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An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Do NOT use Instagram as a billboard. Especially nowadays, people don’t like feeling constantly sold to and will scroll right on by your content if it feels like it’s speaking at them instead of to them. Instead, use it as an opportunity to show your customers the behind-the-scenes of your business, showcase your values, share user generated content, and provide additional context to how your business is solving a need.

As a part of our series about How To Leverage Instagram To Grow Your Business, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kiara Martilla.

Kiara Martilla is the owner of digital marketing and design agency, Kiara Jennifer & Co. Kiara has worked with clients ranging from local solopreneurs to international brands and helped them to build and execute creative marketing strategies that increase brand awareness and set them up for sustainable growth.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I actually discovered the digital marketing realm by accident. When I was in college, I was working full-time in human resources at a national retailer. I was in a marketing course at the time, and one of my big projects for the semester was to shadow someone who worked in marketing and document our experience. I didn’t know anyone in our marketing department, so I asked my director if they could help connect me with someone. I ended up on the team who managed the social media strategy for the company. I remember very specifically one of the meetings I attended was to research Twitter parties– we all logged into our personal Twitter accounts and joined in on a different company’s Twitter party and spent the hour participating and also studying how well Twitter parties engaged the company’s audience.

I just remember thinking– wow! This is really a job? I had so much fun with everything that I was involved in and I felt so fulfilled both creatively and analytically. I became really obsessed with digital marketing after that experience.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?

The most interesting story for me was taking on a client whose Instagram was overrun by purchased followers (all waaaaay outside of the brand’s target demographic) and working to make it healthy again. I had to spend days straight removing over half of the brand’s thousands of followers because they were either fake or without question someone who would never purchase from the company. Once we cleaned out their followers, we worked on creating a consistent posting rhythm and started slowly rebuilding with the RIGHT target market and eventually were able re-establish the brand’s image on social media. Since then, they have gone viral and completely sold out of product multiple times between Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. I think this story is important because it reminds us that the number of followers doesn’t matter as much as attracting the right followers who actually have an interest in what you share and offer.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

For context, I do a LOT of research before I start having discussions with potential clients. I look at their brand, their competitors and their industry as a whole before we even get on our first phone conversation so that I am prepared and able to speak to a general direction that we can take their marketing efforts.

When I was in conversation with my first corporate client, things were going really well. All that was left was to send a video proposal to the C-level team to approve. I created this presentation deck filled with visuals and mock ups. I felt really good about it! I sent it off to my point of contact who was going to forward it to the C-level team. This particular company owned multiple brands– so I made sure to include mock ups for each brand. My point of contact responded and told me that I had used an entirely different company for one of their brands, and it happened to be their biggest competitor! When I had searched for them to pull up their website, their competitor had a Google Ad at the top of the page. I had falsely assumed that the first listing would be to the client’s website since I searched for them by name (this was clearly before I was well versed in Google Ads) so I pulled all of my information from the competitor’s website.

We had a good laugh about it (although I was mortified) and spun it as if I had already knocked my competitor research out of the way. I have tripled checked my client information ever since.

Ok. Let’s now move to the main focus of our discussion. For the benefit of our readers, can you explain why you are an authority about Social Media Marketing?

I’ve done work in the social media space in both Fortune 500 and small business capacity for 8 cumulative years. Social media was the very first digital marketing service I offered when I started my agency in 2018, and continues to be our most in-demand service to date. We’ve helped clients ranging from small, local businesses to international corporations create an on-brand social media experience for their customers, develop strategies that create brand awareness and steady growth among a targeted audience, and create consistent brand recognition that flows cohesively across all of their marketing channels.

Which social media platform have you found to be most effective to use to increase business revenues? Can you share a story from your experience?

It is truly dependent on the business and their target demographic. One of our clients who sells a particularly visual product across the United States sees the biggest return from Pinterest and uses Instagram more as a portfolio for their products. We have another product based business who has completely sold out multiple times thanks to Instagram and TikTok.

Social media can definitely drive direct sales in certain instances, but is more often an indirect contributor to growth by creating brand awareness, showcasing social proof, and building relationships with your target market. This in turn results in increased revenue because of how social media can be used to warm up a cold audience and prime them to buy.

Let’s talk about Instagram specifically, now. Can you share five ways to leverage Instagram to dramatically improve your business? Please share a story or example for each.

  • Do NOT use Instagram as a billboard. Especially nowadays, people don’t like feeling constantly sold to and will scroll right on by your content if it feels like it’s speaking at them instead of to them. Instead, use it as an opportunity to show your customers the behind-the-scenes of your business, showcase your values, share user generated content, and provide additional context to how your business is solving a need.
  • Be SOCIAL on social– don’t post and ghost. Social media wasn’t created to become yet another place for businesses to blast their products and services the same way they do on commercials and billboards. There is a reason people pay to skip the ads on YouTube and Hulu. Use social media to talk with your customers, build trusting relationships, and to LISTEN to what your customers are wanting and needing from you. Customers are people, so when they feel they are being treated as a person rather than a number, they will be a lot more likely to buy from you and refer others to you.
  • Play! Social media is an opportunity to let the personality of your brand shine through. Test out Reels, go live and spend time with your audience, share memes that will make your audience laugh or quotes that will leave them feeling inspired. Not to mention, being an early adopter of new features often leads to increased reach as the competition is a lot more scarce than it is for more established features.
  • Check your analytics every. Single. Month. When you dive in and look at what content performs best each month, it will give you direction on what to create the next month. Sometimes we think we know what our audience wants, but the analytics can totally surprise us. Which leads me to my last point…
  • Test test test! Try different types of content. See how photos do compared to quotes and graphics. See if video attracts more engagement. See if the time of day you post makes a difference. Play with different hashtags. Engage with new people. And do this often, because it will always change.

Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

The biggest thing that I can think of is just promoting the importance of balance and taking care of yourself. I just read in Rachel Rodger’s book, We Should All Be Millionaires an idea that really sparked some thought for me– that by having someone come in and take care of your laundry, delivering your groceries, walking your dog, or in the sense of business taking over something like your accounting or your marketing, you get all of that time back that you would’ve been spending on those activities. That time can then be spent re-energizing yourself at yoga, turning your phone and computer off earlier at night and spending more time with your family, creating a new offer, reconnecting with your clients in a more personal way, etc. By taking things off of your plate, you are giving yourself more capacity to take care of yourself and your business in a way that will only help you to succeed even more.

Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

Definitely Joanna Gaines! Every quarter, I sit down with the newest issue of the Magnolia Journal and go through it page by page. I not only enjoy the content itself, but as a marketer, it fascinates me seeing how all of the different pieces of Magnolia are tied together from the Journal, to the Silos to Fixer Upper and beyond. I’ve studied it immensely from a marketing perspective because I’ve always loved how effortlessly they can draw in their audience through carefully thought out story and beautiful visuals. I am a long time fan and can’t wait until my next visit down to Waco!

Thank you so much for these great insights. This was very enlightening!

Kiara Martilla: Five Ways To Leverage Instagram To Dramatically Improve Your Business was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.