Here's The Secret Instagram Weapon No One Is Talking About | Ep. #839

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about the secret Instagram weapon that no one is talking about.

So Eric, what is it? The—

so we talked about chatbots in the past, right? We talked about ManyChat, we talked about Chatfuel, MobileMonkey, right? But that's all Facebook.

That's correct, but this is just Instagram.

This is just Instagram. Imagine if you had that for Instagram.

All right.

So this product is called Direct Heroes. So I talked to this guy recently. And it's the same type of setup. It's the same type of UI, like a ManyChat. And basically what you do is you can DM the bot and then the bot will respond to you and then you can actually answer yes or no or whatever, and they can drive you into whatever funnel. So if you wanted to buy like basketball shoes versus football shoes, they can take you down that funnel. It's been working well for, you know, e-commerce companies. So this is something that's new. Nobody else is really talking about it right now.

And to clarify, you can't use this on the Instagram app. It doesn't go over your Instagram app. It's more so it goes on your website.

This would be perfect if you're like, if you got a brand already, let's say you're like Nike, for example. I'm just using an extreme example where a ton of people follow them already and they just put in the profile, DM us for some extra goodies in the profile.

So it connects with your direct messaging on Instagram.

Correct.

So the API in, and then from there you can automatically respond, promote them, promote products, services, whatever it is.

Content, whatever. Yeah.

No, that's really cool. And a lot of people aren't using this kind of stuff. And here's the thing, anytime something is chat related and people take the time to engage with you, I haven't used this tool myself. I'm not big on Instagram. It's a great tool and a great platform. It's just, I don't have the time of day to use all 20 or 30 or however many out there these days. But when it comes to any social platform, the best way to drive conversions is to engage with your audience. People think it's all about followers, If you have a ton of followers but there's no engagement, you're not going to get crap in sales. So you need to engage and chatting is one of the best ways. And if you can automate some of it, it'll help drive sales plus make your life easier.

You know, our mutual friends over at Drift, they coined this new word conversational marketing. And I think that's actually a thing now. They actually put up a— you can actually— there's a job description for conversational marketers, which is someone that's just handling the chats on your site, like Intercom, for example, or chatbots. Like Facebook. So basically this person would be responsible for, for manning that. Um, so even let's forget about, you know, the fact that we're just talking about this secret Instagram weapon, this whole conversational thing, whether it's through Facebook, Instagram, or even on your website, if you do it well using like a Drift or Intercom, um, you're going to drive a better experience versus just trying to have, um, someone, you know, half-ass and put together a basic sequence that nobody really cares for. So conversational marketing, Google it, check it out. Drift has written some good content around it.

So speaking of chats, you have a chat on SignalGrey. You've had it for, is it a year now plus? What percentage of your revenue or leads or customers, whatever you want to call it, are from your chatbot?

There's one. Okay, let's see. It's not big. It might even be like 2%.

It has to be more than 2% because you don't have like 50 clients.

No, what I'm saying is, and we don't have more than 50 clients, but the reason—

Your agency would be too hard to scale with 50 clients.

What I'm saying is we literally, I think we only got like one from it. We did get a couple other opportunities, but yeah, until recently we didn't, we haven't really ramped up our conversational bot, which we've improved a lot.

And Nextiva, a mutual friend of ours, they get a ton. Yeah, I believe it's one-third of their revenue comes from the chat. One-third chat, one-third 1/3 phone number, 1/3 form fields. I think that's their split. It's roughly like that.

It's roughly that, yeah.

Now, with the chatbot, the question for you is then, you know, and I know this topic was about Instagram, but it's the same thing if you guys use chatbots on your website, Instagram, it doesn't really matter. If you're not generating that much revenue from the chatbot, why continue to use it?

So what we do is what happens with the large majority of the chats is they actually, we drive them to another piece of content or we drive them to a webinar or we just drive them into our list. So a lot of them, oftentimes they are, when they're raising their hand, oftentimes aren't qualified to work with us because you have standards, we have standards too. Vast majority aren't.

But this, so, but why keep still using them? Because if you're driving, if you're collecting emails from people who aren't qualified—

Because it doesn't cost me any money to have it there.

That's true. And you can always sell them other products. So, and you know, I'm just asking Eric these questions out of curiosity. We've tested out chatbots on our website. We found that it works. It's just—

For what? For the agency or for your software?

Either one. We found that it's just too much work to man the chat.

Software, it works better though, because I can speak to our software, like, you know, large, like, you know, crypto exchanges or, you know, pretty substantial sized companies. Like there's a large sportswear company that reached out. So I think it depends. Cause if you're like Nextiva, it's like, oh, I understand. Like this is a product. Or if it's like software, they'll reach out.

Yeah. What we found is the reason it's hard for Eric and I as an agency is Our ticket is too expensive.

Yep.

And we're not trying to say that in a bad way. It's just as you go upmarket, the majority of your visitors aren't qualified. So then you're going to have people just manning a chat. And that's what we found in which we get way too much traffic for how much work it takes to man the chat. And what we are looking at right now is how to put back on the chat, but do things like look at IP addresses because online you can buy IP addresses for all the large major corporations in the world. And do it in which when someone comes to your site from one of those IPs, then they see the chatbot. If they don't come from one of those IPs, they don't see the chatbot.

Yeah. So what I'll say is this, I think we might've spoken about this before, but one of my friends runs a company called LTV Plus, and he actually, he has chat agents that will man your bots. And the, I've tried this in the past, but what I like about their process, which has been getting better and better over time, is that they will work with you to write like an FAQ and they'll have their people just follow the FAQ and they're following like a set process and they're continually optimizing it and they're giving you good reports on it. The good thing about these services or the bad thing about these services is once we talk about it on a podcast like this and people start to use it, it starts to get worse. So that's the thing with service-based businesses. But hey, it's still good right now. So check it out, LTV Plus. And you can tell them that Eric Siu sent you and Neil Patel sent you. And that is it. Anything else?

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