How Halio.ai Creates 30 Days Of Content In 30 Minutes with IMG.LY
Halio, previously known as Sisoma, is a UK-based social media management platform built for financial advisors. What began as a support service for advisers grew into a SaaS product that uses AI and automation to plan, design, and schedule a month of on-brand social content in a single sitting.
The creative layer behind that platform runs on IMG.LY’s CE.SDK. Here’s how Halio moved from a manual, copy-and-paste content process to a template-driven workflow, and what changed for the advisors who rely on it.
The Challenge: Manual Content That Couldn’t Scale
Financial advisors live in a regulated, trust-driven business where a consistent, professional social presence matters, but few of them are designers, and almost none have time to become one. Halio’s early clients needed a steady stream of branded posts, and Halio produced them the way most small content teams do: by hand, in general-purpose tools like Canva.
That workflow worked until it had to scale. Every advisor wanted their own logo, colors, and tone. Every post needed to look polished and stay on-brand. Producing that volume manually was slow, repetitive, and impossible to grow without adding headcount for every new client. Halio needed a creative engine it could embed in its own product, one that would let advisors customize content themselves without touching a design tool, and one that could keep pace as the company grew.
The constraint was as much about the future as the present. Halio was evolving from a service into a platform, and it needed creative infrastructure that would still fit when the customer base was ten times larger.
Why They Chose CE.SDK
Building a creative editor in-house was never realistic for a lean team. A configurable engine that handles templates, brand assets, and on-the-fly customization is a long-term platform commitment, not a feature a small company ships on the side. Halio wanted that capability without owning the maintenance burden behind it.
CE.SDK fit because it solved the problem they had and the one they expected to have. For co-founder and CEO Mark Lamb, the deciding factor was less a single feature than the trajectory.
We needed a tool that could grow with us, and IMG.LY was the perfect fit.
Just as important was where the ongoing engineering would come from. A small team can’t carve out the resources to keep extending an editor while also running the rest of the business. Outsourcing that work to a dedicated SDK partner meant Halio’s roadmap kept moving without its own developers having to build creative tooling from scratch.
IMG.LY’s ongoing updates and new features have been invaluable. We don’t have the resources to develop these features in-house.
That partnership framing mattered: Halio wasn’t buying a static component, it was buying a creative layer that would keep gaining capabilities as IMG.LY shipped them.
How They Implemented CE.SDK
Halio integrated the CreativeEditor SDK directly into its platform so that designing, reviewing, and scheduling content all happen in one place. Advisors never leave the app to open a separate design tool, which is what makes the 30-minute monthly batch possible.
The workflow is built around pre-made templates. An advisor starts from a brand-safe design and personalizes it: dropping in their logo, adjusting colors, swapping images, and editing copy. Because the templates carry the brand rules, the customization stays on-brand no matter who is editing, including users with no design background.
Around that editing core, Halio layered the rest of its product:
- AI-driven content suggestions propose posts based on current trends and an advisor’s needs, so the starting point is rarely a blank canvas.
- In-platform scheduling lets advisors plan and queue a full month of content without exporting to another tool.
- Review and approval workflows keep team-based and compliance-sensitive content in check before anything publishes.
- Performance analytics track engagement and reach so advisors can see what’s working.
The CreativeEditor sits at the center of that loop, turning a generated idea into a finished, branded asset that’s ready to schedule, all inside Halio.
The Results
The headline change is speed. What used to take hours of manual design now takes minutes: advisors create a full month, 30 days, of branded social content in around 30 minutes.
That compression did more than save time. It made professional-quality output accessible to people who aren’t designers, and it let Halio serve more clients without scaling its content team at the same rate. Producing large volumes of customized, on-brand content became a repeatable, low-effort process rather than a bottleneck.
The downstream effects showed up where they matter most for a SaaS business: in the customers. Advisors using the platform reported higher client satisfaction and stronger engagement, the direct result of posting consistently with polished, on-brand creative. As the workflow proved itself, Halio’s own customer base grew.
Overall Impact
For Halio, CE.SDK did more than speed up a task, it removed a structural limit on the business. By embedding a configurable editor instead of building one, the company turned content creation from a service it had to staff into a product capability its users self-serve.
The less-visible win is leverage. Every new feature IMG.LY ships extends Halio’s platform without consuming its small engineering team, and every advisor who creates a month of content in half an hour is one Halio can serve at scale. The same creative layer that made the 30-minute batch possible is the one that lets the company keep adding clients without rebuilding its content engine each time, exactly the kind of tool that grows with you.
