Ashley Cline: Ice Cream Social

Our interview of Ashley Cline for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere.

Ashley is a digital marketing strategist and co-founder of Ice Cream Social. Ashley explains that as a digital marketing strategist, she helps brands create marketing plans and strategies, with a focus on event marketing. She emphasizes the importance of creating hype and collecting leads before launching a promotion or going on sale.

Ashley also shares her insights on working with influencers, including the importance of clear deliverables, creative guidelines, and usage rights in contracts. She advises influencers to make it easy for brands to contact them and to ask for higher rates.

Finally, Ashley discusses the role of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in driving marketing campaigns. She mentions that Facebook allows for precise targeting of demographics, while TikTok is more experimental.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I'm joined today by Ashley Cline. Welcome to the podcast.

Ashley Cline:
Thank you, Jon. Excited to be here today.

Jon Pfeiffer:
To set the scene, you are a digital marketing strategist and co-founder of Ice Cream Social. Also, you've worked with brands who work with influencers, and worked with influencers who work with brands. So with that background, I got to ask you first, what does a digital marketing strategist do?

Ashley Cline:
Sure, so essentially what I do is I work mostly with brands today and I help them create an infrastructure of what their marketing plan will be. I primarily today focus in on events in event marketing. So I help them compose, what are they going to do as far as when do they go on sale, what does their marketing stack look like, what kind of promotions do they want to offer, what's their pricing strategy? And compile this into a go-to-market plan for them.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So, let's take a hypothetical product.

Ashley Cline:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Say we're going to sell... What product should we sell? Let me ask you.

Ashley Cline:
How about a ticket to an event?

Jon Pfeiffer:
How about a ticket to a Taylor Swift competitor? So, it's an uphill battle already, and the promoter comes to you and says, "I have this new female artist. I think she's the next Taylor Swift, but we have to promote her correctly." What's the first thing you do?

Ashley Cline:
Oh, well, there's going to be some influencer marketing in there to start with, but really when... I guess it doesn't matter whether it's an event or a product because I've done this with both. The first thing you want to do before you launch any kind of big promotion or go on sale for a product or event is you want to spend a period of time, and depending on the unique scenario, this could be two weeks, it could be a month, it could be three months, but you want to spend a period of time creating as much hype as possible.

And while you're creating that hype about what's going to happen, whether it's launching ticket sales for this event or a big promotion, maybe it's a Black Friday sale that you're having for your brand, during that process of creating all this hype, you want to collect leads, a lead would be name, email, phone number, at least email, phone number. And essentially you're going to leverage that list, create a lot of hype leading up to it with emails, text messages, so that the day you go on sale or launch this promotion, you have really great success and momentum to carry you through the rest of the campaign.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And how much of that... You've mentioned texts and emails. How much of that is now driven by Instagram or TikTok?

Ashley Cline:
A lot of it. A lot of it is driven through two main scenarios, one just being your social advertising, and a lot of times that is through Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok. Those are really the main platforms that I'm working with today, and my clients are working with in terms of advertising on social media is really those three platforms.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So demographically, have you broken down what the demographics are between Facebook versus TikTok versus Instagram?

Ashley Cline:
There's a mix of everything everywhere. I would say that is right now still my favorite thing about Facebook is you can just dial in exactly who your demographics are and they'll serve it up to the right people for you. On TikTok, again, it depends on the product, the event, but we do see it does skew a little more female still in what I'm finding, and there is a bit of a gap between millennials and Gen Z. We are finding both audiences are pretty active on there right now. So, it's still a little more of a, in terms of advertising, an experimental platform for us where Facebook, Instagram advertising, that's pretty dialed in, but we're still doing a lot of optimizing and playing around on TikTok.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And how do you measure that? And specifically TikTok, how do you dial it in?

Ashley Cline:
Sure, the number one way that we're measuring that is our direct return. What is our return on any spend? If that is direct advertising spend, or even if we're working with an influencer and let's say we paid a particular influencer X amount of dollars, we are looking to track the returns on that and make sure that it was a profitable campaign for us.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So, I mentioned at the very top that you're the co-founder of Ice Cream Social.

Ashley Cline:
Yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:
First off, what is Ice Cream Social.

Ashley Cline:
It has nothing to do with ice cream, surprisingly.

Jon Pfeiffer:
When I was doing my research, that was the first thing I saw is the question you get a lot is, how did you come up with the name?

Ashley Cline:
Yes, first I'll tell you what it is, then I'll tell you how we come up with the name. So, Ice Cream Social is a referral widget that you could bolt on to really any website or checkout flow, and what that means is... You've probably seen this in many cases, but after you make a purchase to something, in this particular case, I'm going to say events because that's where I do a lot of marketing, we're going to present you an offer that says, "Hey, events are more fun when you bring your friends with you. If you use this tool, invite your friends, and if you get five friends to buy, we'll give you a ticket refund." So, we're essentially creating that gamification and that referral process for you, taking that word of mouth marketing and bringing it to life digitally. It can also be another form of influencer marketing, taking all of your customers and turning them essentially into micro influencers for your brand.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So, how did you come up with this idea?

Ashley Cline:
Well, so I love all things optimization and especially marketing. To me, it's very much like a video game, and growing up, my brother and I had one video game, we had Mario Bros. So once you beat the game, you got to find new ways to keep it fun. So we would create new challenges, who can get the most coins, who could beat it faster? And so, I've really taken this approach in all of my marketing. So as I mentioned, we create a strategy, we go to market, but what happens after it's live? You have to continuously be watching it on a daily basis and looking for ways to improve day over day. And working with a lot of my clients, we're just trying to find, what can we do to drive more sales without spending more money? Because of course, you don't want to just keep-

Jon Pfeiffer:
Throwing money at it.

Ashley Cline:
More money on your social advertising or throwing spaghetti against the walls. So, we're always looking for little tweaks here and there that we can do to drive more sales, and that's essentially where Ice Cream Social was born was from this need of our clients needing to get the word out there about their product or their event without spending more money. And so the idea was, how can we activate this database of customers we already have and help them help us promote our event or our product? And so, that's where we came up with the idea, Ice Cream Social.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then shifting to, and how did you come up with that name?

Ashley Cline:
Yes, so the name came from the idea of back in the day, not sure when, what era, maybe the '50s, that where advertising was really different in a sense of it wasn't in our face every day. There wasn't billboards everywhere, there wasn't social media ads being served to us. And so, the way that people would really share what products they're loving and what they're purchasing nowadays-

Jon Pfeiffer:
I got to stop you for just a second. You mean for our audience, there was a time before an iPhone?

Ashley Cline:
It's really hard to believe right now.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Ashley Cline:
So back in the day, they would do things like your Tupperware parties, or your block parties, your little ice cream socials with your neighborhood, Mary Kay parties, things like that, Avon parties. And so, that's where mostly women would get together and network and swap stories about what products they're using, what they're loving. And so, we just liked the name Ice Cream Social and ran with it.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How many times do you have to explain to people what an Ice Cream Social is?

Ashley Cline:
I would say every day, but it's a fun name and you don't forget it.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So, I want to shift gears and talk about your work with influencers.

Ashley Cline:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
One of the things you've done is negotiate influencer deals, correct?

Ashley Cline:
Yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How do you start? You're going to represent an influencer working with a brand, where do you even start?

Ashley Cline:
Sure, so I would say when I first started influencer marketing, I did represent the brand side. And-

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, I tell you what, then let's flip this and let's talk that side first and then we'll talk influencer.

Ashley Cline:
Because typically what I find is the brand will come to you first with a contract and then it's in your hands to kind of refine that contract and negotiate it. And so on the brand side, the first thing we do when putting together the contract is we make sure we clearly define deliverables, what we're asking for, and we come up with that set of deliverables after we clearly define what our goal is, and you can't necessarily put that goal on the influencer. It's great to make them aware of what you're trying to achieve with this campaign, but you as the marketer, strategist, agency brand, you need to think through, what is your end goal and how can this particular influencer help you get there? And after you've clearly defined what your deliverables may be, that could be let's say a YouTube video and five Instagram stories.

You come up with these deliverables after you have thoroughly studied your influencer, know what they're capable of, know what their strengths are, know what platforms they activate best on, and know who their audience is. So after you've done that research, you can easily come up with what your deliverables should be. And within those deliverables, it's also important, influencers are going to hate this, but we'll explain why it's important and why it works, is you need to have your list of red tape, and we make this so easy for influencers. So, I think they do actually enjoy this because it does make their lives a little bit easier when creating content. And it can be easier to give them a box to play in like, "Hey, we want you to do what you do best, but here's a few rules we need you to follow. Do not say this, do not say that. This is ..."

Jon Pfeiffer:
Threaded creative guidelines.

Ashley Cline:
Yeah, creative guidelines, and essentially you do want to give them those rules to stick to because it's good to have that defined within the contract. That way when they do deliver content and maybe they do something that cannot be posted because they say something they shouldn't, you do have the room to push back and have them redeliver. And as annoying is that can be for influencers, I know, to tell you what to say and what not to say, for a lot of clients that I've worked with, it is very, very important because of the FTC and the FDA, legally we just cannot put our names on anything that has false claims or things along that nature because that can get us in a lot of trouble. So, that's the reason a lot of those rules are put into place. It's not to restrict you creatively in any way. It's we have rules that we have to follow too.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And from campaign to campaign, how much is the creative guidelines tweaked?

Ashley Cline:
I would say not very much. As far as campaign to campaign, very little. You've got your guidelines and we've got our deliverables, and if you're a brand, you can pretty much stick to that a lot of times. The thing that'll change the most is the deliverables, depending on the influencer you're working with. And as a brand, the one thing we always make sure to put within a contract with our influencer, two things, one is we do make sure we define the usage rights. How long can we use this content? And a lot of times the influencer controls that. They'll say, "You can use this for one gear or you can use this indefinitely or for three months," it depends how big the influencer is honestly, but the most important thing that's almost a deal breaker for us if they don't allow it is whitelisting capability.

And what that means is, as an influencer, you're very familiar with posting something and marking it as a brand partnership. And there's also a little button that allows you to give the brand access to that piece of content. And all that does is allow that one piece of content you created, not your whole brand or your ad account or your profile, but that one piece of content will pull into that brand's advertising dashboard and they can put money behind it. And at the end of the day, as long as they're following the rules in terms of image usage for how long, it only helps you because they're putting money behind your name, driving more people to your profile, and that helps grow your following as well. So, whitelisting capabilities is really important as a brand to have in contracts.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How often do you see influencers charge extra for the ability to whitelist?

Ashley Cline:
Not very often. Typically, it is seen as whether you believe it exists or not, a win-win situation. We are only trying to amplify your name and your brand as well.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And you said that one of the first steps is you study the influencers. What specifically do you look at? What do you look for?

Ashley Cline:
Sure, so the first place we start is as a brand, you really need to obviously know who your target market is. It sounds silly to say that, but sometimes people genuinely don't know. So, you need to know what audience you're trying to reach, and through that is how we find influencers, whether through searching or finding people about that age, talking to all of our younger siblings and children, if we're working with younger influencers. You have to identify what's cool essentially, and from there, once we found some influencers... In most cases with the brands I worked with, we play a long game.

We're not going to cold pitch you after seeing your profile for 10 minutes. We're going to follow you for several months. We're going to possibly engage with your content, even if it's not as the brand. Some of us behind the scenes are engaging with our personal profiles to get to know you, not in a secret, undercover, creepy way, just genuinely to get to know you, get to know your fan base. We're looking at engagement. How do people respond to your content? Do you have a high engagement rate? Not necessarily high, but at least average, and that's really to weed out people who have a fake following or an inflated following. If it's below a 2% engagement rate-

Jon Pfeiffer:
They bought followers.

Ashley Cline:
You bought followers. We're kind of getting out of that era where that's not something as typical, people buying followers, as it was maybe five, 10 years ago. So that isn't quite an issue, but we do want to see that you have pretty decent engagement with your content, of course.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So, let me flip it now and look at it from the influencer's perspective. What can an influencer do to make themselves easier to work with?

Ashley Cline:
Sure, pretty obvious, but make it easy to contact you. Let us know how to contact you, whether it's through an agency, a manager, or yourself, let us know the best way to reach you. I would say have some general stats ready about your interests, what kind of content you create, who your follower demographics are. There's a lot of tools out there that will tell us some stuff before we even talk to you, so we got a rough idea, but obviously it's your content, your profile, your analytics, you're going to have the most accurate information. So, kind of having that at a bird's eye view.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And when you're negotiating a contract on behalf of an influencer, what are the most couple important terms that you look at?

Ashley Cline:
Number one is, again, that usage rights. You do want to put an expiration date on that because I will see influencer content that is just used year after year after year. And as an influencer and a person, you're going to evolve and grow and you may not want that content still being heavily promoted and advertised years down the road. Sure, it'll always live there, but at some point you may not want to be actively associating yourself with a particular brand five years down the road. So one, make sure you do have an expiration on for how long that person can use your name and what platforms they can leverage your content on.

Some brands will negotiate things like we can do a press release, we can have a blog post, some evergreen content, which is important for the brand to have. So, you just want to make sure that you are okay with all of that. Secondly, the rate. What I find with influencers, it really is still a little bit of the Wild Wild West when it comes to a rate. There's no standards out there. So one, what I find is most influencers don't ask for enough. You don't have anything to lose. Go ahead and ask for more money. If the brand doesn't have it or they're not okay, they'll come back and tell you.

They're not going to say, "Forget it, we don't want to work with you." They're going to say, "This is what we got, can you make a deal or not?" So one, I would always ask for more money, and this is pretty interesting, but I found that I've worked with influencers and celebrities on the brand side, and we find that influencers charge more money than celebrities in a lot of cases. So just a fun tidbit, but there's definitely room for you guys to charge more money because you don't understand the value you have of having a captive audience. That is the number one thing that all brands are trying to do is find a captive audience.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So, you talked about the time you spend looking for influencers and studying them and playing the long game. How do you consume content, you personally?

Ashley Cline:
Me personally?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, you personally.

Ashley Cline:
I'm a TikTok fan. I like TikTok and if I'm on Instagram, it's stories. I'm not much of a feed person anymore, just like everyone else. I like that quick adrenaline video.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I was going to ask hours, how many minutes to hours do you spend online every day?

Ashley Cline:
Well, online I'm at my computer all day long. As far as consuming social media content myself personally, I've learned to put a lot of boundaries around that. So, I would say I'm pretty good at sticking with an hour or less.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then shifting gears again, what are you working on currently that you can talk about?

Ashley Cline:
Sure, so currently we are really taking Ice Cream Social to the next level, finding more ways to really amplify that word of mouth marketing, continuing to gamify it. We recently teamed up with NBC Comcast, who's made an investment in our company and we're working with them to kind of bring unique case studies with referral marketing and just first party data collection to their partners and brands that they work with.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Kind of on this, but a little bit different, how do you keep up with what's going on in the industry?

Ashley Cline:
Just like everybody else, I am getting the email newsletters, I'm big fan of everything that Morning Brew does. I read their marketing, their tech newsletters. I am checking out what's trending on social media, checking out the news headlines.

Jon Pfeiffer:
One last question for you.

Ashley Cline:
Sure.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Where can people find you on the internet?

Ashley Cline:
Yes, you can find me at icecreamsocial.io or ashleycline.com.

Jon Pfeiffer:Thank you.