How to Elevate Your Toy Business Using the 5 Pillars of Digital Marketing: Insights from Jason Hsieh

09-SEP-24_5 Pillars of Digital Marketing

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Toy Business Unboxed, your gateway to the secrets of the toy industry. Here, Jason Hsieh, a toy entrepreneur and expert in the field. “Every product we develop is really inspired by some of the real life experience that we have with our son.” “60 percent of all toys last year were sold on Amazon.”

“Be passionate about it. Because it’s a road. It’s a journey.” “Like when you have an idea that you think is gonna somewhat change the world, make things better, I’d say go for it.“

Jason Hsieh: Today’s topic is going to be about the five pillars of digital marketing for Toys brand. I’ll be explaining each of the pillar and exactly what you should be doing as a brand owner to make sure you can be successful online through the use of those five pillar and in today’s webinar, I’ll be giving a lot of [00:01:00] example as far as how do you utilize each of the pillar for digital marketing correctly, and how does all five of those work together in conjunction to each other in order to have a successful digital marketing presence for your brand. 

So the first thing I’m going to start is, again, the goal is to show the brand owner how to effectively integrate the five pillars of digital marketing. That’s including content, social media, digital ads, email, and SMS to boost brand visibility and drive customers engagement and maximize sales.

Today’s agenda, of course, I’m going to explain each of the pillars. Example of each of the pillar, then I’m also going to share some practical tip on how to maximize each of the pillar by sharing some of the live case study of the thing we have done with our own brand and then the next agenda is going to be, how do we integrate the five pillar for maximum impact and how do you measure success and optimize the campaign.

First of all, a little bit about me. I have been in the e Commerce space since 2016. Currently, I own two different businesses, which [00:02:00] is LakiKid is our in house toys brand. We design toys for kids with special needs. And, I also run a toy digital marketing agency, which we specialize in helping toys and ballgame companies to be successful online. We also run a non profit foundation called Sensory Inclusive Classroom, which we donate toys to low income school districts and also I run a local meetup group called Phoenix Online Seller, which we just started the event again this month and we’re trying to meet at least once a month and just sharing different digital marketing strategy of what is working and not working for the people that are selling online.

This is how I started, in 2013, our son was diagnosed with Autism ADHD while we were living in Tokyo, Japan. However, we couldn’t find the help and support for our son. He was three back then. So we decided to move to the United States to see better resources and therapy. However, as we might already know, for those of you that do live in the U. S., The health insurance in the U. S. is not the best. It’s actually one of the worst in any of the [00:03:00] advanced countries that you live in. All the therapy that we needed, the insurance wouldn’t pay for it. In 2016, I started dabbling in e commerce for online selling on top of my day job, which I used to work in the corporate finance career. And then I started my own toys brand also online in 2017, all on top of my day job. I was able to slowly grow the business to the point that I was able to quit my day job and now I do this full time. As far as the agency goes, I also started about three years ago when I left my day job. And we specialize in helping other toy and game company like us being successful through digital marketing, both on Amazon and off Amazon. In today’s webinar, a lot of the strategy and different tactics I’ll be showing is for off Amazon marketing, means external marketing. For Amazon, that’s a whole different webinar I did a few months ago, talk about exclusively Amazon marketing, because it’s very different. Amazon marketing itself, it deserves its own topic, whereas offline marketing is a whole different [00:04:00] topic.

Today’s conversation, we’ll be spending a little bit of the time explaining all the different principles of the marketing system that we use, which is first, conversion optimization. How can we make sure our listing on Shopify, if you use Shopify or WooCommerce, could be converging at the highest level possible. That’s the building block of your business online is to make sure your website and your listing is topnotch so when people visit the website, people will actually purchase from you. The second component is profit optimization. In the context of Shopify and eCommerce, you need to understand the cost from, okay, how do you fulfill the shipment? How do you run ads? Who do you need to hire in order to grow your business online? And of course, throughout today’s webinar, I’ll be showing case some live example of how to do that effectively. And the third thing you also want to think about as a business owner is what type of ongoing optimization that you should be doing as a company. [00:05:00] Either you can have someone on your team doing it, or you could be doing it yourself as a business owner. We’ll touch a little bit about that as well. 

Here are the five pillars of digital marketing for toys brand online. I’m going to talk about each one and also showcase some of the example of the scene that we have been doing with our in house brand and also with some of our clients over the years. 

So first content marketing should be the number one thing you should want to consider before you even do digital marketing, because at the end of the day, without content, you don’t have anything to market to. My philosophy as a digital marketer, is to We want to give, and don’t ask for any return until much later. You want to create that trust and that relationship with your customer online. And the best way to do that is to by providing them with free content, either through social media, through emails, through SMS, through all the different channels that you already have. And the reason why content marketing is so critical because just like I mentioned, it helps you trust [00:06:00] and authority with your audience by offering valuable information that address the need and interest of your customer that really make your brand the go to sources for the information. But in order to do content marketing effectively, you need to understand what kind of information or what kind of content is your core customer looking for online. So whether it could be blogs, videos or ebook or any other type of content. How can you position your brand as an expert in the category that you sell? Either you sell toys or you sell arts and crafts, you sell board games, whichever industry you, or whichever physical product you design with your company, you want to also think about who is ideal customer that’s buying from you. For us, for my brand, which is, we design toys for kids with special needs. So our ideal customer, are mom, usually age from 25 to 35. I have kids with special needs. Those are our ideal customer. And what kind of content will our [00:07:00] ideal customer look for? Those is the thing you really want to do a deep dive to, which I can do a whole separate webinar just about brand positioning, but you need to understand your brand positioning first before you start doing content marketing, because the content you are creating for your brand should be also aligned with your customer and what they look for. 

There’s so many different ways to do content marketing as well. Some of the examples I’ll be showing to you today might be something you’ve already tried with your brand before. Number one, a lot of people do this, is writing a blog post on a weekly or monthly basis. This not only gives information about your brand, as you can see the two examples I’m showcasing on the screen right now. One is for my B2C brand, which is LakiKid, we sell directly to the consumer and we have the agency, Toy Launch, which we are selling to business owners. For those two different avatars, we create different content accordingly. For our consumer, we are talking about back to school success. Why is SensoryTools essential for back to school? [00:08:00] Again, this entire article is written for parents and teachers. Whereas the other article on the right, for our B2B company, talking about what is the latest toy industry and digital marketing trend. This is something parents wouldn’t want to read, but a business owner might want to read a little bit about what is going on in the latest toy industry. So again, you want to understand who are you providing or writing the content for. When you’re writing it, or someone on your team is writing it you want to make sure you highlight a key feature and also include engaging imagery in your block, which is super important and you also want to have some type of call to action. That’s a few different way to do the call to action. You can either do a inline embedment means, inside your blog as people are scrolling down You could be a button in the middle of it and say oh click on this to download one of the free ebook. That’s how you not only provide content but also get people’s information in return. That’s how some of the pillar can work together, like content marketing can work alongside with [00:09:00] email marketing and social media marketing, because then you can like also publish on your social media and say, Oh, we have the latest blog post that’s coming out, please go check out this article. If you don’t have their email yet, then you can also ask people to download any, it’s called a lead magnet, means you’re providing content in exchange of people’s information. So that’s one solid example of how different pillar can work alongside with each other and they can have synergy. Again, in the blog posts, one format is inline embedment. The second way is you can have, what is called an exit intent pop up window. So exit intent pop up window is when people are visiting your site, they are about to leave or about to close your page, you can have a pop up. I’m pretty sure for those of you that shop online or read any kind of blog article, you will see a pop up and say, Oh, don’t leave. Please consider downloading this ebook. That’s called an exit intent pop up. Pop up in the digital marketing term. And that’s another way you can collect additional information. The whole idea was a five pillar is [00:10:00] how can you create different tribe or group of people using different channels. You should have a group of social media followers for each of the social media platform. You should have an email list. You should have an SMS list. All those kind of channel can work in conjunction with each other. 

In digital marketing nowadays, I always use this analogy. Attention is the new currency. How can we get the customer’s attention? Because everyone’s fighting for their attention online. There is Facebook, there’s Instagram, there’s LinkedIn, there’s TikTok, there’s email, there’s SMS. There’s so many different same people is getting bombarded. By marketing messages or content, how can your content stand out and how can you grab people’s attention so they would like to consume your content? That is a very important lesson for all of us that’s doing digital marketing for our brand. You can send out a message through social media posts as well. The second example I want to talk about when it comes to content marketing is create educational [00:11:00] video for your product. It can either be a product demonstration, it could be a testimonial, it could be a multiple product together like a bundle, or it could be an unboxing video. So many different ideas, video is always going to be better compared to just a straight images for social media. You should consider creating vertical video for your brand and usually the best format is Vertical video that’s under 60 seconds. So you can use it for a TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Stories and YouTube Shorts Which is the four major kind of platform for social media nowadays. There’s also X, X is not popular. I feel like compared to other channel and personally we don’t market a lot on x right now the four channel I just mentioned is some of our main channel. As far as the TikTok, I was a little cautious because of the current situation, the lawsuit TikTok is having against U. S. government. I would suggest not to over invest on the platform that we don’t really know what the future [00:12:00] is. Of course, if you create a vertical video format, it doesn’t matter what platform you use. You can publish it on all the platforms, don’t need just only to be on TikTok. The format will also work for Instagram, and this is where I want to also give some live example of my sister, which is our digital marketing director inside my company. A small Instagram page with 117, 000 followers. The reason why I wanted to bring up her channel is because this is a great example of what kind of content that you can consider to create for your brand. The little girl that you see here, this is my niece. So for my sister, she just created a video with her daughter. As you can see, some video went viral. This one have 4. 9 million view. This one have 1 million view. This one have 3. 1 million view. The content is actually very simple content. It’s just her kid doing arts and crafts this one is using color mixing. It’s not like a, super high production video, you can make it at home like she made it at home. You don’t need to hire a video [00:13:00] team or whatever. You can do it on your cell phone. Annie, for her, she usually filmed most of those raw videos on her cell phone. I think she used CapCut to edit all the content together for the short form content. You want to make sure it’s short, because social media people don’t have the attention span nowadays. 

This kind of content would be perfect for arts and crafts brand obviously. And this is another video my sister made for her Instagram page. Again very simple, but what kind of content can you create for your brand that you think your customer can resonate with? That is the question that I want to encourage everyone that’s watching and joining me on the webinar or watching the replay to really think about. If you don’t have the bandwidth to do it, you can always ask someone that you know, maybe you have a relative that’s going to college and someone that’s much younger that know how to do TikTok and all this different video content, something to consider. So again, you have to test for social media. You just need to be consistent and [00:14:00] posting regularly because not every single post is going to go viral with your content. Even for my sister’s channel with 117, 000 followers, not every single post gets 3 million views. Some posts get 7, 000 views, again there’s a few with 8, 000 views, there’s a few, this one’s 44, 000 views, 12, 000 views again 26, 000 views. It depends on the content, there’s different reasons behind it, but the most important thing you want to focus on is consistency. That is more important than everything else. If you don’t have the bandwidth to create like one video a day, can you do once a week? Once a month? Whatever the frequency you are most comfortable with. And, also, you can batch all the different videos together. So instead of only creating one video, you can create four. Now you have four videos to use for the entire month, because you just published one video a week. Once you commit on creating the content, you want to make sure you just create it consistently. 

The other [00:15:00] example is e book. E book is a great way to give out to your audience for free and in exchange for their information. Inside the e book you can cover different content. This is two example of the different e book we have created in the past. One for our own in house brand, one for one of our clients. One e book is about flexible sitting classroom. This e book inside you have different example the teacher can use to really help with their student in the classroom setting. So because a lot of our product is being sold to teachers and sold to a school, this kind of content work really, well for our brand. And this is something the teacher actually want to receive and want to download. I can also share with you what it look like inside. So inside the ebook, you can see there’s different pages. This is a content we have about 20 pages is a mini ebook. And inside the ebook, we talk about research and resources on supporting flexible sitting use. Ten things to consider, [00:16:00] setting up your classroom, rule for flexible seating product as well. The e book should be focusing on content and education, and you can mention a little bit about your product at the end of the book as well. But the reason why we’re doing it is really for the content. Here’s what a ebook look like again, research and resources, then we have other link of the article that our team did a research on to put the ebook together. And again, what kind of content can you create that you think that your ideal customer would like to download or to get? And that’s something you want to consider when you’re creating an ebook, like the example I’m showing you right now, which is very helpful for the teacher as they are creating flexible seating for their classroom, which is one of our product line. It’s not about selling the product as much. It’s really about trying to provide valuable resources and information. And you talk about the rules, then at the very end, this is where we talk about the product a little bit. So mentioned, oh, by the way, since now you know how to [00:17:00] create a flexible sitting classroom Consider some of the product that we also provide. We have a fidget chair band, we have balance ball chair. There’s different product that we provide as a brand, but this is one more way to introduce ourself indirectly instead of telling them to buy, from us so that’s another way you can consider as far as using ebook as a content tool for your overall digital marketing. And for ebook, you can also create dedicated landing page is also often referred to as a squeeze page means, for a squeeze page, you are asking them their information in exchange of their emails or phone number or both. It depends on how you like to set it up. That’s a different way of creating the landing page for your website. Sorry guys. I don’t have a live example of a squeeze page right now to show you guys. But as far as squeeze page go, it’s fairly simple. It depends on the platform you’re using, you can create a landing page in [00:18:00] Shopify, or you can create a landing page using WordPress as well. And we as a company, we also launching our own software that can also create a landing page, which I will talk a little bit about at the end of today’s webinar. 

The other form of content you can also consider. It’s creating your own podcast. This is more time consuming. Podcast is not a very easy thing to create. It’s so many nuances. I can also walk you through some of our workflow, so you can understand how much work it is actually involved to create a podcast. But as far as podcast format, there’s different way to do it. Usually, the most easy way for a podcast content is to do interviews. With other people in the industry, like I do with my podcast, Toy Business Unboxed, I interview people in the toy industry. I interview toy inventors, board game designers, retail store owners that sell toys, or people that have been in the industry for 30 years and also people that’s brand new to the industry as well. Some people’s podcasts, they do like a solo [00:19:00] podcast, just them talking to themselves for 20 minutes. I don’t like that format as much. You can consider it if you like to talk to yourself more, but I prefer interview because I like to talk to people and share their story with our audience and for your podcast you can also consider sharing some of your customer stories. Besides the B2B podcast which is Toy Business Unboxed, this podcast is geared toward entrepreneur. This is a consumer based podcast, We did this video podcast for two and a half years. If you look at the replay section, you’ll see we run a podcast from 2018 to 2020. However, because of COVID, we ran into some financial difficulty in 2020 and we decided to Stop the podcast altogether, but we did record about 82 episodes before we stopped and publishing one episode pretty frequently as well. And one way we are doing it for our consumer brand is we decide on the master topic for the month. [00:20:00] For example, for our in house brand for them for this month, we’re talking about. Sensory diet. Sensory diet is a special topic for the kids with special needs. It’s not about food, by the way. Sensory diet is different exercise, different activity you can do to help kids with sensory regulation. Because I know you have the word diet in it. It sounds like it’s about like nutrition and all that, but it’s not about that. Each week we have different soft topic with the overall theme. So week one, we’re talking about what is sensory diet. Week two, we talk about The need of sensory diet and how to get school on board. Week three, we’re talking about what can you do with sensory diet around the house. And we are actually interviewing Matt who is actually occupational therapist. So we’re interviewing some expert in our industry as well. And then the last week we’re talking about all of your sensory diet related question answer. This is another creative way to structure your content so you can have a master topic for the month. Then each week you have different [00:21:00] subtopic, all answering the same kind of scene. And we did this for a few years. For those of you that want to check out more examples of how we did it for our consumer brand, you can check it out by visiting lakikid.com, that’s our consumer facing website. You can do an audio only podcast, or you can do a video podcast, which is my recommendation. If you want to spend all the time creating a podcast, you might as well record it as a video, because you have so many different ways to use the content if you have a video podcast instead of an audio only podcast. Let me explain. So for our podcast that’s still running right now, the Toy Business Unboxed, we have four stages. Stage one, we do the record video interview recording, and then we live stream to Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube simultaneously. Stage two, we’ll download the audio portion of the podcast. Our team will edit it, make it sound like studio quality sound. Then, we’re going to upload to 13 different podcast platforms, pretty much all of them. [00:22:00] Stage 3, we’ll take the video portion of the same podcast, we’ll use a tool to edit it into a 60 second vertical snippet format, like the format I just showed you guys earlier. And then we’ll upload the vertical video snippet to TikTok. Instagram Reels, Facebook Stories, and YouTube Shorts. And, the last step is we’ll put the short form, the long form, the video, the audio, every single format into a content pack, and share that with our guests, so our guests can also help us to promote the podcast. So it become a win situation. Our brand win, they win, and we get more content from the whole effort. But this is definitely a lot of work. So for those of you that’s considering starting a podcast, make sure you want to commit because once you stop, just like any other content marketing, you want to be consistent. For my podcast, I already recorded more than about 50 episodes so far. And we only publish one new episode per week. So right now I have enough content to publish all the way to [00:23:00] February 2025. That’s how much episode I already recorded. When you do the podcast, you want to record a lot of episodes, it’s called batch recording ahead of time. It depends on my schedule. Usually, I record up to three to five episodes a week. Consistency, just every other content marketing I’ve shared with you so far. is one of the most important thing when you come to content marketing. 

Next, I’m going to transition a little bit to social media marketing. Social media marketing is a whole different topic. I’m going to give you some example, but I feel like for social media, my sister is a better speaker on this because she is also an influencer herself. Like the Instagram page I just showed you guys earlier, she had 117, 000 followers. I barely have a few thousand followers. I’m definitely not as good on social media, compared to my sister. 

Why is social media marketing so important? Social media is essential because it allows brands to engage directly with their audience in real time. You can use platforms like [00:24:00] Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or YouTube, like LinkedIn as well, there’s TikTok, there’s a lot of different platforms that you can use to build a community and showcase your expertise and your product through visual content and create viral campaign that could potentially spread the brand awareness quickly. Like one of the video I just showed you, one of my sister’s video have 3 million views. Imagine if you have a 3 million view video for one of your product. How much a potential business you can bring by having someone, the 3 million people watch it, right? So that’s the advantage. But of course, there’s also some disadvantage of social media marketing because over the year, the platform like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. It’s slowly becoming more and more of a pay to play, almost okay, you might have a thousand follower but sometimes if you don’t pay to amplify it, your content by paying social media platforms some money, your content doesn’t go anywhere. That is the common problem I see when [00:25:00] I’m talking to brand owners. Oh, I have a Facebook page with 10, 000 followers, but no one see my post. Because Facebook want you to pay for people to see your post. So that’s one of the major disadvantage with social media. But again, if you are consistent and just keep on pumping out content, and working the five pillars together, that’s way to go around it.

But for social media, here is an example. First, is to create promotional posts. This one, I’ll be very careful to not do it too often. Because again, social media doesn’t want you to sell. They want you to share content, not just to sell stuff to your followers as much. So usually those sales posts that when we do on social media, our reach and engagement usually is the lowest. So you don’t want to keep on promoting yourself continuously. That’s not how social media work. People are on Facebook because they want to watch some crazy cat video not to try to get pitched to. Something to think about when you’re [00:26:00] creating your content and social media calendar. You want to space out your promotional posts over time. So you don’t do promotional posts back to back to back. That could burn out your audience altogether. You got it. Usually we only do promotional posts when it’s like a sales campaign or some kind of special season, back to school sales, or sometimes we do giveaways, or sometimes we do Product launch as well, like we’re talking about we have a new product right now, please go check them out on our store or on Amazon.

The second example that you can also do for social media is definitely use social media to share more of testimonial. You can share image testimonial or you can share video based testimonial. You’re trying to use that to build credibility and leveraging the social proof with social media, obviously is very, important. And it’s also showing real use case study of your customer using your product. You will also encourage other people to share about you using your product and enhance the brand authenticity. So this is [00:27:00] actually the preferred content I would recommend to the brand to create more product and testimonial posts, either image or video. Of course, video is always better than image, but you can have both and you can use it interchangeably with each other as well.

The third type of content, this is more of an education content. You can use, an infographic, or just an engagement post, like a meme. Like the image I’m showing you in the middle. Supporting friends with kids with special needs. Instead of being critical, try to be supportive. It’s just a very simple infographic trying to encourage interactions or try to provide some kind of very quick educational value and you can also use to build like a community of people that’s struggling with the same issue. For our brand because I also have kids with special needs, sometimes it’s really hard for other people to understand when you don’t have kids with special needs, like How much stress it is to raise a kid with special needs, with the IEP, with the therapy, with the tantrum, with all the different issues. But [00:28:00] that’s my niche. What is your niche? For your niche, for the type of customer that you’re serving, what kind of content that you can create so your customer can relate to, and they feel like you not only know them, but you are also one of them. Because I’m also one of the parents, I have kids with special needs. That’s why I do what I do with my in house brand. How can you position yourself almost like one of your customer and think about in your customer’s perspective What kind of content do they want to see on social media that they can relate to and they want to either? Like comment or share again like comment share those three actions Are the action that you want to provoke when you are creating social media content. Make sure they can like it, make sure they can comment on it, and make sure they can share it. Because every single social media platform, it doesn’t matter if it’s Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok, they are always looking for engagement. The more people engage, the higher chance the content is going to spread. The concept is the same is to [00:29:00] put yourself into your customer shoes and try to figure out. This is something you need to test because your customer better than I, I will ever be because I’m not you, I’m not the brand owner for your brand. So you and your marketing team should be brainstorming the concept of what type of content that can resonate with your ideal customer.

And the next example is holiday posts, where approaching the holiday right now was upcoming Thanksgiving and also Christmas. So that’s different holiday related campaign or holiday content that you can create. For example, one of the posts we did is, Six Thanks giving tips for children with autism. Prepare your child and your family, dress for comfort, don’t force feed, and bring toys and sensory gadgets, plan an escape route, reward good behavior. Those are some very simple tips for those parents that have kids with special needs like myself. And usually, the other strategy we did for our brand in the past is called [00:30:00] a Countdown to Christmas. I’m pretty sure some of you know what an advent calendar is. Means for the last month in December, every single day you can open this thing. All my kids always buy it during the Christmas season. So every single day one, you can open that, and you get a free mini toys. You can do the same strategy, the advent calendar strategy for social media as well. You can say, oh, counting down to holiday, each day we’re going to share, we’re going to do a mini giveaway, either a product or a gift card or anything you want to give away. You don’t need to do 30 day, you can do 10 day. 10 day countdown to Christmas, for example, and that’s a type of giveaway we have done in the past and you work really, well for social media because everyone’s in the holiday mood and they want to get some free stuff during the holiday as well. So you’ll get a lot more engagement, a lot more people commenting, a lot of people sharing more. That’s how you can use that to really grow your brand online. 

The next component I want to talk about is digital [00:31:00] ads. Again, in today’s webinar, I’m talking a lot of the live case study and high level example. The actual digital ad, it will require another. Actually, each of the pillar I’m talking about today, all five of them, each of them, deserve its own webinar. That’s how much content it is related to each of the components. For digital ads, there’s a couple of different main platform that you can use right now for e commerce and first of all, why is digital ad important? Digital ads on platform like Google, Facebook, or YouTube are essential for quickly reaching a large targeted audience. And they also offer you measurable and data driven results that allow you to Personalize and customize campaigns to increase sales, generate leads, build brand awareness. And you can either use a search ad, display ad, video ad. There’s a lot of different ads and each platform is a little bit different. But today’s webinar, I’m going to stay high level because the platform like Facebook or [00:32:00] Amazon always change. Google change. So even if I share my screen and teach you how to do the ad, in two weeks, my video will be outdated because that’s how fast those platform changes. But the concept is pretty universal. First, it depends on which platform you decided to run the ads on. You want to make sure your ad look as native as possible. Let me explain, you want to make your Facebook ad look like a regular Facebook post that you might get it from a friend. That is the the concept that you want to think about. Okay, how can I create this post? One way to do that is to leverage the customer testimonial content that we talked about earlier in the early part of the webinar. Because now it doesn’t look like an ad, it looks like someone’s friend just shared a post about this toy they bought. That’s usually a preferred way for running ads on Facebook. You want to make sure the content or the ad you’re running doesn’t look [00:33:00] like an ad. Because then if it do look like an ad, smell like an ad, and taste like an ad, people know it’s an ad, and people won’t click on it. And when you look at the data, you will know immediately why is your advertising cost so high because your ad looks like an ad. If your ad doesn’t look like an ad, it looks like organic content, that’s where your ad can create a lot more traffic at a much lower price. And you also always want to have a call to actions as part of your ads. For a Facebook ad, which is a very complicated platform, that’s a different strategy. Usually, if we run a Facebook ad for our client, you want to have a top of funnel ads, middle of funnel ads, and bottom of the funnel ads. Try to capture Customer at different buying journey and try to create different ads in, for example, the top of the ad should be just bringing awareness. One strategy you can do is you can run a video ad trying to shoot for a video watch, just trying to make sure people can watch the video. Then you retarget based on the [00:34:00] people that watch for at least 15 seconds or this different setting in Facebook you can do you can test and you can retarget based on the people that will actually watch the video means they show some kind of interest in your product what you’re offering before you give them additional offer so again Facebook in itself requires its own webinar in today’s webinar I’m just going to talk about High level concept and if you want to learn more about Facebook ad and how to do all the button smashing in Facebook ad, we can do a separate webinar on that in the future. 

The second format is Google ads. So Google ads and Facebook ad, or you call Meta nowadays. So it’s very different. One is push advertising. One is. Poll advertising. Google ad is considered poll advertising. What I mean by poll advertising means your customers is actively searching for the keyword that’s most relevant to your brand and to your product. Means you have a high chance buyer intention for Google ads means you are polling them because [00:35:00] they are really searching for it. And same with space Amazon, also considers poll marketing for most of the advertising placement, but Amazon had multiple placements. But for Facebook advertising is considered push marketing. What I mean by that means people might be just sitting on Facebook feed. They don’t want to buy anything. They are not searching for anything. All of a sudden your video ads running and say, Oh, I have this wonderful toy, please buy. That’s considered push marketing because you are trying to push your content, your product, your offering in front of the people, even so they didn’t ask for it. For Google ads, it’s pull marketing. People are already searching for it. Google ads, it depends on the type of the Google ads you run, there’s Google display, there’s Google search. That’s also a different strategy as far as you can use different advertising type in Google to figure out, and usually Google ads is more expensive than Facebook ads. The reason is because there’s no engagement, people couldn’t share the ads, like Facebook. Whereas [00:36:00] Facebook if you do an amazing job trying to create your ads so it look like a content piece, look like a native post, people is going to like, comment, and share. On Google, you couldn’t like, comment, and share on a Google ad. That is not how you work. So usually Google ads is for a more advanced marketer. I would suggest to play around with Facebook ads initially, before you spend more money, or you can try both. You can allocate maybe 500 here, 500 in Google, 500 a month in Facebook, just to test and see how it go for your brand before you decide on which is the right platform for you. Because the trickiest thing with Google Ads is If your product is so unique for example, one of my product is a writeable weighted blanket using a water pen. That is one of the product we designed many years ago. But the product is so unique, people are not searching for a writeable weighted blanket online. No one search for that because people doesn’t know that exists. So Google ad in that sense won’t work because no one’s searching for the [00:37:00] keyword. How can I run ads to writable weighted blanket when no one’s searching for that exact phrase because the product is so innovative. No one really knows it exists. In that case, I will use push marketing. I’ll use Facebook Instagram to do marketing for that kind of product because you need to bring awareness. Oh you can do that with a weighted blanket. You can write. It depends on the product some platform will work better than the other. Google is best for peop for product that already people are searching for on a continuous basis. For example, our flexible seating product line is better for Google Ads, because people are searching for flexible seating options for classrooms. So that would be a better choice for Google Ads. 

The next one, which I already talked about, instagram ad, which is pretty much the same family as Facebook, but Instagram and Facebook, I have some minor nuances and that’s different placement that you can do, but the nice thing was meta is once you create a video app, as long as it’s in the right format, you can run ads on [00:38:00] Facebook and Instagram together. And you can see the data together as well, because they are the same company. So inside the advertising platform, you can see both ads. And you can also see data per platform as well. For Instagram, usually what works well is still video, you can either try a square or a vertical video, because that’s pretty native for Instagram is, they do square videos and vertical video for Instagram reels. So again, you want to understand the platform and what kind of content usually go viral on the platform and you want to make sure your ad doesn’t look like an ad. You want to make sure your ad actually look like some kind of content that people would like to engage with. If they can share your ads, perfect. Now you just got free advertising because they share with their friend. There’s also a hashtag, there’s other different nuances. But again very similar to Facebook. Usually, when we run ads on Meta, we always run both placements. We always run it on Facebook and Instagram, and we’ll see data, accordingly. 

The next [00:39:00] one, which is YouTube, which is part of Google nowadays. YouTube ads are a little bit different. There’s different type of ads you can run on YouTube, as far as how long is the ad. For those of you that watch YouTube videos, you know there’s some ads that you cannot skip, you have to watch for 10 seconds, or there’s also a skippable app that people can skip after three seconds, I believe. So it depends on how long is your videos and you want to test for youtube app you can go for a little bit longer videos whereas instagram and facebook i’ll go for much shorter video content Usually try to keep it under 60 seconds if you could because people are used to watching longer educational video on youtube. Usually I will search on YouTube on how to fix my, I think one of my faucets just broke a couple weeks ago. Like, how do I fix that? So it’s like an educational video DIY videos, or any other kind of videos. So people are a lot more I’m used to watching longer form content on YouTube compared to [00:40:00] Facebook and Instagram. So you should test a longer video for your brand and see Which one will work better. Again, the paid advertising, I’m trying to stay very high level. I know I didn’t go into too much detail because because of the time of today’s webinar, I don’t have time to go into every single detail. And I still want to talk about as many case studies as possible. 

The next pillar I want to talk about is email marketing. Email marketing, if you combine that with social media and you combine that with content, still one of the most powerful marketing you can do for your brand. And I know there’s a lot of people say, Oh, email is dead. You know what? It’s not dead. I still check my email this morning. You just need to make sure the email you’re sending out is very selective and also providing content to your customer. People still read email. I still read email. The email is not going away. But there’s also a lot of noise in email marketing because people are bombarded by a whole bunch of random email. So how do you make sure the email you’re sending is very engaging, that people would actually want to [00:41:00] open and click on your emails as well. So again, why is email marketing important? Because it is one of the most Effective or cost effective way to nurture your relationship with your audience. You offer direct line of communication. It allow you to send personalized message and exclusive offer and update to your customer. Whether it’s a newsletter, a holiday promotion or any other type of email marketing. Even as of today when inside our data, we usually email open rate is about 20 to 30 percent. But, when you do social media, your open rate or your reach rate could be only 1%, because Facebook or Meta, they shuttle your reach. Whereas email, at least you have a little bit more control. You own your list. The email that you have, you can contact it. Because they give you permission to contact them by giving you their email in exchange. For example, the e book example I just showing earlier in today’s webinar. And the second thing [00:42:00] is, when it comes to email marketing, You can also use the same list for other purposes. For example, you can combine your email with pay marketing. This is more advanced. You can create a lookalike audience by uploading your current list and Facebook or Meta is going to try to look at the email, look at the first name and last name and trying to find them on Facebook and create a lookalike audience that you can also run ask to so you can ask Facebook. Okay. This is my email. So 20, 000 people In my email list, can you find and create a look alike audience that of the people that’s most similar to people in my email list And so I can run ads to them. It’s called lookalike audience. And you can also create a custom audience. And say, okay, can you find all 20, 000 of them on Facebook? So I can do retargeting to them. Now I have their email. So you see how email and pay marketing can really work together. Most of the pay platform, you can upload an [00:43:00] email list and retarget your email list as well. So that’s why all those components kind of work hand in hand with each other. 

I’m going to give you some examples on what kind of email you can send. First, obviously, promotional email. You have a campaign, you want to send out a sales campaign. Email is usually a better platform to do that compared to social media. Because people see promotional pretty often through the email. But again, don’t overdo it. You don’t want to send them a promotional email every single day and just hit them on the head. You want to mix things up a little bit, not just promotional video, but you want to do a weekly newsletter to build a relationship, build a consistency and also create different content and also bring that trust and authority with your customer, with your brand. For our brand, we do a weekly newsletter and that’s actually. A lot of people will ask me, I have an email, oh, so I have an email list, how often should I email them? I would suggest at least once a week, minimum. If you don’t email them once a week, you know what? If you [00:44:00] email them once a month or once a quarter, people don’t remember you. People are not going to open your email because they got bombarded by so many other emails as well. So if you have an email list of any size, my suggestion is email them once a week, minimum. With the newsletter. At least once a week, you’re given some content. And, this is where all the content marketing you do earlier, can also put into newsletter. Look at one of the article here. The Ultimate Survival Guide to Sensory Friendly Holiday Season, which is what we put in the email. It is one of our blog posts. And you can also use the free e book in your email. You can mix and match different things across different channels. You can reuse the video content and say, Oh, Click on this link and check out our new video on YouTube about so and the emails will help you with your social media effort, and you will also help you with your content effort, because you spend all the time creating the content, you want to make sure people is actually, Consuming your content, otherwise you [00:45:00] spend 30 minutes creating this video no one watched, what is the point? So you really want to make sure you also leverage that using email. And one more thing you always want to create is to create a nurture email sequence. Usually it’s a group of 10 email you want to send out over a month. You can send two email a week, or so for five weeks, you will send them ten emails. In a nurture sequence, this usually trigger when a new customer got into your list. For example, they just sign up to your newsletter, they probably download something from you. For example, they download one of the ebook from you, then you can have it in your software to trigger a nurture email sequence. So you will send them email on day one, Another one in day three, another one in day five, day seven, day nine, etc. So over time, you share story about yourself, you share content with your audience, you can reuse the content, you can reuse some of the blog posts. So you keep on emailing them and stay [00:46:00] top of mind. When they are ready to buy something for their kids, they know they can think of, Oh, I remember this brand, just send me an email about this thing before, I would love to buy something from them now. Keeping getting on top of their mind is very important to create a long term nurture. And for toys and game business, because majority of our sales is in the holiday season, you don’t want to send an email a week before Christmas, Oh, do you remember me? We met about a year ago. Would you like to buy some toys from me? It’s what? You just want to sell me stuff all of a sudden, you didn’t even talk to me for a year. Just like a real relationship. You want to make sure you create that relationship with your customer. over a long period of time. So when they are ready to buy from you, they will come back. The next one you can also use email for is having a product launch email sequence. Over time you can send out different emails, say, Oh, I have a new product that’s launching in the second week of [00:47:00] October, for example, then say, Oh, please join our, So you’ll be the first one to be notified when our product is ready to go live. You want to use email to create some kind of excitement or Give them some exclusive assets, so people will enjoy to stay on your email list. You can also highlight different features, you can use it for storytelling, and really try to drive some sales. For our product launch email, it’s usually about 7, sometimes 10 emails, depends on how many emails we want to build out. And we have different email sequences that we’re sending out as part of the launch campaign, usually over 2 weeks. A week before and a week during the launch as well. And you can also use email to do giveaway and this could tie with the social media as well. Okay, go, and follow and share on social media in order to join the giveaway. I did a whole different webinar about three months ago about giveaway. For those of you that want to learn more about the giveaway strategy, I have a dedicated webinar. You can find it at [00:48:00] toy-launch.com under the content section. You should be able to find one of the previous webinar I did about how to use Effectively, so I’m not going to go too much in depth because I spent like an hour just talking about giveaway in the past. Feel free to check out that video if you haven’t watched that webinar in the past. The next way you can also use email for this is really powerful is to do survey. Okay, we have a new product that we’re working on. Can you give us some feedback on what do you like about the product? What do you don’t like about the product? How can we make improvement to the product? So those are another way on how to use your email to really Create and foster communities, asking for direct customer feedback, and also amplify your word of mouth marketing. It’s okay, and one more way, this is a little bit more advanced, is you can also create an ambassador program. For our brand, we have an ambassador program called LakiKid Ambassador Program, as you can see here. If they apply, they get free product from us. And they get a free product, they [00:49:00] get a free t shirt. They also get some discount code as an ambassador. And as an ambassador, we’ll give them free product, in return we ask them to take picture of their kid using our product as part of our ambassador program. Or we’ll also ask them to take a video of their kids using our product as well. So that’s one way to do the ambassador campaign. And I also have some live example of some way of doing ambassador campaign. If I can find them really quick, so let me show you maybe an example of an ambassador that you want to do as well. Going to go through it really quick. You want to highlight the ambassador program that you have, talk about your brand, talk about what they can get. If they join your program, they can receive a product, and then In return, you want them to take videos and photo, because again, this tied to the content. If you had your own group of ambassador, now you know where to get the testimonial video from, your ambassadors, [00:50:00] because they love and really want to work with you as a brand. Ambassador program is another wonderful way To get content from your customer database and how do you leverage ambassador for content marketing and also for social media marketing at the same time. The next way to use email is called abandoned car email. This is very popular for e commerce marketing because people might go to your Shopify store or your WooCommerce store and they might add the product to car and say I don’t want to buy it and they just abandoned it. It’s just they enter the email, but they never. Finish the whole checkout process you want to capture those people by sending them is called abandoned car email Try to recapture those lost sales offer them some incentive. It’s oh, I noticed you add something in your car But you never finish the purchase. What is going on? So that’s one way to do it and you can also say oh we have said save all your items in your shopping cart [00:51:00] for the next 24 hours But the demand for our product is higher than usual. We would like you to complete your purchase. You can offer some kind of urgency and even scarcity, try to encourage those customers to come back and finish their transaction that they started for whatever the reason they got distracted.

The next thing I want to talk about, which is the last portion of our today’s webinar is SMS marketing. I know I have been talking to a lot of entrepreneurs. Some people doesn’t feel very comfortable about texting people. So you want to be very, careful when you are texting your list and make sure you get consent from them. Do not just send them random marketing message because you have their phone number. Always ask for consent. So one way to get consent is, You want to have on your checkout page, you can have a checkbox say, Oh, do you also want to receive regular updates through text marketing from us? Check the box and provide us with your email. Now you have the legal, legitimate consent from them. So even if you text [00:52:00] them, In the future, you’re not going to get into legal problems, because there’s some lawsuit about SMS marketing in the past. If you didn’t do it correctly, people can try to sue you. So be very, careful when you come to SMS marketing. You want to make sure you get the list legitimately. Collect them, not just collect the phone number, also get their consent to text them. Why is text or SMS marketing very important? It is very, powerful. First of all, Email open rate I just talked about is about 20 to 30 percent. Text marketing open rate is about 90 percent. Because almost everyone opened their text messages. Even though they might not like it, they will still open it. So they will still at least read through the text. Even for me, I sometimes get bombarded with a whole bunch of random text messages. But I do open them and I delete them. But the open rate is there. And if you offer them the right type of content, that is still the most, the fastest way to get hold of your audience. Especially with a very time sensitive [00:53:00] offer or update. Text have such a high open rate like 90 percent and people can text you back as well It’s ideal to deliver any kind of fresh like a promotional event oh for the next 24 hours, we’re doing a special Black Friday, Cyber Monday deal for our brand Come check it out on our store and using Coupon Cyber Monday 20, you get 20 percent off. Something like that. You can make it very simple. 

You can use it for new product launch because it is very time sensitive. And, but you don’t want to overdo it. Instead of sending them 10 messages like what we do in email, usually we just do 1 or 2. In two weeks, maybe we’ll send one a week because we want to make sure we don’t bombard them with text messaging as well. You definitely want to scale back a little bit. You don’t want to text them as much as email when you come to a frequency. And you only use it for very important campaigns. Flash sale similar to the product launch, if you’re doing like a Cyber Monday, Black Friday, that’s a good [00:54:00] time to also try to use SMS marketing. And also you can give them exclusive subscriber discount, that’s a great way to get them into your text list. Because Email list is easier to build than a text list because a lot of people is a little bit unwilling to give you their phone number for you to text them so how can you encourage them to give you their phone number is to give them some exclusive discounts say oh if you join our text messaging list you get like a special deal or a special discount or you become like a vip with whichever program you decide having that additional incentive you Just for text marketing is, essential for your long term success as well. But you have to test it. You have to test to see what is working and what’s not working. And you can also use, this is another very good way to use for back to, back in stock notification. Because maybe they added, they’d be on the waitlist for, Oh, I’m waiting for this weighted animal to come back in stock so I can buy it for [00:55:00] my kid for his birthday that’s coming next month. You want to let him know right away. He’s Oh, no, he just got back in stock today. Please go check out our store and complete your purchase. Something like this, which is really time sensitive is, okay to use text messaging as well. And again, you can also use it for holiday promotion, and just want to make sure, just make sure you don’t send out the frequency too high. 

I conclude all five pillars of digital marketing in today’s webinar. Let me kind of recap. Content marketing, social media marketing, digital advertising, email, and then SMS. All the five pillars should be working together interchangeably. And those are the benefits that you can unlock if you do all five channels together. First, you have a unified customer journey. And you amplify your brand’s visibility through email, SMS, and social media and paid social media. And you’ll be consistently Sending messages, sending content in front of your ideal customer [00:56:00] across all the different channels they might be on, so you get more of their attention. And you can also use data driven decision making. Every single platform I talk about can have data attached to it. For email marketing, you can look at open rate and click through rate. Same as SMS marketing, you can look at open rate, click through rate. For social media, organic social media, you can look at engagement, you can look at reach. For pay social media or pay ads, you can also look at cost per click. You can also look at click through rate when you’re running ads. There’s so many different data that you can look at to make the informed business decision to scale your business over time. And by combining all five pillars together, you also increase conversion and customer retention.

At toward the end of the webinar, I also want to showcase one of the new software that we are also launching here in toy launch called toy marketing hub. Myself and my sister and rest of my team have been working on it for months, and we are about to launch it next month in [00:57:00] October. So this is our software that can Do all five pillars together. It’s an all in one marketing software that will do all five pillars I just talked about earlier on the webinar. And we’re trying to design it exclusively for toys and game industry because that’s our focus. So we’ll be providing industry specific tool and also the promotional campaign for the holiday because holiday is a huge season for toys and game companies and you will have that competitive edge because instead of logging to so many different platform, you have one platform using our software that can access to all five of the component and we all in our software also come offer comprehensive campaign management so you can manage all your platform. You can manage your email, your SMS, your social media complaints in one single login and you also automate the workflow for your digital marketing when you come to all five channels. You can even store some of your content inside our software You also [00:58:00] provide real time tracking and real time data you know as a business owner whether or not your campaign is working or not working. So you can also engage and grow your audience using our software to segment your different audience into different segmentation, and you can also personalize your campaign and you can also create different customer journey through automation. And of course we have a very user friendly interface you don’t really need to be super tech savvy, it’s pretty easy to set up and we do provide ongoing support for our software as well. I have the pricing here as well, but if you want to see a demo of how it’s going to work for your brand, feel free to check out our website at toymarketinghub.com and you can schedule a demo with myself or someone on my team, we would love to walk you through our software and show you how you can potentially use it to grow your business. Using the five pillars I just showed you, which without software, we can manage all five pillars with all [00:59:00] in one marketing software.

And by the way, another free information we have is we also have a free Facebook group called Toy Entrepreneur Group. We’re trying to provide new free content over there in the Facebook group as well. So you can also find our Facebook group on Facebook. Facebook, obviously, by typing in toy entrepreneur circle and you can find all the other information on my website, toy launch as well. Thank you again for everyone’s joining the webinar today and hopefully it was very informative and let me know if you want for us to give you a demo of the software. We’d love to show you how. It all worked behind the scene as well. Thank you so much and have a wonderful week.

Outro: You’ve been listening to Toy Business Unboxed, hosted by Jason Hsieh. Thank you for joining us and exploring the fascinating world of toys and the ingenuity behind them.

To stay updated with the latest episodes and continue your journey into the toy business, remember to subscribe and follow us. If you found today’s episode insightful, please leave a rating and review and share this podcast with others who share your passion for toys. Until [01:00:00] next time, stay curious and keep innovating.