“LBM Talks” hosts top professionals from different sectors of the lumber and building material industry to share their expertise, with a heavy emphasis on practical, tactical strategies to help you serve your markets and grow your business.
This week, LBM Talks Social Media welcomes Ryan McAnally, Marketing and Communications Manager, and Sallie Keene Denton, Marketing Specialist, from Wilson Lumber Company, LBM Journal’s 2025 Dealer of the Year (category: $100MM+).
The insights shared in this episode include how social media fits into their digital marketing strategy, how marketers can measure social ROI, the content creation process for Wilson Lumber, and more.
Connect with Sallie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salliekeenedenton/
Connect with Ryan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcanallyryan/
For any podcast related inquires, contact sally@lbmjournal.com.
Prefer to read about it instead? Take a peek at the transcript below:
(Editor’s note: Transcript is AI-generated and may include some errors.)
Sally
Welcome to LBM Talks Social Media. I’m Sally Lacey, the Social Media Manager for LBM Journal, and every other week, I have conversations with lumber dealers from around the country about how they’re using social media to grow their business. I hope you stick around, because it’s time to get social.
Sallie Keene Denton and Ryan McAnally, Hi, welcome to LBM talk social media. I’m so happy to have you guys here.
Sallie
We are so happy to be here.
Ryan
Yeah. Thank you so much for having us. It’s such an honor to just be able to come on your show.
Sally
Well, it’s a privilege to be able to talk to you guys, and really anybody who gives me their time to hear what you guys have to say. Let’s just start out with some introductions of who you guys are, who you work for, what you do, how long you’ve been doing it? Take it away.
Sallie
Cool. I’m Sallie Keene Denton. I am our current marketing specialist here at Wilson Lumber, and I’ve had a few different positions, mostly in our sales team. Most recently, I was our business development representative, and I have been on this team with Ryan for about a year, doing marketing for our third generation family owned and operated company.
Ryan
Yes. So my name is Ryan McAnally, and I’ve been here for yeah, going on a year now with Sallie and at Wilson Lumber Company. Really excited to jump on board and marketing here. So I’m the Marketing and Communications Manager, and Sallie and I kind of represent the team here as far as marketing function. So we have a lot to do. We have a lot of fun. We try to have a lot of fun, and a lot to manage, of course, that we have a lot of projects that are always ongoing, but yeah, so
Sally
I’m curious you guys are this overarching umbrella of marketing, which entails a lot of things, social media being one of them. I’m just kind of curious what your guys’s thoughts are when it comes to how social media fits into your broader kind of marketing strategy. How do you guys use it? What’s it? What’s What’s its purpose for you guys at Wilson Lumber.
Ryan
Sure. I’d love to. Yeah. I think either one of us could probably answer this, but because we know, we know the name of the game. But I think how social media specifically fits into our digital marketing strategy is that we, we have to, we have to engage people, right? I mean, that’s just bottom line is, anybody who’s in business has to engage people, because your customers are people. I know that sounds very, very elementary, but like it’s very basic. Where the people are you gotta go. So we’re if our audience is on Tiktok, we’re gonna have to move to Tiktok. If our audience is on Instagram, Facebook, all the metas are on LinkedIn, then we have to be in those places. So I think kind of gone are the days of relying totally on traditional marketing, I would say. And I think that sometimes this industry, from what I can kind of surmise, I think our industry, does kind of lean towards traditional marketing techniques. So pulling us, you know, up from the Bootstrap, bootstraps, out into the full digital marketing landscape, is kind of where we want to go.
Sallie
I would echo that and just, you know, with the rise of millennial and even Gen Z customers and builders, I think that that is a lot of Well, research shows like, that’s how people are doing business. They’re using Instagram as a search engine, and they’re using those as research tools. So we want to be there. We want to be visible, and use that as kind of our portfolio of who Wilson lumber is. We’re getting it to be the bigger piece. Like a bigger piece, we definitely have a lot of other inbound marketing strategies. We’re still doing a lot of in person events with our sales team and our customers. But I would say we’re growing our social media.
Ryan
Yeah, for sure, I would say that too. And like, I was just looking at some stats this morning from our LinkedIn I think we started our official company page in like, what 24 Yeah, which is really interesting to me. So in 24 interesting 20 and 24 so which is fine, you know you think you your audience lives in Facebook or Instagram or vice versa, maybe in LinkedIn. But then. Sometimes some of these social apps will kind of die down and lower in popularity, and your audience base might trickle to a different social media platform, so you kind of have to move with them a little bit. But LinkedIn has been great for us as far as engaging our kind of like our target audience. So being able to consistently post on there and engage with others that we know in the industry or we don’t know yet in the industry, or to maybe have a conversation with someone who is talking about something of interest to us, just to be a voice in the conversation that’s really helpful for us in growing our our actual platform with them.
Sally
So speaking of your audience, can you tell me a little bit who your target audience is? Yeah, and where you do find them. So you mentioned you’re on LinkedIn, but the other platforms also.
Sallie
Our target audience is different for each platform. To be honest, we see that a lot of our Well, let me back up a little bit. So Wilson Lumber, we service residential home builders. We service residential retail customers, but we also have a large multi family and commercial division, so we have a lot of different departments within our sales team, and each one of those requires a different strategy as far as marketing to their target customer. So our installed sales team requires is really focused on Facebook and Instagram for a retail homeowner who’s going to look at replacing windows and doors. But then our broader residential team is working with custom home builders, semi custom production style home builders, and a lot of those builders are on LinkedIn, and same goes for our multi family. So we really have honed in with each platform and what our strategy is for each platform.
Ryan
Our audiences, you can, kind of, we can kind of segment them based on the social media platform, right? It’s really interesting like and that might be true for other, you know, lumber yards or whatever, too, or it might may not. But we found that, you know, some commercial, our commercial audience is primarily living in LinkedIn, and then residential audiences, primarily in Instagram and Facebook. So just knowing which content to create and tailor for each of those audiences is the fun part to figure out. The challenge. It’s the puzzle. It’s where the creativity gets to shine. You know, Sally King, Denton, I’ll have to say that we distinguish in this podcast, skd, sometimes I refer to as SKD. She is. She’s really great at coming up with these really great ideas for reels. So she’ll involve employees. She’ll involve customers. And whether it’s like celebrating a customer’s anniversary with us, or their anniversary being in business, or celebrating the Olympics that just happened and doing something crazy and off the wall there, you know, those things are high more much more higher engaging on our Instagram and Facebook reels versus, you know, maybe LinkedIn, where it’s a little more curated differently.
Sally
I would love to hear you know, we’re talking about these creative ideas you have Sally, just what your guys’s process for content creation looks like. But I’m also curious what you have found is kind of most successful,
Sallie
So I would say so the first part of your question was kind of like, how we come up with our content so we have three brand pillars. When Ryan and I first started as a team, we kind of took a real look at what the social media strategy had been previously, and we sat down and we said, Here’s what these the three kind of content pillars are going to be, and it’s brand awareness recruiting, because we do have an HR team that needs help with recruiting, and that that can be a lot of different things, and then our inbound marketing strategy. So obviously, we do want this to drive people back to our website to drive sales in a way without being salesy, right? And so content needs to fit in one of those three brand pillars. Now sometimes do I kind of stretch my pitch to Ryan a little bit about like this works. This is brand awareness. This is so and so, sure, but those are kind of our guiding goal posts, per se. But as far as like, fun, engaging it, people want to know people. People want to walk in and be like, Oh, I know that guy. I saw him on the Wilson number Instagram. They want to be able to have a face that they recognize. So anytime that we have the ability to integrate our sales to. Whether that is for the lumber yard Olympics, which, let me tell you, I thought it was going to pull more teeth to get people to be in that video.
Sallie
We did a lumber yard Olympics video this summer, and so I had, you know, I thought I was going to have a hard time getting participants because we did some silly stuff. But no, that was an easy one. We’ve done like a joke, you know, joke day reel, tell us a lumber themed or a construction themed joke, different, different reels like that that have engaged our crew. But yeah, so I would say that a lot of it’s brand awareness, right? We want people to know who we are. I worked down the street from Wilson lumber for eight years, and had no idea all of the options and solutions they had for my customers. And so I want to be able to make that very known to not just Huntsville and North Alabama. We service the southeast. And so we really have that goal in mind with our content, to engage more than just, you know, our radius, although we are highly community focused, and you know all of that, we’re definitely trying to expand our our reach. Folks love seeing what our cares team is up to, whether that’s with our community partner, which is currently next step farms. So that’s here locally, or whether it’s, you know, on a global scale, with our trips to Guatemala three times a year. Content like that, people want to, you know, see who they’re doing business with, and see what, what we’re up to in that regard. And so any kind of, you know, event like that is is wonderful, and people, we get great engagement from that. We also get great employee engagement, right? Especially on Facebook, I would say, you know, they’re re sharing it, their families are seeing it and commenting on it, things like that. And then we, we see great engagement from exciting events that we have, whether that’s being named LBM journals Dealer of the year for 2025 or our recent acquisition, you know, obviously big, I would call them life events are going to get a lot of excitement and traction. Those don’t happen every day. I mean, sure we’ve had a very busy quarter, but events like that don’t happen every day, so you kind of have to have that, that street strategy and plan in the back, you know, back of your mind, to be able to implement we see a lot of great traction on LinkedIn with our thought leadership, with our CEO, Rob Wilson, our president Josh Hendrickson, and our Director or VP of Sales and Marketing, Gordon Staley, so we see great traction with the thought leadership stuff that we’ve got going on. And so those those leaders are posting kind of just thoughts and insights, not necessarily about the industry, sometimes, yes, but on a broader scale, more about leadership, and that is, in and of itself, brand awareness and showing off our culture and our commitment, you know, our core to our core values. So we see great traction with that on LinkedIn. I think people want those leadership tidbits and advice, right? And we’re doing it in a small way that’s digestible.
Ryan
Like, I mean, really, just to recap, like events that we if we can ever, like, get a camcorder, like camcorder, I’m showing my age, a video camera in the room to to record an event of any kind. I mean, there’s going to be more engagement, right, if you can. And just like, if I had to offer advice to, you know, other other dealers or builders or whoever, really, any company that can, can take the advice that you know, if you have something going on, pull out your camera, encourage your employees to do it, and then just hit record, because you’re going to, you’re going to get engagement. And if you, if you get your employees in on this too, which, you know, Sally just said, you know, our employees, they highly engage, especially on LinkedIn. It’s pretty incredible. They want to be a part of this momentum that’s being built so, and that’s part of, part of its, you know, part of us, the culture we have. We have great culture here, as do many other companies. But there’s, there’s, there’s a great culture here that just, we all want to kind of feed off of the energy. So when you get the employees on board and, you know, you really build up that engagement in LinkedIn. So one thing you didn’t mention, Sally, that I was waiting for you to say, was women in construction. Women in construction. Yeah, the women in construction event we just had, I would say that’s, that’s probably one of our highest engaging in the past 30 days, or maybe 90 days, because, you know, we like to highlight the fact that. So, you know, everybody matters in our workplace, including the women that work here. So, you know, having events like that, it’s, it’s super important, and people realize that, and they recognize that, and they want to support it. So let them support it. Hit record, put it on LinkedIn, and let them support your stuff.
Sally
Exactly. It’s like, what’s the harm in that you’re just giving somebody an opportunity to understand your business more, to understand your people more, for sure.
Sallie
I think it’s that old adage, old adage, right of everything is content. I would say, like almost everything is content, right?
Sally
We need to be a little bit cheesy thing.
Sallie
But I think, I think sometimes it can be daunting, and you might get stuck in the weeds and go, like, should we post this? Should we not post this? And almost all the time, it’s just post it right.
Sally
Like, right, put it out there, right. Yeah, you guys, that was, that was really great. Thank you for highlighting this, the things that are doing. Well, it sounds like you guys, you know you’re you’re kind of analyzing your statistics, metrics, all that kind of stuff. It’s kind of common to say that ROI for social media can’t be measured. I’m interested to hear your guys’s take on that, like, what is kind of success for you? How do you measure success for being on social media?
Sallie
Ryan, you take, take the jump on that.
Ryan
Sure, I think there’s, man, there’s a lot. There’s a, there’s a large conversation around this all the time, you know. So just continually in the marketing space where, you know, can you actually measure the ROI off of likes and comments and shares? Well, yes and no. I think that we can definitely share. I think we can definitely measure, we can, we can measure the engagement, right? It shows our analytics right there on the dashboard. That’s really good. And if these folks are, if these folks are making purchases, then there’s got to be some way to to show and CO really, I mean, there’s a correlation, so we have to be able to report that and show it like, hey, marketing is providing this kind of support for your customer journey right here. So we need to be able to show that. So one thing we hadn’t really talked about yet is part of our strategy when we came on board as we built a whole new marketing strategy focused on digital marketing and the the underlying methodology we use is inbound marketing. So so inbound marketing basically is just engaging and delighting our customers at every stage of the journey with us, whether it’s they haven’t become customers yet, or there have been a customer for 30 years, and we continue to serve them. So an inbound basically just means we’re creating content, whether it be on social media, blogs, newsletters, emails, all that content is going to drive them back to us so we can help support them as their own hero in their own story, basically. So we want to always develop content that’s helping them become a hero to their customers and providing with all the support that we can. And that’s through education, through blogs, that’s through sharing our story. And hey, you come apart. You come be a part of our story too. We’re serving in Guatemala. We’re serving here. We’re doing good things. We want you to be a part of this so they get to be a part of our story. But one, one way I think that we can, like, kind of report on this stuff, is one that we we will be reporting on this stuff, is, since we have this methodology in place. We can tie engagements on social media, whether they’re Instagram or LinkedIn. We can tie those back to Hey, has this visit? Has this contact ever visit our website, or they visit our website too. What have they done on our website? Oh, they’ve looked at 10 different pages about trusses, and they’ve downloaded this, this guide about trust is and they filled out this contact form a couple different times just to ask a couple questions. Well, all that is tied into their customer journey, right? And so we’re able to trace that back to a marketing function that’s helping supporting their journey. So really, that’s how you know, once they become a customer, customer, we can say like, yeah, marketing did all this to help support part of the Sell. Sell of this.
Sallie
We also recycle content in a way, so meaning like, Rob has a customer blog, like a blog that he he publishes monthly. But then we. Also put that in our customer newsletter, and then occasionally we make that a LinkedIn post, or if it’s fitting for Instagram and Facebook, we turn it into maybe a quote from it, and drive again that inbound strategy of driving people back to our website. But I think that’s important too for people who are getting started with social media is you don’t have to create new content for every platform. You just might have to repackage it a little differently for it to be successful on each platform. I think when I finally realized that back I’m a chronically online millennial, I have had my own personal social media foray into, like, influencing, and I’ve had a blog in the past, and those kinds of things. So I think when I first kind of realized, like, I don’t have to be out here creating new content for every single platform, you just have to repackage it differently, that became so freeing. And for sure, with us being a two person marketing team and having a lot of other marketing tasks to accomplish, it helps us streamline our social media strategy.
Sally
I like that perspective of maybe you you kind of get people on social media, you’re engaging with them, but what’s the next step they can take to, like, interact with your company. And it sounds like that’s going to the website, getting more information maybe, yeah, just seeing how they can more interact. I really like that. And it also sounds very like a very intricate process that you were talking about, Ryan, which where, like, you can look at the individual person, like on you can kind of track them, which I don’t mean to say track in a weird way, but I think it’s actually it seems like then you’re more, you’re closer with these people and your customers, prospects, whatever, and kind of like, it’s sounds kind of like community or just getting closer with them, valuing them, very interesting.
Ryan
Yeah, you’re dead on, like, when you’re able to, and we’re not tracking them in a creepy way, but we’re, we are tracking, I believe, helpful way. So by tracking, we can say that, you know, perhaps someone has engaged on a social media post that SKD put out, and maybe she put a link in the comments to an article that she was referring to, and that article lands on our website. So they go there, and they want to read more, and they learn. They want to learn more about this problem, pain point they’re having and how to solve it. So they click into the comments, they click and it goes to our website. We have a we have a new website visitor, right? So if they want to learn more, maybe they download a guide, or they sign up for our customer newsletter, which is going to give them information, you know, on a bi weekly basis or a weekly basis. So they’re always getting more information on hopefully solving some pain points of their own, walking with them in their journey. Until, you know, they onboard with us. Hopefully, you know, that’s the target is as well. We’ll see they’ll see that. You know, we might be the best fit for whatever pain point they have to solve that pain point. But once you once we collect, you know, really, you can’t really track, it doesn’t really do much good to track a visitor until you have their email address, their first and last name, other than before that, they’re just a number in your database. And you want to, like you said, you know, this is a conversation you want to have with them. You want to nurture that lead. You want to develop them and and share just more information with them as they need it.
Sally
Interesting. This is a very I’m really enjoying this conversation, and this is honestly where I thought it was going to lead was into, you know, like marketing. This is just a great episode to just kind of talk about the more marketing side of how social media can be a part of that. So this is awesome, yeah, and it sounds like you got, yeah, it’s very interesting to hear just your kind of strategy of being digital and basically just offering your customers or these people information, everything that they need to help make a decision, or to get in contact with you, or anything like that.
Ryan
Awesome, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Social media is super important in that strategy.
Sally
So just a couple more questions. One is, if you guys have any any future goals? Um, for, you know, social media to help with what you’re trying to do.
Sallie
I would say video, you know, is our next really big push and goal. We’ve utilized a videographer in the past. All of our YouTube content, or I would say the bulk of our YouTube content is all professionally shot videos. But, you know, working on on more vertical video is nice, my goal. But, yeah, it’s our team, Team, social media strategy, goal.
Ryan
So, yeah, agreed, yeah, vertical, vertical. You know, video formats, you know, LinkedIn even just shifted to having, like, a real type format, which is kind of cool, yeah, like Sally said, so we’re doing the video thing, and I would say we’re also trying to bring more video as an in house function of our own. So we’re hoping to to be able to capture more day to day stuff. So we do that with with our, basically, our phones right now, which is great. It’s a great tool. We want to try to step it up, if we can and and use some some bigger equipment, things like that, maybe a drone, you know, we keep talking about it. We keep on getting requests for getting a drone. So we want to do that. It’s just, you know, there’s always something to do.
Sallie
I need to call Big C Lumber. Don’t they have it? Did I listen to that? Don’t they have a drone? Yeah, they do.
Sally
You could ask for recommendations. Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s a great goal. Uh, good luck with that. I when I reflect on like, video for myself, I’m just singing. It’s a lot of work because, and it’s also kind of like with just the content that you’re videoing, trying to get people to be in videos, and even yourself, it’s there’s just a lot going on.
Sallie
Yeah, content creation is a lot. There really is it looks so easy and simple when you see the final product, but there are so many steps along the way to get to that final product. So
Sally
My last question kind of how we close it out here is just a piece of advice that both of you would give to an aspiring LBM dealer who just wants to grow their presence on social media for their business.
Sallie
I think my advice is, start small. That’s to any business starting a social media is pick a platform and start there. I think it can be so overwhelming if you try to do all of all of it at once, right? Everyone’s like, should I get a TikTok? Should I not? Should I do this? Should I do Instagram? Should I do Facebook? And I think you just pick one and spend your focus and your energy there and allow that to grow, and then, you know, get yourself in a rhythm, and you can move on to other platforms, as you know you see fit for your business?
Ryan
Yeah, for sure, I would say that too. I would say, start small, like you said, and don’t worry about building out the con. Don’t, don’t make it crazy, like just pull out your phone, like I said, and shoot something that interesting in your workplace, whether it’s like a day in the life type video, or if it’s just like, you know, event, an event happening, or somebody’s birthday, start there. You want to niche it, niche it down, eventually, to kind of cater that content to your specific audience you really want to reach. But I mean, we’re all people, you know, we can all relate on some level. So the find that sweet spot to for your content to resonate with your audience.
Sally
Well, that wraps up the episode. I just want to say thank you to both of you for being generous with your time and everything that you know and do in a day to day with me.
Sallie
Well, Sally, thank you for asking us to even be beyond thanks for thinking that we had something to share. So appreciate all you do for the industry.
Ryan
Yeah, it was an honor. Come on here. Appreciate you reaching out to us.
