Room 301: Build Your Brand for Fans, Not Fame with Lynn Power

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Resources

Some of the resources mentioned in the podcast, as well as some of our own.

• Follow Lynn Power on LinkedIn
• Check out Masami's products
• Canva – Easy-to-use design platform for creating visuals, social posts, and more.
• PalmStreet – Live streaming marketplace and video commerce platform.
• Power Beauty Collab – Co-marketing collective and support for indie beauty brands.
• Love Loyalty – Customer loyalty program to drive repeat purchases.
• Klaviyo – Email marketing and automation platform.

Disclaimer: These resources shared are based solely on the experiences of the podcast guest. This is not a sponsored segment or an endorsement.

A Podcast for Business Owners & Marketing Leaders

Room 301 is a monthly marketing podcast brought to you by The Digital Maze, a specialist full service digital marketing agency based in Derby. We discuss ongoing marketing themes, topics and news in the digital marketing industry to help marketing managers (and business leaders) stay ahead of the curve.

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Podcast Transcription

Rob Twells (00:01)

Lynn thank you for joining me. eCommerce marketing has gotten much more difficult certainly over last 12 to 24 months. What's your thoughts on that? How are you finding it?

Lynn Power (00:14)

 Yep. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. But yes, you're right. It has gotten  quite a bit more difficult for, I think, a variety of reasons.  know, AI search has thrown an interesting wrench in things.  Customer acquisition costs are going up.

So tough for smaller brands to compete, especially in really crowded segments.  And then you've got a lot of marketplaces that are basically fighting each other, making it hard to stand out. So we are now on Amazon, Walmart.com, Target.com, Nordstrom.com. But  it sounds better than the reality because it's very hard to make a dent  on those large marketplaces.

And I could go on and on.

Rob Twells (01:10)

So what are the kind of things you're doing at the moment to try different things? I think experimentation is really important in a minute to understand what is gonna work. Obviously, relatively small business. you still find that you have the room to experiment and try and do things?

Lynn Power (01:17)

Yes.

I actually think it's easier to experiment as a small business because we don't have any bureaucracy kind of having to run it up the chain and down the chain and all that. we do a lot of experimentation.  We've done a lot of live streaming. We've been on a lot of different apps. We're currently on one called Palm Street that we're playing with. 

But we also have been on a lot of different social selling platforms. We do a lot of content. I created the Power Beauty Collab as a way to have small businesses support each other through co-marketing. we do a lot of, as I said, of scrappy, more organic growth type tactics  to try to create. It's a little bit of a different experience because we want to

to create a stickier relationship with our customers,  which requires a more kind of in-depth conversation, I suppose.

Rob Twells (02:32)

Yeah, and we touched on this briefly off there, obviously with what you do in this sort of beauty segment, there's lots of sort of celebrity endorsed brands and things like that.  Is that having an impact? Do you find that you're always sort of chasing those brands or do you try and position yourself very differently to those?

Lynn Power (02:52)

You know, I ignore them because otherwise you'll go crazy because there's always a new one launching and you know, the hair category wasn't as crowded before, but of course we've now seen a lot of high profile celebrities launch hair brands. Beyonce, Blake Lively, Brooke Shields. I mean, the list goes on and on. And so I kind of think you just have to ignore it  and you have to...

 think about what makes you different, what makes you stand out. In our case, we have a Japanese ocean botanical. We deliver weightless hydration, which is very hard to do. It took my co-founder years to create the product.  But we work for virtually every hair type and texture. So the thing that I bank on is the fact that our customers love us and we have three times industry average loyalty. Hair is a very unloyal category. So

We're a tall midget, we take what we can get and we still have a lot of customers who are borderline obsessed with our products and that goes a long way. So when you're small, you don't need to have a 50 % share of all haircare. You just need the right people.

Rob Twells (04:03)

Yeah, that's amazing.

No, I completely agree. That's amazing to hear. And what are the channels that are working best for you primarily?

Lynn Power (04:18)

Yeah, so we're very active on social, obviously, and I think as a small business, you kind of have to be.  But I would say the one that I am liking right now, two that I'm liking right now, which tend to be kind of the stepchildren of social media would be Pinterest  and YouTube.  You know, a lot of beauty brands don't bother with YouTube, but it's a great place to.

Rob Twells (04:37)

us.

Lynn Power (04:43)

you know, drop a lot of your content and videos and podcasts and long form content and UGC and all that stuff.  So I think it's been helpful. And again, from an education perspective to tell a broader story. Same with podcasts. You know, you can tell a much more in depth story than just, you know, click bait on an Instagram ad.  I like Pinterest because it's more educational in nature, even though the conversion is not.

is not there, we drive lot of traffic to our site, and then we use Facebook to retarget, which is a more efficient use of Facebook as well.

Rob Twells (05:22)

Nice. No, good to hear. And we deploy similar strategies to our clients as well. Well, look, I appreciate your insights on e-commerce, obviously leading an e-commerce band. But prior to that, obviously you spent the best part of 20 years in advertising. If you're in the agency game like I am and have been for as many years as I have, you'll be very aware of the sorts of businesses that you...

you worked for when it came to advertising. So I'm really excited to dive into your insights for the three questions we tend to ask. So the first of those three questions is what's in your toolbox? So you're a busy CEO, you're in brand, team to manage, business to grow. What are you using? What's at your fingertips to help you stay on top and across everything?

Lynn Power (05:56)

yet.

So I have a bunch of tools that I lean on heavily, the first one being Canva. I'm in Canva daily. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs can relate to that, appreciate that.  I would say there's a few new ones that I've been trying. One is called Marquee, and it's a social scheduler.

I like it because it posts across all the different channels, even though I know that's not necessarily best practice when you're really boot, know, strapped for time and bootstrapped and you can't afford to hire people to do separate content for every channel. It's a, it's a, it's a good option. It's very easy to use super turnkey.  I just joined a new loyalty program called love loyalty.

 So that is exciting and I'm thinking of switching from Klaviyo to a different email provider. I find Klaviyo is a bit clunky to use and their pricing keeps creeping up consistently. So we'll see how that goes.

Rob Twells (07:13)

Am I hearing that you're doing the posting, you're managing the social media channels yourself as well? 

Lynn Power (07:20)

Sadly, yes. But it does make it

easier if you have like a, Markey has saved me hours and hours of time. So that's, that's been a godsend.

Rob Twells (07:27)

Yeah.

Yeah, and fair to say you're still quite hands-on then in the different marketing channels.

Lynn Power (07:35)

Absolutely.  think that's one of the things a lot of people, know, founders launch businesses don't always understand or appreciate is just how much work you have to do that goes into the marketing side.  A lot of the founders in our collab have this sort of naive perception that, I made this great product and I put it out there and I put the website up. Like, why am I not getting sales, you know?

 And then I have to be the one to tell them, my God, your job is now just getting started. Like you've really not done anything.

Rob Twells (08:08)

That is the first 1 % done completed. Now for the 99. AI, so using any AI internally.

Lynn Power (08:10)

Yeah.

I use

a lot of different AI tools. have about a dozen that I use for content creation,  products, models, videos, all sorts of stuff. Some are better at certain things than others.  But yeah, I have a whole library of tools in the AI space. Of course, you know, I use the usual suspects as well, know, chat, GPT and Gemini.

those but the image creation AI tools have gotten really quite good.

Rob Twells (08:55)

Well look, the next question we tend to ask is about a failure. Obviously, your career, particularly your advertising career, spans the best part of 20 years, I think I'm right to say.  I'm guessing that along those years you've faced many challenges, made a lot of mistakes, but I guess you've learned from those mistakes and taken that into your business career. So is there anything that really sticks out to you in terms of a mistake that you've made and what did you learn from that?

Lynn Power (09:23)

Yeah, I mean, I could go back, but I'll do one that's more recent. When we launched, we actually partnered with a salon  called Dream Dry and created co-branded products. And that was a couple of weeks before COVID. So they ended up shutting down for the year and then pretty much shutting down.

 And that was rough because we had invested time, energy, effort, and we had all these co-branded products. So when you're making physical products, you know, that adds a wrinkle into things because you're, you're, have the complexity of your inventory. And then of course, if you have products that you suddenly can't use, like I did, that was a very expensive mistake.  So I've learned to be a little more. 

go with the flow, shall we say,  and pivot as necessary, but also not spend so much money upfront on that kind of relationship without some guarantee of longevity there.

Rob Twells (10:37)

I guess in fairness to you, no one could have predicted COVID happening, right?

Lynn Power (10:42)

Yeah, absolutely that's true. But at the same time, I didn't do my diligence necessarily on the partnership. And that was painful.

Rob Twells (10:43)

Thank

And obviously in your advertising career, I imagine you interface with lots of different clients from lots of different industries and sectors. Is there anything that sticks out to you there in terms of learning which came off the back of a mistake?

Lynn Power (11:07)

gosh, there's so many things and you know, the, the world I worked in in advertising,  cause I was in it for almost 30 years, you know, it, it worked at a much slower pace than, than I'm working at now. And so when, when the failures would be things like you'd spend a year and a half working on a campaign only to find that a competitor launched a similar campaign a month or two before you, or.

Rob Twells (11:18)

Right.

Lynn Power (11:36)

the campaign is no longer relevant for X, Y, and Z reason, or the celebrity that you were working with did something crazy and now you had to scramble and find some last minute solution. So there was a lot of that stuff. So I guess I learned to kind of, well, weather the storm a bit, which is a very good thing to do.

So that was something that is very applicable. But I also now  make very fast decisions. And then I deal with the repercussions, which can bite me in the ass, which we talked about with the other example. But I find that if you wait too long, that can be equally challenging and create a lot of friction and pain points.

So I'd rather be a fast mover and deal with the consequences than a slow mover.

Rob Twells (12:35)

I think speed's a very good characteristic to have, especially as someone leading a company like the two of us are.  Just quickly on that point, so I'm hearing during your advertising career, you were dealing with quite large  clients, Bluechip, I suspect. What do you find the biggest differences are between working with those and now working with your own brand, which is much smaller?

Lynn Power (12:56)

I mean, the biggest thing is how they can't get out of their own way. You know, the, the layers of complexity at these organizations is staggering. Even the ones that claim to be nimble and small and you get in there and you're like, my God, they have no idea. So, a lot of times if you're in an agency role and you probably know this, you're doing a lot of coaching around organizational change just to get your marketing sold through. Not that.

you know, because they need it.  and so you, you know, I mean, I spent, when I was in my last position at J, JWT, I spent a couple of years working with J and J and trying to help them do their probably third or fourth digital transformation, right. and, know, restructure and retool and move the deck chairs around.  and then

or three years later they're doing it again. So it's just, it can be very frustrating  if you're somebody who likes action, but it's just a reality of these companies. just can't get out of their own way. 

Rob Twells (14:10)

Yeah,

I agree. We've got obviously a suite of clients and some larger than others and the ones that are larger, it's... Yeah, I'm the sort of person, as you said there, Lynn, I like action. I like outputs actually more than anything. And yeah, it's a tough one to take. I do think we're going to move to a world where things are going to have to get faster because as execution of things happens much faster with AI, for instance, speed is going to become more and more a...

a thing that every business needs to have in their armory. So I think we'll see a change on that front, hopefully, fingers crossed. Now the last part of the podcast is where we talk about what we're to put in Room 301. So for anyone that doesn't know what Room 301 is and why we call this podcast Room 301, first of all, a 301 redirect, SEO term, where you redirect a page from your website that no longer needs to exist anymore or is located elsewhere. So we took that.

And if you've ever seen the BBC One programme called Room 101, you'll have an even greater understanding of why we call it Room 301. But effectively, it's a made up room where we've stuck everything our guests don't like about marketing, lead generation and brand, never to be seen again, hypothetically. So what are you going to put in Room 301, Lynn? What really annoys you? What grinds your gears about marketing, brand, lead gen, whatever takes your fancy?

Lynn Power (15:26)

You

my god.

there's so many things. Well, first of all, it's been very interesting for me to be on the receiving end of a lot of sales emails.  And I can't tell you how many I get that claim to be able to 10x my business overnight.  And, you know, give me an audit and it's it's almost all garbage. And so I want to throw that entire that entire

strategy of cold outreach into the bin for sure.  now I know it's tough because if you're on the other side, it's like, how do you reach people like this? But look, you're doing a podcast, you know, you're finding other ways to try to engage potential clients.  I wish that more digital marketers would do that.  So that that's just an overarching annoyance. I would say 

Boy,  Facebook ads, throw those in the bin.  SEO's tricky.  I feel like I get a lot of mixed and convoluted feedback. So the lack of consistency around best practices is challenging. Throw that in there. I could go on and on. There's so many things.

Rob Twells (16:54)

Looping back to Facebook ads now, I assume that would be a part of your make marketing mix

Lynn Power (17:00)

You know, I've never been able to crack Facebook ads except for using them to retarget my Pinterest traffic.  It's very difficult. Like I just find the algorithm. That's the thing with a lot of  the digital partners. You're in these black box algorithms where there's a lack of transparency and people do their best to try to parse out.

what works on Google versus Facebook versus Instagram versus YouTube versus, you know, TikTok. But a lot of it honestly feels like guessing. And Facebook is one that I hired two or three different experts who all claim to be able to crack it. One was highly recommended. None of them were able to make a dent. And so I just gave up because I think sometimes you just have to recognize maybe it's

The type of content you have, the industry you're in, the budget. I mean, they kept telling me if I spent more, that would be the, you know, the thing that would make the difference. It's like, but that doesn't, it doesn't really make sense, you know, that I have to spend 10 grand a month  to maybe get results that would at least get me 10 grand in sales. Like, it's like, I'm just burning money, you know? So.

Rob Twells (18:24)

And on the SEO front,  yeah, I mean, it's tricky at the moment. think search engine optimization is changing a hell of a lot. Search behavior is always changing a lot. It's a hot topic internally for us. SEO is a big service for us. It's getting much more difficult to attribute success to SEO as well. like I say, the search behavior is changing  quite a dramatic amount. Have you noticed a change in your business with how you're found organically?

Lynn Power (18:51)

 Yeah, our Google used to be a really efficient way for us to get traffic and it's become much more challenging. Like we have to spend more for less traffic and so that's tough. But some of the more organic SEO seems to be helping  for sure. I mean, we've done  quite a bit to try to optimize.

our keywords, our listings, and all the sites we're on, our own site, but then you gotta do it on Amazon, you gotta do it on Walmart, gotta, know, everywhere requires  that kind of level of detail, which is hard when you're small, because, know,  yeah, you don't have the bandwidth necessarily to do all that, but you do your best.

Rob Twells (19:41)

That's it. That's all you can do. That's all you can do. Well, look, Lynn, all of those firmly in Room 301. Thank you for joining me. Lynn, now, tell us more. Tell us more about you. Tell us more about your career. How did you get into, first of all, advertising, second of all, running your own e-commerce business?

Lynn Power (19:59)

Well, I fell into advertising. I wasn't planning on making that a career. I actually had gone to school for  criminal justice in English. And there was a hot minute that I was thinking of either going to law school or FBI or something like that. And then  when I graduated in 1989, ages ago, there was a recession and it was very tough to get a job. So I took a job as a receptionist in advertising.

because that's the job that was available and I typed and I still do. So a superpower. My son now is a better typist than me, which I never thought would happen because I am a super, super, super good typist. But that got me my first job. And then I loved advertising. So I just worked my way up. And then I got to the point where I kind of maxed out my learning curve and my career. And so I decided to...

take control and see if all the advice I've been giving other people for years was that bad, because I'm going to now do it for myself.

Rob Twells (21:08)

So tell us more about  your haircare business then.

Lynn Power (21:13)

Yeah, so I launched two businesses actually in 2020. So Masumi is  clean premium hair care with the Japanese Ocean Botanical. My co-founder worked on the formulations for almost a decade. And it delivers weightless hydration, which is what makes this really unique.  And that launched at New York Fashion Week in February 2020, a few weeks before COVID. And then I also launched a luxury bee-powered home fragrance company called Ilde Nature.

later that year, inspired by the Caribbean island of Dominica. And then I got breast cancer in 2021 and had a full year of treatment of dealing with that. And so I ended up parking my little candle business on the side to kind of, I couldn't do everything. still, you know, it's like, got to prioritize. And then I ended up launching what was called the conscious beauty collective at the time is now called the power beauty collab because Ulta didn't.

didn't like us using the conscious beauty term. But that has been great, because this is about connecting small indie clean beauty founders. And we share a lot of notes,  recommendations, what works, what doesn't work,  and then co-marketing, pop-ups, retail, et cetera. So it's been a really good group of founders who

who are very similar in mindset, looking to create good products, clean products.  Good for you, good for the environment, and then help each other along the way.

Rob Twells (22:48)

Brilliant. Well, Lynn, it was great to have you on. I appreciate you spending the time with us this morning. I know you're on holiday at the moment in Italy, so I appreciate you jumping on. Everything you mentioned was super useful. Your career is fantastic. To have somebody like yourself on the pod is great. And I wish you all the best with the businesses you have as well.

Lynn Power (22:56)

Thank you. No problem.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Rob. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Rob Twells (23:16)

Thanks guys and we'll see you all again soon.