On 10th September, Arcanum Academy won ‘Best Use of Social Media for Growth’ at the Lincolnshire Marketing Awards 2026.
And to top it all off, the ‘highly commended’ runner up is a client who attended one of my social media workshops and is now implementing what they learned!!
See the full list of winners here.
I’d been shortlisted in three categories in total (‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ and ‘Start Up/New Business of the Year’ alongside the one I won), so I went in hopeful and came out with an award! There are a lot of business awards out there that allocate awards based on how many tickets you purchase to the fancy dinner. Lincolnshire Marketing decide on the winners before tickets even go on sale, and all the judges are entirely independent. So a win at this particular awards ceremony feels especially exciting.
What makes this one satisfying is what the entry was built on. It wasn’t a big ad budget, a content team, or posting three times a day. It was the opposite.
The advice I ignored
If you’ve spent any time trying to grow on social media, you’ll have been told to post more. Every day. Several times a day, if you can manage it. Show up, stay consistent, and feed the algorithm.
Most small business owners try it. Most of them end up exhausted, out of ideas by week two, and posting into the void.
I kew there had to be a better way, so I did my research and I found one. I looked into exactly what the algorithm prioritises. I looked at pages that were struggling and compared them to pages that were smashing it. And I combined my data with over 12 years of experience in marketing and copywriting to create a strategy.
My test subject was my house
I set up a home renovation page that doubled as a test bed for my social media strategy. Instead of posting daily, I posted roughly twice a month but I applied my strategy.
The page went from zero to 100,000 followers in six months. It’s now approaching 200,000, and I haven’t spent a penny on ads at any point.
Over 18 months, 44 posts shared across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have pulled in nearly 20 million views. The best-performing post passed 1.5 million views, and 96.7% of those came from people who didn’t follow the page.
That last number is the most important one. Growth doesn’t come from talking to the people who already follow you. It comes from reaching the people who don’t.
Then I asked myself what you’re probably thinking: was it a fluke?
I applied the strategy to my business page – a completely neglected account with about 200 followers. The first post hit over 7,000 views and tripled my following overnight.
Then I started teaching it
Once I knew the strategy worked, I set up Arcanum Academy to teach it.
Over 400 business owners and professionals have now been through the workshops. Every ticketed workshop in the last 18 months has sold out bar one, because it clashed with the Lincolnshire Show. Fair enough.
The results are the part I’m proudest of:
- Samantha Kate Bridal had been averaging 500 views per post. Her first post after the workshop reached 100,000 views.
- Michael from Valuloid Videography has grown his following more than tenfold, going from 1,000 views on average to 40,000 views on average. Some recent posts have exceeded 100,000 views.
- Jailhouse Frock was averaging 9 followers per post and now routinely hits hundreds of new followers per post. She has gained more than 10,000 followers since completing my course and has seen a huge boost in online sales as a result.
One of my clients was shortlisted in the same category as me, which is the best evidence I could ask for that the method works in other people’s hands.
Posting less isn’t the same as doing less
“Post less” gets misheard as “can’t be bothered”. That’s not what I’m saying.
Posting less means spending your time on the thing that actually makes a difference: working out what each post is for, who it needs to reach, and how to make someone who’s never heard of you stop scrolling.
It also means getting more out of every piece of content.
And it still takes consistency. The people who get the best results from my workshops are usually the ones who were already posting regularly. The effort was already there. What changed was the strategy behind it.
Thank you
To the Lincolnshire Marketing Awards team and the judges, thank you for organising the awards and for the recognition.
To every client who let me turn their account into a case study, thank you for trusting me with it. Your results did most of the talking in that entry.
And to everyone who has spent a full day training with me at Mosaic Digital Hub, thank you for doing the work afterwards. That’s the bit I can’t do for you.
Want to learn my award-winning social media strategy?
Arcanum Academy runs full-day social media workshops in Lincoln, roughly once a month. You’ll leave with my full algorithm-leveraging strategy, a year-long posting plan built around your business, a year’s worth of content ideas, and all your kit to take home.
The workshops are designed for people who are already posting and not getting results, rather than complete beginners. Places are capped at 12, and they routinely sell out.
See upcoming dates and book your place
If the next date doesn’t suit you, join the waitlist.