Content strategy: IVY STUDIOS

Executive Summary:

Client: IVY Studios — a South London design studio working across commercial interiors, branding, and community-rooted spatial projects.

My Role: End-to-end social media: audit, positioning, content system design, video-led production, platform optimisation, and tracking.

The Brief: Kickstart B2B organic content marketing - brand building and conversions using minimal in-house resources.

Key Results (Phase 1)

• 5,302 accounts reached on Instagram over 9 months of posting.

• 33,238 total video views generated through new AV-led content

• 13.94% engagement rate (by reach) — strong signal of content relevance

• 924 profile visits driven from organic Instagram content

• 518 website visitors with an average 5:01 session duration (high intent traffic)

• Established a repeatable content + KPI tracking system to guide growth

  
  

About IVY:

IVY Studios is a multidisciplinary creative studio based in South London, specialising in sustainable, equitable, and accessible design solutions for businesses and communities.

They offer interior design, graphics and branding services and host a co-working space within the studio. IVY has been headed by founder and director Teekall Mair-McFarlane since 2016.

The studio is firmly value-led and community-oriented. Teekall makes sure to be involved in local place-making initiatives, showing up where it matters to the local people.

Structurally, the studio is split between three intersecting revenue streams. The first are interior design clients for shopfronts and other commercial establishments like clinics. The second are graphics and branding projects. The last ones are the desks and mini private studios offered as co-working spaces.

The Brief:

Teekall found himself in a typical situation for high-value specialist services; IVY Studios had no budget to spend on ongoing marketing in the early years of opening shop. The website and social channels lay dormant, and new leads were found mainly through word-of-mouth recommendations.

While this was enough in the early years of business, as the company scaled up in terms of the number and total value of projects, finding work reliably became a challenge.

The Pain Point: 'Reliably' is the keyword here:

Teekall has exceptionally strong one-on-one connections, which ensure that when any work does come up, it gets passed to IVY Studios. However, at any given time, regardless of how big your network is. There are only so many people remodelling their office spaces or opening a new franchise.

Word-of-mouth works until it doesn't, and when the client pool found through personal connections dries up, we remind ourselves of the marketing machine we already have at our disposal - social media.

Social media feels 'free' because it happens on your phones, which you have already purchased. There is no more money upfront to simply open Instagram and post some pictures.

The Goal:

We needed to get digital marketing off the ground and turned into a reliable part of the revenue generation pipeline for the studio.

This means two things: lead generation and brand building. Both of these goals are not only distinct in themselves but also are realistically achievable only after some significant base-building work, where results won't be very visible.

Two key questions emerge:

1. Given the available resources, a one-person marketing team (me) in a founder-driven studio with about £300 to spend per month, was it possible to make a dent in our goals?

2. This gets even more complicated, knowing that the three revenue streams demand slightly different types of target audiences. The leads for each stream live on different platforms, use them for different things and are looking for different services. How can we integrate all these avenues into one tightly bound ship?

The Plan:

We divided the social media strategy into three distinct stages.

Stage 1 was the audit + planning + strategy phase. This entailed taking a bird's-eye look at the studio's business goals and making sure the digital marketing infrastructure, from the website to socials, is working in tandem, sending consistent messaging, and leading enquiries in the right direction. Stage 2 was about brand-building. This entailed posting consistent, brand-aligned content across channels and directing all funnel attention to one source. We began by increasing posting frequency, shifting focus from statics to video-based posts, and using Meta/LinkedIn in their own ways.

Stage 3 involved data crunching + optimising the message + revisiting the original content goals. Once the content machine was well-oiled and functioning consistently, it was now time to dig through the fresh data for insights. Ultimately, these insights were used to recommend a content plan and strategy for the next phase.

Before phase 2, there was not enough rich data to support any statistically valid or reliable claims: causal or descriptive. However, stage 3 presented us with cross-platform data so that we could trace the entire user journey from point of visibility to point of conversion (a rough idea, but still valuable).

The Outcomes:

Stage 1: Understanding the Brand + Creative Strategy

We started with the brand story: what makes IVY Studios unique and how it was born.

Next, we understood how different revenue streams intersected and how day-to-day operations at the studio worked.

Then, we understood how lead generation functioned so far, noting gaps and charting how social media can figure into the conversation within the given resources and capacities.

Finally, we took a look at the content posted so far - what to keep, what to avoid, and if something is missing entirely.

Accordingly, we came up with the following content pillars. These are actionable themes and are explicitly paired with core business goals:

Pillar	Description	Purpose
Place & Local Knowledge	IVY’s embeddedness in South London: physical sites, neighbourhoods, regeneration contexts, lived familiarity with place.	Root the brand in South London
Projects as Evidence	Specific, named projects framed as problems addressed, constraints navigated, and decisions made — not just visuals.	Show professional competence in practice
People, Values & Decisions	Founder-led and team-led storytelling about why choices are made: sustainability trade-offs, accessibility decisions, and client relationships.	Make values concrete through people
Continuity & Stewardship	Time-based narratives: years in a space, long-term clients, ongoing relationships, lessons learned.	Emphasise longevity and care
Promotions	Hard-sell ads for co-working and design consultations	Cash-flow

Generating attention, however, is not enough. Attention needs to be channelled in the correct direction by moulding the pathway a user takes when they encounter the brand online.

Accordingly, we came up with this basic attention funnel:

SEE US: Instagram & Facebook content (organic posts)

GET CURIOUS: Profile visits, follows, engagement

LEARN MORE: Website visits from social

CONSIDER: Time spent on the site, repeat visits

GET IN TOUCH: Email enquiries, bookings, conversations.

To be able to measure if the funnel is working as intended, we defined the Key Performance Indicators:

• No Simple Averages: an average no. of likes, reach, or engagement per post or per day really tells us very little about how well the content and funnel are performing.

  
  

  This is mainly because, while the ideal scenario is regular posting, small accounts often have uneven spikes in activity, with some weeks with a lot of posting and others with almost none. Using only simple averages risks ignoring how the underlying distribution is skewed.

• Medians and Rolling Averages: This is why we use the median as a measure to see the value in the middle position, rather than jamming all the peaks and valleys into one block and dividing them into equal parts. Additionally, we can chart how the means change across time by using a week-on-week and month-on-month rolling average.

• Relativise: Absolute figures without any frame of comparison also do not tell us enough. This is why we use ratios of metrics rather than sole figures like 'likes' by themselves. For instance, we track the ratio between reach and views to measure the average number of times each unique user has seen our content. If the ratio is >1, that indicates repeat interest; if it hovers around 1, that indicates a normal performance.

  
  

Stage 2: Funnel Results

SEE US: Total Instagram reach: 5,302. Profile visits: 924. That’s 17.4%. This means that nearly 1 in 6 people who saw IVY’s content were interested enough to click through and look at the profile. Typical organic growth. On Instagram is usually only around 5%, which is only 1 in 20 for most accounts.

GET CURIOUS: Profile visits: 924. Website visitors: 518. That’s 56% of profile visits that convert to website sessions over the year. More than half of the people who checked out the profile went on to the website to

learn more.

LEARN MORE: The redesigned, front-page-led website supported in-depth evaluation, evidenced by 518 unique visitors from Instagram, 727 sessions, and an average session duration of 5 minutes. Session duration is unusually long, which strongly signals that it’s working as designed. For a service-led studio, this is a strong signal of genuine consideration rather than casual browsing.

CONSIDER: Engagement rate on Instagram: 13.94%. This is the key metric to judge an account’s health, and it strongly suggests that we are successfully engaging our niche audience base. The content invites recognition rather than just passive scrolling. For most platforms, anything above ~5–7% is considered strong.

GET IN TOUCH: The current Call-to-Action (CTA) is linked with the Calendly booking service. While Calendly gives a professional look, it may involve many extra steps, which may feel impersonal. However, anecdotal evidence from the client tells us that users are indeed using the Calendly link.

Stage 3: Optimising and Iterating

Looking at the best performing content on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, there are clear trends that emerge (See deck above for full content analysis):

Across all platforms, content that does well:

(a) gives a reason for users to engage, (eg: to congratulate on an achievement, new project, etc.)

(b) has clear professional relevance (e.g. projects before/after)

(c) is better produced (i.e. indicates professional production) and

(d) highlights IVY’s USPs - a sense of familiarity (local), socially conscious (value-driven), and quality design (professional).

A few quick-hit insights emerge:

• The audience on Meta behaves a lot like audiences on LinkedIn, despite being composed of differing demographics.

  • Meta skews younger and more global / LinkedIn is senior and hyperlocal.

  • But both audiences like high production quality, project-based, and community-oriented content.

  
  

  This likely reflects how well offline connections have translated to online engagement. We know what the audience wants, and we're giving it to them - so far, so good.

• BUT where are the leads?

  
  

  Getting credible leads from an organic-only strategy for a niche B2B audience requires a lot more production muscle than we have. Consistent brand messaging which populates the feed and website - a mix of hi and lo-fi videos and text posts on LinkedIn as a supplement.

  
  

  The tempting option would be to abandon the Meta ship entirely and mutiny to the safe B2B hands of LinkedIn. But bewarned that every other business has had the same idea - the market is crowded. To stand out and reach beyond the networks you already have is a slow, slow, slow process.

  
  

  This comes down to platform mechanics. Growth on LinkedIn is gated and spreads through tightly controlled networks. Unlike Instagram, every follow and interaction is a strong signal of intent. We don't hate-follow people on LinkedIn (as far as I know). This means that audience filtering happens at a stage which is well beyond your control.

  
  

  Fighting against this control needs just about the same resources as a Meta strategy, with slower results. However, as we noted above, Instagram can indeed behave like a B2B platform if it is steered in the right direction with far less cost efficiency.

  
  

  Add Meta ads on top, and you get an efficiently targeted B2B Instagram strategy which aims at optimising the ratio between interest-indicators (profile visits, follows) and reach (unique views).

Learnings:

• The funnel is working, BUT

• The audience segments where our content is seen make a huge difference.

• High engagement rates and audience behaviour strongly suggest that social media is still functioning as a supplement to offline connections.

• While this is not bad in itself, the goals of social media are to return traceable value to the business, which is missing.

• While the strategy is multiplatform, each of the three services (interior, graphics, and co-working) needs a separate strategy in its own right, where platforms will be used for different purposes.

• How can we ensure these gaps are filled without costs skyrocketing and ultimately making social media a sinkhole for money?

Next Steps:

The results for stage 2 make it evident that if the goal is brand-building, then continuing to post using the set content pillars will pay off in the long term. With tighter posting discipline, this gap can be patched.

However, it is less clear that relying only on organic content will get us the scale and the kind of audiences we want to reach. It is simply not enough to get eyeballs; they have to be the kind which are more likely than not to become clients. This calls for ad spend. With ads, you get many more views into targeted audiences that are likely to be potential clients and make sure they get tracked (third-party cookie data permitting). While the recommended plan of action for IVY Studios expands in scope, the budget has remained largely the same. The goal for Stage 3, then, is to find a way to operationalise the results of this report and its recommendations without costs skyrocketing. Or, more realistically, limiting the budget explosion.