Growing an Engaged Audience of 600,000 on Social Media with Sophie Miller, Pretty Little Marketer (From Marketingland 2025) | Ep. 370

0:25What is up and welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. Daniel here. And today's episode is straight from Brandland track at Marketland Festival 2025. And you are about to hear someone who lives and breathes real community building. She might be referring to slides in this talk, but if you want to see the slides, you can go into Marketland community to get them. But today we have Sophie Miller, founder of Pretty Little Marketer and the creator behind a 600K strong audience across Instagram and LinkedIn. In this session, Sophie breaks down how she grew from zero to 600K organically, why followers aren't a vanity metric when you treat them right, the science behind shareability and visibility, how to reverse engineer content for discovery, and why social SEO is becoming one of the most underrated growth levers in 2025 and beyond.

1:27Sophie is one of my favorite creators out there and this episode is packed with some tactical ways to grow your brand or your personal brand this year or next year. Let's get into this episode today. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up.

2:10Sophie Miller:Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Brandland track for Marketingland Festival. I am so thrilled and excited to be joining you this year and today to share a little bit about my story. I am in London. I live in London. I have lived here for seven months. I moved here from the English countryside. And whilst the smog is a challenge, I'm absolutely loving being here in this city. And I say that because I would love to know where you guys are tuning in from. I know that Marketing Millennials have the hugest, the most impressive audience. And I imagine we have marketers and people in brand from every corner of the globe.

2:49Sophie Miller:So I would love to get to know you a little bit more while you get to know me a little bit more today as well. I've been very kindly invited to share my story, building an audience of 600 ,000 across social media organically. If we haven't had the joy of meeting on the internet just yet, my name is Sophie. I am 28 years old. I live in London, England, and I am a full-time creator. I'm the founder of online community resource and marketing platform Pretty Little Marketer, which spans 600 ,000 followers across two platforms. We're on Instagram, we're on LinkedIn, and that LinkedIn is separated it into two accounts, Sophie as the personal brand and PLM as the business account.

3:41Sophie Miller:So we're kind of scattered. The numbers are segmented, but I will proudly pout and shout about our 600 ,000 large community, our audience of whom I love very, very much. But it wasn't always 600 ,000. it started at zero. Well, actually it was never zero. It was one because the second I started my business account, I ran to my personal account to follow it. And marketers, I know that you are with me when we post from our brand accounts, we are heading to our personal. We are liking, saving, commenting. I will very often send my posts to myself on my business account as well, just in case, just in case that helps the algorithm.

4:26Sophie Miller:But it was June 2020. So I want you to rewind in your brains five whole years. I started this half a decade ago. I was a second year university student here in England. And I had one year left until I was graduating. One year left until I was leaving school, leaving education and joining the big wide world of marketing. what should have been a really exciting moment of submitting my final assignment of the year oh my goodness it's summer I cried the second I hit the submit button I was overwhelmed and I was lost crap I graduate in a whole year and I have no idea what I want to do I have little experience I'd worked in an agency alongside my degree but it was an influencer marketing and I think I wanted to do socials or something more creative and well I don't know anyone.

5:24Sophie Miller:I'm a pandemic student so I'm home alone. All my studying has been virtual. I don't have a network. I don't know what to do. I remember heading to Google and researching everything under the sun. What do I put on my CV? How to get a job in marketing? Who's hiring? Graduate schemes in London, in the UK? A, the one question that tipped me over the edge, words not to use on your CV. Every single site, I must have clicked through at least the first four pages of Google, every single site says something different. What one recommended saying, another would recommend not saying. And then another site had words I'd never even heard of before.

6:07Sophie Miller:In that moment, I felt so alone and I felt like it was just me. now I'm a Gen Z baby although I've told you I'm 28 I land on zillennial half Gen Z half millennial but I very much consider myself the Gen Z pool and the internet solves my problems I head to Instagram opened up a new account at Pretty Little Marketer and I just started posting every single day I posted every day for the past year Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday and now the content was nothing special you can see from my slides on screen that I was and I still am no designer at the time it was just me Canva and a dream I was sharing my journey I was talking about the campaigns I thought were cool I was rounding up articles I was loving but what started with a hunt for a solution a community some help a desire to connect over something shared this overwhelm and this love for marketing and I want to listen and learn from the peers and the people further ahead than I followed with an audience of a thousand in one week 60 ,000 internet eyeballs across Instagram and LinkedIn only six months later and now half a decade in I threw myself my own birthday party my parents would tell you it's my only child syndrome but PLM my business turned five in June and I threw a birthday party and invited all of our brand partners our community and the peers and creators that I absolutely love and I had the best time reminiscing on half a decade of being a creator and connecting people in marketing for me it's all about culture of advocacy and never passive watching.

7:58Sophie Miller:I think that's one of the reasons why when I share my story and I speak of 600 ,000 followers, all of these big numbers, that's what I'm most proud of. They're not just 600 ,000 passive followers. We can assume that at least a quarter of them are inactive. If we say that the next quarter are double accounts because you follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram, the number gets smaller and increasingly less impressive. What I'm proud of is that these are followers, advocates, community members that are still here. Many, many, many of our most engaged audience members joined us in 2020, 2021, 2022, and have been with us for years, virtually or in person.

8:42Sophie Miller:I'm all about community. But I think that we get caught up in this follow hate. You don't need followers. You just need community. Oh, follow account, vanity metric. I do community. Community is my whole job. It consumes my life and my being. But I still want and I still need followers. You still need followers. Followers play an important role and I don't think they're a vanity metric when you treat them right. Your followers can become your community advocates. They might share your content, they might buy your products, but most importantly, they are the people that trust your recommendations.

9:29Sophie Miller:Your followers are your community, eventually. They are your amplifiers and marketers. We are business builders. They are your future customers. I think the magic happens after the follow button. Once someone follows you is when you can really begin to build your relationship. You can notch them. You can provide your value, build deeper trust. You can guide them towards your offers. but how do you get them there before you nurture anybody before you do the good stuff that I'm sure you're going to learn so much about through this festival you need to solve your visibility problem it's something that I see all the time through the brands I work with the brands I consult with but mostly in our community in our comment section oh goodness I am struggling to grow in our membership group chat.

10:25Sophie Miller:No one's seeing my content and I know that you feel it and I know that you feel the frustration pouring hours into a piece of content or slipping it through 10 rounds of approval by other stakeholders or fighting for a really great idea and nobody seeing him. My mission from the start has been to be discovered by the right people, totally audience-centric and that has come through visibility opportunities. I like to describe visibility opportunities as doorways. Each one is a different way that your ideal follower can discover you. The key isn't to be everywhere and I know marketers do you know that we don't spread ourselves thin or at least we try our best not to.

11:16Sophie Miller:The key is to be strategic about which doors you walk through and how you show up when you do. I'll say it again, it's to be strategic about which doors you walk through and how you show up when you do. I think we so often think that visibility is up to the algorithm gods, Adam Missouri, why is he suppressing my reach? Why am I not in feeds? But it's about being strategic. every platform has its own opportunity i think the mistake that most people most marketers make and sometimes it's not even down to what i'm doing i'm sure there are so many of you who are teams of one who do not have time categorically to create different content and different strategies for every single platform or maybe you're in a busy team and it's more fragmented and you have different people owning different things and collaboration can be really tricky amongst the chaos.

12:16Sophie Miller:Nonetheless, treating every platform the same instead of playing to each platform's strengths can be detrimental. When I design for our platforms for context, I post across Instagram and LinkedIn. Those are the two platforms I feel and believe are best for my mission and our audience and the content that I create. I always think with my end goal in mind. who are we using as our vehicle for growth and where are they? Visibility is not about adhering to platforms or algorithms or ranking rules, although understanding how the platforms that you use and how they work is going to be really important here.

13:02Sophie Miller:For me, it's more so about who do I want to be in front of and what do I want them to do to increase my visibility? Because once you're in front of new people, you're using your existing or new people to get in front of those new people, then you can welcome them in. Then they will hopefully follow. You can notch them, they will advocate, and that is how you grow. You grow a brand, you grow a business, and you grow your impact. As marketers, we're all trying to answer the same question. Which investments are actually driving revenue. And too often, the honest answer is an educated guess. CallRail replaces that guesswork with proof.

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14:10Sophie Miller:What type of visibility opportunity do you have and what do you want the action to be? Are you posting on Instagram and is your feed post something that you want shared to stories? Do you want people to put it in other people's DMs in their group chats? If I did, maybe I would share something witty or trending or relatable about how rough it can be to be a marketer. On Instagram specifically, the explore page is a big part of my growth strategy. If you look at the Pretty Little Marketer Instagram profile, you will see me never posting reels. Despite everyone telling me to, I know that video is king and video is the future, but I really believe it's about matching the purpose, the intent of your post with the format.

14:58Sophie Miller:For me, I explore everything you're hearing me talk about now. I put that into my carousels. I share educational teachings. I do trend breakdowns. So carousels are a format that works for me. And the explore page is where I get our most Instagram growth. Carousels specifically, your front page is your most important. The same way that when you're creating a reel, you're thinking of your hook, capturing someone in the fast three seconds, your visual hook, your text hook, your verbal hook. How can I do that in a carousel? For me, that often looks like using a broad topic that's relevant to me and our audience, but interesting to a mass audience.

15:37Sophie Miller:One of my most quote-unquote viral carousels on Instagram was something, a carousel titled, I think it was something like, Are We Over Influencers? Or Influencers Are Over. And I had a picture of Alex Arle on the front. Now, the carousel wasn't necessarily about influencers being over. I explored much more than that. I was talking about where influencers came from and the future and how it's changing, how it's community fast, how we are enjoying influencers in new ways, sub stacks, emails. It's not just about the day in the life content anymore. But I knew that front cover slide would be interesting to a broad audience.

16:16Sophie Miller:So they would click. I'd hopefully capture their interest as they're scrolling through, and then they would find it valuable enough to hopefully follow. Are you creating with a TikTok repost in mind? If yes, we're going to want to tie it to a trend or an audio and link that to a value or belief that your audience share. We share things because they represent us. It says, hey, this is me. This is what I think. Or we share it because it links to what we think. We want people to think about us. It's our ideal selves and who we want to be. So rather than just creating content and hoping, okay, well, this is going to help me grow.

16:58Sophie Miller:Where do you want it to land? Do you want it to be shared on stories? Do you want it on the explore page? Do you want reposts? And reverse engineer your content from your end destination. I think we talk a lot, or at least I see a lot of content about shareable content and I think that really frustrates some of us I create good content but people aren't sharing it and that is not my fault shares are golden they are everything over summer instagram launched reposts father fathering that they are all about shares you know when someone shares your content they are saying to their network that this person's worth following go, I endorse this.

17:43Sophie Miller:But shareable content is not accidental. It is created by design. It is high arousal emotions that trigger sharing behavior. Anything neutral rarely spreads. People share content that makes them look good or to shape how other people see them. They share things that signal they are in the now. Over the summer, I watched the summer, I Turned Pretty. And if you have also watched the summer I turned pretty on Prime, I would love to know if prior to wrapping up, prior to the season finale, were you Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah? Because my TikTok feed for the whole of summer was split. I can tell you I was a Team Conrad girlie from the start, but I would love to know which camp you landed in.

18:31Sophie Miller:And I actually watched it really late. This series started in 2022, if I remember right, but I binged season one and two just as season three started coming out. As soon as it came out, I was watching and I was engaging in TikTok content and my whole feed soon was the Samurai Turn Pretty content. And I was sharing it. I was reposting. I'm a sucker for a repost. And it was because it signaled that I was in the know. Hey, I'm watching this like everyone else. Does that make me cool? We might share because it makes us look like we have valuable expertise, we might share the things that we feel are aligned to our values too.

19:13Sophie Miller:The NYT research found that useful content gets shared significantly more often. I think that people want to be heroes by providing solutions. So the more immediately applicable your content, the more shareable it becomes. Likewise, I think people like to share content that makes people think. The most impactful posts for me in my experience using shareable content to grow our community strikes a good balance. It's surprising enough to notice. Influencers are out. It's complex enough to engage. This is the future of influencers. but it's simple enough to understand instantly and it's valuable enough to pass along.

20:02Sophie Miller:They learn something new. We want people to share. They declare to their network that this needs to be seen. Shares are important. An easy visibility opportunity. I know we talk about shares like they are the golden buzzer. They can go viral. It's the answer, the everything. And I think that shares are really important, but equally, I'm learning more and more that optimizing my social search and working for social SEO is fast rivaling that in my approach to growing my audience and my community. Our ideal followers are already looking for what we offer. They just don't know about us yet. So optimizing for search on every platform, individually, ideally, is really key.

20:54So if you're

20:55Sophie Miller:unfamiliar with social search, it might look like using keywords in your captions. When people search for what you share, what are the most likely words that are going to be in there? Freelance, marketing advice, growth tips. We want to create content around trending topics in our niche, Most importantly for me, when it comes to my kind of social SEO strategy is answering the questions my audience is asking Google or ChatGP team or typing into search bars. Answer the Public is a really, really great resource for this. You get three free searches and you can go in and you could type in and say a keyword for me might be social media advice or just social media.

21:41Sophie Miller:It will come up with a big circular graph of the who, what, when, where, how, every question that people are searching in relation to this. Maybe then I would step back and consider where someone might search for that. I find what I search for on Instagram different to what I might search for on TikTok. On Instagram, I might search for a restaurant to find their page to book. Whereas on TikTok, I might search for reviews, people that have been there or recommendations in that location. so first considering what they're searching but two considering where they might be searching and how they search differently has been a really important part of my strategy especially in 2025 i do this a lot on linkedin now two linkedin are trying they're often late to the game aren't they but it seems that they are really trying to up their social seo and the kind of value in their search results and for many of you building your personal brands if you want to be known as a certain thing or an expert in a certain space.

22:42Sophie Miller:I think using LinkedIn SEO keywords, answering the questions that people in the audience, your peers, potential clients are looking for, the type of content they would want to see to convert or get in touch, get involved. I think that on LinkedIn is a really underrated strategy and something I'm thinking about for my growth strategy going forward. Shareability is a science. I can tell you which of our pieces will get shares and which might get less. But as feeds become more saturated and it's harder to go to your audience in their feeds, maybe showing up in their search might be the second next best option.

23:26Sophie Miller:now once someone lands on your page visibility for me is only half of the battle once they're on their page it's kind of like walking into a store walking into a shop I'm walking down the high street oh that shop window looks cute I'm gonna go in they've pulled me in because I've seen something that catches my eye now my in-store experience has to be good enough to get me to buy, stay in the store long enough to see something that I like, or just have a good enough experience I'm going to want to go back or advocate. For me, I am very passionate on our social profiles about removing every possible barrier between discovery and following.

24:07So that

24:08Sophie Miller:looks like making your bio crystal clear about what you offer, or creating something that I like to call thin content. And on screen now are three examples I've shared on LinkedIn that I would consider to be thin content. Thin content, for me, it's a stuff, it's a made up term by the way, but thin content to me is like, it doesn't have much substance. It's probably not going to get you to buy. It's not really adding much to my brand experience and it's not necessarily brand building in terms of being strategic, but it's easy to consume and share. It's one-line insights, it's simple graphics and tips, it's memes.

24:50Sophie Miller:The harder you make it to understand what you are about, the less likely someone is to follow you. If you're on my LinkedIn and the first thing you see at the top is a meme about how a client asked me to go viral and I rolled my eyes, oh okay, well this person, this community understands me. You're going to scroll to the next one. Instagram come back, it literally never left. Oh, I was just thinking about how Instagram's getting more popular again, I'm going to swipe through. You're meeting them where they are at. The bottom line, discovery, pulling people in, getting them on your profile, for me is all about being worth following.

25:27Sophie Miller:How do I get more followers is the question I often see when I think the right question is how do I create content worth following? Challenging yourself and your team to get out of your rut. Stop sharing the things that you've been sharing for the past six years. What are we adding to someone's feed? What do they get? What opportunities are we giving them? We are selfish scrollers. When I follow you, do I get a bigger opportunity to share my opinion? Am I being given the opportunity to connect with like-minded people? Am I now closer to who I want to be? Do you give me all the information I need to do X, Y, Z?

26:10Sophie Miller:I think we really need to start stepping out of our own way. And now whilst there are many growth tactics and hacks, I am five years in, half a decade in, and it's been quick growth from the beginning. It has been meaningful engagement from the beginning and it has all been strategic. How can I use the people in front of me to get in front of more people like them? It is a human fast strategy. I'm not relying on algorithms, although we are slaves to them. There's nothing we can do to eradicate them or bypass them. We can understand them or more importantly, we can understand our people. What do they share?

26:51Sophie Miller:Where are they? And what do they search? And I know it sounds simple, in theory, and on paper, and I am pleased to have hopefully started what is going to be a brilliant day on this track for you with some simple thoughts and prompts to help you audit where you are at, step back and question how you can use visibility to grow your audience as well. Visibility is intentional and it doesn't happen by accident. Thank you so much for listening guys. Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast.

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