Lauren Schwartz from California is a thought leader in creating profitable creative strategies for e-commerce brands. She’s a design professional with over 15 years of experience, and had worked in digital marketing over the last 8 years.
Lauren’s passions lie in creating top-performing ad creatives. She has personally led the creative strategy for top brands such as Love Wellness, APL, Colourpop, Our Place, and Leaf Shave.
She is obsessed with design and creative strategy, and in her downtime, she enjoys teaching others her profitable creative methodology and focusing on DTC Advertising, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Pinterest.
Here’s what we covered on the episode:
Lauren’s Background + E-commerce Changes
- Lauren says she’s always loved art and the digital side of things, more specifically figuring out shopping behaviors – as paid media became bigger she fell in love with that as well which is how she got into e-commerce space
- One of Lauren’s first digital jobs was working at a company where they made point of sale (POS) systems for restaurants
- When Lauren first started in the e-commerce space, it was all about figuring out the design of websites and email marketing, and now she says it has changed drastically into a social media digital space where everything is very focus on e-commerce and being on your phone
- How the design landscape changed from a desktop computer to a tiny little phone screen that you hold all day, so Lauren says how she used to design is way different than how she designs digital advertisements today
- Lauren explains that she doesn’t manage the digital ads, she does the design, creative strategy, and works with paid media buyers to deliver the ads for clients
- Lauren shares that she doesn’t have a specific niche, she works with e-commerce in general who are product based
- How Lauren has to stay up to date on all the trends happening on each social media platform, which is hard to do and she explains how she has to test a lot of things, and sometimes they don’t always work out
- Lauren has set packages she offers and works off retainers because it’s important to her that the works with her clients for a long time so she can really understand their brand and help them grow, while giving them the full support they need
- Within the last year, Lauren has been able to grow and bring some more people onto her team — she has 3 designers she was able to bring on, as well as her project manager
- Through the pandemic, a lot of businesses realized they couldn’t rely on retail and that they needed to invest in their online space — Lauren says e-commerce is just as important as retail
- With all the iOS and privacy updates, Lauren explains that people in e-commerce realized that they need to focus their creative because it’s really important when you’re on the social media platforms
Creating User-Generated Content
- Lauren suggests that her clients give their creators a script because 9/10 times when you give them some talking points, you’re going to get back better user-generated content
- Another important thing to think about Lauren says is getting testimonials because people tend to gravitate towards authentic testimonials vs influencers who are “selling your product”
- Lauren explains that to her, user-generated content is real people showcasing your product in an authentic way and explains when people are scrolling through their feed they don’t want to be served ads so you have to use user-generated content in a way that looks very native to each specific platform
- How Lauren creates custom thumbnails for user-generated content because that converts better than a random image — she also explains that they give a lot of guidance to their creators when it comes to talking about and shooting the product so it looks native
- Some brands that Lauren thinks are doing a great job when it comes to being in the online space is Ritual, a vitamin company and Magic Spoon, which is a keto cereal company
- Connect with Lauren on her website, the loft 325.com or on Instagram and shoot her a DM, she is always willing to answer questions
Links mentioned:
Connect with Lauren on Instagram
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