When Melissa Ben-Ishay was fired from her advertising job in 2008, she might have really believed you if you happen to advised her she’d eventually turn her baking hobby into Baked by Melissa, a multimillion-dollar enterprise that focuses on bite-sized cupcakes. After all, it takes that form of self-belief to go from a job loss to spending 13 hours a day crafting recipes in a basement industrial kitchen.
But even she would most likely be stunned that, by 2021, having within the meantime taken over as CEO of her dessert firm, that she’d go viral not for cupcakes, however for salad.
Baked by Melissa has 2.4 million followers on its TikTok account, which options its founder, now 39, making recipes starting from candy treats to burgers to a green goddess salad that went viral on the platform — a January 2022 post on the Baked by Melissa website says the video had by then obtained greater than 22 million views.
To some at her firm, straying from desserts felt off-brand, Ben-Ishay mentioned on Friday throughout a discuss on the Atlantic Festival. But for the Melissa in Baked by Melissa, posting the way in which she does on TikTook is all a part of making an genuine reference to her prospects — one that you just’re unlikely to make if you happen to’re following company guidelines.
“If you have a social media strategy, you’re f—ed,” she mentioned. “And the bigger the company, the harder it probably is, because they need to have a strategy. But you can’t. You have to let your community tell you what they like. And what they respond to is what you apply to what you continue to do.”
How Baked by Melissa constructed a following on TikTook
When Ben-Ishay noticed the sorts of costumer outreach Baked by Melissa was having fun with on Facebook and Instagram, she vowed to be an early adopter of the subsequent large social media channel that got here out.
“Then TikTok happened … and it wasn’t a focus for anyone at Baked by Melissa. As a growing business, there’s always not enough bandwidth,” she mentioned. “We were posting content that I really didn’t believe in.”
Ben-Ishay knew her firm might enhance on this entrance. “I was like, ‘Look, this person has so many more followers, and we’re better. We could do that.’ And nobody really listened.”
When the Covid-19 pandemic started, Ben-Ishay had extra time to dig into TikTook to see what was engaged on the platform. Soon, she felt like she’d discovered a lane to check out.
“I make dessert every night. I am the epitome of Baked by Melissa, and I just love food and sweets. And so I just would start taking videos and trying to figure it out,” she mentioned.
When these posts beginning doing nicely, she started posting underneath the Baked by Melissa account, reasonably than her personal deal with, and by no means felt the necessity to persist with cupcake-adjacent content material. “I was like, ‘I’ll just post this salad I’m making, because it’s fun. I like scrapbooking and it’s like a virtual scrapbook. And yeah, it just started going crazy,” she mentioned.
They key to Ben-Ishay’s success, she mentioned, was authenticity. “What people are responding to is my love and passion for what I’m doing. And I’m not trying to be anything that I’m not,” she mentioned. “I’m not looking at other accounts and being like, ‘Oh, they’re doing that, so I’m gonna try to do that.’ I’m just being my authentic self. And I think that’s what works on social media.”
As it turned out, Ben-Ishay’s instinct jibed with what her prospects would go on to inform market researchers the corporate employed — that the notion that “Melissa is real” was one of many issues that they liked most concerning the brand.
“It gave me the confidence I needed to stomp my feet when everyone on my team was like, ‘What? No. We can’t post salad.’ Yes we can. Because our priority is to build a community and deliver consistent content that makes them come back.”
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CHECK OUT: How Baked by Melissa’s founder bounced back from a layoff with a multimillion-dollar business