Ramsey Solutions has grown from a card table in Dave Ramsey’s living room to a multi-million dollar enterprise during its history. Two executives — Blake Thompson and Jennifer Sievertsen — have helped grow the company’s efforts on social media in recent years to bring the company to new heights.

On YouTube, The Ramsey Show Highlights channel is approaching four million subscribers. The Ramsey Show channel has just under 1 million subscribers on that platform. Individual shows like Smart Money Happy Hour (128,000), Front Row Seat with Ken Coleman (110,000), The Dr. John Delony Show (1.1 million), and channels for Rachel Cruze (508,000) and George Kamel (397,000) each have huge followings on the platform.

Additionally, Ramsey Personalities have a combined 5.1 million followers on TikTok, with Ramsey Solutions seeing millions more between Instagram, Facebook, and X, among other social media apps.

In this fourth installment of our weeklong Social Studies series, Barrett Media spoke with Executive Vice President of The Ramsey Network Blake Thompson, and Ramsey Solutions Chief Marketing Officer Jennifer Sievertsen to discuss how the company has used social media to increase the profiles of the next generation of Ramsey Personalities, as well as its digital video strategy when it comes to platforms like YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok.

*Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Garrett Searight: Blake, I’ll start with you. Can you kind of take me through the — and I realize this is an overarching question — 10,000-foot view from Ramsey Solutions, how you guys view social media, and how that plays into what you do from a content perspective?

Blake Thompson: We treat social media just as important as we do our shows. We always have this underlying core value here that in order to get what we call white space — people that have never heard of us, that need the hope and the help — in this day and age, social media is so vital because that’s where they’re at.

They’re either on social or they’re in more short-form context with their daily life. So we have this value that we’re going to go wherever they are and be the best we can possibly be on that. Whether that’s a TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, of course, so it’s very vital.

We have our Social Media Department under Jen as our CMO because it’s a great marketing tool. It not only markets our products the right way, but more importantly, it brings people down the funnel that have no clue about us. We found that we can do content on social in such a short form with just the highlights of what we do in a long-form setting to hook people. They’ll hear something and go, ‘Hey, I can relate to that.’ Or we’ll do something very entertaining or funny, and they’re like, ‘I want more about this.’

So it’s just such a vital thing for us to get people into our long-form content that we feel is where the life change truly helps. That would probably sum it up the best. At the end of the day, Garrett, we’re a content company. Wherever we can put that content, we’re gonna put it. Social media has just become a perfect avenue for content.

GS: Jen, this is anecdotal, but my wife knows who nobody is. Last week, she didn’t know who Buzz Aldrin was. But she knows who Rachel Cruze is because it pops up on her TikTok. I was watching Smart Money Happy Hour, and she was like, ‘That’s Rachel Cruze! She’s on my TikTok!’ So to that end, how important is it for the future of Ramsey Solutions for George (Kamel), Rachel, Jade (Warshaw), and Dr. John Delony to have their own social media presences to build toward the future of The Ramsey Show and of the company?

Jennifer Sievertsen: It’s huge. We very intentionally — starting with Dave very much pushing this more than a decade ago — said, ‘Hey, we need a plan for how this thing outlives Dave Ramsey.’ For over a decade, we’ve been very intentional about saying, ‘Hey, what does that look like from a forward-facing personality standpoint?’ And we didn’t want to do a one-to-one transition, because then we’d look up and be in the same situation in however many years. We said we really felt like the right thing to do was a one-to-many transition.

Then we really started pretty intentionally down the path of Ramsey Personalities, and it just feels like God’s really brought us the right people at the right time. Their stories are amazing and their experience is amazing. They have come on board, and just very quickly, it’s amazing how the audience has gravitated towards them. So Dave’s audience gravitating towards them, and then way beyond Dave’s audience, towards different ones of them. Like George, and kind of the following he has is a little different than Jade and the falling she has.

And then John Delony, gosh, his show just exploded and felt like almost overnight. Again, a totally different audience, which has been just really cool and really exciting for us. Because, like Blake said, our job is to help as many people as we possibly can. That’s what we feel called to do. And so by their platforms growing that way, that allows us to get in front of more people and hopefully help them.

BT: I thought there’d never be a day where they could even come close to it. It would always be Dave is the guy, and then we know these others with Dave. That’s how it started when we started the succession. ‘Who are these people?’ And after two years of that strategy and working hard of that succession plan Jen was talking about, it’s so cool nowadays to see how many new people we get coming to Ramsey that are even saying, ‘Oh, who’s Dave?’ So John’s bringing in a crew.

Rachel’s bringing in a crew. George is really on the YouTube strategy, bringing in a whole new audience that are younger. So part of that succession, too, is where they’re at in life and who they’re talking to, and it’s just been great.

GS: Blake, you mentioned that obviously, at the end of the day, you’re a content company and are going to put content where the people are consuming the content. How do you go about deciding what short-form video goes where? Is it a ‘We’re going to put everything on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels’ or do you have platform-specific strategies that you’ve figured out?

BT: It’s a little bit of all the above. We don’t just blast it out of a shotgun and hope it works. (We’re) very intentional. We have a team that looks at the analytics of every platform. And we can see, let’s say YouTube, on a normal show where the retention drops off, and we’ll get in a room, and we have what we call a ‘Team Health’ around that show, where they’re constantly in a rhythm going, ‘Hey, we saw a lot of drop off here or scrubbing. What were we talking about? We probably shouldn’t be talking a lot about or spending valuable real estate or time of these people doing that if it’s not resonating.

So the cool thing is, we can take what’s working on those platforms and say, ‘This has been killing it. The retention going through this, this is a topic they’re wanting.’ And then we tend to chop that up per platform on what the best amount of time is that that platform says to do it. That’s where we’ve seen the most success.

And it’s not just the time of the video, it’s also the output. Like YouTube, we saw a world of difference when we started doing three reels a day instead of one a day. And so each team, the standard bar is at least three a day. Well, we haven’t seen the ceiling of that yet, so we added another editor just to start doing more of those. It’s continuing to work.

So we might hit a leverage of way too much. It’s always that balance, too, is that the long form causes the life change. We’re trying not to create short listeners only. The cool thing about YouTube and their algorithm is a Short feels like the same as social media. It’s that quick, short video, just like an Instagram Reel. And what we’re seeing there on those shorts is it is starting to filter down into long form, because they’ll see something with that hook and want more of it. It’ll just roll into that show, or that long-form show. It’s a strategy, but that’s how it works.

GS: I don’t expect you to share the numbers with me or anything like that, but I don’t think maybe the average news or talk media company has harnessed the revenue that can be generated from social media. How helpful has that been to Ramsey Solutions in adding a ’13th month’ or a non-traditional revenue aspect to the company?

JS: It’s interesting because we do social media — as Blake was talking about — to really draw people in. We don’t do it first and foremost as a revenue-generating outlet. And yet, gosh, there are times that certain things just hit and we’re surprised, honestly, in a good way, by how much revenue something did generate.

A lot of it is not straight click-throughs from the social media platform. I would say maybe 5 to 10% of it, like on Instagram, if you’re going to click the link in the profile, very few people actually do that. They’re a little more apt to click a link in a story, but what they are very apt to do — like to the tune of 80 to 90% of them — will go direct to the website, go search, and research whatever it was that was talked about some more. And then we’ll convert from there.

But a couple of times in 2024, something hit really big on social. Like, huge, and the shares and the saves were just off the charts. We saw that same spike then happen in direct web traffic the same day, and then Google searches and click-throughs from search and it was pretty impressive. So social media, you may not always be able to directly attribute it to people clicking on the thing within social media, right? Most of them go around the system, but when you can see the correlation that’s that strong, you’re like, ‘Oh, well, clearly it wasn’t that post that drove all of that.’

GS: Blake, if you were to give advice to somebody who works in the news or talk media industry about getting more involved in social media or deepening their efforts in social media, what would be at the top of your list?

BT: I think some people who aren’t doing it yet or don’t understand it think that they have to create a new whole production path for it, or go out and film brand new stuff, separate from what they’re doing daily. But the key we found, is just taking those clips and those things we’re already in the rhythm of doing. Whether it’s the news as your example, or a PD at a station, it’s all about finding that great content and just plugging it in over there and learning how to get in that rhythm.

We don’t have a separate team that just goes out. Now, we do when it comes to outside of shows, for our personalities. They do content themselves, they can jump on and do it themselves. They work with a social team. ‘Hey, it feels like you should do a little video about this right now.’ But the majority of the growth we’re seeing is what we’re talking about — taking short to long and bringing people down the funnel — has been on things we’re already in a rhythm doing. So it’s pretty simple.

Sometimes I can feel when I talk to someone, it’s like this gap of ‘I don’t have a whole team to do it.’ It’s as simple as, if you know something worked, or it’s something content-wise that you can just chop and put up. If you just do it the right way per platform, it’s going to be way better than doing nothing what you’re doing today.

GS: Jen, same question. What would be the things that would lead off that that conversation for you?

JS: Content from our shows drives a lot of the interaction on social for sure. So you do not have to reinvent the wheel. And by doing that, you can start to learn per platform. Maybe you start with two platforms. Maybe you start with YouTube and Instagram, or Instagram and TikTok. You will find out that, ‘Hey, on TikTok, people might watch a little longer of a clip than they will on Instagram.’ You’ll start to learn the nuances and how you need to customize for each of those platforms. The same clip could be the longer form put over here and the shorter form put on a different platform.

But if you start doing it, you will see — via the interaction and the metrics and the feedback that you get on it — what’s working. You’ll see the social platforms now are less follower-driven and they’re more interest-driven. You can be a very small, new account on a platform, and you can have something go viral because your content is good and interesting. So if you’re a news outlet, you’ve got a really good story, and you can condense that down to a 60-second clip on Instagram? That can actually go viral because people care about and are served up based on their interests, not based on following necessarily.

BT: Another thing I tell them, too, is don’t base it on just the following, like she said. Nowadays, you can get so much analytics and data from the digital platforms to capture everyone that has even viewed it and how long. That’s always a good tool to know, too, going into it, versus just ‘I hope it works.’ You can really study and understand what worked and what didn’t.

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