Today we’d like to introduce you to Caitlin Mccall
Hi Caitlin, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I’m from the small city of Amarillo, Texas. At a young age, I knew that I wanted to live a larger life that I found there, so I graduated HS at 17 and went off to Texas State University, south of Austin and graduated at 21 with a Bachelor’s degree in Advertising and Communication Studies. I was so excited to get into the workforce, but unfortunately the recession made it very hard to find a job in my field. After a few years of fun but failed-starts, working at magazines but with little pay, I decided to use my 20s to experience more of life and (hopefully) that would lead me to my career. I moved around and lived in Austin, Houston, then Sydney and Byron Bay, Australia, Auckland New Zealand, Key West, Florida, St. Pete, Fort Lauderdale, and ultimately West Palm Beach, where my husband and I have decided to settle and start a family. Throughout my travels I worked in service industry, a few marketing jobs, and also as a dive instructor. All of those experiences I attribute to being agile and gritty enough to create a marketing agency and actually stick with it long enough to see it actualize.
While working as a dive instructor in Key West and attending the local college for Marine Environmental Technology (a passion!), I started chronicling my experiences on Instagram, and quickly became a well-known person in the industry as my account grew. With that audience, I launched a podcast and online course on marine conservation and took brand deals in scuba and eco-conscious products. This lead to some great opportunities working with larger companies in the industry. I worked in marketing for a sunscreen brand, the largest training agencies (PADI and then SDI), and Scuba Diving Magazine. All of this lead me to be awarded the Alumna of the Year award at Florida Keys College, and I got to go and speak encouragement at the commencement ceremony.
At this point, I felt I had topped out this small industry and I wanted to have a greater impact and also make more money than what the dive industry was offering. I had always loved and excelled in organic social media, so I specialized and started freelancing with clients in this industry. I quickly started ramping up clients and finding a lot of joy in the work! I surpassed what I had made with my scuba/eco career and realized that this had legs! So I decided to scale this freelancing gig into an agency and focused on created the best packages and services for clients and continuously optimizing for growth. The agency has scaled beyond my wildest dreams, I’ve been able to employ gen-z and help them uplevel their skills and career as well. It’s been very fulfilling and most recently, I’ve decided to refocus my own social media platforms to teach other agency owners how to scale their businesses with systems and sales processes.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It’s definitely been anything but a smooth road! And I want to drive this home because I think it’s easy to look at someone’s chapter 20 and think that it was easy for them. I find myself doing this on social media all the time! But there have been so many struggles and moments of doubt. When you have trouble getting your career off the ground, as I’m sure this younger generation is experiencing again now with the recession, it can have lasting impacts on your mental health. I’ve greatly struggled with feeling like I wasn’t enough – not smart enough, talented enough, etc. Any time I reach a roadblock with scaling that insecurity creeps in and I think that alone is my largest struggle. Otherwise, I’d say the biggest piece of scaling an agency that’s been a learning curve was sales/finding new clients and avoiding the ‘clients from hell’. It’s taken a ton of trial and error but I feel like it’s finally become a smooth process all around, so I’m excited to be teaching other agency owners what I’ve learned so that they can expedite those hardships.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about McCall Digital Marketing?
McCall Digital Marketing is a premium, done-for-you organic social media agency. We help businesses increase their impact and achieve their goals by creating dynamic marketing campaigns.
Our packages include everything that a business or professional personal brand needs to be successful:
• A variety of post-types that can be cross-posted with slight variation per platform to increase reach
• Ongoing optimization to lean into post-types that are performing well
• Standing meetings for collaboration and brainstorming upcoming content
• Bi-monthly edit and post approval portal delivered via link that can be opened on any device
• Premium, done-for-you service that includes graphics, short-form videos (with trending audio research), hashtag and keyword research, call to action (CTA) optimization, ongoing consulting on content shooting if applicable, etc.
Check out our website and services here: https://mccalldigitalmarketing.com/
“With over 10 years of advertising & digital marketing experience, our founder and in-house influencer, Caitlin McCall (@itscaitlinmccall), focuses on creating communication strategies and solutions for our clients that enables them to connect more authentically with their target audience and grow their businesses.”
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I live in West Palm Beach, and absolutely LOVE South Florida. Being from North Texas, it’s definitely not lost on me how beautiful this place is and how lucky I am to live here. I always say it’s like a playground. You can be in a different part of South Florida at a different event every weekend. My favorite part of living in West Palm is the people (everyone is so friendly here!) and the proximity to Palm Beach and Miami. You really have the opportunity to experience a premium lifestyle and make great connections here. It’s definitely a luxury lifestyle and I’ve always been striving for that so I just love it! Also the ocean, obviously, haha!
Contact Info:
Image Credits
The professional photos of me in the white blazer are all by Halle Alessia (South Florida Photographer): https://www.instagram.com/hallealessia/
