We were lucky to catch up with Stephanie M. Casey recently and have shared our conversation below.
Stephanie M. , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?
When I started my marketing-industry business, Lovage Inc., I wasn’t quite sure what it was going to be and I approached it as a consultancy to “make things better.” I began the journey by reaching out to those I had done projects for prior, as a freelancer under my own name as well as those I thought could mentor me in some way. A few people from both those camps ended up hiring me under my new Lovage banner to do some work for their companies.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I have two things going on right now. The first is my marketing-industry company, Lovage Inc. We make cool, responsive websites for progressive companies. The second is my animal advocacy work, Dallas Love Bugs, which is accidentally turning into a business. I’ve learned so much in this space and it is in my DNA to share learnings so my content has started to have an impact reaching about a million people a month. I am working to monetize the project so I may have greater reach and impact. Dallas Love Bugs is housed under Lovage’s “Let’s Make It Better” umbrella.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Building an audience on social media is valuable for influence and monetization opening up possibility… However! It is very important to do this in an authentic manner. Seeing large numbers of followers is what triggers an account is successful, to most people. But that can be an inaccurate metric of success. Purchasing followers or gathering them in spammy ways is all too easy but this will hamper your reach and, ultimately your ACTUAL influence which is what sales (of a product, a concept, support of a movement) are based on. Engagement and participation is where the real value is!
For my Dallas Love Bugs community, I have about 10,000 followers between Instagram and Facebook but my reach is between 500k-1million a month with engagement at about 50% of that. The relationship with my following is authentic and as a result my work is highly supported. As I launch more monetization efforts, I will already have buy in from this engaged following. The people who follow my account on the various platforms want to be part of making a change in the animal welfare space and the work I do is entirely based on that notion.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
For both my current efforts, Lovage Inc. and Dallas Love Bugs, reputation is about consistency, social proof, and transparency. Reputation can be manufactured with clever PR but that eventually wears holes and falls apart if you aren’t truly living the story. Moving within spaces of passion and purpose while being honest sustains trust.
Contact Info:
- Website: lovageinc.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/dallaslovebugs
- Facebook: facebook.com/stephaniemcasey
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/stephaniemcasey
- Other: tiktok.com/@dallaslovebugs linktr.ee/dallaslovebugs
Image Credits
none needed