How to Win Big on TikTok Shop - TikTok Shop Made Simple | Michelle Barnum Smith | MMP #027

How to Win Big on TikTok Shop - TikTok Shop Made Simple | Michelle Barnum Smith | MMP #027 Michelle Barnum Smith: It's really hard for big brands to be successful on TikTok because big brands have a ridiculously difficult time with authenticity. And this is, this is from communications I've had with, with TikTok directly. Unknown Speaker: You're watching The Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Kevin King: Mr. Farrar, my brother from another mother. What's up, man? Norm Farrar: Hey, Mr. King. How's it going? I feel like we're almost in the same room. It's bizarre. Kevin King: It is. We're just down the hall from each other. And the room looks exactly the same. Who would think that you have two rooms in your house that are decorated exactly the same? Norm Farrar: Who'd have thunk that? Kevin King: But some people, you know, when they like something, they like something. Norm Farrar: That's why you're called a misfit. Exactly. But maybe you've noticed a little bit of raspiness in my voice today. Kevin King: A little bit, yeah. It sounds like you've been coughing a little bit or something. Norm Farrar: Not coughing. Well, you want to explain where we were at? Kevin King: Uh, yeah, we just, uh, rolled back in from, uh, from bay. Lost wages. Uh, at the Paris Casino and lost wages, uh, over the weekend, uh, prior to recording. Norm Farrar: Really? Kevin King: I have a cough too, because we've been smoking a lot of cigars. Uh, I think we did four one day, uh, but pretty much like, actually last night was the first time we hadn't smoked a cigar in like eight days straight. Norm Farrar: And that's only because it was like a hurricane or something here. Kevin King: Yeah, there's something going on outside. Yeah, a hurricane going on outside. But yeah, we were at the Big Smoke, which is Halloween for cigar smokers is what it is, and lost wages. And they do this every year and they get about 60 or so booths in this convention center. And about 20 or so, 25 of them are liquor Companies, you know, Johnny Walker and all the vodka companies and giving out free tastings of liquor. And then the other 35, roughly, are cigars. And there are cigar representatives, big cigar companies, some are distributors. And you get these little coupon books and you run around and you hand them a coupon and it's just like going trick-or-treating, knock on the door. But in this case, you hand them a coupon and you have a big bag that they're giving you and you open up the bag and they drop in a cigar. And then you keep going around and you get 35 cigars each person each day. And so it's a two-day event. So you end up with close to 70 cigars by the end of this thing, which is a lot of cigars. And then they get some food. And we're gonna go sit down in a big area where people are just smoking and meet another cigar smoker. So it's a pretty cool event. And then afterwards, you know, this thing only runs like three or four hours at night. Then afterwards, people are hanging out at these nice cigar bars around town. So it's cool. Norm Farrar: Yeah. And there's marketing. There's tons of marketing involved. Even the, it's not sequential, you know, it's not like number one, number two, number three. If you're trying to get all these different booths, it could be one, it could be 32, it could be 23. And a lot of the booths don't even have the numbers up. So you're going to the booth and you're sorting through your tickets and you're trying to rip them out so you're not holding up the line. Kevin King: They give you a coupon book that's in order and every coupon, every page, page 1 to say 35 has a number on it and has a cigar company that says this is good for one Olivia or one Fuente or whatever. But then you go and these booths are in rows around the convention center, but they're not in order. So it's not like it doesn't go from booth 1, 2, 3, 4 all the way up. They might be booth 1 and next to us booth 17, next to that's booth 31. And then you go to another row and it's a different assortment. And each row there's a line of people because there's thousands of people with this. So you got to actually create, that's marketing to get people to mix it up. And you got to create a strategy as someone like Norm and I to actually come in and actually conquer this and knock this thing out so we're just not standing in lines all day long. Norm Farrar: And we did, by the way. We did. Kevin King: Yeah, we did. Norm figured it out, got a map of the layout of the room and mapped it out. And then we divided and conquered. Norm Farrar: And by the way, we got to give a shout out to a new friend of ours, Dwayne. He helped us out and we talked about this just two weeks ago on the podcast about customer service and how you can use that as a marketing strategy. This guy was incredible. You want to talk about what this guy did for us? Kevin King: Yeah, so we, this event went over a Friday and Saturday night and we bought our tickets kind of late. So we weren't able to get the top level VIP, which allows you to get an extra hour into the event to go in at 530 instead of 630 with all the masses. You kind of get, it's less crowded and you get some more time. But on Saturday night, we had tickets to see the Eagles and the Spear. And this show started at 8.30 and you got to be over there at 7.30 and you need a little bit of time to get over there. It's not too far away, but you need a little bit of time to get over there and get situated with traffic and everything. So we're like, shoot, how are we going to do this? It's 6.30. Even if we haul last, there's no way we're going to get all of our 70 cigars, our 35 each. So we tried to buy a pass to actually upgrade. We said, we'll pay the 100 bucks or 200 bucks, whatever it is. And they told us, no, sorry, you can't do that. So Norm had the bright idea of... Unknown Speaker: What did you say? Kevin King: Norm actually had a bright idea. He's allowed two per year. Two per year. It is for you. Let's just go ask this guy over here. He looks kind of official in a suit. Goes up and asks this guy. It turns out his name is Dwayne. And Dwayne, he says, hey, Norm explains the situation. And the guy's like, yeah, don't worry. Come tomorrow. This was on Friday. Come back on Saturday. Come tomorrow. Come see me and I'll take care of you. So we're like, oh, really? And we thought, you know, he just might be saying that. You never know. So we show up on 530 on Saturday to actually go in an hour early. We find Dwayne, you know, down Taking people in, people were walking through and people were like, hey, where's your tickets? No, we're here to see DeWayne. We find DeWayne and he said, hey guys, we're wearing smoking jackets. Nobody forgets Norm's beard. That's a marketing thing. Everybody always remembers that. Plus we had these really nice smoking jackets that we're wearing so people knew we're official. DeWayne's like, hey guys, come with me, come to the front of the line. Norm Farrar: There's like 500 people in line at this point. Kevin King: They took us to the front of the line, like, here you go, just walk on in, gave us the coupon books. And we go into the show and we knock this thing out pretty quickly and we're able to get all our cigars, grab a quick drink, and then head over to the Eagle Show, which was really cool. We'll talk about that in another episode. But we've got a really cool guest today too, Norm, as well on the podcast, right? Norm Farrar: Yes, we do. Life in the Fastlane. I just got to say that. I got to say one Eagle song. I didn't feel like saying Desperado. Life in the Fastlane. I think that was one of your favorites, by the way. But today, we have a really good friend of ours, Michelle Barnum Smith, and I'm going to bring her on right now. Hey, there is Michelle. Michelle Barnum Smith: Hello. Kevin King: Hello. How are you, Michelle? Michelle Barnum Smith: I am excited to be here, guys. Love to hear all of the adventures that you two are constantly living. Like, where in the world are Norm and Kevin? Smoking cigars today. Kevin King: That's right. That's right. It's in the logo up there. It's in The Marketing Misfits logo. If you look up in the little logo up above Norm's right shoulder or behind me, you can see two dudes smoking cigars. So that's part of the culture of The Marketing Misfits, you know? Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Kevin King: We went to dinner last night with Mark and Vanessa. They were asking, where are you at? And we were explaining this to Vanessa Hung. And we were telling her this whole cigar culture and the way this whole thing works. And she was just fascinated by it. She was like, holy cow, I had no idea that there's this whole little cigar culture and these little groups and all this kind of stuff. But yeah, it's a cool world. Just like being a misfit is a cool world. You probably didn't even know that you're a little misfit, right? Michelle Barnum Smith: I do know that I'm a misfit. Kevin King: I know you do. I know you do. Michelle Barnum Smith: It's hard for me to fit in anywhere because I stand out, right? So, yes, yes. Kevin King: I'm very aware. You didn't always stand out. You started in the corporate world, right? Doing corporate marketing and then you had to work your way to try to stand out there. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, but I think about it all the way back from like my childhood. Like I grew up in this rural farming community. You know, I worked on a farm every day of my life, you know, and but my parents named me instead of Michelle, they named me Michelle, like the Beatles song. And so even from a very young, You know, age, I was always standing out and all of my classmates and it was one of those small, small towns where you go to the same, you go to school with the same people in kindergarten that you do graduate from high school. It's like all the way through. And so, you know, even, even down to my name, just not fitting in, you know, it's, it's, it's, I've like, I was set up for this type of life. I'm talking to be reintroducing myself. Actually, it's Michelle. So yes. Norm Farrar: So why don't we get into a bit of your background. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, I mean, so I've been working every day of my life since I was four and I like to say that I have like, I hold all of like the trump cards. So bless my heart. My children are, you know, they might complain about their chores or if they have to weed something, you know, like weed the garden or weed the yard or whatever. I'm like, oh, I must be, I must be really hard for you. You know, like I had to weed like miles of fields. And sometimes I'd have to wake, my parents would have to wake us up at like two in the morning. To go weed some fields during the harvest because a certain plant could only be pulled out of like the beans when the dew had settled on the plants. Otherwise it would shell the beans out and you'd spill the harvest all over the ground. So you have to like wake up and weed by the light of the moon, you know? So I just, sometimes when people are like, you know what, I wake up early every day and I'm like, I feel like I have earned the right to sleep in. I wake, I sleep until my body has woken me up and that to me is like true life success, which is usually around seven o'clock. So it's not anything crazy, but you know, I've lived multiple lives in my lifetime so far. Kevin King: What kind of farm was this? Where was this? Which state were you in? Michelle Barnum Smith: This is Eastern Washington State. Anytime I tell people I'm from Washington, they're all like Seattle. They think green and beautiful, but I'm from Eastern Washington, which is in what's called the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains. Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, all the volcanoes are part of the Cascade Mountains. Eastern Washington, you start driving from Seattle to the eastern side of the state or towards Idaho. And all of a sudden, it goes from this green, lush, beautiful environment to just like stark desert and scrubby and just like ugly. And you're like, what happened? The rain shadow happened. So that's where I grew up was was eastern Washington state. And it was a crop farm. So my grandparents, both sets of my grandparents helped settle that kind of region in the In the 1950s and 60s. And so we have kind of like a whole family history of crop farming and I grew peas, beans, corn, hay, alfalfa. Yeah, all the fun stuff. Kevin King: So you did that all the way through high school and then you escaped to college. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, so I started college when I was 14. Another thing that made me a misfit My mom was like super smart and she saw that she wanted more for her children than like what the local school system could offer. And she had grand plans for all of her children to get out of the small town and go to the big city of Provo, Utah to go to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I laugh because it's not a big city, but compared to the rural small town that I grew up in. She found that there was a way that we could start college sooner and therefore graduate with an associate's degree at the same time you graduate from high school and therefore transfer and be ahead of the game type of a thing. I left all those high school friends and went to the local I graduated at 18 as a junior in college already, which is pretty crazy to think about. Kevin King: You just did two years then at Brigham Young? Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, it was about two and a half years. Kevin King: Did Ron have to do a two-year service thing as well or was it just the guys? Michelle Barnum Smith: I personally didn't. Yeah, I'm a Latter-day Saint. So women are not required. It's not part of our duties, whereas men, it's more of a duty. Women can volunteer to do it, of course. But I didn't feel like that was right for me. I graduated from college right after I turned 21, which is usually at that time when women could go and serve missions. And I started a whole high-tech career. And this was August of 2001. And so, right then it was like the tech boom, the tech bubble, the dot-com bubble thing was going on. And I started as an intern at a big high-tech company, August of 2001. In Utah? Unknown Speaker: Yeah, in Utah. Michelle Barnum Smith: Okay. Yeah, Utah, people don't realize, but Utah has a huge tech presence. Kevin King: The public city is huge in financial stuff and in a lot, yeah. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yep. Yep. There's lots of talent in the area. So lots of, lots of tech giants call it Silicon slopes, but yeah, I graduated from college right before September 11th happened. And then obviously that happened and it just, you know, of course it, it like burst the tech, the tech bubble and there was lots of layoffs. That was, that's like the, the story of my career is, is just riding, riding the various waves of layoffs that, that, are inevitable when you're working in corporate high-tech marketing, for sure. Kevin King: So you weren't coding, you were doing high-tech marketing. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah. So I started. Kevin King: What's that mean? What's high-tech marketing mean? And now a word from one of our sponsors, one of Norm and I's favorite tools, Stack Influence. Norm Farrar: Are you looking to quickly boost new Amazon product launches or scale up existing listings to reach first page positioning? The influencer platform Stack Influence can help. Stack Influence pushes high-volume external traffic sales to Amazon listings using micro-influencers, and guess what? You only have to pay with your products. They've helped up-and-coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top-category positioning, while also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products. Right now is the best time to get started with Stack Influence to crush it during this holiday season. Kevin King: That's right, Norm. Sign up today at stackinfluence.com or click the link in the video below and mention Misfits. That's right. Misfits. M-I-S-F-I-T-S to get 10% off your first campaign. Head over to stackinfluence.com right now. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, that is a good question because it means a lot of different things, right? When somebody tells me that they're like, they do marketing, I'm like, Care to go a little bit deeper? What kind of marketing do you do? Who do you do it for? Where do you do it? High-tech is different because it's B2B at its most basic level. Oftentimes, though, it's enterprise to enterprise. The big companies, I worked for the Fortune 100. More often than not, they were selling into other Fortune 100 companies. So my corporate career was kind of built around partner marketing. And so that was fun for me because then that let me work with these other tech giants in doing marketing campaigns. With them, for them, you know, those types of things. It was very rare that it was business to consumer. It was mostly like, okay, it's lead generation for the sales teams within these huge tech giants and trying to make sure the sales teams and business development teams had opportunities to pursue with selling the products. Kevin King: What did you learn then in that corporate world doing that marketing that you've been able to actually apply to what you're doing now? Michelle Barnum Smith: If anything, yeah, you know what, actually, actually, it's, it's laid the groundwork for understanding how corporate works. And I focus on TikTok shop now. And when TikTok shop first opened in the United States, I knew they were going to have a partner program because that's what big tech does. And so I immediately tracked down their partner program so that I could We're going to talk a little bit about how I joined and I was one of their very first partners ever. I literally got on the phone and tracked down the person over partnerships in New York City. I still have a relationship with her to this day. Last week when we were in Innovate, I had some meetings with that team. Corporate is one of the big kind of takeaways. It's not some necessarily like the marketing and how to as much as it is that every layer in corporate, everybody who is working in corporate has kind of like their roles and responsibilities and the thing, the ways that they are measured, right? Like they have the things that they are motivated to do. So if you can figure out what motivates them and give them what they want, they will get you what you want. Does that make sense? Figuring out how to navigate political landscapes is a huge one. Understanding lead generation is always important, especially in the business world. I have a business-to-business Business, you know, I sell to other businesses. And so understanding how lead generation works and CRMs and, and those types of things, um, all, all kind of play into that. The actual tactics, so much has changed. Marketing is one of those, those worlds that changes constantly. Right. And the tools are always changing. So even if I was using Salesforce originally, and I remember when LinkedIn came out. You know, and was a thing. Like, I was one of the first people to join LinkedIn because I wanted to stay in contact with all of these corporate friends of mine that were constantly, like, getting hired and let go and laid off and all of these things. So staying in contact. So even though, like, marketing tools might come on, they've changed so drastically from, you know, their point of origination. Norm Farrar: Are you finding that the marketing tools or just strategies that you're using now have just become full circle? Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, I feel like I'm in a full circle moment for sure. Norm Farrar: Yeah. One of the things I should mention, by the way, Michelle, it's not that Kevin doesn't like what you're saying. He's got his reactions on. So if you see the thumbs down, it's not that he disagrees. Michelle Barnum Smith: I was like, oh, is it that bad, Kevin? Kevin King: Is something pop on the screen? Norm Farrar: Yeah, right in the middle. Kevin King: What? How does it do that? Was it AI listening or something? Norm Farrar: No, it's a you got reaction setting set somewhere and I don't know. Do this. Kevin King: Oh, it did. Oh, no, it didn't go, but I don't know. Norm Farrar: But all of a sudden Michelle was talking about this. Oh, there we go. Kevin King: Okay. Oh, sorry about that. Yeah. I don't know what happened. I don't know. I must've moved in a certain way that, uh, I have to apologize for picking up tools. You know, it was a great, it was a great, you know, uh, so what, what led you to get out of the corporate world and, and get into, I know we'll talk about the Tik TOK shop, but I know you did. You're a many chat specialist before that. And so you've been in the tech side of things, but what, what led you to get out? And did you go straight into the main chat or were you selling some e-commerce stuff? Talk us through that. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, so in 2012, I finally got married and much to big bearded man. So every time I see Norm, I just feel like I'm looking at my future. Norm Farrar: And how's that for you? Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, so I met and married my husband, Mark, and he was not bearded the whole time we were dating. I will just say that. And then he did a little switcheroo after we got married and, you know, it makes him happy. And so therefore, It's fine, but someday I would like to see his face. Our daughters have never seen his face. I haven't seen his face since we got married, you know, like someday, maybe. I keep threatening him if his hobbies kill him, like he's a hunter, he bikes, he fishes, all these things. I'm like, if you die from one of your hobbies, I'll shave you. I will shave you. And so at your funeral, everybody can see your real face. Kevin King: These AI apps that will actually do it for you on TikTok. Michelle Barnum Smith: Oh, that's funny. That's funny. Yeah. Oh, anyway. What urged me to start my own thing? So in one of my experiences in corporate life was seeing women, um, who wanted that mom life, you know, who, and, and the, and the options were limited, you know, it was like working mom was an oxymoron, you know? Um, so if, if, uh, if a man left work early to go to his soccer, his friend, his son's soccer game, he was a good dad. If a woman left early. Is she really committed to her career? You know, these were the conversations that I was exposed to. I saw women who had these, you know, very generous maternity benefits, you know, basically be back in the office two weeks after giving birth, uh, because of the political, the politics involved, you know, and I didn't want that. I wanted more flexibility. I wanted more options. Um, and, and the only options at that point were to, to quit. You know, to be a mom full time. And I also knew that I was deep enough in my career and had racked up, you know, 12, 13 years of corporate pedigree to walk away from that was a very expensive choice, you know. Because everything in corporate is all kind of seniority oriented. How many years have you been doing this? Like how far up the ladder are you? Do you have a senior manager role, a director level role, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so to take time away to have a family and then to expect to come back. That's not an option. That was an option. And so I was like, you know, I want more control. I want more flexibility. I want to be able to have my babies and use my brain too. And, you know, with a work setting, obviously you use your brain quite a bit as a parent. And so that's why I kind of, I took some time and I stepped away at that point before I had kids. Um, to, to kind of like put together what I was going to do. And that's when I kind of like created, uh, my first kind of marketing agency, my main business, which I called your marketing therapy. Uh, cause I found that I was really good at marketing strategy. Like I can, I can talk marketing strategy and really help people identify, um, opportunities for their businesses very quickly. In fact, I turned it into a, uh, And today I want to talk to you about a dating coaching business at the same time, because I found that what helped me get married at the, at the ancient age for my religion, um, of 32, I might as well be a like dead and buried in the ground to get married that late. What were my marketing skills? I had this round-the-world business trip where I was doing focus groups in China and London and Frankfurt and Amsterdam and doing all of these things. And the very last end of that kind of tour, round-the-world tour, was Paris. And I was in Paris on my birthday. And my birthday's in May. So it was spring in Paris, right? It's very beautiful. Cherry blossoms and just. All of this things. And I was there alone. And I was just like, I'm in the most romantic city in the world alone on my birthday. This sucks, you know? And I kind of had this like pity party moment and I had this spiritual kind of realization or just like I heard a voice and it said, Michelle, you have the tools. You know what to do. You need to get married. And I was like, I don't. Unknown Speaker: What are you talking about? Michelle Barnum Smith: I've been trying. I've been dating. It's not like I've been sitting at home wasting away. I tried, but I realized at the end of that tour that how I had been, every step along the way, we had been You know, talking to people in different cultures and different languages and different, you know, you know, life experiences and doing these focus groups and what came back down to it every single time was branding, targeting and advertising. And those were the things that mattered the most. And those were the things as a single woman that I could control. I could control branding, targeting and advertising. I could control my own personal brand, who I was, what values I represented, how I positioned the product, how I looked, how I felt about how I looked. And then I could identify my target audience, what I was looking for and how that How that translated then into advertising was I actually advertising in the places to find that target market, you know, and I had to have kind of some tough, tough discussions with myself about that. And it resulted in me meeting my husband. And so then for a couple of years, in addition to having like a marketing business where I was helping businesses with their marketing strategies, I was also helping single people with their marketing strategies as well in their branding, targeting, advertising. And I'm happy to say I had some successful I had some successful sellers. I don't have any babies named after me, which I'm a little offended. I mean, Michelle makes a really great middle name at the very least, but, um, but no, like it, it definitely worked for, for some people, but. Yeah, it was kind of a wild ride initially. But no, I did not start off as the queen of ManyChat or TikTok Shop. I had some detours along the way, which any good entrepreneur does, right? It's all about the pivot. It's all about figuring out what works and exploring all the avenues to be able to extend your reach. Norm Farrar: You know, it's pretty interesting that you're talking about your personal brand. You've gone out there and you're marketing yourself, you know, in the dating scene. And I was at an event and there was a face reader there. He worked with companies for jury selection. Michelle Barnum Smith: Oh. Norm Farrar: And he was telling me different, different, like I had my face read, same with a whole bunch of other people. And they were talking about the way your eyebrows are just natural. This is all natural. Not that you can go and groom them or do it. If you do that, and I asked them, if I decided that I didn't like my eyebrows the way they are and I got them some other way, that's gearing towards how your personality is going to shift naturally, which was really bizarre. But one thing he said to me, and I never even thought about it, he just said, for my mustache, He says, you should grow it about an eighth of an inch to a quarter inch longer and people will respect you that much more. You'll be that much more of an authority. And I went, what? And sure enough, I looked it up and that's part of this facial recognition thing. I can trim up the beard. And with beards, there's all sorts of different ways. So I'm talking about marketing here. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah. Norm Farrar: So, you know, your own personal brand. And if I wanted to, I can have a clean cut. I can have a goatee. I did have the Yosemite Sam one time when I burnt hamburgers and it kind of went up here. But it comes down to how you want to position yourself. And the way you want to look. So let's say Kevin, you know, maybe he wants to grow hair. He can, I can't for the most part, you know, or if he wanted to have a mustache coming across here. It was so shocked that by doing just something simple to your face or to maybe your posture, it also reflects your personality and how other people, how you want other people to see you. Michelle Barnum Smith: Oh, that's so interesting. And I bet, especially for jury selection. Norm Farrar: Oh, oh yeah. Michelle Barnum Smith: You know, because you also have like the micro expression. Norm Farrar: Exactly. Michelle Barnum Smith: Side of things too, where I have one of those faces where I'm, it talks whether I'm speaking or not. If I think you're an idiot, my face says it. So sometimes it's not very helpful. But yeah, micro expression reading is super critical. Kevin King: It goes beyond that though. Also, you can judge people in negotiations based on their facial features. There's a guy at GoHighLevel that actually did a whole talk on that and he showed all these examples. One of them was in my newsletter a couple of weeks ago. How if your eyebrows are high or if they're curved or if they're flat, it means different things about your personality. And these might not be deliberate things that you're doing, but it actually reveals a lot about how you answer stuff and how you will respond to being pitched to. And he went through this whole thing about how to do this on Zoom calls and actually get better results. And he showed some case studies stuff. It was really, really interesting. So like you said, though, marketing, I mean, People eat with their eyes first and first impressions do matter. Some people always say, well, I don't care what people think. I don't care. I'm going to dress how I want and that's okay, but you got to understand that's part of your branding as well. I think like you're talking about on facial hair for a man, that's probably one of the only ways that a man can really change himself and maybe grow his hair longer or shorter. But women do it all the time between makeup and lashes and the way they dress, whether it's heels or flats or whatever, how much midriff they're showing or not showing, how their hairstyle is, whether it's up in a bun, it's in a ponytail. I mean, women have a lot more flexibility, I think, on personal branding than men do. Would you agree with that? Michelle Barnum Smith: Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. As women, we can constantly reinvent ourselves physically, you know. It's kind of the nature of, I don't know. I think some women don't care, you know, and that's fine. There are things that I'm interested in exploring and there are other things that I'm not, you know, and, um, but you're right as like my husband, he walks into a room, he's six two, he's got this big bushy beard. Plus he has a lot of hair on his head and men just like. Watch him. He's alpha without even trying to be alpha. You know, they're just, they're like, they roll over and show them, show them, show them their belly. Yeah. Cause it's just like, he is, he's obviously very, he's got all this hair and therefore he's the king. You know, it's funny. It's always funny to watch. Kevin King: I think men do it like that more for power. To be like, like you said, the alpha male, you know, walk in. But I think women do personal branding more for other women. Michelle Barnum Smith: Oh, for sure. Kevin King: And men, women are always dressing and doing things to actually impress other women first and guys second. Women always dress to impress other women. Norm Farrar: We talked about that in Vegas, Kev. Kevin King: Yeah. And that's a lot of people, a lot of guys don't understand that. They don't realize that and they don't understand that women Their brand is more important to another woman than it is to another guy. Michelle Barnum Smith: And what's interesting is my husband is very much an introvert. And so when he walks into a room, he would, I think he thinks that by growing such a luscious beard, as men tell him, um, that he's hiding, but he's actually like, it actually makes him stand out. He's, he's obvious. He's way more obvious, you know? And, um, but you're right, Kevin, like women, women, definitely. There's a little bit of that kind of. Whether we want to admit it or not, kind of that pecking order mentality of like, you know, where do I fall? Where do I, you know, am I the prettiest one in the room? You know, like that kind of a thing. Am I dressed the best or whatever? I try to think of like what motivates me when I'm choosing what to wear. What's especially hard for me, you know, is it's really stressful, is like I work from home most of the time. Like I'm here in my basement and on Zoom calls. And so I'll dress nice from like the waist up, right? And then the waist down, it's just yoga pants, you know, it's just something comfy. But then when I need to go... Kevin King: Who doesn't wear pants? Norm doesn't wear pants. Michelle Barnum Smith: I don't want to know, Norm. Norm Farrar: Sorry, Michelle. Kevin King: I told him he'd sit in my chair in my office. Today he wears pants. Norm Farrar: Yeah. Michelle Barnum Smith: Oh, thanks for that. Kevin King: We'll put down the pants if we need to below that, you know. Don't worry. Put down one of those pee pads, like from a dog. Unknown Speaker: Oh, that's awesome. Michelle Barnum Smith: That's awesome. Norm Farrar: Yeah. Michelle Barnum Smith: But when I go to actual events, I tell people I'm either like a mom at home in yoga pants or I'm on a stage somewhere. Right. And that's like, and sometimes it stresses me out with my wardrobe because I'm like, Oh gosh, what do I want to wear that people haven't seen me wear? You know? Cause I'm usually have like my stage outfit. Do I want to wear the same thing every single time? No. So then it becomes this like, all right, what do I need to wear so that I can stand out this time? And also, this is a point of unfairness, I think, is that men can, for the most part, show up. They could look homeless if they want to and be up on a stage and have so much credibility. And I see this in the tech space, especially. Um, you know, these, these startups, these startup founders and people who look like they just rolled out of bed. Right. But a woman, if she were to pull that and like, you know, walk on stage, most of the time people don't take her seriously. You have a few, you have a few people here and there where, you know, they might show up that way and it surprises you when they open their mouth and they're like these brilliant people. But for the most part, people expect to listen to women who are presenting themselves, you know. Kevin King: Men that are disheveled with their hair, like Sam Altman, the guy that went to jail, the crypto stuff, he's got this hair, never probably combs his hair. They're expected to be nerds. And that's a sign of being smart and nerdy. Versus women are not expected to be nerds. And that's why this whole movement to STEM And all this kind of stuff to try to get women more involved in the tech space, which I'm sure you being in the tech space and in tech marketing, well, marketing is heavily women in most business, especially in the corporate world. Predominantly, I graduated with a degree in marketing from Texas A&M. That's 70% women. But when you get into the tech side, it's the opposite. It's 90% dudes and 10% women. So you have that blend there. So how is that? Michelle Barnum Smith: And it's very rare that you meet a woman on the tech side who doesn't look like a dude. Kevin King: Yeah, there's a lot. Exactly. And that's not a disparaging remark or anything. It's just a fact. Michelle Barnum Smith: It's just a fact. Yeah. Having worked in many high-tech companies, that is just the truth of it. Kevin King: And I think they're spending time coding and having fun with what they're doing and not going through reading Vogue magazine and staying on the latest trends and all that kind of stuff. That's one of the reasons for that. I mean, there's other reasons that we don't want to go into, but there's... But yeah, it's interesting. Michelle Barnum Smith: It is. It is. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, I mean, when it comes down to personal branding, you know, I think at the end of the day, you need to look a certain way that makes you feel comfortable. Because when you're comfortable, then you're confident. Now, like for me, if I were to try to look a certain way that is not And if you have a brand that I'm not comfortable with, that is not who I am as a person, then you would also, you would feel that you would sense that in my presentation, not, not just on a stage, but also in my interactions with others, you know, in, in a networking environment. So I think, you know, if we were to wrap that thought in a pretty bow, it'd be like from a marketing perspective and taking responsibility for your personal brand. Understand what you are comfortable with and how you want to present yourself. And discovering that will help with your confidence in how you present yourself to others. Norm Farrar: Now, a quick word from our sponsor, LaVanta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it. Kevin King: That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levanta, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right. It's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers, all in Levanta's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from. Norm Farrar: So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. Kevin King: You both are parents. This is a question to both of you. You're both parents. The younger generation now, the kids, they want to stand out. When it comes to personal branding, I don't want to be just another guy, so I'm going to paint half of my head red and half of my head black. I'm going to wear these big earrings in my ears. I'm going to do all this just because I'm just being myself, is what they say. I'm just being me. But that's personal branding. What do you think is leading to that? Sometimes you look at them and I will judge that person. I'll see somebody that looks like that. Then you hear them speak and like, this person is not what I expected because they're way smarter, they're vocal. It's not what you expect. Branding actually creates an initial expectation and picture and sometimes there's a mismatch there. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, for sure. So I actually think it's not about branding. I think it's something deeper. Um, I think it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is also like something I first learned about in my marketing classes. So full circle, but when, if we, if we're looking, I didn't do that. Kevin King: I didn't do anything. I'm just holding my hands like this. I don't know what that is. Michelle Barnum Smith: Kevin disagrees. Unknown Speaker: Um. Michelle Barnum Smith: You guys are familiar with my, are you guys familiar? So, so I feel like we are, you know, the, the basic level of, I'm looking at the, I'm looking at the pyramid right now. The very basic level is physiological needs, breathing, food, water, shelter, clothing, sleep. So we live in a society where our basic needs For the majority of the population are met. We are not in the Great Depression where people are just trying to survive, right? We're not like I was raised in not only with depression era grandparents, and then people who literally, you know, carved, carved farmland out of a desert, you know, their pioneer, I have pioneer stock in me, basically. You have physiological needs, then safety and security. Then love and belonging, then self-esteem, then self-actualization. That's the pyramid. I think we're so far removed from physiological needs being met, safety and security being met, and for the most part, I think a lot of depression, anxiety, and things that are happening, the kind of epidemic, The reason that we're experiencing the world around anxiety, depression, you know, those kinds of things is because we've lost that sense of connection. Social media has replaced traditional ways of human connection. But people are trying to find new ways to define purpose. And instead of that purpose being going out and working the fields or doing hunting wild beasts or doing whatever you had to do to survive and have security that day, We're trying to find purpose and meaning in our lives. And sometimes that displays itself in trying different hairstyles and, you know, gauging our ears and, you know, doing all these flamboyant things to try to stand out, to try to find personal meaning, you know, and, and have this kind of self-esteem and be like, I'm unique. Norm Farrar: There he goes again. Stop it, Kevin. Michelle's got some great points. Michelle Barnum Smith: This is an important message. Unknown Speaker: This is an important message. Kevin King: Flip that thing. Flip that thing. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, it's so funny. There's some setting in your Apple. Kevin King: There's probably something setting it somewhere. Sorry about that. Michelle Barnum Smith: No, no, no. You're fine. You're fine. It's funny. So anyway, I think that that is really kind of a critical point as a society that we're at is that so many of those Those basic needs are being met that on a daily basis, people don't have to think about survival. They don't have to think about where their next meal is coming from, where they're going to sleep that night, who, you know, if they're loved, if they have connection and purpose, you know, in the form of family or friends. So I think people are trying to find ways to define themselves and to, you know, figure out what their life purpose is. And therefore it looks like different things. Kevin King: Thus the evolution of social media and TikTok. TikTok started as Musical.ly for music lovers, like a music channel. And I remember Gary Vanderchuk talking about it seven, eight years ago, like everybody should invest in Musical.ly. This is going to be the next big thing. And then Musical.ly pivoted. They got bought by ByteDance and they pivoted into TikTok and took that audience and leveraged them into TikTok. And TikTok, now it's become commercialized and that's what you're helping with on the TikTok Shop. But before the commercialization, it was this place to stand out and to identify and to find your common ground. And the algorithm was so good at watching people that it could actually find those exact things that made you either feel special or feel like you're wanted and loved and those satisfy those needs or find the audience where you could find that and identify with them. And that's what really blew up TikTok and that's evolved now into one of the hottest new e-commerce platforms for selling and a whole bunch of other stuff and upsetting governments and upsetting parents and everything else. So, I mean, we've never seen anything like it with TikTok. I mean, you had Facebook, you had Instagram. All big social media, LinkedIn, all the other Snapchat, some have come and gone. Some have gone out of business like Vine and those, but then you have TikTok that's just becoming this beast, especially in certain countries like Indonesia and the U.S. and China. And China goes by a different name. It doesn't go by TikTok. But what do you think is contributing to this massive popularity of TikTok? Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah. In a word, authenticity. So what makes TikTok so different from every other social media platform? The only one that's closest to it is Snapchat, but from an authenticity standpoint, because you think about, you think about the comparison between Instagram and TikTok and Instagram prior to that was this kind of curated experience. The creators that you followed were there to inspire you at best or shame you at worst because you're like, my house is a mess. It doesn't look like this, you know, this person's house and you know, all of those types of things. So the kind of content that was on Instagram was very. It felt very curated. It felt very, you know, like unachievable, you know, and what was different about TikTok and where it really kind of exploded was during COVID when we're all locked inside of our houses, we need something to entertain us, but also to feel connected to other people because we're so isolated, right? And people could just be themselves. It wasn't this curated experience. It wasn't this inauthentic experience. It was like, yeah, you're right. I haven't showered today. Um, but I'm still here and I'm still here to like talk about my day or what I'm thinking about, or I'm just going to make some spaghetti out of a jar. And with some dry pasta, I'm not going to like. Try to wow you with making pasta from scratch. You know, I'm not just here to inspire you. I'm just here to be a human and and it really just like like fire is taken off so much so that it's really hard. And I'm here to talk to you about how to get for big brands to be successful on TikTok, because big brands have a ridiculously difficult time with authenticity. And this is, this is from communications I've had with, with TikTok directly, because they're like, we have tried so often to, to recruit the Procter and Gamble's and the Hasbro's and the Nike's and you know, these big brands. Pull, you know, they're so corporate. They have so much corporate red tape. They have a PR team. They have the legal team. They have, you know, the million marketing teams to like control every aspect of how the brand is represented. They're not going to just turn their brand over to a bunch of unwashed creators to represent product and, and showcase how. You know how something works or or whatever like they want to have that. They want to control every aspect of how their brand is represented and so they don't do well on TikTok because they can't relinquish that control. Kevin King: But isn't a brand a fundamental? I agree with you, by the way. I don't care what the thing says here up or down. I agree with you. But isn't that a fundamental thing of branding though? A lot of people think a brand is a logo or a name. It's way beyond that. It's how something makes you feel. It's how you identify. That's a brand and so I would think these brands would want authenticity. But I think they're afraid of the negative side of that where it's like, I don't like this brand because of X, Y, Z and they want to control that. But the authenticity side is that you want to show people in real life using real things and not, I would think, but that's a hard hurdle for a corporate world to overcome because of the controlling of the legal issues and everything else that comes along with it. Norm Farrar: That's old school too. They're just not representing. They're not on point with the brand so they're afraid to let go. And you just see it all the time. You see it and even... Kevin King: Is that an age thing? Is that an age thing? Because the C-suites 50 and 60 year olds that don't understand what the 20 and 30 year olds are doing? Michelle Barnum Smith: I don't think so. There's too many decision makers. There's too much red tape. So those corporations are just massive. And so for something to eventually get seen, it has to pass through so many hands and so many sign-offs. So they're not agile. They're not agile at all. And especially with TikTok and TikTok Shop. Kevin King: They should be. They should take what just happened with Chili's. The restaurant chain, the Chili's restaurant chain, I don't know, depending on where you're listening to this, Chili's is a casual upscale, not upscale, but mid-scale casual restaurant. In the United States, that serves all kinds of really bad food that's bad for you. I mean, the food, some people love the food, but it's bad. Michelle Barnum Smith: I like the chicken crispers in the case. Kevin King: Fried foods and it's high calorie, but people love it. But just recently, in the last few weeks, a woman on TikTok I actually took, I think it's their cheese, one of their cheese things, their mozzarella cheese stick deals and did this video that just pulling it out of her mouth and the cheese falling over and just talking about how delicious it was. Sales at Chili's nationwide in the United States the following week went up 40% because of that one video. 40%, look it up. You can Google this story. It's an amazing story. And now Chili's is doubling down on it. And they're like, how can we repeat this? And they're the exact same thing. They don't understand. They're trying to create some source like commercial or try to get someone else to do it. It's like, no, just go with authenticity. But 40%, that's the power of TikTok. And this is this chain with hundreds of maybe even, I don't even know how many restaurants, hundreds for sure. Maybe even into the thousands. And 40% of their stock is up because of one woman who wasn't hired by the company, who just did this on her own and it just went viral. And people were like, I gotta go get me some of those. That looks freaking awesome. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, if I were Chili's right now, I would have like a go post your poll. Like create a hashtag that's relevant to the moment. Post your poll because it's the cheese poll, you know, kind of a thing. And you could even have like a promo code that you ran and just said, hey, Tuesdays, TikTok Tuesdays. You know, like come in and post your poll, you know, kind of a thing. And like even host TikTok lives. Like there's so many things that like Chili's could leverage, you know, outside of like, Oh, we got to hire a marketing agency to, you know, like do a focus group, you know, very, very traditional. Be like more responsive in the moment to it. Norm Farrar: Have that guy's noticed? Have you guys noticed the TV commercials that are just, some of them are okay, but most of them, these large companies, franchise companies are trying to come off like they're using influencers, like a TikTok feel, are just missing it. And it's like, oh my God. Kevin King: The one that misses it, Chick-fil-A actually is trying to do that. They run a lot of ads during sporting events and they have two people sitting on a couch and one of them is a customer. And one of them is someone who works at the restaurant. They're telling some story like, yep, I've been passing through the drive-thru every year and I always take care of Miss Sue because she always likes extra salt with her fries or whatever. And then I'll have some sort of little voiceover of a real person. And I think they're totally missing the mark and they're trying to make that. Authenticity, but I think they're completely missing the mark on that. And I think that's a case study. Someone should look at it and go, this is what not to do. But they keep running them, so they must think they're working. Or maybe there's some KPI that says they're working, but I just don't see it compared to this Chili's one. Norm Farrar: The opinions shared on this podcast are solely of. Michelle Barnum Smith: I love Chick-fil-A. I don't care what they do. Kevin King: I love Chick-fil-A too, but I think they're missing the mark on their advertising. Michelle Barnum Smith: I'm a mom with a minivan and Chick-fil-A is life for my family. Yeah, for sure. No, it's true. It's very difficult to stage authentic content. Kevin King: And that's what this is, is staged. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah. Norm Farrar: I'm curious. Kevin King: Scripted and staged. Norm Farrar: How do you do it, Michelle? Kevin King: How do you do it? As a misfit, thinking outside the box, is it throwing, just getting a hundred creators, like, here you go, here's our product, make something, go for it. And then you hope one of them actually does something cool that works and goes viral? Or what's the process to actually do this? Michelle Barnum Smith: For a corporate or for just a regular old business? Kevin King: Either or both. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah. Kevin King: So, there's less overhead, less obstacles. Michelle Barnum Smith: And this is what I tell, that's why my focus isn't on big brands. My focus is on, you know, expand your brand to TikTok shop for, you know, Amazon sellers, for DTC sellers, you know, people who are, you know, already in the marketplaces and having success there and want to grow. Beyond maybe the channels that they're currently selling on. And most of them don't understand the social side. They don't understand the creator side. And a lot of them get paralyzed from starting on the platform because they think that they have to be the face of the brand. And they don't want to be. They don't want to be content creators. They don't want to have to hire a team of content creators to create branded content. And I say that is the opportunity of TikTok because TikTok is full of creators who don't own brands and want to be the face of your brand, you know, and it's an opportunity for you to, um, to test different creators, to find out who's right for your brand. Um, what I think where I think most, uh, uh, sellers, Some kind of some key mistakes that sellers make straight out the gate is marrying before they date. Meaning like they commit, they're like, Oh, I'm going to hire a brand ambassador straight out the gate. And this person is responsible for creating content for my brand. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. You need a date before you get married. You need to like, see who's right for your brand, who creates good content, converting content, has the right audience. That's responsive to, um, to various offers because it might not be who you expect. And oftentimes the, Let's say the matchmaking institutions that are out there to introduce you to other creators are presenting what we call vanity metrics. How many followers they have, you know, what their, like their average views, you know, things, things that aren't actually associated with the end of the day, this making money. Right. And that can be fabricated. Anybody can buy followers. Anybody can join a follower train to inflate their followers. There's a lot of that going on right now because so many creators are having success on the platform and it's generating a whole generation of what I call UGC creators who are just hopping on the bandwagon and just trying to grow their followers to qualify to be able to come get TikTok shop samples and produce content. Kevin King: What's the difference between a creator and an influencer? That's where I think a lot of people get stumbled to. You hear those two words interchangeably, but they're two different things. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah. Kevin King: Can you explain for the audience the difference between an influencer and a creator? Michelle Barnum Smith: Well, for me, there's a difference between an influencer, a creator, and an affiliate. So a creator, let's start with creators because there is a difference. A creator is somebody who creates content for the sole purpose of creating content. So if we think of on TikTok, if we just think on TikTok creators, we've got Keith Lee, who is, you know, he's TikTok famous for food reviews. So the purpose, the intent behind his content is entertainment and knowledge building. You know, his, his purpose as a creator is, is bringing awareness to these small restaurants in these various cities to, to help them with their marketing, you know, kind of the thing, but how he monetizes is through video views and, um, Engagement and TikTok rewards those types of creators because they want people following them, people watching their content. It's kind of like episodes in a TV show, right? So, so just like Netflix is going to pick up some shows that people are really invested in and want to watch more seasons of, uh, not to tell, not that I watched this, but like secret lives of Mormon housewives. You know, that's Hulu, Hulu's latest, you know, addiction. And they just started season, season two recording because everybody loves it. So creators are all about the content. Influencers have an intent for you to purchase. So influencers are those typical, are typically trying to get you to buy a product of some sort. And that's why they're called influencers. Oh, they made me buy it. So-and-so made me buy it. TikTok made me buy it. TikTok itself is an influencing platform, right? And then you have affiliates and affiliates is where I feel like we've come full circle where you take influencers and you apply accountability and like kind of a joint venture partnership to it. And when I win, you win kind of a relationship. Influencers, it's always been kind of this like, Oh, could I work with you? I'll pay you $5,000 a post, you know, that type of a thing. And then you wonder, did anything happen from that? Did anything actually like occur? Affiliates and what the beauty of with TikTok Shop is that the loops are closed and the reporting and the attribution is all, is all there. So when somebody posts, you can see the exact You know, results of those sales and that's powerful for that relationship. So back to the dating before you get married, you know analogy, you date a lot of affiliates and then the cream rises to the top and those people either on a monthly, quarterly, you know, or you know, I wouldn't go annual but I do it more short-term. Those become your brand ambassadors who you can then pay to create content for you on an ongoing basis or you have more campaigns or products that you launch with them, etc, etc. Kevin King: I know with your company, one of the things that you do, though, is you take a much more analytical approach to the creators and affiliates, especially because when we were at the Think Tank, we were sitting there with somebody at the Market Masters Think Tank. We were sitting there with somebody that has a product and you're like on the computer, like looking at the stats on TikTok. You're going, oh my gosh, you need to do a video. About this particular thing, because it's, I'm making this up, 30,000 searches a month or views a month or whatever, but there's only 18 videos that satisfy this. And so that's what a lot of people aren't doing. They're not using the data and combined with the creativity to actually find what they can actually do. So they're just throwing stuff against the wall and hoping something sticks when there's actually a much better way to do this. And that's what you teach, right? And what you do. Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, that's part of it. Yeah, for sure. I'm all about quantity first and swiping right on a lot of potential suitors. And then when it comes to the sample request portion, getting really particular on who you're going to send that sample out to and develop a relationship with. I definitely have a process that I've outlined because what I see a lot happen is that people are just like, You know, working with affiliates very willingly and not being, not approaching it from that branding, targeting, advertising kind of methodology and, um, and being specific on, well, who has my target audience? Those are the creators that I want to work with, um, and testing those relationships. Kevin King: Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm? Norm Farrar: Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast? Kevin King: Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say. Norm Farrar: I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too and we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another. Unknown Speaker: Yikes! Norm Farrar: But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of The Marketing Misfits. Kevin King: Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. Norm Farrar: So we're down to a couple of minutes before we have to end the podcast. This flew by, by the way. I got a question and that's about getting people more involved. We discussed this a little earlier on, but a lot of sellers, a ton of sellers are not getting involved for one reason or another. Do you have any quick action steps that those people that are sitting on the fence, what can they do to help them get on to TikTok? Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, I mean, it's a good question because there are barriers to entry. Currently, international sellers are not allowed to sell on TikTok Shop. So that's a barrier. There's also business registration difficulties that happen with documentation and there's more. You know, bots than humans to be able to review people's issues. That being said, back to understanding how corporate works, because I saw these issues happening, I developed a system to be able to connect sellers to the right people inside of TikTok Shop, who actually are motivated to get new merchants on the platform. And I'm like, hello, we have a free resource right now. It's, you know, the business development managers at TikTok Shop. This is what they are tasked to do. And they're organized by category. You know, let me help you. Let me broker an intro so that you guys can get connected and get this free resource. Like when was the last time you had like a human being that you could talk to Amazon when you had an issue? Like, oh my goodness, like, let's take advantage of this. So to the people who are fence setters, especially right now, I'm like, guys, How many times do you as Amazon sellers be like, Oh, I heard back in the day you had all this stuff and, and man, good old days. And I'm like, it's the good old days right now on TikTok shop. We have access to things that I know are going to go away. I know we're going to go away. Take advantage of it right now. Get it while it's, get it while it's hot, get it while we have access to humans, you know. Where, where there's, you know, this, there's not this like huge influx of, of products and sellers on the platform. Get, get, well, the getting's good, you know, kind of a thing. So I can share a link with you guys where, where people can, um, uh, you know, submit a form and I can broker that introduction. I can match make for you with, uh, business development managers. If you're, if you're new to the platform, if you're getting started. Norm Farrar: Hopefully it's swiping right. Michelle Barnum Smith: I hope so. Swipe right on Michelle. Norm Farrar: Kev, you got any other questions? We got enough. Kevin King: No, I got plenty. I mean, we'll keep talking for about another five hours. Unknown Speaker: I'll have to bring you back on. Kevin King: Yeah, we'll have to bring you back on because we can go into the weeds on some of this stuff. Pretty cool. Michelle Barnum Smith: Absolutely. Kevin King: I think we talked about some really interesting stuff. I think everybody hopefully listening is going to enjoy this. I think they will. But if they want to find out more about you, how do they do that? What's the website they go to? Michelle Barnum Smith: Yeah, my website is ttshopsellers.com. You can learn all about our TikTok Shop offerings there. I have a course. I have a community. I do one-on-one consulting. And we do have an agency, but we're full for Q4. So don't ask. We're, we're plenty busy, but I think the biggest thing honestly is, you know, feel free to also feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm there too. And there's just, there's so much, there's so much information out there and. And I really try to protect people and create focus so that you focus on the steps that are relevant to you and where you're at in your business. Because otherwise, if you're learning strategies from all over, your businesses might not be ready to execute those things and it might not work for you. So I really try to focus actions and make it really actionable for where you're at in your business. Kevin King: If you want to hear more on Michelle too and go deeper on her TikTok stuff and more even specific, especially for e-commerce, be sure to check out Lunch with Norm, the November 6th edition of Lunch with Norm. You can find that on all these social media channels, all the podcast channels, YouTube, where Michelle and Norm are talking totally different than what we talked about today, as well as the AM PM podcast from I don't know which episode it was. It's been a couple of months now, I think. Michelle Barnum Smith: We need to do that one again because all those strategies are out of date now. Unknown Speaker: That's true. Kevin King: We need to update that, but you still can listen. There's some fundamental stuff that's actually good in there, but you can go check out AM PM podcast and type in Michelle Barnum Smith and find her episode there. And we'll have to do a new one, like you said, soon. Michelle, really appreciate you coming on today. Michelle Barnum Smith: Thanks guys for having me. Norm Farrar: Hold on a second. Kevin King: That's right. Norm's got a question. Norm Farrar: We always have one last question for our guests. And this is going over to you, Michelle. Do you happen to know any misfits? Michelle Barnum Smith: I do. I mean, just like we talked about, there's so many really brilliant marketers on TikTok. And I actually met one on my flight home from New York City back to Utah. I recognized him because I follow him on Instagram and TikTok. He's a huge TikTok influencer. His name is PhilsMyPharmacist. And he is a small town I'm a pharmacist. He owns a pharmacy in Logan, Utah. Which is just a small, small town. And he has, he is the number one influencer and affiliate on TikTok Shop in the health category. I think he's just so brilliant. And he's such a nice guy, even better. I totally, I totally fangirled him in JFK era. I was like, oh my gosh. And he's like, let's work together. And I'm like, you know. I'm a huge fan of him. Kevin King: Awesome. Norm Farrar: Great. Super. So we're going to be removing you for just a couple of seconds. We'll put you in the green room, I guess we'll call it. And thank you so much for, yeah. And Kevin, no more of these. We'll do it. Kevin King: We'll do it. Michelle Barnum Smith: We'll do it. Now that you're actually trying to do it. Yeah. Kevin King: Do it. Norm Farrar: Oh, that was good. All right, Michelle, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and we will see you later. Michelle Barnum Smith: Bye. Norm Farrar: Now I got one thing to do here. There. Kevin King: Yeah, that was good Norm. We could keep talking for quite some time, but you know, people just have to go listen to more Marketing Misfits. If you liked that talk with Michelle, you just got to hit that subscribe button down there or better yet, forward this episode to a friend. And for you know, just hit that forward link and actually for a little note that you got to check this out. This was really fascinating with Michelle. She knows a lot of cool stuff, a lot of cool stories. Or you can always, you know, if you get lost along the way, you always go to marketingmisfits.com. Ted Gummett. I smoked a cigar since then. Unknown Speaker: It's co. Norm Farrar: It's marketingmisfits.co. Kevin King: You'd think by now I'd figure this out, but I, I, I, but I kept, I keep, can't remember if it was .com or .co. Norm Farrar: Hey look, it was just your birthday the other day. You're getting up there. Kevin King: I know, I'm getting up there all the time or whatever. How do you say that? Yeah, so, but okay, marketingmisfits.co to check us out. Again, check us out on YouTube if you're listening to the audio version of this. So you can see those random thumbs up and thumbs down that were popping up on the screen when Michelle was talking. They were totally unrelated to what she was saying and somehow we'll have a ghost over here. But thanks everybody. Appreciate it, man. All right. Norm Farrar: We'll see everybody later. Kevin King: See you again next week on Tuesday.