Full Transcript

Sari 0:04
I'm Sari Kimbell and I've done just about everything in the food industry. I have helped hundreds of packaged food business entrepreneurs and now I want to help you make your delicious dream a reality. Whether you want to be successful at farmer's markets, online, or wholesale on the store shelves, Food Business Success is your secret ingredient. I will show you how to avoid an expensive hobby and instead run a profitable food business. Now let's jump in.

Sari 0:38
Welcome back to the podcast! Something I love, one of my great passions is hearing issues, hearing themes coming up with my clients and then connecting them with the right people. I feel like I am a great connector. There's nothing more that I love of like networking and being around people, me like "oh my gosh, I gotta connect you with this person or you have to talk to this person." So that's like just one of my kind of natural talents and abilities. And I really look at this podcast as just an extension of that; like it's a way for me to reach more people, connect you wherever you're at, whatever you're struggling with, with hopefully the right person, the right agencies, the right services, who are in this industry, who knows exactly what they're talking about and doing. So this is no exception. It's funny, you probably heard me say a couple of times, if you've been paying attention that launching your products while it may seem hard in the moment, you're like getting my product, a physical product launched and my business launched, does not compare at all to actually having a business. That is way harder. It is when the work begins, is when things become less prescriptive, right? Like just do this, this, and this. And that's what I teach you in Food Business Success to get the product physically launched. And then you have a business. And now we got to go figure out, we got to test, we got to play how to actually drive traffic, how to drive customers and get people purchasing your product. So knowing this is the hardest thing and where most people really struggle. Many people if you've never had a business or been an entrepreneur. I wanted to spend the next, this episode and then the next episode, bringing you two different takes on social media, on content creation, on how to reach your customers, email marketing, social media, those kinds of things. So this is a place, a space you have to be willing to play in as a package food business. And so I want to connect you with some amazing people, some amazing women, experts in their area.

Sari 3:13
So today I'm bringing you my interview with Alison and Karin of Umai Marketing, and then next week we have Emily from Set Creative. I know you're gonna want to get your hands in my masterclass. I have a free 30 minute masterclass. We're gonna talk about these three levers today. So the link to do that is go.foodbizsuccess.com/umai. And I will put that link in the show notes as well. I'm very excited to dig more into marketing and how to really maximize your marketing efforts especially on social media and email marketing as a small brand. So today, I am very excited to welcome two guests today, Alison and Karin. They are co founders of UMAI Marketing and they're a boutique agency out of Austin. They have a strong dedication to their clients goals and they work with tons of brands. I was looking on your guys's website and it was so fun to see all of your brands, everything from Serenity Kids, Natural Stacks, Mother In Law's Kimchi, Purely Pecans, Canteen Spirits. But what I love about UMAI and we got connected through a mutual client. I love that you focus on CPG, you are really involved in that. And you guys both just have a real passion for this industry and I love that you're working in a really small way. You're not this big giant agency. So first of all, welcome Alison and Karin. So great to have you here!

Alison 4:57
Thank you, excited to be here.

Sari 5:00
All right. First of all, do you guys want to fill in anything about you as individuals? Like where did you come from? Why did you guys, I'm always so curious as entrepreneurs. Like, how did you start this business? How did you come together?

Alison 5:14
Yeah, I like when Karin tells this little story how we came together.

Sari 5:19
I love it. Karin, take it away.

Karin 5:22
All right. All right. Excuse the background noise if you hear anything. So I started in CPG after Alison and I work together at a prom dress company. Neither of us, or it was like pageant and prom dresses, neither of us had a passion for that. We're in it for different reasons. I went to CPG. I went to Vital Farms, they do eggs. I was there for a few years and then went to a pet food company here in Austin, Nulo Pet Food. And I was always working with these brands that had a strong retail presence. So a lot of what I was doing was content creation, community building, things like that. And then Alison was growing a huge ecommerce brand, had so much experience in paid advertising. And so it just made so much sense to come together. And Alison was really intrigued by the consumer goods space because the founders I think, really Allison's, like, the founders have so much passion, right?

Alison 6:30
There's this, like, it's just a really cool community as well. It's just once you're in, you just feel like you're part of this, like secret society. And it's also like, I've always wanted to work in food, because you know, snacks are nice. So.

Sari 6:46
We all love eating, I think we all share that as well. Oh, that's so funny. You guys worked together so long ago and then circle back around but you both had to build up your individual skill sets. And now you're like dynamic duo here.

Karin 7:03
Oh, great. Great. Yin and Yang.

Sari 7:06
Yeah. So you know, I work with so many early stage entrepreneurs, people just starting their packaged food business. And it definitely ranges on people's savviness and or just outright fear of social media, of marketing in general, of paid advertising, email, which we're going to talk about all those things but, you know, I've started just, I'm so glad we've connected because I'm like, now I have somebody that I trust that I can refer them to. But how do you tell people to go about, you know, when it seems like there's just so many things that you could do as a small brand. So how do you recommend people start with, you know, not a lot of time, usually low budgets. Help! What do we tell people?

Alison 8:00
Yeah, exactly. I mean, we came across that exact pain point when we started our agency and it was very apparent when, you know, talking to these brands that. Number one, they don't have any time. Number two, they don't have the capital to, you know, hire this big agency or spend a million dollars a month. And it was really hard to see people struggling and not having this, you know, path. You know, there should be this roadmap to get you from point A to B or to teach you these things. So I guess our biggest kind of overall message that we like to preach for younger brands is to focus on less. So that means using less levers like you don't need to be on Pinterest, Tiktok, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, when you start. So focus on less levers, focus on where your audience is actually showing up. But also focus on even putting out less content and like less output, less assets, because you need to focus on quality at this point. So that's kind of the big overall message that we like to tell people.

Sari 9:19
Yeah, I love that concept of the levers and doing less. Because I do find, I talk to people and they very quickly just by telling me what they think they should do, they quickly overwhelmed themselves to the point of like, then they're like immobile. I know I need to do Instagram and I need to do to, right? I was just talking to a client today and I was like, I know you want to get there at some point. Like that's your end vision. But you're trying to run a marathon and we haven't even done like day four of our six month training plans. So we need to, like start small, right, and break it down into manageable steps. I mean, that said, I mean, I work with people who have never been on social media, have never let alone doing like paid ads and all of that. So I'm curious if you, and I know we'll talk about your resources as well. But maybe the question is, do you need to have a presence on there? Like, how important is it? From your perspective.

Karin 10:32
Yeah, you know, now more than ever, it's just what consumers expect. So a lot of times, you're gonna find that customers can hear about you one way or another by word of mouth or whatnot. And they'll go to your Instagram before they even go to your website. It happens all the time. And so if they don't see you on Instagram; who are you, what are you doing? You know, so there's certain places where we think you should be playing no matter what and we preach that as Instagram and Facebook because that is where the majority of users are spending their time. And so, you know, I just, I think it's interesting, because it's really intimidating for some people to put themselves out there and to get started especially if they're not creative. But as long as you can just figure out the core strategies and do like Alison said, the minimum amount of work and focus on quality over quantity, that is going to be your best bet. But then, of course, you know, there's so much free education out there. Find people that you trust and follow along and test things. That's always something that we preach, like, if you're not testing, you're not going to be growing.

Sari 11:56
Yeah. Because I struggle with that balance of like, I usually preach B Minus Work, like any something out there is better than nothing out there. Because I do think when people hear quality work, they get stuck in. It's got to be like next level photography. And I get, you know, I write up a caption for an hour. Want to make sure I have all the hashtags. So there's, in my mind, there's got to be a balance between yes, it needs to be quality, you should check your caption, make sure there's no mispelling. But you have to test things like, and you just have to get stuff out there too.

Alison 12:37
Right, I mean, I completely agree with that, too. I mean, you don't know until you do it. And a lot of people have that fear where it's so hard to even post something because it can be super vulnerable. So I think when we say quality, that doesn't mean it has to be the most designed email you've ever seen or the most beautiful social post ever. It's more about connecting with that audience. And that's another thing with smaller brands is that gives you a one off on some of the bigger brands because you can show up as a founder because you're probably doing the social media or the emails. And so you can show up and really connect and build that trust with your audience by posting a video that's super low quality on your iPhone. That's kind of what we mean by quality.

Sari 13:34
Yeah, I love. Okay, that's so good. Because the connection piece is really what you're going after. Not necessarily the, you know, Instagram-worthy photography.

Alison 13:47
Exactly, yeah. So in a lot Karin can go off on that for days. I mean, a beautiful feed really does not mean much these days. It's maybe a quarter, I would say, of the overall. So maybe even less, yeah.

Sari 14:05
Well let's dive into your, you know, the three areas that you guys are experts. And so, let's maybe, Karin, we can talk about social a little bit more. Where does the? Because I agree with you, I don't think it's an Instagram, it's any more about having this curated, beautiful tile, right? Like that used to be the thing. And I'm trying to break some of my clients bad habits of that because they don't want to mess it up. But like, tell us from your perspective what you're seeing as far as reels go or like, what is important when we're looking at social like Instagram and Facebook?

Karin 14:45
Yeah, and I want to clarify really quickly. So our core three method for growing CPG brands, we really focus on organic social, paid social, and email marketing because we believe that if you have that in your marketing mix and you're doing it well, you're going to create a really efficient funnel. And of course, when you have other means, when you have more money, when you have more resources and teammates, you can add more to that mix. But that should be your baseline. And so for organic social in particular.

Sari 15:21
So let's go back over that. Sorry, I'm gonna just stop you like, because that's super important. So organic social, right, it was the first one, and then paid social, and then email marketing. So how do you differentiate? How would you explain to somebody who maybe is like, I don't know what that means? Organic versus paid.

Karin 15:44
So organic social is anything that you create, that you don't put ad spend behind, you don't spend any money on it. And so paid social would be all of your advertising, anything that you put money behind.

Sari 15:57
Okay, great. Just so we're all really clear. Now, you guys, but people, listen. Okay. So Karin, your area of expertise is around social. So yeah, let's talk about that. I'll buy more. What are you seeing as sort of the trends? Or is it important to make sure your feed stays beautiful and curated? Or are reels the thing? Where should you put your time on social?

Karin 16:23
And I love to hear from you that that is what these emerging founders think. But if you really stop to think about the evolution of social, so remember when it was a beautifully curated feed and everything like it was perfectly tiled, the grid was perfect. There weren't other features, Instagram stories weren't popular or even a thing back then. Reels, video content wasn't as powerful. It was a lot of graphics and a lot of photos. But if you don't change, you don't grow. It's a Gail Sheehy quote, I believe it is. If you don't change, you don't grow. And if you don't grow, you aren't really living. Especially with social media, it's constantly evolving, it's never gonna stay the same. So if your strategy doesn't evolve then you're not going to grow. So scrap the perfect feed, I am very much not into it. I don't think any brands should be focusing on that. Of course, if you have the means to focus on that, go for it, as long as the content is super quality and speaking to your audience. So instead, we would really suggest, you know, leaning into reels, of course. Video content has a lot of chance of virality and just lingering longer in people's feeds. But even Instagram stories, so we've kind of evolved a little bit in the past four or five months where people are spending a little bit more time in our experience in Instagram stories. So focusing a little bit more into real life connection through that feature. And then you can spend less time on creating posts to your feed. So I would say that those are two really good places to play around in. You're gonna hear all sorts of nonsense, like you have to use 30 hashtags, you have to use 5 to 7 hashtags, and you have to put a location in time. There are so many things that you have to do that they say you have to do but I would ignore all of the noise and focus on connecting on your audience. That is the number one thing you should be doing regardless of all the other features.

Sari 18:49
Yeah. I love that. That's super, super helpful. You know, I've been playing a lot more with reels and doing a lot of stories. And yeah, I've kind of said, screw it to my beautiful feed. And I think that the clients, I've given some clients a 30 day reel challenge. And they're like, oh my gosh, but like, I mean, it works, right. And people like I think COVID also open things up to be a little bit messier, right? It's like, we're all at home and in pajamas half the time and it kind of made it more democratic in a way like we're all working off of our iPhones and you know, our interior spaces when we're all under lockdown. And so, I know there are lots of stories about people growing their brand based on them just being real and in their kitchen and just kind of showing off the behind the scenes, and I think people really love that.

Karin 19:53
Yeah, and it can be super intimidating. And that's never something that we want to make seem really small. Because getting in front of the camera's really hard for almost everybody I know, for us even though we're constantly doing it. So my best piece of advice is just to get inspired. You got to look at other people that are doing it well and be like, oh, they can be doing. They're doing it, I can do this. So one account I love. I love her reels, Vicky Cakes. She does pancakes. So Vicky Cakes, I would check her out. She does not focus on perfection. She's not using like, studio equipment. She's using her iPhone and she's just connecting with her audience. And it's one that I love giving as an example because you have get inspired to know where to start.

Sari 20:41
Yeah. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna set a timer. I'm gonna spend 15 minutes and look at reels. And that's it. Because that can be a rabbit hole. Three hours later, you're like, what just happened? But set a timer and just save videos that you're like, oh, that could be fun or inspirational. Right? You can save the music for reel. So I won't hang on to reels too long but I think it's so important to mess up your feed, like let's hashtag mess up your feet. Make a mess. My client's listening know who they are.

Karin 21:23
Not have to be perfect.

Sari 21:26
Like, okay, somebody else backed her up. So all right, well, let's talk and I know. And I'm not exactly sure how you guys split your expertise with paid social, but please, both of you jump in. So what are you seeing there? What do you feel like you have? Is there a half to do? Or how does it really help you grow as a brand?

Alison 21:48
Yeah, so I've worked in paid social and when we say paid social that for us is generally Instagram ads, Facebook ads, sometimes that can be Tiktok ads depending on your brand's audience. But I've worked with the Facebook-Instagram platform I think since 2016, it has changed so much. So I just wanted to preface that because if you tried to run ads before all the algorithm updates, I'm not talking about iOS 14. But before they updated their algorithm to make it simpler, that was probably one to two years ago from now, you probably didn't want to jump back in. Now, it is something that we do believe that anyone can do. Any founder, any marketer, any person can. Once they understand how the backend works, they can do it. So I just wanted to say that first. It's not a scary. But yeah, so paid ads, we think it's important if you're looking to scale your brand. If you're happy where you are and you don't want more orders or if you can't take on more orders, maybe paid ads aren't for you at this time. But when you're ready to grow and scale, paid social is going to get you there a lot faster than any other, most likely, any other organic means unless you're able to go viral on with a reel or something like that. So we say paid social because instead of search because with CPG brands, number one, your branding, your aesthetic matters. And so you can kind of portray that through your ad creatives. With search, people are just going to Google or to Bing in searching, you know, like grain-free granola and you're probably going to get outbid if you're a smaller brand. With social, you can tell your story through these amazing creatives, or just, you know, video yourself talking about your brand. So that's why we really like it because you can really connect to your audience in that way.

Sari 24:13
Yeah, I love that. What kind of campaigns are you typically seeing run right now? And what are some of the top ones that you'd like to do?

Alison 24:24
Yeah, so we actually teach a simplified campaign account structure. Again, because you don't have all the time in the world. You don't need to be managing, you know, hundred different audiences and a hundred different ads. So it really, there's two buckets that people usually fall in. Are they pushing their ecom sales? So sending to your Shopify site. Or are you trying to push foot traffic to your brick and mortar or to your retail? So once you decide on which one of those you fall into then it's gonna be more helpful to understand what kind of campaigns you want to run. If you're on the ecom side, we're pushing for sales, our objective is purchases. If you're on the retail or foot traffic to your brick and mortar, that's probably going to be more of a brand awareness campaign, or a reach campaign, or maybe a traffic campaign sending people to your store locator, something like that.

Sari 25:26
Okay. Yeah, makes sense. Are giveaways still a thing? Are they still hot? Where did those fall into paid? Where would you put or are they paid?

Alison 25:40
Well, they're a little bit of both. So with organic, we do run, we continue to run, usually two giveaways a month for our brands. We've kind of moved away from this collaborative giveaway into internal giveaways because collaborative giveaways can be a huge time suck. But with paid, we generally boost those, because you can get a really great cost per follow, like generally under $1 Cost Per follow. I know that's a vanity metric. But it's also, it is social proof. It does, you know, help the entire funnel. And then something kind of interesting that we've been testing for our clients on more of the paid side is we'll run off platform giveaways. I don't really know how to explain this. So instead of posting on your Instagram, we're running story ads, telling people to go to the Instagram account, comment, like, save, follow, do all those things. And then we just pick a general winner each month. And we've seen this really, the cost per click is really low. It helps build that follower really cheaply. And then it also helps you build out your retargeting. So the more people that click on that link, if they follow or not, you have tons of more people to retarget to your website and say, hey, I mean, you saw this, this story ad. Here's my product. You know, here's what it's about. Are you interested in purchasing it? So a little bit of both.

Sari 27:18
Yeah, I love that. Ah, so good. And yeah, we'll start wading into more complex waters here. People might be like, oh, my gosh, what are we talking about? But that's okay. And I think it's so important to know, with all of these things, email, social, like, they're always evolving. And the beauty of it is you as a brand founder can decide, do I want to be in this pool and learning and evolving and kind of having mentors and guides that helped me to figure it out? Or do I want to just pay somebody to do it for me, right? So you always have we can, I always say like, we can solve any problem with either time, money or resources, or we just decide it's not a problem. So we'll talk about different ways that people can work with you. But I always want to point out that like, you don't have to know if you're like lost in what we're talking about, like you guys offer a great course. Or you can always decide like, this isn't my wheelhouse. This isn't my zone of genius. I want to just work with a great agency to help me.

Alison 28:27
Yeah, I mean, what we just covered was a little advance. So just zone it, just block it out if that's not for you.

Sari 28:38
People are nauseated.

Alison 28:40
Yeah. But there is, when we were saying as a simplified campaign structure, generally, you can only run two campaigns in your account. And that's all you need. All this other stuff is just us testing. We can tell you more about it if you're interested or just you know, don't listen. So.

Sari 29:02
And testing is just so important in this. I've done some episodes on like having more fun in your business and think like a scientist, like, you know, people think like, they want like, give me the formula exactly how it's gonna work. But I would imagine in your work, you're always like, oh, that's weird. I wonder why that didn't work or let's tweak this one thing, right?

Alison 29:24
Yeah, they're generally is kind of like, Karin was saying, like a baseline. But yeah, besides that, you know, each account is different in many ways.

Sari 29:35
You're just like a scientist. Put on your lab coats every day.

Karin 29:41
I want to also stress that at this early stage, I don't know a lot of super early stage founders and companies that didn't have a ton of capital that successfully outsourced an expensive agency to help grow their brand the way they wanted it to, unless they had funding. This is just my experience. So it would be our high recommendation to try and get a lot of that legwork done yourself when you are just getting started. Because you need to have audience data so that you can retarget them. You need to have a certain amount of things built before somebody can really take it and run. So I would just highly suggest for these new founders to put on their thinking caps and really try and get at some of this work on their own.

Alison 30:42
Just to add to that, it also is going to help you attract investors when that time comes as well. That's a question we get asked a lot. So.

Sari 30:56
It's so good for you to know what needs to be done in your business and like wear all the hats and then start taking them off. But understanding the ones that don't fit, right. The ones that make sense for you as a brand founder to delegate out but understanding kind of the basics of your business and who you are as a brand and that you've done some of that work is really important growth, I think.

Karin 31:23
Absolutely. And when you're hiring, when you do hire internally or you do hire agencies, knowing what they're doing is a really, really powerful thing to know that your money is being spent properly.

Sari 31:35
Absolutely. So then the last one, email marketing. So what's going on here? What are some of the basic things that every brand founder needs to focus on with email?

Karin 31:51
I can start. Alison and I tackle email together. I think one of my biggest pieces of advice with email is to not sleep on your automations. I think that is something that I sometimes see with some CPG brands is that they'll send some broadcasts out like just newsletters every now and then. But they haven't really focused on optimizing or even creating their automation. So we have six automations that we suggest every brand should have at minimum. So things like a welcome email, an indoctrination sequence telling a new person about your brand, abandoned cart as sunset flow, meaning somebody who hasn't really engaged with you in a really long time, they're just taking up space on your email server. And so you just kind of cleaned them off of your list. So we have six of them in total. And just really focusing on making sure that emails are working for you just in the background while you're getting a lot of other stuff done. You kind of forget how much power is there. But then when you see the analytics, the click through rates, the revenue that gets generated, it can be really, really powerful.

Sari 33:06
Yeah and those things just take some front end work to get set up. But once they're set up, and then you can make some small tweaks here and there along the way, but they're kind of they're running for you. I love that. So what else about email? So how do we get people on our email list?

Alison 33:23
Oh, great question. Um, we like to bounce people. So if that's, if you're, you know, on Instagram or whatever platforms, be sure and continually make it part of your strategy to bounce people over to sign up for a free offer, free lead book. If you're, you know, strictly CPG ecommerce and you're not ready to make a white paper, give them a discount. That's super, that takes like 10 minutes to set up, you know, you don't have to, you know, try to create this big to do. Usually a discount is going to work great to get people on your list. But again, you know, ads are great lead gen. But yeah, if you're not ready for ads, use your organic and make sure that you're sending people to a lead form on your website, something like that.

Sari 34:23
Right. So having that as in your bio or your, you know, if you do a Linktree in your Instagram, something like that, having that page to get on there and make it a part of your strategy, your posting strategy on social. Letting people know.

Karin 34:40
And don't forget to let a lot of people know. And also definitely make sure that your website is optimized to receive emails. So if you have your pop-up or you have an email opt-in in your footer, just making sure that these little things are available. So if somebody wants to learn more, it's really easy for them to do so.

Sari 35:04
Right. Don't make people hunt for it. Oh, that's the worst when I'm on a website, I'm just like, oh my gosh, I cannot find the thing. Why do they make it so hard. So.

Karin 35:18
Yeah, it's not good. You're not gonna want to buy from them.

Sari 35:22
Definitely not. What services, what platforms do you guys, I'm curious, what you recommend or what you typically work with? MailChimp? Klaviyo I know, there's some other ones that I've heard people using?

Alison 35:36
Those are the two we recommend.

Sari 35:42
Yeah, well, I've switched a few folks, some of my clients over from MailChimp to Klaviyo because I do think, you know, it is superior as far as some of the sequencing and some of the behind the scenes pieces but it is not nearly as intuitive.

Alison 35:59
Yeah, that's why we kind of say it's like, you might not be ready for Klaviyo yet, so MailChimp is kind of like the beginner and then Klaviyo next, but it does seem to transfer over. So we generally try to get people on the Klaviyo platform to start first. Yeah.

Sari 36:21
Well and I noticed MailChimp keeps taking away features that used to be part of their free so for people are like, well, I'm just gonna save some money, like to do a lot of things.

Alison 36:32
Aren't they like kind of around the same price too? It kind of blows my mind how great Klaviyo is, and it's kind of on par with Mailchimp.

Sari 36:41
Yeah, so I think no.

Karin 36:45
It's that free MailChimp offer that can really win especially I think it's like under, fact check me later, but under 250 or something like that. And so that's what kind of gets people in that introduction phase especially if you don't know anything about email. You don't want to spend too much. But it really isn't that expensive.

Alison 37:06
I think they have like limits though. So like once you're in then it's like,

Sari 37:11
Yeah and like you said, it is more challenging to get to move out. But the reality is MailChimp and Shopify don't play that well together. So I would rather, I'm just starting people on Klaviyo now just like we're just starting here, because it's free up to 250 subscribers, at least right now. So you know, when you're just starting out like it takes a little while to get up to that point. And then if you have over that and then let's like then it should be worth the investment. So oh email marketing, but it is not dead contrary to popular belief and all the people who are like, but I hate those email. They do work, right.

Alison 38:00
It's so funny. And I don't know, it's like people. It's just like not sexy to people. I think they're just like, yeah, emails, but it's been around for so long maybe that's why but it really is the biggest driver. It can be the biggest driver for sales. And then like Karin was saying, like, set it and forget it. Once you have those automations walking people perfectly down your funnel to buy and then buy again. You know, it's nice. Gotta do it.

Sari 38:35
I agree with you a hundred percent that these are the things that you need to be doing. Like if you're starting a packaged food business and you don't have a way to collect emails or you don't have even if it's just a simple welcome sequence, like even one or two or three emails are just like, thanks for signing up. Let me tell you a little bit about us. Here's what we recommend, you know, just some simple things. So that's, you know, to me, that's the place to start at least your welcome sequence. And then yeah, social, I don't think you can get around it. Sorry, everyone listening.

Karin 39:16
Got it. You got to play the game. And I mean, I would you'd be hard pressed. Like, I would love to ask anybody who doesn't want to do it like, do you know as CPG, a really successful CPG brand that doesn't? You know, you got to get inspired by people that are kind of in your wheelhouse and not get intimidated by what the big dogs are doing. But just stay focused, do less.

Sari 39:45
And I always tell people especially with email, email and social right, like you said Karin, go get inspired. Like go join some other people's mailing lists and see what you get, right. Go and see what the welcome sequence is like, see what the abandoned email is like, right?

Karin 40:02
Oh, absolutely. And that's what one of our teammates, she has a separate email, just for inspiration. And it's and she just opts into so many emails so that she can see what it looks like. And I think that's just so genius. And we also actually have a Facebook group that we just post inspiration. So we post inspirations for social posts, organic post, paid advertising posts, and emails. So yeah, there's definitely places where you can go get inspired.

Sari 40:34
Really think the work you guys do is high quality, it's excellent work and you know the industry. And you're not out trying to just, you know, charge ridiculous high prices. Like, I love the way you guys offer a couple of different ways to work with you. So why don't we go ahead and go there next. And of course, we will put all the links in the show notes as well for people to easily grab. So tell us kind of the ways that you work with people.

Alison 41:01
Yeah, so we work with, we provide services. So generally our core three package, if you don't want to do the work yourself and you can outsource it, you can book a call with Karin. You can just go to umaimarketing.com I believe the buttons right there for you to book a call with her. And then if you're ready and excited to do these things yourself or just want to kind of brush up on your skills. We also have a course for CPG brands specifically. The best resource we have. It's a free 30 minute masterclass. I think that'd be a good place for people to start.

Sari 41:44
Yes, I know people are definitely gonna want to get that free masterclass. And I'm going to put the link in the show notes for it or people can go to go.foodbizsuccess.com/umai. And that's just an easy way to get started, to learn a little bit more about you guys and your style and see if it's a good fit, which then I know, it opens up when you guys open up your main course, which is so phenomenal.

Alison 42:17
Yeah, and then our Facebook group is called The Core 3. So just Google The Core 3, and I'm sure we can link that too and we just post like multiple pieces of inspo every day, things that inspire us, so.

Sari 42:33
Fantastic. And then we've been talking about doing some collaboration between us. So we're going to bring both of you in to do a special workshop inside Food Business Success. And so we're going to work out those details for early sometime in Q1 of 2022. So we'll make sure anybody who's on our email list will get to know about that. And then I know I'm gonna do some things inside of your course or some of your group pieces coming up to.

Alison 43:07
We're excited for that.

Sari 43:08
Yeah. So fun to have this overlapping, you know, it's like I'm helping people with all the logistics and getting set up and all the foundations to have a legitimate profitable food business and then this is just not my area where I want to spend my time or my zone of genius. So that's why I find other experts. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about these three levers and helping to break them down a little bit. I love your message of keeping it simple, not getting overwhelmed, doing less but doing it with more connection. More quality, but not necessarily studio production quality. Just more quality. I think it's more of like from your heart, you know, and just really.

Alison 43:58
Yeah, be a little vulnerable. You know, don't get afraid to connect with your audience.

Sari 44:03
Yeah, I love it. All right, well, thanks so much for your time today. It is really fun.

Alison 44:08
Thank you.

Karin 44:09
For having us!

Sari 44:11
Oh my gosh, so good. I hope you guys got so much out of that. Do less. Do it better. Get really good at it. I love their message of focus on less. So good. So be sure you go grab their free masterclass, go check out UMAI marketing. And then next week I'll be back with talking more about photography and creating video and content and how to do that better on a small budget or just as a solopreneur as many of you are. And that's what I have for you today. I hope you really enjoyed this episode. And until next time, have an amazing week!

Sari 44:55
Are you ready to start that delicious idea that you make in your home kitchen or grow your existing packaged food business and take it to the next level? The most successful food business entrepreneurs have support, guidance, focus, and accountability to help them make it happen quickly without wasting time or money. Plus, I think starting your packaged food business should actually be fun. Food Business Success is your secret ingredient to creating your food business dream. Please don't go this alone. Check out the private free Food Business Success Facebook Group to connect with other foodpreneurs. Get your questions answered quickly. Share your wins and receive special training and tools I only share inside the private community. Just search for Food Business Success on Facebook, or get the link in the show notes. Curious about how Food Business Success can help you? Head over to foodbizsuccess.com and fill out the application to see if you're a great fit for the program. Together let's make your food business dream a reality.