Makel Gardner

Makel started Fin & Vince, a children’s clothing brand, in 2015 with her business partner Sara as a way of keeping busy whilst their husbands were studying.

Fin and Vince use hand-drawn illustrations, 100% organic cotton and is designed as well as made in the US.

Makel knows how to use Instagram to find her target market and how to use that to run successful social media for her business.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Makel’s success

Using Instagram giveaways to grow the number of followers

Result if you follow the steps in Makel’s session

Growth in followers and brand engagement that will lead to future customers

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

We’ve done, I mean, it became this big fad a few months back of these loot giveaways and giving away like these big prizes like $1,000 or a MacBook. And they’d get all these brands to come in and buying into this and we’ve done the couple because you got so many followers like right off the bat.

I was like 3000 followers, I mean, who doesn’t want cash or MacBook, but I mean, what percentage of those people really like your product and are really going to stick around? So then we’ve noticed like after the giveaway ended, it would just take a major drop, and it seems like the ones that did stay around, usually aren’t engaging, they’re not liking, they’re not commenting.

And so I just felt like it wasn’t worth it. It was more worth it to do a giveaway with someone who has your same aesthetic in your same market, in your same target market, I guess I should say. And do those small giveaways with them and those people are going to be your number one supporters.

Sorry. You’re talking about running a giveaway and making sure that you’re only getting the updates of the followers that are going to be interested in ultimately being a customer. These guys are, you know, in your target market, they are potential customers at this point. They’re leads for you. How do you make sure that you are reaching only that you know, that those leads?

Well, it’s kind of asked like where you start and I think obviously most importantly is you have to know your target market.

So you find those people, what your style is, whether it’s like hipster or people who like, we do kids clothes. So ours is like super classic like heirloom to its high end. So we look for people who are wearing those things, who are these big bloggers and influencers that are wearing these kinds of clothes. And we’ve noticed it to be beneficial to reach out to influencers and have them run giveaways for us. So that’s been one way that we’ve liked to do.

So some kind of big blogger who shares our style and shares our aesthetic. It’s a picture and usually it’s just something simple like only our brand involved or maybe like up to five brands. So the people entering don’t have to follow like 50 brands to enter the giveaway. It’s just a few so it’s super easy on the customers end. And they just have to usually tag friends in the comments.

So entering, super simple. There’s no reposting nothing like that. It’s just simple tagging. And we’ve noticed that team, also effective and one other giveaway style that we like to do for not using an influencer or a blogger was, we find brands who also have similar target markets as us.

And we don’t like to clutter our Instagram feed with like a picture that says giveaway across it because it just kind of looks spammy. And it’s just kind of on our style. So we’ve had some like boards that we bought at Home Depot, and we painted them. And we do kind of a flat lifestyle picture. So we have the brand who’s doing the giveaway with us, they send us their product.

And then we get like, I flatly picture with our product next to their product, and it just looks really nice and aesthetically pleasing on our feet. And we’ve noticed a really good response with those kinds of giveaways too.

All right now there’s a few things I wanted to ask you about. But you said that getting people, just tag themselves in or even tagging their friends into the post is the most effective. Can you go into why and how that works?

Yeah, so you can kind of go on our Instagram if you want to see like an example but it just says something like super easy to enter. All you have to do is like this post.

And then number two, it’s a tag friends. Each friend that you tag is an entry and so the more friends you tag the more entries you get. And then I think that makes the engagement on the post super high so more people are seeing it in their explore page and it just kind of becomes a bigger deal especially if it’s like a pretty big blogger doing it. Yeah, I knew that helps.

All right, so when you’re saying it’s a big blogger doing it, is this happening on your account or the bloggers account? And how’s that working?

We do both. So we usually post at the same time. So have the blogger put, will like pick a time of day. Sometimes you can even stagger it so you can hit an audience at night, audience in the morning. It’s just kind of this preference.
You can ask the blogger even how they like to do them in the past because bloggers are usually pretty picky with the way that their look, their feed feels. So a lot of times we send them the product and they get the photo so it fits with their feed.

Right, that’s yeah, because Instagram is one of those things. Everyone has their own style and make sure that you fit in with that. So I understand that now. If you’re both pressing the same time, you kind of mentioned, like what you should kind of write in the in the caption there with the exact same caption. Is the blogger tagging in you know, your account and vice versa as well?

Yes, sorry, I forgot that part. So where it says how to enter, I guess number one would be follow it, would say the blogger and follow the brand. So Finn and Vince. And then number two would be like this post. Number three is tag your friends. So it’s always a requirement to follow both the brands and influencer or if you’re doing with brands, you list all the brands of who the entries you need to follow.