E024 Marco D'Elia: Social Media Influencer

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 0:07
Once upon a time, there were millions of businesses struggling. Every day they wasted time, effort and energy on repetitive tasks that added no value. One day the better automation podcast by PROCESIO came to help them find the way. Because of this, these businesses save time, reduce costs, innovate and make better decisions because of that. These businesses grow, scale, and use human creativity to change this world. Hello, my name is Aziz and I'm your host that Better Automation podcast by PROCESIO where I interview the world's top experts and share their very best ideas on how to improve automation in your business processes and life. My guest today is Marco D'Elia. Marco is a public figure, a social media influencer, an actor, a singer and male model, an MMA fighter, a fragrance enthusiast, the self development lover, and entrepreneur. He is Mr. World Italy and a big believer in the power of social media for business growth and social impact. He has over 200,000 followers on Tiktok and 29,000 on YouTube. Marco, how are you today?

Marco D'Elia 1:35
Hello. Hello, guys. Hello, Aziz. Thanks. Thanks a lot for having me. Thanks for the amazing introduction. It looks like I'm doing everything on this world with your introduction, so thanks a lot for that. And it's all good. It's all good. Thank you.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 1:50
I probably missed a few things that we could add to like a yogi and someone who's interested in health and supplements that are natural supplements and all that. But okay, tick tock social media. Yes, there was for some time stigma about it for business people where they thought it's not really going to happen, or it's not the future. Now everybody's using it. But there are places like tick tock where people are not sure. People are thinking, Should I use paid ads on social media? Does organic social media actually work? Tell me your perspective on how useful can social media and things like tick tock can be for a business service, or someone who's interested to for things that are not just for entertainment, alright,

Marco D'Elia 2:41
TikTok is a great tool, every social media, each one of them, they have a different purpose. So normally, we want to use YouTube to create a community to create and give some information. So it's more of, you know, value kind of platform, we want to use Instagram or Facebook, we want to create a network. So we want to message other people and create our community around stories and the content you post. But for example, if you want to create discoverability Tik Tok right now is one of the best one whatsoever, like the shareability. And factor that you can be viral, even with the first video that you post is amazing. So businesses, if they don't want to use tick tock, they are missing on a great opportunity right now. Because it's not going to be as easy as it is with tick tock now maybe in the future with another platform, but we don't know.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 3:47
How should the content strategy of a business be on TikTok? How can they think about it? Should they try to grow big enough to create some ads or focus on the paid advertisements? Or who should they target? I mean, how can a business have a proper strategy and content calendar for tick tock, right,

Marco D'Elia 4:12
TikTok is such a different kind of social media. It's different from any other one. The cool thing is that you if you go to the TikTok ads website, you can clearly see there's Logan is don't create ads create TikToks meaning that it's the first platform in which ads could be actually watchable, and they don't feel like someone wants to sell you something. And that's all. So it's pretty cool. Sometimes I even save some ads because they're so cool. They're made with a major budget instead of other people. So my opinion is to just simply use the phone, here's a phone like every other creator, and try to be creative at creating content. This strategy is the same strategy that influencers do that people that want to grow on Tik Tok do so it's not a different strategy from other other creators, businesses have to adopt the same strategy, which is just do what the market wants you to do. So right now, it could be a trend. Or maybe you post four or five videos, and then you see that one of the videos, go, one of the videos go better than the other one. So just go for that. Keep, you know, try to look for something that works and then just invest on it. 100% This is what I've done. And I think most of the people that I know that are influencers on tick tock did the same. So they just found that that little thing that worked, and they invest in on it,

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 5:44
thank you that's very useful in business in general that you make small bets and see what works and then invest more in what is working. And for an executive or a person who is in business more b2b to understand, they will say, Okay, I understand for a direct to consumer brand, maybe Tik Tok is the best. But for me, who deals with business people? How can Tik Tok really helped me is it for them, or mostly for direct to consumer brands,

Marco D'Elia 6:18
I think it's more for consumers than business people. There are still a lot of people that actually consume business content, and that are business related even more right now. And they're keep growing. It's not just like, a few years ago, in which tick tock was just for kids to make some dance videos. Now, every kind of niche in every kind of language is there besides some countries, so I think it's, you can create some content and still try, I think the strategy doesn't change. Even if you post something for other businesses, and it's not for consumers, I think the strategy doesn't change, you just have to. I mean, the cool thing about tick tock is that you have a feedback very quick. So it's not like another business or another social media, in which you have to post like YouTube and you have to wait for a few months or even a few weeks, or with a business, you have to wait even a few years to see if it works on tick tock, it's pretty much in terms of hours or even a day, you can see what works and what not. So they're the guessing game isn't valuable at all. So you don't have to guess you just have to find what people wants to see, in that specific moment in that specific niche, doesn't matter if they're businesses doesn't matter if there are people behind the business, there's always people, so they consume it the same way as other people. So I think that you just have to find that needs that misses and just feel it,

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 7:53
thank you. And how to do that is it you're looking towards going viral and your copy it or you're creatively trying many, many ideas, and many of them will fail. And if you will work or how to approach it is it as a copying person, as an innovator who's failing a lot, or you just find a few things that work and you keep on repeat, repeat, repeat until they stop working?

Marco D'Elia 8:18
I mean, those are different strategies, you can try them all. Every one of them worked. And I try them all. And I think that in the beginning, in the first time, if you start from zero from scratch, I think that not copying, but modeling from other people's content that worked. That's what works the best. So for example, even just changing the language, one of my my friend, who is an influencer from Chile, he, with his girlfriend, try to model some content that was viral in the United States and tried to do it in Spanish. And they went viral, and now they have millions and followers and they monetize it. So that thing really work whenever you start having some community around it. So whenever you start having people that follow you, so your abuse doesn't just come from the for you page, but they come also from your following, then I think you can start maybe testing around, or even just in the beginning test around 20% of what you're doing, just test around what works. Maybe try to create something new, be creative. See if a kind of, you know, kind of content works best. Maybe you try a voiceover and it works more. Maybe you try you know, not speaking just with written words, and it works more. So I think it's just a matter of 20% testing, and 80% just modeling from what works and even modeling from what worked that you that you've done that you've done so not just from other people.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 9:52
Thank you and I was speaking to an AI expert about singularity which is supposed to be when AI becomes smarter than humans are as smart. And he said, I don't believe that will happen, what will happen is, you will need to reinvent yourself and create fresh content that is new, so fast that it's almost like every hour or every minute, you need to be so creative and creating something that didn't exist before. And that's really, really exhausting. But AI can help with that. Do you believe this will happen? Do you believe this is what's happening in social media that there is such big competition that even things that used to be okay to do every week, now, you have to do every day, something fresh and new, and exciting. And both modeling what worked but with a twist that is new and different, or you think actually, a lot of people are don't understand social media. So they're just throwing content out there. And if you know what you're doing, you're not really competing with millions of users.

Marco D'Elia 10:58
It really depends on the kind of image that you want to have online. So for example, if you're a doctor, and you want to make health content, for related content, maybe more for business people, or just to you know, monetize it and create a community, you can even skip trends, you can try just to make content that goes well, and testing and just going all the way on it. But if you make if you're more into the entertainment system, that's just trends. So on tick tock, specifically, they just work on trends. So you have to be constantly on the platform to see what's the new trend, or even with some agencies, they can help you find trends, or some sounds before they are released. So or even just launching trends, you know, the biggest the big influencers, there, they are the one that launched the trends. So yeah, I think AI could be useful. I think the human brain works very complex. See, Lee, I don't know, to say it in English, sorry, for my, for my English, but I think it's very complex. And I think that every day, something can change, but you cannot beat the work ethic. Meaning that you have to put the work, you can try many shortcuts. But if AI can help you remember that you can help anyone. So if anyone is good, nobody's good. So you have always to be to find that thing to be different, you know.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 12:38
Thank you. And when it comes to social media, there are two schools of thought more or less, some that say like Gary Vee, you should create an infinite amount of content on infinite like channels to I don't know, if you can make 24 or 48 TikToks per day, you should do that. While some others say actually, quality is very important. So you should spend maybe a whole week tweaking and working on a few seconds of a Tiktok make something amazing that looks professional, is really well edited, well done with like all kinds of motion graphics and cool stuff on a new subject or something that is really unique. So which one do you believe actually leads to the most growth and results is it quantity and as much quantity within Okay, quality level, I'm not saying like bad tiktoks Or to make something really, really, really, really amazing, that takes more time, and therefore you have less content.

Marco D'Elia 13:43
I was a very big fan of Gary Vee. And all his strategy, I read his books, and I loved them. And I went since the almost the start of my social media career, I started creating content with his method. So just creating content, a lot of hustle, you know, work ethic and keep going keep going, the more you create, the better it is quantity over quality. And I think that after a couple of years, three years of doing it, I noticed that what he meant was not exactly you know what people think. So I don't think like I started doing exactly what he was saying. So posting so many content per day, I was posting one day, for a month, I tried to post 10 videos on Tiktok per day. And let me tell you, I grew a little bit and then I stopped growing. And after a while, I noticed that the people that started following me, they didn't even care too much about me. And so I stopped growing because I stopped listening. It was kind of weird. So I started posting more quality content. And I started seeing more growth. Now my mind strategy is to post quality content on some kind of content. So a balance and some quantity content on some other kind of content. So for example, I could post as many stories on Instagram as I want to create content, I can post 2,3,4,5 tiktoks per day if I want speaking about, you know, fragrances, but if I want to talk about something more important, or if they want to, you know, make a YouTube video, then I want to stay there, maybe give it a little more time. And what works, because I think that what Gary Vee actually intended, is not that you just have to create content and you will grow is that you will not grow in terms of followers. In terms of social media, you will grow in terms of experience. So if you post 1000 videos, you grow, as Gary Vee says, but not in terms, you know, I posted 1000 videos, and now I'm a famous, no, you know now how it is how it's experienced to create 1000 videos. So now you know what works. Now you know what doesn't work. Now you know how to make videos, how to edit them, even quickly, you know how to speak in front of the camera. So I think it's more of that in the beginning, maybe it's better to post more and to see what works. But then once you find what works, once you have your community, I think it's better to have a balance between them. So focus more on quality, so that people whenever you post, they are craving for your content instead of just Oh, it's just not a post of today.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 16:48
Thank you that's really interesting and wise. And like you said, the experience of doing what Gary Vee said is what led you to understand that if you didn't do it, you wouldn't have been able to realize what he truly meant. And I remember for you, you know, a lot of people struggle to even have 500 followers on Tiktok or whatever. But you think that is possible? It's not it's not so hard to reach 1000s of followers on Tiktok, what would be a simple strategy for someone to do that, just enough to to have millions of followers or whatever, but to reach maybe 5000 or 10,000 on TikTok.

Marco D'Elia 17:32
I mean, it's pretty easy, you just have to figure out first, what you want to create content about. So for example, fragrances, perfumes, you create three pieces of content, about fragrances in three different teams, three different kinds of content. So maybe one you do a review. And another one, you do an unboxing. So three different kinds of content, but just about fragrances. You see what works more, and you invest in what works more, if none of them works, none of them work. Just go to the for you page search for fragrance related content, see what work there and model that content. That's it.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 18:12
Thank you, Marco, this was my privilege. And my honor, and for all businesses trying to grow, I highly recommend PROCESIO. So they should check it out. PROCESIO is the modern low code, no code platform for advanced automation and creating an enterprise grade back end for your software, you can request access to a totally free account at processes app that will help you a whole lot. And for those who need more, who want to upgrade. There is a very generous 50% of discount code. It's BETTER50OFF one word in capital letters that they can use. And that is wonderful links and more in the description. Thank you, Marco. This was my privilege, my honor, and I actually learned a lot. So thank you.

Marco D'Elia 19:03
Thank you very much for having me. Thank you guys.