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Why You Need 3 Different Instagram Strategies
Holy guacamole, this one’s a doozy! Today’s SocialPros podcast with Jay Baer is filled with delicious insights featuring Instagram pro, Jenn Herman!
We gotta dive straight in.
(04:15) Instagram’s feature set is expanding with Stories, Shoppable Posts, and now IGTV. Traffic that comes to your website from IG is almost always high-quality because of how difficult it is to drive traffic.
(06:00) Mistakes to avoid with the new IGTV.
- Do not just stitch your stories together and call it a day with IGTV.
- With IGTV, segmenting is not an option yet. It’s continuous. One video will lead straight into the next. Make sure content makes sense.
- Stories can be random, IGTV should not be.
(07:30) IGTV is more relatable to YouTube. IGTV is meant to house longterm content. Think of it as a new channel, not short-form, live videos.
(08:50) When it comes to creating IGTV content, do it as often as you can (while still creating value). But be consistent about it in the long run.
(09:55) Jenn’s secret sauce when using hashtags is to use 15 to 20 hashtags per Instagram post:
- 3-5 really popular hashtags
- 3-5 moderately popular
- 3-5 niche specific hashtags
(15:05) Jenn checks content performance in IG analytics every 6 months to find any consistencies within the top performing posts from the past period.
(16:00) Should businesses be posting more or less on Instagram? Since Instagram’s algorithm is based on individual interaction, not popularity, generally speaking, posting less keeps a business from over saturating their market.
(18:50) Carousels on Instagram? Pointers to keep in your back pocket:
- Not every post should be a carousel!
- The first photo has to be the best. It has to be the After in a Before and After sequence. Then in the caption or add an overlay saying Swipe for More.
- Use Carousel to avoid overwhelming your audience.
Crew, if you’re involved with Instagram at all, this is the podcast to listen to!
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How Beardbrand Built Their Email Flows
Odds are good that you, Carnage reader, don’t have a beard. And that’s okay because you don’t need one to get value out of today’s Read.
In case you can’t figure it out from their name, Beardbrand is a company that creates products for beards. (There’s a really good chance that I’m gonna type “Bearbrand” somewhere in this summary. Hopefully, my copy editor catches it.)
Anyway, aside from having a great product, Beardbrand (got it right that time) also crushes email marketing. They’re good. Real good. They send the kind of emails we approve of. And, Really Good Emails recently interviewed Beardbrand’s Digital Coordinator, Jenny Durre, to find out what makes their emails really good.
Here’s what she had to say:
From the very beginning, Beardbrand sets the tone that they’re here to teach you, not sell to you.
When someone signs up for their emails, the subscriber gets put into a 10-day Bootcamp. This email sequence teaches about the Beardbrand community, gives beard improvement tips, and introduces different YouTube personalities.
They also have a great post-purchase flow that is comprised of 11 different emails based on what the customer bought. The key here is that these 11 emails are spread out over 6 months. And, of course, all emails are focused on educating the customer.
Believe it or not, Bearbrand’s (shoot, got that one wrong. Whatevs. I’m leaving it) confirmation email is one of the highest performing emails in terms of revenue. That’s right — they actually make money off of their “thanks for ordering” email.
Abandoned cart emails are also really effective for Beardbrand. They try to make these emails feel like they’re actually from a customer service rep, rather than an auto-triggered marketing email. Altogether, they send 5 abandoned cart emails, and only 1 of them (the last one) contains a discount code.
Dive into the full post to read how Jenny created these flows and how she actually organizes all of it ↓
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Solving the Plastic Avalanche
There’s probably a cabinet in your kitchen that’s full of assorted Tupperware. But, if you’re like 90% of America, that cabinet is so cluttered that you can never find the right lid for the right container.
What’s worse, when you finally find the right lid, it usually causes all the other lids to tumble out in a plastic avalanche.
The Container Store just released a new series of TV spots aimed at solving these every day, frustrating problems. Do you know what happens when you grace a Container Store with your presence? Any storage problem you ever had is now solved.
Can’t find the right tool in your garage? The Container Store’s got you. Have a kitchen “junk” drawer where you can’t find anything? The Container Store will give you more room.
We could keep going, but we suggest you just watch these ↓
