Your Instagram Isn’t Your Marketing Strategy
How we grew The Designory to an audience of almost 400,000 — and why posting was only one tiny part of it
There’s a version of small business marketing that goes something like this:
Start a business. Open Instagram. Post regularly. Cross fingers.
Maybe make a Reel because someone told you Reels are important. Then a carousel because apparently carousels are back. Then panic slightly because the Reel got 317 views and wonder whether the algorithm personally dislikes you.
I get it. Social media is visible, immediate and relatively easy to measure, so it can very quickly become the thing we call “marketing”.
But Instagram is not your marketing strategy. It’s a channel. A very useful one, absolutely. But still just one place where your strategy happens to show up. I learned this very clearly through The Designory.
The Designory didn't actually begin as The Designory
When I first started working with the business, one of my main jobs was to create and establish The Designory as a distinct brand.
At the time, there was already The Design Hunter, which had grown across retail and design. The problem was that the different parts of the business needed clearer identities.
The Design Hunter remained the retail store. The design work became The Designory.
That separation sounds simple when you write it in two sentences years later, but strategically it was a really important move. It allowed us to become much clearer about who each brand was for, what each one represented and how we wanted people to engage with them. The Designory then grew into a significant design brand and online platform, eventually building a social audience of close to 400,000 people.
And yes, we posted on Instagram. A lot. But Instagram wasn't the thing that built the brand. The strategy around it did.
One of the biggest growth drivers was collaboration
From very early on, working collaboratively with other brands was central to what we were building. It is still one of the first conversations I have with new businesses today.
I ask: What do you have that another aligned business doesn't?
And: What do they have that you don't?
Because somewhere in between those two answers is often a marketing opportunity.
Maybe you have expertise and they have an audience.
Maybe you have the audience and they have a beautiful product.
Maybe you have a physical space and they need somewhere to create content.
Maybe you have incredible imagery and they have distribution.
Maybe you have trust within one industry and they have trust within another closely aligned one.
When the customer overlap makes sense, collaboration allows both businesses to create something better than either could have created alone. And crucially, it allows you to grow without constantly paying to introduce yourself to completely cold audiences.
This room was built with brands each showcasing their products within the space, they all shared, used the room in their marketing campaigns and this home became iconic.
Borrowed audiences are incredibly powerful
Small businesses often think growth means finding more strangers. Sometimes it does. But there is another way.
Find businesses that already have the attention of the people you want to reach. Not competitors. Aligned brands.
If you're an interior designer, that might be an architect, furniture brand, stone supplier, builder, artist, photographer or accommodation property.
If you're a wellness practitioner, it could be a complementary practitioner, retreat, skincare company, gym, studio or hospitality business.
If you're a florist, it might be venues, wedding planners, photographers, stylists, caterers or fashion brands.
The question isn't: “Who has lots of followers?”
The question is: “Who already has trust with the kind of person I want to reach?”
That's considerably more useful: A brand with 5,000 highly aligned customers can be far more valuable than one with 200,000 followers who couldn't care less about what you sell.
Collaboration doesn't mean begging for a shout-out
This is another place businesses get stuck.
A collaboration isn't:
“Hi! Love your page. Would you mind sharing my business with your audience?”
There isn't much in that for them.
A good partnership starts with creating value on both sides.
What could you produce together?
A guide.
An event.
A photoshoot.
A competition.
A workshop.
A product edit.
A case study.
A podcast conversation.
A newsletter feature.
An interview.
A collaborative article.
A styled shoot.
An educational series.
A bundled offer.
A physical activation.
Something that makes both audiences think:
“That makes complete sense.”
That was always a big part of The Designory's growth. We were not simply creating content about ourselves. We were creating a wider ecosystem around design, homes, products, suppliers and people. And when you do that well, other businesses have a reason to participate in the growth of your platform.
That is very different from you sitting alone in your office trying to think of another Instagram post.
Your marketing should create an ecosystem, not a feed
This is the bigger point.
If your entire marketing plan can be summarised as:
“We post three times a week.”
You don't really have a marketing plan yet. You have a content schedule.
A marketing ecosystem should answer questions like:
How are people discovering us?
What happens when they do?
Where do we send them?
How do we build trust?
How do we stay in contact?
How do we turn attention into enquiry?
What makes them return?
What makes somebody recommend us?
Where does collaboration fit?
What do we own if Instagram disappears tomorrow?
Social media is one part of that. It should be feeding something else.
Don't build your entire business on rented land
Instagram owns Instagram. LinkedIn owns LinkedIn. TikTok owns TikTok.
You do not own your followers on any of them.
Algorithms change. Reach changes. Features disappear. Accounts get restricted. Platforms fall in and out of favour. You should absolutely use them. But ideally, you're also turning some of that attention into things you control.
Your website.
Your email database.
Your customer relationships.
Your search visibility.
Your intellectual property.
Your reputation.
Your partnerships.
Your community.
This is why I get slightly twitchy when a business has 30,000 Instagram followers and no meaningful email list.
You have already done the hard part. People are interested. Now give them somewhere else to stay.
Your website should be doing much more than proving you exist
Social media is very good at discovery. Your website is where somebody should be able to understand the business properly.
What do you do?
Who is it for?
Why are you different?
What does it cost or what does the process look like?
What proof do you have?
What should they do next?
This is another reason I look at brand, website and marketing together.
If your Instagram is generating attention but the website is confusing, you've built a very efficient system for sending people somewhere they can get lost. Which is not ideal.
Your customer journey needs to continue.
A great Reel might introduce them to you.
A blog article might answer the question they've been Googling.
Your About page might build trust.
Create content that lives longer than 24 hours
I love social media. Obviously. I've spent a rather large portion of my career thinking about it.
But one of its limitations is that content can have an incredibly short life. You can spend hours creating something brilliant and two days later it has essentially disappeared underneath a video of somebody's dog stealing toast.
This is why businesses need evergreen content too.
Blogs are a perfect example.
If I write an Instagram caption answering: “Should I use Squarespace or Shopify?” it might perform really well that week.
If I write a properly optimised article answering “Squarespace vs Shopify for Australian small businesses”, it has the potential to bring people to my website repeatedly through search. Same expertise. Different lifespan. The smartest approach is usually to create one strong piece of thinking and then distribute it across multiple channels.
That article can become:
A carousel.
A Reel.
A LinkedIn post.
An email.
Several Stories.
Pinterest content.
A conversation topic.
Suddenly we're not scrambling for five ideas. We're extracting more value from one good one.
Give people a reason to come back
One of the reasons The Designory built such a strong community was that people weren't only being shown completed projects.
There was always something else to engage with.
Products. Ideas. Design knowledge. Suppliers. Homes. Advice. Stories. People.
That is something I encourage businesses to think about now. What can you become useful for, beyond simply promoting your service?
A building designer might become known for explaining the parts of building a home nobody understands.
A florist might become the account people follow for incredible event transformations and behind-the-scenes installation.
A consultant might become known for making complicated business problems easy to understand.
A furniture company might become genuinely useful around material selection, room planning or care.
The stronger the reason to follow you when somebody isn't currently buying, the larger the pool of people who already trust you when they eventually are.
Stop measuring everything by likes
Remember when one of the Block contestants copied this room? It blew up on social media… but it didn’t get us any more clients, it just got us more fans (which is great! but a business can’t be built on fans alone).
This is probably one of the most dangerous things about making social media your entire marketing strategy. The platform gives you numbers.
So you start optimising for the numbers it gives you.
Likes. Views. Followers. Shares. All useful.
But none of them are necessarily the business outcome.
I would much rather have a piece of content receive 40 likes and generate two excellent enquiries than get 4,000 likes from people who will never buy anything.
Look further down the customer journey.
Are people visiting the website?
Are they staying there?
Are email subscribers increasing?
Are enquiries improving?
Are the right people enquiring?
Are people mentioning your content when they contact you?
Are partnerships appearing?
Is organic search traffic growing?
Is the business becoming known for something?
Marketing should eventually create commercial momentum, not just engagement.
Use other people's expertise too
You do not need to personally be the expert on absolutely everything your audience cares about.
In fact, please don't try. Some of the strongest content comes from bringing other people into your platform.
Interview them. Ask them questions. Invite them to contribute. Feature their work. Build guides together.
This does two things.
It makes your content more useful because you're introducing expertise outside your own. And it creates natural distribution because the person or brand you've featured has a reason to share it too. Again, collaboration.
It keeps appearing because it works.
Don't underestimate PR just because you have Instagram
There was a strange moment where small businesses seemed to collectively decide traditional media was dead because we could all become our own publishers.
We can.
That doesn't mean third-party credibility stopped mattering. Being featured by an established publication, podcast, newsletter, website or industry platform still carries a completely different kind of trust from saying nice things about yourself on Instagram.
Think about where your ideal customer already consumes information.
What Australian publications do they read?
Which newsletters arrive in their inbox?
Which podcasts do they listen to?
Which local media matters?
Which industry websites?
Which directories?
Who could legitimately be interested in your expertise, story, data, product or point of view?
PR, SEO, social media and collaboration are not competing strategies.
They reinforce each other.
Build relationships before you need something
This is probably one of the least glamorous pieces of marketing advice I can give you.
Be a useful person. Support other businesses. Share things because they're good. Introduce people. Recommend suppliers. Comment thoughtfully. Send the email saying you loved something without attaching a proposal for what they can do for you.
Relationships compound. Some of the best commercial opportunities I've seen emerge from relationships that were built long before anyone knew exactly what they would become useful for. Not every conversation needs a funnel.
Sometimes you can just know people. Wild, I know.
Think about what you can trade besides money
This is especially useful for newer businesses that don't have enormous marketing budgets.
You may not have money.
But perhaps you have:
An audience.
A location.
A skill.
A mailing list.
Photography.
Video.
Design expertise.
Product.
Time.
Access.
A network.
Knowledge.
Ask what value you have that another business might genuinely need.
Then look for an aligned business holding something valuable that you don't have.
That's where some of the most interesting collaborations begin.
Make your customer journey embarrassingly obvious
Marketing can be clever. Your customer journey should not be.
If somebody discovers you, what do you want them to do next?
Follow? Read? Download? Subscribe? Book? Enquire? Buy? Tell them.
I see businesses create beautiful content and then simply… stop.
No link. No invitation. No next step. No reason for the customer to move.
Every single post does not need to scream BUY NOW, obviously. But across your marketing, there should be clear pathways from awareness to trust to action. People cannot follow a path that doesn't exist.
Repeat yourself more than feels comfortable
Business owners get bored of their messaging significantly faster than customers do. You have heard your elevator pitch 300 times. They have heard it once. You have seen your brand story every day for four years. They followed you on Tuesday.
This is something I remind myself of constantly. And again, I work with a designer who gets bored in approximately two seconds, so I have considerable real-world practice here. You do not need a completely new marketing message every week.
The goal is to become known for something.
That requires repetition.
Find different ways to tell the same important story.
So what actually grows a brand?
There isn't one trick. Annoying, I know.
The Designory did not become a large platform because somebody discovered the perfect posting frequency.
It grew because the brand itself became bigger than the feed.
We created a distinct identity.
We knew the world we wanted to operate in.
We built strong relationships with aligned businesses.
We collaborated.
We created useful and aspirational content.
We shared other people's stories as well as our own.
We used the audience to create opportunities, and the opportunities helped grow the audience.
Everything fed everything else. That is what I mean when I talk about marketing as an ecosystem.
Instagram was part of it. An incredibly important part. But it wasn't the strategy.
If your marketing currently feels like “posting on social media”, zoom out
Ask yourself:
Where are customers finding me?
What am I doing to build trust once they do?
What useful content do I own?
Where am I capturing my audience?
Which brands already speak to the customer I want?
Who could I collaborate with?
What do I have that they might value?
What do they have that would be valuable to me?
Where does my website sit within all of this?
And if Instagram disappeared tomorrow, what would be left? That last question can be slightly terrifying. But it's useful. Because the strongest brands are not built on one platform.
They build enough relationships, content, reputation, search visibility, direct audience and brand recognition that individual platforms become tools rather than lifelines.
And that is a much stronger place to build a business from.
FEEL LIKE YOU'RE DOING LOTS OF MARKETING WITHOUT IT REALLY CONNECTING?
This is one of the things I work through with businesses all the time.
At Cat Gerke Creative, I work across brand, websites, marketing, content and social media because those things rarely exist as separate problems.
Sometimes you don't need to post more.
You need to work out where the customer is coming from, where you want them to go, what's stopping them getting there and which parts of your marketing could be working much harder together.