Content marketing is a tough game, so when we have a big win, we want to share it—and help you win the same way. That’s why we love to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we tackle creative challenges, strategize for our clients, and make content marketing that gets real results. Today, we’re diving into our collaboration with Happy Money to break down how we increased their social engagement by 77% (and how you can use the same tactics).

The Happy Money Challenge: Engage Millennials

Happy Money is a personal loan company dedicated to empowering individuals to take control of their finances. To increase brand awareness and better engage their Miillennial audience, the team asked us to help revamp their social presence—particularly Instagram. 

Knowing that it is increasingly harder to stand out on social, we took a strategic approach to capture their audience’s attention. Here’s a step-by-step look at how we built a stronger social presence—one post at a time. 

Step 1: Clarify your audience’s drivers. 

We began by analyzing Happy Money’s target audience: Millennials seeking financial freedom. Millennials are savvy and busy, and financial stressors are ever-present, particularly in the current economic climate. 

To successfully engage them, we knew we needed to create high-value snackable content that they could quickly and easily consume. We also knew we had a huge opportunity to make Happy Money visually stand out, as most traditional financial content is stiff, dry, and dull. 

Ultimately, our goal was to create a feed that would not only educate but also entertain and captivate this audience. 

Tip: Start by analyzing your audience’s drivers. What are their pain points? What are their desires? How can your content alleviate or enhance their lives? Use our free guide to create personas if you haven’t identified and segmented your audience yet. 

Step 2: Build a strategy around your story pillars. 

Brands often struggle to put out good social content because they conflate quantity with quality. But if your overall content isn’t telling a cohesive story, you will not be able to effectively connect with your audience. 

Happy Money’s mission is to provide affordable, accessible financial tools and services that empower people to use money as a tool for their happiness. To bring this concept to life through social, we built their content strategy around three key brand story pillars: financial education, wellness, and mental health. 

This allowed us to brainstorm a variety of content, including:

• Expert tips to help Millennials better manage their finances. 
• Financial trends to educate.
• Real-life user stories to create community.
• Humorous content (e.g., “If Your CC Could Text) to entertain and create moments of joy.

Best of all, this approach ensured that every post was unique, but as a whole, their social feed reinforced the larger Happy Money story. 

Tip: Build out your brand messaging framework, including tagline, value prop, and story pillars, to ensure you have consistent messaging across your content. If you’re feeling creatively stuck, you can also use our content brainstorm template to come up with 30 on-brand content ideas in less than an hour.

Step 3: Create a scroll-stopping visual language. 

To make Happy Money stand out in their audience’s feeds (and, again, stand out from the competition), we infused their existing visual language with a fresh and youthful aesthetic.

Through bright colors, playful illustrations, and fun typography, we made their content instantly recognizable online, creating a gorgeous, cohesive feed. 

Tip: Consistent visual elements help build brand recognition, so it’s important to adhere to your brand’s style guide when you create visual content. Additionally, it’s always helpful to do a competitor content audit to see how your competitors are presenting themselves on social. This can give you great inspiration for ways to stand out in your field. 

Step 4: Experiment with different formats. 

Trying new things can be a bit scary, especially if you’re in a creative rut. Happy Money was accustomed to creating static content, but we encouraged them to experiment with more motion (specifically via animated GIFS). This was a smart tactic to create more eye-catching content and create a more dynamic feed. 

Tip: From animated GIFs, to microcontent, to video, there are all sorts of ways you can incorporate different formats into your content. Experiment with these content trends to create a healthier content mix.

Step 5: Optimize your production. 

One of the biggest challenges in social is creating a steady stream of content. To streamline production and maintain consistency between our team and Happy Money, we developed a monthly editorial calendar. This allowed us to batch content, work ahead of time, and create a steady flow of posts without compromising on quality (or falling off the algorithm). 

Tip: Create templates for recurring content types to ensure consistency and streamline content creation. You can also try our tips to optimize your content creation process at every stage. 

Step 6: Maximize content across platforms. 

As previously mentioned, content takes a lot of work to produce, so you want to make the most of everything you create. Although our strategy was primarily focused on Instagram, they also cross-posted content on Facebook to reach a broader audience and ensure consistency across platforms.

Tip: Consider adopting a divisible content strategy, which helps you break one piece of content into many smaller pieces for more cross-promotion. 

Fortunately, these efforts paid off in major ways. By blending high-value content with eye-catching visuals, we attracted more attention to Happy Money’s social accounts and, most importantly, increased engagement.

In the first month alone, we saw:

• 96% growth in IG impressions
• 6.9 million impressions on Facebook
• 19% increase in Twitter engagements

Sice then, we’ve seen even more success, including: 

• 77% increase in Facebook engagement
• 52% increase in Instagram engagement

Most importantly, our partnership with Happy Money has provided more than just a temporary boost in engagement. They now have the vision and tools needed to grow their social channels and audience long-term. 

 “Our partnership with C5 was the first time Happy Money was open to outside help with our organic social content strategy and design. They felt like an extension of our team. New content themes, repeatable segments, and aligned strategy with our PR and paid social teams meant we could all work as a united front. It was a joy to work with them.”
—David Garvin (Happy Money Creative Director)

How to Strengthen Your Social Media 

Whether you’re selling financial empowerment tools or organic skincare, if you want to be successful on social media, you need a strategy that speaks to your audience. 

• Choose the right social platforms for your goals. Note: It’s better to master one or two channels than spread yourself too thin across all of them. See our guide to figure out which platforms you should be on. 
• Show people behind the scenes. In addition to your core content, peel back the curtain and experiment with culture marketing on social media. The more your audience can see the people behind the brand, the more they’ll feel connected to you. 
• Monitor and measure. Find out which social metrics you should track to get the best insight into your success.

And if you need a fresh pair of eyes on your strategy—or an expert team to take content creation of your hands—we’d be happy to chat. Take a look at how we’ve helped more clients revamp their social presence, or reach out. We’d love to get you the likes and lifelong followers you deserve.