I started my social media marketing agency in 2017 after working in-house for 8 years at one of the world’s greatest action sports brands, followed by a shorter stint at a world-renowned luxury skincare brand. One of my biggest “takeaways” from “corporate” was the blatant, enormous waste of time, money, and talent.

→ A lack of systems and workflows lead to a lot of irrelevant work (and the most important work not getting done)
→ So many hours and so many dollars spent on useless meetings
→ Every team working off of their own channel strategy instead of one cohesive content strategy
→ Lack of consensus and the opportunity cost of not ever achieving peak performance because you can’t get everyone aligned around the same strategy

Y'all know the list goes on, and that’s not a knock to these brands! I've spoken with so many leaders who see the same thing happening at their companies, so I've come to think about it as the cost of getting big.

The good news? Despite today’s doom and gloom of the internet marketing industry, it’s a great time to be a bootstrapping brand looking to set up a content, social, and holistic digital growth strategy. You get to start now and you get to do this right, with visibility to what could go wrong and how to avoid it.

The number one way to maximize your small budget to be its absolute mightiest begins and ends with alignment.

The same way you teach a kid to ride a bike with all focus, limbs, and motion charting directly forward in order catch the momentum needed to balance and ride...

→ Your content strategy – responsible for every single piece of content that your brand ever publishes anywhere – should be aligned to your very specific business goals. When you're laser focused on discovering what content supports your goals, you grow faster and it becomes so much easier to measure the impact of every time and dollar you spend on social.

→ Your social media marketing doesn’t work alone, it works when it’s in lockstep with your go-to-market strategy, email strategy, ad strategy, website content, search marketing, and more. When you delegate your social or digital marketing, you need to do so with a playbook that shows how all of these channels work together to maximize efficient performance (if you want to avoid waste)!

→ Talent – you need team members who can bring your strategy to life within the budget you have available (whether we’re talking you and your VA, a team of 50, or all versions in between). When we hire talent before the strategy and playbook are in place, we end up in that woops-I-spent-50k-for-nothing scenario that we like to avoid at all costs. 😜