ECHO Storytelling Agency is an internationally recognized and award-winning group of talented folks who care a LOT about story. We have a proven methodology for crafting values-based stories that connect and inspire. We make high-end books, videos, magazines, websites, and digital content and strategies for companies that need to engage customers and employees, and for individuals who want to leave a legacy. We also provide storytelling training to leaders and internal teams, develop and write company brand stories, and provide story-driven approaches to employee onboarding. We live for finding meaning in the journey. There are 7 of us in our open-concept studio. We like to laugh, eat chocolate, and do jigsaw puzzles . . . often.
Careers
Seeking Great Storytellers
We are currently seeking a Full-time Graphic Designer/Social Media Manager. Full details are below.
In addition to that, we are always interested in hearing from bright and interesting people who love to tell great stories. If you are a freelance writer, editor, proofreader, graphic designer, transcriber, or community manager, please drop us a line at hello@echostories.com. Bonus points for making us laugh!
WE’RE HIRING! Full-time Graphic Designer/Social Media Manager
Founded in 1999, ECHO Storytelling Agency is a company devoted to the power of storytelling. Within ECHO is a storytelling start-up of a different kind, focused on poetry. Bentlily is the brainchild and passion project of ECHO’s founder, Samantha Reynolds. Samantha writes a poem every day, which are shared on the website and several social channels, as well as in a soon-to-be-released series of books, with a mission is to inspire women to slow down and savour the ordinary moments in their own days, find more meaning in their experiences, and enjoy their lives more deeply. While online poetry has seen huge growth over the past few years, it mostly caters to women under the age of 30. We have big plans to make bentlily the leading poetry brand that speaks to women aged 35+. Our long-term BHAG is 1M followers and a NYT bestseller. Our shorter-term stretch goal is 100,000 followers. It’s been done by other poets in the last few years, and we know we can do it too. But we need your help!
We are an inclusive, open and barrier-free workplace. Our studio is on the second floor with no elevator access.
Would your friends and past co-workers describe you this way?
- You love setting ambitious goals and then reverse engineering a strategic plan to get there (while analyzing and tweaking along the way as you learn what’s working and what’s not).
- You have exceptional, original and confident design chops.
- You are not easily discouraged.
- You are an inherently curious person who is always learning and paying attention to changes in the social media and content marketing world, and keen to experiment with new online marketing and social media strategies.
- You are naturally a high-energy, passionate and positive person.
- You take that little bit of extra time to build authentic, meaningful relationships with people.
- Kindness matters a lot to you.
- You are proactive, self-motivated and an idea generator; you get bored if you’re just executing someone else’s orders.
- You have a keen eye for detail, thrive in a nimble and entrepreneurial environment, and are a results-focused, highly-responsible kind of person.
If yes, and if you’re not just looking to pay the bills, but also for work that truly lights you up, read on!
ABOUT US:
As an entrepreneur, poet, speaker, and mother, Samantha Reynolds has built a thriving storytelling agency called ECHO that has been trusted since 1999 by hundreds of leading brands and successful individuals to get their histories on record. In 2011, Samantha started bentlily, a poetry project supported by her ECHO team’s talents. We still describe bentlily as a “start-up” poetry brand because, while it was founded almost a decade ago, it was dormant for many years while Samantha focused on her two young children and growing her agency. Bentlily is now truly re-emerging with a new look and bigger vision. You can think of us as a nine-year-old start-up that hibernated for a while.
What has stayed the same since 2011 is Samantha’s unwavering commitment to write a poem every day as her way of tricking herself into being present to the little moments that would otherwise surely be missed. Bentlily is also still connected to ECHO in that it benefits from the infrastructure of a larger company, like having a bright open-concept office in Kitsilano, eight lovely colleagues, and a health spending account. You get all the excitement of a start-up within the stability of a 21-year-old company that continues to thrive and grow.
Our company culture at ECHO is also happily fanatical about our three core values: positive energy, unconventional caring, and creative rigor. We have a saying that guides everything we do: “Relationship trumps transaction.” We work hard, we trust the people we hire, and we like to laugh a lot. If this sounds like your kind of place, let’s get to the job responsibilities for this position.
MORE ABOUT THE POSITION:
- Once it’s 100% safe to gather in an office, you will rejoin our team at our office at 1616 West 3rd Friendly/mellow dogs welcome.
- For the time being, you’ll work remotely. Most of our staff works from 9am to 5pm with appropriate breaks, but different schedules can be accommodated.
- You will be provided with a laptop to use from home.
- While we are all mostly working from home, our experience is that working remotely works best when everyone on the team is responsive quickly and easily on text, Slack, email or phone. To be clear on this, we are allergic to micro-management but we believe strongly in the power of collaboration.
- This is a full-time position that reports directly to Samantha while also working closely with other key members of the ECHO team as required. We’re a group of smart, hard-working and funny people who genuinely like each other and support each other in our work.
- This position involves working a little bit on weekends to manually post IG Stories. We’re big believers in restoring energy with downtime away from work so we want to minimize this weekend work as much as possible, but as far as we understand it, right now there is no way to pre-schedule the IG stories. Hopefully soon!
- We’ll be straight with you: this position has high expectations. But if you’re the person we’re looking for, you’re the type who gets motivated by high expectations.
Thinking this gig is tailor-made for you? Read on to learn more.
EXPERIENCE REQUIRED, HOURS AND SALARY STRUCTURE:
Our ideal candidate is someone seeking a full-time, long-term position.
Qualified candidates have 3-5 years experience in social media management, graphic design, and online marketing.
Salary is negotiable based on experience but we are looking at a range of $50,000-$55,000. Our company benefits include a health spending account and three weeks of vacation.
DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
Chief responsibility: Increase bentlily brand awareness and drive sales of books and merchandise. You are laser-focused on how to attract fans, turn those fans into customers, and turn those customers into passionate ambassadors.
How will you do this? By executing a combination of the following daily, weekly, monthly and one-off duties in these core areas of the bentlily marketing universe:
SOCIAL MEDIA
- Execute your strategy to ambitiously grow our following and engagement on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
- Design and create visual content from Samantha’s daily poems, photos, videos, and the supplied handwritten quotes (we commission 10 new handwritten quotes per month).
- Adjust dimensions of each graphic for Twitter and Pinterest.
- Schedule the poems (1-2 weeks ahead) to auto-post daily on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest; note that Samantha will write the captions but you will create hashtags and adapt the caption for Twitter length.
- Create and adjust an ongoing hashtag strategy.
- Post 1-3 IG Stories per day, including videos of Samantha reading her poems.
- Post a weekly IGTV video in the main Instagram feed of Samantha reading three poems; create an IG Story to promote the IGTV.
- Manage Instagram Stories Highlights to showcase and promote the brand.
- Generate ideas and test new ways of attracting and engaging fans (ie. different kinds/styles of posts, Facebook group, Facebook Live events, contests, TikTok, YouTube, influencer partnerships, community engagement, etc.).
- Produce the creative (graphics and copy) and manage Facebook/IG ads.
- Analyze social media metrics (e.g. likes, comments, shares, etc.) and business metrics (e.g. traffic, leads, conversions, revenue, etc.), and share with Samantha each month with recommendations on how to adjust based on what you learned that month. We rely on you to judge which social media metrics are the most meaningful for bentlily when it comes to measuring our performance across social channels.
WEBSITE
- Post the poems to our WordPress website (scheduled in advance two weeks ahead).
- Review website performance/analytics in WordPress.
- Create a strategy to drive traffic to the website and convert users into newsletter subscribers and customers.
- Review options to create/include: lead magnets, exit intent pop-up, hello bar, push notifications, incentives to subscribe to newsletter, pop-up to drive newsletter subscriptions.
- Regularly assess website functionality and appearance from the user’s perspective.
- Work with our web designer to create landing pages with unique URLs for people who come from Instagram, from FB, from Twitter, and Samantha’s email signature, to track where our website traffic comes from.
SHOP
- Research and plan best strategy for selling merchandise directly on Instagram and Facebook using Shopify app
- Collaborate with Samantha and Shopify designer to ensure Shop page reflects bentlily brand
- Collaborate with Samantha on merchandise plan to reflect bentlily brand
- Merchandise design required for launch of shop (note: this is not a recurring task; it is only required to help with the launch of the shop)
EMAIL NEWSLETTER
- Create and send our weekly newsletter via MailChimp (newsletter is currently templated but we are open to changing it to improve engagement).
- Manage overall newsletter strategy, including but not limited to drip campaigns/nurture sequence, audience segmentation, and email subject line A/B testing
BLOG
- Create a content calendar for the bentlily blog to generate inbound traffic
- Assign and edit blog posts
- Ensure SEO optimization of each post
- Post to WordPress 1 x/week
- Promote blog posts on social channels or include in weekly newsletter where appropriate
- Write blog posts, time permitting
PR
- Create a PR plan to raise brand awareness online and offline
- Coordinate with our PR freelancer to research and support her pitching to the best 10-15 media and content outlets per week (podcasts, blogs, TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, social channels)
BOOK
- Samantha will manage most of the work around the book launches (the first one in September 2020, and subsequent ones every six months) and author marketing, but there will be related campaigns and promotions to create and manage on social channels leading up to and surrounding the book launches
PLANNING
- Meets with Samantha weekly to discuss projects, promotions, business updates, deadlines, and planning.
- Weekly meeting includes a regular two-way report on: 1) What worked well last week? 2) What do I think we should stop doing, or do differently? 3) What did I see someone else doing that inspired me with an idea for bentlily, or what did I learn that we should try?
HERE’S WHO THIS POSITION IS NOT FOR:
- Those looking for a “side job” while growing their own business.
- People who have a lot going on already and don’t have the time and focus to really dive in.
- People who want a road map of exactly what this journey will look like.
- People who thrive under close supervision.
HOWEVER, THIS POSITION IS FOR A PERSON WHO:
- Is passionate about graphic design and social media.
- Likes doing many things (in a start-up, everyone wears lots of hats, which appeals to you!)
- Takes ownership and pride in their work.
- Is extremely detail oriented.
- Gets deep joy from working with words and images.
- Is not afraid of new challenges.
- Loves learning new things, staying ahead of the curve, and can implement new ideas quickly.
- Can juggle lots of moving pieces while staying collected.
- Is fascinated by the behavioral psychology of marketing. (Analytics tell us what worked so we can repeat past successes; but you love trying to figure out the “why” so you can understand the underlying causes for those trends in order to create future successes.)
- Reads Neil Patel’s blog and Later’s blog for fun.
- Believes 100% that our BHAG is ambitious, yes, but also totally possible if we work hard.
…AND A FEW FINAL THINGS
p.s. When Samantha founded ECHO in 1999, everyone said it couldn’t be done. No one would pay six figures for a book about their life or company. But she knew it was an idea that the world was ready for, and she feels the same way now about bentlily. What matters is…do you?
p.p.s. Take a look at any of bentlily’s social channels or website…what’s one thing you can’t wait to get your hands on and make a change? We’d love to hear it!
HOW TO APPLY?
Send your CV and a note about why you’re the perfect person for this role to sam@echostories.com