Making Your Social Media Strategy Crystal Clear

EMILY: I’m Emily Washcovick, Yelp’s Small Business Expert. Behind the Review features conversations with business owners and customers who wrote one of their Yelp reviews. In our discussions, we talk about lessons they’ve learned that can be used by other small businesses to improve their own reviews…and their bottom line.

Occasionally, I also talk to industry experts who have additional insights into things like customer experience, small business technology, or general advice for running a successful small business. Today, I’m talking to Crystal Vilkaitis, owner of Crystal Media, a social media strategy agency that helps clients, especially small business owners in the retail industry, leverage their social media platforms into profits. Let’s give our conversation a listen.

EMILY: Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m gonna hand you the mic. Could you just take a minute to introduce yourself and tell me about Crystal Media?

CRYSTAL: I am Crystal Vilkaitis and I started a company called Crystal Media over 10 years ago to help independent retailers when it comes to marketing their stores. They feel incredibly overwhelmed and trying to keep up with social media. It’s changing all the time. They’re responsible for doing so many things within their stores that it was hard for them to know what’s working today. What should I be doing? How should I be spending my time? And so I started Crystal Media to at first teach them, be a resource for them. Offer support through our membership program where we give them the tools of what’s working today so they feel supported and they’re not doing things that are outdated because as I’m sure you know, social media changes so often.

So we make sure that they stay up to date and we kind of have this education path for the do-it-yourself retailer, who they’re doing their social or they have somebody on their team, but they just need to know the tools and and strategies that are gonna work to drive traffic into the store. And then shortly after starting the company, we started also managing Facebook and Instagram ads.

The advertising side of social media is a little bit more technical, and I will say it’s a lot more technical than it used to be 10 years ago. Meta, and Facebook likes to make things a little challenging sometimes, and so we run those ads for retailers. Our most successful retailers are running ads on Facebook and Instagram.

The challenge with these platforms is the organic reach is pretty low. So when you are posting something and you’re spending this time to create these reels, or do these live streams, or even just post some photos of new items you got in today. And one to 6% on average of your Facebook fans and followers are seeing that, well, we want more people to see it, right?

And your customers have liked your Facebook page. They said, I wanna see what you’re posting. We help their posts get more reach, get more visibility, and really learn about their store goals and help achieve those goals through ads, making it a little bit easier for them with it done for you.

And then finally, we also manage their local listings, Yelp being one of them, and really make sure that all their listings are claimed and have the right information. So often there’s the wrong name or address or phone number, or we’re missing information like the brands we sell, consumer known lines.

We have really outdated photos and so we update all of that for our retailers, optimize it, and then we update it every single month so those stay fresh too.

EMILY: Incredible. And the reason that we first met was actually through conferencing and being out in the world. And this retail connection that we have is so great for this conversation because I think all of my business owners, whether they have a brick and mortar retail store or not, can learn from the model that you’ve given to so many of your clients.

Which is absolutely be proud of your brick and mortar and what you’re doing in person, but translate that identity online. And I see some of your clients share their experiences about all the online sales they do now when maybe they predominantly were just worried about foot traffic back in the day.

That’s what I’m hoping to accomplish today is opening the minds of our listeners to understand that social, digital, it’s all a way to just reach more people and shine a light on what you’re already doing. It’s not like something completely new. It’s you, but online and something that you and I talked about is the difference between just doing these services for a business and teaching a business owner why we’re doing them, what we’re doing that’s impactful and effective. Can you talk a little bit about why you go the education route and why you wanna help your business owners and maybe what some of those initial tips and tricks are for getting themselves online and understanding the importance of that?

CRYSTAL: So I think education is really important for retailers, small businesses, especially when it comes to marketing and social media. And the unfortunate side is that in this industry, there’s a lot of people that are selling retailers social media management. I’ll do your social media, I’ll do your social media.

And retailers are like, ‘please do my social media. I don’t wanna do it. I’m so busy.’ But when we don’t know what we don’t know, then it’s really hard to manage that company or manage that person that’s gonna be helping you with your social media. I was at a jeweler’s conference a few years ago and I was doing consultations and sat down with this woman who has a store here actually in Colorado, and she was very timid to talk to me.

And finally we just start warming up. Tell me about your store. What are your goals? And she shares that she was burned by a company that was managing her Instagram account by posting a daily post. And sometimes the items that they were posting, she did not even carry in store. So people would come into the store, show Instagram. Where is this ring? Where is this necklace? Shouldn’t have it. She’s so frustrated. It’s a bad experience with the customer. There was no photos of her local area, either or of her, like who’s the brand? Who’s the person behind the brand? And when we are showing our people, that’s what works best, that’s where independents really can thrive and create meaningful connections with their customers.

She was paying $5,000 a month for this service and it wasn’t even her items. Some of the posts had the items she sold, so she was burnt. She took a small business loan out to pay for a six month contract, and that is a perfect example of why I teach and why I do what I do. I need you to understand what kind of content you should be posting on your social media.

I care about the meaningful connections. So what’s gonna actually create the meaningful connections and comments and engagement with your audience so they’re actually buying with you and from you. You could go viral, but that could translate into absolutely no sales, no email address, no loyal customers.

So I really wanted retailers to be empowered to know enough. For some they love it, they love marketing, so they wanna know it all. But most of them are busy business owners, so they need to know enough to make sure that they’re doing the right thing and that it is actually supporting their business goals.

EMILY: And something that’s really interesting I think is you’re sometimes helping a client realize they need to hire someone to post on their social media because it’s not a job for them. It is an important channel, and they’ve grown to a stage where that is a job for someone. And you know, I think some business owners think well, isn’t that what I’m hiring you for? And it’s like, well there is a very distinct difference. Hiring someone to run your social media and actually be the one posting needs to be someone embedded in your content. That needs to be someone who knows exactly what you’re offering, who’s maybe even gelled in with the team and behind the scenes.

‘Cause that’s what social is. It’s taking your customers behind the scenes. Yeah. How do you help guide a business owner on when is the time to invest in this and how do they know when it’s something maybe they could manage or on to help them with?

CRYSTAL: They’re probably ready right now. Because there’s a lot you can do with social and obviously if you just do not have the budget right now, if traffic is slow and you don’t have the budget, then I understand.

So the goal is what can you be doing now to put yourself out there, engage, get more reach and visibility, and build those connections so you can build the business. So we’re building that budget to have somebody help you. Because I have taught this for over a decade. The store owner should not be the person that’s managing the social media.

They should be involved with setting the goals. Here are the goals that I wanna achieve. Here’s the vision, the direction I wanna go. They should be in the content, they’re in the videos and photos, but they don’t have to be the person who is brainstorming the different campaigns you’re gonna be running.

What I teach is you take your SMART goals, goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timed. You take them and reverse engineer those to create campaigns and strategies using social media to achieve those. So somebody on your team can be creating those campaigns and move forward with actually building out that shot list.

What pictures do I need? What photos do I need? Get the owner in the content. They’re then editing, they’re publishing or scheduling, and then they can be responding to those comments, ideally quick when they come in. And so that person needs to be in your store. I really want this person to be able to, if there’s a question like, is this still available?

Or what size do you have? They need to run and see, yes, it’s still available. You want me to put it on hold for you, or here’s the link, you can buy it right online. So they have to have that help. And if they’re not there yet, though I do have a little tip that we can share for the store owner who maybe doesn’t have help and they’re struggling with posting to social media every day because I do recommend doing it daily.

You have an opportunity to show up and connect with your customers daily. So why wouldn’t we wanna do that? We wanna be top of mind. We wanna connect. So I have what I call the daily five helps you get your posts, your social media posts done in five minutes or less. So first we are going to think of our perfect customer.

Just think of that person you absolutely love, okay? We are talking to them. There’s some fear that we have when we have that phone and we’re gonna do a video or take a picture because we’re turning it on us. How do I look? How am I gonna sound? What are people gonna think? Nope, we’re gonna think about our favorite customer because they wanna see you.

And then secondly, You’re gonna be you. I just need you to take a second and just be you. So if you say holy guacamole or yellow or whatever the ways that you talk, you’re gonna be you. ‘Cause your customers relate to you. There’s nobody in the world that is like you. So you need to show up, be transparent, and just be authentically you.

And then the third thing is, we’re gonna jump right in. I want you to just jump right into what this content piece is. If this is a video, we’re jumping right into that. We have three of our favorite Mother’s Day gifts that I’m gonna share in this video. You’re gonna love them. Get right to that hook versus waiting a little, Hey, how’s your day? It’s a nice day here in Colorado. I hope you’re enjoying the spring. I’m gonna talk about three of my favorite Mother’s Day. We wanna jump right in in the very beginning. And four, we’re gonna share. So this is an acronym because here’s what happens. People are like, okay, I got my favorite customer in mind.

I’m gonna be me. I’m gonna jump right in. What the heck should I say? And so you’re gonna say one of these things. You’re either gonna tell a story. Which is S, a story, and it could be personal, it could be something that happened as you were driving into the store today. It could be something that you talked about with a customer or something that happened last night.

So we’re gonna tell a story, just be you, be relatable, be relevant to your customers. Or we don’t have to do all these things. So this is either a story or humanized. Take a picture, be in the picture. A selfie show where you are that behind-the-scenes content. Maybe you’re stocking some boxes that you’re shipping out and you’re just doing a quick video.

Walk and talks are a great thing too to connect with your audience. So that’s very humanized content. Or we’re gonna do A, arrivals. This one’s a piece of cake. Retailers got this down, boom, this just came in. They’re taking pictures of that. That feels really easy to do. We always wanna tell people about our arrivals.

R is relevant, what’s going on in the time of year. So if it is springtime and you wanna talk about that fun activities that are happening in your town, holidays that are coming up. Trends that are hot right now, what’s relevant to the time of year. And then the fifth one E is events. So what do you have going on?

Do you have sales, promotions, open house, anniversary sale? Those things, retailers are really good at doing A and E. Arrivals, Events. Arrivals, Events, but you need to mix it up and add in your stories, your humanized content and the relevant stuff too. I promise you, if you set a queue on your phone or if this is in an open or closed checklist and it’s now the way I do things. I will always do my daily five. It’s gonna help you get those done quick, and then that fifth piece after we share is I want you to engage. Take a minute or two, scroll through your feed, comment on the local coffee shops post, you might even share their drink of the day, so you’re helping spread awareness for them. Comment on some of your customers posts, really connect, have it be meaningful. And this doesn’t have to take an hour of your time. You really can scroll for a couple of minutes and just leave some really thoughtful, meaningful comments or share a few posts and then that’s it.

That’s your daily five.

EMILY: I think that in hearing you break that down, the thing I think is you just gotta start. Yep. You really just have to set this goal, decide a time to do it. And get in the habit. And everything you just shared right there could be done by a solopreneur operator if you need to.

It’s about breaking that dimension and just getting online and something that you wrote or that you mentioned made me think. All right. We have always talked about the importance of engagement beyond just having a strategy of content you’re gonna post. But I don’t think I’ve taken a pause before to really dig into that and what you just shared about commenting on other businesses in your area and engaging with your customers.

That is such an important part because if you’re just posting, but that’s all the account is, vanity content. It’s not going very far. Talk to me a little bit about effective ways to make sure you’re being responsive and engaging. Is it turning on alerts? How do they start doing that part?

CRYSTAL: So a couple of ideas. One is having your notifications turned on so that way your phone, you’ll see it, somebody commented on your page, or somebody commented on your Instagram, somebody dmd you. We do wanna be able to respond to those things quickly. And Instagram recently just said they want people, businesses, responding fast, so they’re taking a count into the ones that are quicker than others and giving them favorability in the algorithm. So it really does help if you are responding fast. And of course, that’s great customer service, right? So the quicker we can do that. So notifications turned on so you can engage and you can respond.

Another great way to engage is live streaming. Because people are there in the moment with you, they can ask questions and you want to encourage them to ask their questions. You can pin a post to the top of your live and give people instructions on what you want them to do. So are you having them comment? Are you having them share? What’s the best way for them to buy if you’re doing a selling event, give some of that information in there. And I recommend, be like on point.

We’re showcasing our products and we, here, I’m gonna talk about this item. Okay? Now I’m gonna pause and I’m gonna read through. Oh, hey Jenny. What’s up? It was so good to see you yesterday. How’s your mom doing? Okay, I see this comment. We’re gonna look into this for you, Judy. You’re here. How are you? Right? Just engage, people feel so special. And if I could just share a quick story about this. I was speaking to a group of florists and I was talking about doing a consistent live stream every week because you train your audience to tune in. And so this florist came up to me afterwards and shared what she had been doing.

She was doing a consistent live stream that she started with the Covid shutdowns because she couldn’t see her customers, she missed her customers, and this was one of the best ways to still engage and see them. So she started doing this and just kept it up every Wednesday doing her live streams. And on the live show, she would pull a winner every week and they would win a free arrangement.

So one week she pulls a winner and that customer comes into the store to get her free arrangement that she won and shares with tears in her eyes to the store owner that she’s been watching these live streams for weeks. It’s what she looks forward to. She just feels like they’re friends. She’s thanking her for doing it.

She lives alone. So it’s really something that she looks forward to. She has this community. She’s a part of something. And she said that when she won, she fell off the couch. She screamed. It was such a highlight for her and that is the stuff, it gives me chills. This is meaningful content, right?

It is about our customers and connecting and being there for them, and we don’t always know where they are in their lives and what’s happening, and so live streaming is just a beautiful way to really connect with them and engage.

EMILY: I love that. And sharing too! So many businesses have their customers on their own posting things they bought or experiences they had because of your business.

And if you don’t re-share that, that’s just a lost opportunity. And when you do share your customer’s content, that makes other customers think about tagging you and posting when they are at your business. So I love that idea of talking to your audience, really thinking of them as joining you and showing them behind the scenes of the business is a big theme that has happened in the pandemic, and it’s never gonna go away now, I don’t think customers wanna see that kind of stuff. The unboxing, the behind the scenes.

CRYSTAL: It’s relatable. So we love relatable content. That’s what gets us to watch people, gets us to stop the scroll, is when it’s somebody like us or somebody that we aspire to be. I once heard that a Broadway playwright said, “How you make a character that everybody hates is make them perfect.” We don’t want perfect, perfect isn’t relatable. So when you are sharing your stories and behind the scenes and what goes into running the store and just getting to know the store owner, you’re starting to feel like, this is my friend. I wanna support them. And when you are being your authentic self, the right people are gonna connect with you, your what I call PCGs, your perfect customer groups.

They’re gonna watch that content and be like, there’s just something about this owner. I love this person. I just feel like I know them. And then what happens to so many of our retailers is they become local celebrities. So then they’re out at the grocery store and we have one retailer. We do her ads for her.

She’s been an insider of ours forever, and she would wear these cat ears on her Facebook live streams. And so one day she’s at the grocery store and a little kid comes over and is like, excuse me, my mom watches you on Facebook. So funny, but she’s recognizable. And we have so many stores. One retailer shared with me at a conference because, and we should talk about this, she was so fearful of going on camera.

And I was really teaching and encouraging my audience. You’ve gotta go on camera, you gotta use video. You know these platforms love video, so you’re gonna get heavier weight for that content, meaning it’s gonna be shown to more people, but your customers wanna see you and connect in the best ways through video.

So she shared that she finally did it. She finally committed, started doing live streams, and she said, with tears in her eyes, and now the people at the bank recognize us. We could have never imagined these results. you just don’t because we’re skeptical.

There’s a lot of resistance when it comes to social and putting ourselves out there. But if we can push through that, get comfortable with the uncomfortable and show up anyways and be consistent, you start becoming that local celebrity. The people at the bank recognize you and you find those PCGs that just love you and will become lifelong customers that will also share your content, talk about you to their friends, and really connect again in that meaningful way.

EMILY: Yeah, that’s wonderful. And this segue into transactions I think is really important because when we’re talking about social, I think sometimes business owners think we’re just trying to grow how many followers we have, and we’re really trying to grow our bottom line, whether that’s by getting them in the door or to spy something online through a digital transaction.

I think some business owners think, well, people don’t buy on Instagram, and that just couldn’t be further from the truth. I buy stuff through Instagram all the time. But talk to me about using your social to sell, not to just grow an audience, but to actually promote what you’re selling.

CYRSTAL: I really recommend retailers to sell through social. It’s one of the best ways. Omnichannel, we hear that a lot. So we’ve got our brick and mortar and we’ve got our social platforms we’re selling through and our e-commerce platforms that we’re selling through. And really this is important because, Consumers, however they wanna shop, we wanna provide that experience and that way for them to get those products from you.

Now through social selling, live selling is one of the best ways to do this, whether you’re on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook. I have a dear friend who is a sales manager at a really kind of high end home decor store in Southern California, and they were gonna do their first live. And I gave her some tips on what to do, and she was at the store and the owner was at her house cuz she had some items at her house. So they did a split screen live on Instagram. They did it for an hour and 45 minutes. And one of my pro tips is that you need to number your products so I’m gonna show this basket and it’s number one and then I’m gonna show this picture frame and it’s number two.

So that way it’s easy for the customer to call you, comment, say, I wanna buy two. There’s software like Comment Sold that will automate this experience. So your customer will register to your Comment Sold, and then when you’re doing a live stream, all they gotta do is say ‘Sold too’. And then they can get that frame or whatever that product is.

So it makes it easy on them. This live stream that my friend did for an hour and 45 minutes on Instagram, the peak that they had was just about 50 people, 48 people that were on live at any given time. They did $17,000 in sales, 17,000, hour and 45 minutes. It was awesome. Wow.

EMILY: Awesome. Wow. Yeah. I’ve started talking about this stuff because I’ve seen some of my business owner contacts listing like thousand dollar items on their Instagram.

We’re not just talking about like a $20 item. People are really okay spending and they just need to see the items. Yep. Something else you mentioned earlier that really caught my attention was the fact that we wanna grow social, but we also need to be connected to these people beyond social. How do we gather their emails?

How do we connect so that we’re not so reliant on the social platform, but we’re actually building a network of people that we can stay in touch with, that we control as owners.

CRYSTAL: You have to build both. Think of it like with your Facebook and Instagram and TikTok followers. You don’t own those audiences.

They’re not dependable. These are undependable audiences, kind of like we’re renting them. At any time, these platforms can change or possibly go away, and so we wanna make sure that we have their contact information and we do own it, right? And it is dependable. So you wanna be building your list. And I really view this, this is an asset to your business.

So we want the email address, the cell phone number. Ideally we have both of those things. If you are doing any kind of mailing, then we can have their address too. But using social media, to get them on your list, is a really great way to use social media. So you can have some sort of promotion that you’re doing and it’s exclusive to people who are on our list. So get on the list. We send exclusive content and deals, event invites, VIP events that you’re gonna wanna go to, but you can only go if you’re on the list. So we wanna make sure that we’re doing that. For people that love a store, a retail store. Like for me, my favorite local store is Pilar Boutique.

It’s a clothing boutique here in Northern Colorado. I love her. I love her clothes and her style, and I am opted into their loyalty program, which also will send out text messages. I. I like getting the text from Anna at Pilar because I love her products, but I think a lot of retailers are worried about texting because they feel like it’s gonna be intrusive and nobody wants to get our text messages.

But you don’t send as often. You’re not sending a daily text. You might not even be sending a weekly text. This might be a biweekly, and maybe it’s to your loyalty group. Five Stars is a great loyalty platform that we recommend, and then it let it do it for you.

You can pull your customers, you can send out that text and connect, but people want to hear from you. They wanna get the emails, they wanna get the text me messages. If you think about it, big boxes will send emails every single day. And customers still opt in and still open and still buy. And typically we see more sales come from emails than from social media.

But again, social is where we’re building the relationship. We’re top of mind and then we’re getting them over on our list so we can stay connected to them. So we really wanna be sure that you have things in place to grow that list.

EMILY: What would be your advice for people who are looking for help beyond going to your site? What are some green flags of vendors or partners who might be good? Or maybe red flags? Things we wanna avoid.

CRYSTAL: If you are looking to hire anybody to help you with your social media, especially if they’re going to be creating content for you and posting for you, or managing your ads, ask to talk to some of their customers, some of their clients.

And I’m surprised not a lot of retailers do this for us, but we have our retailers and we’ve asked, hey, are you okay if a retailer wants to just jump on a phone call with you, hear about your experience, will you share that we have that for all of our products? They love sharing.

Thankfully, they love sharing, but I think it’s better when you hear from the person who’s experiencing the service. So you know what to expect and they can also share, here’s how I’m getting a lot out of it. Make sure that you’re doing that same thing. We just learn a lot from our peers. So ask to talk to current customers.

Do your research too on reviews, see what people are saying and how people are responding. Also asking to see some of their work, so let’s say that you’re hiring an individual versus a company and they may come into your store to do the photos and take the pictures and things like that.

I want you to say, okay, show me some of your other clients. Seeing the portfolio of work, right? Is this lining up? Is it good quality? How is their writing, their design? We definitely want to do our research in that sense.

EMILY: What about pricing? We always think that if something feels too cheap, it probably is, but expensive isn’t necessarily the best option either. How can a business owner make sure they’re getting their money’s worth from a social media partner or vendor?

CRYSTAL: So here’s the deal. What you find with a lot of people is they’ll be like, okay, I’m gonna do your social media. I’m gonna post your Instagram for $5,000 a month, right? And you’re gonna get this once a month or once a day post, and they’re gonna manage it for you. You wanna see a clear outline of what that scope of work is what are you really doing? What platforms, what type of content, are you involved in the strategy at all? Are you doing any of the tracking or is that still on me? Are you responding or is that still on me? If you’re responding and you’re not in store, then how are you working with me to get the information, like really understanding the workflow. And their process of working with you to make sure that it’s pretty streamlined. It should be if they know what they’re doing. And I will say that there’s been so many times that we’ve talked to retailers who are like, will you just do my social media for me?

This one guy I met in Vegas and he’s like, you know, will you fly in? I’d be happy to pay for your flight, fly in and do my social media and then I’ll give you like $200 a month for it. And I’m like, yeah, I don’t know if that’s gonna be cost effective for us. And if we can really manage that, that’s gonna be a challenge.

But I will say that if you are seeing those $200 price point, what are you getting for the 200, because you’re probably not getting a lot. We’re not looking to spend thousands of dollars. The one thing, the one area where you might spend that 5,000 plus is with ad agencies. If you’ve got a higher budget, if you’re spending thousands of dollars to drive traffic into your store and your e-commerce, you’re pretty aggressive with your ad spend and your driving traffic that way.

Then often how those companies work is they’ll take 50% of the contract, let’s say it’s $10,000 a month, 50% goes into the ad spend, 50% goes to them. Ask about that though. How is this being spent and as we increase, is more of that gonna go to my budget or are you also making more? Really understand, goes back to that scope of work, what are they doing for how much and how are we reporting the success and really getting that tracking. Those are some really important things to ask and look for.

EMILY: And if you’re even getting the sense that by asking for these details or digging in is putting them out, probably not the right fit. And I love your advice for asking for work that they’ve done for other people, or just to talk to other people, because that’ll help give you some realistic expectations for what this partnership is gonna require of you, because no matter who you work with, you’re probably not just gonna be able to step aside and let them step in. You’re gonna have to play a role in this relationship. So it’s good to figure out what that looks like.

CRYSTAL: If I can just add on to that real quick too, please, is because we have an ads agency, the most successful clients of ours are involved. So sometimes, we’ll send an email, we’ll be like, okay, how did that perform?

What we’re in-store sales and it’s crickets. We’re not hearing back from our client, and I know we’re so busy and we’re flooded with so many emails in our inbox. We’re trying to do so much, but it really is a partnership. When you’re responding and sharing that information, how did it perform?

Well, if it didn’t perform as well as we hoped we need to know that information so we can change. Is it an audience? Is it the creative? What thing do we need to change to try again and get that to work? Because what I like is, we love momentum, we’re seeing it work, we’re seeing those results, and we want a lever to pull to see consistent results. But we have to work as a team so I know how it’s working on your end and what do you need, what are your goals, what’s your focus? So we can really deliver on that too. So make sure that you are showing up and being a partner in that relationship.

EMILY: Yeah, absolutely. We always close our episodes on the topic of reviews. You have a nice perspective because you’re obviously a business owner, so you deal with reviews for yourself, but you also can remove some of that emotion and give advice to your clients on how they should handle reviews. So I’ll let you just start in general, how do you feel about reviews? How do you leverage them and maybe how do you advise your client’s approach to online review?

CRYSTAL: I feel like we want reviews. We wanna hear from our customers, we wanna hear about the experience. That’s what makes us better. That’s where we can learn if we are dropping the ball somewhere, we want to hear from the people that experience our services. And so we really encourage our retailers to collect reviews.

You wanna be asking for those reviews in the right ways, but really encouraging people to share their experience with you and doing so on whatever platform is easiest for them. But if you can make it easy for them after they’ve done a transaction and you’re sending an email out saying, we’d love to hear your experience and making that easy, boom, it’s right there.

They don’t have to remember to go on to Yelp and pull up the app. Leave that review. You’re making it really easy, a direct link for them. So we wanna collect them, we wanna make it easy. We wanna respond. Always respond to your reviews if they’re good or bad. If they’re good, say Thank you for coming in.

We love working with you. If there’s anything that you remember about that person, I think it’s great to add that, because that’s really showing customer service and your level of attention. To that person and they feel special that you remembered that. And people that are reading that are like, wow, this company really pays attention.

And then of course, if it’s bad, we wanna respond to that too. And what I’ve been telling our retailers lately is I know that sometimes it’s hard to respond to the negative reviews because sometimes we get really frustrated or we’re like, that’s not how it went down, or I don’t even think they shopped here.

I think that they’re a competitor leaving me a review. So my favorite new tool is ChatGPT and you can go to this platform and plug in, leave or write a response, a professional response to this review, and it will write the response for you in about 10 seconds. And then let’s say it’s too professional cuz you’re a little bit more casual in your business.

So then you just tell ChatGPT, make it friendlier. Or make it more casual and it will rewrite it for you. Then you just take that and we’re not gonna copy and paste as is. We’re gonna read fully through and make sure it sounds like us. Are there certain words that you would use to describe a product or that experience that they had?

Address something that may be is specific that the AI ChatGPT couldn’t address cuz it didn’t know that person or know the situation. You wanna customize that. But often the hardest part is just getting started. I don’t even know where I wanna start. I sit down on my keyboard and I type, so no, that’s stupid.

I delete, I type something. No, no, that sounds terrible. Oh, I sound so mad. Just have ChatGPT get it started for you and then you can monitor and always respond.

EMILY: That’s great advice. I think lastly, let’s tell everyone how to find and stay in touch with you. I want them to know about your show because there’s great advice there for retailers.

I want them to check out your website as a resource in case they’re looking for support. So give us the goods. Where can people find and stay in touch with you?

CRYSTAL: Well we are Crystal Media CO, on all social platforms. Crystal Media co.com is our website and we have a show called Rooted in Retail, which Emily, you were a guest on the show. I loved our conversation, and this show is a place for retailers to learn how to build their dream business. I know that retail can be tough, but it doesn’t have to be lonely. And so this show was made for you as a resource for you, and definitely tune in and if you have a story to share or success to share, I’d love to possibly have you as a guest.

You can go to crystalmediaco.com/guest