on a second. Most small businesses don’t need to be influencers to actually sell their company and their product and their thing.
They just need people to hear them.
Absolutely. We saw since 2020, we have seen a huge influx in Amazon shopping due to TikTok, and that is because consumers show how their life has been transformed by a product they bought on Amazon. And it’s such a…that is such a great example of showing…I mean, you see items sell out before anybody can even grab one because somebody has shown how their life was transformed by buying a microwave popcorn bowl. Like it, it’s…it’s absolutely crazy. That kind of value was just unmatched when TikTok came out. That platform, in my opinion, really changed how content was put out.
And gatekeeping really went away once that came out because a lot of people were showing the behind the scenes of how things work and how they run their stuff. And just that awareness and value-based content became so important on the platform once they. Doing longer formats and all that kind of stuff.
So yeah, we can definitely see that’s a positive trend.
Yeah, it definitely changed the game. So before we move on, you said gatekeeping a couple times, give people a little understanding of what that means, cuz that’s one of our kind of like industry buzzwords, so I wanna make sure they understand what you mean by that.
Cause it’s big. Yeah, it so it, it happens in almost every industry, honestly. I, my boyfriend tattoos, so I’ve seen it in that industry. Obviously we’ve seen it in the marketing industry, I’ve seen it in the tech industry. But basically, gatekeeping is where you don’t necessarily share the programs you’re using, the steps you’re taking in those programs.
Your SOPs, your flows, right? How you operate. Canva Hacks, right? We’ve talked about this before. All of those things, if you were to not share those would be gatekeeping and TikTok, YouTube started to break that wall down truly because a lot of people started putting tutorials on there, but TikTok really was like, there’s still a little gatekeeping that’s happening over there.
Let’s really bust that over here. So yeah, it’s definitely…It’s not happening as much anymore. Yeah. And I think people are starting to see the value of, Well, you know, just because I know how to do this and I share it with you, doesn’t mean you’re gonna take away from me. Because, for instance, I’ve been doing this for a long time, right?
Like 20, 25 years, like I remember when websites first started. And so I can share all that knowledge. That doesn’t mean someone’s gonna come along and be able to do exactly what I do. Without a whole lot of effort, it’s gonna take ’em a little time to catch up. And even so my thought process around that is not, I’m not for everybody.
Everyone’s not for me. Maybe somebody else that does a good job can reach that person and help them. So there’s a personality for everybody out there. So I think breaking down gatekeeping, which you’re right, I think TikTok did a lot of that. And now with YouTube shorts coming into the scene, they’re like, okay, we’re gonna take this a step further.
That’s really important because I think consumers across any industry, they want to know what’s going on. They wanna feel educated. They wanna feel like, oh, this is why this company is so good over this one. They need to have an understanding behind that. And I think sharing that is definitely a good marketing strategy and I’ve always thought that.
Absolutely. And we saw a shift in education. Over the pandemic as well. So a lot of people becoming more self-taught and learning in an online environment. And that, that’s a whole deep dive in itself, but it really changed the way socials were put together as well.
We have chatted about this before. The evolution of TikTok was wild, right? It did start as an app for 14 year olds to dance on. Yeah. I admit that all. Nowadays, that’s not necessarily what its primary use is, although there is still a little dancing that happens on there. It’s majority of it is value-based content and just really people helping each other and not even just in the sense of business like.
I see people putting up journal prompts, I see people talking about making wellness shots at home. The fitness industry is on there. You really have so many different industries on there, just helping and bringing value and knowledge. And again, the way we are learning and evolving is always changing.
So I follow, I stumbled upon, or TikTok gave me this professional, he is a lawyer and he is a professional trial attorney that specializes in negotiation. And so all of his TikToks are about interpersonal and how to deal with people in specific situations. And I’ve gotten such great tips from this guy.
Cuz you and I, we talk to people every day, but the reason it came in really handy is I was dealing with state of New Jersey they were trying to tax me for when I used to live there. And I was like, I’m gonna take these skills that I have and I’m gonna use them in this encounter. And don’t you know, it worked beautifully!
It was perfect. Like I, I still have to message the attorney that I follow. I can’t remember his name. I can see him clearly. I’ll have to put it in the show notes so that people follow him. But yeah, I gotta say, dude, this was great. You really helped me out here. So to your point, yeah, I love the dances.
I watch the dances. I watch all the fun stuff, the kitties and the puppies, but there’s that other side of it that’s extremely valuable, even from a professional perspective. And it’s all because he was sharing his negotiating skills. Which is amazing. And that’s so funny because do you think you would follow a lawyer on Instagram like that?
Do you know what I’m saying? Yeah, instagram’s got a different barrier to it. It’s really strange. It’s if I saw it, I would scroll, but this guy comes up and he is like, and the thing is the short content, that’s the beauty of it, is no faff, right? You don’t get the beginning faff you don’t go, oh, and here, this, that, and the other.
It’s no, you gotta get right into it. Here’s what I’m gonna tell you cuz I only have this much time to tell you. They’re concise. Those that have figured it out on TikTok, it’s brilliant. Like it’s speed learning. Yeah. Almost in a sense. Which is really cool. Like listening to a podcast in 1.2, but you’re actually, yeah.
Just taking it all in. Yeah. So here’s the interesting thing, and we did talk about this all my past episodes. I’m starting to mine that and I’m starting to turn them into one minute shorts on YouTube. With just like those ping points so that people get a flavor or feel to see if they wanna invest in the 30 minute podcast.
Can’t even, can’t believe I’m saying that. Give me 30 minutes of your time, one minute chunks. And so I’m starting to see that value come through. It’s oh, I’ll give you a minute of my time. Sure. Oh, that was good. Give me, let me, and it’s that, that short quick learning process that I see too.
So that’s what I find interesting about the short video content or even short form audio content. Cause the podcast industry, nobody did us one minute podcasts. Wouldn’t that be cool that, honestly, that would be really cool. I do actually follow a podcast that does daily, but I think it’s five minutes.
I don’t think it’s one and I’m like, yeah. Now I’m trying to think like, how do you make that one minute impactful? Over time practicing it. You absolutely could. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that might be an iteration that I even, I go to in the future is now that I’m starting to get some experience with these one minute YouTube shorts and like having to re-edit my content down, take a 30 minute podcast and turn it, literally turn it into 10 to 15 good shorts.
It’s, I’m starting to learn how that could happen which is cool. My my podcast producer I know is like listening to this. I’m like, so Duane, this could be coming. So we talked about you, sorry, we talked about TikTok. What do you think about YouTube shorts, because I know we’ve had this discussion like, you’re a huge TikTok fan.
I’m embracing the YouTube shorts a little bit more versus the I consume the TikToks. But I’m embracing from an outbound the YouTube shorts, just because I know there’s a lot of business owners on YouTube talking about, knowing my target audience. So tell me what you think about the Shorts platform.
So I’m a huge lover of YouTube. It is my top three where I go to search for information for stuff. Absolutely. Because there’s just so many great creators on there. I think currently with the status of TikTok being hung in the balance a bit, I think it’s really nice for people to have this option to be able to repurpose their content over there or be able to start producing shorter content on there.
Because things sometimes when you say, okay, I’m gonna start a YouTube channel, you’re thinking 10 minute video. 15 minute, 30 minute. You’re like, and then you start to get a little scared and you start to go, oh, maybe I don’t wanna do this. And it, fear sets in, then procrastination.
Exactly. Oh, write.
So once calculate all that together, it starts to become a lot of reasons why you don’t start. But YouTube shorts gives people that ability to have that entry point to get their feet wet on the platform and understand how they can best utilize it. Now, I always recommend that people repurpose their TikToks if they have them over to YouTube shorts.
However, like you and I have discussed before, they don’t always work the same across platforms. And it really is about figuring out what that part of your target audience wants to see. And using those shorts as teasers into the longer format content is so great on there because they never have to leave the platform to get that longer content from you.
Yeah. When you post a TikTok and you have like a. Let’s say a thirty second clip that you’re trying to push people to go to YouTube and watch the full thing. You run a risk of somebody not wanting to leave the TikTok platform to go and watch the full thing on YouTube. Hence why the clips on TikTok are so important to be quick informational and full of golden nuggets, but leaving people wanting more and understanding that the bigger piece of content has the whole pile of gold, not just a nugget. So being on YouTube shorts is really nice because you’re able to just push in platform, but you’re able to also really, like I said get yourself used to doing video. Video content is not going away anytime soon. It’s only getting bigger and better.
In the last three years we have seen a crazy push for it. Instagram went from being a photo app to a video app. It’s back to a photo app apparently.
So that’s interesting because some industry news that literally just came out, two days before we’re recording this that I heard, and you can tell me if you heard it too, or maybe I got bad information.
But Facebook has stopped monetizing their stories platform, meaning they are not paying content producers to put stuff on the platform. And we know Meta owns both. So I think Meta has tapped out of the of the short format video content game. I think they’re letting that go. So last year when they introduced that program, now I, let me just preface this with, I am not fully knowledgeable on the program, but from what I understand of it.
When they released it last year, they had a 1 Billion Dollar cap on what they could pay out to creators in the sense of reels and stories. Now from what I’ve gathered, they’ve hit that cap which is why they have stopped the program. And now they’re going to go into analysis mode of was this beneficial to our platform?
Did it bring us in more eyes? This actually segues to a really great point though. And if anybody has a connection to Instagram, please send them this clip. Please stop making your platform for creators. It’s for small businesses to thrive and we’d really appreciate to keep the features that let small businesses thrive.
So thank you. That’s my PSA that because it’s just so hard for small businesses to keep being successful on that platform because of the roadblocks that they keep hitting. They brought stores in and that was incredible for the small businesses to have a verified source of payment and to be able to have that security of I bought it through Instagram, so if something happens, I have a place to go and claim a problem.
Just brought that security and gosh, there’s so many features they’ve gotten rid of over the last couple of years that I just cry. I’m like, all my clients are gonna suffer now because this feature is gone. Yeah. And they put their egg in into what we were talking about before. All those businesses, put their eggs in that basket because yes, back when Facebook created Facebook pages for business, they said, come to us.
We’re gonna take care of you. And people believe them. And then I think Meta forgot who was feeding them, right? Because ad revenue has dropped significantly for them because they abandoned and literally just cut ties with the small business community and have made it so difficult across both platforms for people to do business on Facebook, like actually run a business there.
So I actually tell a lot of people it. You can have a Facebook page, you can have an Instagram account, but you need other assets that belong to you so that in case they shut you down or they stop programs or they take features away, you can still keep your business going. I’ve talked to people who their business was just on Facebook and Facebook disabled their account and it literally shut their business down, like literally.
So yes I’m totally with you on that one. And that’s why I like always I’m always leaning away from those platforms cuz there’s that trust factor. Cuz to your point, it’s okay great, you’ve spent a billion dollars and you’re stepping away and you’re analyzing. But what are you doing to the people that we’re actually driving that for you?
Do you think when you’re done analyzing in six to nine months that they’re gonna come back to you? No, they’re gonna go someplace else. Oh, like…YouTube who monetizes shorts now. And they’re probably not gonna make that go away because they’ve seen the success of monetizing the regular platform. You could just look at their data and see that their success to be had there.
For sure. But to go back to the topic so you were saying, people there, the platform, they can’t sell there anymore. And we talked about this I think right before we got on about marketing mix. So let’s talk more about that because social media is awesome, but it cannot be your only platform and it can’t be the only game in town, right?
That goes against marketing 101. So talk a little bit more about your thoughts on that. Yeah, so it’s really funny because whenever I meet somebody in the marketing industry, no matter what area of it they work in, when they find out that I work in social media, I can already feel like a hesitation, right?
Which, to a degree, I understand social media is fleeting. I get it. You have to like really be up on the algorithms. But then I really come to realize that a lot of people in my industry don’t believe in other marketing tools to go alongside with social media. And the reality is, I learned this when I was doing influencing for myself.
You do not own your social media platforms and they take them away from you like that. And like you said, Audrey, you know when you lose that kind of audience, if that was your main bread and butter for bringing in referrals and money source, when that gets turned off, where are you turning to?
One of the first things that we talked to our clients about in the discovery process is what other marketing pieces do you have in place and if you don’t have any, are you gonna be ready to put those in. Because, it’s so important to have email marketing. It’s incredibly important to have a website to show that you are a legitimate professional business that understands your ideal clients’ wants and needs, and that you have a clear message and offering, right?
Like those things are so incredibly important. If website and email is all you have, you are doing great. That is absolutely incredible. There’s ways to grow in that, but to me, those are the basics that you should have before you come to social media because the question then becomes, where are we pushing our efforts to?
Because just pushing in platform or between platforms can only do so much for you. If you want to convert, if you want to really go the distance, you really have to have other things in place to nurture and connect with your ideal client. And that’s. That’s like fundamentals, right?
Ideally, if you have all the budget in the world, you wanna have your website, you wanna have your search engine optimization, some type of emailing system, you wanna be on your social channels, and then you want some other form of outbound advertising. Because when people see you in all these different places, they’re like, oh yes, I know that company.
It’s that awareness and then the following up, don’t make it…you know I say this a lot of times, don’t make it hard for people to find you and follow up with you once they decide they wanna be with you. And so that could really be on one of the platforms like they’re scrolling through. And here’s the amazing thing about social media is that your business piece of content can get smooshed in between kitties playing up here and dogs in their lovely little pajamas below you.
And it’s like there’s all these really good, feel good hormones. And then you come up in the middle and they’re like, that’s awesome. So that’s what I think the beauty of social media is that you get bundled in with all this other great content too. But like you said, you need these other mechanisms, even like you were saying with going out to the long format video or reading a blog article that has that long format video in it as well.
It’s a mix. And you’re right. I think a lot of people in our profession is they’re good at one thing and that’s the hammer and it nails all the marketing and it’s so not true. I yeah. Even when I run reports for clients you see how that mix pulls and works together and it’s brilliant and it’s beautiful and I do see social media as part of that, but I hear it too.
It’s I only do social media. It’s You gotta do more. No, and that’s, so that’s the other thing, right? So you’re right. All of your marketing should be connected. Everything should be flowing into each other. There should be systems in place, right? Yes. But then the other point of that, that I see, the other side of that I see a lot is people’s other marketing materials and their social media not matching.
Canva is an incredible tool. I love Canva more than anything, but it really is hard when your branding isn’t consistent across not only your social media platforms, but all your marketing stuff. So that’s another prerequisite to work with us, is you need to have like consistent branding in place from us to pull from. Otherwise, you’re not gonna get the visibility that you’re talking about. The reason you get that visibility from place to place is because your profile photos are the same. Your color schemes are the same, your fonts are the same. Your tone of voice is the same. Yes. And your ideal clients might be different for the different marketing service that you’re using, right?
Because like you said, one of your ideal clients might be really into reading blogs, and that is their consumption type of content. And the other one might be video. So by doing both of these things, you’re able to touch on all of these, different ideal people at the same time. Absolutely.
Which actually is a really, so one of my favorite things that I teach clients is how to stretch a piece of content. One of my favorite things to do I will tell my clients to just sit down and film like a five to 10 minute video of them just talking about one subject in their business.
There’s incredible platforms like Descript and CapCut that are free and cheap that you can easily take out filler words, dead airspace, all kinds of stuff and make it nice and neat. But let them just go, let them just talk about a topic. And then that video obviously can go out on YouTube as is.
It can get cut up into shorter clips for TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, anything else that can do short forms of content. You can pull the transcript and make a blog post with it. Obviously, you’re going to clean up the language a bit because spoken and written are a tiny bit different, there are so many ways to stretch that piece of content and make it be able to be multi-platform and be able to reach your ideal client in the format that they consume content on.
So it’s always about working smarter, not harder. And so that’s one of the first things I teach my clients is how to be able to, repurpose content too, because that’s really important, especially if you’ve spent so much time making content already, but then making your future content stretch. I love that.
And I think that’s so valuable because a lot of times I hear people say oh no, we’re gonna create all this brand new content for you, but you’re coming from it from a different perspective. Yeah, you might need some new, but let’s see what you got first and let’s see how we can take it, pull it apart, and put it back together.
Which is what you hear. You don’t hear that as much. It’s I wanna create all this new, beautiful content for you. So let’s talk about…so you were telling me you have this new offer that you’ve just put out in the last month or so, I think, tell us about what that is because I think it’s really exciting for our listeners to be able to like, get that first glimpse and taste of working with you.
So we brought social media audits online last week. And so you can sign up to have our company audit your social media profile. It is a presentation that we put together for you that is about 20 slides per platform. We go over branding and profile optimization. We go over content tips and strategies.
We go over an organic engagement strategy based off the platform that you’ve signed up for us to audit. And then we put together some action items and next steps for the potential clients if they wanna keep moving forward, if they get a little hungry after the audit and wanna keep moving forward with working on their social medias.
We have some different ways that they can work with us as well, but it’s $150 per platform right now and we are so excited. We have a bunch of influx last week, so I actually spent all weekend putting audits together, which was actually a lot of fun. But we actually film a video of us going through the presentation and give some really in-depth understanding of why the optimization is the way it is or what we’ve seen from the outside looking in.
And then from there. They can actually ask questions like in the description of the video and I can do video replies back to them and say, so what we mean by content pillars? And be able to go more in depth on stuff. So it’s nice you get like multiple times of talking to me and understanding, and it’s not just like a , “Here’s your audit. Have a great day.”
That’s awesome. I love the video back and forth because that just, it really helps people get to what it is that you’re saying, because a lot of folks still wanna do this themselves. They want it to feel authentic, meaning, they wanna be the face of their brand.
So you helping them navigate that is just amazing. So the link to get your audit is going to be in the show notes. So make sure, and it’s also gonna be in the description for the YouTube video as well. So if you’re watching this video on YouTube, scroll down, it’s there, and then it’s gonna be in the show notes on the site.
Lindsay it’s hard to believe, but we’ve been doing this for 30 minutes already and we gotta start wrapping up. I’m sad. We’ll have to do this again. We’ll have to do like another follow one. I know. So is there any last thoughts or ideas that you wanna share with the viewers and listeners before we finish this?
Yeah, whatever you’ve been wanting to do, start a TikTok. Start a YouTube channel. Be an influencer on Instagram. Actually do UGC content. But you can go to my socials and find out why. Do it. Start today. Start the account. Take the steps and just do it. It seems so much harder than it actually is, but consistency is key and do it for you because you deserve it.
So just do it. Start today. Love it. Just do it. Take action. That’s what I always talk about. Yes. So we are also gonna make sure that we put all of Lindsay’s social channels in these show notes as well, so that you can go follow her. See what she’s up to. There’s some cool stuff there too as well. So thank you so much for being on the podcast.
I really love this. It was great. Thank you for having me. I am so grateful to have been here. And like I said, I could honestly talk to you because we just, we look, we think strategy, so I can just talk to you forever, so we might have to do one whole episode on just talking about strategy, but we’ll come back to that.
So yeah, we’ll let you know when that one comes out. Alright, thanks everybody. I hope you have an amazing day.
