Let’s Steal Their Social Media Strategy Together 👇

Hailey Beiber, Kylie Jenner, all the “it girls” love the brand.

We aren’t talking Gucci, Louis, or Lamborghini. We’re not even talking about Lululemon or Alo. 

Today’s brand of focus was carefully crafted on the faux granite kitchen counter top of Lindsey Carter’s teeny tiny apartment in LA back in 2018.

Marketing Bestie, we’re talking about SET Active, their rise from $10’s of thousands in debt into a cliquey following that has ALL of their new drops selling out in minutes.

Today we’re stealing their social media strategy…

Back in 2018 Lindsey began working on SET Active out of her apartment kitchen with the goal to satisfy a need in her OWN life. She wanted to simplify the way she was getting dressed.

She wished there was a brand out there that she could wear into the office, but also versatile enough to be worn out for those midday errands, and even to that Soul Cycle class in the middle of lunch.

That’s when the idea for SET Active was born.

$20,000 in credit card debt later, Lindsey was ready to launch SET Active to the public. Leaning heavily on her following of ~7,000 on Instagram, Lindsey would document EVERY aspect of her journey building this business on her stories and feed.

Building in public as some may call it lol.

She then began to rely on her community to help shape the future of the brand. Opinions on colors, styles, cuts, Lindsey would ask her community their opinions on EVERYTHING. 

(She STILL does it to this day.)

This helped her quickly find product market fit and shape the brand into a no-brainer solution for people like herself. 

The only problem was finding people like Lindsey at scale. 

As a result of building in public, showing all the vulnerable sides of building a business and documenting the behind the scenes of product development, influencers in her community began to take notice.

DMs started to roll in from the few internet personalities that followed her, this was Lindsey’s first break.

She began sending free product to those content creators in exchange for a post and review on their socials. This was her initial move to introduce SET Active to a new set of consumers.

(Creators like Alix Earle are the prime example of who Lindsey sought to get her product in the hands of. 👇👇)

And it gave the brand enough juice to get off the ground.

But to truly hit scale, Lindsey couldn’t rely on her personal network and creating content herself. 

She was juggling 1,000 other tasks building this business and one of the first moves of delegation she made wasn’t in sales, accounting, or operations, but in social media.

Lindsey made the early decision to lean on the expertise of content creators to help build her brand presence on socials. 

Completely avoiding the route of working with influencers and paying them for a post (to this day SET Active has NEVER paid an influencer to promote their product), Lindsey looked to partner with an already established creator to build SET Active’s socials internally.

And it’s a playbook more brands need to look into following. The traditional recipe for social media has been hiring a do-it-all social media manager who creates all the content, manages the community, digests and reports the analytics, and works in a silo with no support or help.

The recipe that is working 10x better is getting more specific with roles and skills.

Not every social media manager is a great creator, some are excellent with campaign ideation and execution, others know the data inside and out.

So this leaves gaps on your social team. Even an A+ social media manager often isn’t an A+ content creator, and to win big on socials you NEED A+ players at both skills.

So SET Active hired a social media manager to handle all of the high level reporting, campaign strategy, and ensuring that the brand identity is cohesive on all socials. An extremely important role, but most brands know to hire for that position already. 

It’s what SET Active did next that separated them from the pack.

They put out a job posting for a channel-specific content creator.

A TikTok Content Producer, this was a role for someone to exclusively focus on scaling SET Active’s TikTok presence.

The salary was $80,000-$90,000/yr and they hired a content creator named Sam who had ALREADY built a massive following of 1M+ of his own.

Immediately Sam came in and started crushing for the brand.

Before hiring him, SET Active had virtually no following and 5k views on a product video would’ve been a HUGE win for them.

But once Sam started in December of 2023, the account grew like a weed, up to 100k+ followers by June, and videos frequently went viral.

Talking head videos, showing the products, telling behind the scenes stories of the brand, Sam gave everyone a sneak peek into the it-brand. 

The content was relevant to the brand and products they were selling, they just leaned slightly more into the entertainment and relatability side of things which got the virality rolling.

SET Active is now widely regarded as the poster child of the consumer brand world thanks to the silent dance between their TOP TIER product and social media playbook.

It’s not just enough to have a killer product, you need killer execution on the Marketing front to get that product in customer’s hands.

You also get what you pay for when it comes to hiring content creators or working with influencers. Sam is a higher caliber creator, one that requires you to pay $7k+/month, to think you can get away with paying a creator $2-3k/month for a batch of videos and get similar results as SET Active is delusional.

(Sam is now no longer with SET Active, but in the beginning of June they posted that they’re looking for someone new to take on the role with a salary up to $80,000. They’re rinse and repeating their own proven playbook.)

If you want that level of success, you need someone with that level of expertise to come in, nurture that community, build your brand in a positive light, GET TONS OF VIEWS, and reach the right people.

AND you still need a social media manager to keep it all in check. 

Find that person who can run the show, oversee strategy, and find the creative person who knows how to build community on socials, and pair the two together.

Like Bonnie and Clyde that dynamic duo will take you FAR.