Garbaj Clothing

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Case Studies & More

Client

Garbaj Clothing

Services Used

Marketing Strategy, Public Relations, Video Editing, Content Creation, Social Campaign Creation, Advertising Campaign Management

Basic info

Graham Johnson, the president of Garbaj Clothing has built a clothing brand made with sustainable materials to leave the world a little cleaner with every sale they make. The campaign we collaborated on was for his new line of hoodies entitled 'The Lady of The Lake'. Together we crafted a marketing strategy on how to properly sell these hoodies. One of the biggest obstacles we faced was that selling hoodies in February sounds like a safe bet but in Florida, it was about 80 degrees each day. The first step in the strategy was to optimize their social media for the algorithm to show wider audiences their posts, this worked. Since working with them Garbaj had about 900 followers on Instagram, we grew that following to 1200 organically using methods that utilized the algorithm. The reason we wanted to grow their following on Instagram was that it seems the majority of sales they made were from Instagram followers messaging them to buy, this was proven to be accurate because the growth of followers also grew their sales. After we had a method in place on how to grow organically, we decided to run an ad campaign to boost our reach. We gained over 2,000 leads and people we now have in our retargeting database that we can sell to in the future. After we sold the hoodies and grew their following the last thing Garbaj needed was some press. I reached out to my contacts at various news publishers and pitched them the story and mission of Garbaj until it was picked up by 3 different publications. Even now when you google Garbaj those articles come up on the first page, which establishes credibility for the brand.

Catering to the Instagram Algorithm

Throughout my social media research, I have found a proven way to utilize the Instagram algorithm to have Instagram show your post to more people who don't follow you. This will help grow your following 100% organically. This is how I did that for Garbaj.

1. Something To Follow

The absolute main idea when growing a true following is to understand how people think. People may like a photo because it is a good picture but they won't follow an account that does not post something consistently that falls in line with what they want. I see a lot of companies posting a lot of different things on their social media and not sticking to what their followers are there to see. With Garbaj we started using a purple filter on their pics so all pics had consistency and we posted 3 times a week Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. People had something to subscribe to, we just had to get it in front of them.

2. Expanding Our Horizons

Next step after we had a solid arsenal of consistent content to post. We needed to play the algorithm a little bit. All social media ranks you, they want to make sure you are not a fake/spam account so they keep track of any action you take. With a higher ranking, a post using a hashtag is more likely to reach the top of that hashtag and be shown to everyone who follows or searches that hashtag. Another method we used was a hashtag ladder strategy, I have read about this online but I use it differently then most. We would pick very small hashtags from 1,000 - 5,000 posts because we would have no issue getting to the top of those hashtags. Each time we posted I would find a little bit bigger hashtags and we started climbing the hashtag ladder. Eventually, we started using bigger hashtags from 30,000 to 60,000 posts and we were reaching the top of each one. This gave us about 15%-20% more engagement on our posts and brought in a decent amount of new followers.

3. Paid Advertisement

After we had a solid base of growing followers organically. We started utilizing sponsored posts. We optimized the target audience every day to make sure we were reaching the best people to engage with and purchase Garbaj products. I would only suggest using advertising after a solid foundation is in place for growth. We spent about $200 total on ads and this brought in a lot of traffic to our website and we could see which article of clothing people showed the most interest in. Then we started retargeting those people with the clothing they showed the most interest in. Constantly reminding people of Garbaj lead to more followers and even sales. Most people won't follow or buy from a company the first time they hear about them, they must be reminded the brand exists.

Garbaj On The News

Over the course of the short campaign Garbaj and I worked together, I helped get them 3 pieces of PR. Two were in local newspapers and one was a live segment on Channel 10 news (Watch the video on the left).

PR is super valuable for any brand. Not only does it spread your message to a wider audience but in the internet age, everything is saved so you can find it in a search. When someone looks up a business and finds multiple credible articles written about them, trust is more easily built between brand and customer.

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