Evy Tea

We sat down with Evy from Evy Tea to discuss using social media to tell YOUR brand’s personal story, adding value to the lives if your followers, and the importance of having an off-line presence 

The Stats:

Evy Tea

Charlestown, MA

Instagram:

@coldbrewtea

6,868 followers 

Facebook
Evy Tea

1541 Likes

1613 Followers 

Evy Tea was founded in 2014 right here in Boston. Using a cold brew method and traditional techniques and ingredients, Evy had the goal of putting a real good product out there - no more sugar and artificial flavors. Since then, Evy Tea has grown dramatically and can now be found in stores coast-to-coast. Throughout this journey, Evy has used social media in a very unorthodox way: rather than looking at her product portfolio and asking herself how she could turn it into content, she looked at her journey and realized that this was how she could connect with people.

Social media was created as a media to connect people; the more personal you get, the more social it gets. That’s the essence of what works on social for businesses: that personal connection that you just cannot get through traditional marketing. Evy gets this; that’s why her social media channels aren’t filled with ads or phony “inspirational influencer” content. Her feed is quite frankly, her story: the day-to-day grind of a young entrepreneur trying to change the tea game, one bottle at a time. It’s not always perfect, but it’s consistent and it’s real - and it’s clearly been working. 

The Chat:

Tell us about Evy Tea

Evy Tea is a cold brew tea company, and we consider ourselves the innovative American iced tea company. So the goal of the company is to disrupt how the iced tea industry functions as a whole: get rid of the sugar water, bring up the value proposition of iced tea, and bring out a whole new consumer generation for that drink. 

What is your voice on social media?

I think, one of the biggest selling points and one thing that make us a little different compared to other iced tea companies is that my name, Evy is part of the name of the company; so a lot of what Evy Tea is about is my journey: being an entrepreneur, being an immigrant, being a woman, being a person who creates products and is trying to scale this. So a lot of this is more of a real voice behind entrepreneurship. So I’m more of a storytelling model. I don’t do a lot of like, “Inspire”, I don’t do a lot of those social media “rah-rah’s”, like, “look at how beautiful my life is”, or “Follow my account so you can experience that and imagine what it’s like to be me”. I don’t do any of that; I record my day-today and have that be my voice on social media. So people who follow me, tend to kind of wonder what I’m up to. And the only way to keep up with me is on social media, so you can’t get that content anywhere else. 

What channels seem to work best for you?

Instagram. I’ve experimented with Facebook and their algorithm. If you don’t pay for it, your post will never get seen and I’ve realized that a lot of people on Facebook are older folks. So as I understand better who’s buying my stuff, Instagram is a better tool. I’ve just started to explore LinkedIn a little bit more. My 2020 goal is to figure out Instagram and LinkedIn, the two of them. 

Do you have a target audience?

Yes, if you look at who drinks my stuff, it’s women of my age. So it’s a lot more millennial heavy. So it’s about 70-80% of my total audience are millennials. So you and I; those are the people who I generally talk to on social media who respond a little bit more. I get a lot of stalkers; they don’t stalk me, but they don’t participate in the conversation. They look at the content, they absorb it and follow along on the story, but they don’t engage. So my followers tend to be women in their late 20’s and early 30’s, so in that millennial stretch; they tend to interact with me a little bit better. 

Do you use any tools to measure how things are working.

So, I did at the beginning of my social media journey. I wanted to know what I’m getting out of it. I even hired a social media consultant for a couple months to help me understand what posts do better and so on and so forth. Very quickly I realized that because of how quickly the algorithm changes, there are a few basic rules. You’ve got to just keep up with content. If you post every Monday, you need to keep posting every Monday. So that sort of stuff really helps with engagement, and you can see it on the stats page with Instagram. You can be like, “Okay, this one got more engagement”. But as a small business owner, you can’t just spend all day analyzing it. So now I’m like, I’ll post when I have a story to tell and something to share, and not sweat so much, “Oh my god my engagement dropped 20 this week”.

Have you been able to use social to collaborate with other brands that you normally wouldn’t have been able to?

I use social in a very different way compared to other brands I know, because most brands use it purely as a marketing channel. They don’t really expect sales out of it unless they have a direct link on it where you can click on something and purchase it. Then they can measure how it affects their sales. I use social media mostly as a primary marketing tool, but also as a sales tool. Luckily a lot of people who buy our stuff are our age and have their own social media accounts. So I do a lot of customer service, maintenance, generation of leads; through Instagram, so it’s no longer just a marketing tool for me - it’s a sales tool. I’ll have sales reps working for a particular distributor out there that I’ll engage with directly. So it’s a combo marketing and sales tool for me and I no longer marketing just as marketing. I look at it as, I have a story to tell - so the more touch points I have of telling that same story, the better. It may not be that great every day, but if I consistently, consistently, consistently tell the story every day - you don’t know who might be listening! 

What advice would you give to a small business who has never used social media but wants to start?

Not every business is right for social media, in my opinion. If you have a house painting company, why would you spend too much time on Instagram. I feel like Instagram and other platforms are great if you have a very specific goal you’re trying to get out of it. If you want, to generate business - I don’t think social media is the best way to go about it unless you can spend some time working it and building relationships with people; it’s not a cure-all for all of your marketing problems. I will say for smaller businesses, just start following accounts and see what they’re doing; see what works for them. You can see some basic data in terms of how many people liked this and how many comments there are. Talk to similar business owners - what worked for you. But don’t just follow what other people are doing. 

Also, offline - if you’re on social media, you need to make sure you have offline presence somehow. You need to be able to see your consumers and talk to them. Don’t rely 100% on social media. People don’t follow just for the sake of following, they have to get some value out of it. Think of it as a value add: what value are you creating for your customers through social media? If every single day you're like, “Buy my stuff, buy my stuff”, what value are you creating? You’re not creating anything, you’re taking away. So making sure that you're value add is part of the solution when you're on social media. So when you're connecting offline, you can be like, “Hey, what’s your Insta”? That’s a great way of connecting the dots and following through with the conversation. That works. 

Have you been able to use social media to handles any crisis? 

Yes. It’s scary nowadays. In the past, if a journalist was going to reach out to you about an article, they would run it by the person who’s in the story first. Fact-checking, whatever. Now, whatever you put out there is out there, and most journalists feel good enough about describing photos and content directly from social media. Most of the time they don’t even ask you about it. That could create potential problems. I’ve had issues where I was posting - helping out a new distributor I was launching with. I posted it on social media, not realizing that other distributers salespeople follow me on their personal accounts; and I don’t necessarily always know who they are because we’re in 2,000 outlets. There are at least a couple hundred people who I work with on the sales level. And I really pissed them off, like, “You’re promoting them, why are you promoting them”? That created a lot of problems for me. From then on, I had to change my strategy. Not just throw everything out there, but think about it before I actually post. I actually had to reach out to all those people on Instagram, text them, email them. It was not good. 

There’s no bible for this stuff. So when I go on panels they’re like, “What’s the best ROI you’ve ever got”? And I was like, I guess consistency. Whatever you choose to do, do it consistently. 

It’s always personal on social media. I’m sorry if people tell you otherwise, but it’s always personal. You need that personal connection to be connected to people . So if you’re not comfortable putting yourself out there and you're just hiding behind a business, like thats the one thing I’ve seen that doesn't work. That’s just marketing - that’s great, like you're stuff is on sale, I don’t care - what value are you adding?

Thanks for chatting Evy!