[Fully Managed] Jared Muscat of Keep It Stoked Ep. 202

Would You Rather Game

Daniela: Okay Jared, I’m gonna ask you some would you rather questions. So the first one is would you rather have to sing everything you say or dance everywhere you go?

Jared: Dance everywhere I go. I like to dance and it would maybe create efficiency. So maybe I feel like if there’s no space it would be complicated. I would sing everywhere I go but I feel like I’d be so obnoxious everyone would hate me.

Daniela: Yeah, that’s kind of my main reason. I was just going to try to act cool. I also have two kids, so I do kind of have to dance around them or carrying them at times. So you can’t already do it.

Jared: Yeah, yeah.

Daniela: So would you rather always have spaghetti for hair or maple syrup for sweat?

Jared: Both are disgusting. Yeah. Spaghetti hair, I guess. That seems easier to maintain. As long as it doesn’t have sauce on it.

Daniela: Yeah. Yeah. Maple syrup is like you’re sticky all the time.

Jared: Yeah.

Daniela: And last question. Would you rather have a rewind button on your life or a pause button?

Jared: That’s a deep one. I think it would be. Well, I guess a quick question is with the pause button, do you get to just like pause important things and do stuff? Or is it just like you have to hit pause?

Daniela: You can hit pause and like collect your thoughts, I guess. Okay. For whatever situation you’re trying to figure out. It would just be a pause button.

Jared: I always look back and think of things that happened that set me in different directions and realize I’m more than stoked where I am now. So I never want to rewind and do anything different. Just maybe sometimes hit pause and can control the anger.

Daniela: Yeah. That’s what I was thinking. I feel like the rewind button is kind of like a double-edged sword because then you’re going back in the past and you don’t have a guarantee that like making a different choice was necessarily going to lead to a better outcome.

Jared: Right. Right. So much more complicated than just taking a minute to break.

Daniela: Perfect. Right.

Introduction

Daniela: Well, guys, that was Jared Muscat with our game of Would You Rather. Welcome, Jared, to Fully Managed. For everybody watching, you know what the podcast is about. You know what we do here. And you know me. I’m your host, Daniela, and I’m Penji’s partnership coordinator. We talk about business tips. We talk about marketing tips. We assist you guys in your business journeys. And I’m really excited because we have a great guest today, Jared Muscat. He just started a new agency called Keep It Stoked. Hi, Jared. How are you? Welcome to the podcast.

Jared: Thanks for having me, Daniela. I’m stoked to be here and talk marketing and be a part of this great show you’ve got.

Daniela: I’m stoked to have you. So to kind of break the ice a little bit, get the ball rolling, obviously I’ve kind of said a little bit, but can you tell us what we got to know about you, everything that is for everyone that is not familiar with you? Yeah, the ball’s in your court right now to tell us.

Jared’s Background

Jared: I’ll kind of I’ll do my best to keep it short and sweet. I started a company when I was in high school because I just always dreamed of running my own show and specifically being in the surf industry. It was a great experience. I learned a lot. It was successful. But then I got to college and got diagnosed with epilepsy and figured like a stable career was a better path. And I went that route and I got to have an amazing career with, first worked at Surfline then Billabong, after that Patagonia and then Bragg in the marketing world. And it was a great experience. I learned a lot because there was a lot of different agencies, different times. I started with social media before there was such thing as an algorithm even. So it was a fun, great learning experience. And at the end of February, I was laid off and I thought about looking for a job. I, you know, I’ve got the strong resume, but then I remembered my time in high school and how fun it was to run my own show. And after thirteen plus years in the marketing business with the experience I have, I’m excited just to start keep it stoked and make something epic happen.

The Power of Getting Laid Off

Daniela: Oh, yeah, I was muted. I always do that where, like, I mute myself and then I forget and then I start talking, but I think it’s awesome that you took that leap. I feel like someone told me one time that kind of getting laid off is always like kind of a stepping stone for everybody in their life. Like you have to experience it. And it usually is like a pivotal moment. And I feel like that is, I don’t know if I believe it a hundred percent, but I do feel like I see a pattern of people that have experienced that kind of being able to reframe their life. Cause I feel like sometimes like quitting is scary. So when like the job does that for you, you kind of are put in a place where you have to evolve, if that makes sense.

Jared: For sure. And I think it’s, you know, the big thing that I live by is challenges or opportunities. I talk a lot about it on my website and on my social media because of my battle with epilepsy and how I found unique opportunities with that challenge. It’s the same way I saw the getting laid off was, all right, here’s a challenge. What tools, what opportunities do I have to use this to create something better for myself? And I’ve got two kids. I want to work remote. And how can I make that happen? And the best idea was take it into my own hands.

Daniela: Yeah, I think that’s great. And I think it makes you I think getting experience before actually starting something is also great. Because I think when you see how someone else runs things, it can really help you with when you start your own show, right? Or not even maybe just knowing where your strengths lie and being able to start something already aware, like, oh, this is what I’m good at, I think is also a great starting point.

Jared: Yeah, it definitely was helpful. The most helpful thing really has been Steven Johnson and Jessica Bloomberg and a couple other people who’ve gone through similar situations or started their own agencies have been so open to having quick calls, giving me feedback on plans and all my work. They were just allies in helping me build what my plan and goals will be and confidence too. It was really amazing to have peers in the marketing space different specialties than mine but they were there to help me build and are consistently here like giving me advice and ready to help so that was that’s truly amazing like I can’t thank them and the others enough.

Daniela: Yeah, I think that’s great.

Measuring Social Media Success

Daniela: But to kind of get a little bit into the groove of the show, we have a great episode planned. We’re talking about some really cool things. And we’re talking about a topic that’s very interesting nowadays. I think a lot of people are sort of partaking in this in the world of marketing, and that is social media. I think social media is revolutionary. It has revolutionized the marketing game in general. And whilst we see a lot of companies sort of trying to dabble into this, I don’t think that you can be a business owner nowadays and not be in some shape or form on social media, even if it’s just a little bit. But I’m curious about how do you actually measure whether what you’re doing on social media is actually going to convert. It’s actually meeting marketing goals. I think a lot of, I see a lot of businesses kind of just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks type of thing. And I want to hear your opinion on that.

Jared: So I’m going to make an analogy here. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go into the surfer mindset and look at every social media channel as a different type of wave. And within each type of wave, there’s the organic version that you are playing against a crowded lineup in. And then there’s the paid version where you get to own a little bit more of the crowded lineup. You’re a top leader. And so there’s two different opportunities with every single channel and every single channel provides a different goal type. If you’re looking at Facebook, you’re looking at an older demographic that lives on Facebook. And you’ve got to understand what the story you’re going to tell them on organic versions and the types of stories you’re going to tell them on paid versions. And there’s different goals within for organic engagement rate, community growth rate. On paid, you’re going to sit with concern for ROAS, CPM, CPC, the standards, but it’s also going to be different if you’re going after awareness, consideration or conversion levels. And so it’s really the importance of social media is understanding the vast depth of it and getting a team or getting agency help to truly align what you’re going to do with each channel because you have so many opportunities, but you have to be very specific with which opportunity it is. And then that will in turn be the measurement of business success. Your conversion is the easiest and first level of business success measurement via social media. But it’s not the only one and it’s not where all of your budget goes to. It’s a growth process over time.

Budget Allocation for Smaller Businesses

Daniela: That’s I think the analogy to like waves is really cool. We do a lot of surfing where I’m from, so I think I really kind of resonated with me. But what I’m curious with is like when you have a business that is kind of smaller, cause I think this is what happens a lot. Or at least a problem that I see people face is that when someone is kind of getting started and though, like, because they’re getting started, the budget is a lot more limited. And they kind of want to put all of the efforts of marketing into social media, right? They want to get viral on Instagram or TikTok or whatever. And then they’re doing it a lot into organic content. And I think sometimes, I think it really depends, at least for me, that’s my opinion. When I see businesses, I think, Maybe you should have invested a little bit more on like paid ads or you should have put that money that you put into SEO or whatever. Right. Because it feels like this business is more suited for that. And then there’s other businesses that I see that I’m like, OK, yeah, you can. It makes sense because I also feel like organic content is just cheaper to make. You really just need like a fifteen year old making videos for you. But that’s a joke.

Jared: Yeah, I think there’s I think you’re correct. You’re correct. But again, there’s variation within and within industry and business type. One of my first client is a contracting agency and we are going to spend money on Meta and Google right away with a heavy split towards meta actually and the first level of that is an awareness effort we’re not going to try to get someone to call him and over the first three months we understand we’re going to have to get a larger network first and the content building process is going to be a fun detail done by a little bit more older than a fifteen year old twenty one or so years older but I think That’s an important thing is content at the end of the day is always the most important part of any strategy. And so when it comes to social media, understanding your goals and then setting your plan and while your plan is in action, being able to analyze the data that your content is producing is key to being able to be quick to your toes, to make slight adaptations on whichever channel and whichever way to go make sure you hit those goals and can create better goals every six months, every year.

Understanding Your Audience

Daniela: Yeah. I don’t know. I just, the fifteen-year-old stuff was a joke, obviously. I’m just kidding.

Jared: I’m just kidding too.

Daniela: But I obviously, I kind of see this gap with people. I feel like, I don’t know, feel free to correct me, another hot take of mine, but I feel like a lot of the reason that I see sort of businesses struggling to adapt to social media is because I think the people behind it are not in social media as just normal people, like on the internet. And so they struggle to kind of understand why that they need to be there, how they need to show up, right? Because I feel like there’s a lot of like things that are very marketing sort of mindset that you have to have. But I think there’s other things that you need to also understand what the vibe is, for example, on every platform. Right.

Jared: Yeah. I mean, I think and that applies to any type of marketing effort you’re doing where you always need to be able to turn off your personal perspective and think through a multitude of perspectives. Right. If you’re at the company, a company that can create the target consumer identity in great detail, you have to really purely use that target consumer perspective. And if you’re not being able to create it in great detail, then go into your books, do whatever you can to understand your best consumers so that you’re using their perspective instead of your own perspective every time you’re creating those plans.

Daniela: Yeah, totally. That makes sense.

The Rise of Influencer Marketing and UGC

Daniela: What’s your take with things like, I think we’ve seen this rise in social media nowadays, especially like B to B, B to C, but I think I’ve started to see a little bit more on the B to B space of the rise of influencers and UGC content. Like I think I’ve seen a lot of businesses invest in that. And I think at first it was, like I said, like product focused. Like I remember seeing a lot of influencers and like stuff like this, making ads for things like makeup and, you know, like shaving cream and just like everyday products. But now I see I see ads of companies like Morgan and Morgan, like the lawyer firm, and I see a lot of VPN services and like website stuff. And I think it’s kind of like going more into other types of businesses that are not just product related. And I want to kind of go to hear what your take is on this whole sort of rise of influencer marketing and UGC content in general.

Jared: Well, there’s the, let me get a sip of coffee yeah go ahead well I think what that is is it reflects back to the thing that you’ll see in every brand lift study you ever have done which is the most the strongest marketing tool every brand has is word of mouth marketing yeah that’s word of mouth marketing right and so with the digital media you have an opportunity to put a word of mouth marketing feel to the content that you’re selling for your service or your product it doesn’t matter which it is but word of mouth is what brought me to the agency that I’m having help my accounting right it wasn’t the ads I saw on instagram so there’s There’s an importance to word of mouth, how you shape that word of mouth and bring that word of mouth to a consumer. There’s so many varying forms of that. Influencers, it’s a unique opportunity. I’ve always thought influencers are interesting because they were relatively new in the title of influencers to me when I got to Bragg. But at my previous three roles, Surfly and Billabong Patagonia, there was team writers and ambassadors like we worked with. We had contracts with them that worked with them as influencers before being paid as influencers.

Daniela: Yeah.

Jared: So like I saw that evolution and it was a, it’s a fun and interesting evolution, but I’ve always seen them as like, you want your influencers not to be one-offs. You need ambassadors. That’s you need ambassadors. Word of mouth creators is who I personally see as the ideal influencers.

Building Brand Loyalty with Influencers

Daniela: Yeah. You want, like, I also feel like you want someone who is loyal to your brand and understands that a little bit. I feel like, my what I see a lot of influencer stuff happening is just I can you can tell when the the person making the video on the product or the service just wants to get their bag like there’s no loyalty to the brand whatsoever and they’re just reading a script and I feel like these type of ads it doesn’t matter who you’re putting it in front of are kind of not going to be successful.

Jared: I’d always suggest that we’re not always you should never put forever, but I would strongly usually suggest that influencer budget gets spread over long term contracts at lower follower counts than quick big hits with high level influencers. The goal of an influencer is loyalty and word of mouth. You want them to speak highly of you on your channel, not just when you pay them, but they do it organically and they tell their friends because you’ve created that good of a relationship.

Daniela: Yeah, I think so too. I agree. I also don’t think that every brand necessarily is going to thrive on influencer marketing because you have to think about the people that are consuming influencer content. I’ve seen a lot of brands trying to do that and I guess some of them can get brand awareness, but I feel like not everyone is going to get much conversion out of it, if that makes sense.

Jared: Again, it all falls back to understanding your consumer. Is that influencer type going to be someone that influences your consumer to go purchase? I think from my personal perspective, often, Would someone like Bruce Springsteen, for example, buying this product make me want to buy the product? I love his music, but no, I don’t live his life. I’m not going to go spend that. You got to think of who you’re trying to get to purchase and make it as relatable as possible. The big brands, they can go after those big people that just keep people remembering them. but not a lot of brands got very few brands can do that.

Daniela: Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, I feel like if you have a big influencer kind of really loyal to your brand, that might be really good, but I don’t know. I feel like a lot of times I see more, more often than not, I feel like they’re just trying to get paid for the sponsorships that more than actually being loyal to a brand. I feel like a lot of people who are promoting products nowadays don’t even use them or know what they do properly. They’re just like, ah, buy this thing, twenty percent off. So, you know, I think that’s something you take account into a brand because you don’t want to fall into that spectrum of just kind of being that whatever brand that they read to their followers or readers or whatever, wherever they are being an influencer.

Jared: A hundred percent. It just all again comes back to the The influencer budget needs to be focused on focused influencers and loyal influencers. Don’t go swing for a grand slam with one. Set up a full lineup.

Daniela: Yeah, I think totally.

Content Strategy and Planning

Daniela: And now to move on to something, I think this kind of brings the topic into something really interesting, which is actually kind of starting to create strategies for the type of content that you’re going to have, the strategies for what you’re going to be doing, if you’re going to be collaborating with influencers, you know, you have that, that also requires investigation, outreach, negotiation, how much like what these people do, et cetera, et cetera. When you are doing that, right, when you’re trying to figure out how to plan your social media, whether it’s going to be organic, whether it’s going to be paid, whether whatever it is that you’re doing, how do you actually, you know, sit down and do that? Especially now, I think with video kind of being the dominating thing on these platforms, and not everybody necessarily being comfortable with video. I think it was easier before when we would just be like having still images on Instagram feeds and blog articles and stuff like that. And now it’s like, you know, you want to have a short form video of some form. How would you actually recommend this to especially business owners who are not into it and don’t want to do stuff like this?

Jared: So if it’s someone who’s not into it and doesn’t want to do it, hire me first. But then, no, in actuality, content strategy, it’s key. And so you have to write out a plan and you can go corporate jargon and write out a beautiful brief you can look it up on chat gpt if you’ve never written one before and follow it right but you need to set a goal for what your content is going to do you need to outline the key message that’s going to be fluid through content set tone barriers set content style outlines in in detail right like if you’re going to make if your plan is I need three organic social media posts per week. And I know that videos perform best, but I can’t make three videos. I can only get two videos together. So I’m going to do a photo. Here’s how I’m going to do each one of those. So there’s a consistent fluid process that at some point becomes easier to produce the content. and it’s also something that as you’re posting it regularly for a month or two months you look at the back end of it and you see all right this type of when I show the finished recipe at five seconds it’s getting way more views than when I don’t go until the end things of that nature right so you you need to set an organized style guide and brand guide you can go as detailed as you want you need to set the brief there’s all those things to consider and you can go very detailed. You can keep it more broad based on your bandwidth.

Daniela: Yeah.

Jared: More detailed, the better. But again, it’s when you set a structure and a process over time, you can start, it’ll start feeling easier to do.

Outsourcing vs. DIY Approach

Daniela: Yeah. I think, do you think that I, I’m a firm believer that if you are not into something, And you have sort of a way to unload that into someone else who does like doing it or is good at it that you should. Because I feel like if you don’t like it, you’re just never going to be as good as someone who does because you’re inherently not going to put in that much passion. Right.

Jared: A hundred percent. And now as a small business owner myself, I do understand like the importance of doing things of that nature. right like back to the accounting I’m not I would I would love numbers because I love data but I don’t I don’t love numbers that have to do with money and money so I’m gonna pay someone else to take care of that side of it right and and the my first client that the contractor he He said during the first meeting, I was asking him all these questions. And one of them was about specifically, how involved do you want to be? Because I do see a lot of small businesses where the entrepreneur is the face of the business. They love to be the face of the business. Or maybe that’s kind of what they’re forced to be. But anyways, I see that time and again. And he was like, no, get me out. Like get me out, get me out, get me out. That’s why I’m coming to you, right? So he wants to focus on the important part of what he’s good at, creating incredible designs. He doesn’t want to do marketing. So yeah, I’m a big fan of it. I think it’s tough. Like I had to make that decision before I even had clients. like to invest in someone else doing that. But I figured the time I’m saving myself to learn it good enough that I’d feel I’m doing it reliably while I need to go work on building my business is worth that investment.

Daniela: Yeah, I mean, I definitely feel like as you are, obviously at the beginning, it’s going to be difficult to be able to unload something into someone else. But I feel like there’s, it should always be the goal, if that makes sense. Because then, you know, like, okay, fine, I’m getting started. I’m going to do what I can. But it should always be, the goal is to expand, right? To scale, to grow, to have employees, to have a business, to have all of this. So eventually being able to tell someone, like, I don’t want to make these videos. I don’t want to plan these videos. And I understand this is important, but I want you to do it. And I think that is like what you should always be striving towards and kind of building a structure that can lead you to that. Right.

Jared: A hundred percent. Yeah. Like at some point I want to have enough clients where I’m hiring someone to do some of the work for my clients.

Daniela: Yeah. And I think like also just in general, a group effort is always going to be great because you can have different minds and being able to sort of have different ideas and different outlooks and different things is going to be the thing. And obviously you can’t do that at the beginning. I mean, unless you’re like a millionaire, but, but I think it should always just kind of be what you want to get to.

The Importance of Business Owner Input

Jared: Yeah. Back to the though, like, even if you don’t like marketing and you’re hiring someone to do your marketing, I do encourage you to be a part of conversations. Like back to that man, Scott, he, I gave him a very detailed questionnaire after the first meeting asking him extra specifics. And he was, when he first saw it, he was like, I don’t know, man, these are things I don’t know how to talk about that. I was like, I don’t care. You don’t need to talk about it like you’re talking marketing. Talk about it however you’re talking about it because you are… you’ve got a perspective that’s important for creating things that you are also going to like, right? So you need to be involved because they have an idea. They might not know how to say it in a marketing mind, but they know what they want their business to be, know that and be a part of. So you also need to create a relationship with that agency or partner or team that’s like, They can hear your point of view and you’re not stepping on them. You’ve got trust in them to do what they’re great at.

Daniela: Yeah, no, that’s totally important. I think it makes sense because I feel like a lot of times you can, that’s a tricky thing of like thinking that, oh yeah, I don’t care. You do it, but you still need, I mean, if it’s your brand, you need to understand what do you want your brand to say though? Because yeah, if you kind of give that person free range, they might do something that you don’t want to.

Jared: A hundred percent.

Daniela: Yeah, I heard a story about this business owner who had asked, like this was my friend’s experience. Like she asked, he asked her to do a logo and he wanted like tribal themed logo. And then she did the tribal theme. But this business owner, he was religious. He was Catholic, I think, or Christian. I don’t know. The point is that when he saw the logo, he didn’t like it because he thought that it was like, not adhering to his Christian values and his business for him, that was important. And so he had her do it again. Right. And then he was like, no, like I want tribal, but not related to other religions. And she does it again. And then they kind of have this whole process of, of every time him kind of rejecting logo because of something else. And then she ended up telling him like, I need you to be more specific because you’re just telling me these vague things. but you’re not telling me exactly what it is that you want your business to be. I didn’t know that you didn’t have these goals when you asked me for this logo, right? And I think that conversation would have probably been very important to have even if he wasn’t a designer he doesn’t want to do it he doesn’t want to worry about it he should have still been able to have that so that it would have made the process of designing this logo a lot faster so it kind of reminds me of what you were saying.

Jared: Yeah and so that’s why I’ve created this like my onboarding process is making sure that there’s detailed questions I’m getting answered up front And if their effort to answer them doesn’t clarify it, I’m going to ask it again in another way. One of the agencies I’ve worked with in the past, they had this great onboarding process, which I honestly partially adopted in certain varieties. I’m a small agency. They’re a bigger agency, so I can’t do everything they did. But it was great in terms of what they did to make our team tell them what we thought our brand was. And, you know, we get we get like thinking specifically of that logo example, we had to give them screenshots of things we like that inspired like all these different types of screenshots to help them pick picture eight where our minds are. So it’s but it’s a tricky thing. It’s always going to be a slightly tricky thing, getting the exact details, you know. So creating that relationship is important.

Daniela: You’re back on mute.

Jared: I’m sorry. I’m so dumb.

Daniela: Yeah. And that guideline, because I mean, I understand where you’re coming from. Because like I said, like if you ask someone to make a tribal logo and that’s all you ask for them, you’re kind of leaving it up to the interpretation of that person and what they feel is tribal. You know, and so then that’s when the discourse is going to start to come in because you have different things in your head. So you need to make sure that you’re putting into that agency or that person’s head what it is that you want in as many details as you can.

Jared: For sure.

Closing and Contact Information

Daniela: Well, Jared, I think this is a great way to end the podcast. I had such a great time talking to you. But before we end it, I do want to give you the space to promote anything. If what we spoke about today resonated with anybody listening, with our audience, I want you to have space to tell us all.

Jared: Cool yeah so I’d obviously yeah I just started keep it stoked it’s a brand and social media marketing agency what I provide is consulting services whether it’s building your brand tone and guide and your brand marketing strategy overall content strategy development and social media strategy and then If needed, there’s ad hoc projects, building a campaign, those types of things. And on any of those three levels, I can be a part of that. So I’m super excited to bring the perspective of my thirteen years and in different industries and different business sizes. I’m excited to be a part of something that I’m leading, but that I’m going to be a partner with. And I want to see work with brands that are growing, ready to start something bigger and help you get to that big level and build your team and build your brand with you.

Daniela: Awesome. Yeah, I will be adding the links to you to your website, to your LinkedIn on the description so that people can easily access it. They can go and talk to you. And I’m so grateful that we had you out today on the episode.

Jared: Thank you very much, Daniela and the team. And yeah, everybody, keep it stoked.

Daniela: Keep it stoked, guys. We will see you guys on the next episode.

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