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0:01 Liza: Jen, thank you so much for taking your time and doing this case study together. I really appreciate this.

0:09 Jen: That’s okay, thanks for having me here.

0:11 Liza: Cool. So, maybe we can start off with just you sharing, who’s DSA, what do you guys do and what’s your role within the association?

0:22 Jen: Sure. Well, Direct Selling Australia (DSA) is the industry association for direct selling in Australian retails. We represent and support organisations that manufacture and distribute goods that go directly to consumers. We have about 70 members. They’re brands like Avon, Nutrimetics, Thermomix, Isagenixs, Amway. So direct selling is when you take a product or service away from a fixed retail store. You’re selling at person to person or in small groups. It’s most commonly things like cosmetics, skin care, nutritionals and homewares.

1:00 Liza: Well, cool. Awesome. And what do you do within the association?

1:05 Jen: Sure. I’m the Marketing and Communications Manager. I look after everything from our website to our newsletters and anything that’s content and communications that go out to members and the public as well.

1:17 Liza: Okay, brilliant. So, we’ve been working together for a little while now. And I’m actually thinking back ago, like it’s almost two years. It’s incredible how time flies. Can you share with – how did the projects come about with what we did together? What were you trying to achieve with those projects?

1:40 Jen: Well, the association is in a period of transformation. We’re working towards shifting the emphasis of our work from protection of the industry to promotion of the industry. We were thought of as being overly regulatory in everything that we did. We realised that we needed to change everything from the way that we looked to the way that we communicate. So that’s when we started come about. We wanted to increase the brand awareness of the association and the understanding about our industry which is quite often misunderstood.

To do this, we realised that we needed to improve our online presence and that we decided to have the Content Maximiser to create a complete digital strategy and help us turn that vision into reality.

2:29 Liza: Cool. Awesome. Let’s talk about – what we did was we did the strategy and then from there we went on to the website and podcast and so forth. Prior to all of that with what you have previously, how was that working for you?

2:49 Jen: Well it probably wasn’t working for us. [Laughs] Just looking at our website for instance, the communication style, the tone, the look, the feel, the navigation, and just the user friendliness wasn’t very good. The bounce rate on our site was quite high. People are coming on and leaving quite quickly. A lot of our inquiries turned straight to the calls or emails, things like that. And we just didn’t really have much of a presence within the public and also within distributors as well. We mean people that a part of direct selling organisations may not even understood what it is that we do and what we stand for. It’s really important for us to change those things.

3:37 Liza: Yes. And when you talk about the user friendliness, I think back then it was on both ends, wasn’t it? On the front end, the navigation, the back end…

3:47 Jen: Oh yes, so changing something on the back end was really difficult. One day it could work, the next day, maybe not so well. You almost had to be really tech savvy to go in and just update one small word. It was really difficult and time consuming, so it’s something that we really needed to change fast.

4:07 Liza: Yes, and knowing you, you’re full of ideas and you’re quick to implement, so what you had back then, how did that make you feel when you want to implement something?

4:19 Jen: Oh, extremely frustrated, really frustrated. We are only a small team here so we don’t have a lot of time or resources between us, so to be spending a significant amount of time trying to update a website or create content in different ways was really frustrating.

4:39 Liza: Okay, cool. So let’s talk about things that we’ve been doing together. So we started off with the strategy, when you saw that the strategy that came out, what was your thoughts? What did you think of it?

4:58 Jen: Look, I think that what was really important for us that thrill of this, we were always coming back to what it is that we wanted to do. We wanted to change the emphasis of our work, from protection to promotion and ensure that we educate the public about the industry, what we do and what the association stand for. I think the whole way through, I keep coming back to that and making sure that that was the objective, the whole way along when we coming together in creating this process.

5:42 Liza: Cool. So, can you tell us about the solutions or the services that you got from us?

5:44 Jen: Yeah, look, Content Maximiser built our new website which was fresh, modern and user friendly, easy to navigate and have clearly designed paths for our two main audiences. The site also allows our staff members to update and edit the site as we need to, which as I mentioned was a really important factor for us. We also built a social media strategy and we launched three social media channels.

But more importantly, Content Maximiser works with us to create effective content and helped us to schedule and plan for ongoing contents. We launched a podcast channel for the field and again, Content Maximiser setup all the necessary back end stuff. We just look after the recordings and then it’s just so easy. We send the recordings straight back, they edit them and then post them into our channels for us.

Podcast have been something that was so new to us. It was a bit of a journey in the beginning but I feel like, with the support of Liza and the team there, we’ve really been able to just smash this one out and it’s just been really well received.

We also created a few videos, so Content Maximiser helped us create explainer videos, like animation and also some face to camera clips as well. It’s been a complete strategy. Not just sort of the website. We’ve got all these other things running that are all plugging into each other. So, it’s been really good.

7:48 Liza: Cool. Do you mind if I ask you some questions around how your feel around the pod casting process?

7:54 Jen: Yeah!

7:54 Liza: Cool. I know that you’ve been doing the interviews with the field distributors, as you go through that process, how do you feel that is helping to achieve the goal of the association of promoting the industry.

8:16 Jen: Yeah, look, the podcast is all about helping us build relevant and useful content for the field. What that does is, the podcast channel, we focus on topics like mindset, leadership, attitude, working from home, things like that and then once we turn on these interviews and we post them out, it kind of delivers on a few different things here.

The first thing it does is it makes these people understand that they are part of something bigger than their own organisation. That’s really important they’re not just part of one company, they’re part of an industry and to be able to provide these tools and resources, educating them on different challenges that other people in similar situations are having has been really well received. They’re really enjoying that. You often get insights right into the back end of somebody’s challenges so to be able to listen to those and even just the feeling of I’m going through that too or I’ve got a similar challenge, how do I overcome that? So I think that that’s been really important.

I think the second thing is it provides the public to see the view that this is a professional and credible industry that are out there creating contents that’s really useful for building up those leaders.

The third thing that it’s doing which we didn’t expect or anticipate really in the beginning was how excited the leaders get when they’re asked to participate. What normally happens is we approach our members and ask them if they’d like to nominate somebody from within their field to participate in the interview and once that person is nominated by the company, we find that it’s just sends a bit of a wave through their organisation and their teams that they were chosen, someone from their team was chose and it just sends this wave so what that does for us is it just increases the level of awareness of what we do and what we stand for and that the association is more than just a regulatory body that looks after ethical business practices and protects consumers, and things like that. We’re also creating business building tools too, so by using these tools it gets our brand out there and it makes the public and also the field aware of us. It’s actually achieving so many different things all in one go.

10:48 Liza: Yeah, it was to a certain degree, it was kind of like uniting the industry and creating this culture for the whole industry.

10:58 Jen: Yes. It’s all about sharing and providing each other with tools and contents. It’s been really great.

11:05 Liza: All good. Awesome. I guess to wrap up, for the people that are watching this video, companies and organisations where they could be thinking about upgrading their online presence or just want to go to the next level, what would you recommend for them?

11:27 Jen: Well, I guess the thing to remember is don’t just look at updating your website. Everybody updates their websites over time but think about the reasons why you want to do that and what are you trying to achieve. I think that, yourself and your team, you’re expert in conversion and engagement and it’s really important that you guys look at the bigger picture and how you can build a complete digital strategy. It’s critical to any organisations success today. Content Maximiser can take your vision into reality in your organisation to the next level and that’s so important.