Retail marketers struggle to cut through the noise and make meaningful connections on social media, often focusing on surface-level metrics while missing the fundamental human elements that drive engagement and conversion.
Today’s Social Pulse: Retail Edition, powered by Agorapulse, guest Lisa Wells brings a unique perspective to retail, social media marketing, and combining her Master’s in Psychology and experience as a marriage and family therapist with her role as owner of Geneva Flooring, a successful retail flooring business in San Diego. She’s also served as president of the San Diego County Floor Covering Association and brings over a decade of retail leadership experience to our conversation. Don’t miss this episode as she talks with host Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton.
[Listen to the full episode below, or get the highlights of the Social Pulse: Retail Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]
Could you share how you transitioned from being a therapist to running a retail flooring business?
Lisa Wells: Therapy was just a side gig. It was a passion project. I was in flooring since I was 18 years old in a family business, and I got my bachelor’s in business with a minor in psychology, and I just loved to learn. So I was going back to school, I was going to go for business for my master’s in business, and I just found it so boring to study more inventory and marketing.
So I went for what I was passionate about, which was child psychology, and it turned out that they turned you into a therapist. So I was doing it, I loved it. So the program required an internship. I stayed on years past the internship because I was deeply embedded in the networks of the school system, so I was doing art therapy and anger management therapy with junior high and high school, and elementary school kids, and I was running the programs and training people. Then I was working in the juvenile delinquency programs. I was working at the police station and in the courthouse with minors who were taken away from their parents.
So it was just compelling work, and I was doing it 20, 30 hours a week for, oh, I don’t know, maybe four years. But I stopped when I had kids of my own because I already had a full-time job. I’ve definitely been able to implement the things that I’ve learned, obviously, in that time. But I don’t combine and relate the two very often. Weirdly, I think of them as so separate.
But I absolutely use psychology in team management, and probably my approach to marketing and creating relationships with customers and builders is more than in a sales way. I know I don’t think about it in that way, but I guess once you learn people and respect, and listening skills, which is what therapy is, empathy, then you use it in all facets of your life. I’m certainly using it with my seven and eight-year-old daughters.
How has your background in psychology influenced your approach to social media marketing?
Lisa Wells: My marketing is so organic, it is so authentic. I have never written a script or created one. I think about what would be interesting for me, I want to know about the technical specs, how do I sell to my customers that I’ve been selling to for 20 years? They want to know about performance. They want to consider the pets and conditions of their home. They want to talk about their own layout and their own design preferences. So I’m just listening and then screening through my knowledge, editing, and giving them the information in a digestible package.
I don’t plan that for my social media either. I think about the questions that people ask me all the time, and then I do little snippets so that my same message could go out to a larger audience, and then they come back in and they can get it for me individually. But obviously this is scalable, and I don’t know where it’s going to go long term. I don’t make it for that. I don’t know. I do it because I know that it’s relevant, and my marketing team has been telling me that it’s relevant. And obviously, like I am a brand, I’m a personality, so reading something on a page is not the same as thinking who the narrator would be. A picture’s worth a thousand words.
So I’d rather it come from my own voice, and I don’t plan it, so I just come up with the questions and then I answer them, and I never do a second take. And that’s how I came up with it.
Mike Allton: That’s great, though. That’s a real fundamental truth of marketing and social media in particular. Marcus Sheridan coined the phrase They Ask You Answer, and that is exactly what you’re doing. It is so important in all facets of content marketing.
What are some common psychological principles that you see in play as you’re creating this social content, and you’re seeing it resonate with customers?
Lisa Wells: I think that people are sick of advertising and lies. And if I am just telling them my truth and I’m providing value and I’m not being pushy, we’re so sensitive to that. People are more willing to listen to me online. Then, coming into my showroom 20 years ago, people would come in and be like, “Tell me about flooring.”
And I’d spend two hours telling them and having that dialogue. Now they come in, they go, “Don’t you sell me something? I already did my research online.”
Even though the research online is more jaded and marketed, and blogs are purchased advertisements, we don’t know that as consumers yet. We think that’s research. It’s not. But they come in pretty protective and jaded.
Mike Allton: I could see a lot of the ways that retail customers they’re being triggered. By the things that they see on social media, whether it’s directed at them specifically or not, they’re scrolling through Facebook, and they see a post that’s clearly selling to them, and it’s triggering.
But we also know from a psychological perspective, not all triggers are negative. There are some positive triggers. That was something that Jay Baer talked about a lot. He had an entire book about triggers.
What have you found that actually worked well in terms of psychological triggers for your retail social media marketing?
Lisa Wells: I honestly haven’t had very many. And it’s not in my personality to dwell or obsess on how I look, how many likes I got. I don’t read comments. So what I’m delivering is what my marketing person wanted of me. I am dealing with the same insecurities as everybody else. I was 25 pounds heavier last year. I turned 40, and my body changed. And so, honestly, it is very hard to see yourself online and not have judgment.
So I’m trying to come from—and it takes personal work to come from—a non-ego, heart-opening place that says, “No, no matter how many people are watching this, I’m just talking about things I know and I’m coming from a good place.”
So, it’s giving yourself grace and just giving yourself grace, and I don’t overanalyze people’s acceptance or judgment of it.
I think that’s a key in making social media content because nobody likes the look the way they look or the way they sound. They don’t sound smart. I’m flubbing right now. So it’s important to get a good editing team. I tried for five years to create my own content without an editor, and the only way that I got the confidence to say one big spiel and know that it was going to be edited, and the flubbing of your words like I am right now is going to be edited out. So then you have the confidence to just make it through to the end. Honestly, I only have generally about 30 seconds where I can talk before I start blacking out and being aware that the camera’s watching me and everybody’s watching me, and it’s only Tony, my camera guy, and maybe I have a person or two in the office, and so I start getting self-conscious. So I think of the question I want to answer. I talk about it until I start getting nervous, and then I close. And that’s why most of my media content is short. And then the key to success is I don’t ask for permission to edit.
I trust that Tony’s going to cut out the places where I stutter, and then he’ll post it. I never approve or deny, reject anything, I just let ’em post it. And then I work on that self inner work of acceptance and love, self-love, and then I don’t spend the time to see if anybody’s saying mean things to me. I’ve literally never seen anything. Probably somebody has said something, but I do three videos a week, and I just have to move on with my life. I’m a very busy business owner, mom, and friend, so I stay busy, stay confident.
What would you say are some common mistakes that you see retailers making, other retailers, not you, in social media marketing, whether that’s psychological or otherwise?
Lisa Wells: It’s not starting. People say to me all the time, even in my office, that I don’t like to see myself on camera. Nobody does it. It’s not satisfying or fulfilling to any of us. And they, so they don’t start, and they overedit, and then when they create content, they get stuck. And I did for over five years in logistical content editing, creation. I hired somebody, but he didn’t do it. I bought the program. I tried to teach myself. We’re going to try to figure out who was going to do it.
You could get a video edited for 30 to 50 bucks. So you have to find who that person is. Then how are you going to create it? Are you going to create it on your phone? Are you going to buy hardware? Or are you going to buy the software? Are you going to send it through Vimeo? Then you run out of storage space because you have to buy a subscription, and are you going to send it through Dropbox?
But that person doesn’t like the pixelation, so then you’d have to send it through the drive. So those logistics held me back for over five years before I posted a video, and still stopped my YouTube channel from growing right now because I have two teams, and they don’t like how we convert and transport the videos, and who’s going to edit it.
So now I’m trying to collect my raw footage so that it can be chopped up and packaged in different ways. I’m like, I’m not getting younger. I should be able to reuse this stuff. I do an hour-long shoot. Most of it dies on the cutting room floor. So what I did, which changed everything two years ago, was hiring somebody to come into my space with a camera and we set, he calls me and he sets up a date and he brings better lighting, which it was essential for me and makes me look good and edits it out and gives me the confidence. And I just have a three-hour filming window, and then I’m done for the month, and I have three posts a week.
That is the only way this was going to happen for me. I did five videos a year for five years, and not one of them saw my Instagram page because of the logistics and rallying my team together. So once I got all that figured out, now I have a lot of posts, but I think people just need to start now and spend the money that it requires to get the team to do it, if that’s what they think will have a good result for them. Do you need to spend $1,500 a month? Yeah. You do. That’s a minimum that I’ve heard to get somebody to come out, create content, edit, and post and distribute, and that is a full-time job that requires a full-time team, hardware, and software, and that never happened for me when I tried to save the money.
Mike Allton: I love that you started by basically just blowing away limiting beliefs. If you think this is something that you’re not pretty enough or communicative enough or whatever enough, just do it. Get yourself out there.
Lisa Wells: It’s never going to get easier, although creating content does get easier. Accepting myself gets easier. My anxiety has gone down over time. I was so anxious. I do my filming first thing in the morning, so I get my hair done, go to the gym, all that walk in, and I want to film. Because I’m just getting more and more anxious as it goes.
I like to get it outta the way and then get on with the rest of my day.
Is Instagram primarily where you’re pushing your videos, or are you on other platforms as well?
Lisa Wells: I don’t touch it. So I do Instagram socially in a small circle myself, so that’s where I see my posts. And I’m friends with my company, and my friends are friends with my company, and some of my work peers are friends with my company. So my videos are every day, and I get a lot of feedback. About my Instagram, from my circle, because the algorithm has me figured out. And so I’m famous in the flooring community when I’m trying to make these videos to sell floors to other people.
And I’m like, none of these people are going to buy a floor from me. They’re all in flooring. So it’s more of just not a joke, but it is good-natured. I don’t know. I’m trying to think of the right way to describe it, but now I’m blanking. I am just famous in the flooring industry, and that’s funny for all of us.
Like I’ll go to a convention, in another part of the country, and a women’s luncheon, and they’ll be like, oh, I saw you on the internet. Or I’d be walking through a convention and be like, you’re the girl from the internet. It’s funny because I set this out for sales, and instead I’m getting a lot of unwarranted or unsolicited attention from my peers, but it’s good-natured, and I’m accepting it, and I’m accepting the love and praise because all people are saying is, I wish I had done it. I wish I were brave enough to start. Nobody’s asking me how, because everybody knows why they’re not doing it, because they don’t feel secure about their image or how well spoken they are.
Editing gives a lot of confidence.
Mike Allton: That’s a huge point that you just made because as marketers, we’re creating content for our consumers, and we get zero feedback from consumers about our content, ’cause they don’t care. They’re just consuming the message and then moving on or taking some action. They’re never going to tell one of our sales reps that, you know what? I saw your video, and Lisa did a fantastic job. I loved her script. They’re not going to say that ever. So to get positive feedback from colleagues, that’s where that’s going to come from. And I think that’s huge. I know exactly how that goes well in the market.
Lisa Wells: Yeah, we’re having a blast with it. I sent one out last night, and I was like, look at me selling your stuff. And like when I send it out to my reps when I’m featuring one of their products. We’re all buddies. Sometimes they come into my showroom and I let them do a little blurb with my camera guy, and we’re just having a blast with it.
So it gives some texture, but ultimately, the credibility that I’m gaining with my customers, they’re right. They’re not going to judge my delivery. They’re trying to see this woman and her company, is it a brand that I can trust, and do they know what they’re doing? And I think that message comes across pretty clearly.
I do know what I’m doing, and I do speak eloquently about flooring, at least it rolls off the tongue because I’ve talked to thousands of people about it. I don’t know. I am just trying to do good in my world. In the world, that authenticity translates so it’s not manufactured. So that’s what they’re looking for.
Are there any specific tools that you have found that have actually helped you implement your approach to social media?
Lisa Wells: Just Tony from Tony Hernandez, the social media guy. Honestly, having a person behind the camera who is calm and reassuring like you, Mike, and maybe gives you prompts, but either way, is good energy. That helps a lot. But he’s the one who’s getting together, the team of editors, and the logistics. He brings the hardware, like the camera and the memory stick. The little things that stop me from posting are that I didn’t want to look into the hardware and software, and logistics.
So the best thing I could do is say hire somebody else to do all that, unless you’re interested in it. But then that’s your business. Like, my business is flooring. I’m not going to take the time to figure out how to edit. I just will never get across the finish line. I’m having so many problems. Let me write training manuals. Let me make a new banner. I just bought a new sign. Let’s change our logo. I just bought another company, like let’s target builders and designers. That’s where my attention is going, so I can’t take the time and energy for media stuff. That’s somebody else’s passion, not mine.
Mike Allton: I couldn’t agree more, folks listening. Some of you might be in ownership leadership roles like Lisa, and you should absolutely be doing what Lisa is doing. You outsource. You have team members who support you, and you focus on what you need to do to create that content and then move on to the more strategic and visionary aspects of your business.
But I also know some of you listening are the actual practitioners, social media managers, other kinds of content marketers, and so on. There are a lot of things that our friend Tony here is doing that you can actually do yourselves. We talked about it in some other episodes.
Lisa Wells: Absolutely, that’s what you guys can do is support us and make it easy.
Convenience is everything. I am so busy, so the fewer points of contact, the more implications for the next step. Don’t wait. So he calls me, “When can we get it on the schedule? We need more raw content.”
Other than that, I’ve been with him for over two years, and I can set it and forget it. He only needs one day a month for me.
So if I were telling other advertising agencies, “Everything is exactly the support that I need. Just reach out to me. I’m too busy to think about it and reach out to you. If you wait for me for content, we’ll never get posts up.”
And I think that’s where everybody gets stuck. They don’t know what to do next. Tony is not in flooring, so he’s constantly giving me prompts. He says all of my customers want to know where you start. And he’s put emotion into it. “So, how does a new floor make you feel?” And I’m like, “If it has to do with flooring, I’ve talked to a customer about it.” So, if he gives me a prompt, if he thinks this is how I would shop for my flooring, where do you start? What’s the difference between good, better, and best? So he gives me those prompts, and I’ll ramble on for an hour, but anything you could do to support the person and lower the anxiety of how prepared they need to be.
When I’ve worked with other friends in the last year, realtors, etc, trying to encourage them to do their social media, I’m like, “I’ll come shoot it and I’ll give you some prompts, dude, real estate, you could just talk to me.”
And then overall, they’re like, “I need you to prep me with questions. I started a podcast. I’ve done two. Everybody needs to know the questions beforehand.”
I’m more of an off-the-cuff person, but I see people obsessing about this. So that’s what I would say to other marketing companies. The way that you could support us is to come up with some of those questions to lower their anxiety, and then reach out to them, set a date, and get it started.
Are there any resources or thought leaders that you turn to?
Lisa Wells: Oh, it’s so important to have a team to do that.
I have five marketing teams. So I have the people that host my website and have interactive visualizers and SEO, Google Ad Teams, a Google specialist that runs my YouTube channel, and then this social media team. So I am connected many times a month with several teams of people that are on the cutting edge.
And there are things, they’re like, “You need to hold the camera this way. You need to hold the camera this way. You need it to be 15 seconds, 30 seconds, or 2 minutes. Google’s looking for a 15-minute, made that once.”
They’re constantly changing their algorithms and their parameters of what they’re looking for. They’re looking for blogs now. They’re looking for videos. They’re looking for a carousel of change. So it is super relevant for you to know what Google algorithm is looking for right now, and then change your website and your YouTube. They’re looking for thumbnails. You can’t have your face like at the beginning of the video, you need to have a thumbnail. So those things are important, and somebody else needs to tell me that because I am not late at night. Googling what Google needs from me. So there are people who are experts in that, and you just need to align yourself with a good team.
And then in the 30 minutes that I give that person, they’re going to say, “This is what they want from us right now.” And then I create that content, and I shoot it out. And I’ve been doing this for over five years, probably closer to ten, with all of these marketing teams [and] super sophisticated companies like Broadloom or tech companies.
I do see that it’s changed over time, and I do see that there is no way I’m going to do that. I have a job. I have a full-time plus job doing things that have nothing to do with the internet.
So, it’s about aligning yourself with the team.
Thanks for reading the highlights from this episode with Lisa Wells. Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: Retail Edition on Apple or Spotify, where we’re digging into the challenges, successes, and stories of social media and community professionals in the industry, just like you.
