How Frida found organic success through ‘unfiltered’ content

It takes nine months to make a baby—and, evidently, to turn around a baby brand’s social media strategy.

Last year, the team at Frida, which sells products for babies and their parents alike, found that the curated, graphic-centric content that was successful on Instagram 10 years ago just wasn’t resonating with today’s parents. So, last summer, it tapped branding expert Ashwinn Krishnaswamy, who has built a following on TikTok posting about marketing and design, to help build a new organic video strategy.

“An issue that so many companies have is they think about Instagram and this highly curated, highly polished era,” Krishnaswamy told Marketing Brew. “Now, the nature of social has changed.”

The first video he worked on with the brand, posted last June, shows a product that helps babies…relieve themselves, and has since gotten more than 2.5 million views. Since then, Frida has continued to post content that leaves little to the imagination, and has racked up more than 110 million organic views in the process, Krishnaswamy said. Frida’s two separate TikTok accounts, @fridababy and @fridamom, have a combined 257k followers. And as multiple product videos have gone viral, Amazon sales and traffic have also increased for the brand, Samantha Yehle, director of social at Frida, told Marketing Brew.

The positive response to the brand being more creative—and even a little shocking—in its in-house content means that Frida’s marketing team “has completely rewritten the way that we approach social,” both on TikTok and Instagram, Yehle said.

No filters, no problem?

Common medical conditions like cradle cap and perineal tears might not seem like great artistic opportunities, but Yehle said that Krishnaswamy advised the brand to embrace the “highly visual” nature of its products and the situations they can address, which ended up being a win-win for audience engagement and her team’s entertainment.

“We can literally show you how to suck snot out of a fake baby’s nose with gummy bears,” Yehle said. “There were so many fun ways that we used props to illustrate how these products work.”

Prior to this campaign, Yehle said Frida was leaning on UGC videos on TikTok. By creating in-house content that focused on the very real (and sometimes very graphic) realities of being the parent of a newborn, she said it not only got the creative juices flowing, but also helped boost engagement through strong visual hooks. The cradle-cap video, which demonstrates how to use Frida’s 3-Step Cradle Cap Removal System using a combination of cereal and peanut butter applied to a baby doll’s head, resulted in more than 1,200 comments, one of which compared the cereal-and-peanut-butter concoction to a Ferrero Rocher, Yehle said.

Close to 30% of Frida’s TikTok viewers are between 18 and 23 years old, and while it might seem outside of the brand’s target demo, Yehle said appealing to Gen Z is a way to build awareness with the next generation of parents.

“If we were making these very stiff, sort of sweet parenting videos like, ‘Here are three tips for how to deal with your baby’s cradle cap,’ there’s no way an 18-year-old kid with no kids is gonna watch that,” she said. “But our videos are like, ‘What the hell am I looking at right now?’...so we get the best of the comment game.”

Frida’s social team often responds to comments via reply videos, some of which have gone viral even when the video they’re replying to hasn’t, Yehle said. While there was talk at one point of involving creators, it became clear after the first viral video that a witty voice and materials from the office kitchen could do the trick, she said.

Test and learn

Why put so much emphasis on organic content from the get-go? In Krishnaswamy’s opinion, a video that has lots of views but significantly fewer likes is an indication that it’s not something people want to watch—meaning that paid didn’t make sense to him in this case, even if it’s the norm among brands.

“We should be able to make a piece of content that is good, that is either a sales driver or brand awareness driver, and it should perform on its own,” he said. “Once it performs, then we can figure out the paid strategy with the insights there.”

Frida has used top-performing organic videos for paid ads on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, Yehle said, and to date, most organic videos that have done well on TikTok have also done well on Instagram—save for a recent video on the brand’s Push Pop Feeder, which she said was the first to receive more views (and likes) on Instagram.

Because the brand’s president, Eric Hirschhorn, is who brought Krishnaswamy in, Yehle told us, executive trust in the process has been high, which she doesn’t take for granted.

“Our leadership being like, ‘You guys got this. Run with it,’ is very, very cool and, I think, very rare from all of the social media manager commentary I see on LinkedIn,” she said. “We’ve been insulated in a very important way.”

As Frida’s marketing team continues to experiment, Yehle said they’re looking at creating more content about office culture and doing more giveaways, like a recent prize wheel in which customers’ baby-shower invites were entered into a drawing to receive Frida products. The question at the center of those efforts, she said, is, “How can we find ways to take super social, insight-driven ideas and execute them to build brand affinity more and to continue to have fun?”