Advice for Getting Clients on Instagram

Okay. I was on a call the other day with this guy who has posted every single day for the last 18 months on Instagram. He kind of accidentally got like 30,000 followers or something because he had just a couple videos just randomly go viral. Nothing else really hit. And from this following that, he's managed to build zero sales calls, zero clients, only a couple of even email leads. Really nothing to speak of.

When I look at our social media following, I'm like, something's not adding up here.

Yeah.

Unless the entire social media industry is. Or crap, which I don't think they are. Like this, this isn't making sense. Like if you had asked me six months ago, you're going to have 30,000 followers, I'd be like, oh, we're just like printing or.

Yeah.

And like we're not.

Have you booked any, any calls directly and how many email subscribers have you gotten?

I would say maybe 100.

100 calls.

No, 100 people signed up.

Oh, okay.

Calls have been zero.

And so I'm going through their social media profile and I'm noticing a few really critical mistakes that they could immediately fix and probably start booking calls tomor. So if you're in a similar situation to this guy where you've gotten some traction on social but it hasn't really moved the needle for your business, then this frame shift is going to be really, really valuable for you. This is a topic I could talk about for hours, but I'm going to try really, really hard to keep this under 10 minutes. Here. Here's the short version. You need to get them off of social media asap as quickly as humanly possible. That's it. Okay, maybe the long version will help. All right, long version, let's talk theory and then let's talk tactical. Like what are the actual actions that we need to take? So social media is really just a top of funnel mechanism. It's a great way of getting the attention of people who would be a good fit for your service. It's not usually keyword usually. It's not usually a good way of nurturing that attention, getting them to know like and trust you and converting that attention, getting them to buy from you. Now this is completely different. If you sell something cheap or low ticket, you can totally do your entire marketing funnel on social media. Proof being TikTok shop right now in the E comm space. But if you're selling a high ticket service like these guys, these guys are in the tax space, then it's actually really important that you get people off of social media. Because it's not good at keeping people's attention long term. And it takes, oftentimes it takes some time for people to build enough trust to be ready to pay you thousands and thousands of dollars. There's a lot of distractions, a lot of shiny objects, a lot of other creators that they could go follow. And, and so if you're trying to get them just ready to buy on social, it's probably not gonna work. And so your goal with social media should be to sift through this haystack and find your ideal customer on there somewhere, grab their attention really quickly and then get them off of social media as fast as possible. Now one way people like to do this is kind of the YouTube strategy where they'll do Instagram for short form as top of funnel, get attention. You know, maybe a couple of videos go viral every now and again and then they'll post on YouTube as their long form and this is their middle funnel, their nurture. And all they do is they just send people from Instagram to YouTube. So they'll post the YouTube video on their story. Be like, hey, click the link in bio or click the link on this story if you want to watch the full video. I'm not a big fan of this strategy though, because here's the problem with it. If you think about what part of their brain people are in on social media, they're in kind of their like dopamine monkey brain, right? Like they're probably walking down the hall to the next thing, they might be in line somewhere. They might even be at a red light. Tell me you've never been at that place in your life where you scroll aimlessly even at red lights. But in these situations, would someone have time to watch a 10 minute video? Probably not. Like, even if it's like this life changing piece of content that they've been searching for for like years. And this is the one crucial unlock they need to grow their business, which by the way, you're probably not spitting that level of knowledge. Then when the light turns green or they get to the next thing or it's their turn in line, they're going to close their phone, they're going to put it back in their pocket and then whenever they unlock it again and start scrolling again, they're going to have forgotten all about you. And so what I like to do is to capt their contact with a lead magnet, which you can do through an app called Manychat. Basically what it does is when somebody comments or DMs you a keyword it can enroll them in an automatic sequence of messages where it'll grab their email and it'll add them to your email list and then it'll send them the freebie, whether that's a course or a template or a free training or something like that. And so now this thing shows up in their email inbox. Well, I want to ask you again. What part of people's brains are they in when they're checking their email? I know for me, checking my email is one of my first like five things I do when I get to my desk in the morning. So it's, you know, it's 8:00am, I head to the studio, I log into my computer, I'm gonna check Slack, I'm gonna check my email, I'm gonna check Bitcoin and, you know, a couple of other like key things to kind of just get the day started. And so usually I'm sitting at my desk and if a 10 minute video pops up in my inbox, that's like, hey, this is an interesting video that you should watch. And so if I see a free PDF guide or a YouTube video or a free training of some sort show up in my inbox, I can go, hey, I remember asking for that on social. And because I'm sitting here at my desk and I'm not in this like dopamine monkey part of my brain, I might actually take the time to sit down and go through it. Same goes for future emails that you send out to your list. So now every time you have a YouTube video, you can send it to your list. You could send pure text emails to your list a few times a week. I do this personally. And so you're getting in front of people now when they're in a healthier, more intelligent part of their brain, AKA you're able to get better quality attention from them than what you would be getting on social media. And you've probably heard this before too, but your email list is the only audience you actually own. You know, Meta can shut down your Facebook or your Instagram account, YouTube could ban your YouTube channel, but nobody can keep you from contacting your email list. And that's why it's so incredibly valuable. And by the way, if you don't believe me on this, I recently signed a new client, a CFO company from Texas. And this guy originally opted into my funnel four months ago. Okay, now for a lot of you, a lead who opts into your funnel 4 months months ago is pretty much dead, pretty much cold. They're not paying any attention to you anymore. This is somebody who followed you on social media four months ago, but they're really not seeing your content a whole lot anymore. Or there's somebody who opted into your email list but you're not hitting your email list regularly. Or it's somebody who you booked a sales call with and they didn't end up buying from you. And now it's been four months and you haven't checked in with them because you don't have a system for that. But this guy, he saw my ads, he saw my sales video, he opted into my funnel for one of my lead magnets four months ago. And so now between four months ago and now, we're sitting in July today, He's probably seen 20 to 30 something emails from me. I actually went through my CRM and I looked. He's opened every single email. This guy was really investigating me to see what my marketing and sales process looks like. I assume to probably see if I can help him and see if this system looks like something that would work well for him. Which, you know, props to you, man. Like, I like that strategy. But if I hadn't been so diligent with my email list and consistently staying in front of people, I probably would have just completely lost contact with him. We've got offers anywhere from $3,000 to $120,000 a year. And so even just one client can be a really big deal for us. So before I wrap this up, here's just the tldr. Get in front of people on social, get them to give you their contact info, usually in exchange for something free. And now, even if they never see us again on social media, we have a way of still staying in touch with them and staying top of mind for whatever service you provide. And we can reach them on a platform where realistically they're probably going to pay more attention to us. Give this a try. Hopefully it's helpful for you, it's helpful for me, and I'll see you in the next one.