Social lessons

Content&Co is a social media agency born out of the brand building needs of Lewis Road Creamery. Three years on, its founders are in awe of its ability to ride the social media wave.

When you’re in charge of an emerging beverage brand looking to engage a social media agency capable of producing insightful, high impact content – but you’re unable to find one – what do you do?

In 2015, with their legendary products about to seriously disrupt the local market, Lewis Road Creamery’s Angela Weeks and
Peter Cullinane decided to stop looking for an agency and create their own. 

Both had advertising backgrounds, so they had a natural head start. Content&Co was born.

Angela and Peter quickly realised they couldn’t be both client and agency so they engaged a team to look after their baby. 

Twelve months after launching Content&Co Maya Brown came on board as GM to spearhead the management of the business and morph it from content production agency to one offering social media strategy, execution and media planning.

“We wanted to create a business that could continually serve up high quality content for our digital platforms,” recalls Peter. “A business that would allow for a seamless relationship of delivery of assets but also stand on its own two feet from day one.  

“For us it’s always about people and the most challenging and difficult aspect of setting up Content&Co was finding the right mix of talent,” he says. “The ideal combination of attitude and aptitude.” 

Maya, who had been global marketing manager for Icebreaker NZ over five years, was looking for a change and saw Content&Co as her next big challenge.

“The business had only been going a year and was working with just a handful of clients. The goal was to broaden the client base, as well as the offering and really establish the company as a leader in the social space,” she recalls.

“Content&Co started out creating beautiful content for brands, and it was just a natural progression to evolve into a full service social media agency. 

“We’d create these lovely images for [clients] to use across social but there was no strategy behind what they were posting and no media plan. So we brought on the right resource and started owning the brief from the beginning – developing the strategy, creating the content and a posting plan with supporting social media spend.

“The full-service offering is what has really driven our growth over the past year or so,” says Maya. 

Another reason Content&Co is successful is because they really ‘get’ social and are geared up to service it. 

“Brands need content that is socially sticky, and lots of it, because the lifetime of a piece of content is short,” explains Maya. “We understand the need for a constant variety of fresh content that is high quality but also affordable – every video doesn’t need to be a TV advert. Having said that, you don’t want to give up the brand standards on social. There has to be a balance.”

Social advice

Maya says social media is a fast-changing industry and it’s important to keep up. 

“One example is Facebook recently changing its algorithm again, in an effort to prioritise ‘meaningful’ person-to-person interactions among friends and family. This means organic reach drops even further for brands. 

“Businesses must be more strategic about the content they post, because posts that promote meaningful connections and interactions among people will be prioritised in the news feed.

“Have good content that is relevant to social. Large-scale ad campaigns designed for billboards won’t cut it as the only social content during a campaign – it needs to be supported with snackable posts that are visually appealing.

“On social people judge a book by its cover and simply won’t follow an unappealing social feed,” says Maya.

People often have the wrong approach to social media marketing – with the KPIs of simply increasing likes and followers. But this doesn’t directly translate into more leads or sales, she adds.

“With the recent changes in Facebook we also pose the question of whether it’s better to use a paid advertising strategy to generate likes and a fan base or – because you can’t reach many organically anyway – are you better putting that money into boosting your content to reach your target audience? 

“It’s also important to have quality followers. Having 1000 that have joined because of a competition lure won’t engage; they won’t be hot leads and likely won’t lead to sales. 

“Rather have 200 that have followed because your content and brand is relevant to them and they resonate with the content you’re posting.” 

Rather than try to do too much on social across too many platforms and get an average result, it’s better to do your research into which platforms work best for your brand and attract the biggest target audience, says Maya. Then focus on doing a few really well. 

Developing landscape

Looking back over the past three years Peter Cullinane says Lewis Road Creamery “lives and dies” by its social media interplay and Content&Co has never dropped the ball.

“We set the business up based on this need, deliberately stepped away and let it fly. We’re really in awe of what it’s doing.”

There’s no doubt the social media marketing landscape will continue to develop. Social is the new world of brand communication and unquestionably it will redefine the industry even further, believes Cullinane. 

Content&Co’s opportunity is to not only satisfy the needs of Lewis Road Creamery and other clients (Trilogy and Dole are two other brands it works with) but be open to other like-minded clients going forward, he says. 

Maya believes brands will continue to need a strong presence on social, to elevate their success and increase exposure.

“We’ll look to continually improve our media planning offering as paid strategies on social will continue to grow in importance and we’d assume that, as a result, Facebook will also evolve and improve its ad offering and reporting functionality.”