The world of marketing is not only demanding but also constantly evolving. With new trends at every corner and the latest technologies rising in popularity, marketers are pressured to always stay on the pulse.
Social Media Marketing Director Stephanie Studer is an innovative copywriter, marketer, and now Founder and Chief Editor of “Good Morning Evildoers,” a podcast set to launch on Halloween 2024.
With over a decade of experience in both B2B and B2C marketing, Stephanie has mastered the art of crafting compelling narratives that resonate with diverse audiences. Her career is marked by leading teams, managing complex projects, and optimizing content across multiple platforms.
Whether she’s perfecting SEO copy, guiding brand messaging, or creating a new persona for a campaign, Stephanie approaches every project with a blend of enthusiasm and expertise that sets her apart in the marketing world.
In this Q&A feature, Marketing 411 spoke with Social Media Marketing Director Stephanie Studer to learn about changing marketing strategies and staying creative in a content-driven world.
This interview has been transcribed and edited for clarity.
Can you share a memorable campaign where your content strategy played a key role in your success?
I’d like to talk about a reactivation campaign targeting previously dissatisfied clients. It was a challenge because when people are already disinclined to trust you, then you have to overcome a lot of sales objections. The brief was to point out that we had made changes and that we were ready to power their profits.
What we ended up doing was creating an entire drip campaign centered around the little chargers that you can charge your phone or your tablet with. We boxed them up, and then we used a lot of language to reinforce the ideas of power, of electricity, of charging up, and so forth. Then, we unified all the collateral and the emails around that sort of suite of terms and phrases so the packaging, the emails, and the personalized video all synced up, and it worked. We won back several clients for that correspondent channel.
What I took away from that is the physical and the linguistic need to be mutually reinforcing each other. You cannot think that as someone in charge of the copy direction, you don’t have to pay attention to design. You can’t think as a designer that you don’t have to pay attention to copy. Ideally, you should work hand in hand with your graphic designer and other parties to come up with something shiny and exciting. That’s exactly what we did with the campaign, and it actually worked well.
How do you stay creative and avoid burnout when you are consistently producing content?
It is incredibly important to get a good night’s sleep. Day residue impacts synaptic firing. If you don’t rest well enough, your synapses do not fire as fast. You’re not going to come up with creative energy. It is important to think of ourselves not as just machines that make marketing go, but as living beings. You water your plants, and you make sure they get enough light.
I also believe you need to read both widely and wildly. By which I mean, don’t just read in your area, although you definitely should, but read outside of your area. If all you read are the same marketing books that everybody else is reading, then all you’re going to produce is the same kind of marketing that everyone else is producing, right? So, read fiction. I find reading poetry is especially useful because that is about maximizing impact in minimal space, which is exactly what we do with copy. I also suggest biographies and works on creativity. Questlove, the drummer, has a book called Creative Quest that I highly recommend.
But my point is that you have to fill the well before you can draw from it. So, to avoid burnout, you have to do things that aren’t just your job.
Are there any emerging trends that you see shaping the landscape over the next year?
I am really keeping an eye on what is going to happen to TikTok. TikTok was seismic. It was like three teenagers in Dubuque dancing in their living room, and then it just exploded. It radically rewrote the sense of distance between digital creators and digital consumers because it’s so immediate and everyone can participate.
There’s the pending lawsuit, which is TikTok is now suing the United States federal government because the government passed a bill which was signed by the president saying, “You’ve got to pick. You can either divorce yourself from your Chinese company or you cannot do business in the United States anymore.”
So Meta is now pushing reels onto your Facebook feed as well as having them presented on Instagram. Of course, Google is doing similar on YouTube.
I’m really interested to see if the vertical orientation and the sort of visual vocabulary that we have sort of creatively and collaboratively built will transfer to these other platforms because they don’t have the secret sauce algorithm, right? The TikTok algorithm is so clever, and it is incredibly addictive because it responds in real-time to what you’re looking at, how long you’re looking at it, whether or not you interact, and whether or not you like it. It is building an endless pipeline that is designed for that particular person.
Without that algorithm, I would be very interested to see what happens with those vertical videos.
I don’t think we can put that genie back in the bottle, but I’m not sure that it will succeed in the same way. Even if it is literally the same, even if the creator has literally just taken their TikTok and shoved it on YouTube, the environment is not the same.
Can you discuss a time when you had to pivot your social media strategy due to changes in platform algorithms or, or usual behavior?
News is so important to me. The first thing I do in the morning is go to Google News, and then I go to a couple of different newspapers to read the front pages. There’s just so much movement that I try to kind of keep myself from being surprised.
I do think it is important to keep considering each platform on its own merits, even if it is if you’re cross-posting as part of an overall strategy.
So, for example, Facebook, I don’t tag on Facebook because hashtags are useless there. The subculture of Facebook users does not use hashtags the way that people do on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you’re on Instagram or you’re on LinkedIn, then you should use hashtags like they’re going out of style, but on Facebook, why would you bother? It’s not exactly a pivot, but it’s taking each platform on its own merits.
I do want to mention a pro tip because I think it’s something that people do not understand. Pinterest is wildly underused and doesn’t require any tagging at all. In fact, Pinterest discourages you from tagging because they have their own secret sauce algorithm. They’re using AI to pull terms out of pins and route them to where they think they will achieve this ability. I think it is dismissed because it’s seen as that social platform that 20-somethings use when they’re decorating their apartments. I think there are some gender assumptions there, but it’s the third-largest search engine. I feel like it’s so rare for people to bring up Pinterest, but when you think about it, it’s all over the place.
Do you have any more advice you’d like to share?
I do think this is something that we as marketers need to talk about, not just because it’s affecting the industry but also because I think there’s an ethical dimension to it and that is AI.
AI has a lot of people who didn’t understand how it works, cut people loose, and said, “Well, I’m just going to have AI do all my copywriting,” and then they get stuff that’s not great.
But also, from an ethical point of view, it was trained without permission on a lot of copyrighted material. It uses up a tremendous quantity of water and electricity for air conditioning because they’re essentially building these huge server farms. I do think that if we’re going to be good digital citizens, which I hope we will be as marketers, then we have to be good citizens of the place where we keep all the digital stuff—and that means the planet.
While I think that AI can be a useful tool, it must be used in a manner that provides useful information to your end user, and that’s our goal here as marketers.
We want to make sure that we’re giving people what they need to make the best decision on where to spend their money. Hopefully, that will be with us.
To connect with Stephanie Studer and continue the conversation, follow her on LinkedIn.
