Social Media and Growth: What Can the Brand “Frank Body” Teach You?

Nowadays, social media marketing is a staple for every brand, every marketing plan, and every niche. There are no brands – or next to none – that don’t have social media profiles, and the consumers that trust a brand with no social media exposure are non-existent.

However, is there real value in a social media marketing tactic? Just take a look at the chart below:

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The first thing for which marketers use social media is to boost the brand’s exposure and recognition. And no industry knows how to play the social media game right and get that promised exposure better than the beauty industry.

Here’s where Frank Body’s immaculate social media strategy comes into play!

What Is That Brand?

Before I begin telling you about all of the things you need to copy from Frank Body’s strategy, I’ll have to let you in on what that brand is.

Frank Body was founded in 2015 in Australia by three women that had proven their entrepreneurial spirit right after their graduation in 2013 by starting a profiling website as a project that turned into a copywriting and editorial agency.

The brand’s tone of voice has got a name. The name is Frank, and he’s as real as the buyer personas and, by extension, actual buyers he’s “speaking” to.

What made this brand so different was how they handled all steps of the way: From being involved through all the stages of their social media strategy to creating a cheeky persona and from trying out proven methods to going above and beyond expectation on all types of digital marketing.

Pro Tip: This post by Diggity Marketing will clarify those types of digital marketing for you.

After all, creating body, hair, lip, and face scrubs from leftover coffee grounds can sound a bit outrageous. One needed a very developed skillset to make this work.

That being said, the founders were in the right place at the right time, as in 2015, more and more people were aware that coffee is a natural cosmetic, but the brands that used ground coffee to create cosmetics were next to zero.

Therefore, the brand’s founders saw the gap in the business, took the leap of faith and began creating one of the cheekiest and most fun beauty brands.

The founders funded the project as a whole and managed to make $20.000.000 out of their original $5.000 budget.

All because they utilized social media marketing and grew because of it.

Step One: They Listened to Their Potential Audience

The idea for Frank Body began when customers of the coffee shop Steve Rowley – now the business partner of the brand – owned, began asking for leftover coffee grounds to use to exfoliate.

This demand could be considered strange. However, it pinpointed something the market didn’t have at that point, which, in Frank Body’s case, was a natural exfoliating product.

Social media marketing and social media growth are all about capturing the audience’s intent and using it to create a product that will answer their demands.

And if a brand doesn’t listen to their audience, they won’t be able to deliver.

So, begin by monitoring the conversations and keywords in your niche. Use said keywords and conversations as your advantage.

If, for example, you intend to start an eCommerce business, make sure to monitor all the appropriate keywords – and yes, long-tail keywords are something you need.

By engaging in social media monitoring and social listening, you will manage to see everything your competitors lack in your niche and take a good look at what your prospects need. Maybe the product is not the problem; maybe your competitors need a better customer experience strategy.

Use the information to your advantage, monitor your prospects’ conversations, and then market the feature that makes you stand out.

Step Two: They Collaborated With Instagram Influencers

Collaborating with Instagram influencers is not a new social media growth strategy. However, it’s one of the most fruitful ones.

Frank Body focused on content that couldn’t be found anywhere else, right off the bat, sending samples to Instagram influencers and creating brand awareness through its cheeky brand tone that could be carried through their Instagram influencer marketing plan.

But there was a twist that you should utilize for your brand as well: “Frank” didn’t chat with influencers that had a huge social media following. Instead, the brand focused on micro-influencers that were located mainly in its native Australia.

Focusing on micro-influencers allows brands to raise brand awareness by targeting their small but substantially loyal audience. 

Ensure that the point where you differ from your competitors, whether it’s a product, a service, or even a different approach to your customer experience, is what your influencer marketing strategy revolves around.

Another great tactic that Frank Body used was pinpointing the need to get feedback from said influencers. Create content that will be linking back to your brand but won’t look like an ad. 

Influencer posts that aim to advertise and not showcase the product or service are everywhere. Create something that will make your brand stand out and will resonate with both the influencer’s audience and the influencer’s aesthetic at the same time. This will boost engagement, social media shares, and brand awareness, making you go viral.

All in all, there is some real benefit in working with local micro-influencers and not using up your resources on sending products and booking deals with mega-influencers when you need to aim for social media growth. The audiences are narrow, loyal, and following said influencers for a reason.

Your brand needs to find the point where that reason and your product or service can work together and create a real-life experience.

Finally, the brand went forth with one of my absolute favourite marketing tactics and won the social media growth game:

They combined influencer marketing with User Generated Content.

Step Three: They Based Their Strategy on User Generated Content

When a brand starts with $5,000 as its budget, it’s safe to say that it’s not exactly keen on wasting resources.

If you’re facing the same “issue” – in quotes because this is not a real issue if one knows how to handle it – User Generated Content (UGC) will prove to be a real treat.

Create a unique hashtag and encourage your audience to use it while sharing relevant content or content created around your product.

For Frank Body, this hashtag was #thefrankeffect, and if you log onto Instagram and click on it, you’ll see plenty of pictures of people using Frank Body’s products and stating how good they are.

Encouraging people to share their opinion on your products or services can boost your popularity, the posts’ engagement, and the trust between your brand and the prospects/customers.

Frank Body’s encouraged people to upload a picture with their branded hashtag and “Frank” makes sure to like and share most photos that feature it, and not those of Instagram influencers.

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That way, the brand took advantage of word-of-mouth marketing and went viral using UGC as a source of both content and social proof.

Turning your customers into brand ambassadors can not only increase engagement and make a brand’s content go viral.

The important thing about this tactic is that you can encourage your existing customers to talk about your brand by supporting you with content that their friends and loved ones will see. 

This tactic will give you more followers who will be interested in your product. Since you’ve turned your loyal customers into brand ambassadors, it will boost one of the most important metrics: customer lifetime value.

Step Four: They Were Unique

Frank’s persona came when the beauty industry was all for promoting a dull, polished image of beautiful models and influencers. This can get a brand a lot of fame, of course, but it can get old very quickly.

At that stage, beauty brands failed to understand that content on social media needs to be relatable to catch on.

Enter: Frank, the persona that communicates the brand’s tone of voice to the customers. Frank is relatable, uses language that then-marketers would characterize as a little too cheeky, and calls the prospects and the fans of the brand “babes”. More importantly, through fantastic copy and very characteristic imagery – all those creamy and pinkish hues work like a charm – Frank represents all body types, skin types, genders with zero polishing.

Build your brand’s tone, visuals, copy, and everything in-between, having this principle in mind: your brand needs to penetrate its niche by being relatable. 

It’s one thing to be great at something and urging your audience to do the same by simply using your product and being themselves. If your brand’s tone is not relatable, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle to gain engagement and exposure.

Frank made sure to create a supportive community by promoting a product that met a real-life need in a language that the prospects and customers could understand.

Like Frank, refrain from being too technical or too serious if your product is not something that can support that kind of language.

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Before Frank, the skincare industry’s language was all about this acid and that ingredient, and full of terms that were too technical.

In the end, consumers couldn’t relate or even understand the terminology. It was only logical that they were looking for a brand that could support a lighthearted tone, one like the one presented in the picture above.

Creating a brand your prospects can relate with, can only happen when you study your audience carefully, and when you create customer personas that can correspond with said audience.

Be vigilant, study your data, invest in some AI technology to create micro-segments, and make actionable, informed decisions.

Make sure to incorporate the key takeaways of your studies into your brand’s tone and overall marketing plan. 

Your findings will shape your “personality”, your communication pillars, and the way you present your brand on social media.

The Takeaway

Frank Body is a brand that managed to grow out of nothing and created a simple product that turned out to be exactly what the audience needed, especially after years of tiring commercials and social media ads that talked corporate and technical.

Whatever you do, when it comes to social media growth, there are some key things to remember: listen to your audience, show that you care about them, encourage them to interact with you and, finally, be authentic and relatable.

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