Mikeila Scheckenbach of Bandit Design Group

If you know design, you know Bandit Design Studio. Mikeila Scheckenbach is the founder, creative director and it has to be said – genius – behind the business. The best part? She’s doing it all with purpose. “Our promise is to champion diversity, build an inclusive culture, and do our part to create a more equitable world. We can’t promise we’ll always get it right, but we’ll always put our people [that’s you] first,” reads the Bandit website.

Fortunately, Mikeila was only too happy to talk all things social media, and there was no shortage of very valuable insights and lessons.

What social media channel is the most impactful for Bandit?

Instagram is our bread and butter, with it being the platform that suits our visual style of content best. It has been the most impactful channel for our business to date based on the growth, ability to connect with our community, and the leads that it drives for the business. We believe it is the most visually pleasing platform, so it's where we can share content that is polished and representative of the work we deliver to clients. It acts as our mini-portfolio!

How do you connect with your community on social media?

I must admit, we could be a lot better at connecting with our community on social media. However, we love to jump into the DMs with other creatives, potential clients, and existing clients to chit-chat and offer any advice and suggestions where we can. We try to respond to comments and share user-generated content as well. The design and creative community are huge on social media, so we love to support other creatives and keep up to date with what's being shared around the world too. 

In your experience at Bandit, what is the biggest pro and biggest con when it comes to social media efforts?

The biggest pro is being able to share our work with the entire world! The possibility of reaching people on the other side of the world with everything you share is just so exciting. This also means that the diversity of clients we get to work with is very broad. We get a lot of enquiries that come through Instagram in particular, usually from people who have seen us pop up on their feed, or shared through someone else's account. 

The biggest con, due to the style of work we produce, is that it can take a lot of time to prepare content specific for social media. Keeping up with the different algorithms, needs, and wants of the different platforms can become a big task quickly! Making sure we are producing quality content for social media is important to our brand, ensuring we are displaying our work in a way that upholds our reputation and is fun and engaging for our audience to consume means creating a lot of animation and social-media specific graphics constantly.

What is a mistake or misstep that Bandit has made and what lesson did it teach you?

There have been a few missteps over the years! The main one that comes to mind is several years ago we began using a third-party platform to schedule our posts, which resulted in our account being flagged as spam and removing our ability to be tagged in any post or comments. Big bummer! This impacted our ability to be recognised and credited for our work, which was quite damaging to us on social media at the time. We ended up starting a new account after not being able to find a solution for over a year.

The lesson learned was to keep it simple and keep good relationships. We realistically didn't need any fancy software, and luckily because we had been engaging and building strong relationships with our following for a long time we were able to retain a lot of our audience as we moved to a new account. In starting the new account we actually attracted attention from some dream clients in the process, so it all turned out for the best in the end!

What has been a standout moment or milestone for Bandit on social media?

A standout moment for us has been being featured on reputable design accounts such as The Brand Identity. We have had a number of projects featured on their social media platforms over the years, and we're included in their 'Most Read Projects of 2023' wrap-up post last year which is always a big boost for the Bandit brand!

How do you measure Bandit’s social media success?

For me, social media success lies in how far our brand can reach, and we measure that by the growth of our community, new enquiries and clients that come to fruition from coming into contact with us through social media.

Looking forward, what does the future hold for Bandit when it comes to social media activity and efforts?

Looking forward, we are hoping to increase our consistency in sharing on the platforms, engaging with our community, and also increasing out activity on TikTok to produce a bit more content from within the studio and show what goes on behind the scenes!

Learn more about Bandit Design Group, and don’t forget to follow them on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or TikTok. Better yet, if you find yourself in Brisbane in June 2024, be sure to catch Mikeila at The Design Conference.