How QQ Studio Gained and Engaged Audience

In the last year, QQ Studio has been working hard to build up our social media presence. We are by no means done with this process, but we have been blown away by how engaged our audience is with the content we have pushed out. It is an incredibly satisfying experience to see the fruit of your labor sprout and to see your followers engaging with it positively. If you would like to know how we did it, we will tell you.

We came into the social media content creation game with little experience. We are a small company and had to learn the ropes as we played. Research was the name of the game. We read dozens of articles and guides on how to best build up our social media presence. We wrote up reports, had many meetings, and worked together to find the best methods for establishing our brand online. From all this research, we discovered that it was not about the numbers. Big numbers for followers and likes are great, but that is not the most important thing. We learned that the best kind of audience is an engaged one. An audience that responds to your content, comments, and asks questions is the kind that we wanted. This kind of audience is also the hardest to get. Anyone can fluff their account with bots and paid-for inactive followers, but these do not result in any meaningful connections or substantial engagement. To get organic growth, we found that you need a refined strategy.

When promoting a business, it is important to remind people of the human element involved. Too often businesses come off like a collection of nameless drones buzzing away to power a soulless machine. You need to remind your followers that your company is made from the passions and efforts of the people working behind the scenes. Creating content that gives your followers a peek into this process can help establish a personal connection.

We started by creating Instagram stories that showed the inner workings of the company. We hosted warehouse tours, showed off our inventory of products, and presented glimpses into our brainstorm and development process. We found that our followers enjoyed seeing how our company worked and responded positively to all of our behind-the-scenes clips.

Another strategy we found to be extremely successful for gaining an engaged audience was by promoting their products. We are in a good spot to promote our followers since we are a packaging company. We can post our customers using our products to hold their products. In this way, we can promote both our businesses at the same time! The result is a mutually beneficial partnership between our followers and us.

Small businesses like La Connecta Spicy Candies responded very positively to the promotion and even sent us boxes of their candy as a thank you. It is extremely rewarding to spread awareness for other small businesses. We find that the businesses that we promote engage with us more and are always the first to respond to our content. If you want to gain loyal followers, consider promoting others in addition to yourself.

The next step in the promotion process is our interviews. We reached out to customers that have utilized our custom printing service for their products to see if they would take part in an exclusive interview. We reached out to a few customers, and luckily, we got responses. I have had the pleasure of speaking with the owners of Nutz 4 Coffee, Duo Orthodontics, Olde Virden, and MDX Headliner. You can read each of these interviews when you create an account on our website.

From these interviews, we were able to learn how these companies grew, how they reach their own set of customers, and what they look for in packaging. The interviews also established a personal connection. Nutz 4 Coffee even reposted the blog onto their website, which you can find here. Today, this interview is our highest read blog, thanks to the cross-promotion from Nutz 4 Coffee.

One sure-fire way to reach more followers and increase engagement is to host giveaways and fundraisers. We have held multiple giveaways on Instagram, where we gave exclusive gifts to people that engaged with our posts. While these posts generated a lot of buzz, likes, and follows, they also granted us more active followers.

We found that both the winners and the participants of the contests stuck around after the contest was over, responding to other posts and staying engaged. Our fundraisers did the same, and let us give back to charitable causes. We also found that participating in our followers' giveaways ensured they stuck around. We even won some!

There are many, many people on social media. There are enough subcultures and niche interest groups to fill up an ocean. While it may seem difficult to narrow down your audience to the specific group that will engage with your content, it is not impossible. We looked at competitors, monitored analytics, and did more research to find which specific groups are most interested in our service. We then try to create content specifically for these groups. However, we are always on the lookout for more niche groups and interests. We experiment with hashtags and look into trends to find a spot in which we can fit.

We are still early in the development process for our social media. There are pages 100 times bigger and more popular than ours. However, we will take our close-knit and loyal group over an unmanageably large one any day. Right now, we are happy with our collection of engaged followers. We can communicate with them to help grow their business and achieve their dreams, just as we have. Ideally, you can look at our journey and learn something from it. If you would like to join the #packwithcolor family and see what all the fuss is about, visit our Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest pages.