In this episode of The Paid Media Playbook, Laura and Lisa sit down with Sarah Girard and Melissa Grace, the powerhouse duo behind RockitWorks, a social media and marketing agency. Together, they share their journey from event production to running a successful agency, their insights into the evolving landscape of organic and paid media, and their strategies for creating impactful content. Tune in to discover how they approach challenges like audience targeting, balancing paid and organic efforts, and crafting content that converts. Plus, get their best advice for aspiring marketers and entrepreneurs!

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Chapters:

• 00:00 – The Journey to RockitWorks
  Sarah Girard and Melissa Grace discuss their paths from event production to founding a successful social media agency and how their experiences shaped their approach to marketing.
• 6:50 – Mastering Organic and Paid Media
  Insights into the evolution of social media, the balance between organic and paid strategies, and the importance of targeting the right audience with impactful content.
• 12:11 – Metrics, AI, and Marketing Innovations
  The shift from vanity metrics to actionable goals, the rise of AI in marketing, and how these tools enhance productivity and strategy.
• 17:21 – Actionable Advice for Marketers
  Saraha and Melissa share practical tips for entrepreneurs, from aligning paid media with content creation to setting clear goals and leveraging the right platforms.

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Links and Resources:

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• Subscribe to our newsletter here
• Lisa Wekellis on LinkedIn
• Laura Szczes on LinkedIn
• Double Z Media Website
• Double Z Media on LinkedIn
• RockitWorks on Linkedin
• Sara Girard on Linkedin
• Melissa Grace on Linkedin

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Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Paid Media Playbook? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and Spotify and leave us a review!

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Transcription:

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Lisa: Thank you for joining us. We are here today with Sarah Gerard and Melissa Grace. How are you both doing?

Sara: I'm doing 

great. How are you guys? 

Laura: We're pretty well

Lisa: Well, before we dive in, would you start by giving our listeners just a brief overview of your career history?

Sara: Sure. So I've been doing marketing and social media for, [00:01:00] I don't even want to say how long because then like it'll reveal too much about me, but it's been a really long time. I started, actually I started as a producer. I was an event producer a long, long time ago. I traveled the world, had a great time, and met lots of cool people. but then, you know, as you have children, you stay in one place or you tend to. So then I started marketing, mostly with gaming. I worked for a lot of gaming companies and then I moved over to healthcare, and did that for about four years before I started RockitWorks, which is where we are now and where we've been for the past seven or eight years. I met Melissa because she was my client at Providence. 

Melissa Grace: So my background is funny enough, I started in events as well. I used to open facilities. So arenas in Boston, Alabama, I was all over the place. And I always did the marketing, worked on marketing plans. A lot of like ticket sales then took a job with Providence and As Sarah said is [00:02:00] where we met each other and she used to create all the content.

So I managed the 148 different social media channels that Providence has. And so Sarah helped with the planning and the strategy and content creation. So from there, when I left Providence Sarah and I decided that we could work together. She did such good work that I figured it would be a good partnership.

Sara: Joining forces has been amazing. And that is coincidentally how we learned all the ups and downs and pitfalls of paid media. 

Lisa: Yeah,

Sara: Right. It was a big do it yourself situation over there. 

Lisa: It's interesting that you both started in events. Do you feel like your time there had any specific insights that helped you as you moved into a marketing role?

Sara: Actually, yeah. I mean, like I said, I was a producer, so I liked it. I used to like to say that I love creating order from chaos. Right. And so that's, you. know, that, that whole [00:03:00] skillset in itself helped shape what we do 

Laura: You got into content. You guys primarily like to create content. Whether that be video or copywriting or social

Anything, honestly, anything we can do. Yeah.

I love it.

And how long has RockitWorks been open?

Sara: We started in September of 2017.

Laura: Cool. Cool. Well, I just want to say that sometimes we have RockitWorks as part of our team internally here at Double Z. So we are very happy to have you guys on as team members too.

Sara: It's nice having a big community of very talented people around us. 

Laura: Mm-hmm . For sure.

Lisa: And you work with such a diverse portfolio of clients, like Laura mentioned, sometimes with us as a partner agency, and of course often directly with clients. What do you feel is the difference between when you are partnering directly with a client versus with a different marketing agency.

Sara: That's [00:04:00] a great question because honestly, I don't think I treat anyone any differently. Like we just become part of the team when we have a client. So like with Providence, like I took it very personally, all of the content that went out, if it wasn't up to my standards, it didn't. I wasn't good with it going out.

Right. So we just integrate as part of the team. We have to understand the marketing goals. We have to understand the audiences and the tone and you know, the ins and outs of brand guidelines. And we just, we just integrate on any team we go on, whether it's a, you know, solopreneur or the third largest healthcare company in the country. Yeah, I, I feel like we yeah, we have an ability to become, like sir had said part of the team and to, to, in, in some cases we've been with companies who are just starting out. So we actually can help them sort of kick things off and figure out what is it they need to do? How do they get started? And, you know, funny enough your [00:05:00] questions about, you know, Media buying and and and the questions that we get from people who have no idea, right?

Melissa Grace: Is it boosting? Is it media buying? Do we need a content planning strategy? So I think we do have the ability to either hit the floor running with you or come in and sort of adapt and be part of that team right away.

Lisa: And we've been talking a lot about, you know, content, which of course is king, right? You can't run an ad without an ad to run. But I feel like you all at RockitWorks are sort of uniquely positioned to really see how the landscape has changed in regards to organic versus paid placements over the last couple of years.

Sara: Yeah. It's, I mean, it's always changing. And you know, in the past, I don't know, five, probably five plus years you used to be. Well, when it started, right. You remember back in the glory days of Facebook where you could post and [00:06:00] everyone would see it, right. And everyone would interact and it was a great way to connect.

And it slowly became a place where you had to really make paid Media part of your strategy in order to get seen. And so, you know, having great content is one thing, but you have to make sure people see it and there's, you know, there's definitely organic ways of doing that, but also being able to target, like what you guys do is amazing.

Being able to specifically target. you know, certain demographics and making sure that the people that you really know would enjoy this content or would respond to this content will get their eyeballs on it, I think is an important part of the mix. 

Lisa: Absolutely. Especially I saw a metric recently or a statistic that said Less than 10 percent of your followers see your content on Instagram now

Sara: Oh yeah, it's less than 10. Yeah, 

for sure. It's been like, what, Melissa, six, four to six for a long [00:07:00] time. 

Melissa Grace: It's sort of like, I think the analogy that I heard was, it's like being in a stadium and like yelling out into the stadium and literally like maybe the first row, like a couple people hear you. Whereas then when you actually place media or put money behind things, now you have a spotlight and you actually have a microphone and you can begin to find the groups that, you know, that want your message.

And so that was, it's, you know, trying to figure out how to explain that to some of our clients and to, you know, help them better understand that it's really important to have that media spend.

Laura: Yeah. I know people are so focused on followers, aren't they? And it's not,

Sara: And it really is. I mean, it's great to have a huge following, but it really is a vanity metric, right? Like it, as you guys know very well, like if it's just a bunch of people who are bots or whatever, like you're not going to get anything out of it, even if you've got, you know, 30, 000 followers. [00:08:00] 

Melissa Grace: Yeah, I can look at it. I also did a lot of work with influencers as well. And so it was very interesting that at the beginning when the influencer, you know, the craze was starting, it was like, who's the biggest and best who can we get? And what it went down to was who actually has an audience that's going to engage with them.

So I would find, you know, someone with 10, 000 followers and get the engagement that we needed. And then, you know, so it's, it's really been an educational process from the beginning to the end. But again, that, you know, At the beginning, it was, like Sarah said, all about the likes. How many? I got a million people on this campaign.

Sara: But what did you get from that? Right.

Melissa Grace: Right. 

Lisa: Well, something that I think Sarah, you and I got the delightful opportunity to struggle with together recently was trying to get LinkedIn business center to behave properly.

Sara: my gosh. 

Lisa: And I, that I think is the perfect illustration of, I mean, Meta obviously has been in the game, one of the longest, definitely the biggest player there in paid social media, [00:09:00] and we're seeing other platforms now trying to do the same things, trying to implement advertising, trying to get business centers set up so that you can share assets, trying to do all of the first party data, and seeing them sort of adapt the strategies that Meta has had, sort of slowly, one at a time, has been a sort of a fascinating evolution.

Melissa Grace: , it comes down to a lot of it. It comes down to time, right? Like where's your time best spent, especially as if you're an entrepreneur or even for me, when I was at Providence, you know, I had a team of 14 people and still I needed, you know, Sarah's team at RockitWorks to make the content, you know, other groups to place the advertising.

So do what you're good at. I mean, that's one thing that I heard and I've always thought is, If you don't buy media, if you don't do that, then, you know, there's someone else who can help you.

Sara: Yeah. 

That's when I started my business. I had a business coach and he hammered that in. I was like, but I [00:10:00] hate paying the bills or whatever, right? Navigating that. And he's like, then hire someone to do that. Like, Oh yeah, I didn't realize I don't have to do all of it myself. 

Laura: Yes. That's like the best, biggest thing I learned having my own company was that it's way better to have an expert do it than spend your time. 

Lisa: That's something that I hear verbatim quite often is, oh, I can do that. And it's like, well, we're not doubting your ability. I know that you're capable of this. The question is, do you want to do it? Should you want to do it?

Sara: Yeah, we get that a lot with smaller clients or smaller potential clients where they're like, Oh, well, my nephew can do social media, right? And it's like, Well, sure, they can probably post every now and then, but will they have the right strategy? Do they understand messaging? Do they understand your brand guidelines? 

Lisa: Well, I think one thing that's always the question, we talk about how it's completely integrated, paid and organic on [00:11:00] social media, dependent on each other, can't have one without the other. But how do you find the right audience and balance between the two? And It would be nice if there was a silver bullet, right?

Like, oh, you should have this many posts per week and you should boost this many of them with exactly this amount of money and you'll be successful.

Sara: Oh, if only right, if only there was a formula for that, well, what we've been telling people and you know, we like to ease into it. We like to baby step into it. So, like we have a new client that we're doing content for next month, we do want to have a paid element to that. He does need to get in front of certain audiences for certain, like he has different audience segments, first of all.

Right. So you're not going to just serve up all the content to everybody and pay for it. So in order to target them, as you well know, we need to put money behind it, get the right messaging and send it off into that [00:12:00] particular group of people. Right. So, we're easing into it. So we're going to, we have two strategies.

We're going to do whatever the top performing content is just to make sure that it's getting seen and there's some traction. But also if there's a particular message that they want to get out and we should try to do that at least once a month, we're going to boost that to a particular audience. 

Melissa Grace: And, and I would say just to add on to that, it's a lot about the matrix, right? Like before, as we sort of talked about at the beginning, it's about likes. It was about like, did you have a million people now? It's actually. I want someone to click on this and I want them to go to a particular website. I want them to take action.

And so what is it that we as content creators can do to entice you to take that action? And I think that that's what we're very good at is creating content that, you know, serves this one focus and gets people to engage with it. Yeah, I'd say at the beginning, that was one of the things that I didn't [00:13:00] understand was that you couldn't have seven messages. So it was sort of like at Providence, like all these leaders would come to you with like, we need this and this. And I, you know, I need to talk to this audience. And at the time when I was first starting, I was like, well, how do I make them all happy?

Well, you got to tell them one, one message, one, one piece of content, one message, one action. 

Sara: So there's the answer to your question, Lisa. What would you tell your former self, Melissa? 

Melissa Grace: I would tell my former self that multiple times.

Laura: Mm hmm. Uh huh. 

Lisa: So when your team is talking to a new client, how do you evaluate which platforms they should be focusing on?

Because I find that clients often tend to focus on the platforms they use, which is not necessarily the ones that their potential customers use.

Sara: I mean, it really depends on their goals, right? Like what you do, and the goals can change all the time, but it depends on what they wanna do. So are you trying to get more [00:14:00] customers? Are you a B2B company? Are you a visual comp? Are you a photographer? Right? Like so it really just depends on what they wanna do, who they wanna talk to, and what they have to offer. And that's how we do that, right? 

Melissa Grace: And I would say some of some of the people that we have talked to, what we determined is, hey, we're going to start on these two channels. And I hear you saying that you want to build. You know, build yourself out as on LinkedIn and you want to be known for whatever category you're in, right?

A doctor, a marketing person, but let's first do a really good job here and build these two channels out and then take that step. So instead of having I think a lot of people make the mistake of, Hey, I'm going to do five channels. And then all of a sudden you're making so many pieces of content because what they don't get is you can't create one piece of content for all five channels.

And be.

Melissa Grace: so. Yeah, so I think that Sarah and I have sort of learned how to have that conversation of [00:15:00] we hear you and we know you want to be on these, but first, let's do this one really, really well. And then we'll help you grow the others. And so,

Laura: It's the same with what we do just as First Channels, right? Like, let's see, you've got 5, 000, and you want to be on 20 different things.

Melissa Grace: yeah,

Laura: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Melissa Grace: right. 

Lisa: How do you navigate, as content creators, the available assets that a client has? Because video obviously is a highly, highly important,

Sara: Yeah 

Lisa: Not platform. Format is the word. Medium, thank you. But, I mean, I don't make ads, I run them, right? So sometimes a client says, How's a 500 by 500 banner and I say, okay, are you sure?

But you have the power to actually like to fix that a little bit.

Sara: Well, we start from the beginning, right? We [00:16:00] start from the beginning with the strategy and your goals and right and if it doesn't it just doesn't speak to that. Then maybe that's not for right now. We obviously prefer to shoot ourselves cause you know, then you can manage the quality or get someone else to shoot. But 

Laura: Mm hmm.

Melissa Grace: And I, and I think it's, again, it's having that conversation with them, saying to them, do you have a shot coming up? What pictures are you taking? You know, what are other parts of your company? If it's a bigger company, do you have other things happening?

And that way, the more we know about everything that they're doing, the easier it is for us to say, Oh, great.

Sara: it's a slideshow and not a video or, you know, something else, depending on the 

Laura: Oh, I've had to do that before. I'm like, we know we're gonna do billboards, so don't do a bunch of vertical Oh. photos, so it's just like thinking about it when you, yeah, create the content.

Sara: But, starting from the beginning with the strategy usually helps weed out a lot of those issues. It's when you have to play catch up or there's [00:17:00] something pops up that is, you know, timely. 

Laura: I think that's the benefit of having the content and the paid media people talking all the time because yeah, absolutely having everybody in the room in the beginning so that we, you know, could come in and go, no, you need to be here and here. So then they're not just throwing, you know 300 by two 50 at us and 60 second video, you 

Sara: when we're all in the same plan and we all have the same ideas of what 

we're trying to accomplish. Yeah. Yeah.

Melissa Grace: This is sort of like the best of 2024. What did you learn? What came out of 2024 that made you better?

Laura: AI. I

Sara: actually 

Laura: I mean like I made it. It's not like it wasn't around before but just from a, Oh, just making my life easier organizing things.

Sara: Yeah, yeah, and just running things by it too. Like hey, what do you think of this? Right, and you get some feedback and you're like, wow, that's great. Thank you. 

Laura: I [00:18:00] know. I love it. I love it. I had my growth coach put in a bunch of strengths, like all my strength tests in there to tell me what kind of assistant I would need. And so an AI assistant, but like what we would need to do. 

Sara: when I was really digging into AI at the beginning of last year, or this year, it was AI, AI isn't going to take over, but the people who know how to use AI are. 

Laura: Yeah. If you're not doing it, you're way

Sara: Yeah. And also like AI doesn't have a face. So like creating content with your, I mean, it does, but kind of tell, 

Laura: Oh yeah.

Sara: but you know, creating videos of yourself, that's no, one's going to take that over. 

Lisa: So I have a confession Sarah and Melissa, you all launched a series of lessons, I would say for people learning how to do their own social media. I have not even tried to look at it because I know that is not my [00:19:00] skill set.

Sara: Well, it's designed for people who want to learn from scratch. You already probably know whether you know it or not that, you know, half the stuff that we're teaching, but it's, it takes like a, like if you're just building a social media presence, like what should I be thinking about? What color should I be using?

What are my brand tone? Like, who's my audience, how to identify audience personas and then how to create great content, what tools you can use to make it easier, you know, that kind of stuff. But you know, for you, I think you know most of that stuff anyway, so I don't take it personally. 

Lisa: Well, thank you. So then. You kind of touched on this already. Do you think you would really benefit from those units?

Sara: I've met a lot of people and that's why we did the class because I've met a lot of people who would really benefit from it. Mostly like in my small networking groups with people without a budget who have to do it themselves, but like, have no idea what, [00:20:00] No idea where to start. Granted, some of it's going to be, you know, yeah, of course that's my brand.

That's my logo. Right. But a lot of it's going to be like, Oh, I didn't. You know, I didn't realize that, or I never thought of that. Right. So I think it's got something for almost everyone. I also think that like a mark, like in the role you were in Melissa, you had team members who could have benefited from that, right.

They came from other departments, they came from PR, they came from other things and they just took that class to kind of get everyone on the same page. Like, Oh, we shouldn't create this content without knowing what we want to do with it and who we want to talk to. Right.

Melissa Grace: Right. And I would agree with that. I would say there are sections that deal with responding to people, right? Like, how do you respond? Is it important? . Do you do it on the feed? Probably not. DM them, right? So it's little things that you don't think about that you're like, oh, of course, but I do think it's a great, you know, starting, starting point.

Sara: [00:21:00] Yeah. 

, it's like a minimal investment. It's like what, a hundred bucks, 150 bucks.

Lisa: Well, thank you both for joining us.

But before we let you go, I know, Melissa touched on this a little bit already, but if you both could go back in time and give yourselves at the beginning of your career, one piece of advice, what would it be?

Melissa Grace: My one was going to be that just because it looks impressive, doesn't mean it's the best thing to do. And the, and that goes back to like the likes and the impressions that we all talked about, where we used to do reports where we said this had 5 million likes, which really, as the four of us know, means nothing, right.

And so I think if I would have. Had a better understanding and known, like, you know what? I'm actually going to spend 10, 000 for this, right? This specific goal, it would have accomplished so much more. 

Sara: I think mine is just going to be the, what I always say is like, if you don't know why you're doing it, then don't do it. Right?

It's just as simple as that.

Laura: I love that.

Sara: you can, cause you're just [00:22:00] going to be a hamster on a wheel otherwise, round and round and round and not knowing what you're doing.

Or not feeling any sense of accomplishment, even if it's like little goals, which I always, even in personal life, I'm like, all right, set a little goal so you can feel good about yourself, you know, and then like set another one and then set another one. So I think even if you have little brand goals, even if you're just starting out, then. You can feel like you're doing something. You can feel like you're not wasting your efforts and your money, right? So just know why you're doing it.

Lisa: It's like how I start every to-do list with ‘write to do list,’ so I get to cross it off right away.

Sara: I've checked it off.

Melissa Grace: Yes. Yeah.

Laura: I Wanted to add one more thing How I met Sarah I was working in marketing for the rat city roller girls and Sarah was one of the founder founders I believe

Sara: No, I wasn't a founder. I was pregnant when they actually started.

So that doesn't go well together.

Laura: No But what was [00:23:00] your name 

Sara: I rocket

which is coincidentally, not coincidentally, the name of my company, rocket

works

Right? It's a manifestation. 

Laura: Yes, 

Sara: pledge now, but yeah, that was fun. We did a good job.

Laura: . Well, thank you very much

Sara: Thank you guys. This

Melissa Grace: Thank you guys.

Sara: Let's do it again.

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