From storytelling instinct to data-backed strategy: the Coffey & Tea way

About Coffey & Tea

Coffey & Tea is a Perth-based social media agency specialized in tourism and hospitality brands. Founded in 2013 by Meg Coffey, the agency handles content creation, execution, planning, and strategy across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn — the four platforms where their clients' audiences actually spend time.

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Meg describes social media as an ever-moving target, which changes too fast for people to ever really be experts: “They often forget the strategy side of it”.

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The context and challenges: Proving that storytelling-led content actually works

In tourism and hospitality, every brand fights for attention in the same crowded feeds. Generic captions and lookalike content don't convert. Meg's positioning has always been clear: the way to break through is to tell better stories anchored in real experience, written for the right audience on the right platform, supported by user-generated content.

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But "tell better stories" is a strategy clients don't pay for unless you can prove it works.

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That's the central challenge for any storytelling-led agency:

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• Every platform has its own audience and its own grammar. Facebook for nomad travelers, Instagram for vacation photo culture, Pinterest for bucket-list planning, LinkedIn for corporate travel. One narrative cannot be copy-pasted across them.
• UGC powers most of the inspiration, but only if the agency has a reliable way to source and monitor it across multiple client accounts.
• Clients need to see the impact, monthly. Without a tool that surfaces the right metrics quickly, the reporting time eats into the strategy time. Exactly the time clients are paying for.

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"To get 10K Facebook followers organically, you need to tell a good story and have a good offer. Good content is essential to engagement. Valuable content creates credibility."

The solution: An analytics-first platform that backs the storytelling

To run storytelling-led strategies across multiple tourism clients, Meg needed a tool that did three things well: track engagement deeply, surface what's working, and make reporting effortless enough not to crowd out creative thinking.

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That's why Coffey & Tea uses Iconosquare. Specifically:

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• Analytics: Meg lives in the Engagement section. It's where she validates which storytelling formats actually move the needle for each client, and where she takes a holistic view of performance (because losing followers post-vacation is normal in tourism; what matters is engagement quality).
• Listening: for sourcing the 80–90% of inspiration that comes from UGC, and monitoring how each client's brand is being talked about.
• Reporting: for delivering clients the proof points they need, when they need them.
• Conversations: for community management across multiple tourism brands without context-switching between native apps.
• Collaboration: to keep her 5-person team aligned across client accounts and approval workflows.

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Meg's view on metrics is sharp:

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"All metrics are valuable for different reasons. The least important one to focus on is follower count. The real power of social media is being able to download the data, take the time to look at the impact, and find what can be improved."

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That's exactly the philosophy Iconosquare is built around.

The results and transformation: From storytelling instinct to data-backed strategy

The shift hasn't just been operational. It's been strategic. Coffey & Tea's storytelling instinct has always been the differentiator. What Iconosquare adds is the proof layer that turns instinct into a defensible client recommendation.

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Concretely:

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• Multi-platform clarity : Each tourism client is now run with a per-platform engagement view, not a single vanity dashboard. The strategy adapts to where the audience actually is.
• UGC at scale : Meg's team can source, qualify, and track UGC across client accounts without losing hours every week to manual sourcing.
• Reporting that doesn't drain creative time : The agency's value to clients is the storytelling and strategy. Iconosquare's reporting protects that time instead of competing with it.
• Confident client conversations : When a client asks "is the storytelling approach working?", Meg has the engagement data, the reach data, and the post-level breakdown to answer in one screen.

What's next?

Coffey & Tea continues to build its reputation as the go-to agency for tourism and hospitality social media in Australia and beyond. Meg's broader philosophy hasn't changed:

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"Be transparent, be authentic, be yourself. You want to do business with honest people."

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Her advice for community managers and social media professionals:

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"Know what your company stands for. Understand the ins and outs, and then you'll know how to tell your story. Engage with people, talk to them — it's social media. And have fun. We need to go back to having a little fun with it; it doesn't all need to be doom and gloom."