The brands
The Mind Company builds app-based tools for mental fitness and mindfulness. Two of its brands share a parent and an audience that wants to feel sharper and calmer. Elevate trains the brain. Balance teaches meditation. By early 2025, both wanted to revitalize their organic social presence, with a focus on engagement over vanity metrics like raw follower growth. In April 2025, Winston Francois took over organic social content, creative production, and community engagement for both brands.
The challenge
- Inconsistent posting cadence across both brands.
- Low employee and coach participation in content.
- Little coordination across paid, email, and organic.
- Engagement well below benchmark. Balance sat near a 0.01% Instagram engagement rate, and Elevate had strong raw material with no creative cohesion.
The approach
We ran a content system reset built on creative storytelling and community-driven engagement.
1. Content and channel revitalization
- Built new organic content calendars for both brands, aligned to app themes and newsletter narratives.
- Developed static, carousel, and short-form video templates for visual consistency.
- Introduced motivational, mental-wellness, and interactive puzzle content to drive saves, shares, and comments.
2. Cross-functional alignment
- Brought the organic team into monthly and quarterly marketing reviews.
- Worked with Balance coaches to co-create content in an authentic voice.
- Synced social themes with Balance's Bingo Card and Elevate's weekly game features.
3. Community engagement and listening
- Activated social listening through Sprout to monitor conversations and respond in real time.
- Launched user-generated content and branded hashtag initiatives.
- Recommended Elevate spokespeople and more live and Q&A content for Balance.
Results · Balance
Balance saw the sharpest turnaround. Between the first and second thirds of 2025, engagements rose 163%, shares rose 281%, and likes rose 166%, driven by motivational quotes and self-care content. The Instagram engagement rate climbed from 0.01% to 0.4%, closing in on the 0.43% category benchmark. After a dip in June, growth stabilized and recovered through Q3.
Top themes: gentle reminders, quotes, and mental-health tips. Single-image static posts outperformed Reels, a sign the audience wanted advice worth saving and sharing.
Results · Elevate
Elevate grew engagement year over year despite algorithm headwinds. Puzzle and quiz posts became the viral core, with the Logic Puzzle and Brain Teaser series driving the highest comment volume. Tips and communication carousels led saves and shares, and TikTok posts like "3 Signs You're a Weak Communicator" topped engagement across formats.
Top themes: brain teasers, tips and lists, and communication skills. Content that asked for participation beat content people only watched.
"Jason and the Winston Francois team brought senior marketing instincts you rarely get from an agency. They reset our organic social into an actual system, and the posts they made were consistently our top performers. Sharp feedback, real partnership, easy to work with."
What we learned
- Engagement comes from interactivity and self-reflection, not just clean design.
- Static and carousel posts can beat Reels when they deliver clear, usable value.
- Real brand voices—coaches and spokespeople—build trust faster than polish.
- Aligning organic with paid and lifecycle keeps the message consistent across the funnel.
Where this goes next
- Scale original content with internal resources and creator partnerships.
- Build influencer and community pipelines to widen participation.
- Extend puzzle and reminder campaigns into paid amplification tests.
- Keep benchmarking engagement rate month over month as the primary KPI.
The impact
Since April 2025, Elevate and Balance moved from sporadic posting to a systematic, engagement-led content engine, with cross-channel creative alignment and measurable lift in community interaction.