InstaMind - Week 4

This week is a very important week of the course. 

This week we will be finding and engaging with the person you are trying to attract.

It’s a big topic and something that isn’t always the most straight forward so we encourage you to re-watch this week’s videos and re-read this week’s PDFs as frequently as you need to in order for it to click!

Please don’t feel like you need to rush this week, it’s something you’ll definitely get better at with time.

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7 Ways to Engage with your Dream Customer PDF

Engaging with Strangers PDF

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Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to one of possibly the most important weeks of this course.

This week is all about finding and engaging with the person you are trying to attract. So, that might be a dream customer, it might be the person you’re trying to recruit, it might be an influencer. You might refer to them as your ideal client, whatever it is for you. So, you may have noticed that there is not a task for everyday of this week. There are some tasks and there is a bonus task for those of you who want it. But you don’t have to do it, if you don’t want to.

The reason that there are fewer tasks this week than the other weeks is because today’s task is a big one. And so I wanted to give you a couple of days to work through it, to give you a bit of space to work through it. Finding and engaging with your dream customer is one of those things that is a bit of a process. It takes a bit of practise and will be different for all of you.

So, there is a PDF. There’s a couple of PDFs that go with this video, actually. But the main one shows you the seven core ways that you can find your dream customer. So, what I want you to do is I want you to read that PDF. And then take a break, go and do something, come back to it.

Read the PDF again and then make a note of the ideas that you want to try first to find your dream customer. Because what will happen is, not all seven- For most of you, no way will all seven of these ideas work. One or two might work. For some of you a few of them might work. One of them, it might just be that one of them works for you. So, you will need to work through each of these methods to figure out the one that applies to you and finding the person you’re trying to attract on Instagram. What I want you to do is any time that you find something that works whilst you’re going through this process, I want you to add it to a list that we’re going to call your “Sherlock list” because that is what you’re doing.

You’re playing detective this week.

You are searching through the whole Instagram world for your dream customers. And anytime you find a method that works, you need to add it to your Sherlock list. Why would you do this? So, that when I ask you to find and engage with your dream customers daily, from now on, you can very easily go back and review what works and then quickly start to look for your dream customers. Over time as well you’ll find that some things work better than others and you’ll find that you may get limited in some of your methods. So, you want to go back and try some of the others.

So my Sherlock list, for example, of how I find my dream customer could be to look at other coaches and people that are following their accounts. Could be to look at other people who are following Instagram trainers. Could be to look at people who are following other eco-businesses. There’s loads. My Sherlock list is pretty big now and I know, like that, how I can go. I don’t even have to check my Sherlock list anymore. But I know very quickly, very easily how I can go and find my dream customers. And it will be like that for you in the future too. But for now having this Sherlock list is going to save you a lot of time. If you already are a bit lost, stop the video.

Go and read the list, go read the PDF and then come back and watch this again. Because then once you have found some of your dream customers, I’m looking for you to find five to start with using the methods in the sheet. I want you to make a note of their account name. So, what I mean by is their handle. So, what you’ll do is when you’re in their profile, you’ll be able to see at the top of their page their handle.

So, my handle is Kimba Digital. And if I was in, I don’t know. So, this is Jo’s account, who’s on this course, their account name at the top there, when it focuses is- It’s not going to focus. Is Jim Sharples Furniture anyway. It’s deciding not to focus, but you get what I mean. So, you’re going to make a note of these account names. That’s really important and we’re going to come back to that list later. So, making out a note of the account names, the five accounts that you find. And then start looking through their posts for posts that you can comment on. Because we aren’t just finding your dream customers this week, we are engaging with them. So, what I want you to do is to leave three comments on their posts. They don’t have to be the most recent posts. Really, you want to look for posts that you’re actually interested in engaging with because there’s pointless commenting, useless rubbish on posts, that’s not going to help you to build the relationships which is what it’s all about.

So, what you want to do is you want to make sure that these comments are useful in some way. Meaningful and more than three words. They want to be thoughtful. The reason that this is because you’re trying to start a conversation. So, comments of less than three words like, “I like this” or “This is great” or “100%”, look like they were left by a bot. By a piece of software that automatically comments. So, they’re not going to get the attention of your handle. If you think about it from your own perspective, if somebody takes the time to leave a more thoughtful comment on your post, you’re more likely to respond. You might go and check out their account. You might follow them or interact with their stuff. And a relationship starts to form and that’s what we’re looking for.

So, for those of you who are like, “Oh my gosh, how am I going to do this?” That’s really scary, commenting on strangers posts, it’s a very different world to Facebook. Instagram is a place where people kind of expect strangers to comment on their posts and they like it. If somebody leaves that more thoughtful comment on your post, you love it. It makes you feel good because you actually, you’ve put something out there and people liked it. So, don’t feel like that. But if you’re struggling still, how am I going to approach this? I have put together a PDF that has some tips on how to leave good comments, okay? So, that list that I just referred to are of the people that you are engaging with, those five people today. I want you to keep them somewhere so that you can go back and comment on their posts again in the future. Because that’s going to continue that relationship building.

That list we’re going to call the “conversation list.” That’s the list of people you’re having conversations with. You can keep it in a spreadsheet, you keep it on your phone, you can keep it on post-it notes. I don’t care. Keep it somewhere. It’s important. You don’t have to do all of the things that I’ve just mentioned today, okay? That’s why I’ve given you a bit of space to do a bunch of things over the whole week, if you want to. If you just read the PDF today and then come back to it tomorrow, that’s fine. But by the end of this week you should have started your Sherlock list with a list of how you can find your dream customers. It might just be one way for now. You can build on it over time, that’s fine.

And have a conversation list with at least five people that you have found and commented on three of their posts. So, 15 comments in total. And I encourage you strongly to put a timer on when you’re commenting on their posts so that you can make a note of how long it takes you to do those 15 comments. Ideally in the future, you want it to take about 15 minutes a day for you to be engaging with people on Instagram. But if it doesn’t take you 15 minutes a day, if it takes you three hours, then maybe tomorrow comment on a few less people. But the thing is, it gets quicker and easier the more that you do it. I can go into Instagram in 15 minutes, find my dream customers like that and find some stuff to comment on. And it really doesn’t take me very long. It can be very easy to get sucked into an Instagram black hole and just ending up there for hours.

So, put a timer on. Time yourself today and then tomorrow try and reduce it a little bit. As always, if you have any problems, if you struggle at all, please use the group and ask for help. But remember that these tasks this week are slightly different from the other weeks in that they kind of all go together. So, it might be worth looking at the other videos, looking at the other things that are happening, in this week’s task. And trying to get your head around it all before you go into the group and ask for help because the answers might be there.

Okay. So, good luck, Sherlock. You’re going to find your dream customer with the help of us. That’s the whole point. The answers might be in the PDF or you may have to keep searching but we will get there eventually.

Good luck.

Today we are going to build on the past couple of days to carry on building your hashtag bank.

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Video Transcript

Hello. Okay, so today we are going to be updating adding to your hashtag bank. 

Over the past few days, you will have been building your conversation list, which is the list of your dream customers that you’ve been interacting with, engaging with, commenting on their posts regularly. So what I want to do today is to go back to that list and open up people’s accounts and have a look at what hashtags they are using. So very, very simply, it’s really, really easy to do this now. You can use a search function as I’ve shown you before. I happen to already be or I was. I’m going to open it back up again in Joe’s account again. So all you’ll need to do to find the hashtags they’re using is to scroll down, click on their posts, and have a look in here. So you’ll have to click more. 

Some people put their hashtags in their post. Some people put them in the first comment. On this example, there isn’t any hashtags. On the next post, I assume she’s put them in the first comment. Oh, eventually we’ll find some with hashtags in. There we go. So here you can see they’re in the post. And sometimes they’re in the first comment. There is no difference as to where you put them from what I’ve seen. I’ve tried using both. It doesn’t seem to make a difference. 

So what you’re going to do is you’re going to use this exercise to find hashtags that your dream customers are using and add them to your hashtag bank. So today I want you to find 10 hashtags that you can add to your hashtag bank that you weren’t already using that your dream customers are using. That’s all. Just 10. If you find more, great. That’s amazing. 

The idea is that you will slowly grow your hashtag bank over time and that you should be using this opportunity whilst you’re engaging with your dream customers to have a look at what they’re doing, to have a look at what hashtags they’re using, what they’re posting about, what they’re interested in, and use it as a learning opportunity. And over time, you will get to know them better and better and better. 

But for today, just focus on popping 10 hashtags that your dream customers are using into your hashtag bank. Okay. Good luck.

Today we are going to start engaging with your ideal clients through hashtags!

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Video Transcript

It’s time for another way to find and engage with your ideal client. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to pick five of the hashtags that you’ve found that your ideal client uses. You’re going to search for them on Instagram. And you’re going to do that in the way that I shown you before, but I’ll show you again. So you go to the, oh, I’m in the wrong tab. There we go. 

You go to the magnifying glass, and you type in the hashtag that you’re thinking of. So I’m just going to use Bristol businesses for this example. And click search, and then when you find the hashtag that you want, click on it. And what comes up is the top posts for that hashtag. So those are the posts which have been engaged with the most, if it had the most likes and it had the most comments. Now what you want to do is if you click on one of these, you can scroll through them like this, it makes it a bit easier. And you want to search through those hashtags for your ideal client, and you want to comment on the posts in the same way as you have the past few days. 

So I’m not going to give you an exact amount, but let’s say a minimum of three per hashtag. So you want to find three posts to comment on per hashtag. And you want to be doing this fairly regularly. So the reason for this is they’re the most engaged with posts, which means they’re the most active people in those hashtags. So even if some of them aren’t your ideal client, by commenting on those posts you’re going to potentially be seen by your ideal client. You’re going to become much more popular in those hashtags and you’re going to attract attention. Now if some of them are your ideal client, then brilliant. Go into their account, comment on three of their posts, and follow them in the same way as you have done previously. 

So you want to do this for those same five hashtags for a little while. Keep doing it fairly regularly until you’ve interacted with most of the people that use that hashtag. And then when you’ve got to that point where you’re like, “I’ve got quite good relationships with these people now, they’re coming up in my feed naturally and Instagram’s showing them to me,” then you want to change the hashtags and start engaging in those too. This is going to make a big difference. Engagement is such a big part of success on Instagram. So as well as posting regularly, you need to be engaging regularly and make sure that you have a strategy to do that. 

Update time! So there’s not a huge amount to add to this one, but there are a couple of things that I missed that I did want to mention. 

So I talked about in that video how you should be engaging in the top posts in a hashtag, so I want to show you a couple of things first. So what I searched for before was Bristol businesses. Now what you will want to do to make sure that you find all the hashtags, is after you’ve searched, you can go to the tags tab. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I wanted to bring it up again. And then you click on the hashtag you think is relevant. I realise that it’s not focused. So I’ll click into there. Now the top posts are, as I’ve said, the ones that have been picked by Instagram based on engagement and things that they think you’d like. The most recent posts are the people who’ve posted there and they’re the most recently. So those people are using those hashtags right now, so you might want to engage in the recent tab as well as in the top tab, but that’s entirely your shout. 

As I’ve already mentioned but I wanted to repeat it, you should now be getting into the habit of engaging with your dream customers daily using the methods that you’ve learned this week. Put time in your diary. Make it a non-negotiable that you do 15 minutes a day engaging with your dream customers. It is not something you should be spending all day doing. If it’s taking you a lot of time, like I said before, put a timer on, okay? Make this one of those things that you can improve the amount you can do in 15 minutes over time, rather than trying to cram in loads into a small space of time. 

Use some of the things that we taught you in the Time Management Tips PDF, around pairing or habit stacking, as it’s also known. Whereby, if you know that there’s something that you do every single day and you can easily add 15 minutes of engagement, I don’t know if you’re waiting for the kids outside the school, or, you know, whilst you’re preparing breakfast, or, you know, waiting for the coffee to boil, I know, that’s only five minutes, but those kinds of things, which you know you do every day, if you can pair the activity as a trigger, so when that activity happens you always know, “That’s when I engage on Instagram,” it will mean that you can start to build this habit and it will be much easier for you to complete this on a regular basis. 

So off you go, good luck.

We’re going to cover stories in more detail, but for now we are going to focus on how to engage with them.

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Video Transcript

Hey guys, so next week we are going to be looking at stories for Instagram. We’re going to be learning how to create content for them that helps with our strategy. But before we do that I thought I would talk about what our story is, why we want to use them and how we can look at other people’s stories. An Instagram story is stored in a different part of Instagram. 

They are only around for 24 hours and then after that point they disappear. So they’re really, really, really great for behind the scenes, for stuff that’s a little bit less polished for stuff that’s not quite good enough to go on your feed. And they’re really fun and really are interactive. Now I’m not going to talk you through the whole part of stories today but the reason that we want to use them is because they appear at the top of the feed. 

So when people go to scroll through Instagram they see stories first. Which means even if they don’t click into your story, if they see your name and your profile image, it reminds them that you exist. So it’s all part of that kind of know, like and trust and reminding them about who you are and what you do. So today’s task is all about engaging with other people’s stories because if you expect people to engage with your stuff you’ve got to engage with them. And as part of engaging with your IC week I thought it made sense. On Instagram, you want to make sure that you are not on your profile page. So you want to make sure that you are in this… press the home button and at the top all of these circles are stories. They are other people’s stories. 

So you can either go through them one at a time. So you can click on a story and to move to the next one you click on the right hand side. If you’ve not read enough then you click back to the left. And if you want to exit out of them then there’s an exit button up here. Now to interact with those stories, what you want to do is click the message button and it will take you to message that person. You also have the option when you’re in the stories. When you click send message you get the opportunity to do a quick reaction. And so you can send them one of these which is… it just sends them an emoji to their inbox. But I would say, doing a combination of reacting with emojis and longer comments is the best route. 

So you can either scroll through all of them here to try and find people to interact with. Or you can look through people who you’ve followed interacted with over the past few days go to their account and have a look if they’ve got a story for you to view. Now the way to do that is once you’re on their account if they’ve got a circle around their profile ignore the play button ’cause that means I’ve done live video but if they’ve got a circle around their profile, then that means they’ve got stories. 

You can click on the story that and interact with them. So I’d encourage you to go and find at least five people that you want to interact with and send a message to them or interact with their story in some ways that could be sending them a reaction. If they’ve got a poll, maybe you can answer the poll. If they’ve asked a question maybe you can respond to the question. Take this opportunity to go and engage with other people’s stories and build this into your day to day activity for Instagram, engaging with other people’s stories as well as on their grid. Update time, so there’s a couple of things that I didn’t mention I just wanted to add on. When we were talking about watching other people’s stories and engaging them, I talked about how to go forwards and how to go back but not how to pause a story. 

So sometimes you’ll find that a story has way too much information on it. And so rather than going forwards and back all the time you can click and hold on a story to pause it. So for example this is a very busy story that I’ve done today. If it’s about to change to the next one. So if I was like actually I missed that I can tap back and then I can press and hold and you’ll see that this timer which is running out just disappears because I’m pressing and holding. So it just enables you to pause a story and read the whole thing. So if somebody put loads of texts you don’t have to be like, Oh gosh I’ve got to read it in five seconds. You can pause the story and read it. So that’s the first thing that I wanted to mention. 

The other thing is that not everybody will necessarily have the ability for you to message them through their stories. Some people have their settings set up so that people that they’re not following back can’t message them or interact with them. So it might be that you can’t engage with everybody’s stories that you’d like to. It is what it is. The other thing is and it came up as a pop-up I believe previously but you will have seen a little play button by my story when I was doing the video before. And that was because previously Instagram lives showed up in your stories and stayed there and they had a little play button. That’s no longer the case. We will discuss this later on into the course. But that’s what that was if you’re a bit confused by that ’cause you’ve not seen that before. 

The other thing is that when you’re looking through your dream customers accounts for stories to engage with not everybody does a story every single day. So you might find that you go through all of the conversation list that we’ve made this week and none of them have done any stories yet. And that’s okay. Just use the methods that I have taught you this week to find more dream customers who may have created stories. Don’t worry about it if there aren’t any there. I’ve said it before, I’m going to repeat it because it’s super important. Engaging with your dream customer is a really really, really, really important part of the strategy. If you miss this part and then later on in the course, you tell me that you aren’t getting engagement on your own posts and you’re not making any leads or getting any sales. And I find out that you haven’t been engaging that’s what I’ll say to you. 

You should have been engaging with your dream customer. Instagram is a social media platform. You have to get social with people if you want them to get social back it is as simple as that. Once you start to engage with people on their posts and in their messages, only through interacting with their stories I don’t want you messaging people out of the blue nobody likes that. If they reply in your messages or on your grid, wherever you’ve been posting and interacting with them if they reply what will happen is apart from the fact that they start to recognise your name because you’re having regular conversations with them, the Instagram algorithm will see that you’re interacting with them a lot. and so as well as you seeing their things in your feed more frequently they will also start to see your posts and your stories and your content in their feed more often too which is what you want. 

That’s the whole point of this. So the more you interact with them and they interact back the more the relationship will start to form. The more that Instagram will show them your stuff and then their relationship will get even bigger and even better. Now, you may have heard of this marketing term touch points. They used to say in the past that you have to have a certain number of interactions with a potential customer before they were ready to buy. And it used to be a small number like three or seven times that they had to see your content before they were ready to buy. With social media being the way it is and there being so much content out there this number’s increased over time. 

Which means that people have to have even more interactions with you before they feel like they know, like and trust you before they’re ready to buy. If they weren’t ready to buy on day one you know what I mean If they didn’t already definitely need your service straight away then they need some time to get to know, like and trust you. And what this does, this relationship building. Even if you’re a product-based business is it means that they get to know, like and trust you your business and your brand. And so when they are ready to buy you’re the person they’re going to go to first. 

So whilst today’s task is about engaging with people’s stories. What you’ll do from now on is spend the 15 minutes a day that I’ve talked about engaging with your dream customers using a combination of the tools that we’ve talked about this week. To engage with them on their grid and in their stories using your Sherlock list and your conversation list. It will get easier over time. If you’re finding this really, really difficult if you’re finding this overwhelming, please just remember everything is difficult when you first try it you couldn’t walk straight away. You fell over a bunch of time first. 

So it will get easier I promise you and as always if you’re struggling with any of this stuff, if you’re having a bad day when it comes to the Instagram stuff, if you’re having a good day please share these things in the group because other members in there I’m sure would be more than happy to help and to hear what’s going on with you too Good luck

Please watch (and make sure you’ve marked as complete!) all tasks this week (the bonus task doesn’t have to be watched) to gain access to the Hashtag Guide. If you have done so and it’s still not showing please press refresh on your browser to update!