TikTok, Instagram, Facebook are forces to be reckoned with when it comes to modern-day marketing.
Cambridge-based Spencer Social is serving up social media that is engaging, fun, authentic, creative, captivating and, more importantly, it hits the mark with the ever-growing audience of people who live in the social media world.
Who better to guide you through the social media jungle than a ‘Gen Zer’ who lives and breathes the stuff? At 22, founder Sophie Walton has grown up in a digital world. Like many people her age, Sophie’s social media education has happened by osmosis.
She learnt pretty quickly that a university degree wasn’t going to give her the specialist knowledge she needed to be a social media expert.
“I did a wee bit of university. I didn’t finish. I did one marketing paper and I was mostly there for English. I felt like the marketing education there wasn’t really reflective of what I was likely to be doing if I ended up in a social media marketing job. I thought I would see if I could just figure it out myself.”
After a bit of time working in a social media manager role, Sophie took the step into freelancing in 2019 and eventually set up Spencer Social.
With Covid just around the corner, Sophie was still able to develop and grow her business. No longer operating out of her home, in 2021 she moved into an office in Cambridge.
“I was a freelancer through a lot of Covid and have essentially been operating most of my business life during the pandemic. I think it’s kind of a myth that every single online business hit March 2020, and then blew up because everyone was on the internet. It’s still a big learning curve for me.”
When TikTok started to become a serious option for brands, Sophie dove right into experiment with the platform
“I just set up a TikTok account for a small business, just to see if it would work. That account got around six-million organic views that year.”
Organic marketing requires less ‘pushy sales’ than paid marketing, and Sophie says, when done right, it can generate a steady stream of loyal traffic, start to increase brand curiosity, and generate sales.
Being new to the business world, Sophie hasn’t been afraid to turn some of the social media pitfalls into moments of magic.
When a client’s product video was likened to a 2000’s Barbie movie, Sophie turned it into TikTok gold, earning a video addressing the Barbie comparison 3.3 million organic views.
Whether the comments are good or bad, Sophie reckons it’s better to engage with the audience, who, she says, “have spent their precious time interacting with the brand and giving them feedback on your social media presence, you may as well take it”.
“You just gotta roll with it. People are always gonna say negative crap. You might as well be like, yeah, and what? TikTok seems to like that.”
With one-billion monthly active users worldwide, it’s hard to ignore the power of a medium that many associate with young people dancing.
Recent data shows that TikTok became the first non-Facebook app to surpass three-billion downloads and consumer spending on the platform has reached more than US$2.5 billion globally.
Working mostly with food and beverage clients, Sophie and her content manager/right hand woman Kirsty Erskine create content that is more than just a boring product video; they share the good, the bad and sometimes the ugly of the brand’s journey, as they believe being authentic is the key to success.
“Telling the story of the brand is the most important thing. You can always go here’s the product, and here’s the list of benefits. And sometimes if there’s a really amazing, strange, crazy, wild, out-there benefit, then those videos go really well. But a lot of the videos that are going viral, especially at the moment, are videos with the founders talking about, ‘I lost $30k in one week and here’s how I fixed it.’ Those kinds of stories where you watch to the end to find out how they fixed it.”
It’s not all about creating state-of-the-art videos, although they deliver creativity in spades with Kirsty’s artistry and Sophie’s social strategy expertise, the pair can also take existing brand footage and turn it into compelling short form video content.
“Sometimes the content generated by staff living and breathing the brand is better than what an agency will be able to capture. I’m talking about the really authentic, unique, cool moments like watching the bread rise in the oven at 3am or when products turn up with the labels on backwards. Pulling back the curtain on your brand can create some special moments that go viral,” she says.
