Content is king. Or as we like to say “content is queen”.
Though this famous quote originally was coined more than 25 years ago, it still rings true today—maybe more than ever. Whatever industry you’ve found yourself in, content creation is essential for engaging your audience and building your brand.
It’s no surprise then, that something so crucial can take time to execute well. From blogging and email marketing to the plethora of social media platforms out there, you may be wondering how to get the results you desire without spending all of your precious time going down every content rabbit hole.
The good news is: You don’t! There are plenty of ways you can get scrappy when it comes to your social media and content approaches—just take it from the following women business leaders. They’ve implemented strategies such as harnessing user-generated content, repurposing testimonials, and utilizing short-form videos to ultimately minimize the amount of time spent creating content while still seeing impactful results. Try a few for yourself! You just might find that getting a little scrappy has the potential to bring about big results for your
Kaitlyn Lo
Co-Founder of Just Enough Wines, a female-founded premium canned wine brand based out of San Francisco.
My approach: We started creating themed reel series for our Instagram and TikTok. We focus on themes that align well with our product. Luckily, they are a lot of fun creative pairings you can make. We launched our first series in July with a “Spritz Girl Summer” theme making fun cocktails using our sparkling wines and are currently working on a fun “one-bite appetizer” series to pair with each of our wines.
The results I’ve seen: We’ve seen a lot more engagement and reach for our social media profiles. Our community is engaging with and enjoying the content and also sharing it with their network, which has helped our overall brand awareness.
Marissa Pick
Founder of Marissa Pick Consulting LLC, providing strategic consulting focused on digital transformation, content marketing, social media strategy, personal branding, and more.
My approach: Developing bite-sized content. We’re totally overwhelmed with digital content, and I believe it makes sense to extend the content lifecycle of a piece by breaking it into bite-sized visual content. The human brain processes images faster than text, and a lot of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Since we are visual by nature, we can use this skill to build engagement, brand loyalty, and visibility.
The results I’ve seen: Through these content types I’ve seen a major lift in traffic and engagement. People are more likely to interact and it’s always interesting to break a piece of content into three or four different formats for promotion.
Gwendolyn Osborne
CEO and Founder of Lomolique, a woman-owned and operated health and wellness brand committed to making everyday self-care luxurious.
My approach: One technique is “doing more with less.” If I can share, inform, engage or appreciate someone or something online by executing it with fewer funds, less time, or even fewer people, then I’m taking that risk. It has paid off. Especially, as a woman-owned and led business, you find yourself in rooms or places where you’re the only one there. I’ve taken my experiences of being in those spaces and allowing myself, as well as my team, to flourish online with new and fresh posts and collaborations while honing in on how to obtain our goal with less. It’s a minimalistic approach but, that seems to be my repertoire. Lomolique has only two amazing products—for now at least.
My results: I’ve seen more paid collaborations birthed from our “doing more with less” approach. It has opened doors, as well as opportunities for my brands and for me. When you train yourself to work with less when you’re granted more, you are ready and on standby to get down to business. Taking risks is no longer terrifying. It becomes second nature to think outside the box. Specifically online, as a result, I’ve gained a loyal audience and at Lomolique our customer loyalty continues to grow annually.
Rachel Rofe
Founder and CEO of CustomHappy, shipping unique, custom-made products around the world.
My approach: We have been testing out TikTok lately and it’s been great. We add short videos with trending songs, all while having fun and gaining followers. As for content, we also feature some of our customers’ products on our site, which helps them get more eyeballs to their products. It’s a win-win—they get featured and we have content.
The results I’ve seen: One of our accounts got 100 followers in one day. Another got 450 followers after eight videos.
Dumebi Egbuna
Co-Founder and CMO at Chezie, an all-in-one solution designed to help you build impactful employee resource groups.
My approach: Since we are a bootstrapped startup, we’re always looking for low-cost but effective ways to go to market. Our current strategy is really centered on content, but for this example, I want to highlight our online events. These events are centered around the employee resource group’s journey and bring in subject-matter experts to give our audience members the best practices for making their groups impactful. These events have been really successful, garnering anywhere from 180 to 290 registrations, which can then be turned into sales prospects.
The results I’ve seen: We’ve seen great results from our go-to-market strategy, with 61 percent of our leads coming from people who have interacted with our content in some way.
Meredith Reed
Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer at Rexxy, a brand-focused affiliate marketing agency.
My approach: If you’re looking for a scrappy and strategic high return on an investment marketing strategy that generates a steady stream of user-generated content for your brand, start an affiliate program. The affiliates in your program will create and post content promoting your products on social media, but there’s no upfront cost for your brand. You only compensate your affiliates with a commission on the sales they generate. This allows you to avoid the risk and upfront expense of other promotional content strategies like ads and influencer campaigns. Since your affiliates are paid on commission, they are incentivized to produce original content that endorses your products on an ongoing basis. This gives your brand a reliable source of organic content to repurpose on your own social media channels and share with your network.
The results I’ve seen: Rexxy launched an affiliate program for a client that brought in more than $170,000 in affiliate-generated revenue in the first month. The program received more than 150 affiliate applications on the first day. To date, the brand has maintained over 500 active affiliates, all of whom made a minimum $150 purchase from the brand in order to activate their affiliate account.
Mindy Dutka
Chief Storyteller at Dogs I Meet, a commercial pet photography company that helps pet brands build compelling visual stories.
My approach: During the pandemic, I created Tales of Support, a visual storytelling initiative that displayed how dogs are among the unsung heroes of Covid-19. I wanted to spotlight how the pandemic turned every dog into a therapy dog. I networked with my contacts seeking important stories from a variety of people whose lives had been upended by the pandemic. The subjects I interviewed and photographed lived within 25 miles of me so I could stay within the pandemic safety guidelines. Interviews were held over Zoom prior to the photoshoot. I did the photoshoots solo and outdoors, using a telephoto lens so I could keep a safe distance between my subjects and myself. Through photos and narrative essays, I documented the pivotal role dogs played in sustaining their humans throughout the pandemic. I shared this impactful and poignant content on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and my website.
The results I’ve seen: Tales of Support enabled Dogs I Meet to be exposed to new audiences through multiple channels. The project received media exposure on TV and in newspapers, and I was a guest on several different podcasts. The project enabled me to share unique content across LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook and led to new clients and collaborations with several different organizations.
Anouck Gotlib
CEO of Belgian Boys, bringing craveable, turn-key, whole-ingredient European foods to the mainstream.
My approach: One of the things my marketing team does so well is that they stay on top of trends and put our company’s spin on it while the topic is still hot. It’s something that big companies can’t usually do, so we use our nimbleness to our advantage: spoofing NASA tweets, stickering our mascot’s face like the Olivia Rodrigo album, and so much more!
The results I’ve seen: These quick and on-trend posts see great engagement and especially shares. This broadens the reach of the Belgian Boys account in a purely organic way and leads to new potential customers learning about us.
Dina Kaplan
Founder and CEO of The Path, a meditation community.
My approach: We run an incredible Meditation Teacher Training program, and we often have students write to us about how they are sharing meditation after they graduate. I recently decided to invite these graduates to write up about how they are spreading mindfulness. I then offered to publish their article on our blog and link to the student’s website, social media accounts, or any event they want to promote. It is such a win-win, because it’s terrific, inspiring content for us that motivates new students to join our teacher training program. It’s also a great promotion for our graduates’ new offerings because we also do social media to promote the articles after they are published!
The results I’ve seen: The graduates are honored and excited to be featured on our blog and to be highlighted on our social media accounts. I also suspect we have brought in new students who saw the great things our graduates do to share mindfulness after they graduate—and these new students want to have the same impact in their communities, spreading mindfulness and positivity to others!
Jessica Alderson
CEO and Co-Founder of So Syncd, a dating app that matches compatible personality types.
My approach: Instead of outsourcing creative ideas to an agency or leaving it up to one person when we want to try new social media ideas, we ask everyone in the company to develop two or three concepts. It doesn’t take much time. It can take as little as 15 minutes per person, depending on the specific project. The result is that we end up with a diverse set of social media concepts to test with very little time or money.
My results: Our Instagram story views have increased by over 80 percent as a result of testing everyone’s ideas and our story engagement has increased even more.
Ashley Rector
Founder of Laura Alexandria Marketing, a social media marketing micro-agency powered by women.
My approach: Many brands want to be on TikTok and so we’ve discovered a few tips to help videos go viral. Content is king but engagement is queen. As soon as comments start rolling in on videos, make sure you respond to them in real-time, as it brings that user back to the video. Additionally, watching a video start to gain a little more traction than other videos is a sign that the community likes what it is seeing. We will throw $20 to $30 behind that video in ad spend, which opens the floodgates to push it into the viral universe.
The results I’ve seen: With this approach, we helped a client garner 69,000 app downloads for her brand.
Marika Adamopoulos
Founder and CEO of Marika Creative, an agency-ish, specializing in stunning visual experiences.
My approach: Utilizing the organic power of LinkedIn has been tremendously valuable to growing my business and establishing my credibility as a thought leader in the creative industry. Because LinkedIn’s algorithm and content approach are very different from other soci
al platforms, it is a scrappy entrepreneur’s dream to reach the right people. LinkedIn does not require an enormous ad spend to get noticed. By simply posting consistently, you gain respect and authority in your field quickly.
The results I’ve seen: By using LinkedIn, I have connected with several marketing directors and business owners who have since become clients, resulting in new business equal to six figures. I’ve also been able to build strong relationships with fellow creatives and colleagues that would not have otherwise been possible. Overall, my reach and engagement are so much higher on LinkedIn, because I am actually targeting and reaching my ideal customers and audience.
All individuals featured in this article are members of Dreamers & Doers, an award-winning community and diverse ecosystem amplifying extraordinary entrepreneurial women through PR opportunities, authentic connections, and high-impact resources. Learn more about Dreamers & Doers and subscribe to its monthly The Digest for top entrepreneurial and career resources.
By Hannah McCauley, Membership Manager at Dreamers & Doers
Read the Full Article on BlogHer, https://www.blogher.com/digital-marketing/scrappy-social-media-and-content-approaches-that-actually-work-39818/
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