We recently connected with Stephanie Gilbert and have shared our conversation below.

Stephanie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Too often the media represents innovation as something magical that only high-flying tech billionaires and upstarts engage in – but the truth is almost every business owner has to regularly innovate in small and big ways in order for their businesses to survive and thrive. Can you share a story that highlights something innovative you’ve done over the course of your career?

I created a certification program for social media managers to become Master Strategists (a title that didn’t exist before this). In our industry there’s often a lot of confusion from business owners about why a social media manager is valuable & why they should be paid a premium. We often hear comments that belittle our experience and education, like “bravo to the intern running this account” or “don’t you just make memes & post graphics on social media all day?”… Despite social media platforms being one of the number one ways we discover, communicate with & even buy from businesses these days, social media managers are often under-appreciated & underpaid. I wanted to help these service providers establish themselves as industry experts, so they could confidently charge what their services are worth. I developed Social Superlatives to give them the tools they need to make an impact in their client’s businesses — so they could showcase the clear difference between themselves, a professional social media strategist, and an intern.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m the founder of The Social Media CEO. Our mission is to help social media service providers start, systemize and scale their businesses. We do that through our free resources & online Directory, The Social Media Manager Market, our Canva Template Shop, and our 12 month long Master Strategist Program, Social Superlatives. If you want to build a profitable, sustainable business in the social media industry, we’re your BFF.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

One of my favorite stories is about the customer journey and lifetime value. We often don’t consider how long someone is in our “universe” — watching and waiting in the background for the perfect time to buy from or work with us. This was the case with one of my mentorship clients. When we got on a discovery call to talk through what mentorship would look like, I asked her how she’d heard about me and what made her decide to get on the call that day. This was over the summer of 2020. She told me she’d been following me on Instagram since I started my business in 2015. She’d bought a $20 hashtag guide I sold in 2016… and she mentioned she’d been following me ever since on Instagram. Then she mentioned one particular Instagram post that I shared about a synchronistic moment involving the word “Rosebud” that led me to starting my own business. She said she really resonated with that story and it stuck with her all these years, and recently she had her own “rosebud moment” and that prompted her to reach out and finally take the plunge to work with me. It may have taken 5+ years, but that day she leveled up from a $20 guide & would not only go onto investing thousands in mentorship and my certification program, but she would scale her own business to 6 figures later that year! Her story is a reminder to me that while the world will make you think success is quick wins, immediate ROI & overnight success, there is a lot of magic & far more lucrative rewards in playing the long game!

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I know the words “authenticity” & “transparency” get thrown around a lot — but those two core values are a big reason we’ve been as successful as we have been for as long as we have. That, coupled with the fact that we aren’t into scraping the surface and delivering click bait resources that don’t actually help anyone. We genuinely want to see the people in our community succeed so we try to overdeliver on the resources we create in order to help them do that. If we were putting out garbage, easy to Google information or selling services & products that didn’t actually make an impact we wouldn’t be here for too long. Folks would move on. But we have been able to move our community members from free resources to low cost paid resources to high ticket programs — because they are seeing the results and coming back for more. It makes me feel awesome to know I’m making an impact. If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be doing this.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thesocialmedia.ceo/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesocialmedia.ceo/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theSMCEO/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephjgilbert/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/StephJGilbert
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCADkgbUejghh2fVrrmcvjAw
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thesocialmedia.ceo

Image Credits
AshGabes Photography for solo images. @stephgilbert Instagram for group images.