Successful omnichannel marketing isn’t about mastering more platforms. It’s about putting people at the center of everything you do. In this recap of a Social Pulse Podcast episode, guests Heather Disarro and Mark PopeJoy from Soapbox Influence and Retail Media share about how they’ve cracked the code on creating marketing that flows naturally across touchpoints while keeping the human element front and center.
How has the concept of omnimarketing evolved since you both began your careers? And what do you see as the biggest misconceptions B2B marketers have about it today?
Mark Popejoy: Yeah, I think when I first started, omnichannel wasn’t even a thing yet. So that word came around, 15, 18 years ago, something like that … Being in this space for over the last 20-plus years, you kind of see how different platforms talk to each other and different channels start evolving.
And being in Northwest Arkansas, the Home of Walmart, the omnichannel has been the buzzword for quite a while now, and I think just the fact that meeting shoppers where they are, whether that’s on social or in store, or digital. Wherever those locations are, it’s been a big boost and a big push for retail in general.
And we’ve just been focusing on that for the last, probably 15 parts of my career, of how we get there, how we cross that bridge, how to meet people where they are and then designing and communicating to those spaces, that messaging has to be consistent across all those different channels and platforms. So it’s evolved for sure.
What we see now is definitely not what we saw even five years ago, let alone 20. So it’s been good to see, it’s been a challenge, it’s been different things along the way that have popped up that I wouldn’t even have thought about.
Heather Disarro: I am a certified geriatric millennial and I think back to such a lovely term, I think back to when I was a kid, we would see something on a TV commercial and then we would have to go in store touch and feel, Well, we’d have to convince our parents to go into the store and then touch and feel it and then convince them to buy it.
And as I’ve gotten older, as I’ve gone through my career, omnichannel is something that has just gradually evolved, and I think what’s really interesting is that the in-store piece is not as big as it used to be, right? We have omnichannel, of course means we’re looking at online, we’re looking at social, we’re looking at making it easier for people to shop.
But there are still so many people who want to go in store and touch and feel and interact and almost start to create a relationship with that product in person. And so I think it’s really cool the way that Omnichannel has continued to push that, and I hope to see that more in the future as well.
Heather Disarro: It’s funny because I fell essentially into blogging and social media and stuff. Facebook started when I was in college, and because I had that college email address or that university email address, I was able to be one of the first participants of it. But at the root of it all, it was just bringing people together to connect.
It was taking this really big giant world where we kept in touch with people, but maybe not, and making it feel a little bit smaller because we had that connection. And then whenever I started blogging, that was my gateway into influence and everything. You can go back on my blog, like years and years, and you can see just hundreds of comments, and those are, it was essentially like online networking.
I’m still very good friends with a lot of the people who you can see commenting on my blog today. And I think along the way, as it has evolved with social as it has evolved with influence and everything, there’s been this, I’m gonna make up a word, businessification of it all, right?
It’s a business for creators, It’s a way for them to bring in income for their family, for themselves to reach financial goals, et cetera. It’s also business for the businesses that participate in it as well. And I think a lot of times it has lost that human connection., and so I think something that has been really fun is as I’m strategizing for clients for our agency, for myself, even really trying to make it feel, take that idea of having this big world and making it feel smaller, more personal, more intimate, and like people actually care. I think that’s a really big piece that’s been missing lately.
Tell me a little bit more about the work that you’re doing at Soapbox.
Heather Disarro: So I run social channels for clients, and what that looks like, actually, there are a couple of different things. I do like white glove social media management. And so that’s curating all of the content that we source from this giant community of creators that we have, and so you have like really beautiful, varying content, very diverse content. And I put that all together, create the caption, copy, schedule everything out, make sure that I’m interacting and that we’re measuring all of their results, so we have that side of things. We also have another offering that we have is user-generated content creation.
And so that’s another piece of what I do is reaching out again to our community of influencers and depending on whatever the goals are for the client, whether it’s video, whether it’s photos, a mix of the two, what their product focus is, et cetera. We source that content and deliver it to their inbox monthly, and so I do that, and then also head up some of the strategy behind what we’re working with Soapbox Retail as well on the agency side.
Mark Popejoy: Yeah, so I’m Vice President and Team Lead for Soapbox. I’ve been with the company for about four years now.
I oversee all things creative, all things strategy, all things digital. So definitely a lot of different hats on the team, we have different kinds of pockets and teams that do different things. We have a content team that deals strictly with e-commerce listings and how they look.
We have a photo studio where we capture a lot of our video and photography for those .com listings so that we can share with our clients for their socials or their marketing. And then we have a retail media side that manages and places Ads for marketing on all these larger sites, walmart.com, Target, Amazon.
So we really help tell that larger story, and so all parts of the business are talking to each other, so I lead that team. We’ve grown over the last four years. [And] Heather’s [team] helped us in that spot for sure. It’s bringing that social component. But really, it’s just kinda leading this team is going down this road of understanding the capabilities, opportunities that we have that didn’t exist five years ago.
And so yeah, just making sure that we look good, we sound good. We’re helping our clients do exactly that as well, and it’s been fun to see how this team’s evolved over the last four to five years.
How do you ensure visual consistency while still optimizing content for different channels and some of their specific requirements?
Mark Popejoy: Yeah, it’s a constant learning thing, right? So education is part of my background, I was in the education sector for 12 years, and continuously just learning and understanding what things are, how things evolve. We know that even Instagram changes its algorithms and its content, and its requirements, pretty often, and we just have to stay on top of that.
So we really stay on top of being aware when those changes happen and how we can convert those things. Even reverse engineer it so that we are making sure that things are fitting, even after that transfer’s taking place. So a lot of it is staying in the know, being aware, reading a lot, and staying connected to different resources that help us get ahead of it a little bit.
And just maintaining that we have that consistent education and understanding from our team. From the design side, it’s really this, it’s not very different from what it was 25 years ago of maintaining a brand style guide of understanding colors, how they look on digital, how they look on the web versus a phone.
There are very minute differences between different platforms that we just have to be aware of. It is a lot of that, again, it goes back to the education part of understanding what our clients’ needs are, keeping their brand consistent. The last thing a brand wants to do is see their color different on a different platform, or a print piece, or a digital piece. There’s equity in all those things. Color, font, how it looks, spacing, there’s a lot of science that kind of goes into the psychology behind design, and that’s my background.
And I do nerd out about things like that, but I’m also understanding how just attentive you have to be to make sure that consistency happens, otherwise your message is lost, you’re not consistent, and you are not relevant. You’re just not believable if your message is not looking the way it should, according to the brand or the requirements of the platform you’re on.
How does that translate from a B2B perspective?
Heather Disarro: Personally, the way I see it is that businesses are, we’re all people, right? There is no way to separate emotional connection from anything because we all have an emotional connection to something, whether it is one of our clients, who this is how they make their living for their family.
They’re emotionally connected to that company, to the success of that product, to the success of every campaign that they run. There’s an emotional connection there, or if it is somebody who sees an influencer talking about something, they feel that camaraderie somehow, that emotional connection to the influencer.
And when they see that, then they start to develop that relationship, that emotional connection to the product. And I don’t know if there’s a way to take that out of it, and so when I think about making it people-centered, I think emotion is a big piece of it, right? Really making sure that consistency is there because it matters to everybody involved.
It matters to the people who are making the purchase. It matters to the influencer who’s talking about it. It matters to the clients and the people that work for the company. And so I think when you make something people-centric and you make it about the person, about the human behind the screen, then I think everybody wins.
Mark Popejoy: Yeah, I want to definitely jump off that. So even though I have this 20-plus years background in design, really, what I do is communicate, right? It’s messaging, it’s how things are delivered, and the one thing I learned very early on in my career is that communication happens whether you want it to or not, right?
So whether it’s good or bad communication, those things are still happening, and it transcends language. In design, one of the very first things I learned was that textures communicate. They invoke an emotion, and emotions communicate. So those are the things you’re trying to connect with people. Is that emotion similar?
What Heather just said is that you can invoke an emotion, and that will communicate to your audience. And the thing is, communities, people, it’s not a one-off campaign. It’s a long-term commitment when you’re going through these things that when you’re trying to communicate those things in emotion, whether it’s a pool or whether it’s, how a TV looks on your wall, like all the things that we’re trying to communicate and whether we’re adding value to someone’s life or their time or their home.
You know, shoppers are smart. They can see through shallow effort, if that’s your term, if that’s what you’re looking for as a quick fix, it will be short-lived. It’ll be exactly that because campaigns disguised as human sentiment are easy to see through by most people.
What do you see as some of the biggest integration challenges there?
Heather Disarro: Okay. Yes. So each channel is going to be different, right? You have TikTok, which is gonna be a much more sort of casual experience for the end user.
People are going there to be entertained, right? Rather than, specifically educated, although TikTok is very much a search engine at this point and very much a piece of education for your company, but it has to be done in a strategically casual way, versus something like Instagram or Pinterest that’s much more visually oriented.
And I think that the challenge is figuring out how to do that in a way that makes it a cohesive experience for the end user. And so when I think about how B2B marketers can fix that, I don’t know if there’s necessarily a way to fix it. I think that it just means, as to what Mark was saying, like putting in that effort to understand the end user on each platform and then making sure that you’re speaking their language, basically speaking directly to them rather than just cross-promoting or, and not that that’s a bad thing, but making it specifically for that end user versus having the exact same thing on every platform.
Mark Popejoy: Oh, I think that’s perfect. I think identifying those audiences, like Heather was saying, like even with our own socials.
We have different target audiences for TikTok than Instagram or than LinkedIn. There are different demographics altogether. They’re different age groups, it’s a different way to communicate, and you have to just understand, like you can’t have the same message over five different platforms.
It’s tone deaf, it goes generic, and you don’t have any validity to what you’re saying or engaging with your people. And like I said, people are smart. They’re gonna figure it out that if they can just go to one location to get what you’re saying instead of five, you’re missing out on chances to communicate and connect with the audience.
And just understanding that people use different platforms for different reasons. If you don’t do that, you are really gonna just end up shooting yourself in the foot.
Heather Disarro: I also think about myself and my own social habits, right? I will follow the exact same brand across multiple channels, but the nuance.
My own personal nuance, like I am gonna go to, I keep using TikTok as an example, but just because it’s easy, ’cause I want to be entertained but when I want to learn about the product specifically, I’m going to look at what I took from TikTok, how I was entertained. I’m gonna look them up on Instagram. I’m gonna see how they interact on Facebook.
I’m going to maybe pin them on Pinterest. If I’m looking at it from like a strategic business standpoint, I’m gonna look them up on LinkedIn and I’m gonna see all of those different things. And I think it’s important to consider when you do that, not just the individual audiences on each platform, but the nuance within each individual person as well.
The way that they’re going to receive something on TikTok, how is that going to translate as they look you up on other channels as well?
Share a success story where one of your clients adopted this more integrated, people-centered omnichannel strategy. What were key factors that made that work?
Mark Popejoy: Yeah, I think the first one comes to mind, being in this area that we are, we are the home of CPG companies, they have offices here all over, so one of probably our best success story of how we made omnichannel work across all different platforms and devices was with the Johnson & Johnson company.
We had a campaign with a new Band-Aid that was coming out and some new prints that they hadn’t done in quite a while. And so they looked at us, well, because we have both the in-store digital influence side of things, we can really help tell that story in a much more complete way. So we are able to, one, generate in-store signage and displays that really help have that item stand out on the shelf so we can direct people to where they’re supposed to find the item.
We used a digital component where we created a box that we would send to influencers with the Band-Aids inside, with some swag from Band-Aid itself, koozies, and cups, all the different things that, you know, an influencer would have while they’re filming.
And then we hired influencers that directed and drove shoppers right to the store, right to the shelf so this whole campaign was focused on these three or four individuals of how they lived their life day to day and how Band-Aid played a part in that and so it was really good to see a younger generation, i think our demographic for our influencers was 23 to 26, we had a range there.
But introducing like this really old brand of Johnson & Johnson and Band-Aid to a younger audience in a way, and again, meeting them where they are on TikTok, on Instagram, all the things that you would see these reels on. They were able to communicate among themselves with their day-to-day life.
We had an influencer who was hiking and needed a Band-Aid ’cause they cut their leg on a branch, and then right from that, we were able to drive them right to the store. We could tell them right where it could be found, or we drove them right to walmart.com or other platforms where these things are located.
So we are able to tell that story immediately of what the use is for that product, and then send ’em right to the location of where to pick that item up. So we are able to really bring in a legitimate omnichannel experience for this brand that you don’t really think about. Being in the space of influencers, which is, I think is the coolest thing, is when you can marry up a company or a product that you wouldn’t imagine would be in that space, or you would see on TikTok or a reel or whatever it might be.
That’s really cool. That’s really special when you can do that, especially with a company that’s old as Johnson and Johnson with something as simple as a Band-Aid? I have them all over the house. My daughter uses them on every single thing that she can find, but being able to tell that story in that message, introducing a new line, a new design, and a color scheme. I just thought that was really cool.
We were able to package all that up and then really have a great case study at the end of that to show the importance of one, the people that are involved, ’cause if they’re not believable, you’re not gonna do anything.
So we really focus and vet our influencers so that they are relatable. We deal with micro-influencers. We don’t have huge names, we have relatable people, relatable shoppers who are living their life just like you and I, and how they communicate with their audiences really helps make that story quite a bit more authentic than you can find in a typical commercial or influencer.
Heather Disarro: No, I will say number one to Mark’s story, it was really cool the way that we were able to reach the influencers and make it a really great experience, so that they could share that experience with renewing essentially the Johnson Band-Aid brand with their followers.
We did one over the holidays that I thought was really fun as well, and it involved kind of all the facets of the company as well. And so we were able to create this big, beautiful holiday-themed candy display with, it was Lindt and Ferrero Rocher, and it was this big beautiful display that you would find in all kinds of Walmart stores just across the country.
And our design team helped put that together and make it just this big beautiful thing, it was very creative, and then we had a big influencer campaign that drove directly to the in-store experience. And a lot of the photos, a lot of the videos showed the actual influencers going in store exactly where it was located, exactly what they purchased, how they used it to either just eat on their own or gift as part of a holiday experience for their friends and family.
And I just thought it was a really fun, festive way to share something that we’ve all grown up with, right? We’ve seen these candy products; they’re sitting on the shelves all the time, but not a big, beautiful, festive holiday shelf like this and being able to see I just loved the way that the influencers drove exactly to where it was at in store so that people could go in and actually have that experience there.
How are you actually measuring the impact that influencers have on business bottom lines or in the context of this larger omnichannel strategy through social media activity? How is that being measured?
Heather Disarro: So we have a dedicated insights team that goes through all of the insights for every campaign. We have campaigns that maybe they’re just looking for awareness, right? So we can measure engagements and impressions, we can look at organic versus paid, all of that.
But another thing that we have another offering that we have within our influence campaigns is the ability to, when we’re driving people to .com, we can provide personal links for those influencers that cart the product for anybody who clicks on it and so we can start to see and measure a lot more about the actual intent to purchase and be able to provide that for our clients to be able to measure against sales increases and stuff like that.
And so that, plus all of the normal insights that you would find as far as engagement and demographics and stuff like that, really helps set us apart so that we can actually start to help clients measure what that success looks like.
Mark Popejoy: That’s exactly right. Like we are able to track those cart transfers to see exactly the dollar amount that is transferred over those carts. And we lean on our clients who let us know, showing us the needle moving. Like we don’t have obviously the backend data that they would have as far as sales go, and so we just have these really close relationships with our clients that end of the quarter, end of the month, whatever it might be, end of the campaign, we can go back and say, okay, here’s what we did and here is the actual proof that it moved the needle, it made a difference.
And we can track those things with the help of our clients, we can get the dollar amount, but without that, even when that doesn’t happen, we can literally show a dollar value associated with every campaign of what the return was.
Heather Disarro: And I will say again, with that carding link that we have, that also does give us like a serious amount of backend data on the actual, on like when people click on it, what is that person?, what does that shopper look like?
Like sometimes we can find out what their, perhaps their median income is or the location that they’re purchasing from, and stuff like that. And so I think to bring it back down to the person we can see, we can make it feel personal. We can help our clients see who is that actual human being is that you’re talking to on the other side of the screen.
Mike Allton: [You] guys know we have the ability inside the Agorapulse tool to create tracking links. Any link that you share, whether it’s to an e-commerce thing or to a blog post or whatever, it’s automatically tracked with full U10 parameters and we integrate with Google Analytics so that we can see in the back end of Google and bring that back into your AgoraPulse reports, exactly what that shopper did and this idea of pushing links that already have the item added to the cart, which is fairly easy to do.
Like, I have a WooCommerce Cart on my personal site. I do that all the time if I’m creating a landing page for a product, I don’t want them to go to the product page and then have to add it to a cart. There’s just a way to create that link so research that folks, if you’ve got an e-commerce site of your own or you’re working on one for your clients, and kind of build that approach into your workflows.
Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse podcast, B2B edition on Apple or Spotify, and drop me a review. I’d love to know what you thought about this episode or the show overall, and what else you’d like to see us cover.
