Hey folks, and welcome back to the Small Tech Podcast by EC. Today, we've got another amazing guest. She is a graduate of Stonehill College, a TEDx speaker, and has been named a 40 Under 40 honoree by CAPE and Plymouth Business Media, recognized as Best Social Media Specialist by Boston Business Women, board member for a variety of places. Meet Ashley Mason, the brain behind Dash of Social. Hi, Ashley.
Hi, Raph. Thank you so much for having me.
I'm so excited to have you on. So let's talk a little bit about your background. What brought you to where you are at the moment?
Absolutely. So as you mentioned, my company is Dash of Social, which is a content marketing agency based in Massachusetts. We focus a lot on social media management, email marketing, and blog content for tech startups. I got into marketing actually back in 2012 when I had started a fashion and lifestyle blog. And long story short, use social media to become a micro influencer.
My use of social media to grow my own brand made me realize how much of an impact it can make for very little cost, with different brands and organizations, with building their online presence and reaching the right audiences and it made me realize how much I really enjoyed marketing and being able to support organizations in this capacity. So that sparked an interest.
I dabbled in freelancing here and there, starting in probably 2014, before I eventually started Dash of Social in 2016, and now here I am.
Nice. And so what was that transition like between sort of the freelancing and what you've created now?
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think what ended up happening was when I was freelancing, it was obviously just me, but it got to the point where, which is a good problem to have, I had a lot of clients that were kind of coming on and it got to the point where I realized that I physically had reached a ceiling in my business. I could not dedicate any more time to work with all these clients if it was just going to be me.
And so that made me realize that it was a good opportunity to transition from just being a freelancer, to starting my agency and being able to bring on a really talented, capable, and dependable team to support our clients with a variety of different marketing strategies and executions.
I feel like a lot of the people who are going to be listening to this also are going to hit that ceiling at one point. You build a small thing, you get really excited about it, hopefully it grows, and eventually you have to figure out how to move into that next step. I'm kind of curious to hear more about, like, the types of projects that you've worked on, like, what's your favorite kind of project to work on?
Yeah, I really love social media management. I mean, especially with tech companies. Within the tech space, there's so much that's happening so quickly. And I think that being able to have someone on your team who can help you to support, uh, being able to post in your social media profiles, and share and communicate everything that you're up to. With potential clients, potential customers, potential investors, potential board members.
I mean, there's so many audiences that you can reach and speak to through social media. And I think it's crucial to ensure that consistency as you're building your startup or building your brand. So we support companies who are in stealth mode. So perhaps they're not even really public yet. They're working on building up a presence. So when they do launch, they kind of have an audience that's already been built.
And we also support companies who kind of, once they get that funding, they're like, marketing is one of the first things that we're going to invest this money into. So it's really great to be able to work with companies in all these different stages and just help them grow.
Yeah, as you're talking about those different sort of stages and different channels and audiences, I was thinking so many people that I know, including myself will just get stuck in like building a thing and just forget to talk about it.
Yeah.
Um, so it sounds great to have someone to be like, no, no, no. You got to talk about it. You got to get it out there, even perhaps before you've built it.
Exactly. That's a great point. And I mean, one thing that I always remind my clients is no one's going to know what you sell if you don't tell them what you're selling. And so it's just like a great reminder to be consistent and be active on your social media profiles. So that way your audience knows what you're doing and what you're up to. And I also like to say, which is really important, One of my favorite quotes that I can relate to personally, which is the shoe cobbler's son has no shoes.
So you're usually so focused on developing and executing something that you're kind of neglecting your own thing. And so it's kind of tough to just remember to not only work on your business, but work in your business.
So the things that we tend to talk about tend to be a digital product and in your case correct me if I'm wrong, you're doing digital marketing only, right? Or is that, or do you, any kind of marketing?
Digital marketing primarily.
Okay. So this intersection of like the digital space digital products and communications do you have any thoughts about connecting your communications, your marketing strategies into your digital tools.
Yeah, so, I mean, there's a variety of different tools. I think it's important to find one that works. I mean, if we're talking about social media specifically, a handful of social media platforms have built in tools within them. So, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Meta, they all have built in analytics. They all have built in social media schedulers, so that way you can schedule your posts.
I think it's really important to kind of rely on, What's given to you for free or at a low cost just to start and then once you end up building and scaling, then you can start to pursue paid tools or tools that might have further capabilities depending on what you're looking for, but definitely don't hesitate to start small and then kind of see what you would need and what features all these different platforms might offer.
But I mean, there's so much right at your hands that you can kind of dive into and help you to automate, which I think is so important. Automate your marketing, and kind of have it on autopilot, so that way it's just out of sight, out of mind, but you know that your stuff is getting taken care of.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think specifically from like a digital product builders perspective, we talk so much about automation, but often we talk about it in the context of our code and running builds and deployments and stuff like that. For our products, uh, but we completely lose track of all of the other things that can be automated. Yeah, like your marketing. So, yeah, if you can dig a little bit deeper into that, like, what can you automate in your marketing strategy?
So of course there's scheduling. So I always recommend for anyone who's handling their marketing in house to whenever possible, batch create their content. So that might involve dedicating one day per week or maybe a few days per month to creating all of your marketing content. So whether it's writing your social media posts, scheduling your newsletters, creating blog posts, you're able to then schedule those in advance.
So that way you don't have to worry about posting in the moment or remembering that you have a post scheduled and, Oh, I got to make sure to now post this manually because chances are you just won't do it. So I always recommend automating the scheduling process so that way you know your stuff is getting posted and you're staying consistent.
But there's also a lot of automation within, um, analytics, of course, like you don't have to manually go through and comb through your social media profiles or your website analytics to see how your content is performing. You're able to use tools that automatically pull that information for you. So between those, between the scheduling, between the analytics, I think it's huge to be able to find things that can kind of do the heavy lifting for you.
So that way you're not so much in the weeds with doing it yourself.
I'm going to go down a little path that I think is a little awkward in some ways, which is AI and large language models and all of these things. I feel like that is, that fits into this automation conversation. But, I feel like there's a lot of tough conversations to have around that specifically. So Yeah, what are your thoughts on AI?
Honestly, this is a, one of my favorite things to talk about because I think there is a lot of opportunity for good with AI. I mean, I think if you're using AI to just straight up write your content and you're not editing or anything like that, from someone else's perspective, or at least me personally, I instantly know when someone has used Chat GPT to write a social media caption.
I think it's really important, if you are going to use it, to heavily edit it. 100 percent you need to fact check because it doesn't necessarily mean, necessarily mean that the information is correct. So I think if you're going to use it for writing, you definitely need to make it in your own voice. But I think that AI is huge for idea generation.
I mean, a lot of times we all hit that creative burnout where we need to write a blog post or we need to write a social media post and we're like, Oh, I don't even know what topic to write about, so if you go to Chat GPT and type in a prompt that will just help you come up with ideas, that will spark so much creativity and inspiration, and now you can go write the content on your own.
So I think it's huge for just being able to help you think of topics and get some creativity into your day to day, but to actually do the work for you, I think that's a little bit iffy.
How about images? How do you feel about those?
Images, I mean, I also think that's really, um, obvious when someone's using it. I mean, the Kate Middleton image that happened a month or two months ago, whenever that was, I mean, the internet blew up when they saw her disjointed body parts. So, I think it's really you really need to pay close attention. I mean, we've all kind of noticed stock images as well, where people that are generated by AI and people kind of have like six fingers on one hand. And so it's not always generated accurately.
So I think being able to just make sure that you're on the pulse with that and triple checking everything before it gets published or before you share it publicly is really, really important.
Yep so all of this content that we're generating, putting together, scheduling, like how, how do we deliver all of these things? You sent me a little something about, the content marketing trifecta. Do you want to dig into that a little bit.
Absolutely. So when people think of digital marketing, I think they instantly think of social media, and a lot of people are really tempted to just go all in in social media and honestly kind of forget that other things exist. I am always feeling like I'm saying to my clients, Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Don't focus only on social media. There are so many other avenues and outlets that you can use to reach your audience and help to establish that thought leadership.
So by being able to diversify your marketing strategy into social media, into blog content, into email marketing, now you have three well rounded tactics that you can execute. So in order to do that seamlessly and help you to break down further content, I always recommend starting with producing long form content.
So whether it's a podcast recording like this or a blog post or a video, being able to create content that might be a little bit longer in length and then actually take that content into and condense it. So you can take that blog post, so to say, and perhaps pull three to five social media posts from just that one blog and the information that you wrote in it.
So you're ultimately repurposing it, and you're doing less work but getting more output from it, and you're able to therefore save time but still provide value to your audience.
Yep and so repurposing content, reusing things across channels in different ways, is there, are there ways that you would recommend sort of moving people between these different channels and yeah how does that work. How do you see what's working, what's not, and how they intersect.
Yeah, oh, great question. So to see what's working and what isn't, you can always look, for social media specifically, at the analytics that are available within the platform. So you can see how many likes you get on a post, how many followers came from a post, how many comments, shares, saves, all that information is right there for you, which is super helpful to reference when creating a post future content.
From driving people from one outlet to another, I mean, you can really kind of create some type of circle or cycle where you can post in your social media, a call to action for people to sign up for your email list. Whether you have a lead magnet that you offer them in exchange for their email address or you just have a straight up, sign up form, you can use social media to promote the opportunity for people to join your email list and explain the benefits that they'll get from doing so.
You can do the same with promoting a blog post. So if you write a social media post to promote a new blog post that you just wrote and published, now you can direct people, the people who follow you on social media, to now go to your blog and read that blog. You can also drive people from your blog to your social media. So, of course, we should all have a website in 2024.
So if you're using a website and including, Links to your social media profiles at the bottom of it or within your blog post itself. Now you get website visitors who become social media followers. So it's really great to kind of think about how ultimately this ecosystem, which is what it really is with marketing, how this ecosystem connects and you're driving people from seeing you on one corner of the internet to now seeing you in another corner.
Yeah, there's something that I find difficult to conceptualize or like how should I be moving people through a funnel like that and what should be my top of funnel? How do I lead them to the right places? I think that sort of like the movement within the ecosystem and figuring out where the correct sort of end target is, is something that I find a little hard to think.
Yeah. Oh, I love that you asked that. So I would say you want to, the really top of the funnel is awareness. You just want people to find out who you are and to find out what you offer. So I think awareness comes the easiest through social media, because it's so easy to reach such a wide amount of people with little effort. So when people discover you on social media, you want to bring them to the next point in the funnel Which is interest.
Now that they know who you are, now they're coming interested in what you offer. When they're interested in what you offer, that leads them to your website. So you're taking them from social media to your website where they can learn who you are, what you do, and how you help. Once they're on your website, they're probably poking around, they're maybe reading blog posts that you've published, maybe they're checking out the product that you're building and finding interest in that.
Now they really want to learn more about that product. And how can they learn more about that product? By getting on your email list. That's the third step.
So now you've brought that awareness, you've brought the interest, and now you're bringing the nurturing by getting them on your email list and they can receive those consistent newsletters to find out about product updates, launch timelines, exciting news that are happening within the tech startup, and really being able to peak their interest from there.
Thinking about like that top of funnel and social, what about advertising? Where does advertising fit into all of that? I hate LinkedIn. I feel like they always charge so much for such terrible results, but yeah, beyond that, what else is there?
Yeah, I mean, advertising is always a good idea, but I say, it's, you should always make sure that you have a consistent organic presence tied to it if you're going to spend money on paid ads. Because if you're running paid ads but you haven't posted to your social media profiles in three months, people might go from your ad to your profile and be like, hmm, why isn't this company posting? Like, it might give them almost some hesitancy and kind of question your legitimacy.
So I think paid ads are a good idea. I also am a huge fan of partnership marketing, so being able to collaborate with another company or another individual and create content together. So that might be what we're doing. We're hosting a podcast together. That might be hosting a webinar with someone. You can also joint write blog posts together. You can host an in person event.
I mean, there's so many opportunities to partner with someone who shares a similar audience and is building a product complementary to yours and be able to provide value to your audience itself. Now you're getting seen in front of their followers, in front of their connections, through the joint marketing promoting that you're doing, and it makes such a big impact for, such a little amount of effort and time, which is really amazing.
Yep. I'm curious what you think of, okay. So if we're thinking specifically about like digital products, marketing presumably doesn't end once they get in the product. How do you think about keeping people engaged and how your marketing ties into driving retention and that sort of
Yeah, that's such a good point. I always say it's so much more important to retain your customers than it is to acquire new ones. So, I think with so many new products being built all the time and tech startups getting some competitors, you want to remind your customers why they've chosen your product.
So, I think this is especially helpful with webinars, if you do like a product roadmap and show what new features are coming up in the next few months, in the next quarter, in the next year, that keeps your current customers excited about what they can expect to receive.
I think sharing that same messaging within newsletters, whether you send like a monthly newsletter or a quarterly newsletter that says, Hey, here's what's happening within our organization that you can expect to see is really important. I also think this isn't necessarily marketing, but I guess a part of, um, sales and customer service, which does integrate with marketing, but that's being able to set up, um, customer satisfaction surveys.
So having customer service reps just have a candid conversation with their customers and say, what do you like? What do you not like? What could you do without? What would you like to see that we're not currently offering? Those conversations give you so much insight that you can then use to create content.
I mean, if you're hearing pain points, if you're hearing questions that your customers are asking you, you can take that information that, that they're sharing, and you can actually write social media posts addressing the topic, or create an FAQ page on your website that addresses those questions, and now you have so much content to use moving forward.
I love it. Yeah, that's like crowdsourcing your content from, from the people you're trying to sell
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, super cool. Do you want to talk a little bit about specifically your context in Massachusetts? Is there something else that you'd like to poke around at?
Yeah, I mean, I would say, um, I think a huge point about focusing on marketing for, um, a company that's building a tech product is that you want to also focus on the executives within that company.
So I think oftentimes people often think about, you know, The corporate itself focusing on their marketing, but there's a huge untapped potential when you're leveraging your CEO's LinkedIn profile or other executives LinkedIn profiles that can help to bolster the credibility within the organization and help to get seen in front of their connections. And again, that's kind of a form of partnership marketing, but you're now using their personal brands to drive your mission forward.
Yeah. thing that I, so I've been doing a bit of that where we'll put together some content and post it on my profile and then cross post it and back and forth. but when you're talking to someone at a company and you're telling the executives that you need to do this. I felt very hesitant at first with this. like, this is my, my personal profile. I kind of want to disconnect it, but then I realized that there is a lot of value there.
Um, and that I can bring in my sort of personal stories and that can still be part of the sort of company message. So how do you communicate that with executives at a company? Yeah, I think that's something a lot of people kind of go through, is they have that hesitancy.
I always say that in the several years that you've been in your industry, you've built up quite a few contacts of people who should know what you're doing and what you're up to, and the chances are that these executives themselves simply just don't have the time to do it. They know that they need to focus on their own LinkedIn profile, But it all comes down to just not having the time or resources to help them do it.
So, knowing that you can kind of use the people that you've had in your network. To, to your advantage, ultimately, by sharing what you're up to and what you're building, I think that can kind of pique, pique some interest from people. And there might be people who see that post who come out and who might be now interested in investing in it, or interested in becoming a customer. And so you just never know what could happen.
I also think it's a lot easier to have someone else manage your profile. I mean, in addition to what I mentioned with time, a lot of people just kind of struggle to write about themselves. So when you have someone else who's actually writing the content and creating it, it makes it so much easier because we all sit there and if we have to write our own bio, we're like, I don't even know what to say about myself.
But having someone else who's kind of taking on that content writing role, it makes it so much easier for you because now you're removed from it and it makes it actually ensure that you're having stuff posted to your profile.
Yep, that makes a lot of sense. Um, and yeah, writing your own bio. I feel like it's always such a
Exactly. It's awkward to write about yourself.
Yep, you mentioned something there, which was investors, and I guess a lot of the people who will be listening to this podcast will have either to raise money at some point whether it is from venture capital, angel investors, or maybe it's foundations, it's grants, it's that sort of thing, but they still need to build a relationship with the people in those organizations. How does your work, how does digital marketing fit into those types of communications?
so I have, uh, some clients previously who have actually had an email list segment on their email list who was just actually investors. So it was people who worked at VC firms and anytime we had an exciting announcement or a partnership, we sent a newsletter to that list just kind of explaining what happened. We shared a link to the press release. We shared a video that went along with it.
It was an easy way to communicate with 100 plus people about this big thing that was happening within the organization. I also think social media is social proof, so people want to know that something's working before they end up giving their money to it.
So when you use social media to showcase happy customers through testimonials, or showcase the new and innovative features that you have coming up, Investors can go and see your content that you're posting and they'll say, Hey, this, this company is moving and shaking over here. They're really making an impact and I think it might make them feel more secure and more confident in their investment that they may want to make in the future.
Cool. Well, thank you so much, Ashley. This is a lot of amazing stuff. So we're on the small tech podcast and what small tech product do you want to wrap this up with?
Yeah, I love Descript. I am also a podcast host. I feature, business owners and professionals in Massachusetts, and so I've used Descript for probably the past two and a half years to pull transcripts from my podcast episodes. I use it to create videos, um, be able to edit them, and includes closed captioning.
And I just really love how easy it is to take a video and make something really pretty and really aesthetic, since I don't consider myself to be a video editor, and I think just the features that they offer at such a great price is really important for someone who's kind of creating their own content and looking to have a professional feel to it.
Yeah, that's awesome. I love Descript so much. We've been using it now for a couple years and it's such a game changer when it comes to doing videos, doing podcasts, audio. It's yeah, I don't know. What are what are your favorite features?
So I would say I love the transcript part because I share a transcript for every podcast episode. And I mean, when I had a podcast years ago, I actually hand wrote my transcripts and I cringe thinking about that because it took me so much time and I can't imagine doing that now. But it's so important for accessibility, so I love that Descript automates that for me. I also love that I'm able to use it because I create a lot of short videos.
I love that I'm able to use it to quickly edit my videos. If I say a filler word like, um, or if I mess something up, all I need to do is delete that. The text of where I said that mistake and it automatically updates the video itself, which I think is amazing. And I also love that I can easily brand it and include my logo, include my brand colors within the closed captioning.
I mean, I think it just makes it really easy and really feasible to create really great and engaging videos in such a short amount of time.
Yeah, for sure. That is that is exactly what we love about it, too. It's so good This episode is not sponsored by Descript, but if they do want to sponsor cool. Well, thank you so much. She is Ashley Mason, and her company is Dash of Social, and this has been the small tech podcast. Ashley, thanks.
Thank you, Raph.
And that was my interview with Ashley Mason, have a dash of social. You can go find her at dashofsocial.com. You can find the podcast at smalltechpodcast.com. We're on YouTube, on Spotify, where everywhere you can find podcasts. Remember to subscribe. It helps us out. Remember to rate and review, if you enjoyed the episode. And if you'd like to be a guest, we'd love to have you on reach out. And we'll talk about all things, tech and product building and everything around it.
You can also find us at ephemerecreative.ca or goec.io. That's probably easier. And I will see you in the next one. We all want to do something good in the world. So go out there and build something good folks. See ya!