We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Abbey Oslin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Abbey below.

Abbey, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Coming from a large marketing agency, we’ve worked with some big name brands and budgets. We know what it takes to build a successful marketing campaign. But where this industry falls apart is when it comes to supporting small businesses and especially entrepreneurs. So many small business owners feel like they have to wait to “do marketing” until they have a budget, secure a grant or are “bigger” and more well-known.

The reality is, you can start marketing your business for free from day one. No one is teaching small businesses the impact organic marketing can make in their business. There isn’t a lot of talk around how to build a marketing campaign without paying for ads.

This is why we entered this space and left our security of the 9-5 agency. We want to help small businesses grow and entrepreneurs feel confident in marketing their businesses organically and authentically.

Abbey, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We like to call ourselves a marketing agency for the modern age entrepreneur.

We are a close-knit partnership — Abbey and Courtney — and together we make up Duo Collective. We specialize in helping multi-passionate entrepreneurs get more visibility online, more organic growth, and more *real* results from their marketing. We are one part creative and one part strategy, bringing the best of both worlds to our clients.

We’ve been a Duo for over a decade, since our big-time agency days collaborating on projects for household names you’ll find inside your Target cart. When we both realized the corporate life was no longer serving us, we founded our own marketing agency to dedicate our days to helping multi-passionates crush marketing goals and take their business to the next level.

We focus only on organic marketing — meaning all things non-paid. We specialize in branding, social media strategy and content creation alongside search engine optimization. We are also speakers and educators with courses and group coaching programs training others how to infuse our strategies into their own businesses.

We are obsessed with not just building marketing plans, but teaching our clients how to maintain them. We don’t work like a traditional retained agency, our goal is to teach your our secrets and hand off the reigns.

Every client we work with easily turns into a friendship because we truly care. We care about your business growth and your vision and dreams. We want you to succeed just as much as we want our own business to. That is the magic of this entrepreneurial world — we are all in this together!

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Social media is a topic we talk about often with our audience. Some people love it and some people hate it. We have two pieces of advice 1) choose your favorite and 2) be consistent.

Our favorite social platform is Instagram. You will often find us here making ridiculous reels usually wearing wigs. Courtney has kind of an obsession for wigs and we are here for it. We started at ground zero, just like everyone else. We didn’t buy our followers or join an engagement pod. We simply share content we know our audience will love and we do it at a consistency that works for us.

If you are struggling with social media for your business, let us be the first to tell you that you do not have to be on all of them and you definitely don’t have to post daily. Pick one platform, preferably your favorite (because you will like to show up more often) and then decide how often you want to post (i.e. 3x a week). Then follow through and be consistent.

Once you have your priority platform, you can repurpose your content everywhere else. Work smarter not harder. For example, upload your reels to TikTok and make them idea pins to help expand your reach. And be sure to consider the type of content you create. Test and learn. For example, if you love Instagram like us, dedicate time to creating both reels and static content. Your static content serves your following while reels help you reach a wider audience.

At the end of the day, we are all humans and not content creation machines. We need to find a way to turn these platforms back into what they were designed for… community and connection. When you focus less on the vanity metrics (followers & likes) and focus more on genuine comments, connections and messages that is when you will see the real growth.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Well this one is simple — organic marketing. :)

Practice what you preach! We’ve grown our business an average 150% year over year by following through on a strong organic marketing strategy. These have been some of our favorite platforms to drive new business:

Instagram
Email Newsletter — Tuesday Tips & Sips
Blog
Podcast
Outreach (featured on guest podcasts, interviews, backlink strategies, etc.)

Then we repurpose everywhere else; TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

How our strategy comes to life inside each of these platforms has shifted dramatically throughout the past 4 years. When things fall flat we need to evaluate how our content is performing by asking our audience. We’ve made big pivots throughout the years from one on one offerings to selling courses and products to running group coaching programs to year-long programs. The best part about organic marketing is you can authentically communicate these shifts in a way that feels right.

One thing people forget often is to ask your clients and customers to do the selling for you by simply writing a review. Reviews are not only good for SEO but they also boost your authority and make you more credible. These can help your prospective clients say yes more easily.

We are so passionate about how we’ve grown our own business and that is exactly why we teach our clients how to use these strategies to grow their own in a big way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://duocollective.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/duo.collective/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/duocollectivemarketing
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/duo-collective-marketing/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFH7A10t8i8C5lVi9zNq2Ww
• Other: Podcast: https://duocollective.com/duo-on-air-marketing-podcast/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@duocollective

Image Credits
Julie Greer Photography: https://juliegreerphotography.com/