On July 1st 2015, one year ago today, I started working with Olivier Primeau as his digital marketing consultant. We met when my website Canada Nightlife interviewed him about his recent purchase of Beachclub.

After the interview, I stuck around for a few minutes and we discussed how he was using social media to promote the business he had just acquired. After discussing for no more than 30 minutes he hired me and I started working on the project immediately.

The strategy I suggested we implement was to take Olivier Primeau and make him the face of the brand in the eyes of the public. The idea is that the owner of the venue would be the voice that would communicate Beachclub’s narrative via various social media platforms; Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.

Social media is about telling a story and it’s so much easier to tell a humans story than to tell a brands story. By making Olivier the face of Beachclub, his story becomes Beachclub’s story. This allows another human to do Beachclub’s storytelling.

The first thing we did was activate a public figure Facebook page under his own name “Olivier Primeau”. This public figure page was going to be used to tell his story, build his brand, and cultivate a community of fans who are interested in following his adventures. As we started publishing content to his page we saw instant success. His page rapidly grew from 0 to 10 000 fans within the first month.

A year has gone by since we started his Facebook page, making it the perfect moment to share a few key metrics about the success we’ve had with our social media strategy:

• 147 781 103 impressions delivered between July 2015 – July 2016 
• 31 694 845 cumulative impressions delivered over the previous 28 days as of June 2016
• 15 104 800 video views between July 2015 – July 2016 
• 65 000 fans as of July 2016

*these numbers were taken from Facebook Insights on July 1st 2016*

What is an impression? 

Impressions are the number of times a post from your Page is displayed, whether the post is clicked or not. People may see multiple impressions of the same post. For example, someone might see a Page update in News Feed once, and then a second time if their friend shares it.

The impressions delivered by Olivier Primeau’s Facebook page between July 2015 – July 2016

Consumers are now in control of what they view, what they share, and how they view (on what screen). There has been a major shift in terms of the relationship between consumers and marketers.

From a marketer’s perspective, this means that we’re moving towards a pull versus push approach, also referred to as inbound marketing. We can no longer push our marketing messages across, we need to pull customers in with engaging, useful content that tells a compelling story.

One of the best ways we can take advantage of this trends is by combining content, with storytelling and the power of social media. Stories are the way that humans make sense of the world.

With the growth of social media, a storytelling approach to building a brand is critical. We know that stories are inherently social and social media is about making connections.

In my opinion, every great brand has someone that consumers can relate to. Apple has Steve Jobs, Tesla has Elon Musk, Cirque du Soleil has Guy Laliberté and the list goes on. In our case we picked Olivier Primeau for the opportunity.