Case study: @mktgtoday on Instagram

Surprise, everyone on social media starts at zero followers. We hope that after reading this you might feel a little bit of inspiration to ramp up your content game, especially if you have been considering taking content creation more seriously.

Our approach and content strategy

We started making content with a very simple strategy: to leverage experts. For a few reasons, utilizing experts from the marketing industry has been the best approach for us thus far:

• We have enough plebs on the internet. No one needs another person to sit in front of a camera to give rudimentary marketing tips and advice, especially if they are virtually unknown…

• With that, people trust experts. On opposite ends of the “who to trust on social media” scale, you find new content creators on one side and the experts on the other (this includes people who have been creating content for a while and already have a following)

• Content from experts already exists. Leveraging existing content - while giving proper credit and tagging the creators and the experts featured in our content - enables us to make more content at a faster pace than if we made everything from scratch.

How it started

We launched our Instagram on July 1. Our first handful of videos got a few hundred views, nothing crazy. Then, about three weeks after launch, our second video that we posted started gaining traction…

The video went from a few hundred to over 100K views! This lead to us gaining our first real chunk of followers. Right at thirty days, we surpassed 1,000 followers…

We kept following our strategy, posting every day, and we were lucky enough to have a couple more videos get over 20K views, and another video of Steve Jobs that received 300K views…

Each of these videos had been live on Instagram for roughly two weeks before they picked up any steam. Meaning, the high view counts did not come right away, the views came after a little while…

We hit a bump in the road…

Despite getting a pretty good amount of views, and reaching a considerable amount of accounts, we had some gaps in our content creation which caused us to miss a few days of posting. When it comes to posting, ideally, you want to be posting every day. Or, at least, at a regular and consistent cadence. The more frequently, the better.

Missing posting days is not ideal, but not the end of the world if you’re able to get back into the swing of things.

Long story short, we limped our way to 5K followers in just under three months…

Once we regained our consistency, one video carried us to our next milestone…

Seth Godin made some people mad

Many of you actually followed us and subscribed to our newsletter from seeing this video of Seth Godin. The video received hundreds of hate comments, saying that it does not make sense, that the video is stupid, that Hyatt has a brand, blah blah blah…

Despite the hundreds of people in the comments who did not understand the point that Seth Godin was making, the video received over one million views! This was another video that took several weeks before it gained any traction. It was posted on September 1, but did not receive a substantial amount of views until the the week of September 25.

As a byproduct of the viewership and reach, our Instagram reached the next milestone: 10K followers…

How it’s going

Long story short, on our 100th day (exactly) we reached 15K follower the next week, mainly from that one Seth Godin video…

Wrapping up

TL;DR - The key takeaway here is that if you want to create and post content, do it! You never know what could happen. We followed a strategy, we were consistent, and we got pretty lucky to receive so many views on a handful of videos. Every video that went viral did not pop-off immediately, and it took a little time.

If we can do it, so can you.