Define Your Clean, Earned Trust & AI Search for Small Brands with Mary McMahan

Thank you for having me.

Looking back from 2019 to now, my job has become harder. It’s not just handling the marketing, it’s also operations: leading the shipping department, production, everything that goes with that. It’s a lot to handle, but luckily we have an amazing team, and we’re all so passionate about the business. I think the passion is what really matters, so I’m not as stressed as it sounds like I would be.
What’s awesome about being in a small business, especially with our founder so involved, is that with that passion we’re able to tell so many stories, and we’re all so invested. Sometimes there can be a struggle, because when your founder is very involved, her vision might be different from my vision for the company. But we’re coming up on eight years working together, and I think we’ve figured out each other’s work personalities. I also appreciate that, while everyone feels like they have to lead with a founder story for their brand, and I think that is huge for marketing, she still wants a slice of her life to be personal. So we put her story into our marketing pieces and the brand, but she’s not the whole brand, which gives a little bit of separation.

It does. I’m definitely very type A. I’m the kind of person who thinks, if I want it done right, I might as well do it myself, because I know it’ll be the standard I want. Hopefully my team watches this and agrees that I’ve been doing better with delegating. It helps that the employees we have now have been with us for four or five years, so they’re becoming long-term employees who are more invested.
I’m also really excited as we hire more people. One of the ladies we brought on to help with marketing is almost overqualified. She’s such a hard worker, and I trust her a hundred percent. It was hard for me at first, but I thought, I’m going to let you take this on so I don’t have to think about it. That’s been good for the business, because I can focus on other things that need my attention, and good for my personal growth too. I handled email marketing by myself for five years, and it’s okay to let it go and give it to someone who has probably even more experience than I do.

I am. She just joined us a little over a month ago, part-time for now. My goal is to bring her on full-time. She has her master’s in marketing and was a CMO at a beverage company, so she’s fully qualified, and she has lifted so much load off my shoulders.

The biggest point, and I hope more clean brands are getting to this, not just in beauty but in all verticals, is that you need to define what your clean is. The word clean is so ambiguous. On our website we say, this is our definition of clean, and this is what we’re omitting from our products. Anybody can come out with a beauty brand these days and say it’s clean, but what does clean mean to them? So we try to be as transparent as possible. People email us all the time asking, is this ingredient heavy-metal tested, where are you sourcing it from? We want to be transparent, because that’s what matters to a lot of people invested in clean beauty.
The other factor that builds credibility and trust is showing our production behind the scenes. Obviously not all of it, because we don’t want to give away all our secrets, but we give people back-door access to the brand. And then there’s building out the ecosystem you mentioned. With the spa, we’re using our own products and services, so we know they work and give results. Our spa services have blown up since we started them about three years ago. With the school, we’re putting education at the basis of everything we do and having that full clean beauty ecosystem. It shows that we’re not just people who saw that beauty is an industry where you can make a lot of money, which is funny, because it’s probably the most expensive industry to operate in. We have the credentials, the education background and the passion behind it, and we show all of that in both our physical presence and our online presence.

Very much not. A big thing for consumers is that our packaging is very simple, black and white. We don’t put crazy claims on the packaging, and we don’t make it all green with leaves on it to give the appearance. We’re really bare bones. Consumers just have to be aware that because a package is green or brown or feels eco doesn’t mean it’s clean. You have to turn it around and read the ingredient list. A hundred percent of the truth is in that list, not in the icons or the pretty packaging.

I think there’s sometimes more heart and passion in small businesses. Human attention spans are shrinking down to a second, and it’s so hard to grab people’s attention. I hope editors are evolving into wanting stories that pull at people’s heartstrings and bring back the human connection we’re starting to lack in society. Small businesses, especially ones built grassroots from the bottom up, aren’t celebrities with tons of cash flow, and I think those stories grab more attention. Editors want that, too, because it brings in advertiser money on their platforms. Small businesses just have so much to offer in the stories behind them, compared with mega corporations.
On earned media versus owned channels, I don’t see earned media as just press coverage, but also partnerships with influencers and affiliates, anyone who talks about us. Your own channels are important, but you can shout from the mountaintop how great you are. If someone else with credibility in the beauty space, or whatever industry you’re in, mentions your brand and what they believe about it, it screams so much louder than you saying how great it is. So we focus more on influencer and affiliate coverage, and that has really helped boost our brand.

Exactly.

That event was one I helped our local downtown business community put on around 2020. It was a way for people to get out without being around each other, because it was more spaced out. Leaning into community events, and learning from COVID, I found that people want real-life experiences, and we’re craving them with everything being digital. Relationships are feeling transactional.
So we put a lot of effort into meeting the affiliates and influencers we work with in person when we can. Our founder was at an event just last week where she met affiliates we’ve worked with for a few years but had never met in person. Those physical touch points are huge for brands. When we talk with them over social media or email, which I mostly handle, I try to connect on a more personal level rather than just saying, “I need you to promote this, make sure you do this.” If they just had a baby, I congratulate them. If they post that they’re reading a certain book or watched a movie I love, I try to start a conversation around that. We’re all craving authentic conversations these days.
It’s hard, because a lot of this lives on social media, but as businesses we have to reach people at different touch points, and I think personal touch points away from the internet go a lot further than just an email saying thanks.

We’ve had a lot of internal conversations about how AI fits into our business. I only use it to take data and make it simpler, so I don’t have to dig through reports. It works as our data miner. On the customer-facing side, our customers don’t interact with any AI from us. At first I thought we should add an AI chat on our website where people could share their skin concerns and get matched with products. I put out a poll to our customers to see if they’d actually want it, and it was split down the middle, 50-50. A lot said yes, we’d love this, and a lot said no, please don’t. I did that poll maybe a year ago, and if I did it today I think even more people would say no.
I might run it again just to see. Especially with our customer base, in that more holistic world, people love that when you message us through email or even social media, you’re talking to me or my teammate Mika, who also helps with customer service. If we switched to a fully AI agent, I think we’d lose that personal touch, and I don’t think our customers would perceive it well. Some businesses, especially with a younger audience, might like it, but you have to understand who your customer is and whether they would appreciate it. If you use AI in your business, it still needs the human touch. We mainly use it for internal tasks to speed things up, since we’re a smaller team. If you’re considering putting it on the customer-facing side, you really have to think about it before you hit that publish button.

Correct. AI could be quicker, or more cost-efficient for the business, but we just launched a way to book a one-on-one virtual call with our director of education, who is also a master esthetician, and really go deep into your skin. We’re trying to hit those human touch points.

I think as we get through the holiday season and into 2027, generative search optimization could start to become a priority for us. When I go into Google, AI is giving me the answers right away, and I use it. But I wonder if it’s hurting small businesses, because whenever I’ve used it, it recommends the brands that have tons of money, the big well-known brands that have been around a long time. We’ve worked on press and on optimizing our website for SEO, but as we move toward GEO, the generative side, we’re going to invest more time and see. Sometimes we pop up and sometimes we don’t. I haven’t fully figured out what determines that, whether it’s a paid subscription certain brands have access to, or reviews, or press coverage. So we’re going to A/B test and see what moves the needle so we come up more.

It’s been a thing since I started, but two years ago we really got into it and invested more time. Kimya, who helps with marketing, also works with the agency, so SEO is a big priority. We’re going into product pages and blog pages and working on schema markup and FAQs. When we write FAQs and blogs, we think about what people are going to type into an AI tool, and we try to write our copy from the viewpoint of the customer.

I’d tell them it’s okay if you can’t do it all. I felt the pressure to cover every marketing channel, and at times I wasn’t giving each one the justice it deserved. The biggest piece of advice I learned, especially with social media, is to pick the channel you know your audience is on and do it really, really well. For us that was Instagram, and we cross-posted to Facebook and other channels, but pick the one thing you know is driving revenue and that you have a good handle on, and dive into that instead of thinning yourself out across multiple platforms. Our other big thing was email marketing, so in the beginning I went all in on Instagram and email, and then affiliate marketing became a big thing.
Marketing is such a broad department that it could be literally anything. Find the three things you know you do well, where your audience and revenue are, and that you can handle, and pour everything into those, instead of trying to be the brand on TikTok, on X, on every social media platform there is. And just because a competitor or other businesses are on a platform doesn’t mean you should jump on it right away. Think about whether you can dedicate the time to it. It’s hard, because as marketers we’re typically type A and want to do everything, so staying in our lane is hard, but it’s worth it.

Thank you for having me. This was really fun. Super chill. It was great.

Thank you.